The IMF and World Bank were created over 60 years ago to realign the global economic landscape. Andrew Gavin Marshall from the Centre for Research on Globalization, however, says that the actions of these international economic giants did little to help the third world countries it advertised it would, and instead has only helped make the wealthier countries wealthier.

"The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation" -- candidate Barack Obama, December, 2007

"No more ignoring the law when it's inconvenient. That is not who we are. . . . We will again set an example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers" -- candidate Barack Obama, August 1, 2007

When President Obama ordered the U.S. military to wage war in Libya without Congressional approval (even though, to use his words, it did "not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation"), the administration and its defenders claimed he had legal authority to do so for two reasons: (1) the War Powers Resolution of 1973 (WPR) authorizes the President to wage war for 60 days without Congress, and (2) the "time-limited, well defined and discreet" nature of the mission meant that it was not really a "war" under the Constitution (Deputy NSA Adviser Ben Rhodes and the Obama OLC). Those claims were specious from the start, but are unquestionably inapplicable now.

A lawsuit was filed Monday in a US district court on behalf of 700 Guatemalan soldiers, mental health patients, and orphans secretly experimented on from 1946 to 1948.

An apology is not enough for Guatemalans deliberately infected with syphilis by a US medical team in the 1940s. Five months after the American taxpayer-funded medical experiment came to light, victims have brought a class-action lawsuit against the US government seeking compensation for resulting health problems. Seven named plaintiffs, which include both victims and heirs living in Guatemala, filed the lawsuit Monday in a Washington, D.C., district court on behalf of 700 Guatemalan soldiers, mental health patients, and orphans. The victims were all secretly experimented on from 1946 to 1948, the complaint says. The experiments were “both unprecedented and unequivocally impermissible in the United States and throughout the civilized world,” the complaint states. The court brief charges that US public health doctors hired prostitutes diagnosed with syphilis or gonorrhea to have sexual relations with soldiers, prison inmates, and psychiatric patients in Guatemala with the intention of spreading the disease. Once the unknowing subjects were diagnosed with illnesses, the US medical team tested them for potential cures, including penicillin. Orphaned Guatemalan children as young as 6 years old were used as an uninfected test group, according to the suit.

Robert Parry: Guatemala: A Test Tube of Repression

The Israeli lobby in the US is pushing President Barack Obama to go to war with Iran and the Middle East countries need “to be on guard about this [plot],” says political analyst.

Morris said it was worrying that Obama's National Security Advisor Tom Donilon has called on the Washington Institute for Near East Affairs to take stronger actions against Iran. The analyst added that neo-conservatives in the US are also plotting against Syria since Damascus supports the Lebanese resistance movement of Hezbollah.

“What is happening in Syria with the protests...I think the neo-cons through the National Endowment for Democracy have been involved with this, perhaps in terms of rabble-rousing in Syria,“ Morris said. “They want to create strife there [in Syria] and get President Barack Obama to intervene like he did in Libya,” he said.

Morris urged the Middle East countries to be vigilant against US and Israel's plots in the region.

France's Dominique Strauss-Kahn has resigned as managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) under pressures over alleged sexual assault charges that he strongly denies.

"It is with infinite sadness that I feel compelled today to present to the Executive Board my resignation from my post of Managing Director of the IMF," AFP quoted Strauss-Kahn as saying on Thursday. "I want to say that I deny with the greatest possible firmness all of the allegations that have been made against me," he said. "I want to protect this institution which I have served with honor and devotion, and especially-especially-I want to devote all my strength, all my time, and all my energy to proving my innocence," he went on to say.

The leading French politician, who is jailed in New York's notorious Rikers Island, awaits a grand jury decision on whether to indict him on charges of the alleged sexual assault and attempted rape of a 32-year-old Manhattan hotel chambermaid.

