Rick Perry has been trying every trick in the book to pass the new abortion bill in Texas, and now, according to Addicting Info.org, the truth behind his extreme "desperation" has been uncovered. The bill's passage would mean that his sister's company could be poised to make big money from abortions. Milla Perry Jones, Rick Perry's sister, is the Vice President of Government Affairs at United Surgical Partners International. In addition to that plumb position, she is also a board member at the Texas Ambulatory Surgical Center Society.

The Houston Chronicle reports the bill's passage would mean that nearly all of the abortion clinics in Texas would close because they would not be able to afford to transform into official ambulatory surgical centers. The bill would restrict abortions to being performed only in clinics that have this designation.

The few abortion clinics that would stay open would be the ones that already function as ambulatory surgical centers. It does not seem to be a coincidence that Perry's sister just so happens to work at a company that is already considered to be an ambulatory surgical center. She stands to profit handsomely from the bill being signed into law.

The campaign to re-open the inquest into the death of Dr David Kelly is holding a silent, gagged, protest outside the Royal Courts of Justice, London, on Thursday 18^th July 2pm, to mark the tenth anniversary of Dr Kelly's death and to demand the re-opening of his inquest.

Campaigners demand Dr Kelly's inquest, as his right under British law, to examine all the evidence, including the fresh evidence.

The coroner 'speaks for the dead to protect the living.' Campaigners demand due process of British law and transparency, for the clear establishment of truth and justice.

All single, unexplained deaths require an inquest under British law. Dr Kelly's unexplained death, according to many centuries of British law, should have been examined in a proper coronial inquest, with the option of a jury, the power to subpoena witnesses, testimony given under oath, with cross-examination and the requirement to establish suicide beyond reasonable doubt.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit has dealt a terrible blow to Chris Hedges, Daniel Ellsberg, Noam Chomsky and the other activists and journalists suing to prevent the indefinite military detention of American citizens.

Sections 1021 and 1022 of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2012 would allow the military to detain indefinitely persons who are deemed to consort with terrorists or those who commit "belligerent acts" against the United States. Journalists, whose job it is to do just that, would undoubtedly qualify, Hedges has argued.

The plaintiffs have had successes and setbacks in court.

Here is what Hedges wrote after Wednesday's decision:

This is quite distressing. It means there is no recourse now either within the Executive, Legislative or Judicial branches of government to halt the steady assault on our civil liberties and most basic Constitutional rights. It means that the state can use the military, overturning over two centuries of domestic law, to use troops on the streets to seize U.S. citizens, strip them of due process and hold them indefinitely in military detention centers. States that accrue to themselves this kind of power, history has shown, will use it. We will appeal, but the Supreme Court is not required to hear our appeal. It is a black day for those who care about liberty.

During the financial crisis, while Dr. Evil-ish Wall Street villains like Goldman and Lehman Brothers were getting all the bad press, pundits continually referred to J.P. Morgan Chase as the "good bank."

The myth of Chase as the finance sector's one upstanding rock of rectitude reached its zenith in July of 2009 with an embarrassingly hagiographic piece in the New York Times entitled, "In Washington, One Bank Chief Still Holds Sway." In that one, the paper breathlessly praised Jamie Dimon for emerging from "the disgrace of his industry" to become Barack Obama's "favorite banker."

Chase and Jamie Dimon kept that rep for a good long time. As late as 2011, Dimon's name was being floated around Washington very seriously as a potential replacement for Tim Geithner's Treasury Secretary post. Even when Dimon showed up on the Hill last year to testify (read: obfuscate) about the infamous "London Whale" episode, Senators on the banking committee - who, as writer George Zornick noted, had collected a cumulative $522,088 in donations from Chase - slobbered all over Dimon and shelved the important London Whale matter to ask the great genius's advice on how to fix the economy.

Well, there's some more news about the "good bank" - Chase is about to pay yet another ginormous settlement for cheating and stealing from the public. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) will fine Chase "close to $1 billion" for manipulating energy prices in Enron-esque fashion in Michigan and California. The story is interesting in itself - and we'll write more about it later - but for now, it's just the fact of yet another massive settlement for this bank that's so interesting.

Then again, it might be exactly what you thought it would be.

