United States Vice President Joe Biden says the 2014 Boston Marathon will be "bigger, more spectacular" than ever before, and the city’s police commissioner could see that through with some serious changes starting at next year’s race. Notwithstanding last week’s terrorist attack that killed three and wounded hundreds, Boston, Massachusetts is expected to continue its tradition of hosting the annual 26-mile run next spring. Speaking to the city’s Herald newspaper though, Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis says he’s looking to add at least one new element in 2014: unmanned aerial vehicles.

70,000 Agents Used Over 110 Million Bullets [= well in excess of 1500 bullets pr. agent] - Does anyone remember the big Department of Homeland Security (DHS) gunbattles of the past year? If you don’t, it’s because there weren’t any, and that’s got some in Congress doing some very troubling math. The DHS is buying just a ridiculous amount of ammunition. They have 260 million rounds in stock, and want to buy 750 million more, noting that they went through 116 million bullets in 2012 alone. 116 million bullets, and 70,000 active agents means that the average agent is going through 1,600 rounds of ammunition in a calender year, despite the DHS not shooting a bunch of people. Rep. Jason Cheffetz (R – UT), one of the House oversight subcommittee heads, noted that the US Army only goes through about 350 rounds per soldier, and that’s in the middle of a war. The DHS isn’t questioning any of the numbers, but Congress sure is. DHS officials say that they just need their field agents to be super trained and so they’re doing a lot of shooting, some might say a ridiculous amount.

Eric Peters: If Guns Are Bad... - "[A large amount of] ammunition has been solicited by the DHS. Within the next 4 years, they expect to acquire 200,000 million rounds of .223 rifle bullets. For training snipers, DHS have ordered two types of .308 caliber rounds – blanks and 168 grain hollow point boat tail ammunition. This new purchase adds to the 1.8 billion rounds of ammunition they have solicited for months in preparation for...something." (Susanne Posel)

The private prison population in the US has rocketed 17-fold over the last two decades mostly on the shoulders of the deep-pocketed prison lobby, and the business continues to thrive.

Try confining yourself to a small room in your home, like a bathroom or a closet, and spend a few hours there. One only cringes to imagine the detrimental psychological effects that kind of solitude creates for individuals who are subjected to solitary confinement for years at a time, knowing only the walls of their cell and the shades of light that creep across them. The abhorrent state of affairs at the Guantanamo facility often makes international headlines and arguably overshadows the calamity that is the US domestic prison system – where over six million people are subject to some form of correctional supervision, an amount exceeding those who toiled in the Soviet gulags during Stalin’s reign. In the United States, some fifty thousand inmates pass their days in solitary confinement. While there is undoubtedly no shortage of violent criminals in America’s jails, millions are dolled out annually by privately owned prison lobbies directly to politicians in an effort to influence harsher ‘zero tolerance’ legislation and mandatory sentencing for many non-violent offenses.

The Centers for Disease Control has been quietly rolling out a nationwide program called the Immunization Information Systems (IIS), registering your vaccine information into a database. - This effort has been run in parallel with state vaccine registry implementations. What is the intention of such programs? My colleague Leslie Manookian, writer and director of the movie The Greater Good, wrote in a recent article, the “CDC has openly stated that vaccine registries are a tool to identify areas of ‘undervaccination’ so that they can be ‘addressed’ and brought into ‘compliance.’” I would also add to Leslie’s statement that since the government purchases a large bulk of the vaccines (for example, the Vaccines for Children program), it is in their financial interest to make sure vaccines are consumed regularly. If you exempt your child from being vaccinated, your refusal is also being tracked and put into the database. If you want to know why this is a big deal, read on.

A young Russian couple living in California is struggling to understand the events of the past few weeks, which began with a trip to the hospital and continued days later with police forcing entry into the couple’s home to take their child. - Anna Nikolayev and her husband Alex brought their five-month-old boy Sammy to Sacramento’s Sutter Memorial Hospital after he began exhibiting flu symptoms. He had been diagnosed with a heart murmur at birth, according to News 10, a local ABC affiliate. Sammy was admitted to the hospital’s Intensive Care Unit, at which point his mother witnessed a nurse administering the baby with antibiotics, apparently without instructions from the doctor. “I asked her, ‘For what is that?’ And she’s like ‘I don’t know.’ And then I said ‘You’re working as a nurse and you don’t he know what you’re giving my baby?’” Anna struggled to explain through her tears.

