Extreme weather events and Earth Changes in March 2013: more mass animal die-offs, on land and in the sea - visits from comets - more asteroid fly-bys - fireballs and meteorites raining from the sky - pestilence and plagues of locusts - strong earthquakes - record flooding - record snowfall - sinkholes swallowing people alive - hail storms with baseball-sized hail - devastating tornadoes - massive landslides... all synchronised with ever-crazier human behavior as war theaters expand and rumors of yet more wars grow louder...

Law enforcement intelligence-processing fusion centers have long come under attack for spying on Americans. The Arkansas director wanted to clarify the truth: centers only spies on some Americans - those who appear to be a threat to the government.

In trying to clear up the 'misconceptions' about the conduct of fusion centers, Arkansas State Fusion Center Director Richard Davis simply confirmed Americans' fears: the center does in fact spy on Americans - but only on those who are suspected to be 'anti-government'.

"The misconceptions are that we are conducting spying operations on US citizens, which is of course not a fact. That is absolutely not what we do," he told the NWA Homepage, which supports KNWA-TV and Fox 24.

After claiming that his office 'absolutely' does not spy on Americans, he proceeded to explain that this does not apply to those who could be interpreted as a 'threat' to national security. Davis said his office places its focus on international plots, "domestic terrorism and certain groups that are anti-government. We want to kind of take a look at that and receive that information."

But the First Amendment allows for the freedom of speech and opinion, making it lawfully acceptable for Americans to express their grievances against the US government. The number of anti-government groups even hit a record high in 2012, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Many of these groups are 'hate groups' that express disdain for minorities. But unless they become violent, these groups are legally allowed to exist.

As US Army veteran Eric Harroun awaits trial in Virginia for allegedly fighting alongside al-Qaeda supporters, the man's father claims he was working for the CIA and was reporting back to the agency from Syria.

Harroun, a 30-year-old American from Phoenix, Arizona, has been charged by the US government for conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction (namely a rocket propelled grenade launcher) to conduct an attack against the Syrian government. The US Army veteran dubbed by media 'Phoenix jihadist' appeared in numerous videos alongside members of the al-Nusra Front, designated by the State Department as a terrorist organization in December, but which has also been fighting alongside the Syrian opposition to take down the Assad regime. To date, 29 US-backed Syrian opposition groups have linked with al-Nusra, and have signed a petition calling for the support of the Islamist group that the White House believes is a branch of al-Qaeda.

Earth is experiencing an unusual cosmic bombardment as four large asteroids pass it in just one day. Fortunately astronomers don't seem to joking when saying none are expected to pose danger.


The largest is 4034 Vishnu, which is 800 meters across - the length of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai - though much greater in mass. In comparison, the Tunguska meteorite that devastated hundreds of miles of Siberian wilderness when it landed in 1908 was estimated to be no bigger than 100 meters. The asteroid that may have led to the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago may have been up to 10 kilometers across.

But 4034 Vishnu - which was discovered in 1986 - will pass nearly 23 million kilometers from the Earth's surface. The closest of the four, EN 89, will be just over 5 million kilometers away from the planet. The asteroid was only discovered a fortnight ago.

The rewriting of history by the power elite was painfully evident as the nation marked the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. Some claimed they had opposed the war when they had not. Others among "Bush's useful idiots" argued that they had merely acted in good faith on the information available; if they had known then what they know now, they assured us, they would have acted differently. This, of course, is false. The war boosters, especially the "liberal hawks" - who included Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Al Franken and John Kerry, along with academics, writers and journalists such as Bill Keller, Michael Ignatieff, Nicholas Kristof, David Remnick, Fareed Zakaria, Michael Walzer, Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, George Packer, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Kanan Makiya and the late Christopher Hitchens - did what they always have done: engage in acts of self-preservation. To oppose the war would have been a career killer. And they knew it.

These apologists, however, acted not only as cheerleaders for war; in most cases they ridiculed and attempted to discredit anyone who questioned the call to invade Iraq. Kristof, in The New York Times, attacked the filmmaker Michael Moore as a conspiracy theorist and wrote that anti-war voices were only polarizing what he termed "the political cesspool." Hitchens said that those who opposed the attack on Iraq "do not think that Saddam Hussein is a bad guy at all." He called the typical anti-war protester a "blithering ex-flower child or ranting neo-Stalinist." The halfhearted mea culpas by many of these courtiers a decade later always fail to mention the most pernicious and fundamental role they played in the buildup to the war - shutting down public debate.

