The task facing British workers

WSWS- Workers in Britain face the biggest struggles in generations against a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition set on imposing budget cuts, the likes of which have not been seen since the 1930s. more

Tax rises could prompt 'fire sale' of second homes and shares

Telegraph- A 'fire sale' of second-homes, shares and fine art is expected as investors try to beat widely-expected leaps in capital gains tax (CGT) and VAT. more

The "War on Terrorism" for Oil: Folly of the Imperial Oil Adventure. Tolling Bells for Humanity

Global Research- Faced with the end of the age of oil and systemic collapse, the leaders of the Anglo-American empire have engaged in increasingly violent and transparently futile zero-sum games to salvage what is left of a corrupt governmental and economic milieu. more

Facebook founder called trusting users dumb f*cks

The Register- Loveable Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg called his first few thousand users "dumb fucks" for trusting him with their data, published IM transcripts show. Facebook hasn't disputed the authenticity of the transcript.more

FDA: Pig Virus OK for human vaccine!

Reuters- Rotavirus vaccines made by GlaxoSmithKline Plc and Merck & Co Inc are safe to use despite being contaminated with a pig virus, U.S. health regulators ruled on Friday. more

Landmark study set to show potential dangers of heavy mobile phone use

Telegraph- A landmark study will include some evidence that those who regularly hold long conversations on handsets are at increased risk of developing potentially fatal brain tumours. more

Revealed: The very unappetising truth about McDonald's chicken meals (Jamie Oliver, look away now)

Daily Mail- A chicken squats in a shed the size of a football pitch somewhere in the outback of Brazil. And it's not alone.

One of tens of thousands, each bird is allowed the floor space equivalent to a sheet of A4 paper and will live for just 40 days before it hits its genetically-engineered slaughter weight. That's if it doesn't perish along the way.
Five per cent or so will be unable to cope with the conditions and die even before then.
Those that survive will be plucked and butchered in an industrial process the like of which this planet has never before seen. more

U.S. Government Can Execute Its Own Citizens With No Judicial Process And Based On Secret Intelligence

New York Times- The Obama administration’s decision to authorize the killing by the Central Intelligence Agency of a terrorism suspect who is an American citizen has set off a debate over the legal and political limits of drone missile strikes, a mainstay of the campaign against terrorism. more

Has The World Had Enough Of Governments?......Market Has!....

Market Oracle- When Governments start to intervene on everything maybe it's time for them to stop. Maybe the stock market is sending a message that it has had enough of their constant interference. The Government is trying to make the world pay for others discretions. How many more taxes can they create so we can pay for their bail outs for those who deserve to fail? How many innocent people have to lose their jobs because the Government puts undue tax burdens on corporate America and corporations around the world that will force these corporations to fire employees? At what point does the pot runeth over and we have more than we asked for? Will there be blood on the streets? Riots such as those that we saw in Greece right here in our back yards! more

Tension Rises In UK -EU Relatiosnhip Over Euro Bailout And Hedge Fund Regulation

E Gov Monitor- Tension Rises In UK -EU Relatiosnhip Over Euro Bailout And Hedge Fund Regulation.more

Google admits harvesting Wi-Fi data with Street View cars

V3- Google has admitted that it has been recording data transmissions on Wi-Fi networks using its Street View cars.

In a blog posting Alan Eustace, senior vice president of Engineering and Research explained that while Google routinely collected some wireless information in the cars, such as network names, it appeared for the last four years it had also been collecting payload data from open Wi-Fi points. more

VAT should be imposed on food and children's clothes, says IMF

Telegraph- David Cameron should use this summer's emergency Budget to raise VAT on a host of excluded products, including food and children's clothes, the International Monetary Fund signalled yesterday. more

The Vicious Circle of Debt and Depression

Aletho News- Never before has so much debt been imposed on so many people by so few financial operatives—operatives who work from Wall Street, the largest casino in history, and a handful of its junior counterparts around the world, especially Europe. more...

