'It's been over 200 children so far. These are war crimes.' - Princeton professor Cornel West says President Obama is a "war criminal." West, the prominent black academic and activist who has consistently been a harsh Obama critic, took issue with the White House's covert drone program, saying that "the chickens are coming home to roost." "We've been talking about this for a good while, the immorality of drones, dropping bombs on innocent people," West said on his "Smiley & West" radio show with Tavis Smiley. "It's been over 200 children so far," West said. "These are war crimes."

"Let us not be deceived: Nixon, Bush, Obama, they're war criminals," West said. "They have killed innocent people in the name of the struggle for freedom, but they're suspending the law, very much like Wall Street criminals. The law is suspended for them, but the law applies for the rest of us."

Pulse: Obama kills over 700 Pakistanis in 44 drone strikes in 2009 - The Pakistani daily Dawn — a pro-US paper not known for its antiwar stance — reports that US drones killed over 700 civilians in 44 bombings since Obama took office in January 2009. Of the 44 attacks, only five succeeded in hitting their target. In other words, Obama has surpassed his predecessor’s murderous record in Pakistan.

AWIP: US Drones Killed 894 in Tiny Pakistan Agency - Though it is only a fraction of the overall drone war against the nation, the Peshawar High Court today heard details on the impact of the US drone strikes against the North Waziristan Agency, from the tiny area’s agent. In the past five years, 147 distinct US attacks have killed 894 people, including 35 women and 24 children. The vast majority of the other victims were local tribesmen, with only 46 foreigners among the slain, and not all of them confirmed to be militants. Well over 200 people, again overwhelmingly civilians, were wounded in the attacks.

As concerns grow over the violation of privacy in the United States, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) says it has issued hundreds of permits for domestic drone operators. - On Friday, the FAA said it had issued some 1,428 permits since 2007, a number much greater than previously known. Some 327 permits are still listed as active. Domestic drone operators include the police department, universities, state transportation departments, and at least seven other federal agencies including the CIA. The FAA also says another 10,000 drone permits could be issued over the next five years in an effort to license more surveillance drones in US airspace.

Russia Today: FAA takes major step in expanding drone use in America

Do you believe that you really think for yourself? Did you come up with your attitudes, opinions and beliefs on your own, or are they continually being shaped and molded by someone else? Could it be possible that you and everyone around you is actually hooked into a real life version of “the matrix” that is constantly defining your reality for you? Sadly, the truth is that almost all of us have willingly hooked ourselves into a colossal media system that literally tells us what to think. In the United States today, the average American watches 153 hours of television a month. We also spend huge amounts of time watching movies, surfing the Internet, reading books and magazines, playing video games and listening to music. Many Americans are so addicted to being “connected” that they will actually become physically uncomfortable if they are at home and there is total silence. Unfortunately, as I pointed out in a previous article, somewhere around 90 percent of the “information” that we are allowing to be endlessly pumped into our heads is owned by just 6 gigantic media corporations. So could it be possible that the thousands of hours of “news and entertainment” that you are allowing these gigantic corporations to fill your head with each year is having an effect on you? Does the mainstream media have more control over you than you ever dreamed possible? If you want to continue on in blissful ignorance, stop reading now, but if you want to take “the red pill”, keep on reading because the further down the rabbit hole you go, the stranger that things get.

Units of the Armed Forces carried out a series of qualitative operations and destroyed a number of terrorists'' dens and weapons in Damascus countryside, killing a number of the so-called " al-Islam Brigade" leaders. An official source told SANA reporter that another Army unit killed and injured terrorists, destroying their dens along with weapons and ammunition inside them in al-Aoutaiba and al-Abadi towns.

Stephen Lendman: Syria Boils
Stephen Lendman: Washington OK's Israeli Aggression on Syria
Jason Ditz: 150 Killed as Battle for Key Syrian Airport Rages On
Christof Lehmann: 132 Tunisian Insurgents Killed in Aleppo, Tunisia developing into Salafist Hot-Bed

SANA: Grand Mufti: Syria is Paying the Price of Its Support for Arab Causes - Grand Mufti of the Republic, Dr. Ahmad Badreddin Hassoun, said that Syria is now tending to its wounds so that it may rebuild itself, pointing out that Syria is paying the price of its support for Arab causes and its refusal to submitting to US-Israeli dictations and projects. In an interview with al-Mayadin TV broadcast on Friday, Hassoun said that the world will soon see the birth of a new Syria which learned new lessons after the schemes it faced for the past two years, stressing that freedom comes from the people, not from abroad, and that the Arab world is still embroiled in the chaos of the alleged "Arab spring."

