The wife of 2010 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo has been detained in her apartment in Beijing, China, and is not allowed to see people or use her telephone, a human rights group citing her attorney said Sunday. Liu Xia, the wife of Liu Xiaobo, has not been charged with a crime, said Freedom Now, a U.S.-based group. "Liu Xia is under enormous pressure," said Dr. Yang Jianli, a member of Liu Xiaobo's defense team and a human rights specialist with Freedom Now. "We hope that world leaders will immediately condemn this shameful act by the Chinese government and urge Liu Xia's immediate and unconditional release." She was able to tell her jailed husband he had won the prize, the group said, adding that he cried upon hearing the news.

The Guardian: More than 30 Chinese intellectuals have been detained, warned or placed under house arrest.
SMH: China's security apparatus is as Orwellian as ever.

The Ice is Melting, the Hurricanes are blowing. and it is all YOUR FAULT. SCARED? -Don't Be, Its not True.

US physics professor: 'Global warming is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life'. Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Here is his letter of resignation to Curtis G. Callan Jr, Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society.

Anthony Watts describes it thus:

This is an important moment in science history. I would describe it as a letter on the scale of Martin Luther, nailing his 95 theses to the Wittenburg church door. It is worthy of repeating this letter in entirety on every blog that discusses science.

It’s so utterly damning that I’m going to run it in full without further comment.

WUWT: Physicists send letter to Senate — Cite 160 scientists protest regarding American Physical Society's (APS) climate position

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Pakistan reopened a key border crossing to NATO supply convoys heading into Afghanistan on Sunday, ending an 11-day blockade imposed after a U.S. helicopter strike killed two Pakistani soldiers. The closing of the Torkham crossing to NATO vehicles stranded many fuel tankers at parking lots and on highways where they were vulnerable to militant attacks. Some 150 trucks were destroyed and some drivers and police were wounded in the near-daily attacks. The reopening of the northwest crossing came four days after the U.S. apologized for the Sept. 30 helicopter attack, saying the pilots mistook the soldiers for insurgents being pursuing across the border from Afghanistan.

Kim Jong-il stands with heir apparent in live broadcast for first time amid celebrations and a massive military parade. Kim Jong-il, the leader of North Korea, has appeared alongside his third son and heir apparent Kim Jong-un for the first time on live television at a huge military parade marking the 65th anniversary of the founding of the country's ruling Workers' party. The show of military might on Sunday morning, which officials say is the largest in the country's history, is meant to be the apex of three days of celebrations.

The public appearance was the second in two days by Kim Jong-un, coinciding with the government's unusual step of inviting international media outlets, including Al Jazeera, for a rare glimpse inside the communist state. The festivities, which are being broadcast from the capital, Pyongyang, are not only to mark the anniversary of communist rule. North Korean officials are expected to use the weekend's celebrations to declare the historic handover of power from ailing leader Kim Jong-il to his son Kim Jong-un. The live broadcast of the parade at Kim Il-sung Plaza on North Korean state TV is also an unusual departure from broadcasting norms in the country, where any broadcasts are heavily censored.

Fighting in Somalia over the past weeks between the transitional government and the Muslim insurgent group al-Shabaab has cost more than 350 civilian lives with at least 450 people wounded and 23,000 displaced. People who have been able to reach northern Somalia and neighboring countries are leaving. Most arrive on foot and on small buses, traveling without shelter in an exodus that began when the holy month of Ramadan started. The streets of Mogadishu are completely deserted, and people are too afraid to leave their houses. In these dangerous and difficult conditions, aid distributions are becoming rare.

Confused about all the news regarding problems with foreclosures and how home mortgages are related to Wall Street? Check out this YouTube video by Florida Congressman Alan Grayson.

An Israeli minister has strongly condemned a new bill that would force non-Jews people to pledge their loyalty to Israel, saying it carries a "whiff of fascism." "There have been a tsunami of measures that limit rights," Israeli Social Affairs Minister Isaac Herzog said in an interview with Israeli Army Radio on Sunday. On Sunday, the Israeli cabinet is expected to vote on the bill, which would require new immigrants to swear allegiance to Israel.

"The overall picture is very disturbing," the minister added. "We will pay a heavy price for this."

