• Bloodbath in Boston as two explosions rock finish line of famous Boston Marathon as race was winding down
• Officials urging people at the scene to leave as secondary explosive devices have been found
• Fox News is reporting three people killed; injuries still unknown
• New York City stepping up anti-terror efforts in wake of attack

Up to a dozen people have been killed in a deadly explosion and up to 60 people have been injured after two large explosions went off near the finish line of the famous Boston Marathon today, leaving behind a scene of unimaginable carnage.

Law enforcement sources told the New York Post of the body count, and said that the first explosion happened at the Fairmont Hotel.

Eyewitnesses at the scene said there were two loud explosions about five seconds apart, and emergency vehicles crowded the scene.

Witness Dave Weigel said via Twitter minutes after the explosion: 'I saw people's legs blown off. Horrific. Two explosions. Runners were coming in and saw unspeakable horror.'

Police told the Boston Globe that are they still finding 'secondary devices,' and pleading with anyone still in the area to leave at once.

A controlled explosion was set for outside the city library.

Months of increased tension at the Guantanamo Bay prison boiled over into a clash between guards and detainees Saturday as the military closed a communal section of the facility and moved its inmates into single cells.

The violence erupted during an early morning raid that military officials said was necessary because prisoners had covered up security cameras and windows as part of a weekslong protest and hunger strike over their indefinite confinement and conditions at the U.S. base in Cuba.

Prisoners fought guards with makeshift weapons that included broomsticks and mop handles when troops arrived to move them out of a communal wing of the section of the prison known as Camp 6, said Navy Capt. Robert Durand, a military spokesman. Guards responded by firing four "less-than-lethal rounds," he said.

One of the most powerful Op-eds ever published in the NYT, by a Yemeni detainee, underscores the president's role in this travesty

The New York Times this morning deserves credit for publishing one of the most powerful Op-Eds you will ever read. I urge you to read it in its entirety: it's by Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, a Yemeni national who has been imprisoned at Guantánamo without charges of any kind for more than 11 years. He's one of the detainees participating in the escalating hunger strike to protest both horrible conditions and, particularly, the supreme injustice of being locked in a cage indefinitely without any evidence of wrongdoing presented or any opportunity to contest the accusations that have been made. The hunger strike escalated over the weekend when guards shot rubber bullets at some of the detainees and forced them into single cells. Moqbel "wrote" the Op-ed through an interpreter and a telephone conversation with his lawyers at the human rights group Repreive:

"I've been on a hunger strike since Feb. 10 and have lost well over 30 pounds. I will not eat until they restore my dignity.

"I've been detained at Guantánamo for 11 years and three months. I have never been charged with any crime. I have never received a trial.

"I could have been home years ago - no one seriously thinks I am a threat - but still I am here. Years ago the military said I was a 'guard' for Osama bin Laden, but this was nonsense, like something out of the American movies I used to watch. They don't even seem to believe it anymore. But they don't seem to care how long I sit here, either. . . .

"The only reason I am still here is that President Obama refuses to send any detainees back to Yemen. This makes no sense. I am a human being, not a passport, and I deserve to be treated like one.

"I do not want to die here, but until President Obama and Yemen's president do something, that is what I risk every day.

"Where is my government? I will submit to any 'security measures' they want in order to go home, even though they are totally unnecessary.

"I will agree to whatever it takes in order to be free. I am now 35. All I want is to see my family again and to start a family of my own.

"The situation is desperate now. All of the detainees here are suffering deeply. At least 40 people here are on a hunger strike. People are fainting with exhaustion every day. I have vomited blood.

"And there is no end in sight to our imprisonment. Denying ourselves food and risking death every day is the choice we have made.

"I just hope that because of the pain we are suffering, the eyes of the world will once again look to Guantánamo before it is too late."

The rapidity of gold's drop is impressive, concerning, and disorderly. We have seen two other such instances of disorderly 'hurried' selling in the last five years. In July 2008, gold quickly dropped 21% - seemingly pre-empting the Lehman debacle and the collapse of the western banking system. In September 2011, gold fell 20% in a short period - as Europe's risks exploded and stocks slumped prompting a globally co-ordinated central bank intervention the likes of which we have not seen before. Given the almost-record-breaking drop in gold in the last few days, we wonder what is coming?

San Diego police slapped a cell phone camera out of a man's hands Saturday, claiming it could be a weapon, before pouncing on him and handcuffing him, lacerating his chin in the process.

Adam Pringle ended up jailed overnight on charges of obstruction because he refused to hand the phone over when the cop ordered him to do so.

But it's already been established by numerous court cases as well as the U.S. Department of Justice that police do not have the right to take your camera unless it is being used in a commission of a crime.

In this case, Pringle's only crime was smoking a cigarette on a Mission Beach boardwalk, a violation for which he was already getting cited.

"It is against the law to smoke cigarettes on the boardwalk, so I admit I was breaking the law," Pringle said in a telephone interview with Photography is Not a Crime Tuesday.

The incident took place at 7 p.m. Saturday evening as Pringle and two buddies were walking on the boardwalk and came across two cops on bicycles who stopped them and started writing Pringle a citation.

The instruction establishes "DoD policy, assigns responsibilities, and provides procedures for DoD support to Federal, State, tribal, and local civilian law enforcement agencies, including responses to civil disturbances within the United States."

