Iran's oil output stood approximately at 3.8 mil-
lion bpd in 2009.

Iran has discovered 13 new oil and gas fields with in-place reserves of 14 billion barrels of oil and 45 trillion cubic feet of natural gas within the past 12 months.

The Islamic Republic has also exported around 2,200,600 barrels of oil per day in the past year, according to a report published on the Oil Ministry's SHANA news agency.

The report added that Iran's revenue from oil exports during the past year reached $69.1 billion.

Earlier this year, National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) director of exploration Mahmoud Mohaddes announced plans to explore new reserves of 500 million barrels of oil and 5 trillion cubic feet of gas per year during a five year plan. Mohaddes said that during the course of Iran's fourth five-year development plan (2005-2010), the country has discovered 19 new oil fields and eight new gas reserves.

Iran is OPEC's second-largest oil producer after Saudi Arabia. In 2009, Iran's crude production stood approximately at 3.8 million barrels per day. The Persian Gulf country sits on the world's second-largest gas reserves after Russia.

Two private security contractors in Afghanistan were killed by coalition forces who mistook them for "insurgents", the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force said Saturday. The incident happened Friday on a highway in the central province of Wardak, ISAF said. A coalition patrol on the highway had just been fired at by insurgents in a location known as a hot spot for attacks, ISAF said. A vehicle then approached the coalition patrol at a high rate of speed with a man shooting out of the vehicle's windows.

"Perceiving the vehicle to be a threat, the gunner fired at the vehicle and killed two of the occupants," ISAF said.

PressTV: Seven Americans killed in Afghanistan.

The truth that many Americans find hard to take is that that mass U.S. assassination on a scale unequaled in world history lies at the heart of America’s military strategy in the Muslim world, a policy both illegal and never seriously debated by Congress or the American people. Conducting assassination operations throughout the 1.3 billon-strong Muslim world will inevitably increase the murder of civilians and thus create exponentially more "enemies," as Gen. McChrystal suggests—posing a major long-term threat to U.S. national security. This mass assassination program, sold as defending Americans, is actually endangering us all. Those responsible for it, primarily General Petraeus, are recklessly seeking short-term tactical advantage while making an enormous long-term strategic error that could lead to countless American deaths in the years and decades to come. General Petraeus must be replaced, and the U.S. military’s policy of direct and mass assassination of Muslims ended.

Following Obama 'Victory' Address, Efforts to Sell End of War Ring Hollow. It has been a week and a half since the American public was told in no uncertain terms that the “last brigade” had left Iraq, and President Obama took time out of his vacation yesterday to declare his campaign pledge to end the war “a promise kept.” Pointing out that the war hasn’t really ended is of considerable interest to some Americans, notably the families of the 50,000 US troops still fighting it, but nowhere is the reality of the situation more sobering than on the streets of Baghdad where, after seven and a half years of American occupation, the rising violence and the prospect of several more years of occupation and fighting make this supposed “end” a tough line to swallow. Not that Iraqi media outlets aren’t desperately trying to go along with the “end” terminology, reporting that a sniper shot what would have been, in any other time, called a US combat soldier. But now he is a “US reconstruction team servicemen entrusted with protecting the US reconstruction,” and his being shot must come with two paragraphs about how the US has withdrawn all combat forces.

That the withdrawal was a complete fiction, however, is not a closely guarded secret, and in the run-up US officials readily admitted that their plan was to simply rename all their combat troops to something else so they could announce there weren’t any left. This has left the post-announcement reporting centered primarily around stating the obvious or towing the official line.

Chris Floyd: Back to the Heart of Darkness in America's Unended War in Iraq

Hundreds of infrastructure projects are incomplete or abandoned. A $40 million prison sits in the desert north of Baghdad, empty. A $165 million children's hospital goes unused in the south. A $100 million waste water treatment system in Fallujah has cost three times more than projected, yet sewage still runs through the streets. As the U.S. draws down in Iraq, it is leaving behind hundreds of abandoned or incomplete projects. More than $5 billion in American taxpayer funds has been wasted — more than 10 percent of the some $50 billion the U.S. has spent on reconstruction in Iraq, according to audits from a U.S. watchdog agency. That amount is likely an underestimate, based on an analysis of more than 300 reports by auditors with the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. And it does not take into account security costs, which have run almost 17 percent for some projects.

