This video is about the Military Cancer attacking our country

Simon Jenkins: The bloody disaster of Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan is laid bare: Bombs and militia violence make clear the folly of Britain's wars – the removal of law and order from a nation is devastating ■ In each case – Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan – it was easy to see evil in the prevailing regime. These are bad guys that we need to go after, said the Americans. Yet the removal of law and order from a nation is devastating, however cruel that order may have been. Iraqis today repeat that, whatever the ills of Saddam Hussein, under his rule most ordinary citizens and their families could walk the streets at night without fear of murder or kidnap. Religious differences were tolerated. Iraq should have been an oil-rich modern state. Even the Kurds, scourged by Saddam in the past, enjoyed autonomy and relative peace. In each of these cases Britain and its allies, chiefly America, intervened to overthrow the army, disband government, dismantle the judiciary and leave militias to run riot. Little or no attempt was made to replace anarchy with a new order. "Nation building" was a fiasco. The British bombs that flattened government buildings in Kabul, Baghdad and Tripoli did not replace them, or those who worked in them. Those who dropped them congratulated themselves on their work and went home.

Chancellor Merkel’s Christian Democratic Party and the center-left Social Democratic Party have agreed Monday to convene a Bundestag meeting following Edward Snowden’s revelation US had tapped Angela Merkel’s mobile phone. MPs are expected to set up a special committee to investigate US spying activity in Germany. ● "Germany waits an official explanation from the US government as well as the apology. We also expect the US to quit all the spying activities on the German territory and to deliver all the information considering the spying services working in Germany," said the country’s home secretary Hans-Peter Friedrich. The contention in the Bundestag coalition negotiations is the NSA scandal and the position demands clarity and concrete decisions from the German parliament while the Union Party with Angela Merkel at the top is rather cautious with the claims. Everyone understands that the US is the biggest partner and ally of Germany, so any indiscrete announcement could damage their bilateral relations.

Washington, D.C.'s insurance commissioner confirmed Sunday that he was fired after questioning President Barack Obama's proposed fixes to his troubled health-care law. ● William White told NBC News that Mayor Vincent Gray's office didn't explicitly link his dismissal to his comments. But he strongly suggested it wasn't a coincidence. "Anyone who looks at this can draw their own conclusions. My statement came out on Thursday, and by Friday [at] 4:15 I was out," he said. In a statement Thursday, White criticized Obama's announcement earlier in the day that insurance plans scheduled to be canceled next year under the new law could be extended for a year. White said the extensions would create problems for health-care exchanges because they contradict legislation the District and many states passed to implement the law.

Richard Evans: JFK, Israel at Odds Over Nukes ■ There was a was a secret back-channel confrontation between Kennedy and Israeli PM Ben Gurion that came to a head in 1963: Construction at Dimona began in 1958, and the delay in informing the White House is considered one of those 'intelligence community blunders'. I'll leave it to readers to process why it was presented to the Eisenhower White House one week after the 1960 election. Eisenhower merely passed it on for the new Administration to deal with. Kennedy was informed ten days after he took office in January 1961. [1]. Kennedy and Secretary of State Dean Rusk summoned the Israeli ambassador to arrange an inspection of the Dimona facility. The ambassador agreed - "if it is done on a secret basis." Ben Gurion was embroiled in a domestic political crisis (the Lavon Affair [2] ), so as a courtesy Kennedy agreed to wait for an inspection. An inspection was carried out in May 1961, reporting to the President that they found the facility "within the scope of peaceful character". The tensions relaxed for two years. Kennedy, however, expected the inspections to be ongoing. Ben Gurion stepped down in 1963 appointing a new Prime Minister, Levi Eshkol. Kennedy took the occasion to write a polite diplomatic letter to Eshkol, and asked for date for another inspection of of the Dimona facility "within six months", to be followed with regular inspections every six months. And he added the following ultimatum, "As I wrote Mr. Ben-Gurion, this Government's commitment to and support of Israel could be seriously jeopardized if it should be thought that we were unable to obtain reliable information on a subject as vital to the peace as the question of Israel's effort in the nuclear field." There were no nuclear proliferation treaties in those days, so Kennedy was informing the Israeli government that US direct aid and more important trade agreements were now on the table. Kennedy was still waiting for the Israelis to agree to another inspection when he left politics suddenly on November 22nd, 1963.

