• Bloodbath in Boston as two explosions rock finish line of famous Boston Marathon as race was winding down
• Officials urging people at the scene to leave as secondary explosive devices have been found
• Fox News is reporting three people killed; injuries still unknown
• New York City stepping up anti-terror efforts in wake of attack

Up to a dozen people have been killed in a deadly explosion and up to 60 people have been injured after two large explosions went off near the finish line of the famous Boston Marathon today, leaving behind a scene of unimaginable carnage.

Law enforcement sources told the New York Post of the body count, and said that the first explosion happened at the Fairmont Hotel.

Eyewitnesses at the scene said there were two loud explosions about five seconds apart, and emergency vehicles crowded the scene.

Witness Dave Weigel said via Twitter minutes after the explosion: 'I saw people's legs blown off. Horrific. Two explosions. Runners were coming in and saw unspeakable horror.'

Police told the Boston Globe that are they still finding 'secondary devices,' and pleading with anyone still in the area to leave at once.

A controlled explosion was set for outside the city library.

One of the most powerful Op-eds ever published in the NYT, by a Yemeni detainee, underscores the president's role in this travesty

The New York Times this morning deserves credit for publishing one of the most powerful Op-Eds you will ever read. I urge you to read it in its entirety: it's by Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, a Yemeni national who has been imprisoned at Guantánamo without charges of any kind for more than 11 years. He's one of the detainees participating in the escalating hunger strike to protest both horrible conditions and, particularly, the supreme injustice of being locked in a cage indefinitely without any evidence of wrongdoing presented or any opportunity to contest the accusations that have been made. The hunger strike escalated over the weekend when guards shot rubber bullets at some of the detainees and forced them into single cells. Moqbel "wrote" the Op-ed through an interpreter and a telephone conversation with his lawyers at the human rights group Repreive:

"I've been on a hunger strike since Feb. 10 and have lost well over 30 pounds. I will not eat until they restore my dignity.

"I've been detained at Guantánamo for 11 years and three months. I have never been charged with any crime. I have never received a trial.

"I could have been home years ago - no one seriously thinks I am a threat - but still I am here. Years ago the military said I was a 'guard' for Osama bin Laden, but this was nonsense, like something out of the American movies I used to watch. They don't even seem to believe it anymore. But they don't seem to care how long I sit here, either. . . .

"The only reason I am still here is that President Obama refuses to send any detainees back to Yemen. This makes no sense. I am a human being, not a passport, and I deserve to be treated like one.

"I do not want to die here, but until President Obama and Yemen's president do something, that is what I risk every day.

"Where is my government? I will submit to any 'security measures' they want in order to go home, even though they are totally unnecessary.

"I will agree to whatever it takes in order to be free. I am now 35. All I want is to see my family again and to start a family of my own.

"The situation is desperate now. All of the detainees here are suffering deeply. At least 40 people here are on a hunger strike. People are fainting with exhaustion every day. I have vomited blood.

"And there is no end in sight to our imprisonment. Denying ourselves food and risking death every day is the choice we have made.

"I just hope that because of the pain we are suffering, the eyes of the world will once again look to Guantánamo before it is too late."

A brilliant ball of flame streaked across the sky above the Spanish capital Madrid, dazzling stargazers and astronomers alike. The celestial display was so bright it could be seen across the entire country.

The eye-popping moment was caught on camera by the Hita Observatory at the University of Huelva at around 11:45pm local time (2145 GMT). The object struck the atmosphere above the Villamuelas district in the province of Toledo, southwest of Madrid.

"The impact was so abrupt that the object immediately caught fire, creating a ball of flame around 100 kilometers above the Earth," Jose Maria Madiedo of the University of Huelva told the Huffington Post. The meteor then shot towards Madrid at over 75,000 kilometers an hour before disintegrating completely at an altitude of 70 kilometers.

The Spanish Institution for the Study of Meteors and Meteorites, which tracked the fireball, classified the meteorite as a piece of a comet that was flying by Earth.

Almost thirty years ago, cultural critic Neil Postman argued in Amusing Ourselves to Death that television's gradual replacement of the printing press has created a dumbed-down culture driven by mindless entertainment. In this context, Postman claimed that Aldous Huxley's Brave New World correctly foresaw our dystopian future, as opposed to George Orwell's 1984.

Contrary to Postman's critique, however, the principles of Newspeak and doublethink dominate modern political discourse. Their widespread use is a testament to Orwell's profound insight into how language can be manipulated to restrict human thought.

War is peace

Formulating the Language of Perpetual War - From AUMF to "Associates of Associates."

The semantic deception began shortly after September 11, 2001. "Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda," Bush said in his State of the Union address, "but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated (emphasis added)."

So far the conflict between the USG and North Korean is a virtual false-flag only. A major Psyops designed to deflect attention away from a seriously failing US Administration which is pulling out all the stops to pass gun-control laws which are designed to eventually lead to complete confiscation.

This current conflict with North Korea has been engineered and portrayed as a real state of conflict when it is virtual only. In practical terms, North Korea and America are now only involved in a state of virtual war which is unlikely to be followed with an actual real shooting war.

Virtual war is an imaginary war fought only in the major mass media and the enemy is the news consumer or the public which is psychologically managed. Virtual war is a newer type of warfare which is a major Psychological operation, (aka a Psyop), that is, an act of Mindwar against the people.

