Details are continuing to emerge regarding Osama bin Laden's top-secret Abbottabad compound, but the discovery of some marijuana plants just yards from the home has set the blogosphere aflame with speculation.
Said to be worth $1 million (though that estimate is now hotly debated), the home of the world's most feared terrorist has attracted crowds of Pakistanis and media to its now sealed-off gates. But a stroll around the 20-foot-tall, barbed wire-ringed walls led CNN's Nic Robertson to the cannabis crop, barely hidden alongside a garden of cabbages and potatoes. Huffington Post
CNN so-called evidence of marijuana in the fields of Bin Laden – They just put a separate shot into a report. Watch it.(2.20 min. into the report)
Three Muslim clerics traveling to a religious conference in the United States have been forced to get off a Delta flight because the pilot refused to fly with them on board.
The imams were heading to a conference on Islamphobia in Charlotte, North Carolina. Imam al-Amin Abdul-Latif was barred from boarding a flight from New York to Charlotte late on Friday. The other two clerics were traveling from Memphis, Tennessee to Charlotte. Masudur Rahman and Mohamed Zaghloul of the Islamic Association of Greater Memphis were pulled from a connecting flight from Memphis to Charlotte on Friday, The Daily Mail reported. “It's racism and bias because of our religion and appearance and because of misinformation about our religion,” Rahman said. “If they understood Islam, they wouldn't do this.”
Assuming that any of the facts of the recent Bin Laden killing are accurate - which is a huge assumption - here is my hypothesis about what actually happened and what it all means: The shooters were specifically ordered to shoot Bin Laden in the head and dump his body in the sea. Why do I think this? 1. Navy SEALs follow orders. They don't make them up as they go along 2. SEALs are extremely good combat shooters. If they shot him in the face and not the body mass from the very short range within the house, it's because they were told to do that. This was not a confused firefight carried out over long distances. After all, what they essentially did - now that the "facts" are getting out - is that they shot an unarmed man in his bedroom. 3. The bizarre and highly unorthodox decision to thrown Bin Laden's body in the sea clearly came from the top and was not improvised on the scene. 4. CIA chief Leon Panetta stated the other day that the US ordered that Bin Laden be killed, not captured as originally reported. I strongly doubt that either the Navy or even the White House specified this manner of killing and body disposal. So who was driving this bus? This has CIA written all over it.
Despite awaiting extradition to Sweden on sexual assault charges, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is still the subject of much media interest.
Russia Today (RT) interviewed Assange, getting his viewpoint on political unrest in Egypt and Libya, particularly probing what the Wikileaks founder makes of social media’s roles in the recent revolutions in both countries. In his interview, Assange focuses particularly on Facebook calling it the “most appalling spy machine that has ever been invented”.
Explaining in more detail, Assange affirms:
Here we have the world’s most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations, their communications with each other, and their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to US Intelligence.”
According to Assange, it doesn’t stop with Facebook. He believes the social network is joined by Google, Yahoo and other major US organisations that have “built in interfaces for US Intelligence”:
It’s not a matter of serving a subpoena, they have an interface they have developed for US Intelligence to use. Now, is the case that Facebook is run by US Intelligence? No, it’s not like that. It’s simply that US Intelligence is able to bring to bear legal and political pressure to them.
It’s costly for them to hand out individual records, one by one, so they have automated the process.
The Wikileaks founder then warns Facebook users, stating that if a user adds their friend to Facebook, they are “doing free work for US Intelligence agencies, in building this electronic database for them”.
Khamenei gives Ahmadinejad an ultimatum that could result in his resignation
A member of Iran's parliament said today that Ahmadinejad has been given an ultimatum: accept the supreme leader's decision regarding the intelligence minister, or resign from office.
The Guardian also reports that the president was missing this past weekend at religious ceremonies at Khamenei's residence, where he was publicly criticized by the supreme leader's allies.
The video below is from Al Jazeera English, broadcast May 6, 2011.
Alongside the crumbling official narrative of the operation to kill Bin Laden, it has emerged that Obama, Clinton and their staff saw virtually nothing whatsoever of the mission that allegedly led to the assassination of Bin Laden, because according to CIA director Leon Panetta, there was a 25 minute blackout of the live feed which was cut off before the US Navy SEALS even entered the building.
“A photograph released by the White House appeared to show the President and his aides in the situation room watching the action as it unfolded. In fact they had little knowledge of what was happening in the compound,” reports the London Telegraph.
In an interview with PBS, Mr Panetta said: “Once those teams went into the compound I can tell you that there was a time period of almost 20 or 25 minutes where we really didn’t know just exactly what was going on. And there were some very tense moments as we were waiting for information.”