An estimated 40,000 people have fled a town in eastern Syria after three days of heavy fighting between government troops and rebels, the United Nations food agency said. - [CIA/Mossad] "rebels" seized al-Shaddadeh in Syria's oil-producing east on Thursday after the clashes which killed 30 of their fighters and 100 Syrian government troops, a violence monitoring group told Reuters. "A WFP (World Food Programme) team visited the area and estimated that around 40,000 people have fled al-Shaddadeh to al-Hasakah city (the regional capital)," the U.N. agency told journalists in Geneva on Friday. Northeastern Syria was hit by four years of drought before the [CIA/Mossad generated] "revolt" against President Bashar al-Assad started nearly two years ago, resulting in high rates of malnutrition among children, WFP spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs [should have] said. "The fighting and displacement only aggravates the misery of these people," she said, adding the agency had sent extra rations to the area this week. Taking Shaddadeh brings the rebels closer to the provincial capital Hasakah, 45 km (30 miles) to the north in the surrounding Hasakah province. The fresh displacement adds to an estimated 2.5 million people already uprooted within Syria, many living in squalid conditions in schools and other public buildings converted into shelters, according to the United Nations. (Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Andrew Heavens)

With a blinding flash and a booming shock wave, a meteor blazed across the western Siberian sky Friday and exploded with the force of 20 atomic bombs, injuring more than 1,000 people as it blasted out windows and spread panic in a city of 1 million. - While NASA estimated the meteor was only about the size of a bus and weighed an estimated 7,000 tons, the fireball it produced was dramatic. Video shot by startled residents of the city of Chelyabinsk showed its streaming contrails as it arced toward the horizon just after sunrise, looking like something from a world-ending science-fiction movie. The largest recorded meteor strike in more than a century occurred hours before a 150-foot asteroid passed within about 17,000 miles (28,000 kilometers) of Earth. The European Space Agency said its experts had determined there was no connection between the asteroid and the Russian meteor - just cosmic coincidence.

Gregor Grimm/YouTube
USA Today: NASA: Largest meteor in more than 100 years
Russia Today: Fireball explosion equal to 20 Hiroshimas

In the space of three days, a two-year-old mystery about an unidentified prisoner who hanged himself in a high-security Israeli prison has become a scandal for Israel’s vaunted Mossad spy agency. Many here are predicting that it will cost some top officials their jobs. - The Israeli government now acknowledges that Prisoner X was an Australian citizen named Ben Zygier who was held in solitary confinement for eight months in this country’s notorious Ayalon prison before he hanged himself. But the details of Zygier’s life as a Mossad agent are still emerging, and with each new fact, analysts find a pattern of a spy agency that let down its guard and then perhaps went to extremes to cover up its responsibility. In the space of three days, a two-year-old mystery about an unidentified prisoner who hanged himself in a high-security Israeli prison has become a scandal for Israel’s vaunted Mossad spy agency. Many here are predicting that it will cost some top officials their jobs. "This is not an affair, it’s a catastrophe," Uri Misgav wrote in the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz.

The Herald: Zygier 'planned to expose deadly use of passports'
AWIP: Israel killed its own secret agent

Gland, Switzerland, 15 February 2013 – Nineteen percent of the world’s reptiles are estimated to be threatened with extinction, states a paper published today by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) in conjunction with experts from the IUCN Species Survival Commission (SSC). The study, printed in the journal of Biological Conservation, is the first of its kind summarising the global conservation status of reptiles. More than 200 world renowned experts assessed the extinction risk of 1,500 randomly selected reptiles from across the globe. Out of the 19% of reptiles threatened with extinction, 12% classified as Critically Endangered, 41% Endangered and 47% Vulnerable.