"You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."—George Orwell, 1984

In past ages, those who dared to speak out against tyranny—viewed as an act of treason—were blinded, castrated, disfigured, mutilated, rendered mute by having their tongues cut out of their heads, and ultimately crucified.

In the American police state, the price to be paid for speaking truth to power (also increasingly viewed as an act of treason) is surveillance, censorship, jail and ultimately death.

It's a diabolically ingenious tactic for muzzling, disarming and ultimately eliminating one's critics or potential adversaries.

However, where many Americans go wrong is in assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or challenging the government's authority in order to be flagged as a suspicious character, labeled an enemy of the state and locked up like a dangerous criminal.

In fact, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, all you really need to do is use certain trigger words, surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, drive a car, stay at a hotel, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious, question government authority, or generally live in the United States.

With the help of automated eyes and ears, a growing arsenal of high-tech software, hardware and techniques, government propaganda urging Americans to turn into spies and snitches, as well as social media and behavior sensing software, government agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged "words," and "suspicious" activity reports aimed at snaring potential enemies of the state.

It's the American police state's take on the dystopian terrors foreshadowed by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Phillip K. Dick all rolled up into one oppressive pre-crimeand pre-thought crime package.

What's more, the technocrats who run the surveillance state don't even have to break a sweat while monitoring what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, how much you spend, whom you support, and with whom you communicate. Computers now do the tedious work of trolling social media, the internet, text messages and phone calls for potentially anti-government remarks—all of which is carefully recorded, documented, and stored to be used against you someday at a time and place of the government's choosing.

While this may sound like a riff on a bad joke, it's a bad joke with "we the people" as the punchline. Yet it is no laughing matter that Americans are being jailed for growing orchids, feeding whales, collecting rainwater, and praying in their backyards. There is nothing humorous about Americans having their families terrorized by SWAT teams, their pets killed, their children shot, their homes trashed and their privacy shredded. And there's really not much comic relief to be found when the citizenry is forced to pay their own government to jail, spy on, censor, terrorize and kill them.

The following activities are guaranteed to get you censored, surveilled, eventually placed on a government watch list, possibly detained and potentially killed.

Laugh at your own peril.

Sections of the American establishment believe the Kremlin supports Donald Trump. It doesn't. However, many Russians are concerned a future President Hillary will further worsen, already appalling, relations between Moscow and Washington.

Bachman Turner Overdrive was a bunch of Canadian rockers who hit it big in the mid 1970's. The band's success was curious. In an era of glam rock and punk, their brand of three-chord guitar was a few years out of date. Nevertheless, despite their old-fashioned sound, they sold millions of records.

Hillary Clinton is the Bachman Turner Overdrive of US politics. Today, American youth, in common with their global counterparts, are searching for new ideas. Witness the appeal of anti-establishment figures like Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and Beppe Grillo among young voters. Even Donald Trump has galvanized the disaffected American working class behind his campaign.

Hillary offers a position from the 90's and 00's when her husband, Bill, and his successor, George W. Bush, ran the Washington show. In fact, she's something of an amalgam of both. Liberal, at least in public, on social matters and slightly-left leaning on economics like Bill, but a Bush-like hardcore neocon on matters of national security and foreign affairs. Because of this, she's attracted support across the establishment, even if she remains unloved by the general public. Alarmingly, her popularity ratings are stuck in the mid 30's.

In the town of Zaitsevo with a pre-war population of almost 4000 inhabitants, about 1 600 civilians cower under Ukaine's almost daily bombardments. Among them are about 500 children and nine veterans of the Second World War, very old with lots of elderly. Recently, a couple that we had visited in February got hurt, a grandmother of 80 years and her husband were hit in the arm and head.

Last week, the Ukrainian army used white phosphorus projectiles precisely in this area, yet these weapons are prohibited by Protocol III of the Geneva Convention in the war zones where civilians are concentrated, which certainly is the case of Zaïtsevo.

We rendezvoused with a company of Italian and Russian journalists to observe the situation of the large village of Zaïtsevo. Surrounded by the Ukrainian lines overlooking the town, its situation has been bad for many weeks, especially since the arrival of Nazi fanatics of Pravy Sektor who have at heart to terrorize the population.

