On Monday, the settlement between five major banks and the federal and state governments of foreclosure-related fraud charges was filed in federal district court in Washington, DC. The agreement must be approved by the court to take effect.

The settlement, reported to be worth $25 billion, was announced February 9 and hailed by President Obama as a serious rebuke to the banks and boon to distressed homeowners. (See: "Obama administration brokers pro-bank mortgage fraud settlement").

It is nothing of the kind. It quashes investigations by 49 state attorneys general into wholesale fraud and illegality committed by the five biggest mortgage servicers in their rush to foreclose on homeowners and seize their houses. The abuses first surfaced in the fall of 2010, amid reports of "robo-signing" of foreclosure papers and court submissions.

It was revealed that bank employees and contractors routinely vouched for the accuracy of documents affirming the banks' title to targeted homes without having ascertained the facts or having even read the documents they were signing. The process was rife with forgeries, fraudulent notarizations, inflated job descriptions of the signers and other violations of the law.

A new feature story in this month's Wired blows the lid off plans for a massive new National Security Agency data center in Utah that represents the resurrection of a program that Congress killed in 2003, known as "Total Information Awareness," targeting literally all electronic communications all over the world - including those made by American citizens.

The proposal was to build computing systems that could suck up every electronic communication on the planet and filter them through a smart super-computer that would flag certain conversations, emails, transactions and other items of interest for further review. It was a program so monstrous in scope that after a brief legislative battle, Congress imposed strict regulations on the type of technology that could accomplish those ends, prohibiting it from ever being used against Americans.

But if well sourced intelligence reporter James Bamford is to be believed, as of this year, their efforts to stop it are moot.

According to Bamford, the NSA's new data center in Utah will be the most all-encompassing spy machine ever conceived, capable of breaking almost any encryption, reading any email and recording any phone call anywhere in the world, even if it's not made over the Internet. A network of ultra-sensitive satellites enhance the center's intelligence-finding capabilities with the unique ability to sniff electronic communications from a massive distance.

Led by Boxer and DeFazio, Bicameral Letter Calls for Reversal of Two Decade-Old Labeling Policy, Supports CFS Legal Petition

In Only 6 Months, Already 850,000+ Public Comments To FDA In Support Of Labeling

This morning a bicameral letter signed by 55 Members of Congress was sent to U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Margaret Hamburg calling on the agency to require the labeling of genetically engineered (GE) foods. The bicameral, bipartisan letter led by Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Congressman Peter DeFazio (D-OR) was written in support of a legal petition filed by the Center for Food Safety (CFS) on behalf of the Just Label It campaign and its nearly 400 partner organizations and businesses; many health, consumer, environmental, and farming organizations, as well as food companies, are also signatories. Since CFS filed the labeling petition in October 2011, the public has submitted over 850,000 comments in support of labeling.

China, the biggest buyer of Iranian oil, will take steps to prevent European trade sanctions disrupting shipments from the Persian Gulf nation, said tanker operator China Shipping Development Co.

The government has discussed ways of helping shipping companies get insurance once sanctions against Iran kick in on July 1, General Manager Yan Zhichong told reporters in Hong Kong today. The ministry of transport and National Development Reform Commission has had special meetings on the issue, he said.

While questions remain about the existence of a single global elite with an agenda that goes beyond simply keeping itself very, very rich, there are certainly groups that want to run the world for quite other reasons. And with the increasing globalisation of political and economic institutions, it has become easier for a relatively small group to inveigle itself into quite staggeringly influential positions. One cabal in particular reveals - alarmingly - what a small group, driven by a fanatical belief system, can achieve from the shadows. And writing as we are in the United Kingdom, this group is on our doorstep, and has been for over a century. And although perhaps small in number, its reach is big.

Our research into this subject - detailed in The Stargate Conspiracy (1999) and The Sion Revelation (2006) - demonstrated that every major step in the development of the European Union from a simple trading body to a borderline superstate can be traced back to a very specific ideology, which upholds rule by an elite from behind the scenes. But this isn't just about politics. Astonishingly, this ideology is also about mysticism and magic.

This shadowy politico-occult movement is synarchy, which was developed by the Frenchman Joseph Alexandre Saint-Yves, the Marquis d'Alveydre, in opposition to the rise of anarchy in the second half of the nineteenth century. To him the ideal synarchist state would be a rigid social hierarchy topped by an elite that is predestined to rule - absolutely at odds with the then emerging concepts of democracy, individual liberty and social mobility.

