The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns the conviction and prison sentence handed down today against a Somali freelance journalist charged with insulting the government by interviewing a woman who said she was raped by government forces. CPJ calls for the sentence to be overturned and for reporter Abdiaziz Abdinuur to be released immediately pending appeal.

The Bernadir Regional Court in Mogadishu sentenced Abdiaziz to one year in prison on charges of insulting the government and making false accusations, according to local journalists and news reports. Abdiaziz was sent to the central prison in Mogadishu. The woman whom Abdiaziz had interviewed was also sentenced to a year in prison on the same insult charge, while three other defendants, including the alleged victim's husband, were released, news reports said.

Murder of Chokri Belaid, leader of Unified Democratic Nationalist party, triggers 1,000-strong protest outside interior ministry

A Tunisian opposition party leader who had been critical of the Islamist-led government and radical Muslim violence has been shot dead.

Chokri Belaid, leader of the Unified Democratic Nationalist party, was shot outside his home in Tunis on Wednesday morning and died in hospital shortly after.

President Moncef Marzouki cut short a visit to France and cancelled a trip to Egypt scheduled for Thursday after the killing, which triggered a 1,000-strong protest outside the interior ministry.

Few people embody the corporatist revolving door greasing Washington as purely as Elizabeth Fowler

When the legislation that became known as "Obamacare" was first drafted, the key legislator was the Democratic Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Max Baucus, whose committee took the lead in drafting the legislation. As Baucus himself repeatedly boasted, the architect of that legislation was Elizabeth Folwer, his chief health policy counsel; indeed, as Marcy Wheeler discovered, it was Fowler who actually drafted it. As Politico put it at the time: "If you drew an organizational chart of major players in the Senate health care negotiations, Fowler would be the chief operating officer."

What was most amazing about all of that was that, before joining Baucus' office as the point person for the health care bill, Fowler was the Vice President for Public Policy and External Affairs (i.e. informal lobbying) at WellPoint, the nation's largest health insurance provider (before going to WellPoint, as well as after, Fowler had worked as Baucus' top health care aide). And when that health care bill was drafted, the person whom Fowler replaced as chief health counsel in Baucus' office, Michelle Easton, was lobbying for WellPoint as a principal at Tarplin, Downs, and Young.

Whatever one's views on Obamacare were and are: the bill's mandate that everyone purchase the products of the private health insurance industry, unaccompanied by any public alternative, was a huge gift to that industry; as Wheeler wrote at the time: "to the extent that Liz Fowler is the author of this document, we might as well consider WellPoint its author as well." Watch the five-minute Bill Moyers report from 2009, embedded below, on the key role played in all of this by Liz Fowler and the "revolving door" between the health insurance/lobbying industry and government officials at the time this bill was written and passed.

If those North Korean propaganda games weren't odd (and unsettling) enough, the country's state media is incorporating Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and "We Are the World" to show the U.S. under attack. Yeah.

Never mind that "We Are the World" was written by Americans (Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson) or that North Korea probably (um, definitely?) didn't get permission to use this bit from Modern Warfare 3, the entire thing is one complete and very scary mindfuck.

Uploaded by North Korean propaganda agency Uriminzokkiri, the video, as LiveLeak points out, is a dream sequence that shows a North Korean rocket - the same kind the country recently launched into space. As an elevator music version of the USA for Africa charity song plays, the rocket circles the globe, an elated Korea is reunited, and at around the 2:15 mark, an American flag is draped over a bombed out New York City.

More than half of Conservative parliamentary party decline to support PM on issue at heart of his modernising agenda

Parliament took a historic step towards embracing full equality for gay people when MPs voted on Tuesday overwhelmingly in favour of equal marriage at the end of a charged Commons debate that exposed the deep rift over David Cameron's modernising agenda at the heart of the Conservative party.

The 225-vote majority, greeted with rare applause in the public gallery, was marred for the prime minister, who suffered a humiliating rebuff when more than half of the parliamentary Tory party declined to support the government on an issue he has personally invested in.

Owen Paterson, the environment secretary, led an unofficial rebellion by an estimated 136 Tory MPs in rejecting Cameron's plea. The opponents - including two tellers - included Adam Afriyie, the MP for Windsor, who has been running a Tory leadership campaign.

About 40 Conservatives, including the attorney general, Dominic Grieve, either formally abstained or did not vote in the second reading of the bill, which was subject to a free vote in which MPs were entitled to follow their consciences.

We need to remind ourselves of the sheer criminality of George W Bush and Tony Blair, to try and explain what was behind it and how they got away with it.

This is the introduction to Chris Nineham's new book, The People v. Tony Blair: Politics, the Media and the Anti-war Movement.

On Tuesday, 11 March 2003, British Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon phoned Donald Rumsfeld, his opposite number in the US, and told him Britain might not participate in the invasion of Iraq.

"We in Britain are having political difficulties," he said, "real difficulties, more than you might realise." He explained that there was a real chance an upcoming vote in parliament would go against the war, in which case Britain would have to 'disconnect' its troops from the operation.

That night, Donald Rumsfeld went public about Blair's problems at a televised White House press conference, admitting Britain might not be showing up for the invasion. He reassured the media "there are workarounds." Blair, Hoon and their colleagues were furious.

This was nine days before the invasion of Iraq.

Hoon's phone call reflected panic in Blair's camp. A few days earlier Home Secretary Jack Straw had told Blair that if he went to war with Bush without a second UN resolution, "the only regime change that will be happening will be in this room." Next day, Jack Straw was apparently one of a number of senior figures arguing with Blair not to join in.

In Alistair Campbell's words, "Jack S said that Rumsfeld's idiotic comments gave us a way out." One Guardian journalist reported in a piece headlined 'Brought to the brink of defeat,' "Senior civil servants began to check the procedures that might be necessary if Mr Blair was forced to quit."

