Russia has sent advanced antiship cruise missiles to Syria, a move that illustrates the depth of its support for the Syrian government led by President Bashar al-Assad, American officials said Thursday. - Russia has previously provided a version of the missiles, called Yakhonts, to Syria. But those delivered recently are outfitted with an advanced radar that makes them more effective, according to American officials who are familiar with classified intelligence reports and would only discuss the shipment on the basis of anonymity. Unlike Scud and other longer-range surface-to-surface missiles that the Assad government has used against opposition forces, the Yakhont antiship missile system provides the Syrian military a formidable weapon to counter any effort by international forces to reinforce Syrian opposition fighters by imposing a naval embargo, establishing a no-fly zone or carrying out limited airstrikes.

Times of Israel: Netanyahu to Putin: ‘Your missile sales to Assad could trigger war’

The Israeli military says its troops have shot at a target inside Syria, after gunfire from Damascus hit the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. - The military said in a Tuesday statement that the gunfire from Damascus damaged a military vehicle without causing any injuries. The statement added that the Israeli soldiers “returned precise fire.” Tel Aviv has recently boosted military activities in the occupied Golan Heights, where clashes between Syrian forces and foreign-sponsored militants have spiked dramatically in recent weeks.

PressTV: Syria seizes Israeli army vehicle used by insurgents in al-Qusayr

The Daily Star: Israeli unit crosses technical fence in Ghajar - GHAJAR, Lebanon: An Israeli army unit crossed the technical fence just south of the occupied village of Ghajar at dawn Monday, without passing the Blue Line [entering through Syria instead], to a road dug by Israelis by the eastern bank of the Wazzani River. The crossover comes two months after three Israeli bulldozers backed by tanks and armored vehicles crossed the same fence to dig the road that runs parallel to the river. The Israeli unit consisting of 10 army personnel stayed within the area around the makeshift road for a short while, positioning themselves behind rocks and mounds of earth along the Wazzani River.

A new video shows foreign-backed militants in Syria whipping two men for violating marriage procedures based on their interpretation of Islam. - The incident has occurred in the northwestern city of Saraqeb in Idlib Province, where a court formed by the militants issued a verdict to flog the men - the husband and father of a local woman. The al-Qaeda-affiliated Salafi militants in Syria have conducted similar acts in over two years of turmoil in the country. They say their own interpretation is the only correct way of implementing the rules of Islam. Unrest has gripped Syria since March 2011. Many people, including large numbers of Syrian soldiers and security personnel, have been killed in the violence.

Just months after a study was published showing that two Monsanto products, a genetically modified (GM) maize and Roundup herbicide, damaged the health of rats, the journal that published the study appointed a former Monsanto scientist to decide which papers on GM foods and crops should be published, a new article reveals. - Monsanto and GM foods suffered a storm of bad publicity after a study published in the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology (FCT) in September 2012 reported that a GM corn and Roundup caused organ damage and increased rates of tumors and premature death in rats. But in early 2013 Richard E. Goodman, a former Monsanto researcher with close ties to the biotech industry, joined the senior editorial staff of FCT. Goodman was given the specially created position of associate editor for biotechnology.

A massive tornado has ripped through part of the Central US state of Oklahoma, near its Oklahoma City capital, killing 91 so far, including many elementary school children, and leaving a trail of devastation with winds of up to 200 miles (320 km) per hour.

The killer tornado struck the Oklahoma City suburb of Moore Monday afternoon, flattening homes, two schools and a hospital, leaving at least 120 injured with numerous people reported missing. According to the National Weather Service, the dangerous storm system remains a threat to as many as 10 more US states as more twisters are expected to emerge from it. While rescue and emergency workers searched for more survivors through the rubble of an elementary school that was directly hit by the tornado in Moore, Oklahoma state authorities confirmed 91 deaths on Monday, a figure that is still expected to climb.

Gawker: Mile-Wide Tornado Hits Oklahoma City Suburb, Killing at Least 51 - VIDEOS
Niles Williamson: Devastating tornado kills at least 91 in Oklahoma City

The journalism world has been rightly outraged by the Justice Department dragging the Associated Press (and now a Fox News reporter) into one of its sprawling leak investigations. As we wrote last week, by obtaining the call records of twenty AP phone lines, “the Justice Department has struck a terrible blow against the freedom of the press and the ability of reporters to investigate and report the news." But there are several other important lessons that this scandal can teach us besides how important free and uninhibited newsgathering is to the public’s right to know.

