Day one in Beirut, where over one hundred human rights activists from around the world are gathering to join Lebanese and Palestinian activists in the Global March to Jerusalem on March 30, also Palestinian Land Day. Over 20 have come from North America and Europe, and an Asian caravan carries justice activists from 11 countries to join the March.

Local and international organizers have been working on the campaign for months, coming together under an umbrella of non-violent action against Israel’s policy of ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem—a holy city for all—which Israeli leaders have openly declared their intent of forcefully rendering more Jewish. The long and varied list of the March’s endorsers includes: Jamal Juma’a, coordinator of the Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall campaign; Nobel laureates Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Mairead Maguire; Jewish activists like Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb and South Africa’s Ronnie Kasrils; a former member of the German Parliament; Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohammed, former Prime Minister of Malaysia; Princeton’s Dr. Cornel West, and Princeton’s Richard Falk; as well as numerous Jewish and Christian justice organizations, including Independent Jewish Voices, Not in Our Name (NION): Jewish Voices Opposing Zionism, Unitarian Universalists For Justice In the Middle East, and United Progressives. That said, Zionist media, as it always does towards non-violent actions, is accelerating its accusations that the Global Marchers will use violence, something refuted numerous times in the GMJ’s call-out and mandate. Excerpts from the website specifically state:

The Global March to Jerusalem is a global peaceful movement which does not use violence to achieve its goals. The Global March to Jerusalem does not represent any one faction or political party but we call for participation of all social forces, political factions, and ideologies.

A special prosecutor investigating the death of an unarmed black teenager in Florida invoked an exemption on Thursday that allows authorities to deny the release of otherwise public information to the media. - The national media has converged on this Orlando suburb to cover a story that has gripped the country and renewed a discussion about race relations in America. Despite this, public officials have told reporters not to bother asking questions.

HLNTV: Funeral director: No injuries on Trayvon’s hands
CLG: George Zimmerman son of judge with sealed closed arrest record in Fla.

A US assassination drone strike has killed at least four people in Pakistan’s northwestern tribal region near the Afghan border, security officials say. - The US drone raid targeted a house in a market area of Miranshah, the main town in North Waziristan, early Friday, according to the officials. An intelligence official also said the attack left four people dead and two injured. Washington has increasingly turned to unmanned aircraft to carry out strikes in several countries, including Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. On January 31, President Barack Obama confirmed that the United States used the unmanned drones in Pakistan and "other countries".

Jason Ditz: Obama Told Pakistan: US ‘Not Ready’ to Stop Drone Strikes

U.S. officials believe that the Israelis have gained access to airbases in Azerbaijan. Does this bring them one step closer to a war with Iran?

In 2009, the deputy chief of mission of the U.S. embassy in Baku, Donald Lu, sent a cable to the State Department's headquarters in Foggy Bottom titled "Azerbaijan's discreet symbiosis with Israel." The memo, later released by WikiLeaks, quotes Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev as describing his country's relationship with the Jewish state as an iceberg: "nine-tenths of it is below the surface." Why does it matter? Because Azerbaijan is strategically located on Iran's northern border and, according to several high-level sources I've spoken with inside the U.S. government, Obama administration officials now believe that the "submerged" aspect of the Israeli-Azerbaijani alliance -- the security cooperation between the two countries -- is heightening the risks of an Israeli strike on Iran. In particular, four senior diplomats and military intelligence officers say that the United States has concluded that Israel has recently been granted access to airbases on Iran's northern border. To do what, exactly, is not clear. "The Israelis have bought an airfield," a senior administration official told me in early February, "and the airfield is called Azerbaijan."

Hürriyet Daily News: Baku denies granting Israel air base access
Haaretz: Azerbaijan denies granting Israel access to air bases on Iran border
Philip Giraldi: Lobbying for War + Dying for AIPAC
Stephen Lendman: Imperial Rage for War

A student in Philadelphia has been arrested for taking photos of a traffic stop outside his house. That’s despite of the fact that police officers were specifically instructed that people can take pictures of their activity in public. - Ian Van Kuyk, a Temple University photojournalism student, has been charged with obstruction of justice, resisting arrest and disorderly conduct. All for simply trying to do his course assignment. Van Kuyk relates the story.

He was sitting on the porch stairs of his home when police pulled a vehicle to the side of the street. As he was tasked with a night-photography assignment, Van Kuyk decided to use the moment, grabbed his camera and began shooting photos. A police officer then told Van Kuyk to move away from the scene, and the student followed the order but continued shooting. However, an officer soon demanded that Van Kuyk stop taking photos. When the student asserted his rights to film on public domain, an officer reportedly said: “Public domain, yeah we’ve heard that before!” Van Kuyk says the officer then started shoving him. “He was pushing me, and I kept taking pictures and he didn’t like it, and he … got real aggressive and threw me to the ground,” the student recalls.

The mother of female Palestinian prisoner Hana Shalabi
holds the picture of her daughter (PressTV)

Joint Press Release, Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel.

