Israel launched a witch hunt against Palestinian educators and pupils who commemorated Land Day by participating in the community’s declared strike. Education Ministry supervisors visited Palestinian schools on Land Day and schools were ordered to send lists of teachers absent that day.

On 30 March 2011, the 35th commemoration of Palestinian Land Day, the Israeli Ministry of Education launched a campaign of intimidation against Palestinian schools and educators in northern Israel. Dr. Orna Simchon, director of the Education Ministry’s northern district, sent a letter to Palestinian schools in the region on Land Day, demanding to know whether classes were held that day and if not, why. They were also asked to immediately report the attendance records for the day, including lists of teachers who had and had not come to school. Land Day commemorates the 1976 Palestinian strikes and demonstrations, against Israeli land confiscation policy, during which six Palestinian citizens of Israel were killed, hundreds arrested and hundreds injured.

This year as in previous years, a general strike took place on Land Day in Palestinian towns and villages in Israel. This strike included the education system and was fully supported by the High Arab Monitoring Committee- National Committee’s local council heads, together with most student- parent committees and councils, elected in Palestinian schools.

This is but the most recent attempt by Israel to prevent Palestinian citizens from celebrating and commemorating their history. On 22 March, the Israeli Knesset approved the controversial “Nakba Law”, which mandates fines for state funded bodies that commemorate the Nakba, the 1948 Palestinian catastrophe of death, displacement and dispossession. The Palestinian public in Israel has stated it will continue to commemorate its national days and history, despite this legal threat.

PalestineRemembered.com
1948 LEST WE FORGET – Palestine and the Nakba
+972: The new Nakba Law: Privatizing freedom of speech
AWIP: Knesset Passes Bill Prohibiting Nakba Commemoration
Electronic Intifada: Global actions mark Palestine's Land Day
Palestine Monitor: Palestinian Land Day: The Non-Violent Struggle Continues

The Libyan leader proposed the nationalisation of U.S. oil companies, as well as those of UK, Germany, Spain, Norway, Canada and Italy in 2009. On January 25, 2009, Muammar Al Gaddafi announced that his country was studying the nationalisation of foreign companies due to lower oil prices. "The oil-exporting countries should opt for nationalisation because of the rapid fall in oil prices. We must put the issue on the table and discuss it seriously," said Gaddafi.

"Oil should be owned by the State at this time, so we could better control prices by the increase or decrease in production," said the Libyan leader.

These statements have worried the main foreign companies operating in Libya: Anglo-Dutch Shell, British Petroleum, U.S. ExxonMobil, Hess Corp., Marathon Oil, Occidental Petroleum and ConocoPhillips, the Spanish Repsol, Germany's Wintershall, Austria's OMV , Norway's Statoil, Eni and Canada's Petro Canada.

In 2008, the Libyan state oil company, National Oil, prepared a report on the subject in which officials suggested modifying the production-sharing agreements with foreign companies in order to increase state revenues. As a result of these contract changes, Libya gained 5.4 billion dollars in oil revenues.
On February 16, 2009, Gaddafi took a step further and called on Libyans to back his proposal to dismantle the government and to distribute the oil wealth directly to the 5 million inhabitants of the country.

Sergei Balmasov: The United States Will Take Libya’s Oil and Gas by Force

The possibility of a last-minute presidential dash by Hillary Clinton has been raised after it emerged that her popularity among voters has almost reached an all-time high. The Secretary of State's favourable rating among Americans [allegedly] has soared to 66 per cent from just 61 per cent in July 2010. The impressive figures raised hopes among her supporters that Clinton will take advantage Obama's nose-diving popularity and run for president in 2012. A stand-out candidate has yet to emerge in the early days of the presidential and the promising figures suggest that Clinton could become the first U.S. female president.

The WikiLeaks chief discusses radical journalism and WikiLeaks's main threat in an exclusive New Statesman essay. In an exclusive essay for the New Statesman, the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, argues that WikiLeaks is a return to the days of the once popular radical press. He also discusses why the New York Times dislikes the whistle-blowing website, and reveals the biggest threat to WikiLeaks today. Assange argues that the New York Times's hostility to WikiLeaks stems from the newspaper's illiberal tradition of failing to back organisations or figures which challenge established elites. He highlights the newspaper's failure to support the American pacifist and anti-war campaigner Eugene Debs, who was imprisoned for ten years for making an anti-war speech in 1918.

WikiLeaks is able to succeed because, unlike many of its forebears, it does not rely on advertisers, he continues. "As well as the hostility of governments, popular grass-roots publishers have had to face the realities of advertising as a source of revenue. [T]he Daily Herald...was forced to close despite being among the 20 largest-circulation dailies in the world, because its largely working-class readers did not constitute a lucrative advertising market."

WikiLeaks, however, has other problems, writes Assange: "How do we deal with an extrajudicial financial blockade by Bank of America, Visa (including Visa Europe, registered in London), MasterCard, PayPal, Western Union, the Swiss PostFinance, Moneybookers and other finance companies, all keen to curry favour with Washington?"

NATO troops have killed two civilians in a car crash near Afghanistan's capital Kabul, and have shot dead a third person to escape the scene of accident. A military convoy identified as British crashed into a civilian vehicle on Wednesday, killing two women, a Kabul police spokesperson told Reuters. Soon an angry crowd gathered around the scene of accident, pelting the NATO troops with stones. The foreign forces then "started opening fire at the crowd and killed a civilian man," the spokesman added. A woman and her child were also wounded in the shooting spree.

The Resistance in Pakistan's southwest has destroyed two tankers carrying fuel to NATO forces in neighboring Afghanistan.

