by Stephen Lendman

Established by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court on July 1, 2002, it's mandated to prosecute individuals for genocide and aggression, as well as crimes or war and against humanity.

Much earlier, the UN Charter was created "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our life time has brought untold sorrow to mankind." Its Chapter I states:

"To maintain international peace and security, (member states shall respect the) principle of the sovereign equality (of other members), settle their international disputes by peaceful means, (and) refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state."

Full story »

By Rady Ananda

At the 64th World Health Assembly underway right now in Geneva thru May 24, a major review of smallpox experimentation will be presented where leaders are expected to call for the destruction of all remaining samples, since the disease has not surfaced in over 40 years.

Meanwhile, two biopharm companies are in a spat over a US government awarded contract to develop a smallpox vaccine, as the U.S. continues to refuse to submit to international arms control inspections of its "dual use" biodefense-bioweapons labs.

Full story »

by Stephen Lendman

For Palestinians worldwide and millions supporting them, Nakba Day commemorates loss of their homeland, initially 78% in 1948, then the rest 19 years later in 1967.

Speaking for many, Audeh Rantisi recounted the horror, saying:

"I cannot forget three horror-filled days in July 1948," weeks after Israel's May 14 Yom Ha'atzmaut, its Declaration of Independence at the expense of displaced and slaughtered Palestinians.

"The pain sears my memory," he said, "and I cannot rid myself of it no matter how hard I try."

Many hundreds of thousands of Palestinians endured brutality, harassment, humiliation, and loss of their entire world, what Edward Said called "a slow death," shattered lives, and the incalculable horror of it all.

Explaining the horrific toll, Rantisi added:

"First, Israeli soldiers forced thousands of Palestinians from their homes near the Mediterranean coast, even though some families had lived in the same houses for centuries." "Then without (food or) water, we stumbled into the hills and continued for three deadly days. The Jewish soldiers followed, occasionally shooting over our heads to scare us and keep us moving. Terror-filled my 11-year old mind as I wondered what would happen. I remember overhearing my father and his friends express alarm about the recent massacres by Jewish terrorists. Would they kill us, too?"

Full story »

By Rady Ananda

Adding to the natural rice industry’s woes after Bayer CropScience contaminated a third of the US rice supply with transgenic rice in 2006, the widespread application of Bayer’s glufosinate and Monsanto’s glyphosate is reducing crop yields, and burning and deforming rice plants that survive. [Image: Glyphosate deforms the growing points on rice plants.]

The Mississippi Rice Council (MRC) has sounded a national alarm over damage caused by aerial drift of glyphosate, the main ingredient in Monsanto’s herbicide Roundup, calling for severely restricted aerial application.

MRC president Mike Wagner recently told crop dusters at this year’s Mississippi Agricultural Aviation Association annual meeting that glyphosate is wreaking havoc on the natural rice industry where “non-transgenic rice is planted in a sea of genetically modified crops that are tolerant to glyphosate.”

Full story »

Michael Collins

Man wouldn't pay you unless he had to. Chris Rock

The antiunion movement in the United States keeps us underpaid and represents a serious impediment to economic growth. Despite that, the antiunion sentiment remains strong among the political establishment and their patrons. Why?

Worker rights and a decent wage represent a toxic brew to the ruling elite. In the past, they expressed their antiunion position in a crude fashion. From the 1870's through the 1920's, industrialists fought union growth with hired thugs and complicit law enforcement officials. Organizers and union members were harassed, maimed, and killed throughout the country for simply acting on the right to organize and participate in a union.

Full story »

Mary Shaw

On May 12, Amnesty International (AI) released its annual report on the state of human rights in the world. The report examines the human rights records of 159 countries around in the world during 2010.

The United States of America got some bad marks again this year, primarily related to human rights violations in the "war on terror" and our continued use of the death penalty.

"US President Obama's promise that the Guantanamo detention centre would be closed by January 2010 was not fulfilled," AI notes in the report. "By the end of the year, 174 people remained held in the prison. The only Guantanamo detainee so far transferred to the US mainland for prosecution in a federal court was tried and convicted. Two Guantanamo detainees were convicted by military commission during the year after pleading guilty. Revised rules, issued in April, governing military commission proceedings for so-called 'war on terror' suspects showed that there was little hope that the US administration would make substantial reforms and uphold human rights."

