A decade after the deadly SARS virus wrought havoc in Beijing and other Chinese cities, hospitals in China’s capital are gearing up in the event that another pandemic begins to spread. Following news that at least two men in Shanghai have died from the H7N9 avian flu virus—the first known human deaths from the virus—the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Public Health released a statement that medical facilities in China’s capital are now taking extra precautions to screen for the virus, as Xinhua News reported on Tuesday.

Russia Today: Top scientists to Obama: Ban mutation experiments that will make avian flu more infectious

The central Arkansas spill caused by Exxon’s aging Pegasus pipeline has reportedly unleashed 10,000 barrels of Canadian heavy crude - but a technicality says it's not oil, letting the energy giant off the hook from paying into a national cleanup fund. At least legally speaking, diluted bitumen like the heavy crude that's overrun Mayflower, Arkansas is not classified as 'oil.' While the distinction might normally not mean much, in the case of the disastrous spill in Arkansas it ensures that ExxonMobil will not have to pay into the federal Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund.

ThinkProgress: Exxon’s Duck-Killing Pipeline Won’t Pay Taxes To Oil Spill Cleanup Fund

Europe has been slow to act, but it is not too late. It is now a fact: Hungary is no longer a democracy. President János Áder has just signed the implementation decrees for new constitutional reforms that wipe out what was left of opposition forces against the government. More particularly, the Constitutional Court is no longer allowed to give its opinion about the content of laws and to refer to its own case-law – which results in the loss of almost all monitoring power on the legislature and the executive. This meticulous destruction of democracy and its values – whose starting point was the landslide election of Fidesz in 2010 – has taken place over months and months, under everybody's eyes.

Congress is supposed to work for the public, not hide things away from the public. This isn’t a situation where they’re discussing classified info or plans — but merely a bill focused on information sharing between the government and private companies. Any markup on CISPA needs to be public.

In addition to the United States, the countries participating in the negotiations include Australia, Brunei, Chile, Canada, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam. Japan has expressed its desire to become a negotiating partner, but not yet joined negotiation, partly due to public pressure to steer-clear.

Natural gas from the offshore Tamar field was pumped to Israeli shores for the first time Saturday, four years after its discovery, in preparation for its first use in the Israeli energy market — a move that could transform the Israeli economy. The Tamar deposit, discovered in 2009 some 90 kilometers west of Haifa, holds an estimated 8.5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. On Saturday, hailed an “important day for the Israeli economy” by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, natural gas from the field was being pumped to a newly erected facility on the coast of Ashdod, connected to the gas field via pipelines laid out on the ocean floor, 150 kilometers long and 16 inches wide. The gas is to be transferred Sunday from the facility to a processing plant in Ashdod. From there, it will flow into the Israeli market. These newly harnessed resources promise to be a major boon to both the country’s public and private energy needs. The controlling Tamar shareholder, Yitzhak Tshuva, said Saturday’s start of pumping came “months ahead of schedule.” He said the gas flow “will make Israel energy independent.”

Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland has released a public statement apologizing to the public for the passing of the Monsanto Protection Act, stating that the legislation was buried deep within a government spending bill that was required to ‘prevent a government shutdown’. - Mikulski is the Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman, one who was ultimately responsible for passing the bill that contained the notorious Monsanto Protection Act — a legislative ‘rider’ that grants biotech juggernaut Monsanto immunity from federal courts when it comes to their GMO crops. Although ‘written’ by Senator Roy Blunt, who actually gave Monsanto the ability to write their own Monsanto Protection Act and has received over $60,000 from Monsanto, Mikulski has taken serious flak for the passing of the rider. A rider that Monsanto thought they could slip through the Senate without much of a fight, only to find that the alternative news has made it a mainstream media topic by force (despite GMO lovers saying that it never even happened).

Stephen Lendman: Monsanto Protection Act

The United States says it has deployed a second guided-missile destroyer in the Pacific to waters off the Korean Peninsula as tensions mount with North Korea. - On Monday, US defense officials said that the USS John McCain was being positioned to operate off the Korean Peninsula. On Tuesday, Pentagon spokesman George Little said the McCain had arrived at a "pre-determined location" in the western Pacific. Little also said that the USS Decatur, another destroyer, had also been deployed in the western Pacific "to perform a missile defense mission as assigned by our combatant commander."

An American professor of politics says US President Barack Obama is following in the footsteps of his predecessor George W. Bush in fabricating pretexts for military strike on Iran. - “Despite ample evidence of the devastating effects of the gratuitous invasion of Iraq that began a decade ago, the president and his buddies are now drumbeating for an attack on Iran,” wrote Falguni A. Sheth, a professor at Hampshire College, in a column on salon.com "In essence, the increasingly menacing public posture of US officials toward Iran — coming in the same month as the 10-year anniversary of the jingoistic, imperially smug, and devastatingly destructive invasion of Iraq — cannot but remind us of the spurious calls for war made back in 2002," she said. She noted that no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), the pretext used for the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, have been unearthed in Iraq.