Woman charged with attempted murder of Labour MP

A woman was charged today with the attempted murder of Labour MP Stephen Timms, who was stabbed during a constituency surgery in east London.

Unemployed Roshonara Choudhary, 21, will appear before Stratford Magistrates’ Court on Monday.

More......

Genetically Modified Foods: 80% of What’s In Your Grocery Cart

The Doctor Within- “As a scientist, actively working in the field[of GMO] I find that it is very, very unfair to use our fellow citizens as guinea pigs.”
– Arpad Pusztai, PhD

Since the 1990s world agriculture and food production has undergone the most radical transformation in history. With very little public awareness, in just a few short years genetically modified foods have come to dominate both global agriculture and supermarket shelf space. more

Finance 202: How We Became Debt Slaves and learned to love it

Info Clearing House-Who is in charge of these United States?

If you guess that it’s the people with the money, then you are correct. Not the elected representatives of the people. Not the men and women in uniform, not the factory workers, or farmers, or teachers, or bus drivers and pilots. Just the guys and gals with the moneybags. more

Pakistani Taliban say America will "burn"

Yahoo News- Pakistani Taliban militants have warned America that it will soon "burn" while calling for Pakistan's rulers to be overthrown for following "America's agenda". more

Cartwright: Expect war for 5-10 more years

Army Times-For the next “five to 10 years,” the military likely will remain engaged in the same kinds of conflicts it has been fighting since 2001, said Marine Corps Gen. James Cartwright.

The vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs on Thursday told a conference in Washington that “no one I know thinks we’ll be out of” these kinds of conflicts any time soon.
more

10 Reasons to Be Alarmed About Our Catastrophic Oil Addiction

Alternet- War, terrorism, economic instability -- these are just a few of the reasons to be concerned about our addiction to oil. Here's a list of 10 reasons to be concerned. more

US faces one of biggest budget crunches in world – IMF

Telegraph-Earlier this week, the Bank of England Governor, Mervyn King, irked US authorities by pointing out that even the world’s economic superpower has a major fiscal problem -“even the United States, the world’s largest economy, has a very large fiscal deficit” were his words. They were rather vague, but by happy coincidence the International Monetary Fund has chosen to flesh out the issue today. Unfortunately this is a rather long post with a few chunky tables, but it is worth spending a bit of time with – the IMF analysis is fascinating. more

PETROL TO HIT £1.30 A LITRE

Express-MOTORISTS face a relentless rise in petrol prices while European drivers enjoy falling fuel costs.

Unleaded soared to a record average high of 121.6p a litre this week and experts warn that it could rocket to 130p within months in Britain’s great petrol pump rip-off. more

Police loading up on military technology

Vancouver Sun- From New York and London to the mountains of Afghanistan, the gizmos used by special forces and police to try to solve terrifying dilemmas such as these are increasingly similar, a trend driven in part by security companies seeking new markets.

While the crossover of gadgetry between military and civilian authorities is not new, its greatly expanded scale and variety is. Some emerging technologies with such dual use, according to industry executives, include: more

New terror monitors: parking attendants

MSNBC-LAS VEGAS - Parking attendants and meter maids could be the nation's latest line of defense against terrorist attacks.

A new government program aims to train thousands of parking industry employees nationwide to watch for and report anything suspicious — abandoned cars, for example, or people hanging around garages, taking photographs or asking unusual questions. more

Mervyn King: "World's Worst Financial Crisis Ever"

Washingtons Blog- Bank of England Governor Mervyn King says:
We are still halfway through the world's worst financial crisis ever.He is in good company.The following experts have said that the economic crisis could be worse than the Great Depression: more

Debt Crisis and the Euro Blood Bath, ConDem Death Embrace

Market Oracle- The coalition government parties have publically locked themselves into a 5 year death embrace. They had no choice, as their honey moon period will soon evaporate as the government has no choice but to implement swinging spending cuts and mega-tax rises such as VAT to 20% to fill the 25% black hole between what the government spends and what it earns in revenue which will soon ensure that the ConDem government is destined to become the most hated government of the past 50 years! more

