The IRS needs to crack down on political nonprofits, experts say - or risk looking weak and useless.

Big dark-money groups like the Karl Rove-advised Crossroads GPS promised the IRS they would have "limited" involvement in politics - in order to protect their non-profit tax-exempt status - yet went on to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to influence the 2010 and 2012 federal elections. Now several tax policy experts, including a former high-ranking IRS official who ran the division overseeing nonprofits, say the IRS must bring the hammer down on these shadowy nonprofits or risk looking weak and useless.

"The government's going to have to investigate them and prosecute them," says Marcus Owens, who ran the IRS' tax-exempt division for a decade and is now a lawyer in private practice. "In order to maintain the integrity of the process, they're going to be forced to take action."

A Syrian airstrike tore through a house in a rebellious suburb of Damascus Monday, killing at least 13 people including eight children as the government ramped up its operations against the opposition strongholds ringing the capital, activists said.

Government forces have used warplanes and multiple rocket launchers over the past 24 hours in what activists described as some of the heaviest barrages of the Damascus region since President Bashar Assad's regime launched an offensive in November to dislodge rebels from the capital's outskirts.

The air raid struck a home with residents inside early Monday in the southern suburb of Moadamiyeh, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human rights and other activists said. Neighbors pulled the 13 bodies from the rubble, the Observatory said, adding that at least seven more people remained trapped.

Syrian state media refuted that account, and blamed rebels for the deaths in Moadamiyeh. The official SANA news agency said "terrorists" fired a shell at the neighborhood from nearby Daraya, hitting a residential building and causing casualties. The government refers to the rebels as terrorists.

President Barack Obama heads into his second term weighed down by an American government snarled in partisan gridlock, but also by an unproductive relationship with the leader of Israel, the bedrock U.S. ally in the tumultuous Middle East.

And the puzzle that is the U.S.-Israeli relationship under Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is only growing more complex.

"It's troubled. It's the greatest dysfunction between leaders that I've seen in my 40 years in watching and participating," said Aaron David Miller, a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center who served under six secretaries of state in both Republican and Democratic administrations. He was deeply involved in negotiations involving Israel, Jordan, Syria and the Palestinians.

"I don't think we are headed for a showdown," he said, "but the relationship will continue to be dysfunctional."

Six former officials of the scandal-ridden city of Bell go on trial this week in a massive corruption case that nearly bankrupted the Los Angeles suburb.

The former mayor and vice mayor and four former City Council members are charged with misappropriation of public funds in a 20-count felony complaint.

Prosecutors claim they looted the city's treasury in order to pay themselves exorbitant salaries. The complaint says sham commissions were created to enrich the defendants.

Two major figures in the scam are not part of this trial. Former City Manager Robert Rizzo and Assistant City Manager Angela Spaccia are scheduled to be tried separately. They have been accused of making millions while hiking taxes and fees for residents in the modest, blue-collar suburb where many live in poverty.

Jury selection begins Tuesday and the trial is scheduled to last seven weeks. Key witnesses are expected to be former city employees and officials who discovered the shady dealings and were granted immunity from prosecution for their testimony.

The following documentary provides compelling evidence of deep and disturbing connections between intelligence agencies, abusive cults, and the failure of government anti-cult organizations like MIVILUDES to investigate the widespread reports of ritual child abuse around the world.

Just as the 'war on terrorism' - conducted by the biggest perpetrators of terrorism - has been used to justify the removal of our civil liberties, governments around the world are clamping down on alternative lifestyle choices - irrespective of whether or not they are actually beneficial choices - under the guise of protecting people from 'cultic deviances'. Meanwhile they have consistently covered up, whether at local or national levels, the most horrific sex crimes, including what can only be described as satanic ritual abuse and truly cultic deviance, committed against children as young as new-born infants by what are clearly organised, powerful and ruthless individuals.

NOTE: This video contains information that many viewers will find extremely disturbing, involving the ritual abuse of children.

Melissa Harris-Perry and her guests on Sunday discussed whether the best answer to gun violence is ending the "War on Drugs."

About 800 people die every year as a result of gang violence, Harris-Perry said, "a large percentage of which are connected to drug trafficking."

When it comes to gun violence, "maybe ending the War on Drugs is the best gun control measure we can enact," as many violent gangs would no longer have a lucrative business in prohibited substances.

