In the days of hysteria immediately following the Boston bombing, an unlikely media darling emerged. Ruslan Tsarni, the alleged bombers’ uncle, known to the press as “Uncle Ruslan,” gained notoriety for the ferocity with which he denounced his own nephews and their alleged Islamic radicalism. It isn’t hard to see why the press focused so closely on “Uncle Ruslan.” He said precisely what the so-called “authorities” wanted to hear about the suspects in precisely the way they wanted to hear it. Compare this to the coverage of the boys’ mother in the mainstream media. After revealing the FBI’s connection to the Tsarnaev brothers—causing the Bureau to reluctantly confirm that they had investigated Tamerlan in the past—she has been alternatively smeared and dismissed by those same media outlets which have refused to delve into the FBI connection. But even more interesting than the sudden popularity of “Uncle Ruslan” is his background and ties to other organizations.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, while in Shanghai, was given a sharp dressing-down by Russian President Vladimir Putin, a warning that Russia would not tolerate further Israeli attacks on Damascus and would respond. - Putin did not say how, but he did announce he had ordered the acceleration of highly advanced Russian weapons supplies to Syria. Israeli Debkafile's military sources disclosed that the Russian leader was referring to S-300 anti-air systems and the nuclear-capable 9K720 Iskander (NATO named SS-26 Stone) surface missiles, which are precise enough to hit a target within a 5-7 meter radius at a distance of 280 kilometers. In his phone call to Netanyahu, the Russian leader advised the prime minister to make sure to keep this in mind.

At around 18:45 UTC the OpenDNS resolvers saw a significant drop in traffic from Syria. On closer inspection, it seems Syria has largely disappeared from the Internet. - The graph [...] shows DNS traffic from and to Syria. The drop in both inbound and outbound traffic from Syria is clearly visible. The small amount of outbound traffic depicted by the chart indicates our DNS servers trying to reach DNS servers in Syria. Currently both TLD servers for Syria, ns1.tld.sy and ns2.tld.sy are unreachable. The remaining two nameservers sy.cctld.authdns.ripe.net. and pch.anycast.tld.sy. are reachable since they are not within Syria. Umbrella Security Labs, which is the threat research division of OpenDNS, also reported on an Internet blackout in Syria November of 2012, where we shared details of the top 10 most failed domains during the outage. Expect updates from our team shortly.

Electronic Frontier Foundation: Syrian Internet Goes Dark, Leaving Questions and Uncertainty - Earlier today, we learned that Internet traffic between Syria and Western online services had plummeted drastically, indicated that the country's connection to the wider Internet had been shut down. Reports from Renesys and Google confirmed the routes into Syria had been withdrawn, implying either a massive infrastructure cut, or a deliberate silencing of online communication. The details of the situation in Syria are still unknown, but we’re deeply concerned that this blackout is a deliberate attempt to silence Syria's online communications and further draw a curtain over grave events currently unfolding on the ground in Syria.

RIA Novosti: Syria Back Online After 20-Hour Blackout
SANA (Syrian Arab News Agency)
[Syrian Radio & TV Daily Newscast of Syrian TV, Wednesday 08/05/2013 - YouTube]

Never tell the truth in the midst of a “crisis”. - Poor Carla del Ponte – as soon as she let the cat out of the bag on the Syria “sarin gas” hoax a flurry of articles appeared in the mainstream media reporting panicked denials by UN officials and reminding us all of her past sins. [...] All of this is meant to divert attention away from – and discredit – what del Ponte said in an interview with the Italian television network RIS: “According to the testimony we collected, the rebels have used chemical weapons, using sarin gas, although the investigation is far from concluded. Our investigations will have to be further examined, tested and proven through new witnesses but as far as we could determine, at the moment only opponents of the regime have used sarin gas.” That’s a rough Google translation. The London Independent has her saying this: “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. This was used on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities.”

As I wrote about here yesterday there was a special ops unit in Tripoli on the night of the terrorist attack in Benghazi which was preparing to mobilize in order to assist the brave heroes who died that night trying to save Chris Stevens. If this team had made it to the scene it is very possible that Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods would be alive today, but that team never made it to Benghazi because it was ordered to stand down. Yesterday I wrote that I found it hard to believe anyone would ignore a direct order from the commander-in-chief during an attack which amounted to an act of war against the United States and today it is being reported that only the president–or someone acting on his behalf–could order the special ops to stand down. If this it true it means either Barack Obama is lying and he didn’t authorize all available resources to be used to thwart the attack, he himself ordered the stand down, or he told someone else (Hillary Clinton?) to order the stand down while he went to bed in order to rest before his major fundraiser in Nevada on September 12th. Now that we know this order came down from someone very high up in the Obama regime–acting on the behest of the president–the only question remaining is why was the stand down order issued?

Physicist pulls out of conference hosted by president Shimon Peres in protest at treatment of Palestinians.

Professor Stephen Hawking is backing the academic boycott of Israel by pulling out of a conference hosted by Israeli president Shimon Peres in Jerusalem as a protest at Israel's treatment of Palestinians. Hawking, 71, the world-renowned theoretical physicist and Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, had accepted an invitation to headline the fifth annual president's conference, Facing Tomorrow, in June, which features major international personalities, attracts thousands of participants and this year will celebrate Peres's 90th birthday. Hawking is in very poor health, but last week he wrote a brief letter to the Israeli president to say he had changed his mind. He has not announced his decision publicly, but a statement published by the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine with Hawking's approval described it as "his independent decision to respect the boycott, based upon his knowledge of Palestine, and on the unanimous advice of his own academic contacts there". Hawking's decision marks another victory in the campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions targeting Israeli academic institutions.

