The full extent of the Dresden Holocaust can be more readily grasped if one considers that as many as a half a million persons died within a 14-hour period, whereas estimates of those who died at Hiroshima range from 90,000 to 140,000. Author Kurt Vonnegut was in Dresden as an American POW when it was bombed in 1945; he wrote a famous anti-war novel, Slaughterhouse Five, in 1969, based on his experience. The book was banned in several US states - and branded a "tool of the devil" in North Dakota. Churchill, the monster who ordered the Dresden slaughter, was knighted. The rest is history...

The WWII Dresden Holocaust - 'A Single Column Of Flame'

"You guys burnt the place down, turned it into a single column of flame. More people died there in the firestorm, in that one big flame, than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined." - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr

On the evening of February 13, 1945, an orgy of genocide and barbarism began against a defenseless German city, one of the greatest cultural centers of northern Europe. Within less than 14 hours not only was it reduced to flaming ruins, but an estimated one-third of its inhabitants, possibly as many as a half a million, had perished in what was the worst single event massacre of all time.

On 3 January 2011, following the UK Column's lead article exposing insider dealing between the Cabinet office and political behavioural training charity Common Purpose, the Independent newspaper revealed that David Cameron had also set up a Cabinet Office Behavioural Insight Team. Formed in July last year, the secretive cell is tasked to "dream up psychological tricks to alter our behaviour" - and on a massive scale.

The Independent article warned how the public is to be reframed or "nudged" into politically acceptable "Social Norms"; starting with healthy eating, voluntary work and tax gathering. While this may seem innocent to some people, these early 'soft' targets are already being greatly expanded to include wider central government ideological and political agendas, including Cameron's socialist straitjacket of the Big Society. Elite multi-millionaire Socialist and Tory Chancellor George Osborne has already signed up to Behavioural Economics - another form of mental reframing of individuals and groups, specifically to achieve political economic objectives. Their theory and intent is, that once mentally retrained, we "willingly rush to pay excessive taxes".

Last month, Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) said that if employees strike, "they should be fired," and former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R) wrote in an op-ed that the moral case for unions "does not apply to public employment."Now, facing a $137 million budget deficit, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has proposed a "budget repair bill" that would severely limit collective bargaining, eliminate the right of unions to negotiate pensions, retirement and benefits.

Walker is facing fierce criticism for this all-out assault against state workers, especially after he insisted that the "National Guard" will be used against a walkout:

When asked by a reporter what will happen if workers resist, Walker replied that he would call out the National Guard. He said that the National Guard is "prepared...for whatever the governor, their commander-in-chief, might call for. ... I am fully prepared for whatever may happen."

The leaders of Nova Scotia's three main parties say public trust in the province's politics has been more deeply shaken after the RCMP laid 52 charges on Monday against one current and three former members of the legislature.

The charges, resulting from a criminal investigation of members' constituency expenses, include fraud, theft and breach of trust.

Premier Darrell Dexter said the charges will make it more difficult to get people to participate in politics.

"You know frankly, I'm not just disappointed, I'm angry about it because we all have to live with the consequences," he said.

Dexter refused to comment on the individual cases but he said the fallout from them will make it difficult for all political parties.

"It just becomes much more difficult to bring people into public life," he added.

At the end of a nine-month investigation, RCMP said all four men have been charged with fraud exceeding $5,000 and breach of trust by a public officer.

All of those charged are scheduled to make their first appearance in Halifax provincial court on April 20. None of the allegations against the men have been proven in court.

Among those charged are two former cabinet ministers, Conservative Richard Hurlburt and former Liberal Russell MacKinnon.

The political earthquake in Egypt has sent shockwaves through Israel, shredding decades-old security assumptions and leaving the Jewish state to face more turbulent, demanding relations with its powerful neighbour.

The toppling of President Hosni Mubarak following a popular uprising was greeted by scenes of jubilation in Cairo and wild celebrations on the streets of Gaza, but in Israel, Friday's dramatic events were met with silent anxiety.

It is hard to overstate the importance to Israel of its 1979 peace accord with Egypt, which has given it stability on its southern flanks and has helped successive Israeli leaders maintain the status quo in the unresolved Palestinian conflict.

A future Egyptian government is unlikely to tear up the historic Camp David peace treaty, because such a move could deprive it of crucial U.S. aid. However, most analysts foresee a more testy and uncomfortable ties in the years ahead.

"This has left us dangerously isolated. Egypt was our only strategic partner in the region," said Alon Liel, a former director-general of Israeli Foreign Ministry.

"In the future, Egypt will have different relations with Israel. More hostile and more unpredictable," he added.

