A new report from a special U.N. investigator says drone strikes have killed far more civilians than U.S. officials have publicly acknowledged – at least 400 in Pakistan and as many as 58 in Yemen – and chides the U.S. for failing to aid the investigation by disclosing its own figures. U.N. Special Rapporteur Ben Emmerson, who issued the "interim" report, said the U.S. had created "an almost insurmountable obstacle to transparency." "The Special Rapporteur does not accept that considerations of national security justify withholding statistical and basic methodological data of this kind," wrote Emmerson in the report, which is due to be presented to the U.N. General Assembly next Friday. Read the report on drone casualties here [.pdf].

US drone hits Kunar, four Afghans die - Video
US drone strikes supreme war crime: Kevin Barrett
US drone attacks are ‘least expensive’ way to wage war: Danny Schechter

■ Physician Dahlia Wasfi’s powerful speech featured in TheParadigmShift 2009 video. Our only apparent solution: the 99% demanding arrests of obvious US War Criminals (video has images of US war-murders) “We have an obligation to every last victim of this illegal aggression because all of this carnage has been done in our name. Since World War 2, 90% of the casualties of war are unarmed civilians, one-third of them children….”

■We have an obligation to every last victim of this illegal aggression because all of this carnage has been done in our name. Since World War 2, 90% of the casualties of war are unarmed civilians, one-third of them children. Our victims have done nothing to us. From Palestine to Afghanistan, to Iraq, to Somalia, to wherever our next target may be, their murders are not collateral damage, they are the nature of modern warfare. They don’t hate us because of our freedoms. They hate us because every day we are funding and committing crimes against humanity. The so-called “war on terror” is a cover for our military aggression to gain control of the resources of western Asia. This is sending the poor of this country to kill the poor of those Muslim countries. This is trading blood for oil. This is genocide. And to most of the world, we are the terrorists.
■ In these times, remaining silent on our responsibility to the world and its future is criminal. And in light of our complicity in the supreme crimes against humanity in Iraq and Afghanistan, and ongoing violations of the U.N. Charter in International Law, how dare any American criticize the actions of legitimate resistance to illegal occupation!
■ Our so-called enemies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, our other colonies around the world, and our inner cities here at home, are struggling against the oppressive hand of empire, demanding respect for their humanity. They are labeled insurgents or terrorists for resisting rape and pillage by the white establishment, but they are our brothers and sisters in the struggle for justice. The civilians at the other end of our weapons don’t have a choice, but American soldiers have choices. And while there may have been some doubt 5 years ago, today we know the truth. Our soldiers don’t sacrifice for duty-honor-country, they sacrifice for Kellogg Brown & Root.
■ They don’t fight for America. They’re not establishing democracy, they’re establishing the basis for an economic occupation to continue after the military occupation has ended.
■ Iraqi society today, thanks to American “help” is defined by house raids, death squads, check-points, detentions, curfews, blood in the streets, and constant violence. We must dare to speak out in support of the Iraqi people, who resist and endure the horrific existence we brought upon them through our bloodthirsty imperial crusade. We must dare to speak out in support of those American war-resisters, the real military heroes, who uphold their Oath to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, including those terrorist cells in Washington DC more commonly known as the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial branches.

Geoffrey Cowley/MSNBC: Environmental contamination ■ Between 2002 and 2005, U.S. forces shot off 6 billion bullets in Iraq (something like 300,000 for every person killed). They also dropped 2,000 to 4,000 tons of bombs on Iraqi cities, leaving behind a witch’s brew of contaminants and toxic metals, including the neurotoxins lead and mercury.

France has called for an explanation for the “unacceptable” and “shocking” reports of NSA spying on French citizens. Leaked documents revealed the spy agency records millions of phone calls and monitors politicians and high-profile business people. ● The US Ambassador to France Charles Rivkin was summoned by the French Foreign Ministry to account for the espionage allegations on Monday morning. "I have immediately summoned the US ambassador and he will be received this morning at the Quai d'Orsay [the French Foreign Ministry]," French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told press. He added that “we must quickly assure that these practices aren't repeated.” In addition, citing the report on French publication Le Monde, Interior Minister Manuel Valls spoke out on national television against US spy practices. “The revelations on Le Monde are shocking and demand adequate explanations from the American authorities in the coming hours,” said Valls on television channel Europe 1. He went on to say that it is totally unacceptable for an allied country to spy on France.

