Newly published images from the U.S.-run Guantanamo Bay prison display the extent of abuse prisoners face at the notorious prison complex. - Some of the images reveal how prisoners are force-fed if they go on hunger strike. One picture shows that prisoners on hunger strike are strapped to a metal restraint chair and fed through the nose with plastic tubing. Another picture shows a chart given to detainees to indicate their level of pain and demonstrate their emotions while in detention. Over 130 of the 166 Guantanamo Bay prisoners are on their 142nd day of hunger strike, protesting their conditions. Human rights groups have condemned the force-feeding of hunger-striking detainees, saying it is a form of torture. A hunger striker at the prison has said that American officials are using increasingly brutal tactics to break up the nearly five-month strike. Shaker Aamer said American officials make prisoner’s cells “freezing cold to accentuate the discomfort of those on hunger strike” and force "metal-tipped" tubes into hunger strikers' stomachs twice a day in order to keep them alive, the Guardian reported. Aamer, who is the last British inmate at Guantanamo, explained that the harsh force-feeding process causes inmates to vomit over themselves.

[It's not clear whether the photos in the following two links are the photos referred to in the article above. -Ed.]
Guantanamo Joint Medical Group Hunger Strike Response Photos
Photo Gallery | Guantánamo hunger strike

A review of top-secret NSA documents suggests that the surveillance agency still collects and sifts through large quantities of Americans' online data – despite the Obama administration's insistence that the program that began under Bush ended in 2011. Shawn Turner, the Obama administration's director of communications for National Intelligence, told the Guardian that "the internet metadata collection program authorized by the Fisa court was discontinued in 2011 for operational and resource reasons and has not been restarted." But the documents indicate that the amount of internet metadata harvested, viewed, processed and overseen by the Special Source Operations (SSO) directorate inside the NSA is extensive.

Washington's Blog: Do You Have ANY IDEA How Widespread the Spying Really Is?
The Guardian: The NSA files

The US Army confirmed on Thursday that access to The Guardian newspaper’s website has been filtered and restricted for its personnel. The policy is due to classified documents described in detail in the stories. Gordon Van Vleet, spokesman for the Army Network Enterprise Technology Command, or NETCOM, said in an email to the Monterey Herald that the Army is filtering "some access to press coverage and online content about the NSA leaks." The spokesman said the procedure was routine part of "network hygiene" [Newspeak/1984/Orwell] measures to prevent unauthorized disclosures of sensitive information. In a later phone conversation he clarified that the filtering was “Armywide” rather than restricted to some US Army facilities.

Monterey Herald: US Army Blocks Soldier Access to Guardian Website

Faced with several days of overt threats from the Obama Administration and top senators threatening to revoke a key US-Ecuador trade pact if they dare to grant asylum to Edward Snowden, the Ecuadoran government has told the US what they can do with their frozen broccoli and fresh cut flowers, and has cancelled the pact themselves.

The first of four parts where Professor Bob Carter uses the scientific method on the popular theory with global warming being linked to CO2 levels. He examnines the hypothesis and it fails the test. Inconvenient Truth author Al Gore would find his presentation contradicted by this presentation? Will Kyoto`s greenhouse reduction goals be in vain? [Part 2 of 4] + [Part 3 of 4] + [Part 4 of 4]

The UK looks set to become the first country to allow the creation of babies using DNA from three people, after the government backed the IVF technique. - It will produce draft regulations later this year and the procedure could be offered within two years. Experts say three-person IVF could eliminate debilitating and potentially fatal mitochondrial diseases that are passed on from mother to child. Opponents say it is unethical and could set the UK on a "slippery slope". They also argue that affected couples could adopt or use egg donors instead. Designer baby: "It is a disaster that the decision to cross the line that will eventually lead to a eugenic designer baby market should be taken on the basis of an utterly biased and inadequate consultation." One of the main concerns raised in the HFEA's public consultation was of a "slippery slope" which could lead to other forms of genetic modification. Draft regulations will be produced this year with a final version expected to be debated and voted on in Parliament during 2014.

