Here is the truth behind the middle east conflict. Ask yourself: Why aren't Americans shown these honest facts on any of the over 1,700 major media outlets? And WHAT OTHER INFO IS BEING WITHELD? Rachel Corrie: 'a true hero' was killed by the state of Israel, and by its brutal regime that practises not only 'mass punishment' but also 'ethnic cleansing'. The same regime that has displaced over 4 million Palestinians, and killed many thousands. The same regime that has denied the right to self-determination to the Palestinian people. A regime that systematically destroys the lives of innocents every single DAY.

Cote d'Ivoire's incumbent president has surrendered to the forces of the president-elect, the UN has said. Cote d'Ivoire's Laurent Gbagbo has surrendered to the forces of presidential claimant Alassane Ouattara and is being held by them, the United Nations has said. "The United Nations mission in Cote d'Ivoire has confirmed that former President Laurent Gbagbo has surrendered to the forces of Alassane Ouattara and is currently in their custody," UN spokesman Farhan Haq said on Monday. Haq said the UN mission, known as UNOCI, was "providing protection and security in accordance with its mandate." He told Reuters that UNOCI was mandated to protect political stakeholders in Cote d'Ivoire, which included Gbagbo.

Maikel Nabil found guilty of insulting the military and spreading false news. An Egyptian military court has jailed a blogger for three years for criticising the armed forces, ruling the country since president Hosni Mubarak''s ouster in February. "Regrettably, the Nasr City military court sentenced Maikel Nabil to three years in prison," Gamal Eid, Nabil''s lawyer, told the AFP news agency on Monday. "The lawyers were not present, the verdict was handed out almost in secret," he said. Nabil was found guilty of "insulting the military" and of publishing false news. His lawyers said they would appeal the ruling. The verdict is likely to cause concern among Egypt's large network of bloggers who had hoped the overthrow of Mubarak in a popular uprising would usher in a new era of freedom of expression.

7.30 host Leigh Sales speaks to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who is fighting his extradition to Sweden.

Amateur footage recently posted on the internet shows American troops firing live ammunition on Iraqi prisoners during a riot in a US detention facility in Iraq back in 2005.

The footage shows US forces using disproportionate force and live rounds against prisoners at the US prison facility Camp Bucca located in Iraq. The Iraqi detainees were protesting the American troops' desecration of Islam's holy book, the Qur'an. Four prisoners were shot dead and five others wounded during the violence.

At the time, the US military tried to cover up the bloodshed, saying the riot happened when the prisoners confronted a search for contraband in the prison. But the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) later revealed that the real cause of the riot was the desecration of the Holy Qur'an by US troops. In 2008, the US military revealed that it held a total of around 20,000 detainees, some 17,000 of whom at Camp Bucca near Basra in southern Iraq, and more than 3,000 others at Camp Cropper in the capital Baghdad. [Links here and here]

This was after the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse scandal broke in 2004...Torture and prisoner abuse are still going on...it's systemic & systematic. Obama is no better than Bush. It's business as usual.

Egypt’s ruling military junta, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, launched a deadly attack on thousands of protesters encamped in Tahrir Square on Saturday morning. Security forces killed six protesters, while the Egyptian health ministry reported that 71 people had been hospitalized. The attack followed a huge demonstration that took place in Tahrir Square on Friday night. The crowd was estimated at several hundred thousand, reportedly the largest protest since the fall of Hosni Mubarak on February 11. The huge crowd in Tahrir Square, the epicenter of the mass protests that helped bring down Mubarak, demanded that the military regime rapidly hand over power to an elected civilian authority. Many chanted that the military junta was identical to the old Mubarak regime.

Government forces were reported to have been “shooting randomly” at those attending funerals yesterday for some of the people shot dead in Dera’a on Friday. News reports referred to tanks being deployed overnight Saturday in the Mediterranean coastal city of Banias, the location of one of Syria’s two oil refineries. Syria’s National Organisation for Human Rights reported Sunday that 30 people had been killed on Friday in Dera’a, 3 in the central city of Homs and 4 in the Damascus suburbs of Harasta and Douma. [Link]

Uruknet: Deadly clashes hit Syrian town of Banias
BBC: Footage emerges of protests in Deraa, Syria

TRIPOLI (Reuters) - Muammar Gaddafi has accepted a roadmap for ending the civil war in Libya, South African President Jacob Zuma said after leading a delegation of African leaders at talks in Tripoli. Zuma, who with four other African heads of state met Gaddafi for several hours at the Libyan leader's Bab al-Aziziyah compound, also called on NATO to stop air strikes on Libyan government targets to "give ceasefire a chance." No one at the talks gave details of the roadmap for peace in this oil-producing nation. Rebels have said they will accept nothing less than an end to Gaddafi's four decades in power, but Libyan officials say he will not quit.

