Des Moines, Iowa - Midwest ranchers have never been enamored with environmental regulators, but they really began to complain after learning that federal inspectors were flying over their land to look for problems.

The Environmental Protection Agency flies over power plants and other facilities nationwide to identify potential air, water and land pollution. It began using aerial surveillance in the Midwest in 2010 to check farms for violations of federal clean water regulations.

Ranchers who object to the program said they're not trying to hide anything. It's the quiet approach the EPA took with the program designed to spot illegal disposal of animal waste that they find upsetting. Most were not even aware of the flyovers until regional EPA officials mentioned it at a meeting three months ago.

"For me, it just creeps into the 'Big Brother is watching you' area, to where the government just feels like it's getting more and more intrusive," said Buck Wehrbein, who manages a cattle feeding operation in Mead, Neb., about 30 miles west of Omaha.

EPA officials explained during a meeting with ranchers in West Point, Neb., that they lease small planes that fly EPA staffers over cattle operations. The staffers take photographs as they seek evidence of illegal animal waste running off into rivers and streams.

It was a scene that riveted the world for weeks: The ailing Yasser Arafat, first besieged by Israeli tanks in his Ramallah compound, then shuttled to Paris, where he spent his final days undergoing a barrage of medical tests in a French military hospital.

Eight years after his death, it remains a mystery exactly what killed the longtime Palestinian leader. Tests conducted in Paris found no obvious traces of poison in Arafat's system. Rumors abound about what might have killed him - cancer, cirrhosis of the liver, even allegations that he was infected with HIV.

A nine-month investigation by Al Jazeera has revealed that none of those rumors were true: Arafat was in good health until he suddenly fell ill on October 12, 2004.

More importantly, tests reveal that Arafat's final personal belongings - his clothes, his toothbrush, even his iconic kaffiyeh - contained abnormal levels of polonium, a rare, highly radioactive element. Those personal effects, which were analyzed at the Institut de Radiophysique in Lausanne, Switzerland, were variously stained with Arafat's blood, sweat, saliva and urine. The tests carried out on those samples suggested that there was a high level of polonium inside his body when he died.

If you went out and took a poll of the American people on July 4th (Independence Day) and asked them if they are free, what would the results look like? Of course the results would be overwhelmingly lopsided. Most Americans believe that they live in "the land of the free" and that they are not enslaved to anyone. But is that really the case?

Slavery does not always have to involve whips and shackles. There are many other forms of slavery. One dictionary definition of a slave is "one that is completely subservient to a dominating influence". I really like that definition. Today, millions of Americans are slaves of the system and they don't even realize it.

Debt is a form of slavery, and millions of Americans having become deeply enslaved to our debt-based financial system. When someone enslaves someone else, the goal of the master is to reap a benefit out of the slave. You don't want the slave to just sit there and collect dust.

Today, most Americans have willingly shackled themselves to a system that systematically drains their wealth and transfers it to the very wealthy. Most of them don't even realize that they have been enslaved even as the system sucks them dry.

Just think about it. Where is the "big money" in the United States today?

When asked that question, most Americans think of Wall Street.

Well, who controls Wall Street?

The bankers do.

The borrower is the servant of the lender, and they generate massive amounts of wealth by lending us money.

Perhaps an example will be helpful.

Have you ever run up $5000 of credit card debt? Many people have run up much, much more than that, but let us use $5000 for our example.

According to the Federal Reserve, if you only make the minimum payment every month, at a 20% interest rate it will take you 49 years to pay that credit card off and you will pay back a total of $26,169.

So you would have gotten the original benefit of spending the $5000 and you would have had to work extremely hard to pay back an additional $21,169 to the bankers.

In essence, you would be working as a servant of the bankers until you had paid back that entire debt plus interest.

Unfortunately, our entire system is now designed to get you to go into debt.

Traces of the poisonous element polonium have been found in the belongings of late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, a Swiss institute said on Wednesday, and a television report said his widow had demanded his body be exhumed for further tests.

Arafat died at a hospital in France in 2004, after a sudden illness which baffled doctors. Many Palestinians have long suspected he was poisoned.

Darcy Christen, spokesman for the Institut de Radiophysique in Lausanne, Switzerland, told Reuters on Tuesday it had found "surprisingly" high levels of polonium-210 in Arafat's belongings.

But he stressed that clinical symptoms described in Arafat's medical reports were not consistent with polonium-210 and that conclusions could not be drawn as to whether the Palestinian leader was poisoned or not.

The Qatar-based Al Jazeera satellite channel said the institute had tested Arafat's personal effects, given them by his widow.

Are you suspicious of federal authority? How about really into individual liberty? Well according to a new study funded by the US Department of Homeland Security, you very well might be a terrorist.

