Human rights lawyer Heba Masaleha said one of the Palestinian children detained in an Israeli jail tried to commit suicide as a result of the severe depression he suffers from because of his exposure to maltreatment at the hands of jailers. - Masaleha refrained from mentioning the name of the child, but she said she visited him in jail. She stated that the child has been staying in bed for three days without moving or talking to anyone, except about his intention to commit suicide, adding that the child cannot sleep properly at night and already refused to eat food for two days. [...] The center said that the children were on their way to a Palestinian folkloric festival that was held in the West Bank in solidarity with prisoner Samer Issawi, who ended his months-long hunger strike recently after a deal with his jailers. The center underlined that the Israeli occupation regime deliberately kidnap Palestinian children to break their spirits in violation of the international law, which stipulates the need for protecting the children and their right to grow safely without any restrictions on their freedom. It noted that there are about 321 children, 30 of them patients, in Israeli jails.

The U.S. government is spying on the American people and yet they continue to publicly deny that they are actually doing it. - Big Brother is watching everything that you do on the Internet and listening to everything that you say on your phone. Every single day in America, the U.S. government intercepts and stores nearly 2 billion emails, phone calls and other forms of electronic communication. Former NSA employees have come forward and have described exactly what is taking place, and this surveillance activity has been reported on by prominent news organizations such as the Washington Post, Fox News and CNN, but nobody really seems to get too upset about it. Either most Americans are not aware of what is really going on or they have just accepted it as part of modern life. But where will this end? Do we really want to live in a dystopian “Big Brother society” where the government literally reads every single thing that we write and listens to every single thing that we say? Is that what the future of America is going to look like? If so, what do you think our founding fathers would have said about that? [...] Are you outraged by all of this? You should be.

Indigenous groups claim they have not consented to oil projects, as politicians visit Beijing to publicise bidding process.

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. According to the California-based NGO Amazon Watch, seven indigenous groups who inhabit the land claim that they have not consented to oil projects, which would devastate the area's environment and threaten their traditional way of life.

UK special forces are being pulled out of Afghanistan ahead of a planned mission to help Syrian rebels. - SAS and SBS commanders are drawing up top secret plans to give the fighters much-needed weapons. A Whitehall source revealed SAS and SBS veterans are being “quietly” withdrawn from Afghanistan to prepare for their new mission. They will be working with guidance from MI6 and their French counterparts, the Directorate-General for External Security, to get a £20million Brit-funded arsenal stockpiled in neighbouring countries into rebel hands.

Iran's foreign minister says it is Syria's Arab neighbors - not Tehran - who should respond to Israel's recent airstrikes near Damascus. - Ali Akbar Salehi says Arab nations "must stand by their brethren in Damascus." He also warned of "serious repercussions from a political vacuum" should President Bashar Assad's regime collapse. Salehi spoke to reporters during a visit to the Jordanian capital, Amman, on Tuesday. He said he believes Israel "would not dare strike" at suspected Iranian nuclear sites but that his country is "prepared for the worst." Over the weekend, Israeli warplanes targeted what Israel claimed were caches of Iranian missiles bound for the Lebanese militant Hezbollah group. Syrian activists said Sunday's airstrike on a sprawling military complex near Damascus killed at least 42 Syrian soldiers.

The Daily Star: Turkey PM says Israeli air strikes on Syria 'unacceptable'

The United States and NATO say they are "skeptical" on the finding of UN human rights investigators that foreign-backed militants used chemical weapons in Syria. - The White House press secretary repeated Washington’s accusations that Damascus used chemical weapons. "Separately," the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) also tried to undermine the report, saying it’s unclear who used such weapons. "We do not have confirmed, consolidated information as to who might have used" chemical weapons, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said in Brussels on Monday. [They didn't seem to need "confirmed, consolidated information" when they were accusing Syria a couple of weeks ago...] The UN Independent Commission of Inquiry on Syria could not find any evidence that Syrian government forces used chemical weapons against militants, commission member Carla Del Ponte said. "Our investigators have been in neighboring countries interviewing victims, doctors and field hospitals and, according to their report of last week which I have seen, there are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated," Del Ponte said in a television interview. "This was use on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities," said Del Ponte, a former Swiss attorney-general who also served as prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

AWIP: U.N. has testimony Syrian rebels used sarin gas: investigator
In Wake of US-Israeli Attack on Syria, UN Reveals Terrorists Not Government Used Sarin Gas

Haaretz: Former Bush administration official: Israel may be behind use of chemical arms in Syria
Retired U.S. Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who once served as Secretary of State Colin Powell's Chief of Staff, believes that the chemical weapons used in Syria may have been an Israeli "false flag" operation aimed at implicating Bashar Assad's regime. Wilkerson made his astounding assertion in an interview on Current TV. Wilkerson said that the evidence that it was Assad’s regime that had used the chemical weapons was "flaky" and that it could very well have been the rebels or Israel who were the perpetrators. Asked why Israel would do such a thing, Wilkerson said: "I think we've got a basically geostrategically, geopolitical inept regime in Tel Aviv right now." A "false flag" operation is a covert attack on foreign or domestic soil carried out by governments or organizations under a false identity, aimed at placing blame on the enemy.

