President Barack Obama overruled top lawyers from the Justice Department and the Pentagon and decided he has the legal authority to continue the air war in Libya without congressional approval, the New York Times reported Friday night.

Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon general counsel, and Caroline D. Krass, the acting head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, had told the White House that they believed that the United States military's activities in the NATO-led air war amounted to "hostilities." Under the War Powers Resolution, that would have required Mr. Obama to terminate or scale back the mission after May 20.

But Mr. Obama decided instead to adopt the legal analysis of several other senior members of his legal team -- including the White House counsel, Robert Bauer, and the State Department legal adviser, Harold H. Koh -- who argued that the United States military's activities fell short of "hostilities." Under that view, Mr. Obama needed no permission from Congress to continue the mission unchanged.

Several Israeli leaders on Sunday urged the United States to allow jailed Jewish-American spy Jonathan Pollard to attend his father's funeral, after he was not granted permission to join him at his bedside before he died.

Several politicians had tried in vain to convince US authorities to allow Pollard, who is serving life imprisonment, to visit his father before his death on Saturday.

"I know that the prime minister (Benjamin Netanyahu) did his best to enable Pollard to see his sick father," Culture Minister Limor Livnat told reporters.

"Unfortunately, there was no response to our requests for Pollard to meet his father before his death," said Science Minister Daniel Hershkowitz.

Moody's has threatened to cut Italy's credit ratings on concerns over a possible rise in eurozone interest rates may derail the country's fragile economic recovery, raising more fears of contagion from the Greek debt crisis

Moody's announcement placing Italy's Aa2 rating on review for downgrade of the next 90 days came after European markets had closed for the weekend.

The agency said structural weaknesses such as a rigid labor market posed a challenge to growth.

Italy's potential downgrade highlights the risks facing indebted European countries as they struggle to avoid a Greece-style crisis.

Markets are worried that Italy, like Greece, will struggle to make the necessary spending cuts and other fiscal measures needed to cut its debts to affordable levels.

• Haddad axed after claim Syrians are fleeing imposters in stolen army uniform
• She also said flood of terrified refugees are visiting 'relatives' in Turkey
• Troops storm town of Maaret al-Numan as EU prepares sanctions

For weeks she has been ridiculed for putting forward outlandish explanations for Syrian atrocities - all in a perfect cut-glass English accent.

But the Damascus regime has finally ditched its flame-haired spokesman Reem Haddad, otherwise known as 'Comical Sally'.

Haddad was absent from the airwaves yesterday in the wake of a series of interviews in which she has bizarrely claimed residents were fleeing 'armed groups' dressed in stolen army uniform, and the flood of refugees to Syria were doing the equivalent 'visiting the next street'.

She also accused journalists of being swept up in an 'eyewitness phenomenon' when she was faced with requests for independent verification of her 'facts'.

Home Front Command launches fifth major drill to prepare civilians in case of attack; sirens to sound across country on Wednesday, when citizens will be requested to retreat to nearby shelters.

The Israel Defense Forces began a nation-wide Home Front defense drill on Sunday, to prepare security forces for an array of possible attacks.

The exercise, codenamed Turning Point 5, includes a number of scenarios, including a strike on a power plant, missiles being fired at targets across the country and one of hackers breaching into key Israeli computer systems.

Everything I want to do is illegal. As if a highly bureaucratic regulatory system was not already in place, 9/11 fueled renewed acceleration to eliminate freedom from the countryside. Every time a letter arrives in the mail from a federal or state agriculture department my heart jumps like I just got sent to the principal's office.

And it doesn't stop with agriculture bureaucrats. It includes all sorts of government agencies, from zoning, to taxing, to food inspectors. These agencies are the ultimate extension of a disconnected, Greco-Roman, Western, egocentric, compartmentalized, reductionist, fragmented, linear thought process.

On-farm Processing

I want to dress my beef and pork on the farm where I've coddled and raised it. But zoning laws prohibit slaughterhouses on agricultural land. For crying out loud, what makes more holistic sense than to put abattoirs where the animals are? But no, in the wisdom of Western disconnected thinking, abattoirs are massive centralized facilities visited daily by a steady stream of tractor trailers and illegal alien workers.