The clip below is from a 2007 AKBank convention in Instanbul, Turkey held right before the annual Bilderberg Meeting which took place there that same year. In it, former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, (as well as member of the Bilderberg Group, Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, and Bohemian Grove among others) Henry Kissinger can be seen giving the following speech:

In the Middle East, we live in a different world. The nations do not represent historic entities in the same sense that European nations did. Turkey of course does, and Iran in a considerable extent does. But in the region in between, the borders were drawn by the victors of World War I on the basis largely of what would facilitate their influence. So therefore, the identities of these countries, and of their borders, can be challenged more easily.

What we in America call terrorists are really groups of people that reject the international system, and they're trying to regroup it to a radical Islamic fundamentalists kind.

Clearly Kissinger is saying that, because many Middle Eastern countries do not have what appears to be in his view the 'historical significance' of older countries, they are wide open for attack, regime change and re-ordering.

If the Government Is Going to Spy ... Why Doesn't It Do Something Useful?

The big banks have committed massive crimes and manipulated virtually every market.

The failure to prosecute fraud is preventing a sustainable economic recovery.

As such, prosecuting Wall Street fraud is arguably an issue of national security.

The government is collecting everything ... and spying on just about everything we do.

We are passionately opposed to mass surveillance. But - if the government is doing so - why can't it gather info on the crimes of the big banks ... so we can prosecute them?

As we repeatedly focus on wealth inequality in the United States (i.e.; just four hundred persons in the US have as much in assets and income as the bottom 50% of Americans), a video points out the even more extreme global wealth disparity.

There are many reasons for this. Take for example institutional sources that contribute to this trend. The World Bank, for interest, oversees "loans" to developing nations. But by creating long-term indebtedness, these struggling counties end up owing at least $600 billion dollars in interest on loans whose principals have, in essence, already been paid off in actual dollars.

These usorious interest rates end up in the hands of the bankers and the shareholders of the financial institutions that are inter-related with the World Bank through the nations that govern it, particularly the United States which calls the shots. Criticisms of the World Bank focus on how it creates financial conditions that result in debt dependency of the nations that borrow from it, therfore negatively impacting the economic prospects of the vast majority of its residents.

A British lawmaker who described Israel as an "apartheid state" whose future is in doubt after "inflicting atrocities on Palestinians" was suspended by his party on Thursday.

David Ward, a member of the Liberal Democrats, the smaller grouping in Britain's two-party coalition government, was reprimanded after making a series of remarks about Israel.

He refused to apologise after sending a message on Twitter on Saturday which read: "Am I wrong or are am I right? At long last the #Zionists are losing the battle - how long can the #apartheid State of #Israel last?"

Earlier this year, the 60-year-old wrote on his website that he was "saddened that the Jews, who suffered unbelievable levels of persecution during the Holocaust, could within a few years of liberation from the death camps, be inflicting atrocities on Palestinians".

Former Rolling Stone journalist Michael Hastings has been cremated and sent home in a urn despite the fact his family wanted his body.

Hastings died on June 18th after his Mercedes crashed into a tree and had burst into flames in the Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, causing speculation to arise that Hastings, who was working on a major exposé of the CIA, could have been set up.

Kimberly Dvorak of San Diego 6 who spoke directly with friends of Hastings family said, "A close family friend did confirm that Michael's body was sent home in an urn, meaning he was cremated and it wasn't the request of the family....in fact the family wanted Michael's body to go home."

It is very suspicious that now Michael Hastings body is unable to be a part of any evidence that can possibly contradict the LAPD's claim that there was no foul play in the journalist's death.


Hours before the car crash Hastings had sent out an email to family and friends claiming that he was onto a big story and needed to "off the rada[r] for a bit."

Rolling Stone magazine has defended its new cover story featuring Boston bomb suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, which has prompted uproar.

The magazine said a profile of Mr Tsarnaev suited its "commitment to serious and thoughtful coverage".

But the mayor of Boston said the publication's cover "rewards a terrorist with celebrity treatment".

A number of US retail chains have announced they will not stock the edition.

Mr Tsarnaev, 19, pleaded not guilty last week to all charges in connection with the 15 April bombings, which killed three people, including an eight-year-old boy.

Janet Reitman, Rolling Stone's contributing editor, spent two months interviewing Mr Tsarnaev's friends and family for the forthcoming issue's article.

'Disgusting'

In a statement appended to the top of the story, the magazine's editors said on Wednesday their "hearts go out to the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing".

"The cover story we are publishing this week falls within the traditions of journalism and Rolling Stone's long-standing commitment to serious and thoughtful coverage of the most important political and cultural issues of our day," it said.