From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program. - Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet. At a tense meeting in the White House Situation Room within days of the worm’s “escape,” Mr. Obama, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time, Leon E. Panetta, considered whether America’s most ambitious attempt to slow the progress of Iran’s nuclear efforts had been fatally compromised. “Should we shut this thing down?” Mr. Obama asked, according to members of the president’s national security team who were in the room.

When President Obama promised Americans ‘hope and change’ during the run up to the 2008 Presidential election his supporters thought he meant a change for the better. Few would have believed that when Barack Obama said he would “fundamentally change America,” it would actually make things worse – much worse.

This latest video montage from Fox News and now disavowed by the network as the work of a rogue associate producer, has democrats and some republicans claiming it is biased against the President and reminiscent of 1930′s propaganda. The video, which takes a look at where the nation stood on jobs, prices for food and energy, the national debt, and government assistance programs, compares how far we’ve come (or fallen) since President Obama took office. Propaganda? Maybe. Probably. It is, after all, the mainstream media. But facts are facts, and instead of making this about the journalistic integrity of organizations that have long since lost their credibility with a large segment of Americans because they are clearly in the business of entertainment and not news reporting, perhaps we should actually consider the content of the message itself.

The US has no interest in Julian Assange, insists America’s ambassador to Australia. The statement comes as the WikiLeaks founder grasps his last chance before extradition to Sweden, which he fears will pave the way for further rendition to the US. - ­The US ambassador to Australia, Jeffrey Bleich, rejected as “an invention” claims that Washington was preparing a warrant for the arrest of Julian Assange, an Australian national currently under house arrest in Britain, over WikiLeaks' role in publishing thousands of secret US diplomatic cables last year. “There is no such thing as a secret warrant. Period. They don't exist,” Bleich told the Australian national public broadcaster ABC on Thursday. “It's not something that the US cares about. It's not interested in it.” Meanwhile, the website “Justice for Assange” [correctly] claims exactly the opposite.

The United States has sent a handful of military trainers back into Pakistan in a sign the two nations may be able to achieve some low-level cooperation against militants despite a string of confrontations that have left Washington's relations with Islamabad in crisis. - Fewer than 10 U.S. special operations soldiers have been sent to a training site near the border city of Peshawar, where they will instruct trainers from Pakistan's Frontier Corps in counter-insurgency warfare, a U.S. official said. The number of American military instructors in Pakistan dropped to zero after U.S. aircraft killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in late November. NATO labeled the border incident an accident but it enraged Pakistanis and sent already tense ties with the United States into a tailspin.

Neo-fascist Yulia Shamalov-Berkovich

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called for the mass arrest of the black “infiltrators,” saying that they could “cause the negotiation [sic] of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state,” even though their numbers are estimated at less than 1 percent of Israel’s overall population. - Israel started building prison-work-camps based on a 2009 proposal, that would have them trading manual labor for food and “shelter” inside the prison. And this is where Shamalov-Berkovich enters into things, as a member of the “Lobby for Citizens Affected by Illegal Infiltrators.”

She blasted human rights groups today on the floor of the Knesset who have been criticizing both the camps and the riots, terming them “hypocrites” and insisting that given half a chance they’d create a massive work camp system of their own to imprison the Ultra-Orthodox. “I would imprison them all for incitement and for pitting Jews against Jews,” she added. Shamalov-Berkovich insisted that Israel’s illegal blacks “are living like animals” and that they are “compromising the security of the state and its citizens.”

Allison Deger: Knesset member and J14 advocate: Jail all human rights activists who support African migrant workers and send them to work camps
Haaretz: Protesters attack Israeli of Ethiopian origin in rally against African migrants

Israeli journalist, Uri Blau, will be indicted for possession of classified Israeli military documents, by Israel's Attorney General, Yahuda Weinstein, Haaretz reports.

Blau, who reports for Israeli newspaper Haaretz, received the documents from Anat Kamm, who was convicted in February of passing the documents on without authorization. The State Prosecutor's office stated during the announcement that he intends to indict Blau, that there was no connection between Blau's activity as a professional journalist and the possession of the classified documents and that "betrayed his duty – and later his commitment before the state – to cease possession of them." Such statements raise question's as to the nature of Israel's commitment to a free and open press, suggesting that Blau's should place his duty to his nation above those of the ethics of his profession.

