A Fox News military analyst who has previously justified the U.S. invasion in Iraq by asserting that Russia conspired to hide Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) now says that there is a "very high probability" that those WMDs are in Syria.

Fox News host Brian Kilmeade on Friday spoke to retired Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney about recent rumors of a chemical attack near Aleppo, Syria.

"What are the chances of the return address on these chemicals being from Iraq?" Kilmeade wondered.

"Well, I think there is a high probability of that," McInerney declared. "That's conjecture, but we do know prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom, there was a lot of vehicles crossing the border into Syria. And there was a great deal of conjecture. A Iraqi major general swore by it. He said he delivered it."

"And so I think that it would be a very high probability if we could get into those bunkers that they would have Iraqi signatures on them."

In 2006, McInerney told Newsmax that there was "clear evidence" that Iraq had WMDs before the war and that the Bush administration "ignored Russia's involvement" in helping to hide the weapons.

Department of Veterans Affairs Reports 73 Thousand U.S. Gulf War Deaths

More Gulf War Veterans have died than Vietnam Veterans. This probably is news to you. But the truth has been hidden by a technicality. So here is the truth.

The casualties in the Vietnam War were pretty simple to understand. If a soldier was dead from his combat tour, he was a war casualty. There are 58,195 names recorded on the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC.

Some of these brave men died in the jungles of Vietnam while others died in Medivac units or hospitals in Japan and America. A dead soldier can surrender his life anywhere in service to his country. It really doesn't matter where this happens. The location of a soldier's death in no way colors his sacrifice.

But something odd has happened with the Iraq War. The government, under the Bush administration, did something dishonest that resulted in a lie that's persisted since the war began -- and continues to this very day. They decided to report the war deaths in Iraq only if the soldier died with his boots on the ground in a combat situation.

What's the difference, you might ask?

Israel has apologised to the Turkish government for the deaths of nine people on board the Mavi Marmara, the lead ship in a flotilla attempting to breach the blockade of Gaza three years ago, in a move to repair a damaging diplomatic breach between the two countries.

The move, apparently brokered by US president Barack Obama during his three-day trip to Israel, has long been resisted by the government in Tel Aviv despite pressure from the international community.

According to White House officials aboard Air Force One, Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu placed a call to his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan while closeted with Obama in a trailer on the tarmac at Ben Gurion airport in the last minutes before the president's departure for Jordan. Obama joined the call at one point.

The Israeli prime minister's office said Netanyahu "apologised to the Turkish people for any errors that could have led to the loss of life". Erdogan accepted the apology, White House officials said.

This was the "first step" towards normalisation of relations between the two countries, US officials said, and had been the subject of talks between Obama and Netanyahu in Jerusalem this week.

Eric Margolis writes: Realizing they will never be a world power, the Cypriots have decided to settle for being a world nuisance. ~ George Mikes, Hungarian writer

Cyprus is a big pain in the neck for one and all. Its banks are bust due to reckless lending to Greece. The sunny island is a beehive of tax evasion, money laundering, dodgy trade and espionage.

Now, the threatened bankruptcy of Cyprus has triggered the latest European financial crisis.

Russian businessmen and the Russian Mafia have some 30 billion euros stashed away in Cyprus. Russians make up the second largest biggest cohort of Greek Cyprus' 869,000 people. Some 260,000 ethnic Turks live in the isolated Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, which no one but Turkey recognizes.

A 10 billion euro EU bailout is in the works. But the Germans, who will have to fund most of the rescue, are loathe to rescue the Russian mob, and who can blame them?

It was only as David Cronin saw Tony Blair and his entourage striding towards him that he finally plucked up the courage to go through with his plan to attempt to arrest the former British prime minister over his role in the invasion of Iraq and claim a bounty on his head.

"I walked up to him very briskly and managed to put my hand on his arm and say, 'Mr Blair, this is a citizen's arrest,'" Cronin told Al Jazeera of the 2010 encounter at the European Parliament in Brussels, where he worked as a journalist.

"I didn't have time to say anything else before his bodyguards pushed me away, so I just shouted at him, 'You are guilty of war crimes!' He looked at me for a split-second before I was bundled off. I can only describe it as a look of puzzlement and contempt."

Ten years since British forces joined the US-led assault, many in the UK are more critical than ever of the country's involvement in a conflict documented by the Iraq Body Count database to have killed more than 112,000 civilians.

More than a fifth - 22 percent - of Britons polled by YouGov this month said they believed Blair should be tried as a war criminal for his role in the conflict, which was preceded by massive anti-war demonstrations in London and other cities.