Ramallah-Jaffa, 29 March 2012− In response to this evening’s reports in the media that Hana Shalabi has ended her hunger strike on its 43rd day and agreed to a deal in which she will be deported to Gaza for three years, Addameer and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHR-Israel) cannot yet confirm this news. Addameer’s lawyers were deliberately denied access to Ms. Shalabi today and PHR-Israel’s doctor has been denied access to her tomorrow. Her family has also been denied permission to visit her. Addameer and PHR-Israel are first and foremost concerned about Ms. Shalabi’s health. Addameer and PHR-Israel are further concerned that her medical condition and the high danger on her life were used in order to threaten her to take the sole option of being deported.

AWIP: Hana Shalabi has been on hunger strike for 40 days– A call to action

Greece watches events in Spain with pan-European revolt in planning stages.

• Government refuses to back down
• Clashes in Barcelona tonight, but calm in Madrid and Valencia
• Reports of arrests and injuries
• Energy usage down 20% as workers down tools
• OECD says eurozone struggling, and UK in recession
• Today's agenda

Vicky Short: Millions join general strike in Spain

An 8-year old Afghan girl named Noorbinak, according to the MSNBC, “told Hakim that the shooter first shot her father’s dog. Then, Noorbinak said in the video, he shot her father in the foot and dragged her mother by the hair. When her father started screaming, he shot her father, the child says. Then he turned the gun on Noorbinak and shot her in the leg.”

“One man entered the room and the others were standing in the yard, holding lights,” Noorbinak said in the interview. A brother of one of the victims said the children who witnessed saw many soldiers. “They don’t know whether there were 15 or 20, however many there were,” he said in the interview.

Jason Ditz: US Military ‘Can’t Access’ Massacre Site to Collect Evidence - Officials say that “security issues” have kept them from going to any of the locations in the two villages near their base, and that they haven’t been able to get formal permission from the villages in the district to do so either. Bales’ lawyer, John Henry Browne, is expecting these circumstances to dramatically change the face of the trial, noting that “they haven’t been back there. So there’s no crime scene, there’s no DNA, there’s no fingerprints, there’s no confession.” Bales is facing 17 counts of murder and other charges over the massacre.

Max Keiser Interview Russia Today.

Human Rights Watch has condemned abuses committed by Syrian rebels in their stronghold of Homs. But one member of a rebel "burial brigade" who has executed four men by slitting their throats defended his work in an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE. "If we don't do it, nobody will hold these perpetrators to account," he said. - Hussein can barely remember the first time he executed someone. It was probably in a cemetery in the evening, or at night; he can't recall exactly. It was definitely mid-October of last year, and the man was Shiite, for sure. He had confessed to killing women -- decent women, whose husbands and sons had protested against Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime. So the rebels had decided that the man, a soldier in the Syrian army, deserved to die, too. Hussein didn't care if the man had been beaten into a confession, or that he was terrified of death and had begun to stammer prayers. It was his tough luck that the rebels had caught him. Hussein took out his army knife and sliced the kneeling man's neck. His comrades from the so-called "burial brigade" quickly interred the blood-stained corpse in the sand of the graveyard west of the Baba Amr area of the rebel stronghold of Homs. At the time, the neighborhood was in the hands of the insurgents. That first execution was a rite of passage for Hussein. He now became a member of the Homs burial brigade. The men, of which there are only a handful, kill in the name of the Syrian revolution. They leave torture to others; that's what the so-called interrogation brigade is for. "They do the ugly work," says Hussein, who is currently being treated in a hospital in the Lebanese city of Tripoli. He was injured when a piece of shrapnel became lodged in his back during the army's ground invasion of Baba Amr in early March.

Pentagon: All U.S. Elite Commandos in Mali 'Accounted For'. - The Pentagon confirmed Friday that all U.S. special operations forces in Mali are safe amid an attempt by rogue military forces to topple the east African nation’s civilian government. “We do have SOF personnel in country and they’ve ceased all activity,” says a senior Pentagon official. “I don’t know if they’ve departed, but as of [Thursday], they had not. Additionally, all were accounted for.” The Pentagon official did not disclose the number of SOF personnel in Mali, but special operations deployments typically include small numbers of troops.

Many people seem to believe that if we could just get Obama out of office or if we could just reform our economic system that our problems as a nation would be solved, but that is simply not true. Our problems run much deeper than that. The societal decay that is plaguing our country is very deep and it is everywhere. We are a nation that is full of people that do not care about others and that just want to do what is right in their own eyes. We hold ourselves out to the rest of the world as "the greatest nation on earth" and an example that everyone else should follow, and yet our own house is rotting all around us. The words "crazy", "insane" and "deluded" are not nearly strong enough to describe our frame of mind as a country. America has become a sad, delusional old man that can't even think straight anymore. The evidence of our mental illness is everywhere.

'Now we know why George Zimmerman didn't get arrested... No Words... According to court records, George Zimmerman is the son of retired Supreme Court Magistrate Judge Robert J Zimmerman, his mother Gladys Zimmerman is a court clerk... He has three closed arrests: 7/18/05 for resisting arrest with violence and battery on a law enforcement officer div 10... 8/9/05 for domestic violence div 44... And again on 8/10/05, domestic violence div 46 ***' (Live Radio Show)