Haaretz: Haaretz journalist Uri Blau to be indicted for possession of classified IDF documents
The Guardian: Israeli journalist to be tried over leaks that revealed illegal military killings
Associated Press: Israel to indict reporter over state secrets

Stephen Lendman: Accelerating Fascism in Israel
Stephen Lendman: Eroding Free Expression in Israel
Jonathan Cook: Mossad operation threatened against reporter
Jonathan Cook: Did Banned Media Report Foretell of Gaza War Crimes?
Jonathan Cook: The dark underbelly of Israel's security state
AWIP: Israeli Wikileaks: Journalists demand not to try Haaretz reporter

The outcome of an election in Greece next month that may determine whether Athens can stay in the euro was thrown into doubt on Wednesday when a poll suggested the anti-bailout SYRIZA party would win, contradicting six previous forecasts. Wayne Madsen comments: Six previous polls showed pro-banker parties in lead. The six previous polls were obviously faked, as are most corporate media polls today. Fake polls are dutifully cited as scientific and authentic by the neocon media, i.e, Bloomberg and the "Wailing Wall" Street Journal.

"Julian Assange loses extradition case – live coverage" - This is completely fucking outrageous, and everybody should be up in arms. First, the majority of the court substituted its own argument for those made by the prosecutor - proving that they rejected all the prosecutor's arguments for extradition - an argument that was never argued in court, thus depriving Assange any chance to refute it. Secondly, they then tried a dirty trick by attempting to hide this substituted argument from Assange's counsel until it was too late. They knew their methods of railroading Assange were dirty, and it was only the diligence of Assange's lawyer that brought this atrocity into the open in time, forcing the judges to give Assange another kick at the can. These judges of the majority are obviously utterly corrupt, and the only chance for justice in this matter will be in Strasbourg. You can see how important it is to get Assange to the United States that senior judges would make complete fools of themselves to do it.

The pictures from Al Houla, Syria, last Friday are almost too brutal to look at. I have a 5 year old daughter and I know it's only luck of birth that separates her from this horror. But my shock led me to write this today as I know there is something we can all do together to stop this. Dozens of children lie covered with blood, their faces show the fear they felt before death, and their innocent lifeless bodies reveal an unspeakable massacre. These children were slaughtered by men under strict orders to sow terror. Yet all the diplomats have come up with so far is a few UN monitors 'observing' the violence. To the UN Security Council and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon:

As citizens of every country of the world, we call upon you to immediately commit to sending at least 3,000 international monitors to Syria with a mandate to protect civilians, and to move fast to define a political transition plan. In the wake of the vile massacre of dozens of children in Al Houla, only such a presence can prevent the killing of innocent children and families, and only an urgent plan with a clear road map can put an end to the Syrian conflict. We have a responsibility to protect the Syrian people and the world can no longer look away.

Officials Retain Effective Control Over Detainees in 'Afghan Custody'. - The US has made much of its transfer of the detainees at Parwan Detention Facility to Afghan government control. This, as with so many other “transition” moves, has been hyped as enormously significant, but in reality is superficial. For the detainees, nothing has really changed. They’re still stuck on a US military base, with their “administrative detention” nominally under Afghan control, but access to them is still strictly controlled and the Afghan general running the facility is hopeful for future influence, but still mostly a figurehead. Even though the transition agreement puts him theoretically in total charge, the Afghan general himself is not much better off than the detainees on site, his cellphone is seized when he arrives at the facility (by US military officials), and even his access to interviewers is controlled from the Pentagon. Such issues are likely to continue to grow, as US officials try to change the narrative of occupied Afghanistan to an “ended” war with a massive and coincidental military presence, while at the same time retaining all of the control in everything but name.

Activists protest close to the Suvretta House five-star hotel in the chic Swiss ski station of St Moritz, where the Bilderberg Group is holding its annual meeting on June 9, 2011.

Around 150 of the world’s elite approached the grounds of a suburban Virginia hotel on Thursday for the first day of the 2012 Bilderberg Conference, but also on hand were throngs of protesters who gathered to opposed the top-secret gathering. Journalists and critics of the annual clandestine conference stationed themselves outside of a Chantilly, Virginia Marriott hotel near Washington, DC early Thursday to catch a glimpse of the government officials, entrepreneurs and other assorted members of the privileged elite who had gathered for this year’s event. In year’s past, it is rumored that leaders of the United States and Britain were agreed on by global figureheads behind closed doors during the Bilderberg Conference; this week in Virginia, speculators have introduced the notion that international big-wigs will be brought with questions surrounding both who to back during the 2012 US presidential election and who will be picked to run alongside GOP nominee Mitt Romney.

[The civil war theme starts at 7:45] The people in the United States will eventually launch a civil war against the minority capitalist cartels who are making enormous profits at the cost of the people’s sufferings, a political analyst tells Press TV. “Ultimately, people in the US are turning these international wars of aggression around and they are turning them into a civil war against the one percent that profits it as human suffering goes on,” said Caleb Maupin, with the International Action Center from New York, in a Wednesday interview with Press TV. Maupin pointed to Washington’s resolve to continue its military adventurism across the world amid the deepening economic crisis in the country and the aggravating life conditions for the American public.

New York Times: Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will
Seumas Milne: America's murderous drone campaign is fuelling terror