Le Monde: Espionnage NSA : Laurent Fabius convoque l'ambassadeur américain
Le Monde: Espionnage de la NSA : tous les documents publiés par "Le Monde"
The Guardian: Snowden leaks: France summons US envoy over NSA surveillance claims
The Local: 70 million phone calls in France recorded in one month
France24: France summons US ambassador over 'spying'

JPMorgan agrees deal to settle probes into bad loans sold before the 2007 crisis, but criminal proceedings to continue. ● JPMorgan has agreed a provisional deal with the US government to pay $13bn to settle investigations into bad mortgage loans the bank sold to investors before the financial crisis. Under the agreement, the bank will pay $9bn in fines to the US government and $4bn for relief for struggling homeowners, sources told the AP news agency on Saturday. ● The tentative deal does not release the bank from criminal liability, a factor that had been a major sticking point in the discussions, the source said. If the agreement is finalised it would be the US government's highest-profile enforcement action related to the financial meltdown that plunged the economy into the deepest recession since the 1930s. ● As part of the deal, the Justice Department expects JPMorgan to co-operate with the continuing criminal probe of the bank's issuance of mortgage-backed securities between 2005 and 2007, the person said. When the housing bubble burst in 2007, bundles of mortgages sold as securities soured and the investors who bought them lost billions.

Bob Adelmann: JP Morgan Buying Its Way Out of Legal Troubles ■ Considering JPM's total assets of $2.5 trillion, annual revenues of $100 billion, and net earnings of $21 billion a year, the fine it has agreed to pay can be put into proper perspective: It’s “chump change,” as Michael Hiltzik put it, writing in the Los Angeles Times. The bank will be getting off easy if the Justice Department goes along with the deal. JPM, aware that the day of reckoning was near, had set aside $28 billion of shareholders’ capital in reserve, just in case. Even though the bank is hoping to get off at half of those projected losses, the agreement offered comes with strings: Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan's CEO (shown), not only wants the settlement to include all the other pending lawsuits (including the interest-rate manipulations known as Libor and the trading losses incurred by Bruno Iksil, better known in the trade as the “London Whale,” who cost the bank more than $6 billion when his excessively large trades went south), he wants all criminal investigations to go away as well.

Barry Grey: Blanket settlement with JPMorgan: A $13 billion cover-up ■ The $9 billion fine, the largest penalty ever imposed on a US corporation, is less than half the $21 billion profit JPMorgan recorded in 2012. The bank is pulling in enormous profits despite having set aside $28 billion since 2010 to cover legal costs. It is necessary to place the size of the fine in the context of the economic damage resulting from the bank's practices. Reportedly, $4 billion will go to settle a suit by the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) charging JPMorgan with knowingly making false statements and omitting material facts in selling $33 billion in worthless mortgage bonds to the government-sponsored mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac at the height of the subprime mortgage bubble (2005-2007). That is about 2 percent of the $188 billion in taxpayer money the government has spent thus far to prop up the firms.

Pressure intensified on Syrian rebels on Monday to permit access to chemical weapons sites in areas under their control, as officials said the rapidly shifting lines in the civil war made it difficult for inspectors to reach some locations and called for all parties to ease the process of dismantling Syria’s toxic arms. A Western diplomat in the Arab world said that though the Syrian government was legally responsible for dismantling its chemical weapons under an international agreement, its opponents should also cooperate in the process, because several chemical weapons sites were close to confrontation lines or within rebel-held territory. “The international community also expects full cooperation from the opposition,” the diplomat said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a delicate issue.

US News: Rep. Alan Grayson: Syria Intelligence Manipulated
PressTV: Syria rebels may face military elimination: Analyst

The first case of a child being trafficked to Britain in order to have their organs harvested has been uncovered. ● The unnamed girl was brought to the UK from Somalia with the intention of removing her organs and selling them on to those desperate for a transplant. ● Child protection charities warned that the case was unlikely to be an isolated incident as traffickers were likely to have smuggled a group of children into the country. The case emerged in a government report which showed that the number of human trafficking victims in the UK has risen by more than 50 per cent last year and reached record levels. A total of 371 children were exploited, with the majority of them being used as slaves or sexually abused. They included 95 children from Vietnam, 67 from Nigeria and 25 from China. Others hailed from Romania and Bangladesh. The figures also detail how 20 British girls have been victims of human trafficking. It comes after a series of court cases in which British girls were raped and exploited by gangs of Asian men.

The Lancet, one of the world’s leading medical journals, has published a report supporting the thesis that Yasser Arafat was poisoned with polonium-210. ● The president of the Palestinian Authority died in a French military hospital in November 2004 after falling ill at his headquarters in Ramallah. The study did not address the question of whether Arafat had been assassinated or how he had come into contact with polonium, but the presence of the radioactive isotope points irrefutably to Arafat’s murder. Given the difficulty of obtaining the isotope by anyone other than the nuclear powers and asking cui bono (who benefits?), the murder could only have been planned—if not carried out—by Israel or the United States.

