Palestinian genius film maker, actor and political activist Juliano Mer-Khamis, 53, was shot dead on Monday in Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank.

According to Jenin police chief Mohammed Tayyim, Mer-Khamis was shot five times by Palestinian militants, but that police were still investigating the circumstances of his murder. I would wait to learn more about the tragic incident; as we know, the IDF trains special units that are operating disguised as Palestinians militants.

Mer-Khamis was well-known as an actor for his film and theater roles, both in Israel and abroad, and had made a name for himself as a director and a political activist, as well.

Mer-Khamis was affiliated with the local theater in Jenin, established by his mother in the 1980s. In 2006, Mer-Khamis opened the Freedom Theater in Jenin, along with Zakariya Zubeidi, the former military leader of the Al-Aqsa Martyr Brigades in that West Bank city.

Mer-Khamis' mother, Arna Mer, was an Israeli Jewish activist for Palestinian rights. His father, Saliba Khamis, was a Christian Palestinian. Mer-Khamis was born and raised in Nazareth.

The Guardian: Israeli peace activist Juliano Mer Khamis shot dead in Jenin

US President Barack Obama has launched his campaign for the 2012 presidential election, urging his supporters to continue backing his first-term policies -- although he failed to live up to most of his promises. In a video posted on his official website and an e-mail to supporters on Monday morning, Obama announced his intention to stand for a second term in office. Obama's official bid for his second term in the White House starts 20 months before the November 2012 election. In his 2008 campaign Obama vowed to repeal Bush tax cuts, close Guantanamo and bring American troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan. However, he failed to deliver on any of those promises.

Stephen Lendman: Obama's Terror War on Libya - As President, Obama broke all [his] pledges, including every major one, delivering betrayal, not populist change. Make no mistake. His imperial ambitions are reckless, duplicitous, unscrupulous, and lawless - mindless of vital homeland needs and priorities, notably for America's growing millions in poverty or heading there, denied help to wage global wars, bail out Wall Street, and benefit other corporate favorites. As a result, he accelerated America's decline, heading the nation for tyranny and ruin.

Stephen Lendman: Obama Year Two: Continued Betrayal and Failure (Part I)(Part II)

Israel is launching an international campaign to push the United Nations to rescind a scathing report on Israeli war conduct in Gaza two years ago, after the report's author backtracked from key allegations against the Jewish state.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his cabinet he had ordered the diplomatic offensive in response to the new admissions from international jurist Richard Goldstone, who wrote in The Washington Post at the weekend that his most serious accusation against Israel – that it deliberately targeted civilians – appeared to be wrong. He said that in hindsight his report would have been very different. Mr Netanyahu said Mr Goldstone's comments vindicated Israel's wartime conduct and that the report, which accused both Israel and Hamas militants of possibly committing war crimes, should be scrapped.

Gilad Atzmon: Goldstone’s U-Turn
Stephen Lendman: Revisiting Israel's Terror War on Gaza
Celine Hagbard: Goldstone Flip-flops After Talk With Racist Zionists
AWIP: Goldstone backtracks: Regrets Saying Israel Intentionally Killed Gazans

The first discernible signs of mission creep by the coalition were detected in Libya yesterday. In several places around Benghazi, there were palpable signs that Western "assistance" was active on the ground. Military and diplomatic operatives from the US and Western Europe – usually described as experts, consultants and advisers – turned up in the rebel capital, Benghazi. These include UK personnel, among them a former Royal Navy officer who had recently served as a diplomat in Afghanistan. He said he was in Libya as a consultant to the opposition administration. A group speaking with English and Scottish accents was encountered on the road out of Benghazi towards the front line in three four-wheel-drive cars. They said they were carrying out engineering maintenance work. If such personnel are now operational, can military trainers be far behind?

Patrick Martin: Mounting evidence of CIA ties to Libyan rebels
James Petras: Libya and Obama’s Defense of the ‘Rebel Uprising’

Despite making much of the idea that the US would be taking a “supporting role” in the Libyan War as of Sunday, it seems to have taken very little convincing for the Obama Administration to agree to the continuation of its air strikes. Early Sunday NATO officials started talking up the “request” for the US to launch missiles at Libya, and the Pentagon quickly confirmed that the attacks will continue through at least Monday. The official explanation is that the much vaunted “bad weather” has really hindered the number of US strikes launched over the past few days. Apparently, then, the war is operating on something akin to a flex-time schedule, with the US making up for its lack of blowing things up in recent days with a fresh salvo Monday. At the same time, despite all of this weather, NATO has been launching scores of strikes on a daily basis over the past several days. There’s no indication what exactly is being hit in those strikes, but it appears the weather hasn’t stopped these strikes.

PressTV: Britain will dispatch 600 marines from its Royal Navy taskforce and at least 6 ships to Libya this week in defiance of the UN mandate
Xinhuanet: NATO conducts 70 air raids in Libya on Saturday
Yahoo: Ship brings rare glimpse of Libya's bloodiest front
PressTV: Fight for Libya's oil-rich Brega continues

Xymphora: Inevitable 'humanitarian' result
Justin Raimondo: The Arab Awakening, Hijacked?
James Petras: Libya and Obama’s Defense of the ‘Rebel Uprising’

Chinese authorities are still silent on the whereabouts of Ai WeiWei, who has been missing for more than a day after he was held by authorities as part of a massive crackdown on pro-democracy dissidents.