Pakistani officials say the "militants" set fire to the tankers in the south-western province of Balochistan. According to the reports, the drivers of the vehicles escaped unharmed, and their whereabouts are unknown. The US military and NATO rely heavily on the Pakistani supply route into landlocked Afghanistan, where about 150,000 US-led international troops are situated. But, during the past three years, NATO supply trucks and oil tankers have become the target of frequent attacks by The Pakistan Resistance. In response, Pakistani "authorities" have deployed large contingents of police and military forces on all major arteries in the area to curb the attacks. However, attacks on NATO vehicles remain unabated.

Tariq Saeedi: Mossad And India Spy Agency Team Up, Target Pakistan
Pepe Escobar: REBRANDING THE LONG WAR: Balochistan is the ultimate prize

South African jurist Richard Goldstone has accepted an invitation to visit Israel and work to nullify his UN report accusing Israel of targeting civilians during its offensive in the Gaza Strip two years ago, Israel's interior minister said yesterday. The Israeli invitation follows Goldstone's comments that he no longer believes Israel intentionally fired at civilians. Israel had shunned the Jewish jurist since his 2009 report, ordered by the UN Human Rights Commission into the actions of Israel and Hamas in the three-week war of 2008-09.

Gilad Atzmon: Goldstone’s U-Turn
Sami Moubayed: Goldstone now praises Israel
Stephen Lendman: Richard Goldstone's Fall from Grace
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

Hanging on for their lives as the tsunami crashes past them, this is the dramatic moment Japanese survivors clung to a mast and roof rails as waves swept away a building beneath them.

As tsunami waters recede from some Japanese towns, the image taken the day the disaster struck shows the group of 30 people forced to climb an antenna tower in Minamisanriku, northeastern Japan.

Just moments later, a devastating wave crashed into the roof of the three-storey building, sweeping away all but nine of rooftop group. The helpless plight of the survivors is the latest setback as Japan still struggles to contain the fallout from the March 11 disaster.

The tsunami-ravaged Fukushima nuclear plant is now spewing radiation into seawater off Japan's coastline measuring 7.5million times the legal limit, while the plant's operator said it will pay 'condolence money' to aid those forced to evacuate its surrounding area. Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) was forced on Monday to start releasing 11,500 tonnes of low-level radioactive seawater after it ran out of storage capacity for more highly contaminated water.

Japan's economic growth also faces massive threats after the Fukushima fallout caused widespread blackouts among the country's supply chains and global firms.

NHK World: US marines finish clean-up on remote island
Japan Today: TEPCO [allegedly] stops leak of radioactive water into Pacific
PressTV: Plan to cover its crisis-hit Fukushima atomic plant with special radiation-shielding sheets cannot offer a quick remedy and will last until September

A German deputy environment minister said the government would phase out all nuclear power in the country before 2020, taking a hard line stance that may not be reflective of the center-right coalition.

"A decision has been taken to shut down eight plants before the end of this year and they definitely won't be reactivated. And the remaining nine will be shut down by the end of the decade," Juergen Becker told Reuters on Monday. "Japan has shown that even if there is a miniscule occurrence, the residual risk is too high to justify the continuation of nuclear power (...) It is better to go for other energy services in a civilized country," he said.

YES – Dr. Kevin James Barrett (born 1959) do deny the ’9/11 official story’ that Muslims were behind the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. Dr. Kevin Barrett, Professor of Islamic Studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison – is the founder of Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth . He was denied a tenure-track position at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, hounded by Rep. Steve Nass and 61 other pro-Israel state legislators, and handed a death threat by CNN’s Islamophobe Bill O’Reilly – all because of his political opinions and religious identity (he had converted to Islam in 1993).

It is Dr Barrett’s strong assertion, along with myself and millions of Americans, that after nearly a decade of reviewing all publicly available forensics evidence, 1450 Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth are formally questioning the government’s official story about what destroyed the three high rises at the World Trade Center on 9/11, and calling for a new, independent investigation. Their concerns are based on strong evidence for explosive controlled demolition of the buildings.

As reported by the UK Friends of Bradley Manning, the British Government has tonight recognised that Bradley Manning is a citizen of the United Kingdom.

Ann Clwyd MP, spoke of Manning in parliament just after 10PM, a continuation of her previous efforts to raise Manning's case in the UK. On March 16, Ann Clwyd raised the question of Manning's treatment with Foreign Secretary, William Hague, during his testimony before the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. (The exchange between Clwyd and Hague appears in the last several minutes here.). The next day, Ann Clwyd formally requested during Business Questions in the Commons that a debate be held on the conditions of Manning's detention. She explicitly compared Manning's treatment to that "meted out" to prisoners at Guantanamo.

New chief set for £13.5million pay package this year. A bank worker got the sack after she criticised her boss's £4,000-an-hour salary on Facebook. Stephanie Bon, 37, from Colchester, Essex, was working as a £7-an-hour HR assistant for Lloyds Banking Group when she heard about her new chief executive's mammoth salary. Miss Bon went on Facebook and posted 'LBG's new CEO gets £4,000 an hour. I get £7. That's fair.' But after her bosses heard about the comment she was marched from the offices and fired.

Doonesbury: A Banker's Progress - Comic Strip
[Pun alluding to Bunyan's Christian allegory "The Pilgrim's Progress"]

Researchers say morality treatments could be used instead of prison and might even help humanity tackle global issues. A pill to enhance moral behaviour, a treatment for racist thoughts, a therapy to increase your empathy for people in other countries - these may sound like the stuff of science fiction but with medicine getting closer to altering our moral state, society should be preparing for the consequences, according to a book that reviews scientific developments in the field. Drugs such as Prozac that alter a patient's mental state already have an impact on moral behaviour, but scientists predict that future medical advances may allow much more sophisticated manipulations.