Whenever there is a choice between one option that makes capitalism seem the only possible economic system, and another that would actually make capitalism a more viable economic system, neoliberalism means always choosing the former. The combined result is a relentless campaign against the human imagination. Or, to be more precise: imagination, desire, individual creativity, all those things that were to be liberated in the last great world revolution, were to be contained strictly in the domain of consumerism, or perhaps in the virtual realities of the Internet. In all other realms they were to be strictly banished. We are talking about the murdering of dreams, the imposition of an apparatus of hopelessness, designed to squelch any sense of an alternative future. Yet as a result of putting virtually all their efforts in one political basket, we are left in the bizarre situation of watching the capitalist system crumbling before our very eyes, at just the moment everyone had finally concluded no other system would be possible.

What is a revolution? We used to think we knew. Revolutions were seizures of power by popular forces aiming to transform the very nature of the political, social, and economic system in the country in which the revolution took place, usually according to some visionary dream of a just society. Nowadays, we live in an age when, if rebel armies do come sweeping into a city, or mass uprisings overthrow a dictator, it's unlikely to have any such implications; when profound social transformation does occur - as with, say, the rise of feminism - it's likely to take an entirely different form. It's not that revolutionary dreams aren't out there. But contemporary revolutionaries rarely think they can bring them into being by some modern-day equivalent of storming the Bastille.

At moments like this, it generally pays to go back to the history one already knows and ask: Were revolutions ever really what we thought them to be? For me, the person who has asked this most effectively is the great world historian Immanuel Wallerstein. He argues that for the last quarter millennium or so, revolutions have consisted above all of planetwide transformations of political common sense.

Chart show will treat anti-Thatcher song as a news item

The BBC was accused of caving in to pressure and censoring the will of record-buyers after ruling that it would broadcast just five seconds of "Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead" during Sunday's chart run-down.

Tony Hall, the new BBC Director-General, approved a "compromise" which will prevent the song, which is heading towards the number one slot after being adopted as a posthumous protest by opponents of Lady Thatcher, being aired in full by Radio 1.

Instead a five-second clip will be played during a special news report, broadcast during Sunday's Top 40 Chart Show, presented by Jameela Jamil, explaining why a song from 1930s film The Wizard Of Oz had made the charts. The song itself is only 51 seconds long.


Ben Cooper, Radio 1 Controller who made the announcement, said the decision was "a compromise and it is a difficult compromise to come to."

The executive said he has yet to decide whether the words "Ding dong the witch is dead" will actually appear within the report, which will explain to listeners why Lady Thatcher was so divisive and the subject of a "hate campaign".

April 9, 2013 marks ten years since the fall of Baghdad. Ten years since the invasion. Since the lives of millions of Iraqis changed forever. It's difficult to believe. It feels like only yesterday I was sharing day to day activities with the world. I feel obliged today to put my thoughts down on the blog once again, probably for the last time.

In 2003, we were counting our lives in days and weeks. Would we make it to next month? Would we make it through the summer? Some of us did and many of us didn't.

Back in 2003, one year seemed like a lifetime ahead. The idiots said, "Things will improve immediately." The optimists were giving our occupiers a year, or two... The realists said, "Things won't improve for at least five years." And the pessimists? The pessimists said, "It will take ten years. It will take a decade."

Looking back at the last ten years, what have our occupiers and their Iraqi governments given us in ten years? What have our puppets achieved in this last decade? What have we learned?

We learned a lot.

Dr. Ross is an internationally renowned clinician, researcher, author and lecturer in the field of trauma-related disorders. He is the founder and President of the Colin A. Ross Institute for Psychological Trauma.

Dr. Ross is the Executive Medical Director of three trauma programs located at Timberlawn Mental Health System in Dallas, Texas, Forest View Hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan and Del Amo Hospital in Torrance, California. Dr. Ross provides treatment for patients with trauma related disorders and symptoms. This would include treatment for: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Dissociative Disorders, Borderline Personality Disorder, Addictive Disorders, Anxiety Disorders, Depression, and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. The symptoms treated and the admission criteria are: suicidal ideation, homicidal ideation, self-destructive and addictive behaviors, and inability to function.

Hours after the death of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, the history books are being re-written and the beatification of the Iron Lady is well underway.

Current British premier David Cameron praised Lady Thatcher for having "saved Britain" and for making the has-been colonial power "great again".

Tributes poured forth from French and German leaders, Francoise Hollande and Angela Merkel, while US President Barack Obama said America had lost a "special friend".

Former American secretary of state Henry Kissinger and former Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev also lamented the loss of "an historic world figure". Polish ex-president Lech Walesa hailed Margaret Thatcher for having brought down the Soviet Union and Communism.

Such fulsome praise may be expected coming from so many war criminals. But it is instructive of how history is written by the victors and criminals in high office. Obama, Cameron, Hollande and Merkel should all be arraigned and prosecuted for war crimes in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Somalia and Mali, among other places. Kissinger has long evaded justice for over four decades for his role in the US genocide in Southeast Asia during the so-called Vietnam War in which over three million people were obliterated in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

The British state is to give Thatcher, who died this week aged 87, a full military-honours funeral. The praise, eulogies, wreaths and ceremonies are all self-indictments of association with one of the most ruthless and criminal political figures in modern times.