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.

Under the title 'Fallujah's children's 'genetic damage', that old war horse 'literally' of the BBC's foreign propaganda service, John Simpson, manages not to mention the phrase 'depleted uranium' when allegedly reporting on the alarming rise in birth defects that include cancer, leukemia and a horrific rise in child mortality since the US demolished the city of Fallujah in 2004. And it's not until right at the end of the piece that the US attack on Fallujah is even mentioned, let alone depleted uranium!

Simpson says:

"Even if it's possible to produce watertight scientific proof that American weapons were responsible for the genetic damage it will be almost impossible for the people who suffered to get any redress. American legislation makes it extremely difficult to sue the US government over acts of war."

Well that takes care of that little problem then, doesn't it. I trust the US government will reward Simpson for his slavish support of its wars of conquest and destruction.

Indeed, just look at the title of the video, the phrase genetic damage is in single quotes, thus the damage to the children of Fallujah, which is clearly and obviously genetic in origin, is questioned by the BBC's spin meister Simpson. Worse, the video shows doctors comparing the effects of depleted uranium on the children of Fallujah with that of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and point out that in fact, they're much worse than the damage inflicted by the Empire's atomic bombs.

New York City asks: What happened to the 1,116 missing 9/11 victims?

More than 11 years after the catastrophic destruction of the World Trade Center, New York City's government is finally asking: What in the world could have happened to the missing 1,116 victims?

In every building collapse in history, all of the victims' bodies have been recovered more or less intact. That is because falling buildings crush human bodies. They do not shred them into tiny pieces, or cause them to vanish into thin air.

Yet on September 11th, 2001, the most famous "building collapses" in history somehow caused the bodies of more than 1,000 victims to magically disappear. Not even a shred of skin, a fragment of fingernail, or a shard of bone from any of these bodies was ever recovered, despite meticulous "sifting and bucketing" efforts.

But that's not the only mystery. Hardly anything was left of the 1,634 WTC occupants who did not completely vanish. Most of the human remains discovered and DNA-identified were in the form of tiny, shredded pieces, not intact bodies.