The question as to why US-led NATO forces are determined to engineer a regime change in Libya is now becoming clear. While media pundits and political experts still argue over whether the Libyan rebel gangs are actually being backed and directed by US, UK and Israel intelligence agencies, broader long-range Western policy objectives for Libya are being completely ignored. One only has to read the strategic briefings in U.S. AFRICOM documents to realise the true endgame in Libya: the control of valuable resources and the eviction of China from North Africa.

Ellen Brown: Libya: All About Oil, or All About Banking?

After her husband was assassinated during midnight mass at a church in Sri Lanka on Christmas Eve 2005, Canada welcomed Sugunanayake Joseph.

Former foreign affairs minister Bill Graham spoke at a memorial service for her husband, Joseph Pararajasingham, a Sri Lankan MP, calling him a “man of peace.” Five years later, the Immigration and Refugee Board has ordered the 74-year-old Toronto grandmother deported, concluding her role as a politician’s wife — supporting her late husband’s career and accompanying him to political events — amounted to membership in a designated terrorist organization.

“My husband was not a terrorist,” Joseph told the Star on Thursday. “I am also not a terrorist. He was an innocent man. A man of the people.”

Joseph was also wounded in the shooting. Shortly afterward, the federal government issued a visitor’s visa so she could flee to safety in Canada, where her son and daughter are citizens. But when she made a refugee claim in 2007, the federal government alleged Joseph was inadmissible because she had been complicit in crimes against humanity and had belonged to a terrorist organization in Sri Lanka.

Why is a 3% tax increase on the richest considered "socialism" but a 14% pay cut on the middle class is "doing your part?" [Twitter]

Tiny Bahrain, a vital American ally in the Gulf region, is reimaging itself as a classic Cold War police state in the aftermath of the democracy uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa. The island's Sunni hereditary monarchy, which presents itself to the world as a ''constitutional monarchy'', was ahead of the reform curve that erupted in Tunisia in January - three months earlier it set about repressing political parties and arresting majority Shiite activists by the hundreds.

The Guardian: Bahrain strips grants and tuition payments from its students who protested the kingdom in the UK

Italian Peace Activist Vittorio Arrigoni Slain by Militant Captors in Gaza Strip.

The body of 36-year-old Italian peace activist Vittorio Arrigoni was found in Gaza shortly after his captors posted video of him blindfolded and bloodied. They had vowed to execute him unless their group’s leader was freed from custody by Gaza’s Hamas-led government. Arrigoni was a member of the International Solidarity Movement, a Palestinian-led movement that uses nonviolent and direct action methods to oppose the Israeli occupation. He had lived in Gaza since 2008 after arriving on a boat carrying humanitarian aid. We speak to Huwaida Arraf, a friend of Vittorio’s and co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement.

HUWAIDA ARRAF: We are still piecing together the information. It was late yesterday when we discovered that Vittorio was indeed being held captive. It was—we had suspected that something was wrong, because we hadn’t heard from him in a while. And then the video popped up on the internet, showing him bound and blindfolded, with his face a little bit swollen and bloodied. [...] All I know and all I could say is that Vittorio has one of the most beautiful souls, big heart, of anybody I’ve ever had the honor of meeting. And his killing is truly a loss for—you know, not just for those of us who knew him, but for all of Palestine.

You Tube: Mossad Killed - Vik Vittorio Arrigoni
[World United News: Those who want to bump off the witnesses of the slaughter]
Tlaxcala/Megachip: Those who want to bump off the witnesses of the slaughter - 15/01/09
Desert Peace: GAZA CITY MURDER ~~ WHO DONE IT AND WHY?

A death sentence for a young businesswoman chills entrepreneurs. If any point is beyond dispute, it is that Ms Wu was a dynamo. She dropped out of secondary school and started a string of beauty parlours whose primary product was the use of animal-placenta injections to achieve the same sort of skin-smoothing effect for which collagen is used in the West. Within a few years she was reported in China Daily to have assembled a business empire that spanned spas, hotels and property. Her net worth was then said to exceed 3.8 billion yuan ($576m).

It all began to crumble when Ms Wu was detained in 2007, but a conviction did not come until December 2009, a particularly long delay that many believed was caused by efforts to broaden the investigation to include other prominent people. Ultimately, she was convicted of “illegal fund-raising” for, the court concluded, raising 773m yuan from illicit sources.

Australia's scandal-hit defence force faced the threat of a class action lawsuit after advocates for an ex-recruit who claims he was beaten and raped warned "hundreds" more cases could emerge. Police are investigating the allegations of the man, who was just 15 when he joined HMAS Leeuwin in the 1970s and says he endured beatings and assaults that saw him honourably discharged after less than a year. Fellow sailors forced the victim, now in his 50s, to run a gauntlet of rubber hoses and pillowcases filled with boots and sexually abused him with a mop handle, he claims.

What's happening in the UK is contrary to the notion that we need to cut spending to create jobs. At least in the short term, austerity is painful and negative to the economy. The New York Times takes a big look at what's been happening:

But in Britain, one year into its own controversial austerity program to plug a gaping fiscal hole, the future is now. And for the moment, the early returns are less than promising. Retail sales plunged 3.5 percent in March, the sharpest monthly downturn in Britain in 15 years. And a new report by the Center for Economic and Business Research, an independent research group based here, forecasts that real household income will fall by 2 percent this year. That would make Britain’s income squeeze the worst for two consecutive years since the 1930s.

The article implies that somehow this news should or could inform the US debate, but we're pretty doubtful.