Ed Hightower: New revelations of US government spying on the press

Bruce Schneier: I'm going to start with three data points. One: Some of the Chinese military hackers who were implicated in a broad set of attacks against the U.S. government and corporations were identified because they accessed Facebook from the same network infrastructure they used to carry out their attacks. Two: Hector Monsegur, one of the leaders of the LulzSec hacker movement, was identified and arrested last year by the FBI. Although he practiced good computer security and used an anonymous relay service to protect his identity, he slipped up. And three: Paula Broadwell, who had an affair with CIA director David Petraeus, similarly took extensive precautions to hide her identity. She never logged in to her anonymous e-mail service from her home network. Instead, she used hotel and other public networks when she e-mailed him. The FBI correlated hotel registration data from several different hotels -- and hers was the common name. - The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like it or not, we're being tracked all the time.

I'm Being Followed: How Google—and 104 Other Companies—Are Tracking Me on the Web

Sister Teresa Forcades is one of Catalonia's foremost political figures, but uniquely for a faith-led figure in Spain, her ideology is feminist and left-wing. Against a backdrop of continued economic contraction and austerity, she spoke to the Guardian about the need for an alternative to capitalism and criticised the misogyny of the Catholic church

At last we know. The mysterious legal authority for Barack Obama’s killer drone program flows from another administration with an elastic interpretation of executive power: that of Richard Nixon. - In a chilling 16-page dossier known simply as the White Paper, one of Obama’s statutory brains at the Justice Department cites the 1969 secret bombing of Cambodia as a legal rationale justifying drone strikes, deep inside nations, against which the United States is not officially at war. This startling disclosure is drafted in the antiseptic prose of an insurance adjuster announcing the denial of a claim based on a pre-existing condition. Yet, the bombing of Cambodia (aka Operation Menu), which involved more than 3,000 air strikes, was almost universally acknowledged as a war crime. Now the Obama administration has officially enshrined that atrocity as precedent for its own killing rampages.

It was inevitable. A technology like 3D printing that essentially puts cheap labor, manufacturing, and retail all in the same place - upon one's desktop - spells the absolute, utter and permanent end to the monopolies and unwarranted power and influence of the corporate-financier elite who have lorded over humanity since human civilization began - a permanent end the elite will fight against with the total summation of their ill-gotten power and influence. The pretext being used to begin this war, is a 3D printed gun built and demonstrated by Defense Distributed in Austin, Texas. After designing, printing out, and firing the 3D printed gun, the US State Department demanded that the designs, distributed for free on the Internet, be taken down - claiming tenuously that by posting the designs on the Internet, arms export bans may have been violated - this the same government that is on record, openly shipping arms, cash, and military equipment to its own listed terrorist organizations from the Mujahedeen e-Khalq (MEK or MKO) in Iraq and Iran, to the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) in Libya, to Al Qaeda's Syrian franchise, Jabhat al-Nusra.

A foreign-backed militant who was seen eating an organ of a dead Syrian soldier in a recent video has confirmed the authenticity of the 27-second clip. - In an interview with Time magazine conducted via Skype on Tuesday, Khalid al Hamad, known by his nom de guerre Abu Sakkar, confirmed that the video is real and that he did indeed take a bite of the soldier’s lung. The video shows him cutting out some of the soldier's organs and biting into one. At the time of the filming, al Hamad believed that he was eating the man’s liver, but A surgeon who saw the video said the organ in question was actually a lung. Other Syrian militants condemned the "horrific and inhumane" action and said he should be arrested or killed for committing the atrocity. Human Rights Watch said it was a war crime.

Finian Cunningham: Cannibalizing Syria: The West to blame - This is the nature of sickening violence that Western governments have been sponsoring in Syria for more than two years. And if US President Barack Obama, Britain’s David Cameron and France’s François Hollande get their way with plans to openly supply mercenaries in Syria with even more weaponry, then the bloodbath in that country will escalate.

