On Monday, a suicide bomber posing as a member of the Yemeni military killed at least 96 people and wounded hundreds more - most if not all soldiers - in a blast in Sanaa, Yemen's capital.

The soldiers were rehearsing for a military parade in Sabeen Square near the presidential palace, Yemeni officials said. According to Agence France-Press, the bomber, carrying explosives under his uniform, "blew himself up in the middle of an army battalion." As many as 300 wounded soldiers were being treated at seven area hospitals, AFP said.

An al-Qaida source claimed responsibility for the attack, according to the BBC.

"This is a real massacre," one soldier, Ahmed Sobhi, told the Associated Press. "There are piles of torn body parts, limbs and heads. This is unbelievable."

According to CNN, top Yemen officials, including the country's defense minister, were at the scene but escaped unharmed. CNN said 101 soldiers were killed in the blast.

The parade was to be part of a National Day of Unification celebration marking the 22nd anniversary of the May 22, 1990, union of North and South Yemen.

According to AFP, it's unclear if Tuesday's parade will take place as planned.

Propaganda that was supposed to target foreigners could now be aimed at Americans, reversing a longstanding policy. "Disconcerting and dangerous," says Shank.

An amendment that would legalize the use of propaganda on American audiences is being inserted into the latest defense authorization bill, BuzzFeed has learned.

The amendment would "strike the current ban on domestic dissemination" of propaganda material produced by the State Department and the Pentagon, according to the summary of the law at the House Rules Committee's official website.

The tweak to the bill would essentially neutralize two previous acts - the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 and Foreign Relations Authorization Act in 1987 - that had been passed to protect U.S. audiences from our own government's misinformation campaigns.

The bi-partisan amendment is sponsored by Rep. Mac Thornberry from Texas and Rep. Adam Smith from Washington State.

In a little noticed press release earlier in the week - buried beneath the other high-profile issues in the $642 billion defense bill, including indefinite detention and a prohibition on gay marriage at military installations - Thornberry warned that in the Internet age, the current law "ties the hands of America's diplomatic officials, military, and others by inhibiting our ability to effectively communicate in a credible way."

If you needed any more proof that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is doing absolutely nothing to keep Americans safe - since there is, in reality, no terrorist threat whatsoever - aside from the constant "mistakes" and allowing airport employees to work without background checks, now you have it.

Bimbo Olumuyiwa Oyewole, a Nigerian immigrant, lived under the name Jerry Thomas for around 20 years and somehow was not only able to hold a job but hold a job supervising security officers at a relatively large airport.

The real Jerry Thomas was reportedly murdered in 1992 in Queens, New York, yet somehow Oyewole was able to pass both state and federal background checks in order to hold his position supervising 30 security guards at Newark Liberty International Airport.

Trio accused of making petrol bombs and plotting attacks, but supporters say suspect materials were beer-making kit.


Three protesters arrested in a late-night raid days before the start of this weekend's 60-nation NATO summit in Chicago have been charged with terrorism for possession of explosive devices, police and their attorney have said.

The men have been accused of making petrol bombs and planning to attack US President Barack Obama's campaign headquarters, the home of the Chicago mayor, Rahm Emanuel, and other targets during this weekend's conference, prosecutors said on Saturday.

The three were arrested on Wednesday night in a raid of an apartment in the city's South Side Bridgeport neighbourhood ahead of the two-day meeting.

The Chicago Police Department (CPD) said the men were charged with conspiracy to commit terrorism, providing material support for terrorism, and possession of an explosive incendiary device.

The trio was charged with providing material support for terrorism, conspiracy to commit terrorism and possession of explosives.

The suspects were each being held on $1.5m bond. They are believed to have come to Chicago late last month to take part in May Day protests. Six others arrested on Wednesday in the raid were released on Friday without being charged.

Are the worldwide protests helping or hurting? That is the question.

As Alexander Haig once stated "they can protest all they want so long as they pay their taxes". This statement is pretty telling in my opinion.

Now accompany that statement with the question, has protesting and hitting the streets really brought any change in policy, banking, wars etc.? Unfortunately, the answer clearly is no.

Let us take a look at some examples:

The Civil Rights Movement

The civil rights movement was a political movement for equality. Between 1950 and 1980 the movement took the form of campaigns of civil resistance.

The aim was to achieve change by means of nonviolent forms of resistance. But the campaign of "nonviolent forms of resistance" was accompanied, or followed, by civil unrest. In some cases armed rebellion.

When one thinks "civil rights movement" a few things probably comes to mind right away. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, sit-ins, and the hosing of black demonstrators, just to name a few.

I have a lot of respect for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and the numerous students that stood tall against oppression.

I want to make clear that I am questioning the effectiveness of demonstrating/protesting to bring about change. I am in no way saying that these individuals are "dumb" for the actions they took against oppression.

The police state's framework for suppressing information and opinion arguably threatens all forms of independent thought and appears poised to intensify as the "war on terror" continues. As the recent emergence of US plans for indoctrination in reeducation camps reveals, Western governments' actual enemy is the capacity for a people to exercise critical thought en route to intervening in and altering political-economic processes.

Public opinion - defined by 19th century English political thinker William MacKinnon as "that sentiment on any given subject which is entertained by the best informed, most intelligent, and most moral persons in the community" - is fundamentally at odds with police state prerogatives also exemplified in recent US Department of Homeland Security documents.

