A major earthquake struck Iran near the border with Pakistan on Tuesday and an Iranian official said hundreds of people were feared to have been killed. - Tremors from the 7.8 magnitude quake were also felt in India and Gulf states. "It was the biggest earthquake in Iran in 40 years and we are expecting hundreds of dead," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake hit at 5:44 a.m. ET at a depth of 15.2 km (9.4 miles). People in the city of Zahedan poured into the streets when the earthquake struck, Iran's Fars news agency reported. All communications in the area have been cut, the Iranian Red Crescent's Mahmoud Mozaffar told state television. Rescue teams have been dispatched to the affected area, he said. "In the aftermath of this earthquake five evaluation teams from the Khash and Saravan branches were sent to the area to assess damage," Mozaffar said. The epicenter was in southeast Iran in an area of mountains and desert, 201 km (125 miles) southeast of Zahedan and 250 km northwest of Turbat in Pakistan, USGS said. On April 9, a powerful 6.3 magnitude quake struck close to Iran's only nuclear power station, killing 37 people, injuring 850 and devastating two villages.

Mohammad Khaleq is one of more than 8,000 Palestinian children held by Israel since the year 2000.

On April 11, in one of the trailer caravans that house the Israeli military courtrooms at Ofer prison, three boys sat in the brown Israeli Prison Service shabas uniform. Their feet shackled, their eyes darting between the judge, their lawyers, and their families. The youngest was 14-year-old Mohammad Khaleq, a short, skinny boy with a light brown birthmark under his right eye and a heart murmur since birth. Mohammad was arrested from his home in the village of Silwad, near Ramallah, in a 2:00am raid on Friday April 5. Eight heavily armed soldiers burst in to the modest home, waking the Khaleq family - the two parents and six children, the youngest just six years old - and gathered them in one room. "The soldiers thought they had come to arrest me," Mohammad's father, 46-year-old Abdelwahab, told Al Jazeera. "When they saw that Mohammad was just a kid they felt embarrassed, but they still took him away."

IMEMC: Child from New Orleans sentenced to serve in adult prison in Israel

In early February, more than 11 years into his detention at Guantanamo Bay, a Yemeni man named Samir Naji al-Hasan Moqbel went on a hunger strike. He had company: By mid-March, The Washington Post reported 14 detainees on hunger strike; by mid-April, it was up to 43. The camp’s military guards have responded to the hunger strike with force-feedings and by clamping down on such freedoms as allowing detainees to leave their cell doors open and live communally. A recent clash between guards and prisoners wounded even some guards and ended with gunfire that included, according to a military spokesman, “four less-than-lethal rounds.” Monday, The New York Times published an op-ed column by al-Hasan describing the hunger strike that he says has cost him 30 pounds of body weight. He dictated the column through an interpreter during a phone call to his lawyers. While it does not directly address the question of why they are hunger striking (more on this below), it does describe in harrowing detail what he says is an increasingly haphazard force-feeding routine.

Japanese Constitution Explicitly Bans 'First Strike' Wars. - Even though the Japanese constitution explicitly bans the nation from launching a “first strike” against another nation, a top official in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) claims his nation has the right legally to attack North Korea right now. The comments were made by Shigeru Ishiba, the Secretary General of the LDP and likely Japan’s next prime minister, who claims attacking North Korea would be “self-defense.” Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution renounces all uses of force to settle “international disputes” and also forbids the nation from having a standing army (though they keep the Self-Defense Forces, in essence an army). The LDP has never been too keen on this, however, and Ishiba and fellow LDP leader Shinzo Abe have been outspoken about wanting to scrap the amendment entirely, insisting Japan needs to engage in overseas wars as a matter of “national pride.”