The new instruction titled "Defense Support of Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies" was released at the end of February, replacing several older directives on military assistance to civilian law enforcement and civil disturbances. The instruction requires that senior DoD officials develop "procedures and issue appropriate direction as necessary for defense support of civilian law enforcement agencies in coordination with the General Counsel of the Department of Defense, and in consultation with the Attorney General of the United States", including "tasking the DoD Components to plan for and to commit DoD resources in response to requests from civil authorities for [civil disturbance operations]."

Military officials are to coordinate with "civilian law enforcement agencies on policies to further DoD cooperation with civilian law enforcement agencies" and the heads of the combatant commands are instructed to issue procedures for "establishing local contact points in subordinate commands for purposes of coordination with Federal, State, tribal, and local civilian law enforcement officials."

Did you know that the greatest period of economic growth in American history was during a time when there was absolutely no federal income tax?

Between the end of the Civil War and 1913, there was an explosion of economic activity in the United States unlike anything ever seen before or since. Unfortunately, a federal income tax was instituted in 1913, and this year it turned 100 years old. But there was no fanfare, was there? There was no celebration because the federal income tax is universally hated. Sadly, most Americans just assume that there is no other option to an income tax. Most Americans just assume that it has always been with us and that it will always be with us. This year, the American people will shell out approximately $4.22 trillion in state and federal income taxes.

That amount is equivalent to approximately 29.4 percent of all income that Americans will bring in this year, and that does not even take into account the dozens of other taxes that Americans pay each year. At this point, the U.S. tax code is about 13 miles long, and those that are honest and pay their taxes every year are being absolutely shredded by this system. But wouldn't the federal government go broke if we didn't have a federal income tax? No, actually the truth is that the federal government did just fine before there was an income tax. In fact, the U.S. national debt has gotten more than 5000 times larger since the federal income tax and the Federal Reserve were created by Congress back in 1913.

As I have written about previously, the Federal Reserve system was actually designed to trap the United States in a debt spiral from which it could never possibly escape, and the federal income tax was needed to greatly expand the size of the federal government and to soak the American people of the funds necessary to service that debt. But it doesn't have to be this way. America was once much better off before the income tax and the Federal Reserve were created, and we could easily go to such a system again.

Quietly and after many members had left for the weekend, the Senate voted Thursday night to approve a new bill, S. 716, introduced by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada), that no one had read, and that was not publicly available on the Library of Congress website until after the vote.

The purpose of the bill was to gut key provisions in the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act requiring broad disclosure of already public reports about the personal finances of public officials and employees. Responding to concerns that some provisions of the STOCK Act were overly broad and might put some government employees at risk, the Senate decided to exclude legislative and executive staffers from the online disclosure requirements entirely and to delay implementation of other mandates for themselves.

In a report published on the 11th of April French daily Le Monde admits that rebels fighting the government of the Syrian Arab Republic are dominated by Japhat Al Nosra, a terrorist group linked to Al Qaida. The admission comes after two years of non-stop disinformation trumpeted from all French mainstream media outlets from the official right to the official left, disinformation that has attempted to convince the French public that democratic revolutionaries are fighting a war for human rights and freedom against a brutal, tyrannical dictator, who is '' killing his own people''.

This puerile and deeply dishonest narrative has now been utterly discredited, as the facts about the terrorist nature of the Syrian rebels have become too obvious to ignore. In an article entitled 'The New Visage of French Jihadism' it is reported that French jihadists are leaving France in their hundreds to join the 'holy war' against the Syrian Arab Republic, with many more joining jihadist groups in Mali.

On the same page in an article entitled 'Al Qaida extends its territory and unites its forces in Iraq and Syria', Le Monde's Christophe Ayad reports:

'The head of Iraq's Islamic state, the Iraqi branch of Al Qaida, announced in a recorded message on April 9th, that his group would be fused with the Japhat AL Nosra( Support Front), the principal armed jihadist organization in Syria. The new group will be called Al-Qaida in Iraq and the Levant. This announcement comes two days after the call of Ayman Al-Zawarhiri, the successor of Osama Bin Laden in the leadership of Al-Qaida 'headquarters,' for the establishment of an Islamic state after the fall of the regime of Bachar-Al-Assad, afflicted since two years by an insurrection by the Sunni majority.'[1]

Tax Day, April 15, is traditionally the time of year when liberals trot out that old Oliver Wendell Holmes chestnut: "Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society."

But what kind of "civilization" are we paying for? At the federal level, if you include not only the nominal "Defense" [sic] budget, but Veterans' Affairs, the military aspects of NASA and the Department of Energy, interest on the national debt from past wars, etc., military spending is nearly half the total budget.

The Obama administration complains that sequestration has resulted in cuts to, among other things, law enforcement. But the US has the largest prison-industrial complex in the world, and militarized SWAT teams of black-uniformed Gestapo wannabes in virtually every town in the country, mainly because of government-declared "wars" on consensual activity like drug use and sex work.

But some government spending - infrastructure, education, welfare and so on - is "progressive," right?

We know progressives love infrastructure. You can't sit through an MSNBC commercial break without seeing Rachel Maddow equating the Hoover Dam with "big things" and national greatness.