U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced on Thursday that the current color-coded terror alert system will be replaced with a new two- tiered system.

"Today I announce the end of the old system of color-coded alerts. In its place, we will implement a new system that is built on a clear and simple premise," Napolitano said during a speech at George Washington University in Washington, D.C..

"When a threat develops that could impact you -- the public -- we will tell you. We will provide whatever information we can so you know how to protect yourselves, your families, and your communities," she said.

The current terror alert system, which uses five colors to represent different levels of terrorist threat, was created in March 2002 by then president George W. Bush, but was widely criticized as being confusing and too vague.

Under the new system, there will be two levels of threat -- " imminent threat" and "elevated threat," Napolitano said.

Israeli soldiers tell Channel 4 News they were ordered to "cleanse" Palestinian neighbourhoods, as filmmaker Nurit Kedar says "the atmosphere was that nobody should talk about this war".

I find it ironic that the media, the British government, and leaders in medical academia jumped on board attacking and destroying Dr. Andrew Wakefield's reputation based on "fraud" charges related to a study he conducted about the link between the measles vaccine and autism.

It is ironic for a number of reasons. How can the British government, itself drowning in deception at every level, dare accuse anyone of fraud?

The panel assembled by the government and academia to judge Wakefield, ironically, dares to speak of fraud, yet their main complaint is that his findings "might endanger the 'sacrosanct' vaccine program," not that his principal findings were wrong. In fact, several independent researchers found the same measles vaccine-related colitis that he described.

A recently released charge by the BMJ editors is that Wakefield was poised to get huge profits from a product stemming from his research results. I am not here to defend Wakefield, rather, I demonstrate the double standard regularly practiced by his vocal critics.

Virtually every paper published on drugs, such as statins, is authored by individuals having financial links to as many as three to four pharmaceutical companies each. The same is true of papers published by major journals extolling vaccine efficacy and safety. They know these papers violate every ethical principle known, yet they are published in some of the most prestigious journals.

Abundant evidence has shown that these very same people destroy the reputations of anyone producing evidence, no matter how well researched and of the highest ethical standards, if it in any way endangers this vaccine program. It is ironic that these accusers speak of "blatant fraud," when virtually all of the vaccine safety evidence they use abundantly is fraudulent by careful design.

"The policy set for GE alfalfa will most likely guide policies for other GE crops as well. True coexistence is a must." - Whole Foods Market, Jan. 21, 2011

In the wake of a 12-year battle to keep Monsanto's Genetically Engineered (GE) crops from contaminating the nation's 25,000 organic farms and ranches, America's organic consumers and producers are facing betrayal. A self-appointed cabal of the Organic Elite, spearheaded by Whole Foods Market, Organic Valley, and Stonyfield Farm, has decided it's time to surrender to Monsanto. Top executives from these companies have publicly admitted that they no longer oppose the mass commercialization of GE crops, such as Monsanto's controversial Roundup Ready alfalfa, and are prepared to sit down and cut a deal for "coexistence" with Monsanto and USDA biotech cheerleader Tom Vilsack.

With Comcast's takeover of NBC, the era of the mega-mega-merger is upon us.

For more than a century, American law has recognized the destructive power of corporate monopolies. When one company controls an entire resource, means of production, or delivery system for products, it gets an unfair advantage over competitors. It can overcharge them out of existence or drive them into bankruptcy. Since Teddy Roosevelt's presidency, our government has tried to ensure that monopolistic business practices don't destroy fair pricing and consumer choice.

Then how can it justify the merger of Comcast and NBC Universal, which the Federal Communications Commission approved on January 18? The FCC is supposed to reject any media merger that doesn't advance the public interest. But Comcast's takeover of NBC will give one mega-corporation control of too much of what we watch and how we watch it.

If one were to judge by the amount of media attention and press recently the BP blowout at the Macondo site in the Gulf of Mexico nine months ago is a wrap. The report given to President Obama from the National Oil Spill Commission, which was completed on a very tight timeline, provides an overview of the spill and recommendations for ensuring such an incident does not happen again in the future. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, the report did not include or consider a sufficient amount of independent data regarding the short- and long-term impacts of the spill on the ecosystems, marine life, and human health. Independent studies on all aspects of the spill have been hampered by both a lack of funding and the withholding of critical data from researchers by government agencies and BP. Even as the report was released and commissioners holding forums and press briefings along the Gulf Coast, record amounts of crude continue to roll in with the tides. On Thursday, January 13, a record 17,000 lbs of crude was collected from the surf on one small section of beach in the Ft. Morgan area of Alabama.

