US President Barack Obama is accused of making a U-turn on his nuclear disarmament pledges as his administration plans to allocate billions of dollars for upgrading its atomic arsenal in Europe. - According to newly published figures, the United States will set aside more than USD 10 billion dollars for a life extension program for the B61 bombs and another USD one billion for adding controllable tail fins. The plan to give new tail fins to nearly 200 B61 gravity bombs stored in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Turkey would give them new mission and new capabilities. The bombs could be delivered by stealth F35 fighter-bombers. "What will be going back to Europe will be a guided nuclear bomb…

At least two Guantanamo Bay detainees have attempted suicide since the confrontation between guards and prisoners in February that brought about the ongoing hunger strike, AP reports.

A team of journalists, including from AP, have been allowed into the facilities. They testify the atmosphere has grown tense and heavy in the prison where 166 men are indefinitely held with little to no hope of release. Still they were not allowed to gather more information on the two suicide attempts. At least seven people have managed to kill themselves since Guantanamo was first set up in 2002. The fact that Gitmo has turned into a pit of hopelessness is confirmed both by the detainee's lawyers and some US officials. While the number of officially-acknowledged hunger strikers is growing, most prisoners are isolated from each other and the world. "How can the military, even the military, hope to maintain discipline over a prison camp where there is absolutely no hope for those men confined here?" Lieutenant Commander Kevin Bogucki, a US Navy Military Lawyer who was visiting his clients at the base this week, told AP. Out of 86 Guantanamo prisoners cleared for the release, the overwhelming majority - 56 of them - are Yemeni nationals, RT's Gayane Chichakyan points out. However, three years ago the US suspended all transfers of detainees to Yemen. It may well mean dying in Guantanamo, Omar Farah, petitioner for the Center of Constitutional Rights, believes.

US-led foreign forces have bombed a religious school in Afghanistan's northern Balkh province, killing several people, Press TV reports. - According to police authorities, at least two people were killed in the attack. However, locals put the number at three. Five others were said to have sustained serious injuries in the assault, which has outraged local residents, as reports by police indicated that the attack had not been coordinated with Afghan security forces. In 2001, the United States, along with its allies, invaded Afghanistan under the pretext of battling terrorism. The offensive removed the Taliban from power, but the country remains gripped by insecurity despite the presence of thousands of foreign troops. The United Nations has said that the number of civilians killed or injured in Afghanistan has dramatically increased in the first three months of 2013 compared to the same period last year. Many civilians have lost their lives in US-led operations in various parts of Afghanistan over the past decade, with Afghans becoming increasingly outraged at the seemingly endless number of the deadly assaults.

Five days of heavy fighting has subsided, and Syria’s government is back in control of Jdaidet al-Fadl, a suburb of the capital city of Damascus. Heavy fighting left at least 80 people dead, according to rebel accounts, with at least some civilians among the slain. - But as has so often been the case with no media on the ground, different rebel groups were telling wildly different stories with different death tolls. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which quoted 80 as their “official” total, said some groups were claiming 250, a toll echoed by Jamal al-Golani, a rebel leader, who told Reuters that they believe over 250 died. The BBC claimed unnamed groups were putting the toll as high as 450. Syria’s state media also reported on the fighting but completely dodged the question of a death toll, saying only that they inflicted “heavy losses” on the rebels who had been in control of the suburb.

Al-Manar News: Assad: Fighters from 23 Foreign Nationalities Are Fighting in Syria Now

For years the US and its intelligence services have championed the Chechen cause – legitimizing terrorism as righteous resistance. But after news that the two alleged Boston bombers were of Chechen origin, the story took on a new political dimension. - In the last 48 hours, an astounding change has occurred in the lexicon of the mainstream media in the United States, as Chechen Islamists are no longer being referred to as “rebels” and “freedom fighters”. In the wake of the news that Chechens were involved in the Boston bombing (an assertion that has not actually been proven despite the media having already convicted the Tsarnaev brothers), the language immediately shifted. The Associated Press, Reuters, and countless other media and news outlets have published articles discussing the “jihadist threat” from places like Chechnya where “suicide attacks, blood feuds, and hostage crises” are routine.

BigPondNews: Boston bomb suspect reported to be awake
InfoWars: Claim: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's last Message to his father – “I have never done it, they set me up”
PressTV: My sons were framed by FBI: Father of Boston suspects
Russia Today: ‘Tamerlan was not a religious fanatic’ – Tsarnaevs’ relative to RT - Video

12160.info: Boston Bombings: Tamerlan Tsarnaev and the Naked Man - Dan Dicks Interviews Suspect's Aunt in Canada: Maret Tsarnaeva the aunt of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev the suspected Boston marathon bombers has revealed to me that she can positively identify the oldest nephew Tamerlan Tsarnaev as the man who was stripped naked and placed into a police cruiser during the manhunt for the suspects. (VIDEO)

Mike Adams: Security theater moves to Act Two following arrest of Boston marathon bombing suspect - I'm trying to get a grip on the full spectacle of the police state theater we have all just witnessed in Boston. Where to begin? - In examining the events of the week, a rational person can't help but conclude that only a small part of what's being officially reported about the Boston marathon bombers has any basis in fact. And even after the announced arrest of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the remaining survivor of the supposed terrorist bombing duo, we still have:

• No images or video of this person placing any bomb on the ground
• No acknowledgement of the existence of the "Craft" military spooks who all carried large backpacks at the marathon and were found moving away from one of the bombs just minutes before it went off
• No apology from the mainstream media for its week-long rampage against "right-wing extremists" who it vilified as the probable bombers
• No explanation for why it takes thousands of heavily-armed police, armored assault vehicles and federal agents to find and arrest one teenager
• No reply from the FBI on just how much the FBI controlled and manipulated these suspects over the last few years, as has been described by their mother.
• No legal justification for the "lockdown" martial law declaration that has been illegally forced upon the people of Boston

But don't hold your breath on any of this. The last thing the public would ever get in any of this would be real answers.