Stanley Kurtz: Why should the privileged wish to become victims? ■ In his important new book, The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse: Save the Earth, Punish Human Beings, French intellectual gadfly Pascal Bruckner does the most thorough job yet of explaining the climate movement as a secular religion, an odd combination of deformed Christianity and reconstructed Marxism. ● Not only have the ideologically driven “studies” programs taken over a large share of the college curriculum, but many courses in conventional departments reflect the underlying assumptions of the various minority-studies concentrations. Today, classic liberal-arts courses have themselves been turned into tiny besieged islands, while the study of alleged oppression represents the leading approach at America’s colleges and universities. In this atmosphere, students cannot help wishing to see themselves as members of a persecuted group. Climate activism answers their existential challenges and gives them a sense of crusading purpose in a lonely secular world. The planet, as Bruckner would have it, is the new proletariat. Yet substitute “upper-middle-class” for “planet,” and the progression of victimhood is explained. Global warming allows the upper-middle-class to join the proletariat, cloaking erstwhile oppressors in the mantle of righteous victimhood.

Pascal Bruckner: Apocalyptic Daze ■ As an asteroid hurtles toward Earth, terrified citizens pour into the streets of Brussels to stare at the mammoth object growing before their eyes. Soon, it will pass harmlessly by—but first, a strange old man, Professor Philippulus, dressed in a white sheet and wearing a long beard, appears, beating a gong and crying: “This is a punishment; repent, for the world is ending!” We smile at the silliness of this scene from the Tintin comic strip L’Étoile Mystérieuse, published in Belgium in 1941. Yet it is also familiar, since so many people in both Europe and the United States have recently convinced themselves that the End is nigh. This depressing conviction may seem surprising, given that the West continues to enjoy an unparalleled standard of living. But Professor Philippulus has nevertheless managed to achieve power in governments, the media, and high places generally. Constantly, he spreads fear: of progress, of science, of demographics, of global warming, of technology, of food. In five years or in ten years, temperatures will rise, Earth will be uninhabitable, natural disasters will multiply, the climate will bring us to war, and nuclear plants will explode. Man has committed the sin of pride; he has destroyed his habitat and ravaged the planet; he must atone.

Marlo Lewis: Balance is not bias ■ The Cook study does not really prove what it claims to prove. The authors examined 11,944 abstracts of climate papers published between 1991-2011. They found that nearly two-thirds of the abstracts expressed no opinion on the supposed “consensus” position. So their headline – 97% of scientists agree – is inaccurate and misleading. IN 1984-speak, they are claiming Silence is Affirmation. Is the 97% figure made up out of whole cloth? Not quite. It turns out that 97% of about one-third of the abstracts affirms or implies that humans are responsible for some portion of global warming since 1951. And guess what? Just about every prominent skeptic agrees with that as well. As an attempt to discredit contrarians, the Cook study is a bust. The key science question for climate researchers today is not whether greenhouse gas emissions warm the planet but whether state-of-the-art computer models are accurate enough to forecast climate change and inform policy decisions.

Just one day after President Barack Obama signed into law a bipartisan deal to end the government shutdown and avoid default, the US debt surged a record $328 billion, the first day the government was able to borrow money. ● Fasten your seatbelt, because the US debt rate is racing out of control and nobody seems to know where or when the spending will end: The US debt now equals $17.075 trillion, according to figures the Treasury Department posted online on Friday. The one-day increase of $328 billion to the US debt load smashed the previous record of $238 billion set two years ago. The huge leap toward what some economists fear will be eventual insolvency was blamed on the government replenishing its supply of "extraordinary measures," that is, the federal funds it borrowed from over the last five months in a desperate effort to avoid hitting the debt ceiling.

The budget brinkmanship has cost the world's largest economy billions of dollars - as well as the trust of investors around the globe. And it also sparked calls to de-americanize the world economy. For more, RT talks to Pepe Escobar, Asia Times Online roving correspondent.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has hinted that the Tel Aviv regime has clandestine relations with Saudi Arabia and Persian Gulf littoral states. ● Netanyahu’s remarks in Knesset this week that Arab states have begun to realize that Israel is not their enemy reveal the clandestine relations, which have been recently fortified, Ynet reported. This secret network of relations includes countries which don’t have official diplomatic ties with the Israeli regime. The report added that the tension in the Middle East has brought the security and political interests of Israel and these states, which see the Tel Aviv regime as a steady and reliable ally, closer. It said that Israelis informed of these relations say that certain countries in the region, in the absence of the US, seek a reliable collaborator which they can work with even secretly."Common interests were created within regional instability," an Israeli source said.

Ynet News: Israel, Arab states work together to battle Iran's nuclear plan