Beekeepers, conservation and food campaigners accuse Environmental Protection Agency of failing to protect the insects

The US government is being sued by a coalition of beekeepers, conservation and food campaigners over pesticides linked to serious harm in bees.

The lawsuit accuses the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of failing to protect the insects - which pollinate three-quarters of all food crops - from nerve agents that it says should be suspended from use. Neonicotinoids, the world's most widely used insecticides, are also facing the prospect of suspension in the European Union, after the health commissioner pledged to press on with the proposed ban despite opposition from the UK and Germany.

"We have demonstrated time and time again over the last several years that the EPA needs to protect bees," said Peter Jenkins, an attorney at the Centre for Food Safety who is representing the coalition. "The agency has refused, so we've been compelled to sue."

"America's beekeepers cannot survive for long with the toxic environment EPA has supported," said Steve Ellis, a Minnesota and California beekeeper and one of the plaintiffs who filed the suit at the federal district court. "Bee-toxic pesticides in dozens of widely used products, on top of many other stresses our industry faces, are killing our bees."

Watch this, and ask yourself, who might be writing that script?

As we approach the 10th anniversary of possibly the most contentious and divisive war in living memory, Peter Taylor forensically investigates how key intelligence used by Downing Street and the White House to justify invading Iraq was based on fabrication, wishful thinking and lies.

Using never before first hand testimony, this Panorama special tells the story of how two high placed sources, who were very close to Saddam Hussein, talked to the CIA secretly via an intermediary and directly to M16 in the build-up to the war and stated that Iraq did not have a Weapons of Mass Destruction programme, but they were both ignored.

In a story of spies and intrigue, lies and deception, key people reveal how little intelligence Britain and America actually had and how none of the human sources at hand had any direct knowledge of WMD's. Former CIA Paris Station Chief Bill Murray tells of how he used an intermediary to recruit Iraq's Foreign Minister and of his frustration when his crucial information he gathered from his source was rejected because it did not fit the White House's agenda. The intelligence received from the Iraqi Foreign Minister was confirmed just a few months later when Iraq's Head of Intelligence passed on the same message, that Iraq did not have any WMD's, to an MI6 officer.

In 1798, when John Adams was president of the United States, the feds enacted four pieces of legislation called the Alien and Sedition Acts. One of these laws made it a federal crime to publish any false, scandalous or malicious writing - even if true - about the president or the federal government, notwithstanding the guarantee of free speech in the First Amendment.

The feds used these laws to torment their adversaries in the press and even successfully prosecuted a congressman who heavily criticized the president. Then-Vice President Thomas Jefferson vowed that if he became president, these abominable laws would expire. He did, and they did, but this became a lesson for future generations: The guarantees of personal freedom in the Constitution are only as valuable and reliable as is the fidelity to the Constitution of those to whom we have entrusted it for safekeeping.

We have entrusted the Constitution to all three branches of the federal government for safekeeping. But typically, they fail to do so. Presidents have repeatedly assaulted the freedom of speech many times throughout our history, and Congresses have looked the other way. Abraham Lincoln arrested Northerners who challenged the Civil War. Woodrow Wilson arrested Americans who challenged World War I. FDR arrested Americans he thought might not support World War II. LBJ and Richard Nixon used the FBI to harass hundreds whose anti-Vietnam protests frustrated them.

In our own post 9/11 era, the chief instrument of repression of personal freedom has been the government's signature anti-terror legislation: the Patriot Act. It was born in secrecy, as members of the House of Representatives were given 15 minutes to read its 300 pages before voting on it in October 2001, and it operates in silence, as those who suffer under it cannot speak about it.

Obama says his first visit to Israel as US president is chance to 'reaffirm the unbreakable bond between our nations'

The alliance between Israel and the United States is eternal, Barack Obama has said after landing in the Jewish state for his first visit since becoming US president more than four years ago.

"I see this visit as an opportunity to reaffirm the unbreakable bond between our nations, to restate America's unwavering commitment to Israel's security and to speak directly to the people of Israel and to your neighbours," Obama said at a welcoming ceremony at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport. "I am confident in declaring that our alliance is eternal, is forever," he added.

In a short speech before Israeli parliamentarians, religious leaders, military figures and other dignitaries, Obama said: "We will never lose sight of the vision of an Israel at peace with its neighbours." The Palestinians were not mentioned by name.

Air Force One touched down at about 12.30pm local time in glorious spring sunshine that prompted the president to discard his jacket shortly after the end of the ceremonials. His visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories is scheduled to last 50 hours before the 600-strong entourage departs for Jordan on Friday.