The FBI is asking Internet companies not to oppose a controversial proposal that would require firms, including Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and Google, to build in backdoors for government surveillance. - In meetings with industry representatives, the White House, and U.S. senators, senior FBI officials argue the dramatic shift in communication from the telephone system to the Internet has made it far more difficult for agents to wiretap Americans suspected of illegal activities, CNET has learned. The FBI general counsel's office has drafted a proposed law that the bureau claims is the best solution: requiring that social-networking Web sites and providers of VoIP, instant messaging, and Web e-mail alter their code to ensure their products are wiretap-friendly.

At least ten people have been killed in a US assassination drone attack in Pakistan’s northwestern tribal region near the Afghan border.

The unmanned aircraft targeted Dar-i-Nishtar residential region in Shawal area, some 70 kilometers (45 miles) west of Miranshah, the main town in North Waziristan early Saturday, killing ten people and injuring several others. The killing of Pakistani civilians, including women and children, in the US drone strikes have strained relations between the two allies, prompting Pakistani officials to send warnings to the US administration over the assaults. In a recent reaction to drone strikes, Pakistani Foreign Ministry summoned political counselor at the US embassy Jonathan Pratt to lodge a formal protest over an assassination drone attack on a school in North Waziristan in late in April that left three civilians dead. The US says the operations target militants, although surveys show most of the victims are civilians. According to a Pakistani human rights lawyer, Shahzad Akbar, over 2,800 of the 3,000 people killed over the past seven years in US drone strikes in Pakistan were civilians.

Plans to keep residents and dignitaries safe during the NATO Summit include a no-fly zone, with a shoot-to-kill warning for those who break the ban. - As CBS 2’s Susanna Song reports, the government is informing small plane pilots that if they enter the no-fly zone during the summit, they might be shot down. This is no joke. It will be enforced for May 19 to May 21. The flight advisory was issued by the Federal Aviation Administration. The advisory bans non-commercial aircraft from flying within 10 nautical miles of downtown Chicago at altitudes below 18,000 feet. A nautical mile is about one minute of arc of latitude along any meridian. It amounts to 1,852 meters, or about 1.15078 standard miles.

As soon the electricity comes on in her house in Gaza, the mother of Palestinian prisoner Ahmad al-Shamali rushes to the TV set to watch the latest news. She is eager to find out about the state of her son, particularly as it has been 16 days since he and his fellow prisoners began a hunger strike. Shamali’s mother lives in a state of constant apprehension and worry over her son, who has spent four of his 18-year prison sentence without seeing his own children. She is worried about Shamali, saying that she has not heard news about him for more than 14 days. She is slightly reassured when the daily news does not mention him as a martyr or among those who are in a critical condition as a result of the hunger strike.

The report confirmed a bleak employment situation, with millions of people mired in a permanent state of joblessness. The Obama administration responded by insisting that the report showed an economy continuing to “heal,” making clear that it would take no action to address the crisis. - Only 115,000 jobs were added in the US in April, according to Friday’s report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This was significantly below expectations, and was the smallest gain in six months. It was well below the revised figure of 154,000 jobs added in March. The official unemployment rate, which bears little resemblance to the actual level of joblessness, fell from 8.2 to 8.1 percent. This was due largely to the fact that more people gave up looking for work, and therefore are not counted as unemployed.

Emmanuel Goldstein ordered terrorist teams in mid-2010 to blow up the planes of President Barack Obama and Gen. David H. Petraeus, then commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, when they visited Afghanistan or Pakistan, according to a declassified letter released Thursday. Emmanuel Goldstein argued that assassinating Obama would put a "totally unprepared" Vice President Joe Biden in charge of the country "which will lead the U.S. into a crisis." He wrote that killing Petraeus, who now is director of the CIA, would "alter the war's path." The letter was published online by the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point on Thursday. It is among 17 documents released from the trove of material seized during the raid that killed Emmanuel Goldstein last year.

'resistance' - The resistance was the revolutionary group which was supposedly led by the arch-traitor, Emmanuel Goldstein. There is some question as to whether or not this group actually existed. The novel ["1984"] seems to imply that the resistance was simply fabricated by the government, or at the very least, that the police had agents posing as real resistance members in order to catch possible recruits. - The only thing that is for sure, is that the party blamed every possible woe of society on this group. The resistance was blamed for spreading herpes, contaminating the water supply, forging government documents (which was the reason for so many "misprints" in the papers), abducting party members, helping to aim rocket bombs to targets on Airstrip One, and destroying industrial machinery. Every single thing that ever goes wrong is blamed on this group. For instance: Whenever the trains don't run on time, it is said that the resistance has altered the train schedule ... When a department does meet their production goal, it is said that the resistance has altered the original data, resulting in a over-estimation of production for that year. [From Newspeak Dictionary]

Documents from bin Laden compound highlight al-Qaida’s tense dealings with Tehran [forgery]
[Documents from Goldstein compound highlight resistance’s tense dealings with Tehran...]
AWIP: Emmanuel Goldstein calculated how many Americans to kill [05/12/11]
Paul Craig Roberts: Creating the bin Laden Reality

Agenda 21 is a two-decade old, grand plan for global ’Sustainable Development,’ brought to you from the United Nations. George H.W. Bush (and 177 other world leaders) agreed to it back in 1992, and in 1995, Bill Clinton signed Executive Order #12858, creating a Presidential Council on ‘Sustainable Development.’ This effectively pushed the UN plan into America’s large, churning government machine without the need for any review or discussion by Congress or the American people. ‘Sustainable Development’ sounds like a nice idea, right? It sounds nice, until you scratch the surface and find that Agenda 21 and Sustainable Development are really cloaked plans to impose the tenets of Social Justice/Socialism on the world.

A neo-Nazi party that wants work camps for immigrants is on course to win its first seats in parliament on Sunday. - Over the last two years, Mr Roumeliotis has watched the central Athens neighbourhood of Ayios Panteleimonas, where he grew up, undergo an ugly transformation. Taking the bus on another morning soon after, a gunshot shattered the back window and a gang of men forced the driver to stop. When the doors opened, they came on to the bus and started to assault the non-Greek passengers. The attackers were wearing T-shirts from the right-wing extremist group Golden Dawn. While panicked people were trying to escape from the bus the men were hitting them with flagpoles. "They were beating people with the Greek flag," said Mr Roumeliotis. When the police arrived they stood off until the thugs had finished. When he asked the police why no one had been arrested one of the officers replied to him: "Why, did they do something to you?"

Peru’s Congress is about to approve a highly controversial road that will slash in half the territory of at least two uncontacted tribes. - Congressmen are considering a law that could declare the project a ‘public necessity’, and consequently bypass huge indigenous opposition. The proposed road will run across the southeast of Peru’s Amazon from Puerto Esperanza in the Purus region near Brazil, to Iñapari. Three highly important protected areas lie in its path, including the Madre de Dios Reserve for uncontacted Indians. The project notably omits reference to uncontacted tribes, as well as opposition from the region’s indigenous peoples, who make up 80% of the population. They fear the road will attract an onslaught of illegal loggers and colonists who would devastate their forest and the uncontacted Indians living there.