The worldwide March Against Monsanto this past Saturday was no mere political demonstration. Rather, it was a worldwide mobilization against corporate greed, the assault on our health and environment, and the oppression of small farmers. - As the diverse crowd gathered in New York City’s Union Square on an unseasonably cold and rainy Memorial Day weekend – just as they did in hundreds of cities around the world – it was clear that Monsanto and the issue of health and food sovereignty transcends political ideology. People from all walks of life joined together to reject Monsanto and its pesticides, Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), and socially and environmentally destructive business practices.

Though the US dollar continues to reign as the foreign reserve currency of choice, a new International Monetary Fund analysis shows that the currency has slumped to a 15-year low, heightening concerns that it may lose that status. - While the dollar currently constitutes 62 per cent of the $6 trillion in foreign holdings by the world’s central banks, when a historical view is taken into account, Dick Bove, vice president of equity research at Rafferty Capital Markets says the dollar’s actual percentage of total money supply worldwide has gone from 90 per cent in 1952 to about 15 per cent today. Bove, like many other analysts, believes that the rise of the Chinese currency, the yuan, is at the expense of the US dollar’s dominance as a safe haven.

The Daily Star (Lebanon): Qatar may drop dollar peg in future: central bank chief

The man shot and killed by an FBI agent during interrogations connected with the Boston Marathon bombings was unarmed, an unnamed FBI source has said. - Ibragim Todashev, 27, was interrogated by an FBI agent for hours on May 22 at a condominium in Orlando, Florida, regarding his connection with Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev. The FBI said Todashev was killed after he turned violent and brandished a knife and stabbed the FBI agent. The unnamed source contradicted that account, however, telling the Washington Post on Wednesday that Todashev had neither a gun nor a knife.

Russia Today: Friend of Boston bombing suspect unarmed when killed by FBI
PressTV: FBI agent killed unarmed Todashev: Report
AWIP: Witness tied to Boston bombing suspect killed by FBI

A grandfather checking on his neighbor is shot and killed by Fort Worth police. The shots rang out early Tuesday morning near Woodhaven Country Club, in east Fort Worth.

Those close to the family say the victim lived nearby and heard his neighbor’s burglar alarm. Neighbor Jerry Wayne Waller then apparently went outside to see what was going on. The 72-year-old man didn’t even make it to the house across the street before he was shot. He died on his own property. The neighbors in the Woodhaven Country Club area and generally know each other pretty well. Becky Haskin, a former Fort Worth City Councilmember, lives in the area and said she believes Waller, “…was doing what neighbors do probably checking on the neighbor that the alarm went off.” The elderly man, who was armed at the time, was shot and killed in his own driveway by police responding to a burglary call. “We heard five shots,” Haskin recalled. They were just rapid fire one after the other.” For the normally quiet and quant neighborhood, Waller’s death is devastating. Neighbors say he and his family have always been very involved in the community. “They are just a nice retired couple, that loved working in their yard, having family over, and grandkids,” Haskin said. CBS 11 News has been trying to get more answers from Fort Worth police. The official response has primarily been that the shooting is “an ongoing investigation.”

James Hall: The data mining technology that is integral to the Google AdWords experience is a power tool in creating an individual profile for anyone who surfs the web. The amazing capacity to target specific ads to personal search topics, geographic locations and web history is the harbinger of a total recall on your personality. If the benefits of getting relevant advertisement that maximize sales opportunities were the only purpose of the process, the relatively benign intrusion of a materialistic message might be tolerable to most internet users. However, the bull in the china shop is not merely in the business of making a commercial profit. Google is a wonder creation of the calculate surveillance society.

Syria has received the first shipment of an air defence system from Russia, President Bashar al-Assad was quoted as saying, sending a signal of military strength days before an EU arms embargo on the war-torn country lapses. - "Syria has received the first shipment of Russian anti-aircraft S-300 rockets," Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar newspaper quoted Assad as saying in an interview due to be broadcast later on Thursday. More of the missiles would arrive soon, he was quoted as saying. Russia has said it would deliver the missile system to the Syrian government over Western objections, saying the move would help stabilize the regional balance. A staunch ally of the Assad government, Moscow has appeared to grow more defiant since the European Union let its arms embargo on Syria expire, opening up the possibility of the West arming the rebels battling to topple the president. The embargo lapses on June 1.

