Drone victim Noor Syed (Photo: N. Behram)

Obama Aide: Constitution Makes Strikes Lawful Anywhere on Planet.

Fresh off of an interview yesterday in which he shrugged off civilian killings in the US drone war, top White House adviser John O. Brennan was ordered to provide more “openness” on the program at a speech today in Washington. This time, Brennan centered on the legality of the strikes, insisting that not only does the Constitution allow the president to assassinate people anywhere on the planet, but that the drone program was “legal, ethical and wise.”

ACLU/Common Dreams: White House Admission of Drone Strikes Does Nothing to Justify Program’s Legality
Bill Van Auken: US resumes drone killings in Pakistan
Medea Benjamin: Obama Administration Silencing Pakistani Drone-Strike Lawyer
Jefferson Morley: Drone victims’ defender speaks

Bare Statistics of Rhinos Being Slaughtered Horrifying - They're being killed in such unprecedented numbers that there are realistic fears they could be wiped from the face of the planet within a generation. - The bare statistics are horrifying. In South Africa, more rhinos are being slaughtered for their horns in a single week than were killed in a whole year a decade ago. And the death toll is fast accelerating. In 2007, a mere 13 were killed. In 2008, it was 83, and, a year later, 122. Last year it was 448, and this year, by 19 April, it was 181. That is equivalent to 600 a year in a country which is home to 93 per cent of all white rhinos. One expert thinks that at this rate the species could be wiped out by 2025. Others think it could take longer. Patrick Bergin, chief executive of African Wildlife Foundation, said: "If the poaching of rhino continues at current rates, we could see their extinction within our lifetime. The situation is absolutely at crisis levels."

"We conclude therefore that Rupert Murdoch is not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company" - Rupert Murdoch "is not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company", MPs have said. The culture committee questioned journalists and bosses at the now-closed News of the World, as well as police and lawyers for hacking victims. Its report has concluded that Mr Murdoch exhibited "wilful blindness" to what was going on in News Corporation.

Washington has been building up the Filipino military, like others in the region, to contain a non-threatening China. - Recent joint U.S.-Filipino military exercises are a direct military provocation to China even as Washington rhetorically refuses to take sides in rising tensions in Asia-Pacific. The Philippines is using the U.S. to ward off China’s regional influence and stand up to Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea. The exercises included mock beach invasions along coastlines facing China. The U.S. has been building up the Philippines’s military and security forces, offering funding and weapons in exchange for greater American presence in the country.

Peter Symonds: US-Philippine military exercises directed against China

There are currently 2000 Palestinians on hunger strike in Israeli prisons, though judging by the lack of coverage of the story in the mainstream media you'd never know it. Two of the prisoners involved are now in a critical condition, having been on hunger strike for 60 days and counting. They are protesting prison conditions, including the widespread use of solitary confinement, lack of medical treatment, and most importantly the use by the Israelis of the prisoner category described as administrative detention. Under this particular category prisoners can be held indefinitely at the behest of the military without any charges being brought, no trial, or even so much as a hearing to be made aware of the evidence against them. Currently, over 300 Palestinians are being held in Israeli prisons and detentions centers under administrative detention, including six women and six children. Since the beginning of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories in 1967, over 700,000 Palestinians have been detained by Israel. This forms approximately 20 percent of the total Palestinian population in the Occupied Territories. Considering the fact that the majority of those detained are male, the number of Palestinians who've been detained forms approximately 40 percent of the total male Palestinian population of the Occupied Territories. Draw your own conclusions.

BABA AMR, Syria — For Syrians on both sides of the concrete wall that now surrounds this neighborhood, the comparisons to the region’s longest running conflict are unavoidable. “When my wife described the wall to me I immediately thought of the wall built by the Israelis to isolate Palestinian villages and towns in the West Bank,” said Abu Annas, formerly a resident of Homs’ devastated Baba Amr district. “I can understand that Israel built a wall to protect Israeli settlers from Palestinians. But I cannot understand how a national government builds a wall to separate its citizens from each other.” Since forcing the retreat of rebel fighters from Baba Amr after a brutal month-long bombardment in February, government forces have constructed a massive concrete wall to seal off the former opposition stronghold.

Britain, home to the MI6 spy agency that inspired the James Bond stories and the billion-dollar film franchise, has been wrestling this week with one of the country’s strangest real-life spy mysteries in a generation, one that has become known popularly as the case of the spy in the bag. An inquest held just across the Thames from MI6’s headquarters here has brought forth details of the bizarre and lonely death in August 2010 of Gareth Williams, a 31-year-old rising star in supersecret counterterrorism work. He was found in a fetal position, arms crossed on his chest, locked inside a duffel bag resting in an unfilled bathtub at the government flat assigned to him in the upscale Pimlico district of London. His naked body had been in the bag for a week before it was discovered, so badly decomposed that the police and pathologists have been unable to determine whether he was murdered in what his family’s lawyer has suggested to the court was a plot by others skilled in the “dark arts” of spy work.

Wayne Madsen's Comment: Only ruled a "mystery" because Williams was murdered by the "I-team." And when Israel is involved in anything, it is always a "mystery" or "conspiracy theory."