AboveTopSecret: FEMA Photographer Kurt Sonnenfeld - Complete WTC Photos

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu rushed on Sunday evening to distance himself and his government from Rabbi Ovadia Yosef’s death wish for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian people, after the flood of angry Palestinian reactions to the comments. “These words do not reflect the approach of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, nor the position of the government of Israel,” the Prime Minister’s Office said in a statement.

AWIP: Palestinians should perish from this world: Ovadia Yosef.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM: A US-Israeli exploration group said on Sunday it will begin drilling for natural gas at a new site off Israel’s Mediterranean coast in October and that there was a small possibility of reaching oil under the gas. The main objective in drilling at the Leviathan prospect is to recover commercial amounts of natural gas.

Noble Energy, which leads the group and owns 40 percent of Leviathan, has said the well has gross unrisked mean resources of 16 trillion cubic feet of gas [453 billion cubic meters] and has a 50 percent geologic chance of success. The consortium also includes Delek Drilling and Avner Oil Exploration, which hold 22.7 percent each, and Ratio Oil Exploration with another 15 percent. Delek Drilling and Avner are units of conglomerate Delek Group. The group said in a statement they will be drilling at a depth of 5,095 meters for natural gas. It said that a secondary target would be to drill for oil at depths of 5,800 to 7,200 meters. The upper layer has gross unrisked mean resources of 3 billion barrels of oil but the probability of geological success is 17 percent. The lower layer is estimated to have 1.2 billion barrels of oil but its probability of success is just eight percent. Israeli energy shares were up 6 to 9 percent.

AWIP: The Issue of Territorial Waters: Gaza's Offshore Gas Fields

National service? I hear the left-wing collectivists pushing this idea on the public on talk shows and written media. Yeah - we're all going to get together, bring shovels, pickaxes, hoes, hammers, saws - and with donated materials we will, together, rebuild our now-crumbling police state into a shiny new police state. But there is one thing President Soetoro and his NWO cronies ask you to leave at home - your brain. Serve your country as a citizen - not a slave. Hold your "representatives" accountable - there is strength in numbers.

A July 14, 2010 file photo shows protester Greg Johnson,
right, and counter protesters Ina Marshall and Tim Foster,
left, arguing during a demonstration against a planned
mosque and Islamic community center in front of the
Rutherford County Courthouse in Murfreesboro, Tenn.

One of the most under-reported political stories is the increasingly vehement, nationwide movement -- far from Ground Zero -- to oppose new mosques and Islamic community centers. These ugly campaigns are found across the country, in every region, and extend far beyond the warped extremists who are doing things such as sponsoring "Burn a Quran Day." And now, from CBS News last night, we have this:

Fire at Tenn. Mosque Building Site Ruled Arson. Federal officials are investigating a fire that started overnight at the site of a new Islamic center in a Nashville suburb. Ben Goodwin of the Rutherford County Sheriff's Department confirmed to CBS Affiliate WTVF that the fire, which burned construction equipment at the future site of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro, is being ruled as arson....The chair of the center's planning committee, Essim Fathy, said he drove to the site at around 5:30 a.m. Saturday morning after he was contacted by the sheriff's department. "Our people and community are so worried of what else can happen," said Fathy. "They are so scared"...

Larry Chin: Masterminds, mosques and mass insanity

Marc Lynch: How Arabs view the anti-mosque movement

ANOTHER weekend, another grass-roots demonstration starring Real Americans who are mad as hell and want to take back their country from you-know-who. Last Sunday the site was Lower Manhattan, where they jeered the “ground zero mosque.” This weekend, the scene shifted to Washington, where the avatars of oppressed white Tea Party America, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, were slated to “reclaim the civil rights movement” (Beck’s words) on the same spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream exactly 47 years earlier.

AWIP: Palin: ‘I hope that Dr. King would be so proud of us’ -Video.

