Genetic engineering in agriculture has disappointed many people who once had hopes for it. Excluding, of course, those who've made money from it, appropriately represented in the public's mind by Monsanto. That corporation, or at least its friends, recently managed to have an outrageous rider slipped into the 587-page funding bill Congress sent to President Obama.[1]

The rider essentially prohibits the Department of Agriculture from stopping production of any genetically engineered crop once it's in the ground, even if there is evidence that it is harmful.

That's a pre-emptive Congressional override of the judicial system, since it is the courts that are most likely to ask the U.S.D.A. to halt planting or harvest of a particular crop. President Obama signed the bill last week (he kind of had to, to prevent a government shutdown) without mentioning the offensive rider [2] (he might have), despite the gathering of more than 250,000 signatures protesting the rider by the organization Food Democracy Now!

A long overdue debate breaks out about whether rational atheism is being used as a cover for Islamophobia and US militarism

Two columns have been published in the past week harshly criticizing the so-called "New Atheists" such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens: this one by Nathan Lean in Salon, and this one by Murtaza Hussain in Al Jazeera. The crux of those columns is that these advocates have increasingly embraced a toxic form of anti-Muslim bigotry masquerading as rational atheism. Yesterday, I posted a tweet to Hussain's article without comment except to highlight what I called a "very revealing quote" flagged by Hussain, one in which Harris opined that "the people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists."

The U.S. military is sending a land-based missile defense system to Guam to defend against possible North Korean ballistic missile launches, according to a news release from the Department of Defense.

The statement said the missiles, a truck-mounted launcher, and radar and target acquisition systems will be deployed in the "coming weeks."

One of the headquarters of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command is located in a basement in central Damascus.

All secrecy measures are there: one cannot drive through the area; hidden guerillas everywhere, and several dozen CCTV cameras. This is the Palestinian group whose headquarters and weapons were seized in December last year by the Syrian militants in Yarmouk, the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Syria near Damascus.

Several people are sitting in a small room. These are: member of the PFLP GC Political Bureau Anwar Raja, editor in chief of the Palestinian Forward magazine, Tahsin Al Hаlabi, and about five other companions who come and go while we speak.

Anwar Raja was born in Jaffa. He was ten when the Palestinians were thrown out of the Holy Land. He experienced all the tribulations of the Palestinian struggle firsthand. And Tahsin Al Hаlabi was only 10 months old when his family had to leave their home.

'I was arrested and sentenced to 12 years in an Israeli prison for the right to see my home. During my time in Nablus prison I learned English, French, German, and Italian. And I speak Hebrew better than settlers in Israel', he laughs.

'In order to free him from captivity, we seized three Israeli soldiers', recalls Anwar Raja.

When this story first surfaced, the initial reaction was, April Fools day joke, how could a country with one of the lowest per capita emissions signing up to a treaty that expired on December 31st 2012 be hailed as a Green success story.

The world's only treaty for fear of CO2, the Kyoto Protocol ended along with 2012 on December 31st, attempts to keep it alive at COP18 failed, an attempt at a new Kyoto 2 was ignored by most of the world, except the EU and grasping hands of the small islands states demanding their climate justice money.

All search engines confirm this story to be true, such is the state of decline of Big Green these days that a negligible emitter joining a now defunct treaty is a cause for celebration:

Afghanistan has taken another step towards implementing its national climate strategy by ratifying the Kyoto Protocol.

The move makes it the 192nd country or regional economic integration organization to sign up to the treaty, which will come into force for Afghanistan on June 23 this year.

Classed as a developing or Non-Annex I country, it will not have to adopt any binding emission targets, but will be required to draw-up plans to develop a low carbon energy and transport system.

Joining Kyoto also allows the country to take part in the UN's international emissions trading programmes; raising the prospect of richer nations investing in renewable energy and similar low carbon schemes in Afghanistan.

More than 6,000 people died in Syria in March, the deadliest month since protests against the government began two years ago, activists say.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a UK-based activist group, said it recorded 6,005 deaths last month.

The holiest Jewish site in Syria - the 2,000-year-old Jobar Synagogue in Damascus - has been looted and burned, and its roof blown off. The Syrian army and rebel forces have both blamed each other for the demolition of the historic landmark.

It is believed that the Jobar Synagogue, one of the world's oldest, was built atop a cave where the Prophet Elijah once hid from persecution. One of the earliest historical mentions of the synagogue can be found in the Talmud.