In a public broadcast yesterday the Venezuelan government announced the transition to democracy. Measures include the sale of community media to business giant Rupert Murdoch, and the privatisation of the health sector.

A Venezuelan government spokesperson told the press, "On the advice of a special US commission, the government will be expanding media diversity by selling all of its community media to Rupert Murdoch".

"The media package includes Latin America's Telesur, which will no longer report from the ground and talk to real people, but rather read US government press releases from an autocue," the government spokesperson said.

Further, the government announced it will be bringing Monsanto into the country to advise on food reform.

"We realised that organised communities shouldn't participate in politics, they don't know their own needs, only transnationals like Monsanto and Macdonalds really understand these issues," the spokesperson said.

As Arctic Britain prepares to shiver for at least another month, a leading scientist today predicted the world was heading for another Ice Age.
Incredibly, British Summer Time officially starts tomorrow but millions of brassed off Brits pining for warmth will have to endure freezing temperatures and biting winds until May.

The misery will continue with daytime temperatures struggling to reach a bracing 5C (41F). The only ray of sunshine, forecasters said, is that it will stay dry.

As if the outlook wasn't bleak enough already, meteorologists believe the shivering start to 2013 has been the coldest in more than 200 years.

More worryingly, the combination of sub-zero temperatures and heavy snow experienced across much of the country recently could be the prelude to a new Ice Age that will begin next year and last for 200 years.

A growing hunger strike among detainees is mocked by gullible journalists spouting familiar Potemkin Village propaganda

If you're looking for a fun activity-filled resort to take your family for a summer vacation, you simply cannot do better than Club GTMO, according to a new glossy travel guide just published by Robert Johnson, the Military and Defense Editor of Business Insider, under the guise of a news article. Scrumptious meals. Video games galore for the kids. Outdoor sports. Newspapers from your hometown delivered by smiling bellhops to the front door of your villa. Picturesque Caribbean vistas. All that and more can be yours - provided that you're "compliant". What more could vacationers - or prisoners kept in a cage for more than a decade with no charges thousands of miles away from their family - possibly want? They are, proclaims Johnson, treated "absurdly well". Not just well: absurdly well. They are, he actually writes, lavished with "resort treatment".

The context for Johnson's glowing thumbs-up is an intensifying hunger strike among (totally ungrateful) prisoners at the camp. Lawyers for the detainees say the hunger strike was triggered "as a protest of the men's indefinite confinement without charge and because of what they said was a return to harsh treatment from past years, including more intrusive searches and confiscation of personal items such as mail from their families." That includes, the lawyers say, a lack of sanitary drinking water which has "already caused some prisoners kidney, urinary and stomach problems". Detainees also complain about the recent manhandling of Korans. One lawyer for 11 detainees, Carlos Warner, identifying himself as a "liberal" supporter of Obama, told CNN that the detainees are now deprived of some privileges they had all the way back in 2006 and said the situation there was "dire".

The US military, needless to say, denies these claims. While detainee lawyers insist that the overwhelming majority of detainees are participating in the hunger strike, US military officials claim that "only" 31 of the 166 are doing so. They do acknowledge that some are being force-fed, a few have been hospitalized for dehydration, and that more and more are participating in the strike. As the New York Times' Charlie Savage notes this morning, the conflicting claims are difficult to resolve. That is in part because journalists have very restricted access to the camp and no access to the detainees.

Unimaginable stress, irrepressible memories, psychoactive prescription drugs make lethal combination.

With what must be one of the strangest statistics in the history of wartime, the Pentagon has released the fact that more soldiers are dying overseas by committing suicide than from combat wounds - about one a day. July 2012 was the worst on record, a month that saw 38 soldiers take their own lives and with 349 recorded for the year. These figures have doubled in the past decade.

More alarming yet is the report that America's returning vets are committing suicide at the unprecedented rate of more than 20 each day - "one every 65 minutes," reported Daily News of New York City - but there is no official answer as to why this happening.

Is it the post-traumatic stress from repeated tours in war zones or Big Pharma's drugs that are being used to treat it?