BBC: IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn quits over sex charge
Paul Craig Roberts: The Strauss Kahn Frame-Up: The Amerikan Police State Strides Forward
David North & David Walsh: The serious questions raised by the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair

Defying a ban by Madrid election officials, several thousand people gathered in Puerta del Sol on Wednesday as mass demonstrations against unemployment and the government's social policies swelled across the country for the fourth day.

Anti-riot police were called in to enforce the ban, but at press time no one had been dislodged from Madrid's main square. People appeared in good spirits despite initial fears of confrontations. Earlier in the day, the Madrid Electoral Board banned organizers of the so-called 15-M movement from holding its rally. The board ruled that there existed "no special or serious reasons" for the urgent call for the mass demonstration. The Real Democracy Now platform, which is spearheading the movement, called on demonstrators to camp out in Madrid's Sol and other main squares in cities across Spain until Sunday's elections. But Madrid Board members decided that the protests "can affect the election race and the freedom of citizens to cast ballots" for whom they choose. The Central Electoral Board, which decides campaign policy for the entire nation, said it would make a final ruling in lieu of the different decisions being adopted by regional officials. Saying they are fed up with high unemployment and a faltering economy, demonstrators, mostly youths, are demanding a voting boycott against the major political parties in Sunday's local and regional elections.

HeidelbergCement and Cemex, two building materials industries from Germany and Mexico, respectively, are involved in the operation of quarries in the occupied West Bank. The Electronic Intifada has obtained documentation showing loaded trucks leaving the illegal quarries and traveling into Israel.

International law prohibits Israel’s exploitation of natural resources in the occupied West Bank, Gaza Strip and Syrian Golan Heights for its own benefit. Meanwhile, Israeli run-quarries in the West Bank — including Nahal Raba and Yatir quarries, which are operated by subsidiaries of HeidelbergCement and Cemex — supply almost a quarter of Israel’s construction material. HeidelbergCement’s subsidiary Hanson Israel operates the Nahal Raba quarry in the West Bank near the green line — Israel’s internationally-recognized boundary with the occupied West Bank — and Kfar Qasim, a Palestinian village in Israel. Cemex owns fifty percent of Yatir Quarry through its subsidiary ReadyMix Industries. The Yatir quarry lies next to the Israeli settlement of Teneh Omarim in the south Hebron hills of the West Bank.

JERUSALEM (AFP) -- Russia has expelled Israel's military attache at its Moscow embassy on spying allegations, Israeli defense officials said on Wednesday, dismissing the charges as unfounded.

The officials said air force Colonel Vadim Leiderman returned to Israel several days ago after being questioned by Russian authorities over espionage allegations and then told to leave the country immediately. Israel's state-run Channel One television said the Russians released him without charges owing to his diplomatic immunity. "He was suspected by the Russians of running several local residents," the TV said.

At least a dozen Afghan civilians were shot to death and another 85 wounded in mass protests Wednesday over a NATO night raid that killed four members of a family in the country’s northern Takhar province.

Those killed in the raid, two men and two women, reportedly all members of the same family, are only the latest in a series of unarmed civilian victims, including children, who have lost their lives in similar incidents in recent weeks. A crowd, which at its start was estimated by local journalists at 2,000 peoplemany of them carrying sticks, axes and shovelsmarched into the center of Taloqan, the provincial capital, carrying the bodies of the victims killed in the raid the night before. The protest, which included many students, is reported to have grown to include as many as 15,000 people. The protesters chanted “Death to America” and demanded justice for those killed.

The crowd came under fire as it marched on a NATO Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) base in Taloqan, where a contingent of approximately 25 German troops are deployed. Some of the protesters threw grenades, Molotov cocktails and rocks over the walls of the base, where two German soldiers and three Afghan guards were reportedly injured. German troops reportedly came out of the base, and German reinforcements together with elements of the Afghan National Army were brought in from the neighboring province of Kunduz to quell the protest.

[This picture of Abu Zubaydah was included in his classified Guantanamo Detainee Assessment Brief released last month by WikiLeaks.]

