Defense Ministry Insists Everyone Slain Was 'Taliban'. - Local police are confirming that a NATO-led night raid against the Logar Province left at least five civilians, including four children dead, and a number of others wounded. Logar official Rais Seddiq confirmed that two of the slain civilians were killed immediately, and that three others died of their wounds in the hospital. The confirmation sparked an angry reaction from the Afghan Defense Ministry.

The plight of hunger strikers at the US’s notorious Guantanamo detention facility has been deepening as the prison authorities refuse to supply the inmates with drinking water and keep them in “extremely frigid” cells. A group of lawyers stated in an emergency motion filed with a federal court in Washington that the Gitmo guards had refused to provide drinking water to hunger strikers and kept camp temperature “extremely frigid” to break the strike. The lawyers also said the lack of drinkable water had led to medical conditions affecting the kidneys, urinary system and the stomach of the prisoners on strike. Over a hundred of Guantanamo inmates have been on a hunger strike since early February. They are demanding an end to their indefinite detention. More than 160 inmates have been kept at Guantanamo without charge since early 2000s.

Jason Ditz: US Denying Guantanamo Detainees Water
PressTV: Red Cross sends delegation to Guantanamo prison a week early
Russia Today: Gitmo military attorney: ‘The fact that my client still happens to be breathing is mostly trivial’

An internationally-spread Orwellian surveillance system uncovered by RT has been linked to a software company that collects the GPS coordinates of cell phone users in over 100 major cities. - The discovery of the TrapWire risk mitigation program last year and its ability to match human faces caught on camera against massive databases of intelligence led to an outcry from privacy advocates around the world. Now once again the burgeoning preponderance of Big Brother is being put into perspective. In late 2011, members of the loose-knit hacktivist group Anonymous pilfered data from the servers of private intelligence firm Stratfor that were in turn handed over to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks for dissemination. When internal emails alluding to a service called TrapWire surfaced in the leak, an investigation uncovered a program that, according to the company’s founder, “can collect information about people and vehicles that is more accurate than facial recognition.”

The Cyprus liquidity crisis will only lead to violence, Wide Awake News founder Charlie McGrath has told RT. The journalist warns that the Cyprus solution may serve as a model as the wider EU deals with the financial crisis.

Michael Snyder: The Global Elite Are Very Clearly Telling Us That They Plan To Raid Our Bank Accounts - So exactly how did the big banks in Cyprus get into so much trouble? Well, they have been doing exactly what hundreds of other large banks all over the U.S. and Europe have been doing. They have been gambling with our money. In particular, the big banks in Cyprus made huge bets on Greek sovereign debt which ended up failing. But what happened in Cyprus is just the tip of the iceberg. All over the planet major financial institutions are being incredibly reckless with client money. They are leveraged to the hilt and they have transformed the global financial system into a gigantic casino. If they win on their bets, they become fabulously wealthy. If they lose on their bets, they know that the politicians won't let the banks fail. They know that they will get bailed out one way or another. And who pays? We do.

Stefanos Evripidou/Cyprus Mail: Limits now in place for re-opening of banks - text of decree included

Ecuador plans to auction off more than three million hectares of pristine Amazonian rainforest to Chinese oil companies, angering indigenous groups and underlining the global environmental toll of China's insatiable thirst for energy. On Monday morning a group of Ecuadorean politicians pitched bidding contracts to representatives of Chinese oil companies at a Hilton hotel in central Beijing, on the fourth leg of a roadshow to publicise the bidding process. Previous meetings in Ecuador's capital, Quito, and in Houston and Paris were each confronted with protests by indigenous groups. Attending the roadshow were black-suited representatives from oil companies including China Petrochemical and China National Offshore Oil. "Ecuador is willing to establish a relationship of mutual benefit – a win-win relationship," said Ecuador's ambassador to China in opening remarks.

As Xi arrives in Durban, the BRICS summit will announce the formation of a BRICS Development Bank with a $50 billion capital chest (China has a surplus of $3.31 trillion, a vault that will be likely be recycled through this kind of bank). But there are grave doubts about the model of the investment, coming in to promote resource extraction rather than social development. There is worry too that the new BRICS Bank, which is likely to be housed in Shanghai, will be a well-capitalized Southern version of the World Bank rather than the kind of development bank envisaged by BancoSur (before its radicalism was tempered by the Brazilian government – as pointed by Oscar Ugarteche and Eric Toussaint). The kind of regimes that now control the BRICS process are constrained by their own class projects – they favor neo-liberal policies as long as these do not discriminatorily favor the North.

DURBAN, (SANA) – The leaders of the BRICS member countries affirmed their rejection of the militarization of the crisis in Syria, stressing the need for the Geneva Statement to form the basis for settling this crisis. - In a statement issued on Wednesday at the conclusion of the BRICS summit which was held in Durban in South Africa, BRICS leaders voiced deep concern over the deteriorating security and humanitarian situation in Syria, denouncing the repeated and increasing violations of human rights and international law due to ongoing violence.

SANA: President al-Assad Calls upon BRIC S to Contribute to Halting Violence in Syria
Bloomberg: BRICS Nations Plan New Bank to Bypass World Bank, IMF

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has named Swedish scientist Åke Sellström as the head of the mission tasked with probing the alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria. The fact-finding team was set up at the request of the Syrian government. Damascus has accused foreign-backed militants of using chemical weapons against civilians near the northern city of Aleppo. Syrian media say dozens of people have been killed and nearly 140 more injured in the chemical attack.

If it really happened everyone would want to talk about it. We are living in a state of total terror. Maybe we could look at the genuine Arab Spring revolts which were Tunisia and Egypt, where the people protested peacefully.

The woman who signed off on the destruction of evidence proving the CIA’s implementation of torture has been promoted within the agency. The undercover officer is now in charge of the CIA’s clandestine service – at least, temporarily.

Italy remains without a government four weeks after the country’s parliamentary elections. Last Friday, Italian President Giorgio Napolitano gave the head of the Democratic Party (PD), Pier Luigi Bersani, a mandate to form a government. Over the last two days, however, Bersani has been bluntly rejected by both potential partners in a government—the right-wing People of Freedom (PDL) of Silvio Berlusconi and the populist 5-Star Movement (M5S) of comedian Beppe Grillo. The basic dilemma Bersani confronts is that he is seeking to assemble a government to carry forward austerity policies demanded by the bank and the European Union (EU), although the Italian electorate repudiated such policies in the February 24-25 election.

Global democracy has neither advanced nor retreated substantially in the past year, according to The Economist Intelligence Unit's 2012 democracy index, which was published on March 20th. Among the findings of our latest index, now in its fifth edition, are that democratisation prospects in the Arab world remain highly uncertain; that democracy has regressed in much of eastern Europe; and that there is a crisis in popular confidence in politics in the West. In short: it is not easy to build a sturdy democracy, and even long-established democracies are vulnerable to corrosion if not nurtured and protected.