■ In the early morning of April 26, 2006, the 1st Squad, 2nd Platoon of the Kilo Company abducted Hashim Ibrahim Awad from his home. Members of the eight-man squad testified that they had planned in advance to select a random Iraqi male for ambush.
■ The Marines captured Awad, a 52-year-old father of 11 children, at around 2 a.m. They bound and gagged him, and brought him to a roadside ditch prepared by the squad to look like the site of an attempted IED bomb placement. Half an hour after Awad was abducted, the squad opened fire on the man and killed him.
■ Afterward, the squad removed the bindings from their victim, and positioned his body with a shovel, an AK-47, and empty bullet casings, to make the scene resemble that of a firefight. Afterward, Hutchins and his comrades described the incident as an ambush and a “good shoot.” Afterward, the squad filed a formal report that asserted Awad had been caught digging a hole for a roadside bomb and had engaged them in a firefight.

Kevin Rudd [was] installed [yesterday] as Australian prime minister, three years after he was removed in an inner-party coup, following one of the most serious political crises in the 122-year history of the Labor Party. Following last night’s 57 to 45 vote by the Labor caucus to restore Rudd to the Labor leadership, the entire ruling establishment has closed ranks behind the decision. The overriding motivation behind the decision to back the reinstatement of Rudd was the fear within ruling circles that the unpopularity of Gillard has been so deep and widespread, because of her role in the coup against Rudd three years ago, that the Labor Party was heading towards an electoral wipeout in the forthcoming federal election, scheduled for September 14. Recent polls have indicated that, under Gillard’s leadership, the Labor Party might have received fewer than 30 seats in the 150-seat House of Representatives.

Patrick O’Connor: The political crisis in Australia

Israeli Gen.Amos Yadlin

■ Backing and arming the so-called Syrian opposition distracts from the threat posed by Israel and its expansionist agenda by internalizing the enemy in order to weaken the State. As former Israeli Intelligence Chief, Amos Yadlin told the audience at the Israel Policy Forum in February 2013: “And this military [Syrian], which is a huge threat to Israel, is now also weakening and, in a way, disintegrating. We still have risk from Syria– a risk of being an AlQaeda country, a Somalia-type country — but from military point of view, each one of these are less dangerous than the Syrian regular army.” ■ Perpetuating adversaries to kill each other is a time-tested tactic – one which was used during the bloody eight year Iran-Iraq war; a war which according to Leon Wieseltier[i] was a “distraction” when Israeli boots were on the ground in Southern Lebanon. In that war, the United States was providing arms and intelligence to both sides. ■ When asked what the logic was in aiding both sides in the bloody war, a former official replied: “You had to have been there”[ii]. ■ But why Syria? The Need for Water: The primary goal of the early Zionist leadership was to control and secure the region’s waters. At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, Chaim Weizmann declared that ‘it was of vital importance not only to secure all water resources feeding the country, but to control them at the sources – and the development of these waters became the primary aim of the Yishuv as a whole. ■ This policy remained in place. As Israel’s third Prime Minister Levi Eshkol put it, water was “the blood flowing through the arteries of the nation”. As previously stated, the chaos we witness in Syria today has been in the making for years with the aid and backing of Israel-firsters in order to accommodate Israel’s agenda – expansion and control of regional water supplies while weakening its adversary/ies. ■ Israel faced one of its worst droughts in 1990-91. A second more serious drought in 1998, forced it to turn to water rich Turkey. Turkey and Israel engaged in serious negotiations starting in May 2000 to import 50 billion cubic meters of fresh water from Turkey using tanker ships, but using tankers was not cost effective for the transport of water. Alternate plans were suggested. ■ In September 2000, the same year that young Bashar-al Assad succeeded his father as President of Syria, a strategy paper entitled “The Geopolitics of Water” by the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS) opined that “Since extensive water planning proposals will necessitate the establishment of pipelines and energy grids stretching across borders, a political and military structure that can ensure the safety and security of the carriers will be the prerequisite to effective water sharing”...“But an effective regional system would require political-military cooperation against Syria”.