After US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks showed that the State Department was lobbying worldwide for Monsanto and other similar corporations, a new report based on the cables shows Washington's shilling for the biotech industry in distinct detail. - The August 2011 WikiLeaks revelations showed that American diplomats had requested funding to send lobbyists for the biotech industry to hold talks with politicians and agricultural officials in "target countries" in areas like Africa and Latin America, where genetically-modified crops were not yet a mainstay, as well as some European countries that have resisted the controversial agricultural practice. After a concerted effort to "closely examine five years of State Department diplomatic cables from 2005 to 2009 to provide the first comprehensive analysis of the strategy, tactics and U.S. foreign policy objectives to foist pro-agricultural biotechnology policies worldwide," nonprofit consumer protection group Food & Water Watch published on Tuesday a report showing in plain detail the depth of the partnership between the federal government and a number of controversial biotech companies that have slowly but surely pushed their GMO products on a number of new countries in recent years.

The White House has denied any prior knowledge of the Justice Department’s investigation of the Associated Press. US Attorney General has defended the probe, saying the “aggressive action” was in response to national security being put at risk. Just hours after the AP reported on Monday that the Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors employed by the news agency, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said, “Other than press reports, we have no knowledge of any attempt by the Justice Department to seek phone records of the AP.” Meanwhile, US Attorney General Eric Holder defended the probe during a Tuesday afternoon press conference, but said he recused himself from the investigation because he was interviewed earlier by the FBI on the matter and didn’t want to provoke a conflict of interest.

Barry Grey: Obama Justice Department secretly seized Associated Press telephone records - In a brazen and illegal attack on press freedom, the Obama Justice Department secretly subpoenaed the telephone records of Associated Press editors and journalists and tracked ingoing and outgoing calls on at least 20 telephone lines, including the national headquarters of the press agency and its news bureaus in New York, Hartford and Washington DC. Among the lines tracked was the telephone used by AP reporters working out of the House of Representatives press gallery in the Capitol. The Associated Press was given no advance notice of the government dragnet, which reportedly began in April of 2012 and continued through May of that year. Such a massive operation over a two-month period would generate records of many thousands of telephone calls, providing the government with legally privileged information about AP journalists’ sources and methods. More than 100 journalists work in the offices where phone records were seized.

On May 31, 2010, Israeli commandos attacked the first Freedom Flotilla in international waters in the Mediterranean Sea, killing nine Turkish citizens, including a teenager with Turkish-US dual citizenship, on board the Turkish-flagged Mavi Marmara and injuring about 50 other people who were part of the team on the six-ship convoy.

The International Criminal Court says it has launched a preliminary investigation into Israel's deadly attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in 2010 to see if war crimes or crimes against humanity had been committed. - "My office will be conducting a preliminary examination in order to establish whether the criteria for opening an investigation are met," ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said in a statement issued on Tuesday. On May 31, 2010, Israeli commandos attacked the first Freedom Flotilla in international waters in the Mediterranean Sea, killing nine Turkish citizens, including a teenager with Turkish-US dual citizenship, on board the Turkish-flagged Mavi Marmara and injuring about 50 other people who were part of the team on the six-ship convoy.

The hunger strike at the notorious US Guantanamo prison has entered its 99th day, with the authorities beginning to implement humiliating measures against the prisoners.

Clive Stafford Smith, a leading lawyer representing various detainees in Guantanamo prison, said in a letter to British Foreign Secretary William Hague that hunger strikers should go through body cavity searches before they could contact their lawyers even with a phone call. “The US military has started directly abusing prisoners who want to contact their lawyers to tell them what is happening,” Smith said, adding that the searches involve the private body parts of the detainees. He also said that two of his clients and at least another inmate were dissuaded to contact their lawyers in order not to go through the body searches. The US military has reportedly denied that authorities at Guantanamo carry out the humiliating searches.

Earlier, David Remes, also a lawyer for Guantanamo prisoners, had previously said the prison officials had threatened the inmates with humiliating body searches to dissuade them from meeting their lawyers. “Under the new search policy, a detainee who leaves his camp is subject to a search including his private parts and …,” Remes also said. Remes added that two of his Yemeni clients on hunger strike, identified as Abd al-Malik Abd al-Wahab and Salman Rabeii, had talked about the new policy. The lawyer was at the US naval prison from April 29 to May 3. Over two thirds of the 166 prisoners still held at the notorious US jail are on a hunger strike, which began on February 6 against prison condition and the detainees’ indefinite confinement.