Mubarak ruled Egypt for three decades, dealing with eight different Israeli prime ministers during that period and providing them a vital anchor of certainty as they continued to strike out against numerous enemies across the Arab world.

Republicans unveiled a budget plan on Wednesday that proposed a $1.6 billion cut to the Environmental Protection Agency, an agency whose authority they have sought to curtail, while business trade groups have complained about the burden placed on them by agency regulations. Politico also reported that the GOP's proposal would hit the Energy Department hard , with a proposal to cut energy efficiency and renewable energy programs in half.

Rep. Fred Upton, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has said he favors gutting EPA's authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions with a "legislative fix" rather than simply denying it funds. (See our overview of Upton's positions on energy.) He told the Wall Street Journal that his disagreement with the EPA is: "You don't subsidize different forms of power -- you let the market run on its own."

The war has already begun, total war is a possibility.

While the corporate owned media has the plebeians arguing over whether or not Iran should have nuclear weapons or if it intends to commit genocide against the Jews (the largest population of Jews in the Middle East outside of Israel actually resides in Iran), the debate is already over, and the war has already quietly begun. Before it began, however, someone meticulously meted out the details of how it would unfold. That "someone" is the mega-corporate backed Brookings Institute.

Background

"Which Path to Persia?" was written in 2009 by the Brookings Institute as a blueprint for confronting Iran. Within the opening pages of the report, acknowledgments are given to the Smith Richardson Foundation, upon which Zbigniew Brzezinski sits as an acting governor.

The Smith Richardson Foundation funds a bizarre myriad of globalist pet projects including studies on geoengineering, nation building, meddling in the Caucasus region, and even studies, as of 2009, to develop methods to support "indigenous democratic political movements and transitions" in Poland, Egypt, Cuba, Nepal, Haiti, Vietnam, Cambodia, Zimbabwe, and Burma. Also acknowledged by the report is the Crown Family Foundation out of Chicago.

In 2003 an MIT-educated expert in children's learning patterns, Dr Aafia Siddiqui, disappeared with her three children in Pakistan. Was she, as the Americans said, an Al Qaeda operative who in 2008 emerged after five years undercover, carrying a handbag full of chemicals and plans for major terror attacks in the US, and then attempted to shoot US soldiers? Or was she, as her family, and most people in Pakistan have always maintained, seized by Pakistani agents for reasons unknown?

Now new evidence of the kidnapping of Dr Siddiqui prises open part of one of the most shocking of the myriad individual stories of injustice in the war on terror. It also underlines the recklessness and perfidy of a key United States' partner in the war on terror, which carries its own threat of explosion.

Dr Siddiqui was sentenced in a New York court last year to 86 years for attempted murder of US soldiers in Afghanistan. Her mysterious five-year disappearance before that, her reappearance in Afghanistan in 2008, her subsequent trial in the US, and the confusion surrounding all these events, have made Dr Siddiqui's a symbolic case in much of the Muslim world. Now a senior law enforcement officer has claimed to have been involved personally on the day she was seized, with her three children, by Pakistani police agents in Karachi in March 2003 and handed over to the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI.

The FBI put out a "wanted for questioning" alert for Dr Siddiqui just before she disappeared. She was later high on the US wanted list, with the US claiming that she was living undercover as an Al Qaeda agent. She was a "clear and present danger to the US", the then-U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft said in 2004. For all these years the Pakistani government repeatedly denied holding her, and after her arrest in Afghanistan in 2008 spent $2 million on US lawyers for her trial. After her conviction, the Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani, committed himself to work for her return from a US prison. Dr Siddiqui had become, "the daughter of the nation" and the centre of a popular cause he could not afford to ignore.

US Senator John McCain warns Fox News viewers of the "virus" spreading throughout the Middle East. The "virus" McCain is speaking about is what the CIA used to call "the communists" i.e. the overwhelming majority of humanity. The irony here is that it is in fact people like McCain who are the carriers of the virus - specifically, psychopathology, which has already infected the entire planet but is particularly virulent in government structures in the US.

The US State Department has begun sending Twitter messages to Iranians in Farsi, alluding to the "historic role" social media have played in mass protests against Iran's 2009 disputed presidential polls.

The Twitter feeds in the Iranian language began Sunday as US officials accused Iran of hypocrisy by supporting the anti-government revolt in Egypt but seeking to prevent anti-government demonstrations in Iran.

On the Twitter account, USAdarFarsi, the State Department said it "recognizes historic role of social media among Iranians We want to join in your conversations."

In another tweet, the State Department said: "Iran has shown that the activities it praised Egyptians for it sees as illegal, illegitimate for its own people."

In a third tweet, it said "US calls on Iran to allow people to enjoy same universal rights to peacefully assemble, demonstrate as in Cairo."