There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what...

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is trapped in reflection theory. He was allegedly himself involved in illegally smuggling nuclear triggers out of the US, and he assumes that Iran desperately wants a nuclear weapon as well. But Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has given a fatwa against nukes, and there is no solid intelligence pointing to an Iranian weapons program. Iran can’t be close to having a weapon if it doesn’t have a weapons program. He has no credibility left on such warnings. Scott Peterson at the Christian Science Monitor did a useful timeline for dire Israeli and US predictions of an imminent Iranian nuclear weapon, beginning 20 years ago.

1992: Israeli member of parliament Binyamin Netanyahu predicts that Iran was “3 to 5 years” from having a nuclear weapon.
1992: Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres predicts an Iranian nuclear warhead by 1999 to French TV.
1995: The New York Times quotes US and Israeli officials saying that Iran would have the bomb by 2000.
1998: Donald Rumsfeld tells Congress that Iran could have an intercontinental ballistic missile that could hit the US by 2003.

A Liberal Democrat Defence Minister has claimed he was sacked to avoid a damaging Coalition split over a pre-emptive strike on Iran. - Former Armed Forces Minister Sir Nick Harvey told friends that he was fired in the reshuffle to allow Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg to sign Britain up to an Israeli-US preventive strike to take out Iran’s nuclear installations. Friends of Sir Nick – who was handed a knighthood just days later – say that he could have embarrassed the Lib Dem leader by being too critical of Israel’s actions if he had still been in the key Ministry of Defence post. The row broke as sources confirmed that British intelligence agents are already deeply involved in attempts to discover Iran’s nuclear secrets. It is also understood that the US has asked Britain to provide frigates to patrol the Straits of Hormuz, through which much of the world’s oil passes. The sacking of the respected Minister took MPs and Army top brass by surprise.

Hundreds of police barricaded the New York Stock Exchange as Occupy Wall Street protesters swarmed the Financial District for the movement’s one-year anniversary, with over 180 reportedly arrested.

Police made 180 arrests by Monday evening, primarily for "disorderly conduct" or impeding "vehicular or pedestrian traffic."

Witnesses had previously reported on Twitter that demonstrators were being arrested for "blocking pedestrian traffic." A well known local artist named Molly Crapabble was sitting in a police van when she wrote on her Twitter page that people were being "yanked off of the sidewalk" by police.

The final tally will ultimately be higher, as at least seven people were arrested after falling on the Bank of America building later in the afternoon. Several more arrests were subsequently reported after demonstrators marched to the World Financial Center in lower Manhattan and the adjacent Goldman Sachs Tower. Around half a dozen protesters staged a sit-in protest outside of the Goldman Sachs headquarters and refused orders by police to disperse.

Washington Post: More than 180 Occupy Wall Street arrests
Seeking Alpha: Fed Up: Bernanke Declares War On The Poor
PressTV: 65 years of tax cuts for the rich created inequality not prosperity

After Taliban gunmen destroyed eight Harrier jets at a US camp in Helmand Province, the US military has suffered its worst air loss in one day since the Vietnam War. - The Taliban attacked Camp Bastion, the main strategic base in southwestern Afghanistan, on Sept. 14, causing $200 million in damage in the single most destructive strike on a Western base during the war, according to military officials. Two Marines were killed, nine coalition personnel were wounded and six jets costing between $23 million and $30 million were completely destroyed. The approximately 15 insurgents, dressed in US Army uniforms, had penetrated the base Friday night and instantly began shooting and setting fire to parked Navy-AV-8B Harrier jets when they were inside. Three refueling stations were severely damaged during the attack.

Russia has just declassified news that will shake world gem markets to their core: the discovery of a vast new diamond field containing "trillions of carats," enough to supply global markets for another 3,000 years. 'Trillions of carats' lie below a 35-million-year-old, 62-mile-diameter asteroid crater in eastern Siberia known as Popigai Astroblem. The Russians have known about the site since the 1970s.

They decided to keep it secret, and not to exploit it, apparently because the USSR's huge diamond operations at Mirny, in Yakutia, were already producing immense profits in what was then a tightly controlled world market. The Soviets were also producing a range of artificial diamonds for industry, into which they had invested heavily. The veil of secrecy was finally lifted over the weekend, and Moscow permitted scientists from the nearby Novosibirsk Institute of Geology and Mineralogy to talk about it with Russian journalists. According to the official news agency, ITAR-Tass, the diamonds at Popigai are "twice as hard" as the usual gemstones, making them ideal for industrial and scientific uses. The institute's director, Nikolai Pokhilenko, told the agency that news of what's in the new field could be enough to "overturn" global diamond markets.