Occupied Palestine | فلسطين:
Professor Stephen Hawking joins academic boycott of Israel in solidarity with Palestinians (Updated)

Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke is a Reverse Robin Hood, robbing from the lower 95% and giving to the financier class. The Real Reverse Robin Hood: Ben Bernanke and his Merry Band of Thieves. It's worth understanding the mechanisms of this wealth transfer: in essence, the Fed extends low-cost credit (i.e. "free money") to the financier class which then uses this free money to buy rentier assets, that is, assets that generate economic rents for the owners, who add no value and create no wealth. This is of course the neofeudal model: the financial aristocracy in the manor house own the rentier assets and the debt-serfs toil away to pay the rents and taxes. The financier class (i.e. those that benefit from the financialization of the economy) are as unproductive as feudal lords; they skim the profits generated by the debt-serfs while adding no productive value to the economy.

In an experimental bid to determine whether wider gun ownership could lead to a decline in crime, a University of Houston graduate student and the Armed Citizens Project is looking to give away shotguns to residents of fifteen cities. - Kyle Coplen, 29, is the founder of the Armed Citizens Project, a group which announced that it will seek to expand its program into the Chicago Metropolitan Area at a recent National Rifle Association convention in Houston, Texas. According to Coplen, the idea is to give out free, 20-gauge single-barrel shotguns to residents living in mid- to high-crime neighborhoods to see whether the presence of armed homes would cause a drop in crime.

President Barack Obama has done nothing to carry out his promise to close Guantanamo. - The hunger strike involving more than 100 detainees at the Guantanamo prison camp entered its fourth month this past Monday. The detainees have been held without charges for more than 11 years. [They] are being held indefinitely, without being charged or tried. It has become increasingly clear that many detainees are prepared to starve themselves to death. As one of them, British citizen Shaker Aamer, told his attorney, Clive Stafford Smith, “It is possible that I may die in here. I hope not, but if I do die, please tell my children that I loved them above all else, but that I had to stand up for the principle that they cannot just keep holding people without a trial, especially when they have been cleared for release.”

Russia Today: OpGTMO: Anonymous vows global hack attack to shut down Guantanamo

Militants fighting against the Syrian government have abducted a group of UN peacekeepers monitoring the ceasefire line between Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. - U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon strongly condemned the detention and called for the peacekeepers' immediate release. They were detained as they patrolled close to an area where 21 Filipino observers were held for three days in March. Syria's two-year uprising has increasingly seeped into sensitive frontiers, threatening to draw other countries closer to a conflict that has already killed more than 70,000 people in Syria. U.N. spokeswoman Josephine Guerrero said the peacekeepers were taken at Position 86, near the southern end of the narrow "area of separation" between Syrian and Israeli forces.

Berkeley Lab's sound-restoration experts have done it again. They've helped to digitally recover a 128-year-old recording of Alexander Graham Bell's voice, enabling people to hear the famed inventor speak for the first time. The recording ends with Bell saying "in witness whereof, hear my voice, Alexander Graham Bell." Berkeley Lab's Carl Haber and Earl Cornell developed the noninvasive optical sound recovery technology that gave Bell's recording a second life. Their method is derived from work on instrumentation for particle physics experiments. It acquires high-resolution digital maps of the surface of audio media without touching them. It then applies image analysis methods to recover the data and reduce the noise of scratches and other damage. A few years ago, Haber and Cornell set up this technology at the Library of Congress, where it's used to digitally restore audio recordings that are too fragile to play. This analysis was conducted at Berkeley Lab earlier this year. The work required help from Engineering Division staff, who developed the gear and belt seen in the image above. This enabled the drum to be rotated at a slow, steady rate so it can be optically scanned.

Suicide was the No. 1 cause of death among the younger population in South Korea in 2011, with the suicide rate rising significantly over the past decade, a report showed Thursday. - According to the report by Statistics Korea, suicide was the leading cause of death among those aged 15-24 in 2011. The suicide rate per 100,000 among the age group stood at 13, up from 7.7 tallied in 2001. Ten years ago, traffic accidents topped the list with the highest death rate of 15.6, the report showed. In 2011, traffic accidents were the No. 2 cause of death with the death rate of 7.8. Cancer, heart diseases and drowning came next with the rates of 3.8, 1.0 and 0.8, respectively, the report showed. The nation’s suicide rate had been on the rise since the early 1990s. It peaked in 1998 before declining slightly later. Since 2000, the rate has been growing again.

Blackwater mercenaries already busy little assassination bees: Anti-US Drone Candidate Imran Khan injured in Pakistan poll rally fall 07 May 2013 Leading Pakistani politician Imran Khan has been injured after falling off a lift that was taking him on stage for an election rally. Officials told the AFP news agency that the former cricketer suffered head injuries after the fall in Lahore. TV footage showed supporters carrying a bloodied and dazed Mr Khan away from the rally. Mr Khan has recently emerged as a serious contender in May's elections, with thousands attending his rallies. "He has received injuries to his head and he has been taken to hospital," Malik Ishtiaq, a local spokesman for Mr Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) told the AFP news agency. [Right, the hospital - where CIAciopaths will 'finish the job.']

PolicyMic: Pakistan Election 2013: Imran Khan Vows to Shoot Down US Drones If Elected

Israeli Cabinet ministers backed a draft law to demolish Bedouin villages in the country's Negev Desert and move its residents to government-approved settlements in the area. If adopted by the Knesset, it will affect tens of thousands of Bedouins. Bedouin leaders have harshly criticized the plan, saying they were not included in discussions of the bill. Under the Prawer-Begin plan, or 'The Bill on the Arrangement of Bedouin Houses in the Negev,' the Bedouin population will be relocated to officially recognized Bedouin towns such as Rahat, Khura and Ksayfe, and their current homes will be demolished.