Also in the "war on terror", AI's report criticizes the Obama administration for its failure to prosecute the instigators of torture and other human rights violations by the Bush administration: "[I]n the USA, those responsible for crimes under international law committed as part of the 'war on terror', such as torture and enforced disappearance, were not held to account. In November, former President George W. Bush admitted that he had authorized the use of 'water-boarding' (a form of torture in which the process of drowning a detainee is begun) during his administration. Nevertheless, accountability and remedy for human rights violations committed as part of the USA's programme of secret detention and rendition remained non-existent. In November, the US Department of Justice announced, without further explanation, that no one would face criminal charges in relation to the destruction in 2005 of 92 tapes depicting evidence of 'water-boarding' and other torture techniques used against two detainees held in 2002."

Regarding the death penalty, AI's report notes that "[46] prisoners - 45 men and one woman - were put to death in the USA during the year. This brought to 1,234 the total number of executions carried out since the US Supreme Court lifted a moratorium on the death penalty in 1976." AI describes the death penalty as "the ultimate, irreversible denial of human rights, and calls for worldwide abolition of the death penalty "to end the cycle of violence created by a system riddled with economic and racial bias and tainted by human error."

In this year's report, AI has again exposed the US not as a nation of laws and justice, but as a nation of impunity and injustice.

I am ashamed for my country, as every citizen of conscience should be.

You can obtain a copy of the report, or browse the report by region or by country, at: http://www.amnesty.org/en/annual-report/2011

Mary Shaw is a Philadelphia-based writer and activist. She is a former Philadelphia Area Coordinator for the Nobel-Prize-winning human rights group Amnesty International, and her views on politics, human rights, and social justice issues have appeared in numerous online forums and in newspapers and magazines worldwide. Note that the ideas expressed here are the author's own, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Amnesty International or any other organization with which she may be associated. E-mail: mary@maryshawonline.com

Link: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/04/28/60minutes/main20058368.shtml?tag=contentMain;contentBody

by Stephen Lendman

Ahead of May 15 Nakba commemorations, massive crowds assembled in Cairo's Tahrir (Liberation) Square in solidarity. They displayed banners, proclaiming, "The People want the Rafah Crossing opened," and "Palestine is a Arab state."

They also waved Palestinian flags, chanting "Solidarity with the Palestinian Intifada" and "National Unity" ahead of a planned weekend march to Gaza. More on that below.

Full story »

Franklin Lamb From Damascus

As many of us observe the great Arab and Islamic awakening of 2011 in stunned amazement, as it rapidly spreads across the region, this observer agrees with those who declare, “ well it’s about time—Godspeed to the rebels and goodbye to the despots.”

Indeed, most of the despots had been installed and propped-up by the US government and its allies without many American citizens’ awareness or liking.

What I continue to find in Syria and what I saw during my first 24 hours in Damascus shocked me. It was not at all what one expected to find having read a fair bit of the Western and some of the Arab media reports, and arriving from the Syria-Lebanon border at Maznaa.

Full story »

By Elizabeth Young

911 is without a doubt the most written about, analyzed and discussed conspiracy in the history of mankind.

Yes, even the official story, “Nineteen fanatical Arab hijackers, masterminded by an evil genius named Osama bin Laden, is a conspiracy between Osama Bin Laden (who isn’t even wanted by the FBI [1q]) and the Arab terrorists whom the U.S. government claims hijacked planes and crashed them in to important buildings in the N.E. sector in the United States [because they “hate our freedoms”].

“Conspiracy” is a REAL word for a REAL act that has existed in human societies in all cultures throughout human history. If conspiracies did not exist, we would not have a word for it. The problem that we face today is that the US Government has arrogated to itself a singular role as a political pontificate that believes that it and its agents in the Justice Department, alone, constitute the only “person” (corporate person) on this Earth who is allowed to use the word “conspiracy” as it employs the charge of “conspiracy” every week in trials to put both guilty and innocent people in jail while deriding and discrediting all others who employ the word as “conspiracy theorists.” Paris Flammonde [2q]

There are inside, outside and even an inside-outside-space conspiracy theory about what really happened on 911.

Test your knowledge of the September 11, 2001 stories. See if you can spot the Terrorist Job (the story), The Inside Job (Global Domination) (the story behind the story), The Exotic Weapon story (another story behind the story) or The Metaphysical story (the story behind the story behind the story behind the story!)

Question 10. Why Ground Zero? The buildings hold 17,400 people. How is it possible 90% of the occupants in the Twin Towers below the impact zone were evacuated safely. And, finally, why did the South Tower, that was hit second collapse first?