These criminal weapons were invented by the Anglo-Saxons, Britons and Americans during World War II and were used at several levels, in so-called strategic bombing but in reality, terror on German cities, then in Korea, Vietnam and recently in Iraq and the Israelis in Gaza.

Since the beginning of the war, the Ukrainians, who are supported by the US and many European countries, have not hesitated to use these terror weapons.Injuries caused by such weapons are horrific and the damage extensive, calling to mind the survivors of the great bombing of Dresden in February 1945 and other Japanese cities.

Turkey's embassy in Stockholm asked Sweden's TV4 television network to pull a documentary on the mass killings of Assyrians by the Ottoman Empire because the film "will fail to serve the principle of objectivity."

Ahead of Sunday evening's scheduled broadcast of a documentary titled Seyfo 1915 - The Assyrian Genocide, TV4 said it received an email from Turkish embassy press officer Arif Gulen, in which he opposes the film's use of the term "genocide," which is often used to describe the tragic death of as many as 275,000 Assyrians at the hands of Ottoman Turks during WWI.

The letter, which was subsequently published on TV4's official website, asks the station to "reconsider your decision on broadcasting of the... documentary film with a balanced and sensible attitude," while cautioning that "only a competent international tribunal can determine whether a particular event is genocide."

His statement provoked a sharp reaction from the broadcaster, which denounced Gulen's attempt to pressure the channel to cancel its broadcast, and aired the documentary.

"We can never accept this. We will protest against any attempt to exert pressure that threatens freedom of expression," said TV4's program director, Viveka Hansson, in a statement on the company's website.

Speaking to Expressen, Gulen said that he had "full respect for freedom of expression and for the channel," but refused to retract his plea to TV4 to withdraw the documentary piece.

According to the Russian Foreign Minister, the statements of the Turkish leadership on Nagorno-Karabakh crisis are absolutely unacceptable.

Statements by Turkey on the crisis in Nagorno-Karabakh are not helping the situation and sound like calls to war, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Friday:

"I believe that the statements that were voiced from the mouths of the Turkish leadership are absolutely unacceptable for one simple reason: these were calls not for peace, but for war. These were calls to solving the conflict using military force. This contradicts the positions of the co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk group's position at the roots and at the roots of the global community."

Violence in Azerbaijan's breakaway region escalated early this month. Baku and Yerevan have accused each other of provoking hostilities. A ceasefire was achieved on April 5, following days of clashes that led to numerous casualties on both sides.

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict began in 1988, when the autonomous region with a predominantly Armenian population sought to secede from the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic. The region proclaimed independence when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, triggering a war that lasted until a Russia-brokered ceasefire in 1994.

The resolution adopted by 33 countries condemns the Israeli government's stewardship of Jerusalem.

The Israeli government and Jewish groups have expressed outrage at a resolution adopted by the U.N. cultural agency that put the Western Wall Plaza in quotation marks, described Jewish sites as "so-called" and even claimed that some Jewish graves were bogus.

The resolution , sponsored by several Arab countries and adopted by UNESCO's 58-nation executive board last week, condemned the Israeli government's stewardship of east Jerusalem, home to the city's most sensitive holy sites.

The April 15 document also decried the renovation of "so-called Jewish ritual baths" and the alleged creation of "Jewish fake graves." Sites were either referred to by their Arabic or English names or, in the case of the Western Wall Plaza, the holiest site where Jews can pray, were put in quotes.

Riyadh has approved a long-term economic blueprint to transform the kingdom's economy aimed at minimizing the country's reliance on oil. Titled 'Saudi Vision 2030', the plan reveals budget, policy and regulatory changes which are to be realized over the next 15 years to help the country's economy to survive beyond crude.

Over seventy percent of the country's income comes from energy exports. With the plunge in crude prices Saudi Arabia ran a record deficit of over $90 billion in 2015. Riyadh intends to raise its share of non-oil exports in non-oil GDP from 16 percent to 50 percent. It aims to build a "prosperous and sustainable economic future" for the kingdom, according to the news release. It also gave details on privatization and the creation of what it called the "largest sovereign wealth fund in the world."