£1,200 tax shock for Middle England: How families will bear brunt of new coalition's drive to slash Britain's deficit

Daily Mail- Middle-class families face a bill of up to £1,200 a year under the Government's plans to slash the deficit.
Rises in national insurance, the loss of tax credits and what experts say is an inevitable rise in VAT are all set to hit them the hardest. more

NATO In Afghanistan: World War In One Country

Stop NATO- Since the North Atlantic Treaty Organization took control of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan in 2003 the amount of troops serving under that command has grown from 5,000 to over 100,000.

There are currently 134,000 foreign troops in the nation counting U.S. soldiers serving separately with Operation Enduring Freedom, although the aggregate number is to reach 150,000 by the summer and most American troops not now under NATO command will soon be. There are 47,000 troops from NATO member and partner countries in the nation. more

European Council On Foreign Relations: EU Needs To Use Crisis For Greater Power

Dprogram- Several more autocratic international voices have added their weight behind proposals to vastly empower the EU with greater authority to govern over nation states in Europe, in the wake of the sovereign debt crisis. Meanwhile, one leading commentator has described the move as “fiscal fascism”. more

Big Brother wants to watch you more closely. Especially how you spend your money.

OC Register- The bill sets up two new supersnooping federal agencies to collect data on ordinary Americans: more

Autistic Boy Charged With Making Terrorist Threats Over Stick-Figure Sketch

Fox News- A fourteen-year-old autistic boy is facing terrorist charges after a sketch he made in school.

The sketch shows two stick-figures. One of them is labeled ‘Me’ and is shown shooting a gun at another with a teacher’s name above it. more

Detroit to destroy 10,000 houses

Wall St Journal- DETROIT—Wrecking crews are preparing to tear down a landmark 5,000-square-foot house in the posh neighborhood of Palmer Woods in the coming weeks, a sign that Detroit is finally getting serious about razing thousands of vacant and abandoned structures across the city. more

Euro Breakup Talk Increases as Germany Loses Proxy

Bloomberg- The consequences are an 860 billion-euro ($1 trillion) bill for a debt binge led by Greece, sagging confidence in the European Central Bank’s independence and mounting speculation that a currency designed to last forever might break apart. more

Obama’s torture loophole

Aletho News- What’s the difference between a US-military-run detention facility and an intelligence gathering facility? For one thing, Red Cross officials are being prevented from seeing how prisoners are treated when held at Bagram’s intelligence gathering facility. Is that so that they can be tortured in secret?

Two days after taking office, Barack Obama signed an executive order banning torture. The era of secret detention facilities and CIA-administered waterboarding were over. Or so we thought. more

Euro: The Worst is Yet To Come

Safe Haven- The austerity measures, pledged in return for 110 billion euros ($139.7 billion) in emergency aid from the European Union and International Monetary Fund, are expected to keep the economy in recession through 2011."The IMF will not stop thirsting for workers' blood," said Yannis Panagopoulos, chairman of Greece's main private sector labor union GSEE. "Its recipes are a disaster and the government must turn them down." more

The Road To Destruction

Safe Haven- For years numerous writers and advisers have been predicting that some form of great reckoning was coming. (The Great Reckoning was a book by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Moog.) The premise is that every credit-led expansion in recorded history has ended in a dramatic "credit crunch" and economic catastrophe. more

Propagandized in America- the chains of illusion

Wake- up Call- Part of the reason we are in this mess, and the main reason why the American people don’t even know what is happening to them, is that the illusion machine (television) has removed the American population tragically far from reality. The gap between the news we see on TV, and what is actually happening in the world today, is the most severe it has ever been. We have been bred to be completely removed from reality. As famed American philosopher and psychologist John Dewey once said, “We live exposed to the greatest flood of mass suggestion that any people has ever experienced.” more

Woman held after MP Timms stabbed

A 21-year-old woman has been arrested after senior Labour MP Stephen Timms was stabbed in the stomach during a constituency advice surgery.