Planetary and Space Science Centre: Earth Impact Database: Popigai
Itar/Tass: Russia declassifies deposit of impact diamonds

ON the night of Sept. 16, 1982, the Israeli military allowed a right-wing Lebanese militia to enter two Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut. In the ensuing three-day rampage, the militia, linked to the Maronite Christian Phalange Party, raped, killed and dismembered at least 800 civilians, while Israeli flares illuminated the camps’ narrow and darkened alleyways. Nearly all of the dead were women, children and elderly men.

Thirty years later, the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila camps is remembered as a notorious chapter in modern Middle Eastern history, clouding the tortured relationships among Israel, the United States, Lebanon and the Palestinians. In 1983, an Israeli investigative commission concluded that Israeli leaders were “indirectly responsible” for the killings and that Ariel Sharon, then the defense minister and later prime minister, bore “personal responsibility” for failing to prevent them.

While Israel’s role in the massacre has been closely examined, America’s actions have never been fully understood. This summer, at the Israel State Archives, I found recently declassified documents that chronicle key conversations between American and Israeli officials before and during the 1982 massacre. The verbatim transcripts reveal that the Israelis misled American diplomats about events in Beirut and bullied them into accepting the spurious claim that thousands of “terrorists” were in the camps. Most troubling, when the United States was in a position to exert strong diplomatic pressure on Israel that could have ended the atrocities, it failed to do so. As a result, Phalange militiamen were able to murder Palestinian civilians, whom America had pledged to protect just weeks earlier.

Robert Fisk: The forgotten massacre
Sonja Karkar: On massacres, atrocities and holocausts: Sabra and Shatila...

The standing military court in Gaza city issued on Monday morning different prison sentences against members of an extremist group after it found them guilty of kidnapping and killing the Italian peace activist Vittorio Arrigoni in April last year.

Mahmoud Al-Salfiti, 24, and Tamer Al-Husasna, 26, were found guilty of kidnapping and murdering Arrigoni and each sentenced to life imprisonment and hard labor. Another member of this group, Khadr Jerim, 26, received a 10-year prison term for kidnapping the Italian, while a fourth, Amer Abu Ghola, 26, was jailed for a year for providing the house in which Arrigoni was found hanged. Arrigoni, 36, a long-time member of the pro-Palestinian international solidarity movement, was kidnapped on April 14, 2011 in Gaza by Salafist jihadists. The police found his body the other day in a house west of Jabaliya district. The family of Arrigoni had expressed its willingness to see a fair trial held against the killers of their son and appealed not to condemn them to death.

Stephen Lendman: Remembering Vittorio Arrigoni
Ken O'Keefe: Thoughts on Vittorio Arrigoni & Surfing in Gaza - VIDEO
Italian Peace Activist Vittorio Arrigoni: "A Beautiful Soul, a Big Heart" - Video [DemocracyNow]
PCHR remembers Italian activist, Vittorio Arrigoni, on the first anniversary of his death in Gaza

The Yemeni government says the United States has deployed 50 Marines in Sana’a to boost security at the US Embassy in response to the recent violent upheavals over an anti-Islam movie. - “We would not accept any foreign forces, but the unit in the US Embassy is an exceptional case," the government said in a statement issued late on Sunday. The statement added that the Marines will leave the country as soon as the security situation improves. On Friday, the Pentagon announced that it had sent Marines to Yemen after demonstrators stormed the US Embassy in Sana’a in protest over an anti-Islam film made in the US.

Zero Hedge: 4000 Marines Headed To Middle East
Armada of British-US Naval Power Massing in the Gulf as ISRAEL Prepares to Attack IRAN
Russia Today: US to flex naval might in Persian Gulf war games

PressTV: Zionists, US launch all-out war on Islam - The Zionists created that blasphemous film. They did it to enrage Muslims and provide the USA with an excuse to send in drones. At the same time there is increasing Zionist rhetoric, and increasing intent, against Iran. Whilst the Americans like it to be known that they are against an attack on Iran, the truth is that they want it. American, British and French warships now swarm in the Persian Gulf waiting for the Israeli planes to strike. Within minutes of the strike an Israeli plane will fire a missile at an American aircraft carrier and the Western media will announce that Iran has attacked. Which will be untrue but it will appear to be true because it will be yet another false flag attack, at which the USA and Israel are experts, giving an excuse for the warships to hurl their missiles. This is all part of the general Western onslaught against Islam the object of which is to weaken all Islamic states so that none of them can ever stand up against an ever-expanding Israel.