Reuters: Assad says Syria received Russian missile shipment: Lebanese media
PressTV: Syria already in possession of Russia's S-300 system: President Assad
Reuters: Syrian army seizes strategic air base near Qusair

About 60,000 veterans remain homeless in the United States, says Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan calling the statistic a “national disgrace.” - “Having close to 60,000 homeless veterans, as we currently do, is a national disgrace,” Donovan said at the annual National Coalition for Homeless Veterans conference Wednesday. “We can’t let these forgotten heroes slip through the cracks.” Donovan said the staggering figure serves as a sobering reminder of the challenge to find housing for America’s homeless veterans. U.S. officials will have to provide housing for about 60 homeless veterans a day if they are to meet a self-imposed deadline to eliminate homelessness among former soldiers, according to Stars and Stripes.

Profits for the US banking industry rose in the first quarter of 2013 to a record $40.3 billion, according to a report released by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation on Wednesday. Profits surged by 15.8 percent compared to the same quarter last year. The quarterly profits top the previous record set more than six years ago, prior to the financial meltdown of 2008. It was the 14th straight quarter of banking sector profits. The record bank profits, along with a soaring stock market, is a direct product of the policies of the Obama administration. Trillions have been handed out to the banks and financial institutions, including $85 billion every month from the Federal Reserve. Not a single bank or bank CEO has been held criminally responsible for the financial catastrophe, which they have utilized to increase their stranglehold over the economic and political system.

Laurent Guyénot: "The neoconservative movement, which is generally perceived as a radical (rather than “conservative”) Republican right, is, in reality, an intellectual movement born in the late 1960s in the pages of the monthly magazine Commentary, a media arm of the American Jewish Committee, which had replaced the Contemporary Jewish Record in 1945. The Forward, the oldest American Jewish weekly, wrote in a January 6th, 2006 article signed Gal Beckerman: “If there is an intellectual movement in America to whose invention Jews can lay sole claim, neoconservatism is it. It’s a thought one imagines most American Jews, overwhelmingly liberal, will find horrifying. And yet it is a fact that as a political philosophy, neoconservatism was born among the children of Jewish immigrants and is now largely the intellectual domain of those immigrants’ grandchildren”. The neoconservative apologist Murray Friedman explains that Jewish dominance within his movement by the inherent benevolence of Judaism, “the idea that Jews have been put on earth to make it a better, perhaps even a holy, place” (The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy, 2006)." "Neoconservatism is essentially a modern Jewish version of Machiavelli’s political strategy. What characterizes the neoconservative movement is therefore not as much Judaism as a religious tradition, but rather Judaism as a political project, i.e. Zionism, by Machiavellian means."

Gilad Atzmon: Take It From the Rabbi’s Mouth - Every so often we come across a secular Jewish ‘anti’ Zionist’ who argues that Zionism is not Judaism and vice versa. Interestingly enough, I have just come across an invaluable text that illuminates this question from a rabbinical perspective. Apparently back in 1942, 757 American Rabbis added their names to a public pronouncement titled ‘Zionism an Affirmation of Judaism’. This Rabbinical rally for Zionism was declared at the time “the largest public pronouncement in all Jewish history.”

Ethiopia has diverted the Nile River as it continues with the construction of a new $4.7 billion hydroelectric dam. - In its quest to become Africa’s largest power exporter Ethiopia has set out plans to invest more than $12 billion in various projects designed to harness the natural power of the various rivers running through the country’s rugged highlands. The flagship of the plan is the Grand Renaissance Dam being built in the Benishangul-Gumuz region near to Sudan; currently 21% complete, it will have a 6GW capacity once finished. The Chief Executive Officer of the state-run Ethiopian Electric Power Corporation, Mihret Debebe, said that “the dam is being built in the middle of the river so you can't carry out construction work while the river flowed.” The diversion of the Nile around the site “now enables us to carry out civil engineering work without difficulties. The aim is to divert the river by a few meters and then allow it to flow on its natural course.”

Shamus Cooke: It’s now clear that Obama’s foreign policy in Syria is actively encouraging terrorism. - For a president that is executing Bush’s “war on terror” against Al-Qaeda and “its affiliates,” it seems odd that President Obama has targeted the secular Syrian government for “regime change.” Equally odd is that Obama’s strongest military ally on the ground in Syria- the best equipped and effective fighting force against the Syrian Government — is Jabhat al-Nusra, a group that has affiliated itself with al-Qaeda, and aims to turn Syria into an extremist Islamic state that enforces a fundamentalist version of Sharia law.

Justin Raimondo: Why John McCain Wants to Aid Syrian Terrorists - His trip to Syria in support of lung-eating savages - When John McCain slipped into Syria the other day to meet with Islamist rebels, Sen. Lindsey Graham tweeted “best wishes” to his fellow warmonger and claimed “dibs on his office if he doesn’t come back.” Leave it to Sen. Graham, who has been agitating along with McCain for the US to send weapons to the rebels, to joke about the untrustworthiness of the very people he wants to arm. But the rebels’ savagery is no joke: we are, after all, talking about people who eat the lungs of their enemies.