Michael Skolnik, political advisor for Russell Simmons, claims that President Obama has "taken steps" to end the drug war.

Iran claims its capability to defend itself is growing and the Islamic republic is "prepared for any threat". The statement follows tests of "modern warfare" capabilities and exercises to hone battle tactics in the strategic Strait of Hormuz.

The naval force of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which is in charge of maintaining security in the Persian Gulf area, held exercises near the port city of Bandar Abbas, which holds a strategic position on the Strait of Hormuz. The main aim was to boost its forces combat readiness, familiarize them with the latest drills, and increase their response time.

The drills also tested well-timed responses to natural and manmade disasters, and allowed IRGC forces to operate new weapons, Iranian Press TV reported.

"Our present capabilities are incomparable to the past. Today, our youth, banking on the past experiences and modern science, have managed to show their capabilities to the world and be prepared for any threat," IRGC Navy Commander Rear-Admiral Reza Torabi was quoted as saying.

Earlier this week we reported a victory for anti-GMO activists when it was announced that Poland banned GM crops under new legislation.

The North-Eastern European country, Poland, has become the latest EU nation to ban the production of genetically modified (GM) crops, although, the European Food Safety Authority has approved GM crops as being safe for cultivation. Poland's Ministry of Agriculture has opted to take advantage of a special 'safeguard clause' which allowed them to reject these GM crops, allowing Poland to protect their agricultural base from contamination. (Waking Times)

Unfortunately, however, in what appears to be a classic political deception, this recent news is, sadly, just not true.

Many of the most notable events in modern (and even ancient) history have provoked some form of 'conspiracy theory'. That is to say, ordinary people were not satisfied with the official story about how the event unfolded because all or some aspects of that story simply did not objectively make sense. Despite what the mainstream media would like us to believe about 'conspiracy theories', most conspiracy theories are based on objective problems with the official narrative. But note that I said 'based on'. The problem with conspiracy theories is that, while they usually reflect a more accurate overview of a major event, they are forced to rely on theory (due to deliberate with-holding of data by official sources) rather than hard evidence (which would disqualify them as theories) and are therefore open to abuse by people who tend to use their imaginations to complete the picture rather than the more critical functions of the human mind.

Compared to other similar events where many people found the official story implausible, the Sandy Hook massacre has provoked a veritable flood of conspiracy theories, and many of them are not based on any hard evidence.

A large majority of the alternative news pundits that have attempted to independently investigate the Sandy Hook massacre have engaged in some seriously irresponsible and shoddy journalism. Among the more outlandish and baseless theories, we find the claim that "actors" took the place of the parents and siblings of the Sandy Hook victims, and that no children were murdered at all because, the theory goes, if they were, "why haven't we seen any bodies?" I've already exposed the logical fallacies in a few of these theories elsewhere, but there is one theory that still refuses to go away, perhaps because it is slightly less obviously bogus, and many people are still touting it as the single fact that "busts open" the official story as a "hoax".

The theory in question is that a man named Christopher Rodia was the REAL owner of the black Honda Civic, which has been identified as the car of Adam Lanza's mother that was found outside the Sandy Hook elementary school. The basis for this erroneous belief, still held by many, is police scanner audio that was picked up from the morning of Dec. 14th and which details Connecticut State Police response to the massacre.

Forget knocking on doors. The "Grandma Brigade" in Minnesota gathers public info about other voters.

In Minnesota, Democratic volunteers scour their local newspapers each morning for letters to the editor with a political slant. They pay attention to the names of callers on radio shows. They drive through their neighborhoods and jot down the addresses of campaign lawn signs.

Then they feed the information into a state Democratic Party database that includes nearly every voter in Minnesota.

Some of the states' few dozen data volunteers are so devoted that they log into the party database daily from their home computers. Deb Pitzrick, 61, of Eden Prairie, convinced a group of her friends to form the "Grandma Brigade." These women, in their 50s, 60s and 70s, no longer want to knock on doors for the Democrats. Instead, they support the party by gathering public information about other voters.

Much of the data the Grandma Brigade collects is prosaic: records of campaign donations or voters who have recently died. But a few volunteers see free information everywhere. They browse the listings of names on Tea Party websites. They might add a record of what was said around the family Thanksgiving table - Uncle Mitch voted for Bachmann, cousin Alice supports gay marriage.