Central to Saint-Yves was the creation of a united Europe, a call for which appears on the first page of his first book on synarchy, Keys to the East (1877). He believed that his perfectly balanced society reflected deep cosmic laws, with which his elite perfectly resonated. They are also directly guided by the powers that rule the universe - as he believed himself to be.

Fort Mead, Maryland - An attorney for an Army private accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of pages of classified information asked a military judge Thursday to dismiss the charges, arguing the government bungled the handover of documents to the defense.

The request came during a hearing for Pfc. Bradley Manning at a military courtroom at Fort Meade, Md., near Baltimore. Military prosecutors say Manning, a 24-year-old Oklahoma native, downloaded and sent to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks a vast store of sensitive documents and diplomatic cables. The military says Manning indirectly aided al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula by giving information to the WikiLeaks site.

Banks might be indulging a bad habit that could be worsening the foreclosure crisis, according to recent research from economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.

The economists, Thomas Fitzpatrick and Stephan Whitaker, did some analysis of the Ohio real estate market and found a disquieting trend. Banks seem to be over-valuing many of the homes they foreclose on, making it less likely that homeowners can get a loan modification and more likely that they'll end up losing their property.

It is not clear how or why banks are getting an inflated idea of the value of so many properties - especially since foreclosed homes tend to drag down real estate prices for the whole neighborhood - but the trend seems to be real. Fitzpatrick and Whitaker note that at foreclosed-home auctions in the Cleveland area, banks routinely sell their properties for much less than what they paid to buy them from the sheriff, meaning banks are high-balling their estimates of what those homes are worth.

Building a skyscraper is the ultimate expression of economic confidence, and more than half of the 124 skyscrapers currently under construction in the world are being built in China. But confidence is often based on nothing more than faith, hope, and cheap credit, and a frenzy of skyscraper-building is also the most reliable historical indicator of an impending financial crash.

The Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building, the twin symbols of New York's emergence as the world's financial capital, were started at the end of the "Roaring Twenties" but completed in the depths of the Great Depression. The Petronas Towers in Malaysia were built just before the Asian financial crash of 1998. Burj al-Khalifa in Dubai, now the world's tallest building, was just starting construction when the Great Recession hit in 2008.

Informed diplomatic sources have reported to the Wayne Madsen Report (WMR) that Bahrain, representing the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), offered Russia a bribe of $5 billion if it did not use its veto in the Security Council to defeat an Arab League-sponsored resolution calling for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down. In the February 4 vote on the resolution, Russia, along with China, used their vetos to shoot down the resolution. U.S. ambassador to the UN Susan Rice called the vetoes "disgusting" and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton referred to the Russian and Chinese action as "despicable," with Germany's UN ambassador Peter Wittig calling the vetoes a "disgrace."

But in what could be termed disgusting, despicable, and disgraceful was the reported offering of a $5 billion bribe for Russia's yes vote by Bahrain's Foreign Minister Shaikh Khalid bin Ahmed bin Mohammed Al Khalifa during a trip to Moscow prior to the UN Security Council vote. Our sources report that the Russian government flatly turned down the offer of the money, which was bundled by Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman.

The spring air in the small, sand-dusted town has a soft haze to it, and clumps of green-gray sagebrush rustle in the breeze. Bluffdale sits in a bowl-shaped valley in the shadow of Utah's Wasatch Range to the east and the Oquirrh Mountains to the west. It's the heart of Mormon country, where religious pioneers first arrived more than 160 years ago. They came to escape the rest of the world, to understand the mysterious words sent down from their god as revealed on buried golden plates, and to practice what has become known as "the principle," marriage to multiple wives.

Today Bluffdale is home to one of the nation's largest sects of polygamists, the Apostolic United Brethren, with upwards of 9,000 members. The brethren's complex includes a chapel, a school, a sports field, and an archive. Membership has doubled since 1978 - and the number of plural marriages has tripled - so the sect has recently been looking for ways to purchase more land and expand throughout the town.

But new pioneers have quietly begun moving into the area, secretive outsiders who say little and keep to themselves. Like the pious polygamists, they are focused on deciphering cryptic messages that only they have the power to understand. Just off Beef Hollow Road, less than a mile from brethren headquarters, thousands of hard-hatted construction workers in sweat-soaked T-shirts are laying the groundwork for the newcomers' own temple and archive, a massive complex so large that it necessitated expanding the town's boundaries. Once built, it will be more than five times the size of the US Capitol.