This looks like major trouble.

President Obama has nominated Dartmouth College President Jim Yong Kim for the position of President of the World Bank. All bets were on Jeffrey Sachs. Sachs even thought he was the man, as countries around the world were lining up behind him.

However, President Obama out of the blue nominates Kim. It should be noted that Kim has zero financial background, which in itself may not be bad, since it means he is not a regime bankster. But, his credentials suggest that Obama sees some kind of global social health program along the lines of Obamacare, with the World Bank as a key player.

Kim has been a Professor of Medicine and Social Medicine and Chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. What's "Social Medicine". Wikipedia explains it well:

The field of social medicine seeks to:

understand how social and economic conditions impact health, disease and the practice of medicine and foster conditions in which this understanding can lead to a healthier society.

Translation: It's about central planning for the medical industry.

One should judge Nicolas Sarkozy according to his actions, and not according to his personality. Yet when his doings surprise even his own constituents, it is legitimate to take a detailed look at his biography and question the bonds that brought him to power. Thierry Meyssan has decided to write the truth about the French Republic's president background. All the information included in this article is provable, except for two assertions signalled by the author who alone takes full responsibility.

Tired of the overextended presidencies of François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac, the French elected Nicolas Sarkozy counting on his energy to revitalize their country. They were hoping for a break with years of no-change and ideologies of the past. What they got instead was a break with the very principles which founded the French nation, and have been shocked by this "hyper-president", seizing every day a new dossier, attracting towards him the right and the left wing, and tearing apart all points of reference to the point of creating total confusion.

Like children who have just made a boo-boo, the French are too busy trying to find excuses for themselves to admit the magnitude of the damages and of their naiveté, and they refuse all the more to see who Nicolas Sarkozy really is, that they realize they should have known since a long time who he was.

The United States, European allies and even Israel generally agree on three things about Iran's nuclear program: Tehran does not have a bomb, has not decided to build one, and is probably years away from having a deliverable nuclear warhead.

Those conclusions, drawn from extensive interviews with current and former U.S. and European officials with access to intelligence on Iran, contrast starkly with the heated debate surrounding a possible Israeli strike on Tehran's nuclear facilities.

"They're keeping the soup warm but they are not cooking it," a U.S. administration official said.

Reuters has learned that in late 2006 or early 2007, U.S. intelligence intercepted telephone and email communications in which Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a leading figure in Iran's nuclear program, and other scientists complained that the weaponization program had been stopped.

That led to a bombshell conclusion in a controversial 2007 National Intelligence Estimate: American spy agencies had "high confidence" that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in the fall of 2003.

Current and former U.S. officials say they are confident that Iran has no secret uranium-enrichment site outside the purview of U.N. nuclear inspections.

They also have confidence that any Iranian move toward building a functional nuclear weapon would be detected long before a bomb was made.

These intelligence findings are what underpin President Barack Obama's argument that there is still time to see whether economic sanctions will compel Iran's leaders to halt any program.

U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales was charged on Friday with 17 counts of premeditated murder, a capital offense that could lead to the death penalty in the massacre of Afghan civilians, the U.S. military said.

The 38-year-old soldier is accused of walking off a U.S. military base with his 9mm pistol and M-4 rifle, which was outfitted with a grenade launcher, before dawn on March 11, killing nine Afghan children and eight adults and burning some of the bodies. It was the worst allegation of civilian killings by an American and has severely strained U.S.-Afghan ties at a critical time in the decade-old war.

It's unclear what prompted the killings, but the case has drawn new attention to the debate over mental health care for the troops, who have experienced record suicide rates and high incidences of post-traumatic stress and brain injuries during repeated deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Six other Afghans - a man, a woman and four children - were wounded in Panjwai district of Kandahar province, the spiritual birthplace of the Taliban. Bales also was charged with six counts of attempted murder and six counts of assault in those cases, according to Col. Gary Kolb, a spokesman for U.S. forces in Afghanistan who disclosed information from the charging document.

Bales, a father of two from Lake Tapps, Washington, was officially informed of the 29 charges just before noon local time at the U.S. military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he is confined.

Syria now faces punishing sanctions from the Arab League, as a diplomat from the body says Damascus ignored Friday's deadline to accept foreign observers. Meanwhile, France is actively seeking international support for a humanitarian corridor to be set up in the crisis-torn country. This is also the first time a major power has formally called for foreign intervention in the uprising against President Assad. But there are questions about Paris 'go-to' efforts.

Thierry Meyssan has written "Operation Sarkozy".

