In letters to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and the Security Council, the Syrian Foreign Ministry criticized the world body's "continued silence" on the crimes perpetrated by foreign-backed terrorist groups against Syrians, SANA reported on Thursday.

"The government of Syrian Arab Republic calls on the Security Council to condemn that terrorist crime which claimed the lives of scores of Syrian innocents [as well as] other terrorist crimes that shed the Syrians' blood," said the letters.

The letters also said the Security Council should "punish" Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey for supporting the Takfiri terrorists operating against Syria and turning a blind eye to the UN body's resolutions on counterterrorism.

"There is a de facto redefinition of "the economy" when sharp contractions are gradually lost to standard measures. The unemployed who lose everything...easily fall off the edge of what is defined as "the economy" and counted as such. So do small shop and factory owners who lose everything and commit suicide. And so do the growing number of well-educated students and professionals who leave...all together. These trends redefine the space of the economy. They make it smaller and expel a good share of the unemployed and poor from standard measures. Such a redefinition makes "the economy" presentable, so to speak, allowing it to show a slight growth of GDP per capita.

The reality at the ground level is more akin to a kind of economic version of ethnic cleansing in which elements considered troublesome are dealt with by simply eliminating them. This shrinking and redefinition of economic space so that economies can be represented as being "back on track" holds for a growing number of economies in the European Union and elsewhere [like the United States]... One indication of a people's economic despair is a sharp rise in suicide. This trend is evident in several countries worldwide from India to the United States...

The channels for expulsion vary greatly. They include austerity policies that have helped shrink the economies of Greece and Spain, environmental policies that overlook toxic emissions from enormous mining operations in Norilsk, Russia and the American state of Montana...if our concern is environmental destruction rather that interstate politics, the fact that both these mining operations are heavy polluters matters more than the fact that one is in Russia and the other in the United States...The diverse processes and conditions I include under the notion of expulsion all share one aspect: they are acute. While the abjectly poor worldwide are the most extreme instance, I do include such diverse conditions as the impoverishment of the middle classes in rich countries, the evictions of millions of small farmers in poor countries...Then there are the countless displaced people warehoused in formal and informal refugee camps, the minoritized groups in rich countries who are warehoused in prisons and the able bodied unemployed men and women warehoused in ghettoes and slums...Some are new types of expulsions, such as the 9 million households in the United States whose homes were foreclosed..."

Saskia Sassen's forthcoming book Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Harvard-Belknap Press, May 2014) begins its sobering journey with an Introduction titled, "The Savage Sorting." The Savage Sorting seems destined to become the short-form description of 21^st Century to be remembered, if at all, in some distant future by a genetically reengineered humanity (and biosphere).

The headline over a presentation by Jews for Justice for Palestinians of the text of a talk given by Norman Finkelstein to a number of British universities in mid-March was The End of Palestine? It's time to sound an alarm. The purpose of this article is to do just that.

In his talk which analysed U.S. Secretary of State Kerry's peace initiative ("a sham"), Finkelstein explained at length that the Palestinians are on their own because the powers that be in the Western and Arab worlds want them to accept crumbs from Zionism's table and effectively surrender to Zionism's will. (I've been saying that for ages).

He also notes, and I agree, that the Palestinian cause is not as alive and well as it once was in the hearts and minds of the Arab masses, not least because they have troubles of their own.

Finkelstein's summing up included this:

The PA fantasizes that it can liberate Palestine via international diplomacy, while BDS fantasizes that it can liberate Palestine via international sanctions. But the only ones who can liberate Palestine are the Palestinian people themselves, principally those living under occupation. Only mass nonviolent civil resistance can catapult Palestine back on the international stage.

If a popular revolt, like the first intifada, erupts under the simple slogan Enforce the Law, and if the international solidarity movement does its part, it might be possible to mobilize public opinion - including sectors of liberal American Jewish opinion - and exert sufficient pressure on the international community such that Israel will be compelled to meet its legal obligations.

My purpose is to put some flesh on the bone of the statement that the Palestinians themselves must take the lead if their cause is not to become a lost one.

"Anything you can do, I can do better. I can do anything Better than you." - song from Annie Get Your Gun

The conventional wisdom is that democracy is the best form of government. As the imperialist demagogue Winston Churchill, put it, "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried." But such conventional wisdom comes by default. No one has ever offered any evidence in support of it. In fact, no one even knows what such evidence could be. No established criteria exist for the comparative adjectives worst, worse, bad, good, better, and best when they are applied to governments.