Mr Timms, 54, was said to be in "good spirits" as he recovered in hospital after the incident at the Beckton Globe community facility in Kingsford Way, east London, where the East Ham MP was holding a regular surgery.

A Scotland Yard spokeswoman said police were called to the scene at 3.20pm. She said: "A 21-year-old woman was arrested at the scene and is currently in custody at an east London police station."

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Europe's fiscal Fascism brings British withdrawal ever closer

Telegraph- Just when you thought the EU could not go any further down the road towards authoritarian excess, it gets worse. more

Quanell X: If you shoot one more black man in Bellaire, your city will go up in flames

KHOU-Local activist Quanell X organized a protest Wednesday outside the Bellaire Police Department.

"This cop is a criminal, this cop should be in jail," Quanell X said. “If you shoot one more black man in Bellaire in cold blood, then your damn city will go up in flames.” more

The Federal Fat Police: Bill Would Require Government to Track Body Mass of American Children

CNS News- A bill introduced this month in Congress would put the federal and state governments in the business of tracking how fat, or skinny, American children are. more

Drastic social cutbacks unveiled throughout Europe

WSWS- In the wake of the $1 trillion euro bailout agreement reached at the beginning of this week, governments throughout Europe have unveiled austerity measures that include sweeping attacks on jobs, wages and basic social rights. more

Trilateral Commission Wants War With Iran

Prison Planet- Trilateral Commission member Mikhail Slobodovsici, a chief adviser to the Russian leadership, unwittingly provided a revealing insight into the plans of the global elite during the group’s recent meeting in Dublin Ireland, when he mistakenly told a We Are Change Ireland activist he thought was a fellow TC member that the globalists are planning a war with Iran. more

Biometric cash machine lands in Europe

Sovereign Independent-Customers of BPS visiting one of its ATMs in Warsaw have the option of placing their fingerprints on readers, instead inputting a four-digit code, to authorise withdrawals or other transactions, following the introduction of new technology this week. more

Council employs 25 times more interpreters than 10 years ago

Telegraph- A council is employing 25 times more interpreters than 10 years ago as a result of an increase in non-English-speaking immigrants. more

Ken Clarke sworn in as Lord Chancellor

Dressed in full ceremonial robes Kenneth Clarke was welcomed by the country's judiciary today as the latest Lord Chancellor of Great Britain.

In full wig and resplendent in black and gold attire - but without his customary suede shoes - the Secretary of State for Justice was sworn in to an office which has its origins as far back as the Norman Conquest. More……..

Addict who robbed commuters to buy drugs gets 8 years

A man who robbed commuters at knifepoint to fund his cannabis habit has been jailed for eight years.

Micardo Pieterse, 19, terrorised at least 11 passengers on trains and buses across south London between October last year and January this year, attacking some and threatening others.

More……….

Here's Your War on Terror, America

Turkish Air Defense System Deployed to "Defend Syria, Iran against Israel Raids"

Al-Manar TV- High-ranking sources in the Israeli Foreign Ministry expressed displeasure with Turkey over deploying anti-aircraft batteries along the Syrian border in the Iskenderun district.

The Turkish daily Hurriyet meanwhile, quoted a military source as saying that “this move aims at repelling a US or Israeli attack against Iran or Syria.” more

Coalition government may have to impose £50bn tax rise

Telegraph- City economists now view it as an odds-on probability that the coalition will raise VAT to 20pc within 18 months, according to a panel of economists regularly consulted by the Treasury.