A report published earlier this year by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland has surfaced, and in their DHS-funded findings, Americans "reverent of individual liberty" and others adamant about protecting their personal freedoms are categorized as extreme right-wing terrorists.

In the paper, Hot Spots of Terrorism and Other Crimes in the United States, 1970-2008, researchers used definitions from another START study, 2011's Profiles of Perpetrators of Terrorism, to characterize what traits should be considered when describing right-wing terrorists. Both papers were funded with grants from the US Department of Homeland Security provided to START.

Although the authors of the paper note that the study's findings do not necessarily represent the opinions of START of the DHS, the website PrisonPlanet.com notes that the organization was started with the aid of $12 million of Homeland Security funds. The latest report is described by its authors as the latest part in a series of studies sponsored by the Human Factors/Behavioral Sciences Division, Science and Technology Directorate and the US Department of Homeland Security in support of the Counter-IED Prevent/Deter program.

Ontario's police watchdog has cleared a Toronto police officer who says he punched an Occupy Toronto protester in the face during an arrest.

The Special Investigations Unit says it's unclear whether the force was "excessive," when considering the level at which Angela Turvey was resisting arrest.

The SIU says Ms. Turvey, 37, had a broken nose, a black eye and required seven stitches above her right eye, but it wasn't clear whether the injuries were from the punch or her head hitting the ground during arrest.

Israel has crowned Miss Holocaust 2012. Her name? Hava Hershkovitz. Hundreds of survivors in their 70s, 80s and 90s took part in the event in Haifa, held "to celebrate life and survival."

Walmart's explosive growth has gutted two key pillars of the American middle class: small businesses and well-paid manufacturing jobs

Sam Walton opened the first Walmart store in Rogers, Arkansas, 50 years ago this month. Sprawled along a major thoroughfare outside the city's downtown, that inaugural store embodied many of the hallmarks that have since come to define the Walmart way of doing business. Walton scoured the country for the cheapest merchandise and deftly exploited a loophole in federal law to pay his mostly female workforce less than minimum wage.

That relentless focus on squeezing workers and suppliers for every advantage has paid off since July 1962. Walmart is now the second-largest corporation on the planet. It took in almost half-a-trillion dollars last year at more than 10,000 stores worldwide.

Walmart now captures one of every four dollars Americans spend on groceries. Its stores are so plentiful that it's easy to imagine that the retailer has long since reached the upper limit of its growth potential. It hasn't. Walmart has opened over 1,100 new supercenters since 2005 and expanded its U.S. sales by 35 percent. It aims to keep on growing that fast. With an eye to infiltrating urban areas, Walmart recently introduced smaller "neighborhood markets" and "express" stores.

Yasser Arafat, Palestinian leader and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, died mysteriously on November 11, 2004.

Now, a nine-month investigation by Al Jazeera revealed Tuesday that Arafat was in good health until he suddenly fell ill on October 12, 2004.

[...] tests reveal that Arafat's final personal belongings - his clothes, his toothbrush, even his iconic kaffiyeh - contained abnormal levels of polonium, a rare, highly radioactive element. Those personal effects, which were analyzed at the Institut de Radiophysique in Lausanne, Switzerland, were variously stained with Arafat's blood, sweat, saliva and urine. The tests carried out on those samples suggested that there was a high level of polonium inside his body when he died.

"I can confirm to you that we measured an unexplained, elevated amount of unsupported polonium-210 in the belongings of Mr. Arafat that contained stains of biological fluids," said Dr. Francois Bochud, the director of the institute.

Studying inequality in America reveals some facts that are truly hard to believe. Amidst all the absurdity a few stand out.

1. U.S. companies in total pay a smaller percentage of taxes than the lowest-income 20% of Americans.

Total corporate profits for 2011 were $1.97 trillion. Corporations paid $181 billion in federal taxes (9%) and $40 billion in state taxes (2%), for a total tax burden of 11%. The poorest 20% of American citizens pay 17.4% in federal, state, and local taxes.

2. The high-profit, tax-avoiding tech industry was built on publicly-funded research.

The technology sector has been more dependent on government research and development than any other industry. The U.S. government provided about half of the funding for basic research in technology and communications well into the 1980s. Even today, federal grants support about 60 percent of research performed at universities.

IBM was founded in 1911, Hewlett-Packard in 1947, Intel in 1968, Microsoft in 1975, Apple and Oracle in 1977, Cisco in 1984. All relied on government and military innovations. The more recently incorporated Google, which started in 1996, grew out of the Defense Department's ARPANET system and the National Science Foundation's Digital Library Initiative.

The combined 2011 federal tax payment for the eight companies was just 10.6%.