The death toll has risen to 464 after four days of clashes between Christians and Muslims in the central Nigerian city of Jos.

"We found more than 200 bodies gathered at the mosque in Kuru Gada Biu and 22 more at Mai Adiko," said a senior mosque official, Muhammad Tanko Shittu.

Residents of Jos claim that the clashes were ignited over the reconstruction of a mosque in a Christian neighborhood of the Nassarawa Gwom city, according to Reuters.

The Nigerian government has imposed a 24-hour curfew to control the riots, but sporadic gunfire can still be heard throughout the night. Additional troops have been deployed to Jos to maintain order.

As much as the U.S. government has touted its love of democracy, the affection often has been conditional, based not on the will of a nation's population but on the elected leader's acceptance of American economic and political dictates.

No place has that been more true than in Haiti where American-favored dictators like the Duvaliers were long tolerated while popularly chosen leaders, such as Jean-Bertrand Aristide, found American officials siding with anti-democratic thugs, as David Swanson notes regarding the 2004 coup.

1. "Asymmetrical Warfare"

When President Barack Obama took office last year, he promised to "restore the standards of due process and the core constitutional values that have made this country great." Toward that end, the president issued an executive order declaring that the extra-constitutional prison camp at Guantánamo "shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than one year from the date of this order." Obama has failed to fulfill his promise. Some prisoners are being charged with crimes, others released, but the date for closing the camp seems to recede steadily into the future. Furthermore, new evidence now emerging may entangle Obama's young administration with crimes that occurred during the Bush presidency, evidence that suggests the current administration failed to investigate seriously - and may even have continued - a cover-up of the possible homicides of three prisoners at Guantánamo in 2006.

Late in the evening on June 9 that year, three prisoners at Guantánamo died suddenly and violently. Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, from Yemen, was thirty-seven. Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, from Saudi Arabia, was thirty. Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, also from Saudi Arabia, was twenty-two, and had been imprisoned at Guantánamo since he was captured at the age of seventeen. None of the men had been charged with a crime, though all three had been engaged in hunger strikes to protest the conditions of their imprisonment. They were being held in a cell block, known as Alpha Block, reserved for particularly troublesome or high-value prisoners.

As news of the deaths emerged the following day, the camp quickly went into lockdown. The authorities ordered nearly all the reporters at Guantánamo to leave and those en route to turn back. The commander at Guantánamo, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, then declared the deaths "suicides." In an unusual move, he also used the announcement to attack the dead men. "I believe this was not an act of desperation," he said, "but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us." Reporters accepted the official account, and even lawyers for the prisoners appeared to believe that they had killed themselves. Only the prisoners' families in Saudi Arabia and Yemen rejected the notion.

Ahead of an Israeli-German cabinet meeting in Berlin, media reports indicate that Israel intends to station one of its German-made Dolphin submarines in the waters of the Persian Gulf.

"Israel's use of the dolphin submarine in exercises in the Red Sea aroused fears that Israel may seek to maintain a continued presence in the Persian Gulf as soon as it receives its submarines form Germany in 2011-2012," the Tagesspiegel said on Sunday.

The meeting, delayed in November due to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's illness, is expected to focus on Israel's push to buy a sixth Dolphin-class nuclear submarine from the Germans.

During the day-long trip by the centre-right government, Netanyahu seeks to expand Tel Aviv's submarine fleet.

Israel has previously received three submarines as a donation form the government of the then German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.

In a series of articles, Israeli writer Barry Chamish reviews Israeli television's 2004 expose of the deliberate mass radiation poisoning of 100,000 young Israeli immigrants from North African and Middle Eastern countries (Sephardim) with a screening of the award winning 2003 documentary film, The Ringworm Children.

The story goes like this: With vast evidence from Nazi experiments in the concentration camps and the atomic bombing of Japan, the scientific community was well aware by 1951 of the short and long-term dangers of radiation, especially on children. The American government had banned forced radiation testing based on eugenics on humans prisoners, the mentally feeble, etc., but wanted human lab rats for its nuclear and other programs.