Syria denies that it has used, or even possesses, chemical weapons, accusing the United States and Britain of lying in order to pressure the embattled Damascus government. - Syrian Information Minister Omran Al-Zoubi talked to Russia TV on Friday, dismissing a claim by U.S. officials a day earlier that they had evidence the chemical weapon sarin had been used in Syria on a small scale. "Everything that the American minister and British government have said lack credibility," Al-Zoubi said. "It's baseless, and it's a new tactic to put political and economic pressure on Syria."

PressTV: Syrian officials deny government use of chemical weapons
Russia Today: UN team can’t be trusted ‘politically’ without Russian experts - Syria
Jason Ditz: Syria Allegations Rest on Flimsy Evidence
Stephen Lendman: Creating a Pretext for War on Syria
Bill Van Auken: Washington fabricates chemical weapons pretext for war against Syria

The US Department of Defense conducted urban warfare training drills in Tinley Park, Illinois, a southwestern suburb of Chicago, during the nights of April 23 and 24. The drills, conducted with the coordination of the Illinois state government, came a week after the police shutdown of the city of Boston following the marathon bombings. Similar exercises have been conducted recently in Miami, Florida and Houston, Texas. Stories have emerged in local media only after frightened residents called in reports of explosions. It is not known how many such operations have been conducted in other cities. The drills held in Tinley Park took place at the now-closed Tinley Park Mental Health Center. The center was shut down by Illinois Democratic Governor Pat Quinn last June as part of a series of budget cuts that have targeted education, mental health, and other social services in the state. That a facility once devoted to social services has been so quickly converted into a training ground for military operations clearly reveals the ruling elite's attitude toward the basic needs of the population.

A Documentary about Steven E. Jones, a BYU physics professor who made startling discoveries about the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

A subway-borne chemical attack is one of those theoreticals that require the willful ignorance of regular passengers—for most of us, it's just better not to think about it. Not so for the NYPD, which yesterday announced a plan to test how a chemical or radiological attack would spread through the city's 200-odd miles of subway, by pumping an invisible gas through the system this summer. The Subway-Surface Air Flow Exchange, or S-SAFE, has actually been in the making for over a year—that's how long it takes to plan a fake airborne toxic event in a city of more than eight million. Led by Paul Kalb, the principal investigator on the $3.4 million Department of Homeland Security-funded grant, the group will track the movement of small amounts of Perfluorocarbon tracers (or PFTs) through the five boroughs on three days in July. "The study will show us the worst case scenario," he explained over the phone today. "It'll be a close representation of how particles from a bioweapon or dirty bomb could move through the air."

WantToKnow: Humans Used as Guinea Pigs By Government, Military, Business - 1966 - The U.S. Army dispenses Bacillus subtilis variant Niger throughout the New York City subway system. Many thousands of civilians are exposed when army scientists drop lightbulbs filled with the bacteria onto ventilation grates. (Wall Street Journal - full text, New York Post)

SF Weekly: Operation Midnight Climax: How the CIA Dosed S.F. Citizens with LSD
Stephen Lendman: MK-ULTRA: The CIA's Mind Control Program

As many as 2,644 people, called subjects, died during the clinical trials of 475 new drugs on human beings in last seven years and only 17 of the medicines were approved for marketing in India, the Centre has informed the Supreme Court. - Responding to allegations by NGO, Swasthya Adhikar Manch, in its PIL that Indians were used as guinea pigs by foreign pharmaceutical majors for human trial of their new drugs, the Union health and family welfare ministry said of the 57,303 enrolled subjects, 39,022 completed the clinical trials. "Serious adverse events of deaths during the clinical trials during the said period were 2,644, out of which 80 deaths were found to be attributable to the clinical trials," health secretary Keshav Desiraju said in an affidavit on behalf of the ministry of health and family

Iceland's Supreme Court has ruled that Valitor (formerly Visa Iceland) must pay WikiLeaks $204,900 per month or $2,494,604 per year in fines if it continues to blockade the whistle-blowing site. - The court upheld the decision that Valitor had unlawfully terminated its contract with WikiLeaks' donation processor, DataCell. "Today's decision marked the most important victory to date against the unlawful and arbitrary economic blockade erected by US companies against WikiLeaks," the organization's press release stated.