"We will smooth the process of listing private Saudi companies and state-owned enterprises, including Aramco. This will require deepening liquidity in our capital markets, fortifying the role of the debt market and paving the way for the derivatives market," the announcement said.

Ministry of Defense (MoD) officials should face the same threat of criminal prosecution for corporate manslaughter as staff in any other UK workplace, Britain's Defense Select Committee has said. The committee of MPs, which oversees MoD operations and the work of associated bodies such as the armed forces, made the recommendation in a report published Monday. The study called for the MoD's blanket immunity from corporate manslaughter - extended in the form of a "crown censure" - to be lifted.

"The lives of serving personnel are worth no less than those of civilians and those responsible for their deaths must be equally liable under the law," the committee said.

Blanket immunity

The MoD currently has crown immunity if one of its staff dies in the so-called line of duty. This is facilitated by a special exemption from corporate manslaughter law in Britain. Britain's Defense Select Committee says the situation requires prompt reform. Since the turn of the millennium, some 135 MoD staff have died while in training. Britain's Health and Safety Executive (HSE) had to bring in a crown censure in eleven of these cases.

"Hugo Chavez defied the most powerful interests, and he refused to bow down....I believe there is a very strong possibility that President Chavez was assassinated."

— Eva Golinger

MW - Do you think that Hugo Chavez was murdered and, if so, who do you think might have been involved?

Eva Golinger - I believe there is a very strong possibility that President Chavez was assassinated. There were notorious and documented assassination attempts against him throughout his presidency. Most notable was the April 11, 2002 coup d'etat, during which he was kidnapped and set to be assassinated had it not been for the unprecedented uprising of the Venezuelan people and loyal military forces that rescued him and returned him to power within 48 hours. I was able to find irrefutable evidence using the US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), that the CIA and other US agencies were behind that coup and supported, financially, militarily and politically, those involved. Later on, there were other attempts against Chavez and his government, such as in 2004 when dozens of Colombian paramilitary forces were captured on a farm outside of Caracas that was owned by an anti-Chavez activist, Robert Alonso, just days before they were going to attack the presidential palace and kill Chavez.

There was another, lesser-known plot against Chavez discovered in New York City during his visit to the United Nations General Assembly in September 2006. According to information provided by his security services, during standard security reconnaissance of an event where Chavez would address the US public at a local, renowned university, high levels of radiation were detected in the chair where he would have sat. The radiation was discovered by a Geiger detector, which is a handheld radiation detection device the presidential security used to ensure the President wasn't in danger of exposure to harmful rays. In this case, the chair was removed and subsequent tests showed it was emanating unusual amounts of radiation that could have resulted in significant harm to Chavez had it gone undiscovered. According to accounts by the presidential security at the event, an individual from the US who had been involved in the logistical support for the event and had provided the chair was shown to be acting with US intelligent agents.

Israeli intelligence says it has managed to break up a Jewish terrorism network which had been carrying out attacks against Palestinian citizens in the West Bank. Among those arrested were two minors and an IDF soldier.

Israel's intelligence agency, the Shin Bet, said that six members of the cell were suspected of trying to firebomb dwellings in which Palestinians were present, while the organization described the suspects as "extremely violent."

"During the latter half of 2015, there were a number of terror attacks and violent incidents against Palestinians in the Gush Talmonim region," the Shin Bet said, as cited by the Times of Israel. "Two notable attacks were against buildings that had Palestinians inside."

The intelligence agency said it had undertaken a "lengthy intelligence effort" in order to help expose the terror group. Among those arrested were two minors who were born in 1999 and 2000, as well as a 19-year-old IDF soldier. The three other men arrested were aged between 20 and 22 and hailed from the settlements of Nahliel and Kiryat Arba.

The suspects "confessed to carrying out widespread terror activities, which included attempts to harm inhabited Palestinian homes, attacking minorities, arson, and vandalizing Palestinian vehicles," according to the Shin Bet, as reported by the Jerusalem Post.