The technocratic mindset of agencies such as the DHS and Federal Bureau of Investigation that oversee federal, state, and local policing procedures seeks to short-circuit and quell dissent by identifying transgressive thought that deviates from an assumed normalcy, then interlinking it with perceived threats or violent actions against the state. In a grand governmental exercise of Freudian-style projection, the DHS's usage of inflammatory terms such as "terrorist" and "extremist" are routinely utilized to emphasize the nature and degree of various activist groups' alleged deviant ideologies. This practice proceeds in light of the fact that most every "terrorist" act within the US since 9/11 has been carefully guided by the FBI or, as was the case with the initial "underwear bomber, Western intelligence agencies likely working in concert.

A November 2011 DHS document, "Domestic Terrorism and Homegrown Violent Extremism Lexicon", is the agency's recent codification of terms intended to instruct and aid government officials in recognizing "threats of terrorism against the United States by facilitating a common understanding of the terms and conditions that describe terrorist threats to the United States [sic]."

Then, in a fashion that will be familiar to those who understand the tactics of groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, an untenable array of activist pursuits spanning the political spectrum - "Anarchist Extremists", "Animal Rights Extremists", "Anti-Abortion Extremists", "Environmental Rights Extremists" - are libelously lobbed together and defined alongside designations including "Racist Skinhead Extremists", "Homegrown Violent Extremist", "Radicalization", and "Terrorism".

Under cover of the night around twelve police cars stopped five journalists when they were heading back to where they are staying in Chicago during the NATO summit. All five have been covering protests against the NATO summit for the past few days.

The five journalists included Luke Rudkowksi, who streams as @Lukewearechange, Tim Pool, who streams as @Timcast, Jeoff Shively (@Jiraffa), Dustin & Jess. They are known for their work livestreaming and tweeting out regular coverage of Occupy protests.

Rudkowski of We Are Change managed to record the Chicago police approaching the journalists in the car. The police have their guns drawn. They shout, "Hands! Hands! Get your hands up!" And then, "F**kin' hands!" Then Pool's voice can be heard saying, "We're being raided. For folks who are watching, we are being raided by the CPD right now as we speak."

There is some trouble with the door. The door is locked and the police are knocking on the windows of the car. The door is opened. A police officer can be heard telling one of the journalists, "Put your coffee down so you don't burn your crotch."

Police officers ask a journalist, who I presume is Rudkowski, if he has anything on him. He then is told to leave the camera on the seat of the car.

The video cuts and then we see Shively and Rudkowski recounting what happened. They say police are following them. They add the police would not explain why they were stopped, they were pulled over by unmarked police cars and Rudkowski and Dustin were cuffed together.

Binyamin Netanyahu reignites row over fate of thousands of African migrants in Israel

The Israeli prime minister has stoked a volatile debate about refugees and migrant workers from Africa, warning that "illegal infiltrators flooding the country" were threatening the security and identity of the Jewish state.

"If we don't stop their entry, the problem that currently stands at 60,000 could grow to 600,000, and that threatens our existence as a Jewish and democratic state," Binyamin Netanyahu said at Sunday's cabinet meeting. "This phenomenon is very grave and threatens the social fabric of society, our national security and our national identity." Israel's population is 7.8 million.


His comments follow media reports of rising crime, including two gang rapes, in southern Tel Aviv, where many African migrants are concentrated. However, Micky Rosenfeld, spokesman for the Israeli police, said the overall crime rate in Israel had fallen. There had been one alleged rape of a teenage girl connected to the migrant community, for which three suspects were in custody, he added.

Militarized Chicago - Next month in Baltimore they're going to celebrate the War of 1812. That's what we do with wars. We say they're the last resort. We say they're hell. We say they're for the purpose of eliminating themselves: we fight wars for peace. Although we never keep peace for wars. We claim to wage only wars we have been forced into despite all possible effort to find a better way. And then we celebrate the wars. We keep the wars going for their own sake after all the excuses we used to get them started have expired. The WMDs have not been found. Osama bin Laden's been killed. Al Qaeda is gone from the country where we're fighting it. Nobody's threatening Benghazi anymore. But the wars must go on! And then we'll celebrate them. And we'll celebrate the old ones too, the ones that were fought here, the ones that were in their day not quite so heavily painted as last resorts or humanitarian missions.

Last year Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee persuaded Congress to create an Iraq-Afghanistan Wars holiday. It's on our calendars now along with Loyalty Day (formerly May Day), Veterans Day (formerly Armistice Day), Memorial Day, Yellow Ribbon Day, Patriots Day, Independence Day, Flag Day, Pearl Harbor Day, and of course September 11th, among many others. Last week there was an Armed Forces Spouses Appreciation Day. The military holiday calendar is like the Catholic saints' days now: there's something every day of the year.

But there's no celebration of the times we avoided war. We claim to prefer peace to war, but we don't make heroes of those presidents or Congresses who most avoided war. In fact, we erase them. Our history books jump from war to war as if nothing happened in between. Nobody celebrates 1811, only 1812. Even the peace movement doesn't celebrate the past decade's prevention, thus far, of a war on Iran.

A private door opens from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office in central Jerusalem directly into a long, modestly furnished, half-paneled room decorated with modern paintings by Israeli artists and a copy of Israel's 1948 declaration of independence. It contains little more than a long wooden table, brown leather chairs and a single old-fashioned white projector screen.

This inner sanctum at the end of a corridor between Netanyahu's private room and the office of his top military adviser, is where one of the decade's most momentous military decisions could soon be taken: to launch an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear program.

Time for that decision is fast running out and the mood in Jerusalem is hardening.

Iran continues to enrich uranium in defiance of international pressure, saying it needs the fuel for its civilian nuclear program. The West is convinced that Tehran's real objective is to build an atomic bomb - something which the Jewish state will never accept because its leaders consider a nuclear armed-Iran a threat to its very existence.


Adding to the international pressure, U.S. ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro said this week American military plans to strike Iran were "ready" and the option was "fully available".