Hunger strikers being force-fed at Guantanamo Bay must wear masks over their mouths while being shackled to a restraint chair for up to two hours. Authorities have revised the way they feed the strikers, comparing their techniques to battlefield tactics. Nasal tubes are jammed up the prisoners’ noses until a liquid supplement reaches their stomachs. The tubes, which are 61cm in length or even longer, stay in the prisoners’ nostrils until a chest X-ray or a test dose of water show that the nutritional supplement has reached the prisoner’s stomach. The shocking procedure doesn’t stop there. Detainees are then sent to a “dry cell” with no running water while they undergo supervision to make sure they don’t vomit. If they regurgitate their supplement, they’re sent right back to the restraint chair.

Force-feeding is an extremely invasive and highly controversial practice which many human rights activists - and the UN - say is torturous. But what’s perhaps even more shocking than the procedure itself is that the final decision regarding who will be force-fed is left up to Guantanamo Commander John Smith - not physicians.

Ryan Fogle was allegedly caught red-handed late last night trying to recruit a Russian intelligence officer for the CIA. - In a dramatic moment right out of the pages of a Cold War thriller, a US diplomat has been arrested in Russia and accused of being a spy. Ryan Fogle was allegedly caught red-handed late last night trying to recruit a Russian intelligence officer for the CIA. The Federal Security Service today released pictures of the arrest, saying its officers snared Mr Fogle carrying a large amount of money along with eavesdropping equipment. The FSB – the successor to the feared KGB – said it captured the American in Moscow on his way to meet his intended recruit. Mr Fogle was also allegedly carrying a disguise to be given to the Russian agent and a letter offering £653,000 a year for information requested by the US. Russia declared the diplomat “persona non grata” today and ordered him to leave the country.

Al Qassam website - Ramallah- More than 7 million Palestinian refugees, uprooted from their homes and lands since the Palestinian Nakba (the usurpation of Palestine), are still hoping to return to their homeland, and reject the notion of land swaps.Many of the Palestinian families who fled Palestine still hold keys to their homes after being forced to leave their lands and homes at gunpoint. MP Mona Mansour stressed the right of return for all Palestinian refugees who were forcibly expelled from their historical lands. She confirmed her total rejection of the notion of land swaps, warning of its seriousness on the Palestinian cause. Dr Abdel Sattar Qassem Professor of Political studies confirmed that Nakba anniversary highlights the Palestinian refugees’ adherence to their right of return despite their difficult living conditions in refugee camps. The refugee Ahmed Abu Saada from Jalazoun refugee camp confirmed that the Palestinian right of return will never be compromised. Resistance is the only reliable option to return to our homeland, he stressed.

"Die Wahrheit Wird Euch Frei Machen" (The Truth
Will Set You Free)

University of Freiburg´s refusal to let lecture hall to Cafe Palestine Freiburg found to be illegal.

Last Friday, Cafe Palestine Freiburg won a landmark victory in the Administrative Court, when the refusal by the University of Freiburg to make available to Cafe Palestine a lecture hall for a presentation by Professor Christophe Oberlin of Paris on the topic "Plastic Surgery in Gaza" was found to be illegal. The Court, consisting of three professional and two lay judges determined that the leeway granted to the University in the practice of its authority is limited by the principle of equal treatment and the right to freedom of opinion (though this does not of course include every opinion). The reasons offered by the University in refusing use of a lecture hall were that the event might serve illegal and anti-constitutional aims and might lead to constitutional and legal violations which, according to the administrative regulations of the Ministry of Science (Wissenschaftsministerium) and the University’s own guideline, are grounds for refusal. But the university failed to prove that the event might encourage constitutional and illegal violations and therefore was found to be abusing freedom of opinion.

Gilad Atzmon: Landmark victory For a Change - Cafe Palestine Freiburg won a landmark victory against Freiburg University in the German administrative court last Friday. Six months ago Café Palestine filed a complaint against the University in the Administrative Court following the University´s refusal to let the Palestinian solidarity group use a space for a lecture by Paris University professor Christophe Oberlin. On Friday, the Administrative Court of Freiburg made of five judges found that the University acted illegally. Freiburg University together with Dr. Heinrich Schwendemann, who was the main actor against the Café, were highly criticized by the court. Schwendemann is one of the founders of the German Holocaust memorial site shoa.de. As far as I am aware the University will have to pay a penalty. I guess that Dr. Schwendemann may need to consult with a legal expert soon. Apparently the Shoa expert was lying in court and he may face a further legal humiliation soon.

The Other Site: Gabi Weber: The Truth Will Set Us Free?