TAPE RECORDINGS from inside doomed Anglo Irish Bank reveal for the first time how the bank's top executives lied to the Government about the true extent of losses at the institution. The astonishing tapes show senior manager John Bowe, who had been involved in negotiations with the Central Bank, laughing and joking as he tells another senior manager, Peter Fitzgerald, how Anglo was luring the State into giving it billions of euro. Mr Fitzgerald had not been involved in the negotiations with the Central Bank and has confirmed he was unaware of any strategy or intention to mislead the authorities. Mr Bowe, in a statement last night, categorically denied that he had misled the Central Bank. The audio recordings are from the bank's own internal telephone system and date from the heart of the financial crisis that brought the State to its knees in September 2008. Anglo itself was within days of complete meltdown – and in the years ahead would eat up €30bn of taxpayer money. Mr Bowe speaks about how the State had been asked for €7bn to bail out Anglo – but Anglo's negotiators knew all along this was not enough to save the bank. The plan was that once the State began the flow of money, it would be unable to stop. Mr Bowe is asked by Mr Fitzgerald how they had come up with the figure of €7bn. He laughs as he is taped saying: "Just, as Drummer (then-CEO David Drumm) would say, 'picked it out of my arse'." - Mr Bowe's comments in the audio recording reveal that Anglo's strategy was to lure the State in, leaving taxpayers with no choice but to continue to provide loans to "support their money". The recording also shows Mr Bowe and Mr Fitzgerald laughing as they say how there is no realistic chance of ever repaying the loans.

BBC: Irish shock and anger as tapes reveal bankers' behaviour - Very few people in the Republic of Ireland doubted that the banks were less than honest in their dealings with both the Irish Central Bank and the government. But to hear how apparently blatantly dishonest they were has shocked many. Sometimes it is not just what is said it is the tone that matters.

72% of Likely U.S. Voters Know the NSA Has Monitored the Private Communications of Congress, Military Leaders and Judges. - The government keeps on lying about how it’s spying on Americans without authorization from a court. It keeps lying about the scope of its spying. It keeps lying about the need for mass surveillance (and here) and the way that the information gained from spying will really be used … to harass political opponents. Indeed, NSA whistleblower Russel Tice – a key source in the 2005 New York Times report that blew the lid off the Bush administration’s use of warrantless wiretapping –recently said that the NSA illegally spied on General Petraeus and other generals, Supreme Court Justice Alito and all of the other supreme court justices, Barack Obama, the White House spokesman, and many other top officials. The mainstream media will not interview Tice about this explosive issue. And yet – in very heartening news – a new poll by Rasmussen shows that the American public understands much of what is really going on.

Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall had called the NSA out for flat out lying on a "fact sheet" the agency had posted about its section 702 surveillance efforts. The NSA's response? They quietly deleted the pdf document from their website. Because it's not like the internet notices when you suddenly delete the document you put out to defend your overreaching surveillance techniques... You'd think that, of any agency out there, the NSA would recognize the most that simply deleting something on your local computers doesn't make it actually disappear from the world. But, here's the best part: Separately Tuesday, another NSA official said the removal of the fact sheets and letter from the senators were unrelated.

■ Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, was rightly imprisoned for life in 1998 for sending bombs that maimed and killed three people and injured 23 more, from 1978 to 1992. No one can excuse his terrorism. Kaczynski’s ideas, however, described in a manifesto entitled, "Industrial Society and Its Future," cannot be dismissed, and are increasingly important as our society hurtles toward individual disempowerment at the hands of technology and political forces that erode autonomy. ■ “Industrial Society and its Future” was published on September 19, 1995 by The New York Times and The Washington Post, to comply with Kaczynski’s demand, in exchange for him stopping the bombings. Kaczynski, who is still alive, wrote that the increasing industrialization of America and the world, and our increasing reliance on technology, would end up short-circuiting the ability of human beings to think for themselves and act on their own ideas and abilities. ■ He saw the political “left” as embracing these technologies with special fervor, because they were in keeping with the “leftist” ideology that centralized power was the way to govern men. He saw these “leftists” as psychologically disordered—seeking to compensate for deep feelings of personal disempowerment by banding together and seeking extraordinary means of control in society. ■ Well, Kaczynski, while reprehensible for murdering and maiming people, was precisely correct in many of his ideas.