The UK foreign secretary William Hague is "playing an avoidance game" over the case of Bradley Manning, the US soldier accused of downloading and leaking classified cables to WikiLeaks, according to Ann Clwyd, a Labour MP.
The former human rights envoy to Iraq has also accused the Foreign Office of "continued stonewalling" of Manning's mother, Susan.
The charges against Manning include "aiding the enemy" – a capital crime.
Manning's mother (who is British) wrote to the foreign secretary three weeks ago, asking British consular officials to visit her son in military prison to check on his physical and mental health, which she said was deteriorating.
'The propaganda that is put forth in this news report is absolutely horrendous and is more evidence that the corporate controlled media is simply the mouthpiece of the police state.' David Icke Website
The gruesome incident, which was reported by Al Arabiya TV on Wednesday, has triggered an exchange of accusations between the opposition and the government of embattled President Ali Abdullah Saleh. It is not known whether Mr. Al-Rumaishi, who hails from Shi’an district of the southwest province of Ibb known for being the poets’ hub, is for or against the government.
But the hideous action against him recalls the 24-year reign of Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq, when dissidents had their foreheads tattooed, and fingers and tongues cut off. On Tuesday, Ibb witnessed demonstrations led by thousands of its citizens denouncing violence against protesters in the country on Tuesday. The demonstrators who took to the streets made it known that they rejected the deal brokered by the Gulf Cooperation Council that called for Mr. Saleh to leave office within a month. The deal also promised him immunity from prosecution. Despite the immunity offer, Mr. Saleh rejected the proposal.
Workers have entered the Unit 1 reactor building of Japan's damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant for the first time since a hydrogen explosion hit the facility a day after the devastating March earthquake and tsunami.
Twelve staff members stepped in to install duct pipes to six ventilation machines that will filter out the radioactive material in the air, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the plant operator, said Thursday.
"Groups of four will go in one by one to install the ducts. They'll be working in a narrow space," Junichi Matsumoto, TEPCO's spokesman, said.
High radiation levels inside the plant have kept workers from entering the facility to repair the plant's cooling systems. No one has entered the reactor building since the March 12 explosion. TEPCO has said it may take a year to bring the nuclear plant back up to speed.
A British inquest jury has ruled that a 47-year-old man who died of internal bleeding on the fringes of violent protests against the 2009 G20 summit in London was illegally killed by a police officer. Ian Tomlinson, a homeless newspaper salesman, collapsed and died on the edges of the demonstrations against the G-20 meeting. A pathologist initially ruled that the death was consistent with natural causes, but video showed Tomlinson being shoved to the ground by a riot gear-clad officer. Other pathologists ruled that his death could have been the result of his confrontation with police.
Amnesty International says new satellite images and testimony from a former inmate show North Korea is holding around 200,000 people in its huge network of political prison camps where torture is rampant and conditions near slavery.
The human rights group based in London released on Wednesday recent satellite photos which show four of six camps located in the impoverished country's South Pyongan, South Hamkyung and North Hamkyung provinces.
North Korea has long been regarded as having one of the world's worst human rights records, but it rejects outside criticism and denies the existence of prison camps. "North Korea can no longer deny the undeniable," Sam Zarifi, Amnesty International Asia Pacific director, said in a statement.
"Hundreds of thousands of people exist with virtually no rights, treated essentially as slaves, in some of the worst circumstances we’ve documented in the last 50 years," Zarifi said. "Conditions in these camps are inhuman and [leader] Kim Jong-il must close them immediately," he added.
Prison camps are believed to have been operation since the 1950s and can be categorised into two: 'total control zones' where inmates are never released without any proper trials; and 'revolutionary zones' where conditions are more lenient, Zarifi said. "These are places out of sight of the rest of the world, where almost the entire range of human rights protections that international law has tried to set up for last 60 years are ignored," he said.
Kyoung-il Jeong, a former inmate at a revolutionary-zone Yodok prison, testified that inmates are fed 200 grams of corn gruel and often thrown into a cube "torture cell" where it is impossible to either stand or lie down.
It was an unusual overture to a rendition of Mozart. But then, the arrival in Gaza of Daniel Barenboim, the world-famous Israeli conductor and his Orchestra for Gaza – featuring musicians from Paris, Milan, Berlin and Vienna - to play for an audience of schoolchildren and NGO workers was itself far from usual.
The orchestra set off from Berlin on Monday, stopped at Vienna and then landed at El Arish, close to the Egyptian side of the Gaza Strip, on a plane chartered by Barenboim himself.
