A little-known provision of the Patriot Act, overlooked by lawmakers and administration officials alike, appears to give President Obama a possible way to keep the National Security Agency’s bulk phone records program going indefinitely — even if Congress allows the law on which it is based to expire next year. Senate Republicans on Tuesday night used a filibuster to block consideration of a bill to end and replace the N.S.A. phone records program. The debate about what may happen next has played out based on a widely held premise: that the legal basis for the program, Section 215 of the Patriot Act, will expire on June 1, so if Congress remains gridlocked, the program will automatically shut down.

Patrick Martin ■ Senate blocks any limit to NSA spying on phone calls || The effect of the vote is to delay consideration of any legislation on NSA spying until the next session of Congress, when Republicans will be in the majority and will control key committees like Intelligence and Judiciary, which originate and write legislation. The defeated measure, drafted by the outgoing chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, would have placed very slight restrictions on the NSA program that collects metadata on virtually ever phone call placed in or through US telecommunications companies or the Internet.

More than 10,000 Palestinian children have served time in Israeli jails since 2000, PA Minister in charge of prisoners’ affairs Issa Qaraqaa said in a press release on Wednesday. ● The statement came on the anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 20 November 1989 and entered into force on 2 September 1990. 300 Palestinian children are currently held behind Israeli bars, according to the statement. ● Since June 2014, Israeli occupation forces arrested nearly 3,000 Palestinian citizens, 30% of whom were children. Most of the reported arrests were carried out in occupied Jerusalem, where 850 Jerusalemites were nabbed during the reporting period. ● 95% of the detained children were subjected to torture and severe beating during their arrest and investigation process as part of the Israeli policy to forcibly extract confessions from the detainees, Qaraqaa added. ● The minister for prisoners’ affairs called for cancelling the Israeli bill to impose additional penalties on Palestinian children, who throw stones at Israeli soldiers, that could reach 20-year imprisonment sentences. Israel does not provide any immunity for children and regularly violates international agreements on children's rights by humiliating and torturing them and denying them fair trials, the PA official concluded.

Sherwood Ross ■ Review of Michel Chossudovsky's Book: "Towards a World War III Scenario. The Dangers of Nuclear War" || U.S. plans to attack Iran with a mix of nuclear and conventional weapons have been in readiness since June, 2005, according to Michel Chossudovsky. a distinguished authority on international affairs. “What is unfolding (in Iran) is the outright legitimization of war in the name of an illusive notion of global security. America’s mini-nukes, with an explosive capacity of up to six times a Hiroshima bomb, are upheld as a ‘humanitarian’ bomb, whereas Iran’s nonexistent nuclear weapons are branded as an indisputable threat to global security,” Chossudovsky writes. He points out that a U.S.-Israeli strike against Iran would probably not be limited to Iran’s nuclear facilities but likely would be “an all-out air attack on both military and civilian infrastructure, transport systems, factories and public buildings.” Employed would be “the entire gamut of new advanced weapons systems, including electro-metric weapons and environmental modification techniques (ENMOD),” Chossudovsky writes. [...] “It is not Iran and North Korea which are a threat to global security by the United States of America and Israel,” he adds. What’s more, Western European governments have joined the bandwagon and “have endorsed the U.S.-led military initiative against Iran.”

Leading individuals from seventeen countries, many having served the United Nations in senior positions, have urged the UN General Assembly to re-open the UN inquiry of 1961-62 into the cause of the death of former UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld in 1961. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has suggested the General Assembly may wish to consider three options in pursuing the matter further. He also called on Member States ‘in the light of the passage of time, to declassify any relevant records in their possession.’

RORG: Hvem drepte Dag Hammarskjöld?
Dagens Nyheter: Regering byter linje angående Hammarskjölds död
The People's Voice: The Murder of Count Folke Bernadotte

Dennis J. Bernstein ■ Criticism of how Israel treats Palestinians has become a firing offense in some circles, including academia where professors must muzzle themselves or face accusations of anti-Semitism. In the case of Steven Salaita, Twitter posts about Gaza cost him his job. As bombs rained down on the people of Gaza this past summer, Palestinian-American professor Steven Salaita shared his outrage and horror about the Israeli assault via Twitter. Then, as he prepared to move his family and start his new job as a tenured professor in American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois, Salaita was abruptly un-hired. Wealthy donors had objected to his tweets and pressured the university to keep him out, part of a broader campaign to silence people advocating for Palestinian rights, as Salaita described in a recent interview on Pacifica’s “Flashpoints” program.

"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back." -- Carl Sagan

Andrew Montford ■ CONSENSUS? WHAT CONSENSUS?