But what about dressing a couple of animals a year in the backyard? How can that be compared to a ConAgra or Tyson facility? In the eyes of the government, the two are one and the same. Every T-bone steak has to be wrapped in a half-million dollar facility so that it can be sold to your neighbor. The fact that I can do it on my own farm more cleanly, more responsibly, more humanely, more efficiently, and in a more environmentally friendly manner doesn't matter to the government agents who walk around with big badges on their jackets and wheelbarrow-sized regulations tucked under their arms.

OK, so I take my animals and load them onto a trailer for the first time in their life to send them up the already clogged interstate to the abattoir to await their appointed hour with a shed full of animals of dubious extraction. They are dressed by people wearing long coats with deep pockets with whom I cannot even communicate. The carcasses hang in a cooler alongside others that were not similarly cared for in life. After the animals are processed, I return to the facility hoping to retrieve my meat.

When I return home to sell these delectable packages, the county zoning ordinance says that this is a manufactured product because it exited the farm and was reimported as a value-added product, thereby throwing our farm into the Wal-Mart category, another prohibition in agricultural areas. Just so you understand this, remember that an on-farm abattoir was illegal, so I took the animals to a legal abattoir, but now the selling of said products in an on-farm store is illegal.

What we have learned from this year's Bilderberg conference

This year, Bilderberg was bigger than ever. Bigger crowds, bigger names, more coverage. So here, starting with about the least most important thing, is what I've learned from this year's Bilderberg summit in St Moritz. I've got a bit of a crush on the Chinese vice-minister for foreign affairs

Move over Queen Beatrix. Fu Ying is my new postergirl. I can't help myself. She just seems so ... fun.

Always hopping about, taking photos of wild flowers, pointing at the view, laughing - she's like, I don't know, a normal person or something. I look at Ying and have to wonder if China's really such an oppressive place after all. It can't be! Not with people like lovely Fu Ying running it. I think we've been misinformed. Western lies. Fu is the real China.

The BBC turned up!

But only in the form of Marcus Agius, the senior non-executive director on the BBC's executive board. He's also chairman of Barclays, and extremely well connected. Here he is, queuing to get on a private jet home.

Also on board was Washington hawk, and one of Bilderberg's nastiest pieces of work, Richard Perle. Boy, that's someone you don't want to get stuck next to on flight. I bet he really hogs the armrest.

Middle East Analyst Maidhc 'O Cathail, accuses New York Senator Charles Schumer of turning the United States into "an Islamophobic police state". He told Press TV's U.S. Desk on Thursday that Schumer is "yet another reminder of who is stoking fear of Muslims in America."

'O Cathail also said that "Senator Schumer told a Jewish radio show that Hasham - an orthodox Jewish name for 'God' - gave him his name 'Schumer' which means guardian, so that he can fulfill the very important role in the U.S. Senate as the guardian of Israel."

He added, "presumably Schumer's God-given role also includes turning the country he is actually paid to represent, the United Sates, into an Islamophobic police state."

As you know I have been following the earth changes since the event that many believe place around June 6, 2011. I have documented the new norther sunrise and have received hundreds of reports from around the world.

Local reports in and around the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Plant suggest that the waters are expected to rise at least 5 more feet.

Suspicious military movements have been spotted within the Continental United States, including unmarked vehicles and soldiers.

Here is a video regarding the nuclear plant in Nebraska:

The Word bizarre means something strange or weird or very difficult to explain. Could the operators of this mega fraud have given the name Bizarre deliberately so that they could laugh at the many thousands of victims for their folly of jumping on to the bandwagons of money chain? The mindset of the Malayali is something that eludes comprehension.

To be sure this is not going to be the last of the queer acts of scoundrels, who have been bidding for the most opportune time to hit at the weakest point of a human being - that is greed. The urge to make a quick buck! Most people here long to become millionaires overnight. And they seem to be willing to fall headlong into these traps.

The money chains are quite obvious traps. No man of reason can conceive the idea of a magic wand doubling the money you invest just in three years - that too after taking away a considerably big amount from it as commission to the agents, who succeed in enticing the customers into it. That those few agents who are at the uppermost rung of the money chain gain the most, and those thousands at the lower most rung lose everything is the proven fact.