Antiwar: African Union: Gadhafi Agrees to Peace Plan
Raw Story: Gaddafi exit ‘was discussed’ at meeting of African leaders
WSWS: European Union prepares to send ground troops to Libya
Uruknet: "Humanitarian Intervention" in Libya - A Cloaked War of Choice

Iceland have rejected a government-approved deal to repay Britain and the Netherlands $5-billion (U.S.) for their citizens' deposits in the failed online bank Icesave, referendum results showed Sunday.

With about 90 per cent of the votes counted, the “no” side had 59.1 per cent of the votes and the “yes” side 40.9 per cent. The result reflects Icelanders' anger at having to pay for the excesses of their bankers, and complicates the country's recovery from its 2008 economic collapse.

Prime Minister Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir said the results were disappointing but she would try to prevent political and economic chaos ensuing. She said the repayment dispute would now be settled by a European trade court - which could impose harsher terms on Iceland than those rejected in Saturday's vote. Britain and the Netherlands said they would fight to get their money back.

A tiny North Atlantic nation with a population of just 320,000, Iceland went from economic wunderkind to financial basket case almost overnight when the credit crunch took hold. Its major banks collapsed within a week in October 2008, its krona currency plummeted and protests toppled the government.

Stephen Lendman: Icelanders Vote on Predatory Bailout: Nei

ZeroHedge: With Its Economy On The Mend, Iceland Stuffs Bankers For Second Time - In a shining example of how it can be done, Iceland, for the second time in as many years, by popular vote refused to provide up to $5 billion to Britain and Netherlands banks. The just completed referendum once again rejected a $5 billion Icesave debt deal, pushed on Iceland by its European banking brethren. "The debt was incurred when Britain and the Netherlands compensated their nationals who lost savings in online "Icesave" accounts owned by Landsbanki, one of three Icelandic banks that collapsed in late 2008." And while Iceland PM Johanna Sigurdardottir did a brief Mutual Assured Destruction tour claiming "economic and political chaos could follow" we can't help but think we are witnessing the early stages of Europe's most flourishing economy over the next decade, while all other countries in Europe fail one after another due to their inability, unwillingness and cowardice to force bankers to experience, gasp, losses for fear of "reprisals." As for the "isolation" that Iceland is threatened with experiencing should it give banksters the finger, we are certain it is just a matter of a few months before some enterprising hedge funds, scrambling for yield career risk offsets, decide to take on the role of the IMF or of repeatedly insolvent Dexia, and lend directly to Iceland.

In what can only be described as a stunning deterioration in foreign relations between the world's two superpowers, following Friday's release by the US State Department of the annual report on human rights, which expressed sharp criticism of the human rights records of China, North Korea, Cuba and Belarus, among others, China decided it has had enough. Less than 48 hours later, it has lashed back at the US with a report that is making headlines at every government controlled, and otherwise, media in mainland China, which makes a mockery of the US double standard when it comes to human rights, and exposes US "hypocrisy" which China (rightly many would claim) asserts is merely a pretext for continued US attempts at world "hegemony". As Xinhua reports on its front page, "The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2010 was released by the Information Office of China's State Council, or cabinet, in response to the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2010 issued by the U.S. Department of State on April. The U.S. reports are "full of distortions and accusations of the human rights situation in more than 190 countries and regions including China. However, the United States turned a blind eye to its own terrible human rights situation and seldom mentioned it," China's report said." The war of words hits a new all time record: "The United States has taken human rights as "a political instrument to defame other nations' image and seek its own strategic interests," the report said. [...] These moves fully expose the United States' hypocrisy by exercising double standards on human rights and its malicious design to pursue hegemony under the pretext of human rights, it said. The report advised the U.S. government to "take concrete actions to improve its own human rights conditions, check and rectify its acts in the human rights field, and stop the hegemonistic deeds of using human rights issues to interfere in other countries' internal affairs." While that last sentence may not be an explicit warning for the US to shut the hell up and focus on its own dirty laundry, or else, it sure does sound like one.

Bradley Manning: top US legal scholars voice outrage at torture Obama professor among 250 experts who have signed letter condemning humiliation of alleged WikiLeaks source.

More than 250 of America's most eminent legal scholars have signed a letter protesting against the treatment in military prison of the alleged WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning, contesting that his "degrading and inhumane conditions" are illegal, unconstitutional and could even amount to torture.