Israeli forces have repeatedly demolished homes in Al-Araqib in a bid to get the community to move into townships. - Hakmeh Abu Mdeighem sat quietly on a cement cinderblock last Wednesday, looking out across a small valley at where, moments earlier, Israeli police bulldozers had turned a handful of tents and shacks into piles of sandy rubble. The 49th demolition of the Bedouin village of Al-Araqib had just ended, and Abu Mdeighe, a mother of nine, spoke unflinchingly. "One feels that one doesn't live in one's own country anymore. One feels that a continuous war is going on between him and Israel. This is a war that Israel wages against us everything month," she said. "What can we do when the state comes and fights you inside your own house, on your own ground, when it destroys your house on the heads of your sons?" Abu Mdeighem, her husband and her children, live inside the village's century-old Islamic cemetery. The burial ground is the only place in Al-Araqib that has never been demolished. It is here that the handful of families who remain now call home.

Gilad Atzmon: Ynet reported [last Monday] on this interesting incident of a Haredi Jewish passenger photographed wrapped in large plastic bag during flight. The [man] doesn't like to be in proximity to women or Goyim, let alone Goyim women i.e. Shiktzes. He is religiously thrilled by this unique and original form of self imposed isolation. Ynet suggests that the man in the bag was an Israeli combat pilot at an earlier stage of his life. I assume that dropping bombs on innocent people leaves a deep scar in the chosen's soul.

[Ynet News] The New York Daily News later explained that the man was a Kohen, a descendant of the Jewish priests who presided over the Temple, and as the aircraft flew over a cemetery he covered himself in a plastic bag so he could remain pure. Under Jewish law, Kohanim are banned from going near cemeteries. The Kohen, formerly a secular Jew who embraced Orthodox Judaism and asked to remain anonymous, told Ynet of his long service in the Israel Defense Forces, where he held sensitive posts. In 1983, as a show of appreciation, the Air Force commander gave him the "opportunity to study in a yeshiva at the expense of the Air Force, which paid my salary for the two and a half years I studied in the yeshiva." The photo was the subject of public criticism and was shared and condemned on social networks. Rabbi Yosef Brook, head of the Netivot Olam Yeshiva and the passenger's rabbi, criticized the media coverage of the photo and the public reaction to it, saying: "I am convinced that none of those who reacted is at (the Kohen's) personal or intellectual level." [The] critics are primitives.

The US has announced that it will provide militants in Syria, now openly admitted to being Al Qaeda terrorists, with $123 million in military aid - while thousands of cancer patients at home are being turned away from clinics because of budget cuts. Compounding the the criminal negligence of telling sick people to seek help elsewhere, is the fact that the military aid the US is providing terrorists in Syria will be used to perpetuate an already 2 year long, sectarian-driven humanitarian disaster.

In an April 3, 2013 Washington Post article titled, "Cancer clinics are turning away thousands of Medicare patients. Blame the sequester," it was reported: Cancer clinics across the country have begun turning away thousands of Medicare patients, blaming the sequester budget cuts. Oncologists say the reduced funding, which took effect for Medicare on April 1, makes it impossible to administer expensive chemotherapy drugs while staying afloat financially. When one considers that the conflict in Syria was premeditated by the US, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, as early as 2007, simply to overthrow the Syrian government and weaken neighboring Iran, the mind-numbing criminality of America's current foreign and domestic policy becomes even more obscene.

The United States is set to give the militants fighting against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad up to USD 130 million in military supplies, officials say. - A senior US State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said on Saturday that the US Secretary of State John Kerry will elaborate on the details of the US aid to Syria opposition during the meeting of the so-called Friends of Syria group in the Turkish city of Istanbul. The meeting will take place later in the day and the leading members of the so-called Friends of Syria group including the United States, Britain, Germany, France, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar will attend the gathering. The official also added that the military supplies include body armor, armored vehicles, night vision goggles and advanced communication equipment.

Paul Craig Roberts: If you want to go to heaven, you had better get busy overthrowing Syria

NASA's Kepler mission has discovered two new planetary systems that include three super-Earth-size planets in the "habitable zone," the range of distance from a star where the surface temperature of an orbiting planet might be suitable for liquid water.

The Kepler-62 system has five planets; 62b, 62c, 62d, 62e and 62f. The Kepler-69 system has two planets; 69b and 69c. Kepler-62e, 62f and 69c are the super-Earth-sized planets. Two of the newly discovered planets orbit a star smaller and cooler than the sun. Kepler-62f is only 40 percent larger than Earth, making it the exoplanet closest to the size of our planet known in the habitable zone of another star. Kepler-62f is likely to have a rocky composition. Kepler-62e, orbits on the inner edge of the habitable zone and is roughly 60 percent larger than Earth. The third planet, Kepler-69c, is 70 percent larger than the size of Earth, and orbits in the habitable zone of a star similar to our sun. Astronomers are uncertain about the composition of Kepler-69c, but its orbit of 242 days around a sun-like star resembles that of our neighboring planet Venus. Scientists do not know whether life could exist on the newfound planets, but their discovery signals we are another step closer to finding a world similar to Earth around a star like our sun. "The Kepler spacecraft has certainly turned out to be a rock star of science," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "The discovery of these rocky planets in the habitable zone brings us a bit closer to finding a place like home. It is only a matter of time before we know if the galaxy is home to a multitude of planets like Earth, or if we are a rarity."