As an Israeli citizen it is illegal for Barenboim to enter Gaza without a permit, and, as if that wasn't enough, the recent murder of an Italian peace activist and fears that pro-Osama bin Laden groups in Gaza might seek revenge on western targets meant that the UN security team was on high alert.
Barenboim has previously played in Ramallah and holds an honorary Palestinian passport, and is widely praised for his attempts to reach out across the divide. In Israel, meanwhile, he has been attacked for promoting the work of Wagner.
Former Pakistani intelligence chief Hamid Gul went on the Alex Jones Show today and characterized the unverified assassination of Osama bin Laden as symbolic theater. Gul said the event was a “make believe drama” designed to be used for Obama’s upcoming re-election campaign. The supposed hit as described by the government and the corporate media is the “stuff of folk lore, for legend-making and the ballad,” Gull explained.
Hamid Gull went on to cite the late Prime Minister of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto, who told David Frost in late 2007 that Osama bin Laden was murdered by Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who is also one of the men convicted of kidnapping and killing journalist Daniel Pearl. The BBC had excised Bhutto’s comment but was forced to reinsert the footage in its version after the unedited version appeared on YouTube. See this post.
She was assassinated on December 27, 2007, after a political rally in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.
Saudi-backed Bahraini forces have attacked a number of schools across the Persian Gulf kingdom, abducting several students, witnesses say.
Bahraini forces took away two students from a school in the capital Manama and eight others from a school in the north-eastern town of Busaiteen on Monday. It was not immediately clear why the students were taken away. Security forces also snatched a wounded anti-government protester from Salmaniyah hospital in the capital.
Since the beginning of anti-regime protest rallies in Bahrain in mid-February, authorities have brutally suppressed those voicing support for the opposition. Last month, Bahraini authorities expelled 33 students from Shahrakan primary school after they chanted anti-government slogans in a school bus. Bahraini security forces have repeatedly attacked medical centers across the country, arresting wounded anti-government protesters and medical staff. Physicians for Human Rights says doctors and nurses have been detained, tortured or disappeared because they have "evidence of atrocities committed by the authorities, security forces and riot police" in the crackdown on anti-government protesters. Protesters are demanding an end to the rule of the Al Khalifa dynasty.
After comment-threading at Huffpost this afternoon about the range of inconsistencies between the White House account of the anti-Bin Laden operation and what appear to be the facts, this little message greeted me when I went to leave a link to tonight’s piece there an hour ago:
There was nothing obscene, hateful or libellous in what I wrote. Just a comment saying how come helicopters fell out of the sky but no Navy seals died; and by the way where does it say in the Q’ran that Muslims should be buried at sea.
Two weeks ago, a threader here told me to ‘expect more censorship now Arianna has sold out to the right-wing AOL mavericks’. Oh how I laughed then. Oh how silly I feel now….especially given this post from a couple of days ago
I believe Bin Laden is dead. But I also believe we are being fed a stream of bollocks about who knew what, and when. I believe it is my right in a liberal democratic society and a free Web to post about it. Clearly, I’m mistaken.
The U.S. special forces team that hunted down Osama bin Laden was under orders to kill the al Qaeda mastermind, not capture him, a U.S. national security official told Reuters. "This was a kill operation," the official said, making clear there was no desire to try to capture bin Laden alive in Pakistan.
An assassination is "to murder (a usually prominent person) by a sudden and/or secret attack, often for political reasons." An additional definition is "the act of deliberately killing someone especially a public figure, usually for hire or for political reasons."
Assassinations may be prompted by religious, ideological, political, or military motives. Additionally, assassins may be prompted by financial gain, revenge for perceived grievances, a desire to acquire fame or notoriety (that is, a psychological need to garner personal public recognition), a wish to form some kind of "relationship" with the public figure, a wish or at least willingness to be killed or commit suicide in the attack.
CNN and the corporate media report this evening that purported CIA asset Osama bin Laden has been killed by the U.S. military in a mansion outside the Pakistani capital of Islamabad along with other family members.
In an address to the nation, Obama said he ordered the strike that allegedly killed Osama. The remainder of his speech followed the standard war on terror propaganda script.
A small team of Americans killed bin Laden in a firefight at a compound in Pakistan, the president said in a dramatic late-night statement at the White House, the Associated Press reported following Obama’s address.
In February, 2004, Iranian state radio claimed Osama bin Laden had been captured in Pakistan’s border region with Afghanistan “a long time ago.” Pentagon and Pakistani officials denied the report. “Osama bin Laden has been arrested a long time ago, but Bush is intending to use it for propaganda maneuvering in the presidential election,” the radio report said.