Shortly after he was cap­tured in March 2002 at a safe house in Faisalabad, Pakistan, following an early morning raid jointly conduc­ted by the CIA, FBI, Pakis­tani police and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Abu Zubaydah woke up at a black site prison in Thailand and discovered that his left eye had been surgically re­moved.

Zubaydah, who is wearing an eye patch in a photog­raph included in his Guantanamo threat assessment file released by WikiLeaks last month, apparently never consented to the med­ical procedure and to this day has no idea why it was done, accord­ing to one of Zubaydah's attorneys.

"I can tell you that Abu Zubaydah has no explanation for the loss of his eye," said Brent Mickum, who has represented Zubaydah since 2007. "He continually wants me to make inquiries to try and determine the circumstances for which he lost his eye, but no one has been forthcoming."

Zubaydah, the first "high-value detainee" captured in the "war on terror" whom the Bush administration had falsely claimed helped plan the 9/11 attacks and was the "No. 3" person in al-Qaeda, was shot in the leg, groin and stomach with an AK-47 during the March 28, 2002, raid. He allegedly attempted to evade capture by trying to jump from the rooftop of his safe house to the roof of a neighboring house. But the wounds he sustained did not include injuries to his eyes, face or head, according to intelligence officials and photographs of Zubaydah taken as he lay unconscious in a pool of blood, teetering on the brink of death, following the raid.

The Middle East is running dry. The most water-stressed nations on Earth are all in the Middle East and North Africa. Add surging populations and food and energy costs, and trouble seems inevitable.

Water, it's the very stuff of life, and a high-resolution analysis of the most water-stressed places on Earth reveals anew a stark reality. The Middle East and north Africa (Mena), currently in the middle of a historic wave of unrest, is by far the worst affected region. Of the 16 nations suffering extreme water stress, according to risk analysts Maplecroft, every single one is in the Mena region. Bahrain tops the list of those using far more water than they sustainably receive. Other crisis-hit countries, including Libya, Yemen, Egypt and Tunisia, are not far behind. Syria tops the next category: high stress. (The full top 20 is in a table below, with a bit on the methodology). The obvious question is to what extent this severe lack of water underlies the troubles affecting these nations? The obvious response is that only a fool would wade into political and historical waters so deep and try to divine the role of a single factor, amid poverty, unemployment, repression and more.

In a project carried out out by an international team of astronomers with a telescope in New Zealand , a new class of planets has been found out in the universe: planets that do not orbit stars, but float freely out in space.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Japan-New Zealand survey, which was conducted in 2006 and 2007. The survey looked at the galactic bulge at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. For their search, the astronomers used the 1.8-meter (5.9-foot) Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics (MOA) telescope at Mount John University Observatory in New Zealand. What the astronomers discovered were a new class of planets around the size of the planet Jupiter. They are called isolated orbs, orphan planets, or free-floating planets. A free-floating planet is any object in the universe that has an equivalent mass to a planet, in this case the planet Jupiter, but is not gravitationally bound to any star, brown dwarf, or other such object, Instead, it orbits a galaxy directly. They also found that these planets are floating freely in space, without orbiting a star. Astronomers conjecture that they are outcasts from developing planetary systems.

CANNES, France — Peter Fonda launched a four-letter attack on US President Barack Obama at the Cannes film festival on Wednesday, calling him a traitor over the handling of the aftermath of the Gulf oil spill. The star of the 1969 road movie "Easy Rider" was in Cannes for the premiere of "The Big Fix" by Rebecca and Josh Tickell, the only feature documentary in the official selection at the Cannes film festival this year. Fonda -- a keen environmentalist and co-producer of the film which centres on the explosion of the BP oil rig Deepwater Horizon, the ensuing spill and its consequences -- accused Washington of trying to gag reporting on the issue.

"I sent an email to President Obama saying, 'You are a f(expletive) traitor,' using those words... 'You're a traitor, you allowed foreign boots on our soil telling our military -- in this case the coastguard -- what they can and could not do, and telling us, the citizens of the United States, what we could or could not do'."