The list of signatories includes Laurence Tribe, a Harvard professor who is considered to be America's foremost liberal authority on constitutional law. He taught constitutional law to Barack Obama and was a key backer of his 2008 presidential campaign. Tribe joined the Obama administration last year as a legal adviser in the justice department, a post he held until three months ago. He told the Guardian he signed the letter because Manning appeared to have been treated in a way that "is not only shameful but unconstitutional" as he awaits court martial in Quantico marine base in Virginia. Tribe said the treatment was objectionable

"in the way it violates his person and his liberty without due process of law and in the way it administers cruel and unusual punishment of a sort that cannot be constitutionally inflicted even upon someone convicted of terrible offences, not to mention someone merely accused of such offences".

SENDAI, Japan — A strong new earthquake rattled Japan’s northeast Monday as the government urged more people living near a tsunami-crippled nuclear plant to leave, citing concerns about long-term health risks from radiation. The magnitude 7.0 aftershock, which trapped some people in collapsed homes, came just hours after residents bowed their heads and wept in ceremonies to mark a month since a massive earthquake and tsunami killed up to 25,000 people and set off radiation leaks at the nuclear plant by knocking out its cooling systems. “Even after a month, I still cry when I watch the news,” said Marina Seito, 19, a student at a junior college who recalled being in a basement restaurant in Sendai when the original 9.0-magnitude earthquake hit on March 11. Plates fell and parts of the ceiling crashed down around her.

This has been one of the most difficult blog entries we’ve written. In order to gather the most thorough evidence to date, we poured through countless news stories from Japan and the World, as well as official press releases from TEPCO, NRC documents, Areva status documents, and a JAIF report in order to determine the truth at Fukushima. We had assumed that since the IAEA is an international organization, it would have the most honest report, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. What you’re reading took numerous hours of research over many days to discover the theoretical timeline of Plutonium radioactive isotope leakage at the Fukushima Daiichi facility. There are two sources of Plutonium at Fukushima’s Daiichi plant.

1. #3 Reactor was loaded with MOX fuel some four months before it was to be de-comissioned. This is strange in of itself.
2. Plutonium is created in small quantities by the nuclear fission process in the spent fuel rods. Most of these are stored in the fuel storage pool at #4 reactor.

ABC News: Japan set to extend nuclear evacuation zone

“They come for our woman and our children,” Bassem Tamimi, the leader of the Popular Committee of Nabi Saleh recently told me, “they [the Israeli army] know that woman are half our population and half our strength and so they target them along with the children.” Tamimi, a gentle man with a warm smile spoke to me about the repression of his village as we sat in his home overlooking the settlement of Halamish. “They know where to apply pressure on our resistance. It has become really difficult since the last wave of arrests.”

Israel is devoting maximum effort to the repression of Nabi Saleh’s determination to demonstrate against the Occupation. The specific method of repression has been in development for the past eight years and is not only designed to break the demonstrations but to leave permanent psychological scars on the next generation of Nabi Saleh villagers. In short, children are used to implicate the leaders of the Popular Committee for incitement in demonstrations, providing evidence for their long term incarceration. In the last month, six children have been arrested or detained in Nabi Saleh by the army.

Israeli racism turns its ugly head in south Tel Aviv

Racism in Israel is nothing new. There is racism against Palestinians, against Arabs, against non-Jews. There is racism between Jews from Europe and Jews from Arab countries. In our racism, we are no different from many other Western countries. However, the past year in Israel has seen an a significant increase in the number of racially motivated attacks on foreign workers and Palestinians by gangs of Jewish nationalists who seek to ‘cleanse Israel of non Jewish and dangerous elements.’ The problem is reaching endemic proportions as lawmakers have largely remained silent and the crimes continue unabated.

David Sheen, an Israeli journalist with Haaretz, has been quietly documenting the rise of racism in Tel Aviv. His latest video (below) is a look into the ugly work of nationalism which is the foundation of the current spike in racist attacks. In the video, Sheen attends a rally of Jewish nationalists who seek to expel foreign infiltrators ‘that are taking over the southern part of Tel Aviv.’ The interviews that he conducts on the street show a disturbed society in crisis. [Joseph Dana]

The Obama Administration has refused to allow Irish American traditional musicians (and Irish musicians resident in the US) to participate in the Second Annual Celtic Festival in Cuba, April 15-26.

The festival is being organized by Kilian Kennedy of Ireland who discovered during a vacation in Cuba a lively Celtic tradition sustained by immigrants and descendants from Gaelic provinces of northern Spain. Last year, he arranged for musicians from Ireland and Canada to come to Cuba for a week of performances, workshops and seisiuns based in the lovingly restored Old Havana. This year's festival is receiving support from Culture Ireland as well as Havana's Office of the Historian, Dr. Eusebeo Leal.