Just weeks after the arrest of alleged Jewish terrorist, Yaakov Teitel, a West Bank rabbi on Monday released a book giving Jews permission to kill Gentiles who threaten Israel. ● Rabbi Yitzhak Shapiro, who heads the Od Yosef Chai Yeshiva in the Yitzhar settlement, wrote in his book "The King's Torah" that even babies and children can be killed if they pose a threat to the nation. Shapiro based the majority of his teachings on passages quoted from the Bible, to which he adds his opinions and beliefs. "It is permissable to kill the Righteous among Nations even if they are not responsible for the threatening situation," he wrote, adding: "If we kill a Gentile who has sinned or has violated one of the seven commandments - because we care about the commandments - there is nothing wrong with the murder." Several prominent rabbis, including Rabbi Yithak Ginzburg and Rabbi Yaakov Yosef, have recommended the book to their students and followers.

John Goetz, Christian Fuchs, Frederik Obermaier and Tanjev Schultz: U.S. supersedes authority at German Airports, Seaports in Name of ‘War on Terror’ ■ The U.S. agents appear without warning. Suddenly, they’re standing next to a flight attendant pointing someone out. That passenger shouldn’t be allowed to board the plane. Officially, these American border patrol agents are only supposed to give ‘advice’ about potentially dangerous passengers. In practice, though, they determine who can and can’t fly to the U.S. They are part of a troop of agents and security guards stationed in Germany permanently. More than 50 agents from Homeland Security, the Secret Service and immigration and transportation services work alongside the CIA and NSA in Germany. These agents enjoy diplomatic immunity and have power akin to German customs and police officers. They decide who can board planes, which containers are loaded onto cargo ships—sometimes they even make arrests, apparently.

Commenting on the law banning gay propaganda, Putin said that Russia and Europe have demographic problems. “Europeans are dying out. Don't you understand that? And same-sex marriages don't produce children. Do you want to survive by drawing migrants? But society cannot adapt so many migrants. Your choice in many countries is the way it is: recognition of same-sex marriage, adoption, etc. But let us make our own choice the way we see it for our country,” Putin said. The president added that some American states still have criminal liability for homosexuality. “Why does everyone like to focus on Russia? You shouldn't fuel tensions here; there is nothing terrible here,” he said. President Putin also joked that his old friend Silvio Berlusconi, former Italian Prime Minister would not have faced trial if he was gay. “Berlusconi faces trial for bedding women. If he was gay, no one would ever lay a finger on him,” he said with a smile.

The DNA of ancient viruses first spotted in the Neanderthal genome have now been identified in modern humans – although whether they cause disease is not yet clear.

In 2010, researchers unveiled the genomes of two extinct groups of human – the Neanderthals and the Denisovans. This revealed that some humans share a few per cent of their DNA with their extinct cousins. Ever since, geneticists have been poring over the ancient DNA sequences for an insight into Stone Age life. Last year, Jack Lenz's team at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York began looking for signs of endogenous retroviruses in the ancient genomes, a class of virus that not only invades cells but worms its way into DNA. These retroviral gene sequences make up about 8 per cent of the human genome, and are part of what is sometimes called "junk" or non-coding DNA because they don't contain genetic instructions to make proteins. Lenz found 14 retroviral gene sequences in the Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA. When he compared this to the human genome used as a standard reference, he found that none of the sequences overlapped – in other words, it seemed that modern humans did not share this endogenous retroviral DNA with their extinct cousins. [Photograph by Joe McNally/NGS]

Most of the videos are shot from squad cars while African American men are told to sing or "dance like a chimp." ● Grosse Pointe Park police officers are capturing humiliating photos and videos of black men and texting them to friends and family, the Motor City Muckraker has found. One of the main culprits is Officer Mike Najm, who texted a picture of a black man in the back of a trailer and typed, “Gotta love the coloreds.” In one video, Najm can be heard telling a mentally ill black man to sing. Most of the videos are shot from squad cars while African American men are told to sing or “dance like a chimp.” Some of the subjects are even in the back of police cars. Grosse Pointe Park Capt. David Loch said earlier today he was skeptical of the allegations because of a contentious divorce between Najm and his ex-wife, whom Loch presumed to be the source of the texts. But after we watched more than a dozen racially charged videos this afternoon sent from officers in his department, Loch said he would immediately investigate.

Motor City Muckraker: Grosse Pointe cops demean mentally ill man on camera - Video

Fueled by the Edward Snowden scandal, more Americans than ever are asking the NSA if their personal life is being spied on. And the NSA has a very direct answer for them: Tough luck, we're not telling you. Americans are inundating the National Security Agency with open-records requests, leading to a 988% increase in such inquiries. Anyone asking is getting a standard pre-written letter saying the NSA can neither confirm nor deny that any information has been gathered. "This was the largest spike we've ever had," said Pamela Phillips, the chief of the NSA Freedom of Information Act and Privacy Act Office, which handles all records requests to the agency. "We've had requests from individuals who want any records we have on their phone calls, their phone numbers, their e-mail addresses, their IP addresses, anything like that." News reports of the NSA's surveillance program motivates most inquirers, she said.