In 1951, the director general of the Israeli Health Ministry, Dr. Chaim Sheba, flew to America and agreed, on behalf of the Israeli government, to supply the humans in exchange for money and nuclear secrets. Dr. Sheba returned to Israel with 7 x-ray machines, supplied to him by the American army.

President Barack Obama pledged $100 million for Haiti quake relief on Thursday and enlisted two former U.S. presidents to help raise more, vowing to the Haitian people: "You will not be forsaken.", Reuters reported.

Determined to stay on top of the rapidly unfolding humanitarian crisis in the quake zone, Obama told his top aides that responding to the tragedy should be their top priority.

Obama, facing his biggest test of international relief since taking office a year ago, promised an initial U.S. contribution of $100 million and said he had directed his administration to launch "a swift, coordinated and aggressive effort to save lives and support recovery in Haiti."

Fresh from revelations, reported by WMR, that Israel's Mossad and Chabad House-based criminal syndicates were targets in a criminal gangland retribution attack by a notorious Muslim gang in Mumbai, comes word that Mossad has, once again, been implicated in an intelligence and criminal network, this time in Turkey.

What makes this latest example of Israel's failure to stem the criminal activities of its intelligence service and criminal syndicates worse is that Turkey, unlike Israel, is a NATO ally of the United States and, therefore, the United States is bound by treaty to protect NATO allies from aggression by non-NATO states, including Israel.

China has started scanning text messages for inappropriate content representing the latest move in the country's increasing censorship.

Customers of China's two largest mobile phone networks, China Mobile and China Unicom, have had their text-messaging service blocked after sending risqué texts, according to the state media.

It comes as the country is embroiled in a row with Google over cyber attacks. On Tuesday the internet giant, said it may quit China because of concerns about the country's recent increase in censorship.

The Global Times, a government-run newspaper, said "everyone seems to be under watch". Last year, the government vowed to suppress pornography on the internet and has now extended its campaign to mobile phones.

China Mobile is the world's biggest mobile phone company, with over 508 million customers. Its network handles 1.7 billion text messages a day.

It's one thing to counterfeit a twenty or hundred dollar bill. The amount of financial damage is usually limited to a specific region and only affects dozens of people and thousands of dollars. Secret Service agents quickly notify the banks on how to recognize these phony bills and retail outlets usually have procedures in place (such as special pens to test the paper) to stop their proliferation.

But what about gold? This is the most sacred of all commodities because it is thought to be the most trusted, reliable and valuable means of saving wealth.

A recent discovery - in October of 2009 - has been suppressed by the main stream media but has been circulating among the "big money" brokers and financial kingpins and is just now being revealed to the public. It involves the gold in Fort Knox - the US Treasury gold - that is the equity of our national wealth. In short, millions (with an "m") of gold bars are fake!

Who did this? Apparently our own government.

Background: In October of 2009 the Chinese received a shipment of gold bars. Gold is regularly exchanges between countries to pay debts and to settle the so-called balance of trade. Most gold is exchanged and stored in vaults under the supervision of a special organization based in London, the London Bullion Market Association (or LBMA). When the shipment was received, the Chinese government asked that special tests be performed to guarantee the purity and weight of the gold bars. In this test, four small holed are drilled into the gold bars and the metal is then analyzed.

The Underwear Bomber case indicates that whoever is behind these bomb scares is laughing at our gullibility.

How realistic is it that al-Qaida, an organization that allegedly pulled off the most fantastic terror attack in world history, would in these days of heightened security choose for an attack on an airliner a person who is the most conspicuous of all? Umar Farouk Mutallab had a one-way ticket, no luggage, no passport, and his father, reportedly a CIA and Mossad asset, had reported him to the CIA and Mossad. Does anyone really believe that al-Qaida would choose as an airliner bomber a person waving every red flag imaginable?

This obvious question has escaped the U.S. media, a collection of salespersons marketing full body scanning machines for airports.

Would al-Qaida, with its extensive knowledge of explosives, have armed Umar with a "bomb" that experts say couldn't have blown up his own seat?