Others warned that the VAT increase may be able to raise barely more than a fifth of the revenues required. more

Good News And Bad News

Kitco- Reports from the Labor Department today tried to polish-up terrible jobless reports with all kinds of numbers tricks and Pollyana talk. Most of the Sheeple and smarter media members and analysts are not buying it. We reported some new predictions this week and they are not pretty. The Ships Of State in the U.S. and in many other nations in Europe are floundering and rudderless. This is not going to end well at all. A fiscal firestorm with the attendant social problems looms. Buckle up your money belt and hunker down for an international systemic hurricane. more

The 55% trick: protecting you from democracy

Guardian-Let us start by being very charitable to the new Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition. Those who wrote the agreement underpinning their union must have been very tired when they put pen to paper.

One has to hope so, because at first sight, the Con-Lib Dem coalition has launched an audacious attempt to gerrymander parliament's rules. On its first day. more

VAT rise 'will cost family £425 a year' as new Government signals cuts of 20%

Daily Mail- Millions of families face a VAT rise costing them £425 a year, while public spending cuts of 20 per cent are being planned by the Government, experts said last night. more

Prognosis 2012: Towards a New World Social Order

Information Clearing House- When the Industrial Revolution began in Britain, in the late 1700s, there was lots of money to be made by investing in factories and mills, by opening up new markets, and by gaining control of sources of raw materials. The folks who had the most money to invest, however, were not so much in Britain but more in Holland. Holland was the leading Western power in the 1600s, and its bankers were the leading capitalists. In pursuit of profit, Dutch capital flowed to the British stock market, and thus the Dutch funded the rise of Britain, who subsequently eclipsed Holland both economically and geopolitically. more

Many signatories of controversial letter on climate science not working in climate related fields

Examiner- The mainstream media and these pages on Examiner.com reported the release of a letter from 255 scientists last week that said despite recent scandals in climate science, the science behind the manmade climate change theory remains sound. The embarrassing use of a faked photo in the trade journal that published the letter damaged the credibility and now a look at the resumes of the signatories shows most don’t even work in climate science. more

It’s all go down in FarmVille and I haven’t even left my computer’

It is the life all young parents dream of, isn’t it? Move out of London to Devon to enjoy fresh air, a gaggle of pets and growing your own vegetables. That’s what we did two years ago and so far today I have milked the cows, brushed the calves, calmed the bull, collected eggs and harvested some watermelons, not to mention squeezing in the school run.

But there's a catch.

Only one of these activities, however, actually involved my getting up from the computer. More.....

BP finally releases oil spill video, but lies about delay

Raw Story- Experts say criminal charges 'just a matter of time.'

BP officials finally made an underwater video of its broken well gushing oil into the Gulf of Mexico, after being pressured to do so by media outlets and the White House, and then claiming they hadn't received requests for the footage. more

You Are Being Lied To By The Entire Financial System

Peter Santalli- Almost every US Corporation will do and say anything to keep us spending money, regardless of what they know about the fragility of our entire financial system. Bankster’s are now using world governments as patsies to commit the largest heist in world history. Stealing a trillion dollars from US citizens proved to be too difficult, as they had to receive congressional approval to bail themselves out. Their recent scam involves using the world’s central banks to bypass democracy & funnel money to offshore entities without oversight. Just think; the IMF, partially funded by the US Treasury; can operate freely & independently as they steal US currency for their cronies without being held accountable to the US taxpayer. more

Incoming British FM Won’t Rule Out Attacking Iran -Hague Vows to Be 'Friend of Israel'-

Antiwar- In an interview aimed at cementing his reputation as a “friend of Israel,” incoming British Foreign Secretary William Hague vowed to see British law changed so as to hold Israeli officials immune from war crimes charges, and promised to take a tough line against Iran’s civilian nuclear program, calling it the “most urgent thing” for him to tackle.


William HagueIn fact, Hague seems to be taking a considerably more hawkish position on Iran than the Labour government had, and says that it would be a mistake to ever rule out military action against Iran. more

Sheeple: Signs that you may be part of the herd

War on you-Millions of people from countries across the world have begun to wake up to the very real threat of repressive and engineered Globalism, or what the financial elite and the politicians who work for them often refer to as “The New World Order”. The movement against this centralization of economic and social power has gained traction in nearly every sphere, to the point where even the mainstream media has been forced on occasion to acknowledge its existence and prevalence. Those of us who have been working more than a few years in this activist organization, what many of us call the “Patriot Movement”, or the “Liberty Movement”, have seen incredible leaps and bounds in the fight against disinformation and the spread of unadulterated truth. Our work has gone viral, and our membership has skyrocketed, however, the task of diluting ignorance in the overall populace is far from over. more

Is Israel Sliding Towards a Police State?