Furthermore, that democracy is the best form of government has not always even been the conventional wisdom. Plato, who founded his Academy in Athens around 400 BCE, where democracy is said to have originated, writes, "Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy." And at least some of those who wrote the American Constitution in the 1700s were well aware of democracy's pitfalls and that no democracy had endured for any length of time. John Adams writes, "Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself." Despite their knowledge, the Constitution's writers persisted, believing that they could build a nation that avoided the faults that had destroyed earlier democracies. But they were wrong!

In fact, no genuine democracy has ever existed. The citizens of no nation have ever governed themselves. Lincoln's "of the people, by the people, and for the people" is pure bombast. What has passed for democracy has always been some form of representational oligarchy. But no one can represent two different ideologies at once. Even the word 'democracy' has never been adequately defined. If you read the Wikipedia article, you will find numerous different forms of government described, all of which are named democracies but differentiated by a qualifying word. There is representative democracy, constitutional democracy, people's democracy, etc. As George Orwell says, "It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning." Talk about an unqualified democracy is nonsense.

The Obama regime has issued simultaneous threats to the enemy it is making out of Russia and to its European NATO allies on which Washington is relying to support sanctions on Russia. This cannot end well.

As even Americans living in a controlled media environment are aware, Europeans, South Americans, and Chinese are infuriated that the National Stasi Agency is spying on their communications. NSA's affront to legality, the US Constitution, and international diplomatic norms is unprecedented. Yet, the spying continues, while Congress sits sucking its thumb and betraying its oath to defend the Constitution of the United States.

In Washington mumbo-jumbo from the executive branch about "national security" suffices to negate statutory law and Constitutional requirements. Western Europe, seeing that the White House, Congress and the Federal Courts are impotent and unable to rein-in the Stasi Police State, has decided to create a European communication system that excludes US companies in order to protect the privacy of European citizens and government communications from the Washington Stasi.

Rebels embattled against the regime of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad have reportedly come into possession of high-powered anti-tank weaponry, the likes of which may have been supplied by the United States.

Images of rebels equipped with heavy arms have begun to circulate in recent days, and at least one news site has claimed that the source responsible is the US government.

On Monday, Israel's Debkafile website reported that two moderate Syrian rebel militias - the Free Syrian Army and the Syrian Revolutionary Front - have been supplied with advanced US weapons, including armor-piercing, optically-guided BGM-71 TOW missiles, thanks to the Pentagon.

In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert present "To frack or not to frack? That is the question you will NOT be asked!" They look at proposed changes to the trespass laws in the UK which will allow companies to frack under private property without seeking permission and in exchange for £100. In the second half, Max interviews Nomi Prins about her new book, All the Presidents' Bankers. In the book, she describes the long history of the Washington D.C. to Wall Street corridor of corruption and the six banking families who have long controlled, or have tried to control, the American financial and political establishment.

Former US Secretary of State was nearly hit by a shoe during a speech in Las Vegas Thursday, dodging the object at the last second as an usher escorted a young woman from the audience.

Clinton had only been on the stage at an Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries meeting near the Mandalay Bay hotel and casino for moments when an object flew toward her from the crowd. Clinton, also a former New York State senator and First Lady, stepped out of its path and joked, "good thing she didn't play softball like I did," as quoted by the Associated Press.

The United States Air Force commander in charge of the NATO alliance's military presence in Europe said on Wednesday this week that US troops may soon be deployed to the region as tensions continue to worsen near the border between Ukraine and Russia.

In an interview with the Associated Press, US Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove said that forthcoming plans intended to ensure stability in Europe for the NATO partners in the area could involve the mobilizing of American troops.

Representatives from the 28 countries involved in the multinational organization have asked Breedlove - a four-star general who has since last year served as the supreme allied commander of NATO's European operations - to have a plan ready by early next week, according to the AP's John-Thor Dahlburg, to reassure partners in the region "that other alliance countries have their back."

Breedlove told the newswire that he has every intention of unveiling his proposal ahead of next Tuesday's deadline, and that he wouldn't "write off involvement by any nation, to include the United States."

A day after the House Ways and Means committee voted to refer former IRS official Lois Lerner to the Department of Justice for possible criminal prosecution, another committee voted to adopt a resolution recommending the House find Lerner in contempt of Congress for refusing to testify before the panel.

In a strictly party-line vote, 21 Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee voted to send the resolution to the floor for consideration by the full House. Twelve committee Democrats voted against the move.

"Today, the Oversight Committee upheld its obligation to pursue the truth about the IRS targeting of Americans because of their political beliefs," Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., said. "Our investigation has found that former IRS Exempt Organizations division Director Lois Lerner played a central role in the targeting scandal and then failed to meet her legal obligations to answer questions after she waived her right not to testify. In demanding answers and holding a powerful government official accountable for her failure to meet her legal obligations, this Committee did its job."