The concert was one of the “Commanding General’s Spiritual Fitness Concerts,” and featured the band Barlow Girl. According to the band’s web site, BarlowGirl is “tender-hearted, beautiful young women [they are three sisters] who aren’t afraid to take an aggressive, almost warrior-like stance when it comes to spreading the gospel and serving God.” Major General William E. Chambers, a self-described born again Christian, created the Commanding General’s Spiritual Fitness Concert series at Fort Eustis when he was the commanding general there. The revelation that US soldiers were punished for refusing to attend a religious rock concert on their base is the latest evidence that Christian fundamentalism is supplanting the Constitution in the American military.

A series of leaks to the New York Times and the Washington Post over the past week has revealed that members of the Afghan government headed by President Hamid Karzai are paid agents and informers of the CIA. The revelations began on August 25 when senior Times’ correspondents Dexter Filkins and Mark Mazzetti reported that a close aide of Karzai who is accused of corruption, Mohammed Zia Salehi, had been on the CIA payroll for “many years”. The information was provided by anonymous sources “in Kabul and Washington,” suggesting it came from high up within the US military or the Obama administration itself. Two days later, the Washington Post cited other US sources alleging that the “CIA is making secret payments to multiple members of the Karzai administration”. The Post stated:

“The CIA has continued the payments despite concerns that that it is backing corrupt officials and undermining efforts to wean Afghans’ dependence on secret sources of income and graft”.

The CIA revelations underscore the cynical nature of the American propaganda used to justify the war since 2001. Venal individuals who take payments from a foreign occupying power and plunder the country have been portrayed as the representatives of a democratic future for Afghanistan. The Afghans who have resisted the occupation and fought for the liberation of the country have been labelled terrorists, killed in their tens of thousands and hunted down by 150,000 foreign troops.

Floodwaters have inundated a large town in southern Pakistan, spreading further destruction in an area where hundreds of thousands of people who fled to higher ground are in dire need of food and water.

Almost all of Sujawal's 250,000 residents fled from the town before the water rushed in, but the damage to homes, clinics and schools added to the widespread devastation the floods have caused across Pakistan, said Hadi Baksh, a disaster management official in southern Sindh province.

Authorities in Sujawal were trying to limit the damage, but the water level has already risen to 5ft (1.5m) in the centre of town and up to 10ft (3m) in the surrounding villages, said Anwarul Haq, the top official in Sujawal.

The floodwaters also threatened Thatta, one of the major cities in southern Sindh and the base of operations for local authorities trying to cope with a disaster that has overwhelmed the Pakistani government and international partners who have stepped in to help.

The floods began in the mountainous North West about a month ago with the onset of monsoon rains and have moved slowly down the country toward the coast in the south, inundating vast swaths of prime agricultural land and damaging or destroying more than a million homes.

"A Friday Dose Of Father Coughlin - August 27, 1939". Coughlin is, of course, a 'monster', because he believed usury was evil and because he was against American involvement in the Second World War (and because he was an 'anti-Semite'). Coughlin believed:

1. Unions should be strengthened.
2. Child labor should be stopped.
3. The working man should have a living wage.
4. Wealth should be redistributed through increased taxation of the wealthy.
5. The Federal Reserve should be nationalized to end the Depression by preventing the cash squeeze imposed by the banksters (I wonder what he'd think of the cash squeeze the banksters have the United States under today?).
6. New Deal policies were correct (but he later turned against Roosevelt believing that Roosevelt had been captured by the banksters).
7. Money wasted on wars should be distributed to the poor.

In summary, an utter monster. It is hilarious that 'progessives' in America are trying to make some kind of point by airing radio broadcasts from the 1930s of a guy who was so far to the left to be unrecognizable to today's 'progressives'.

JERUSALEM: Just ahead of renewed peace talks between Israel and the Palestine, an influential Israeli spiritual leader has denounced the move, dubbing the Palestinians and their leader "an evil and bitter enemies of Israel"who should "perish from this world."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the upcoming launch of peace talks an opportunity to secure endurable peace, lasting generations. But, Ovadia Yosef, spiritual head of the religious Shas party in the government, denounced the talks, scheduled to kickstart on September 2, and said,

"Abu Mazen (nom de guerre for Abbas) and all these evil people should perish from this world," "God should strike them with a plague, them and these Palestinians," Rabbi Ovadia was quoted as saying during his weekly sermon at a synagogue near his Jerusalem home.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu today said he is optimistic that a that a deal will be reached during the talks.

PressTV: Rabbi slammed for promoting 'genocide'.