Osama bin Laden died of kidney failure soon after the September 11, 2001, attacks. In 2002, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said bin Laden had kidney disease, and that he had required a dialysis machine when he lived in Afghanistan. That same year, the FBI’s top counterterrorism official, Dale Watson, said, “I personally think he is probably not with us anymore.”
A Taliban leader told the Pakistan Observer on December 21, 2002, that Bin Laden was suffering from a serious lung complication and died in mid-December, in the vicinity of the Tora Bora mountains. The source claimed that bin Laden was laid to rest honorably in his last abode and his grave was made as per his Wahabi belief, according to Fox News.
Saif al-Arab Gaddafi, the youngest son of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, and three of his grandchildren have been killed in a NATO air strike, a Libyan government spokesman said.
Gaddafi and his wife were in the Tripoli house of his 29-year-old son, Saif al-Arab Gaddafi, when it was hit by at least one missile fired by a NATO warplane late on Saturday, according to Libyan government spokesman Moussa Ibrahim.
"The house of Mr Saif al-Arab Gaddafi was attacked tonight with full power. The leader with his wife was there in the house with other friends and relatives.”
"This was a direct operation to assassinate the leader of this country. This is not permitted by international law. It is not permitted by any moral code or principle. What we have now is the law of the jungle. We think now it is clear to everyone that what is happening in Libya has nothing to do with the protection of civilians."
Saif al-Arab, Gaddafi's youngest son, who was sent by his father to cooperate with Libyan security forces in the massive crackdown on pro-democracy protesters joined forces with the demonstrators in the eastern city of Benghazi on Thursday.
According to the reports, Saif al-Arab, Gaddafi's youngest son, who was sent by his father to cooperate with Libyan security forces in the massive crackdown on pro-democracy protesters joined forces with the demonstrators in the eastern city of Benghazi.
Charlie Veitch, the founder of the peace activist group ‘The Love Police’, was pre-emptively arrested on Thursday the 28th of April 2011, around 1615h, on an allegation of a conspiracy to cause public nuisance. As the video evidence shows, Charlie was not read his rights, and no warrant was presented for his arrest or for the search of his living space.
He was held for 16 hours at Parkside Police Station in Cambridge. Outraged locals, students, and activists protested outside the station, and concerned citizens from around the world inundated the station with phone calls to voice their concern of this totalitarian police behaviour. Parkside police were obstructive to his lawyer, family, and partner, let alone friends and supporters, by not providing any information of his wellbeing or whereabouts.
On May 1, 1886, a general strike broke across the United States. Within days it would culminate in the events forever associated with the name Haymarket. In 1889 the founding congress of a new, second, Marxist International named that day, May Day, for worldwide actions of the proletariat.
Through all the twists and explosions of these past hundred years, the tradition of May Day has developed and spread: as a day when class-conscious proletarians of all countries take stock of their situation, make their plans for the year ahead, celebrate proletarian internationalism, and declare their determination to carry their struggle through to the final goal of communism throughout the world.
In many countries, battles rage to proclaim May Day as a day of revolutionary struggle after years where it has been suppressed or gutted by revisionists.
in 1984 the newly formed Revolutionary Internationalist Movement issued its Declaration on May First and since then has called for celebrations and struggle on May First in countries across the planet under unified revolutionary slogans. Today, just as throughout the past century, May Day concentrates in embryo the leaps and prospects of the world revolution.
On May 1, Pope Benedict XVI will beatify his predecessor, John Paul II, at a huge ceremony in St. Peter’s Square in Rome. Beatification, the final step before canonization, or sainthood, ennobles the deceased as “blessed,” or worthy of veneration. Authorities have prepared for a million visitors to the weekend events.
Most beatification cases are decided decades after the person dies—a sign of Vatican probity on whether a life achievement, nominated by religious colleagues, merits a path to sainthood. The timetable is at the pope’s discretion. In this case, Benedict’s decision to fast-track John Paul’s case has drawn a chorus of criticism from prominent Catholics and survivors of sexual abuse by clergy.
Should a pope who turned his back on the worst crisis in modern Catholic history be exalted as a saint? Lawsuits by victims, numerous prosecutions and news coverage of bishops who enabled abuse are the shadow story of John Paul’s twenty-six-year pontificate, during which time he responded to continuing allegations of clergy abuse with denial and inertia. American dioceses and religious orders alone have spent nearly $2 billion on legal actions and treatment of sex offenders, an aching scandal at incalculable cost to the church’s stature.