WIKILEAKS PRESS RELEASE Wed Apr 24 17:24:44 BST: Milestone Supreme Court Decision for WikiLeaks Case in Iceland - Today's decision marked the most important victory to date against the unlawful and arbitrary economic blockade erected by US companies against WikiLeaks. Iceland's Supreme Court upheld the decision that Valitor (formerly VISA Iceland and current Visa subcontractor) had unlawfully terminated its contract with WikiLeaks donations processor DataCell. This strong judgement is an important milestone for WikiLeaks' legal battle to end the economic blockade that has besieged the organisation since early December 2010. Despite the effects of the blockade having crippled WikiLeaks resources, the organisation is fighting the blockade on many fronts. It is a battle that concerns free speech and the future of the free press; it concerns fundamental civil rights; and it is a struggle for the rights of individuals to vote with their wallet and donate to the cause they believe in. If the gateway to WikiLeaks donations is not re-opened within 15 days Visa's Valitor will be fined 800,000 ISK ($6,830) per day.

European Commission enabling blockade of WikiLeaks by U.S. hard-right Lieberman/King, contrary to European Parliament’s wishes - European Commission documents released today by WikiLeaks show that hard-right U.S. politicians were directly behind the extrajudicial banking blockade against WikiLeaks. In the heavily redacted documents, MasterCard Europe admits that Senator Joseph Lieberman and Congressman Peter T. King both “had conversations” with MasterCard in the United States. Lieberman, the then-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, boasted of instigating Amazon’s cutting of service to WikiLeaks – an action condemned by the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers on 7 December 2011. Senator Lieberman tried to introduce the SHIELD Act into the Senate and advocated for prosecuting the New York Times for espionage in connection with WikiLeaks’ releases. Rep. Peter King, chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, tried to formally designate WikiLeaks as a foreign terrorist organization, have its staff listed as ’enemy combatants’, and have WikiLeaks put on a U.S. Treasury blacklist. On 13 January 2011 the U.S. Treasury announced it would not do so because there was no evidence that WikiLeaks should be on such a list. While Lieberman and King were unsuccessful in these methods of legally cutting WikiLeaks from its popular donor base, they were successful in doing so extra-legally via VISA and MasterCard, which together hold a monopoly of 97 per cent of the market of EU card payments.

Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world's largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything. You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that's trillion, with a "t") worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history. That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world's largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world's largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.

A Norwegian resistance fighter who led a daring raid to sabotage Nazi Germany's atomic bomb program during World War II has been honoured at a London ceremony. - Joachim Rønneberg led a six-man team for Operation Gunnerside, an attack on the Norsk Hydro heavy water production plant in Vermok, Norway. The operation, in early 1943, destroyed the plant's supplies of heavy water, which the Nazis hoped to use to produce nuclear weapons. An earlier unsuccessful raid involving British paratroopers resulted in heavy casualties when the gliders carrying the men crashed and the survivors were captured, tortured and executed by the Gestapo. The Operation Gunnerside raid was dramatised in the Franco-Norwegian film Operation Swallow: The Battle for Heavy Water in 1948, and the later US movie The Heroes of Telemark, starring Kirk Douglas.

norway.org.uk: Hero From World War II Joachim Rønneberg in London
Ynet News: Norway document reveals Israel nuke secrets [12.07.2005]
Ynet News: Norway rejects Vanunu's asylum request [04.15.2005]
Today's Zaman: Heavy Water and Israel [11.08.2005]