The British House of Commons will sit for just 142 days this year, that's 223 days off. During their time away from the parliament MPs claim they are working hard in their constituencies but this is not always the case.

MPs have just started a 19 day early summer holiday, right after they had an 18 day Easter break, RT's Sara Firth reports. They'll then sit for seven weeks before a six week fully paid summer holiday. And if that's not enough they get a month off in the autumn for party conferences.

As vote-counting got underway following recent national elections in Iraq last week, a string of bomb explosions occurred in Baghdad on Thursday May 16th, killing at least 30 people and wounding many more.

At least one of the bombs was placed in what authorities described as "an explosives-laden car left in a parking lot in Karrada, a busy commercial area where several government departments are located.

The second bomb, detonated just seconds later - was supposedly the work of a suicide bomber with an explosives belt, who blew himself up outside the offices of Iraq's Higher Education Ministry.

Later that evening another car bomb near an outdoor market in Baghdad's Sadr City killed another eight people and wounded 17.

Meanwhile in Youssifiyah, south of Baghdad, 'unknown gunmen' stormed the home of a Sunni militant who had taken up arms against 'al Qaeda', and killed him along with his entire family.

The following day, Friday 17 May, a bomb exploded at an outdoor market in North Baghdad, killing five shoppers and wounding 14 others, all civilians. The Voice of Russia reports that already this year, 3,500 people have been killed.

Yasser Al-Zahrani was twenty-one years-old when he died at Guantanamo Bay. The US military claims he, along with two other prisoners, committed suicide in their cells. However, a new document uncovered by journalist Scott Horton and published by Harper's Magazine strongly suggests that they were killed at a CIA black site prison.

The Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) investigated the deaths of Al-Zahrani, Ali Abdulla Ahmed, and Mana Shaman Allabard al Tabi. They concluded that they had died on June 10, 2006, after taking their own lives by making a rope out of bed sheets and T-shirts and hanging themselves.

Both Ahmed and Allabard were allegedly declared to be dead immediately when their bodies were discovered. Al-Zahrani, on the other hand, was transported to the Naval Hospital at Guantanamo and then pronounced dead later.

Horton uncovered a document, Exhibit 25, which was missing from the NCIS report on the "suicides" released in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. It features statements from Master-at-Arms Denny, a member of the escort team who helped transfer the three detainees to the hospital.

I think that we can all agree that the situation in the Ukraine is one of total chaos.

• Renat Akhmetov, the local oligarch-mobster, had declared that his companies will go on a "warning strike" for 3 hours per day because Akhmetov was angered that the authorities of the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) had taken over the control of the railways which resulted in losses for his company.
• One of the officials of the DRP reacted to Akhmetov's threat by declaring that the DRP authorities have begun the process of nationalization of the companies located on the territory of the DRP, in other words, Akhmetov's holdings.
• The military forces of the neo-Nazi junta have begun shelling several cities in eastern Ukraine, destroying several buildings
• The military commander of the DRP forces, Igor Strelkov, has made a poignant and blunt appeal for a much bigger mobilization of men, especially officers, in the volunteer forces defending the DRP against the junta's military.
• Ukrainian death-squads have, yet again, kidnapped a team of Russian reporters, this time of the TV station LifeNews, accusing them of being the "information-component" of a terrorist movement.
• The Russian government has indicated that the military forces, which had been on maneuvers, have returned to their bases. NATO denied that.
• The Russian military has completed the building of a network of pipelines which are now fully supplying Crimea with fresh water.
• The leader of the Ukie Nazis, Yarosh, has announced that if he is elected he would launc a guerrilla war in Crimea.

So, what is really going on?

I think that while it is premature to make grand conclusions and predictions, we can begin by agreeing on a number of basic facts.

Is a new Cold War looming? It seems so. This shouldn't be happening, but it is.

The confusion that followed the end of the old Cold War is one reason why.

That confusion has been a problem for the anti-imperialist left. While the Cold War was on, there was seldom any need to fall back on principles. Then it was easy for right thinking, well-informed people to side with insurgencies fighting imperial domination; that was what common decency required.

This has not been the case in recent years.