Option 1 - Ground Zero is the location of the World Trade Center, the symbol of our freedom to go shopping. When kerosene (jet fuel) takes on the qualities of an explosive demolition agent the characteristics and reaction times are unpredictable.

Option 2 - Ground Zero is the location of the World Trade Center, where an attack was guaranteed to shatter Americans’ sense of security and justify a war on “terrorism” and A New Pearl Harbor.

Thermite/thermate/super thermate/mini Hydrogen-bomb (mini-nuke) detonations were delayed in both towers because the Neocons “got a call from the, er, fire department commander,” telling them that the American people were so gullible that they would accept 2,819 deaths as a mass murder, and therefore since, “we’ve had such terrible loss of life, maybe the compassionate thing to do is wait, to pull it.” And they made that decision to wait 73 minutes to pull the South tower, and 102 minutes to pull the North Tower, and we watched while the delays allowed 90% of the occupants of the Towers below the impact zones to be safely evacuated. [11q]

Option 3 - Ground Zero is a location where 50 million tons of mass could be reduced largely to dust with an Exotic Weapon. (DEW)

To minimize the loss of life when a DEW is fired at a target that is occupied by humans, the operator can set an elapsed time delay.

The elapse time setting for the South Tower was 73 minutes, the North Tower, 102 minutes from the time the weapon was fired and created the impact holes (the holes were designed to make you believe that Airplanes were flown into Twin Towers, see #6).

The delay allowed 90% of the occupants of the Towers below the impact zones to be evacuated safely.

Option 4 - Ground Zero is the location of The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center which were were micro cities with powerful electric systems.

8:46 a.m. – Arm Wrestling initiated by TPTB, in violation of rule #15032, at the electro-magnetic grid location 40° 42′ 41.3852″, -74° 0′ 44.0064 (One World Trade Center).

The TPTB began with a surge in backpressure. The Sidemore technique had a high probability of success because the powerful electromagnetic frequencies from the micro cities would interfere with the Earth’s energy. The intention was to further weaken an Earth (suffering from decades of environmental damage and pollution) which possessed greater strength than TPTB.

Although the Sidemore attack failed, TPTB knew that the Earth would not throw her weight into the match and pin TPTB.

Why? Because the energy required in a toproll maneuver would result in the collapse of the North and South Tower Arm Wrestling table legs, killing all 17,400 occupants in an unusually horrible and agonizing death.

The Earth would never do such an abominable thing to innocent bystanders (Click here to read why TPTB killed 70 million people to ensure the Jews arrived in Haifa not in 1946, or 1950 but in 1948).

Instead the Earth was limited to a quick surge of backpressure, releasing enough energy to keep from being pinned and prolonging the match until the Towers could be safely evacuated.

A toproll from TPTB locked the Earth in a death grip followed by 73 minutes of surges from side to side, counting on the micro cities’ powerful electrical systems to drain the Earth’s energy. During that time the earth perspired, which explains the presence of Hurricane Erin off the coast of New York.

9:59:04 a.m. Exhausted from the interference from the electricity and the protracted back and forth pivots, the Earth’s grip was slipping, the arm and hand were in the losing position, as they were below two-thirds of the way to the pin pad.

Because nearly everyone was safely evacuated from the South Tower, the Earth summoned all of her strength and an enormous surge of energy came forth. She was able to execute an outside toproll maneuver and the match was saved. The energy expended for the maneuver caused the Arm Wrestling table leg of the South Tower to collapse.

The match continued an additional 29 minutes while 90% of the occupants were safely evacuated from the North Tower.

10:28:31 a.m. The Earth executed a toproll followed by the press. The match was over. The Earth was declared the winner and the Arm Wrestling table leg of the North Tower collapsed.

Pictures of Mini Nukes at PakAlert Prove 9-11 was a Metaphysical Catechism (Test).

By Susan Lindauer, 9/11 Whistleblower

Some of our leaders think Americans don't need the truth about 9/11 any more, because Osama's dead and it's over.

As somebody who got brutalized at "ground zero" of the 9/11 cover up for most of the past 10 years, I could not disagree more. I'm sick of asking for a proper Congressional investigation. Congress already knows the truth about 9/11. That's why they're not poking around. However, it's a huge mistake for the rest of us who know the truth, or parts of it, to wait for permission to speak. America has trapped itself in a mythic nightmare about terrorism that exaggerates our enemies, while our leaders manipulate our sense of patriotism and effectively blind us to mistakes in national security policy. It's not a successful policy if it weakens our country.

Full story »