Destruction of Eight Villages in Violation of Obligations as Occupying Power - A number of top diplomats from the European Union and elsewhere are angrily condemning Israel for the military’s plan to expel Palestinians from eight villages and then destroy those villages to make way for “military training” zones. Israeli officials have been trying to destroy the villages since 1999, but had been blocked by the Israeli High Court. The Defense Ministry now insists that the villages were “illegally built” in military territory even though they have been there since at least 1830, some 150 years before the military claimed it. The destruction of the villages would displace some 1,500 Palestinians, who the military plans to force into the city of Yatta. The military argues that theoretically some of the villagers could be “terrorists” spying on their training, and that the court wouldn’t have jurisdiction to prevent them from such demolitions.

The Pentagon will begin flying surveillance drones off the coastlines of Japan, China and Taiwan, an agreement reached after talks between Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Japanese Defense Minister Satoshi Morimoto at the Pentagon on Sunday.

The unmanned aerial missions will focus on a Pacific island chain called the Diaoyutai Islands, which have become the focal point of a simmering territorial dispute between China and Japan. Even Sen. John McCain, one of the biggest hawks in Congress, called the deployment “unnecessarily provocative.”

In keeping with the Obama administration’s antagonistic military postures towards China, the US has backed various neighboring countries from Japan to the Philippines. And it’s no surprise drones have taken a larger role in what the Pentagon plans to make a new military theater of Air-Sea Battle.

New war strategies called “Air-Sea Battle” reveal Washington’s broader goals in the region and illustrate how a war with China – which the US apparently yearns for – would play out.

“Stealthy American bombers and submarines would knock out China’s long-range surveillance radar and precision missile systems located deep inside the country,” reports theWashington Post. ”The initial ‘blinding campaign’ would be followed by a larger air and naval assault.”

He’s back! Just three months after being put out of office by the French electorate, Nicolas Sarkozy has sparked a political firestorm by criticizing his successor’s Syria policy. The former president, famous for his hyperactivity, in defiance of the convention that retired leaders should be seen but not heard, issued a statement on Wednesday calling for foreign intervention to prevent further massacres by the government of Bashar al-Assad. Laurent Fabius, foreign minister in the government of the current president, François Hollande, reacted today with a particularly Gallic mixture of fury and disdain, accusing Mr. Sarkozy of wanting to relive the glory days when he spearheaded the international intervention against the Libyan regime.

Thierry Meyssan: Western and Gulf powers have launched the largest secret war operation since the Contra war in Nicaragua. The Battle of Damascus is not intended to topple President Bashar al-Assad, but to fracture the Syrian Army to better ensure the domination of Israel and the U.S. over the Middle East. While the city is bracing for a new assault by foreign mercenaries, Thierry Meyssan takes stock of the situation. Continue reading here.

Tony Cartalucci: As FSA proxies fail and psychological operations falter, US prepares more direct (and desperate) approach for long-sought regime change. - As it becomes increasingly clear that last week's "surge" by NATO-backed so-called "Free Syrian Army" terrorists was a failed psychological operation, coordinated with meticulously timed assassinations the day of the UN Security Council vote designed to stampede the Syrian government out of power, the FSA's foreign sponsors are preparing the public for a more direct intervention while desperately attempting to maintain the illusion of chaos and the imminent collapse of Syria's government.

PressTV: US seeks an excuse to step up military campaign against Syria: Analyst - Video
PressTV: Syrian forces kill armed group’s leader in Aleppo

Three American soldiers have been killed by a man in an Afghan police uniform in yet another so-called 'green-on-blue' attack, the US military says. - The incident occurred in the southern province of Helmand on Friday. Afghan officials said the three were all Special Forces members attending a meeting in the Sangin District late on Thursday. On Thursday, the US-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said an Afghan National Army soldier fired on ISAF members in the Laghman Province. The ISAF spokesman said that no ISAF soldiers were killed in the attack in Laghman. Yet, keeping in line with policy he would not confirm whether any had been injured.

Britain's role in supplying information to an American military "kill list" in Afghanistan is being subjected to legal challenge amid growing international concern over targeted strikes against suspected insurgents and drug traffickers. An Afghan man who lost five relatives in a missile strike started proceedings against the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) and the Ministry of Defence demanding to know details of the UK's participation "in the compilation, review and execution of the list and what form it takes". Legal letters sent to Soca and the MoD state the involvement of UK officials in these decisions "may give rise to criminal offences and thus be unlawful".

A new virus dubbed Gauss has attacked computers in the Middle East spying on financial transactions, emails and picking passwords to all kind of pages. The virus resembles Stuxnet and Flame malware which was used to target Iran, Kaspersky Lab says.