Whatever Donald Rumsfeld might have meant by 'workarounds' if Britain had pulled out of the war it would have been catastrophic not just for the government but for the whole Iraq operation.

As Hoon himself admitted later, the British and US forces were so intertwined there would have been a massive hole in military planning. Worse, the US would have lost vital political cover for an invasion that was leaving it more and more isolated.

Amidst widespread concern that North Korea might be accelerating its nuclear weapons program, the country has apparently decided to add more fuel to the fire.

Uriminzokkiri, North Korea's central news agency and the main source of state produced propaganda, posted a video on Saturday that shows what appears to be a United States city -- possibly New York -- covered in flames after an apparent nuclear missile attack.

According to The Australian, the video is shot as if it is the dream of a young man. In his dream, the man sees himself orbiting the Earth aboard a space shuttle that is extremely similar to the rocket that North Korea tested last December. As he circles the planet and "We Are the World" plays in the background, he looks out the window of the ship and is able to see North and South Korea re-united far below.

Then the tone of the video changes from joy to dread. The camera shifts and shows a city that bears a United States flag being attacked by missiles. The skyscrapers in the city, one of which resembles the Empire State Building, are either engulfed in flames or crashing to the ground in ruins.

The world is ruled by neither justice nor morality; crime is not punished nor virtue rewarded, one is forgotten as quickly as the other. The world is ruled by power and power is obtained with money. To work is senseless, because money cannot be obtained through work, but through exploitation of others. And if we cannot exploit as much as we wish, at least let us work as little as we can. Moral duty? We believe neither in the morality of man nor in the morality of systems." Tadeusz Borowski This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

This hideous and degrading picture of the human animal Borowski painted at Auschwitz : humankind without benevolence, without compassion; lacking empathy, lacking mercy; inexorable, ruthless, and malevolent; a savage, brutal animal devoid of morals but obedient to laws. Borowski believed there was no crime a man would not commit to save himself. That belief, salvation for self at the expense of justice, precludes moral virtue. Borowski, a poet and a writer, labored at Auschwitz from 1942 until the liberation of the camps; he was not a homosexual, or a Roma or a Jew; he was an observer of human nature in a place where it was bared to the bone. But if his life there brought him to the realization of the barbarity of humans, devoid of morals, then he also understood what we lost as a result of that void:

"There can be no beauty if it is paid for by human injustice, nor truth that passes over injustice in silence, nor moral virtue that condones it."

Until and unless we eradicate injustice, we have no reason to know beauty, for all that we create is tainted by that injustice pretending all is well with our world. Truth does not exist if injustice surrounds us and we are silent in our complicity. Proclaiming moral virtue in a world awash in crimes against humanity is condoning the crimes unless we act to eradicate the crimes.

A key federal budget trick is using words to confuse citizens, such as labeling U.S. military spending as "defense" though much is for "offense" and sliding costs for wounded soldiers under "veterans affairs" and nuclear bombs under "energy," as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar explains.

As budgetary battles proceed with competing rhetorical salvos about what parts of government spending are unreasonably large, or are most out of control, or are the "real" reason for burgeoning deficits (actually, every part of the budgetary equation, on both the expenditure and the revenue sides, is just as real as every other part), one welcomes the occasional breath of fresh semantic air on the subject.

Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, using data compiled by Winslow Wheeler of the Project on Government Oversight, observes that the figures usually adduced to present spending on "defense" or "national security" understate by a long shot actual federal spending that is appropriately put under such labels.

The figure most often cited is the "base" budget of the Department of Defense, which was $535 billion for FY2012. But military and defense expenditures go well beyond that, including such things as the development of nuclear weapons, which is done in the Department of Energy, or training of foreign military forces, which come under the international affairs section of the federal budget.

Add in all those other things and the total is more like $930 billion rather than $535 billion. And that's just current expenditures, not taking into account follow-on effects such as additional interest to be paid on the national debt.

Chris Hedges gave this talk Saturday night in Brooklyn at the People's Recovery Summit.

The corporate state has made it clear there will be no more Occupy encampments. The corporate state is seeking through the persistent harassment of activists and the passage of draconian laws such as Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act - and we will be in court next Wednesday to fight the Obama administration's appeal of the Southern District Court of New York's ruling declaring Section 1021 unconstitutional - to shut down all legitimate dissent. The corporate state is counting, most importantly, on its system of debt peonage to keep citizens - especially the 30 million people who make up the working poor - from joining our revolt.

Workers who are unable to meet their debts, who are victimized by constantly rising interest rates that can climb to as high as 30 percent on credit cards, are far more likely to remain submissive and compliant. Debt peonage is and always has been a form of political control. Native Americans, forced by the U.S. government onto tribal agencies, were required to buy their goods, usually on credit, at agency stores. Coal miners in southern West Virginia and Kentucky were paid in scrip by the coal companies and kept in perpetual debt servitude by the company store. African-Americans in the cotton fields in the South were forced to borrow during the agricultural season from their white landlords for their seed and farm equipment, creating a life of perpetual debt. It soon becomes impossible to escape the mounting interest rates that necessitate new borrowing.

Debt peonage is a familiar form of political control. And today it is used by banks and corporate financiers to enslave not only individuals but also cities, municipalities, states and the federal government. As the economist Michael Hudson points out, the steady rise in interest rates, coupled with declining public revenues, has become a way to extract the last bits of capital from citizens as well as government. Once individuals, or states or federal agencies, cannot pay their bills - and for many Americans this often means medical bills - assets are sold to corporations or seized. Public land, property and infrastructure, along with pension plans, are privatized. Individuals are pushed out of their homes and into financial and personal distress.