Mr Ai was held by police on Sunday as he attempted to board a flight to Hong Kong. Family and friends have been unable to contact the pro-democracy activist for more than 24 hours. His disappearance comes as China carries out a massive crackdown on lawyers, writers and activists, arresting and detaining dozens since online calls for protests similar to those in the Middle East and North Africa began to circulate in February. No public protests have emerged. An outspoken government critic, Mr Ai has been keeping an informal tally of those detentions on Twitter, where he has more than 70,000 followers. Despite his frequent brushes with the Chinese state, the internationally-acclaimed artist has never before been formerly arrested or detained for such a long period of time. “There is no news of him so far,” said Lu Qing, Mr Ai’s wife. Mrs Lu said she was interrogated on Sunday night by Beijing city police, who searched the couple’s home and took away items, including documents, computers and hard drives.

“They asked me about Ai WeiWei’s work and the articles he posted online,” she said. “I told them that everything that Ai did was very public, and if they wanted to know his opinions and work they could just look at the internet.”

Within months after the Bush administration relaxed limits on domestic-intelligence gathering in late 2008, the FBI assessed thousands of people and groups in search of evidence that they might be criminals or terrorists, a newly disclosed Justice Department document shows. In a vast majority of those cases, FBI agents did not find suspicious information that could justify more intensive investigations. The New York Times obtained the data, which the FBI had tried to keep secret, after filing a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act. The document, which covers the four months from December 2008 to March 2009, says the FBI initiated 11,667 "assessments" of people and groups. Of those, 8,605 were completed. And based on the information developed in those low- level inquiries, agents opened 427 more intensive investigations, it says.

Up to 1,000 civilians have reportedly been massacred in the town of Duékoué in the West African country of Ivory Coast. This is the biggest loss of life in the former French colony since the disputed presidential election in November 2010.

There has been a standoff between the two rival presidential candidates since the election. The stalemate has now descended into civil war, as Alassane Ouattara, who is backed by France, the United States and international bodies, tries to oust the incumbent Laurent Gbagbo. Ouattara’s forces have seized most of the country, including the political capital, Yamassoukro, and the main port, San Pedro. They are now fighting to gain control of the commercial capital, Abidjan. Gbagbo retains the support of his 2,500-strong presidential guard, an unknown number of mercenaries and the Patriotic Youth movement. Many elements in the army have shifted their allegiance to Ouattara, following a United Nations Security Council resolution on March 30. France and Nigeria sponsored the resolution that called on all state officials to recognise Ouattara. This was the signal for the beginning of Ouattara’s military assault on Gbagbo’s forces.

Antiwar: French Military Captures Ivorian Airport
The Telegraph: Alassane Ouattara announces 'rapid offensive' to topple Laurent Gbagbo
The Independent: UN staff flee Abidjan amid warnings of 'bloodbath' - VIDEO

Rockhopper, the Falklands oil exploration company, has estimated that there is almost three times as much recoverable oil than previously reported at one of its wells in the South Atlantic. The company announced today that it believes there are at least 155m barrels of oil extractable from the Sea Lion well, which is some 80 miles north of the Falkland Islands. Rockhopper estimated in June that there would be a minimum of 57m barrels recoverable from the site. The company’s share price jumped 11 per cent to 265p after the announcement. The shares have risen almost six-fold in the last year, after Rockhopper first found oil at the well last May. Rockhopper is one of six companies which has a licence for oil exploration in the region, but its Sea Lion well is the first oil find in the Falklands.

Japanese engineers on Monday were "forced to" release radioactive water into the sea while resorting to desperate measures such as using bath salts to try to find the source of the leaks at a crippled nuclear power complex. Engineers also planned to build a giant silt curtain in the ocean to stop the spread of more contamination from the Fukushima Daiichi plant. The plant operator had to release low-level radioactive seawater that had been used to cool overheated fuel rods after it ran out of storage capacity for more highly contaminated water, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edanosaid. Operator Tokyo Electric Power(TEPCO) said it would release over 10,000 tons of contaminated water that was about 100 times more radioactive than legal limits.

A series of bloody incidents across Afghanistan demonstrates the weakness and political crisis of the US occupation regime, and refutes the claims by the Obama administration that its escalation of the war against the Taliban and other insurgent forces has produced significant military gains. Several of the incidents were triggered by the provocative actions of a small Christian fundamentalist group in Florida, which staged a public burning of the Koran last month and posted video of the event on the Internet, including Arabic-language subtitles in an effort to inflame Muslim opinion around the world. The video has been widely circulated in Afghanistan, and US-backed President Hamid Karzai made a public denunciation of the desecration of the Islamic holy book in a speech Thursday, in which he called for the arrest of the Florida preacher, Terry Jones, who staged the Koran-burning.