The Obama administration is set to argue to a federal appeals court Friday that the government may breach, with impunity, domestic spying laws adopted in the wake of President Richard M. Nixon's Watergate scandal. The case tests whether Americans may seek recourse or monetary damages when a sitting U.S. president bypasses Congress's ban on warrantless spying on Americans - in this instance when President [sic] George W. Bush authorized his secret, warrantless domestic spying program in the aftermath of the September 2001 terror attacks... The government appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and arguments before a three-judge panel are set to be heard in Pasadena, California, this Friday.

The US is planning to move the majority of its warships to the Asia-Pacific region by 2020, Defence Secretary Leon Panetta has revealed. - He said that by 2020 about 60% of the US fleet would be deployed there, in the clearest indication yet of the new US strategy in Asia. Mr Panetta told a regional security meeting in Singapore that the shift was not aiming to contain Chinese power. Beijing has indicated it is unhappy with the US boosting its presence. Last November, President Barack Obama announced that the Asia-Pacific region was a "top priority" of US security policy. His comments were seen as a challenge to China, which is striving to be the main regional power. "By 2020, the navy will reposture its forces from today's roughly 50-50% split between the Pacific and the Atlantic to about a 60-40 split between those oceans," Mr Panetta told the annual Shangri-La Dialogue conference.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned against any Libya-style plan to bring down the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. - “Why are we thinking that if we push the current leadership from power, then tomorrow general wellbeing will begin there?” Putin said after talks with his French counterpart Francois Hollande in Paris on Friday. “What is happening in Libya? What is happening in Iraq? Has it become safer there?” he said. “We propose to act in an accurate, balanced manner at least in Syria.” The Russian president also warned the situation in Syria was "extremely dangerous" and that he saw emerging signs of a civil war.

Our galaxy is on a collision course with its nearest neighbour, Andromeda, and the head-on crash is expected in four billion years, the US space agency NASA said. Astronomers have long theorised that a clash of these galaxy titans was on the way, though it was unknown how severe it might be, or when. - But years of “extraordinarily precise observations” from NASA’s Hubble Space telescope tracking the motion of the Andromeda galaxy “remove any doubt that it is destined to collide and merge with the Milky Way,” NASA said in a statement. “It will take four billion years before the strike.” After the initial impact it will take another two billion years for them “to completely merge under the tug of gravity and reshape into a single elliptical galaxy similar to the kind commonly seen in the local universe,” NASA added. The stars inside each galaxy are so far apart that they are not likely to collide with each other, but stars will likely be “thrown into different orbits around the new galactic center.” Scientists have long known that Andromeda, also known as M31, is moving toward the Milky Way at a speed of 4,02,000 kilometers per hour, or fast enough to travel from the Earth to the Moon in one hour. But the nature of the crash depended on the galaxy’s sideways motion in the sky, and that trajectory remained a mystery for more than 100 years until the latest analysis of Hubble’s findings were revealed.

Chantilly's Westfields Marriott hotel is the site of an “unprecedented” security crackdown as the world’s richest and most powerful arrive for the annual Bilderberg conference. - Hundreds of demonstrators are expected to protest the highly secretive gathering, which kicks off Thursday and lasts through the weekend. The off-the-record meeting, well known in conspiracy lore but typically given little to no media attention each year, once again will bring together heads of state, billionaire bankers, leading businessmen and other international movers and shakers. “This year, it’s the biggest ever. The security is leveraged up big time. It’s unprecedented,” Mr. Jones, one of the loudest Bilderberg critics, said in an interview Wednesday after he and his staff were told to remove themselves from the hotel or risk arrest.

European Union treaty to rein in government spending is approved by Ireland voters. Europe stock markets continue to slide on grim jobs data and worry about Spain. - Irish voters approved a European treaty to keep government spending in check, offering a small victory Friday to the region's leaders as they battle a worsening debt and banking crisis that has raised fear for the survival of the euro. A referendum to adopt the fiscal pact won by a strong margin, 60.3% to 39.7%, though only about half of Ireland's voters cast ballots Thursday. Prime Minister Enda Kenny, who campaigned hard for the "yes" side, hailed the result as a signal that his bailed-out nation "is serious about overcoming its economic challenges." "This treaty will not solve all this country's problems, but it is one of the many foundation stones that you need to put in place to ensure that our economic position stands on firm ground for the future," Kenny said soon after the official tally was announced Friday afternoon.

An Phoblacht: Irish Daily Star and Daily Mirror lash 'Yes' campaign for scare tactics

Infowars-Ireland: Irish Referendum: Fiscal Treaty Passes – Last Vestiges Of National Sovereignty Will Now Be Stripped Away - The 1st June 2012 will go down in history as a sad day for Ireland – Much like the Flight of the Earls on 14 September 1607, the last vestiges of National Sovereignty will soon be removed as power has now been handed over completely to unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats in Brussels. Today the Irish Minister for Finance, Michael Noonan, is not in Ireland but in Chantilly, Virginia, USA, cavorting with the rest of the ‘elites’ at a Bilderberg meeting.

The Zionist-controlled media took up the story, and “translated” the question with headlines such as “Pupils asked ‘why do some people hate Jews?‘ in GCSE exam” –although the word “hate” never appeared in the original question. Far from being “anti-Semitic”, however, the question is designed to be pro-Jewish. The answer which the students had been taught was that anti-Semitism is some bizarre irrational blind prejudice.

The rational and non anti-Semitic answer to the question is that anti-Semitism is the result of the actions of the Jewish extremists and Zionists, who control the Jewish community. Their actions, which include prominent Jewish criminal endeavors in finance and societal degeneration in the media, cause people to be left with a negative impression of the Jewish people as a whole. This is compounded by the enormous crimes of Zionist Israel against the Palestinian people and the blatant lobbying by Jewish pressure groups for horrific wars against their perceived enemies such as Iraq and now Iran. The real answer to the question is therefore not, as the Jewish Supremacists like to say, an “irrational prejudice,” but actually the actions and activities of the Jewish Supremacists themselves.