The empire's stewards in the Obama administration and in the military-national security state complex are taking full advantage. So are ostensibly independent NGOs.

It is a risky business - made all the riskier by the cluelessness of the principals. On Team Obama, they know not what they do.

At the Fourth Summit of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CICA) that opens May 20 in Shanghai, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani will meet with both Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Among other things, the summit will underscore how rising non-Western powers are playing ever more prominent roles on the global stage. However, Western elites remain stuck in a time warp, wherein the United States and its European partners are the imperial masters of all they survey.

In this regard, it is an interesting coincidence how mainstream Western media outlets consistently produce narratives that are almost indistinguishable from official government statements regarding countries and leaders with dissimilar worldviews from their Western counterparts. For instance, we repeatedly hear about the democratically elected "dictators" in Venezuela, yet we are assured that friendly dictators are "moderate reformers".

Just imagine if the democratically-elected government of Canada had been toppled in a Russian-financed coup, in which far-right extremists and neo-Nazis played a prominent role.

That the new unelected 'government' in Ottawa cancelled the law giving the French language official status, appointed a billionaire oligarch to run Quebec and signed an association agreement with a Russian-led trade bloc.

Just imagine...

If Russia had spent $5 billion on regime change in Canada and then a leading Canadian energy firm had appointed to its board of directors the son of a top Russian government politician.

Just imagine...

If the Syrian government had hosted a meeting in Damascus of the 'Friends of Britain'- a group of countries who supported the violent overthrow of David Cameron's government.

That the Syrian government and its allies gave the anti-government 'rebels' in Britain millions of pounds and other support, and failed to condemn 'rebel' groups when they killed British civilians and bombed schools, hospitals and universities.

That the Syrian Foreign Minister dismissed next year's scheduled general election in the UK as a 'parody of democracy' and said that Cameron must stand down before any elections are held.

Hear my presentation at the very first Hip Hop Summit before Hip Hop got sold out and taken over: If you think COINTELPRO is over, think again. It's on steroids now!! Here's John Potash on the assassination of Tupac Shakur. I had already found evidence of his surveillance, Potash found more! All to keep Hip Hop artists from becoming political and to degenerate into what we see now. -Cynthia McKinney

Egyptian authorities move him from prison cell

Jailed Al-Jazeera journalist Abdullah el-Shamy, who has been on hunger strike in Egypt for more than 100 days, is near to death according to his doctor.

"He has started to have impaired liver and kidney function," said the doctor, Mohamed Osama el-Homsi. "It means that his organs are in danger."

He has lost a third of his body weight. El-Homsi said El-Shamy's condition was life-threatening and he could "die within a few days".

He was moved from his cell in Tora prison to an undisclosed location after his lawyer, Shaaban Saeed, asked the authorities to transfer him to hospital.

Make no mistake: it's been the year of Edward Snowden. Not since Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War has a trove of documents revealing the inner workings and thinking of the U.S. government so changed the conversation. In Ellsberg's case, that conversation was transformed only in the United States. Snowden has changed it worldwide. From six-year-olds to Angela Merkel, who hasn't been thinking about the staggering ambitions of the National Security Agency, about its urge to create the first global security state in history and so step beyond even the most fervid dreams of the totalitarian regimes of the last century? And who hasn't been struck by how close the agency has actually come to sweeping up the communications of the whole planet? Technologically speaking, what Snowden revealed to the world -- thanks to journalist Glenn Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras -- was a remarkable accomplishment, as well as a nightmare directly out of some dystopian novel.

From exploiting backdoors into the Internet's critical infrastructure and close relationships with the planet's largest tech companies to performing economic espionage and sending spy avatars into video games, the NSA has been relentless in its search for complete global omniscience, even if that is by no means the same thing as omnipotence. It now has the ability to be a hidden part of just about any conversation just about anywhere. Of course, we don't yet know the half of it, since no Edward Snowden has yet stepped forward from the inner precincts of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the CIA, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, or other such outfits in the "U.S. intelligence community." Still, what we do know should take our collective breath away. And we know it all thanks to one young man, hounded across the planet by the U.S. government in an "international manhunt."