Lew Rockwell: Flaky Syrian Chemical Weapons Evidence Does Not Deter Neo-Cons - Col. Lawrence Wilkerson appeared on the Young Turks program late last week to reveal that the "varying degrees of confidence" with which Defense Secretary Hagel proclaimed that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons was in fact based on "really flaky" evidence, according to Wilkerson's sources in the intelligence community. "There is no way I would say my red line had been crossed and start something serious in terms of US intervention based on this very flimsy evidence," said Wilkerson, an academic advisor to the Ron Paul Institute. Now we hear that, according to UN investigator Carla Del Ponte, it appears that the rebels rather than the government had used the banned weapons. Hardly a surprise, as they are the ones to gain by sparking a US/NATO attack. Nevertheless, the interventionists for some reason never suffer criticism or loss of reputation when their lies are exposed. They will turn on a dime from "Assad used chemical weapons we must go in" to "the rebels in Syria have used chemical weapons we must go in," expecting no one to notice.

On Monday, April 29, the Herschel Space Observatory exhausted its supply of ultra-cold liquid helium coolant, required to do its most sensitive observations. A ten-year period in which five telescopes gazed at the sky observing the heat of cosmic objects, rather than the light emitted, has come to an end.

Herschel was launched on May 14, 2009 from the European Space Agency launchpad in French Guiana carrying a a 3.5 meter (11.5 feet) mirror, the largest ever flown in space, and launched with over 2,300 liters of liquid helium to support at least a three year mission lifetime. The telescope observed wavelengths of light unobserved by previous instruments. Infrared astronomy is a useful probe of the Universe for three central reasons. Much of the universe is comprised of material which is cold, unlike the hot surface of stars. This is invisible in most of the electromagnetic spectrum unless illuminated by nearby hot objects, but is visible in the infrared. Cold clouds of gas and dust can be mapped directly through infrared observations. Much of the universe is also dusty, and dust extinguishes visible light. Infrared has the ability to reveal the details of events like stellar formation inside obscuring clouds. It permits a full and unbiased census of stellar formation even for extraordinarily distant galaxies. Finally, the universe is expanding, and the most distant objects appear to recede from us at enormous velocities. This shifts much of their emitted radiation towards the red and into the infrared.

Britain and its European allies help Zionist regime’s settlements in the occupied West Bank sustain and flourish through buying products produced by settlers. The UK government - on the one hand - condemns settlements as illegal as a majority of EU nations do and on the other they continue to buy products made in the occupied Palestinian territories and thus help sustain those illegal settlements.

■ “Settlements are illegal under international law, constitute an obstacle to peace, and threaten to make a two-state solution impossible”, said EU High Representative Catherine Ashton in one of many statements made by the EU and its spokespeople over the years on Sept. 27, 2010 in connection with Middle East peace talks. This position is clear and has been consistently upheld. The West Bank colonies were established in violation of Article 49 of the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, intended to protect civilians in time of war, including when they fall under foreign occupation. The EU maintains that the Geneva Convention provisions continue to apply to the territories Israel occupied in 1967, despite the long duration of the continuing occupation. Opposition to the Israeli settlements should, at the very least, mean doing everything possible to discourage the creation of new settlements, and doing nothing that might serve to legitimize and entrench those that already exist.
■ Yet a recent report indicates that the EU states are importing goods from the settlements, and thereby reinforcing them economically. Moreover, these imports far exceed those from the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip-by 15 times. For Israeli settlers living in the occupied territory, this means the EU imports over 100 times more per settler than per Palestinian.”

Accused of perpetrating a “profound evil,” former Pennsylvania judge Mark Ciavarella Jr. has been sentenced to 28 years in prison for illegally accepting money from a juvenile-prison developer while he spent years incarcerating thousands of young people. Prosecutors said Ciavarella sent juveniles to jail as part of a “kids for cash” scheme involving Robert Mericle, builder of the PA and Western PA Child Care juvenile detention centers. The ex-judge was convicted in February of 12 counts that included racketeering, money laundering, mail fraud and tax evasion. In addition to his prison sentence, Ciavarella was ordered to pay nearly $1.2 million in restitution.