The NSA spying scandals have taken a toll on Germans' opinion of their longtime ally, according to a new survey. Mistrust in the United States has skyrocketed, and more Germans are viewing whistleblower Edward Snowden as a hero. ● The survey, commissioned by public broadcaster ARD and daily newspaper Die Welt, found that only 35 percent of Germans considered the US government trustworthy -- numbers not seen since the times of highly unpopular President George W. Bush. Forty-three percent said they were satisfied with the work of US President Barack Obama. Just a year ago, he enjoyed the backing of 75 percent of Germans. The results appear to be a strong indictment of the pervasive US surveillance programs uncovered through classified documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden -- whom 60 percent of respondents consider a hero. Despite that strong majority support, Germans were evenly split over the question of whether their country should offer Snowden asylum, with 46 percent saying "yes" and 48 percent saying "no."

Iran's foreign minister says he believes 'ingredients are there' for historic breakthrough after decade of diplomatic sparring.

Iranian and western officials will start drafting a nuclear agreement in Geneva on Friday after international negotiations made dramatic progress, Iran's foreign minister has told the Guardian. As hopes of a breakthrough soared, the US secretary of state, John Kerry, is to travel to Switzerland on Friday to help seal an agreement which could, if successful, go a long way towards defusing tensions in the Gulf and put off the threat of new war in the Middle East. A senior US state department official said: "Secretary Kerry will travel to Geneva, Switzerland, on Friday at the invitation of EU high representative Ashton in an effort to help narrow differences in negotiations." An agreement on any scale would represent a historic breakthrough after a decade of diplomatic sparring marked by paralysis and distrust.

Haaretz: Netanyahu warns Kerry: Israel not bound by any deal between Iran and West ● Israel does not see itself bound by an agreement between Tehran and the six world powers over Iran’s nuclear program, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry Friday morning. In a tense meeting with Kerry ahead of his departure to Geneva to join negotiations between the P5+1 and Iran, Netanyahu said that that Israel does not see itself committed to any deal between Iran and world powers. Kerry called off making a statement before the meeting in an attempt to avoid a public confrontation. But Netanyahu decided to go ahead with a statement on his own and slammed a possible agreement between Iran and the six world powers.

Jason Ditz: Interim Iran Nuclear Deal Could Be Signed Friday
New York Times: West and Iran Seen as Nearing a Nuclear Deal

A Swiss forensic team has published findings strongly indicating that Yasser Arafat, the former President of the Palestinian Authority (PA), was poisoned with the radioactive isotope polonium-210. ● Arafat died in a French military hospital in November 2004 after falling ill following a meal at his headquarters in Ramallah, in the West Bank. According to the 108-page report by the University Centre of Legal Medicine in Lausanne, obtained by the news channel Al Jazeera and shown to the Guardian, scientists found at least 18 times the normal levels of radioactive polonium in Arafat’s remains and in soil stained with his decaying organs. The scientists were confident up to an 83 percent level that the late Palestinian leader was poisoned. Their report only addressed the question of what killed Arafat, not whether he was deliberately poisoned or how. But their findings, part of a broader investigation into Arafat’s death, mean that the elected Palestinian leader died in office as a result of a political assassination.

Stephen Lendman: Israel Killed Arafat
Justin Raimondo: Killing Arafat

This clip would have been worth uploading even if the two guys
in the background did not make it even more convincing.

Paul CIAnCIA, the alleged LAX gunman...what a great name for an anti-government conspiracy minded shooter - Kenny's Sideshow

Robert Fisk: The poppy helps us avoid a search for the meaning of war ■ I know all the reasons they give us. We must remember our dead. “They” died for us and our freedom. The cost of sacrifice. Remember Passchendaele. Never forget. At school I used to wear a poppy – without the leaf which now prettifies this wretched flower – and so did my Dad who, as I often recall, was a soldier of that Great War, in the trenches of the Third Battle of the Somme, 1918, and at Cambrai. But then, as 2nd Lieutenant Bill Fisk grew older and became sick, he read the biographies of that most meretricious of officers, Earl Haig – butcher Haig of the Somme, whose wife gave her name to the original poppies – and came to regard the wearing of these sickly and fake petals as hypocrisy. He stopped wearing the poppy for 11 November, and so did I. ● At Ypres four years ago, I was honoured to give the Armistice Day lecture just before 11 November; but I did not wear a poppy and politely declined to lay a wreath at the Menin Gate – that “sepulchre of crime” as Sassoon called it – and I discovered, as the clergy purred away beneath the names of the 54,896 Great War soldiers with no known grave, a headstone atop the city’s old medieval wall. Nothing could equal the words which his family had courageously inscribed above the final resting place of 2nd Lieutenant Arthur Conway Young, who died on 16 August, 1917: “Sacrifice to the fallacy that war can end.”

A 13-year-old boy in Kansas was suspended on Wednesday for wearing a Vera Bradley purse — and officials say he can’t come back until he takes it off.

Skylar Davis told KCTV that he had been carrying the colorful Vera Bradley handbag for months until one official at Anderson County Senior-Junior School insisted that he remove it on Wednesday. After telling Assistant Principal Don Hillard that he wasn’t going to take the purse off, Davis’ mother, Leslie Willis, was called to pick him up.

“I was a little furious, and I called the school [and spoke to Hillard] to reverify the story, and yeah, he refused to take off his Vera Bradley bag, nothing more to do it,” Willis recalled to KCTV. “Skylar has been going to school since August with that same Vera Bradley bag on, hasn’t taken it off. What is the problem?” “I don’t think everyone should be treated differently,” he said. “Everyone should have the same privileges.”

Willis added that there was no rule about purses in the school handbook. Davis pointed out that girls at the school never faced punishment for wearing their purses.