(Mr Sarkozy and the CIA. Based on Thierry Meyssan's "Operation Sarkozy" )

Here are some of the points Meyssan makes about Sarkozy and his government:

1. The CIA planned Sarkozy's rise to power and has influence on his government.

2. When Sarkozy became president, Alain Bauer was put in charge of the French intelligence services.

Bauer is the grandson of the Grand Rabbi of Lyon.

He is also former Grand-Master of the Grand Orient of France (a top mason).

And he is former number two at the USA National Security Agency in Europe.

The official story on the final denouement of the Toulouse shootings drama is in. Like so many other official narratives around 'Muslim terror attacks', it's full of holes and requires anyone attempting to believe it to engage in some serious mental gymnastics.

Mohamed Merah, was a 23-year-old French guy of Algerian descent who loved cars, worked in a car repair/supply store, wanted to join the French army to "defend the French flag" but was refused, was partying in a nightclub three weeks before his alleged shooting spree, had a history of petty criminal offences and was due in court in April for driving without a license. He also had, allegedly, visited Israel, Afghanistan and Pakistan for some, as yet, unknown reason, perhaps "ideological indoctrination".

That's about as much as we can say about him without disseminating dubious government propaganda, specifically the claim that he was the author of the recent shootings in Toulouse. That particular claim is in serious doubt given that an eyewitness at one of the shootings stated clearly that the gunman, who always wore a motorbike helmet, was "quite fat". Other eyewitnesses said the the man they saw shooting was "of European descent". Here's a recent picture of Mohamed Merah:

In the wake of a horrific rampage, in which Mohamed Merah (now dead after a 32-hour standoff with police) reportedly murdered three French soldiers, three young Jewish schoolchildren, and a rabbi, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France has begun calling for criminal penalties for citizens who visit web sites that advocate for terror or hate. "From now on, any person who habitually consults Web sites that advocate terrorism or that call for hatred and violence will be criminally punished," Sarkozy was reported as saying.

Apart from the obvious flaws in Sarkozy's plan--users, can, of course, use anonymizing tools to view the material or simply access it from a variety of locations to avoid appearing as "habitual" viewers--there are numerous other reasons to be concerned about criminalizing access to information.

First, there's no guarantee that criminalizing access to hate speech or terrorist content will end the very real problems of hate crime and terrorism. Extremist violence didn't start with the Internet and it won't end with it, either.

Second, who defines "hate speech"? In France, that definition includes Holocaust denial, which in the past resulted in Yahoo! discontinuing auctions of Nazi memoribilia (the collectors of which are not, by any stretch, all sympathizers). And negative comments about France's Muslim community have also resulted in criminal penalties, most notably in the case of actress Brigitte Bardot, who has been convicted five times for "inciting racial hatred." While Holocaust denial and comments about Muslims such as those made by Bardot may be deplorable, they should not be criminal.

Finally, while Sarkozy is not--yet--calling for websites to be blocked, it wouldn't be a stretch; after all, France already offers mechanisms for blocking child pornography and "incitement to terrorism and racial hatred." If Sarkozy were to decide censorship is the answer, one major risk would be overblocking: there's nary a country in the world that censors the Internet without collateral damage (in Australia, for example, testing on a would-be censorship regime found the site of a dentist blocked, among others).

EFF has serious concerns about the implications of Sarkozy's comments. When a democratic country such as France decides to censor or criminalize speech, it is not just the French that suffer, but the world, as authoritarian regimes are given easy justification for their own censorship. We urge French authorities to judge crime on action, not expression.

The following are important facts that may help you understand the background to the recent shocking events in South Western France.

Three servicemen have died and in another attack on a Jewish school, a teacher, two of his own children and a third child were tragically gunned down by a masked man riding a motor scooter.

Important fact number one: the first round of the French presidential election is scheduled for April 22nd. A final encounter between the two front runners is scheduled for May 6th, should no clear winner emerge from the first round.

And number two: the incumbent Nicholas Sarkozy is fighting for his political life. He has trailed his socialist opponent Francoise Holland for months now. He has not led in the polls against any socialist contender since November 2009.

To sum up, Sarkozy is one of the consistently least popular presidents in the history of the Fifth Republic. He looked every inch the loser engaged in a race to the bottom. His populist lunges at the over-bearing EU, playing the anti-Turkish card over the Armenian genocide issue, barely registered more than a temporary flicker on the political Geiger counter.

Fifteen men across eastern Australia, some of them fathers, have been charged with child pornography offences following the discovery of hundreds of thousands of images and videos of children including toddlers.

Seven men were arrested in Victoria, five in NSW, two in the ACT and one in Queensland following a tip-off from Interpol to the Australian Federal Police (AFP) in December.

The arrests over the past week have disrupted a network of online child predators, the AFP alleges.

The peer-to-peer file-sharing network, which involves the sharing of information without using a central server, was originally discovered in Germany.