From Louisiana to Florida, cleanup workers, ordinary citizens, and tourists have been sickened by exposure to the toxic crude and dispersants. In the areas where people live near or are surrounded by the Gulf waters, documented cases of sickness consistent with chemical poisoning related to crude and dispersants continue to increase; specifically southern Louisiana, the Ocean Springs area of Mississippi, and the Gulf Shores/Orange Beach resorts cities of Alabama. Despite medical tests showing high levels of chemical poisoning and physicians reports confirming widespread illnesses, the mainstream media has given only passing coverage to the health issues. The National Oil Spill Commission in its final report to the president likewise gives the health impacts only a passing mention despite the fact that it was a top-tier issue at every public forum the Commission held as Commissioner Frances Beinecke noted recently in New Orleans.

During the 1950's the CIA and military conducted experiments on US soldiers in order to control their behavior and create Manchurian candidates. A group of the veterans are suing the CIA and the military over allegedly implanting remote control devices in their brains. The lawyer for the victims, Gordon P. Erspamer, says the CIA and military has barely cooperated with the case and they claim executive privilege and top secret classification in order to avoid discovery.

Boise, Idaho - Republican lawmakers in nearly a dozen states are reaching into the dusty annals of American history to fight President Obama's health care overhaul.

They are introducing measures that hinge on "nullification," Thomas Jefferson's late 18th-century doctrine that purported to give states the ultimate say in constitutional matters.

GOP lawmakers introduced such a measure Wednesday in the Idaho House, and Alabama, Kansas, Maine, Missouri, Montana, Oregon, Nebraska, Texas and Wyoming are also talking about the idea.

The efforts are completely unconstitutional in the eyes of most legal scholars because the U.S. Constitution deems federal laws "the supreme law of the land." The Idaho attorney general has weighed in as well, branding nullification unconstitutional.

President Obama's announcement on Tuesday that "this is our generation's Sputnik moment" came across as puzzling. Had al Qaeda sent a suicide bomber into space? But it turned out to be just a clumsy metaphor. The first Sputnik launch in October 1957 is a now distant event that no longer arouses passion. It would be as if someone described the Watergate scandal as that generation's Teapot Dome.

Nothing has happened recently that could be roughly analogous to Sputnik. The launch drew its shock value from the context of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was America's bitter adversary. It had been less than a year since Nikita Khrushchev had said, "Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you." In the 1950s the U.S. missile program suffered a series of high-profile failures and seemed to be failing. The Soviet program had its disasters too, but they were hushed up, so the success of Sputnik seemed to come out of nowhere. It seemed to confirm that their German scientists were far ahead of our German scientists.

The sense of national purpose that followed the Sputnik launch was not based on an abstract sense of the need for better education programs; it was a national security emergency. In those days lagging behind in the technology race could literally be fatal. Mr. Obama has failed to conjure the same sense of looming disaster, excepting the national state of alarm over his irresponsible deficit spending.

Mr. Obama said that the country needs to "reach a level of research and development we haven't seen since the height of the Space Race." In that respect one would think that the president would have invoked John F. Kennedy's May 25, 1961 "Special message to the Congress on urgent national needs," also known as the "Man on the Moon" speech, which was also delivered to a joint session of Congress. But the contrasts between the two addresses are greater than the comparisons. President Kennedy couched his objective of landing a man in the moon in terms of winning "the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny." He saw the space race as having critical impact "on the minds of men everywhere, who are attempting to make a determination of which road they should take." To JFK it was a critical competition between the free world and the communist bloc.

It's not just bad harvests and climate change - it's also speculators that are behind record prices. And it's the planet's poorest who pay

Just under three years ago, people in the village of Gumbi in western Malawi went unexpectedly hungry. Not like Europeans do if they miss a meal or two, but that deep, gnawing hunger that prevents sleep and dulls the senses when there has been no food for weeks.

Oddly, there had been no drought, the usual cause of malnutrition and hunger in southern Africa, and there was plenty of food in the markets. For no obvious reason the price of staple foods such as maize and rice nearly doubled in a few months. Unusually, too, there was no evidence that the local merchants were hoarding food. It was the same story in 100 other developing countries. There were food riots in more than 20 countries and governments had to ban food exports and subsidise staples heavily.

The explanation offered by the UN and food experts was that a "perfect storm" of natural and human factors had combined to hyper-inflate prices. US farmers, UN agencies said, had taken millions of acres of land out of production to grow biofuels for vehicles, oil and fertiliser prices had risen steeply, the Chinese were shifting to meat-eating from a vegetarian diet, and climate-change linked droughts were affecting major crop-growing areas. The UN said that an extra 75m people became malnourished because of the price rises.