Antiwar- Israeli nuclear whistle-blower Mordechai Vanunu has been sentenced to another three months imprisonment for allegedly refusing to perform community service in West Jerusalem.

Vanunu, a former employee at Israel’s secret Dimona nuclear facility in the Negev desert, spent 18 years in jail after he revealed information about the facility to the international media. more

New weapons experimented in Gaza: population risks genetic mutations

New Weapons Committee- Toxic and carcinogenic metals, able to produce genetic mutations, have been found in the tissues of people wounded in Gaza during Israeli military operations of 2006 and 2009. The research has been carried out on wounds provoked by weapons that did not leave fragments in the bodies of the victims, a peculiarity that was pointed out repeatedly by doctors in Gaza. This shows that experimental weapons, whose effects are still to be assessed, were used. more

CEO Predicts Market Armageddon: Dow To 5,000

Prison Planet-Cornerstone Wealth Management CEO David Hefty agrees with a growing number of other financial experts that a real estate collapse in China before the end of the year will send shockwaves through the global economy, leading to a stock market collapse which will send the Dow into free fall below the 5,000 level.

Although Hefty said that the Dow would push higher beyond 12,000 by July, the fact that the market is “still in complete denial of what’s going on around the world and here at home” would soon lead to a dramatic reversal, Hefty told skeptical CNBC hosts
more

Spanish prosecutors want 13 CIA agents arrested

Uncover the News- Spanish prosecutors are asking a judge to issue arrest warrants for 13 CIA agents who they believe were involved in the spy agency’s 2004 “extraordinary rendition” of a German citizen, according to Spain’s El Pais newspaper. more

European Powerbrokers Present Proposal For New Economic And Political Order

Prison Planet- The European Commission, the executive body of the European Union, has revealed a set of proposals to fully integrate the economies of the EU member states and centralize power under a federalized union.

Following monday’s announcement of a €750bn EU bailout fund, the EC head and Bilderberg darling José Manuel Barroso announced details of the plan for further European integration. more

Pennsylvania... The 'Polite Speech Police' Ticketing Hundreds of People for... Bad Language?

Know the lies-In Pennsylvania, the cops have become arbiters of polite speech!... According to an ACLU lawsuit, the Pennsylvania State Police charged hundreds of people with disorderly conduct for... swearing. more

Judge throws out libel action over Baader-Meinhof link in journalist’s blog

A political activist today failed in her libel action over a journalist’s blog which referred to her “Baader-Meinhof" link.

In a ruling that gives bloggers some protection against libel actions, Mr Justice Eady rejected a claim by Johanna Kaschke , a Tower Hamlets-based Conservative, against David Osler, a Labour Party member, over an article that was written in April 2007.

Ms Kaschke claimed that some of the comments linked her with terrorism. The judge at the High Court in London, however, struck out the claim as an abuse of process.

Mr Osler, a journalist and blogger, said that he only posted the material after seeing an article on Ms Kaschke’s own website and had never suggested that Ms Kaschke was involved in bank robberies, violence or terrorism.

More.....

Genetically Modified Foods: Sterility- another Reason to Avoid Them

Organic consumers-If you doubt that Genetically Modified (GM) foods threaten your body, here is a recent report from Russian biologists. They conducted what they thought would be a "routine" study of the long-term effects of the consumption of GM soy feed among a hamster population. For the first generation, the only untoward effects seemed to be constipation. The second generation didn't seem too much the worse for wear either. But the third generation showed serious ill effects and turned out to be completely sterile. more