Reuters: China points finger at U.S. over Asia-Pacific tensions
PressTV: China slams US growing military presence in Asia
The Economic Times: Stop encroaching our territory: Chinese military warns Japan

Chris Floyd: All condolences are due to the victims of the Boston bombing and their families -- and to all those victimized by violence around the world today. This includes the 37 people killed in bomb attacks across Iraq, a commonplace occurrence since American invaders destroyed the country and deliberately sowed bloody sectarian strife there. And the families of the 20 people killed by a bombing Sunday in Somalia, a country whose fragile peace was shattered by an American-backed foreign invasion, which included American bombings, American renditions and American death squads sowing -- what else? -- bloody sectarian strife. And the captives in Guantanamo Bay being beaten and brutalized by a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, who is keeping dozens of men cleared for release even by the twisted, draconian "rules" of the gulag itself -- while he continues to kill people around the world -- without charges, trial, evidence, defense or warning -- by his own unchallengeable, merciless diktat. And the families of the four unnamed, unknown people killed Sunday in Pakistan -- a sovereign nation allied with the United States -- in a drone attack by U.S. missiles: more corpses to join the thousands killed by coward-controlled robots in the Nobellist's savage campaign that is "radicalizing an entirely new generation" and inflicting psychological terror on hundreds of thousands of innocent people, day after day, night after night, without end.

At least three people have been killed and more than 130 others injured when two explosions shattered America's oldest and most prestigious marathon, the Boston Marathon, as runners crossed the finish line. - Witnesses said the first blast went off at the Boylston Street finish line as spectators were cheering on people about three hours into the 117th running of the 26.2-mile (42.19-kilometer) race on Monday. It was followed by a second explosion just seconds later. Smoke rose 50 feet in the air, and people began running and screaming after hearing the noise. Video images showed bloody spectators looking dazed and chaos broke out. Ambulances and firefighters poured into the scene, rushing the victims to hospitals. Spectator Samantha Bissonnette said she was about half a mile (0.8 kilometers) away when the explosions occurred.

Local 15: Bomb Sniffing Dogs, Spotters on Roofs Before Explosions - University of Mobile’s Cross Country Coach, who was near the finish line of the Boston Marathon when a series of explosions went off, said he thought it was odd there were bomb sniffing dogs at the start and finish lines. "They kept making announcements to the participants do not worry, it's just a training exercise," Coach Ali Stevenson told Local 15.

The Chief: Boston runners were warned beforehand that they were going to die
Barry Grey: Media rush to judgment in Boston Marathon bombing
Mike Adams: Boston marathon bombing happened on same day as 'controlled explosion' drill by Boston bomb squad
Gateway Pundit: Police Have Video of Suspect Dropping Bombs in Trash Cans
HeraldNet: Lake Stevens runner just feet from blast in Boston
CNN: Boy, 8, one of 3 killed in bombings at Boston Marathon; scores wounded
The Telegraph: Boston Marathon explosions: three dead, dozens injured as 'bombs' hit race finish line
Russia Today: Boston blasts: FBI Investigators scour crowdsourced evidence

Tony Cartalucci: FBI's History of Handing "Terror Suspects" Live Explosives - What takes shape is an FBI at the center of perpetuating America's terror menace, not at the forefront of fighting it. With every attack foiled or carried out involving FBI uncover operatives revealed only after successful "stings" or in the case of the World Trade Center bombings, an inconvenient witness stepping forward and revealing the FBI's role, the first and foremost suspect considered after any bombing on US soil should be the FBI itself.

An American UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter has crashed in South Korea near the North Korean border, a South Korean defense official says. - The official speaking on condition of anonymity said that the incident took place during ongoing South Korea-US joint military exercises in Cheolwon county of Kangwon Province bordering the North. "The number of casualties was not immediately confirmed with an investigation currently underway to also identify the exact cause of the crash," South Korean Yonhap news agency quoted military sources as saying. The incident comes at a time of heightened military tensions on the Korean Peninsula.

PressTV: US engaged in dangerous game in North Korea: Analyst - Video
Tony Cartalucci: Key to Peace in Korea - Remove US Presence

Among the cables, a series of diplomatic communications exposes the relationships between the Vatican and a number of dictatorial regimes, from Chile’s Augusto Pinochet to Argentina’s Jorge Rafael Videla to Spain’s Francisco Franco. On September 11, 1973, a CIA-backed coup led by general Pinochet overthrew the elected government of Socialist Party President Salvador Allende. In Pinochet’s 17-year dictatorship, thousands of left-wing activists, students, trade unionists and anyone suspected of opposing Chilean and international capital were killed or disappeared by the regime. Hundreds of thousands were jailed and tortured, or sent into exile.