Gauss has infected hundreds of personal computers across the Middle East – most of them in Lebanon, but also in Israel and Palestinian territories. Kaspersky Lab has classified the virus, named after one of its major components, as “a cyber-espionage toolkit”. The malicious malware spies on transactions in banking systems and steals passwords and credentials to social networks, emails and instant messaging accounts. It can also collect system configurations. Though Gauss seems to be specifically designed for several Lebanese online banking systems, it can also go after Citibank and PayPal users. It is not immediately clear who may be behind the new Trojan virus, but Kaspersky Lab says the “nation-state sponsored” toolkit has features characteristic of Flame, DuQu and Stuxnet malware, which targeted machines in Iran.

New York Times: Virus Seeking Bank Data Is Tied to Attack on Iran

Former senior intelligence officials have created a detailed surveillance system more accurate than modern facial recognition technology — and have installed it across the US under the radar of most Americans, according to emails hacked by Anonymous. - Every few seconds, data picked up at surveillance points in major cities and landmarks across the United States are recorded digitally on the spot, then encrypted and instantaneously delivered to a fortified central database center at an undisclosed location to be aggregated with other intelligence. It’s part of a program called TrapWire and it's the brainchild of the Abraxas, a Northern Virginia company staffed with elite from America’s intelligence community. The employee roster at Arbaxas reads like a who’s who of agents once with the Pentagon, CIA and other government entities according to their public LinkedIn profiles, and the corporation's ties are assumed to go deeper than even documented. [...] Since its inception, TrapWire has been implemented in most major American cities at selected high value targets (HVTs) and has appeared abroad as well. The iWatch monitoring system adopted by the Los Angeles Police Department (pdf) works in conjunction with TrapWire, as does the District of Columbia and the "See Something, Say Something" program conducted by law enforcement in New York City, which had 500 surveillance cameras linked to the system in 2010. Private properties including Las Vegas, Nevada casinos have subscribed to the system. The State of Texas reportedly spent half a million dollars with an additional annual licensing fee of $150,000 to employ TrapWire, and the Pentagon and other military facilities have allegedly signed on as well.

Striking changes in two satellite images of the Amazon rainforest between 1972 and 2012.

The two images below – both acquired by the NASA’s Landsat satellite – give you the view from space of deforestation that has taken place in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil between 1975 (left) and 2012 (right). The images show a portion of Rondônia, a state in western Brazil.

Access to this remote region began with the building of a major road stretching from north to south. Secondary roads were then slowly cut through the dense forest at right angles to the initial road. Settlers cleared the area by first cutting and then burning the forest. As farmed lands grew larger and closer together, they began to merge into a large area of deforestation with a distinctive fishbone pattern. Researchers say that between 1980 and 1992, more than 1,000 square miles (2,500 square kilometers) of forest in Rondônia was lost each year. The beginning of the loss coincided with a 1979 decision by Brazil’s Program of National Integration to build roads in the forest and to offer cheap land for agriculture.

In recent decades, the center of deforestation in Brazil has shifted east to the states of Mato Grosso and Pará, where large tracts of land are being cleared for mechanized agriculture, rather than small farms. Even so, Brazil’s overall rate of deforestation has slowed, attributable in part to more rigorous enforcement against illegal deforestation and logging activities. Bottom line: Two images were taken by the Landsat satellite in 1975 and in 2012 show deforestation in the Amazon rainforest.

Groundwater use is unsustainable in many of the world's major agricultural zones. - Almost one-quarter of the world’s population lives in regions where groundwater is being used up faster than it can be replenished, concludes a comprehensive global analysis of groundwater depletion, published this week in Nature. Across the world, human civilizations depend largely on tapping vast reservoirs of water that have been stored for up to thousands of years in sand, clay and rock deep underground. These massive aquifers — which in some cases stretch across multiple states and country borders — provide water for drinking and crop irrigation, as well as to support ecosystems such as forests and fisheries. Yet in most of the world’s major agricultural regions, including the Central Valley in California, the Nile delta region of Egypt, and the Upper Ganges in India and Pakistan, demand exceeds these reservoirs' capacity for renewal.

Reuters: Potential grows for food crisis as prices surge: U.N.

US pledge to rebuild Haiti not being met. - The deadly earthquake that leveled Haiti's capital more than two years ago brought a thread of hope: a promise of renewal. With the United States taking the lead, international donors pledged billions of dollars to help the country "build back better," breaking its cycle of dependency. But after the rubble was cleared and the dead buried, what the quake laid bare was the depth of Haiti's dysfunction. Today, the fruits of an ambitious, $1.8 billion U.S. reconstruction promise are hard to find. Immediate, basic needs for bottled water, temporary shelter and medicine were the obvious priorities. But projects fundamental to Haiti's transformation out of poverty, such as permanent housing and electric plants in the heavily hit capital of Port-au-Prince have not taken off.