Uprooted Palestinian: Israeli Cabinet Approves Controversial Loyalty Oath
Al Jazeera: Cabinet adopts bill that requires non-Jewish immigrants to swear loyalty to the "Jewish, democratic state".
Jerusalem Post: Cabinet passes new loyalty oath requirement, Labor opposes
Stephen Lendman: Avigdor Lieberman: A Profile in Ultranationalist Extremism

There is a clear and pressing need to end the monumental folly of prosecuting a war in Afghanistan. It is spreading in intensity into the tribal areas of Pakistan and could yet rattle a weak civilian government in Islamabad to bits. To persuade themselves that they are prevailing, the US, Britain and their allies maintain the illusion that they are building the capacity of the Afghan state, when that claim is being routinely undermined by corrupt elections and a president in Hamid Karzai who packs his administration with his relatives. Belief in the nation-building project has collapsed. The bar of success is being lowered.

From the 1950s' Pentagon to today's Obama administration, the United States has repeatedly pondered, planned and threatened use of nuclear weapons against [China] North Korea, according to declassified and other U.S. government documents released in this 60th-anniversary year of the Korean War. Air Force bombers flew nuclear rehearsal runs over North Korea's capital during the war. The U.S. military services later vied for the lead role in any "atomic delivery" over North Korea. In the late 1960s, nuclear-armed U.S. warplanes stood by in South Korea on 15-minute alert to strike the north. The new information is contained in Korean War documents released by the CIA to mark this June's anniversary of the start of the conflict; another declassified package obtained by Washington's private National Security Archive research group under the Freedom of Information Act; and additional documents, also once top-secret and found at the U.S. National Archives, provided to The Associated Press by intelligence historian and author Matthew Aid.

Reservoir cracks threaten to unleash second torrent of toxic sludge on village of Kolontar in Hungary. Workers are racing to build an emergency dam in western Hungary on Sunday as cracks in a reservoir widen, threatening to unleash a second torrent of toxic sludge on the village of Kolontar and nearby rivers.

About one million cubic metres of the waste material leaked out of the alumina plant reservoir into villages and waterways earlier this week, killing seven people, injuring 123 and fouling rivers including a local branch of the Danube. Kolontar was evacuated yesterday after cracks appeared in the northern wall of the reservoir.

News agency MTI cited environment state secretary Zoltan Illes as saying a 25-metre crack in the weakened wall had widened slightly by this morning. Tibor Dobson, spokesman for disaster crews at the scene, said workers had laid the groundwork of a new dam in Kolontar to ward off any fresh flood of the sludge, which tore through neighbouring areas last Monday, toppling cars and wreaking havoc in houses. Dobson said the number of people evacuated from Kolontar, which lies closest to the reservoir, had increased to about 1,000 overnight. Prime minister Viktor Orban has said the torrent of sludge is the worst ecological catastrophe Hungary has suffered.

Google: Google Earth Imagery of the Hungarian sludge spill - Before & After

Speaking in New York to a thinktank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, former British Prime Minister Blair has called for a "revolution in thinking" in the fight against Islam, because at the moment, in his opinion, "the Islamists are winning this fight". In particular, a failure to challenge the narrative that Muslims were oppressed by the west "was fuelling extremism around the world" and only weakens those "many Muslims who believe passionately in co-existence and tolerance", The Guardian quoted him as saying.

"We think if we sympathize with the narrative - that essentially this extremism has arisen as a result, partly, of our actions - we meet it half way, we help the modernizers to be more persuasive. We don't. We indulge it and we weaken them. Worse, a reaction springs up amongst our people that we are pandering to this narrative and they start to resent Muslims as a whole".

Blair noted that he still has not determined how to deal with the "extremist ideology" (Islam - KC) - whether to enter into direct confrontation with it or try gradually "to manage it and hope, in time, it changes itself". "On balance, however, I don't believe that it (religion of Islam - KC) can be "benignly managed" out of existence.

Join us and help make sure the war's tenth year is also its final year. For almost a decade, we've asked a very small slice of the population--military families--to shoulder the heaviest burdens for U.S. policies in that country. As we start Year Ten, an increasing number of veterans who are telling us that the war isn't making us safer and it's not worth the cost. These are just a few of their stories.