According to Israel Radio, the rebels claimed that the Syrian government looted the synagogue before burning it to the ground. Meanwhile, the government alleged that the rebels had burned down the synagogue. It has also been claimed that "Zionist agents" stole historic artifacts from the holy site as part of a planned operation, Al-Manar Television reported.

Earlier this year, the Jobar synagogue was damaged by shells reportedly fired by Syrian government forces. A video uploaded by the Syrian opposition in early March exposed the damage done to the structure.

Any attempt to challenge the elite needs courage, inspiration and a truly groundbreaking proposal. Here are two to set us off

Most of the world's people are decent, honest and kind. Most of those who dominate us are inveterate bastards. This is the conclusion I've reached after many years of journalism. Writing on Black Monday, as the British government's full-spectrum attack on the lives of the poor commences, the thought keeps returning to me.

"With a most inhuman cruelty, they who have put out the people's eyes reproach them of their blindness." This government, whose mismanagement of the economy has forced so many into the arms of the state, blames the sick, the unemployed, the underpaid for a crisis caused by the feral elite - and punishes them accordingly. Most of those affected by the bedroom tax, introduced today, are disabled. Thousands will be driven from their homes, and many more pushed towards destitution. Relief for the poor from council tax will be clipped; legal aid for civil cases cut off. Yet at the end of this week those making more than £150,000 a year will have their income tax cut.

Two days later, benefit payments for the poorest will be cut in real terms. A week after that, thousands of families who live in towns and boroughs where property prices are high will be forced out of their homes by the total benefits cap. What we are witnessing is raw economic warfare by the rich against the poor.

So the age-old question comes knocking: why does the decent majority allow itself to be governed by a brutal, antisocial minority? Part of the reason is that the minority controls the story. As John Harris explained in the Guardian, large numbers (including many who depend on it) have been persuaded that most recipients of social security are feckless, profligate fraudsters. Despite everything that has happened over the last two years, Rupert Murdoch, Lord Rothermere and the other media barons still seem to be running the country. Their relentless propaganda, using exceptional and shocking cases to characterise an entire social class, remains highly effective. Divide and rule is as potent as it has ever been.

In America truth is offensive. If you tell the truth, you are offensive.

I am offensive. Michael Hudson is offensive. Gerald Celente is offensive. Herman Daly is offensive. Nomi Prins is offensive. Pam Martens is offensive. Chris Hedges is offensive. Chris Floyd is offensive. John Pilger is offensive. Noam Chomsky is offensive. Harvey Silverglate is offensive. Naomi Wolf is offensive. Stephen Lendman is offensive. David Ray Griffin is offensive. Ellen Brown is offensive.

Fortunately, many others are offensive. But how long before being offensive becomes being "an enemy of the state"?

Throughout history truth tellers have suffered and court historians have prospered. It is the same today. Gerald Celente illustrates this brilliantly in the next issue of the Trends Journal.

Over the past 35 years I have learned this lesson as a columnist. If you tell readers what is really going on, they want to know why you can't be positive. Why are you telling us that there are bad happenings that can't be remedied? Don't you know that God gave Americans the power to fix all wrongs? What are you? Some kind of idiot, an anti-American, a pinko-liberal-commie? If you hate America so much, why don't you move to Cuba, Iran or China (or to wherever the current bogyman is located)?

The ancient Greeks understood this well. In Greek mythology, Cassandra was the prophetess who no one believed despite her 100 percent record of being right. Telling the truth to Americans or to Europeans is just as expensive as telling the truth to the Greeks in ancient mythology.

During Passover, the Jewish population of Israel has passed the symbolic 6 million mark - the same number of Jews who were believed to have been killed during the Nazi Holocaust - while the country's total population is now 8 million.

Israel now has the world's largest community of Jews, replacing the U.S. (5.5 million, with 2 million in New York City alone), France (500,000, mostly in Paris) and Canada (380,000, primarily in Toronto).

Britain has 290,000 Jews, most of them concentrated in London.

According to the Interior Ministry, Israel's non-Jewish population comprises about 1.6 million Arabs and 350,000 non-Arab Christians and others (mostly immigrants from the Soviet Union whose religion has not been listed or registered by the ministry).

Another half-million Israeli citizens live abroad, the Ynet newspaper reported.