Syria says it has arrested members of a terrorist group that planned acts of sabotage to destabilize the country following weeks of unrest.

According to Syrian security officials, foreign organizations provided the group with financial as well as military assistance to incite unrest in the country.

The head of the armed terrorist group, Anas al-Kanj, has confessed to receiving instructions "to incite people to protest, particularly outside the Ommayad Mosque in the capital, Damascus, and in the towns of Daraa, Latakieh and Banias."

He also confessed that he was ordered to use live ammunition and open fire on "protesters in order to sow disarray and lead people to believe that the security forces were shooting on the demonstrators."

Regulators on Friday shut down a small bank in South Carolina, the 45th U.S. bank failure this year in the wake of economic distress and piles of bad loans.

The pace of closures has slowed, however, as the economy improved and banks worked their way through the bad debt. By this time last year, regulators had closed 81 banks.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. seized Atlantic Bank and Trust, based in Charleston, S.C., with $208.2 million in assets and $191.6 million in deposits. First Citizens Bank and Trust Co., based in Columbia, S.C., agreed to assume the assets and deposits of the failed bank.

In addition, the FDIC and First Citizens Bank and Trust agreed to share losses on $141.8 million of Atlantic Bank and Trust's loans and other assets.

The failure of Atlantic Bank and Trust is expected to cost the deposit insurance fund $36.4 million.

In 2010 regulators seized 157 banks, the most in a year since the savings-and-loan crisis two decades ago.

The FDIC has said that 2010 likely would mark the peak for bank failures.
Regulators on Friday shut down a small bank in South Carolina, the 45th U.S. bank failure this year in the wake of economic distress and piles of bad loans.

Jerusalem -- Palestinians traveling to Egypt stormed a gate at the border crossing on Saturday after waiting for hours in buses, Gaza officials told CNN.

It is the first kink in cross-border travel after Egypt reopened the crossing with Gaza last week, a symbolic move that signaled the Cairo government's greater support of Palestinian aspirations.

The Rafah Crossing had been subject to frequent closures by Egypt after the Islamic militant group Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007.

The closure of the border had been part of an embargo policy by Egypt and Israel aimed at cutting off Hamas, but the embargo created an economic hardship on the Palestinian territory by limiting shipments of goods in and out of the country.

As the Bilderberg conference heads towards Switzerland there's still time to book your seat on a minibus to St Moritz

As Europe groans, and austerity bites, as defaulting looms, and once proud nations fall to their knees in debt, there's only one annual conference of bankers and industrialists that can step in and save us all...

Bilderberg!

Next week, in Switzerland, Henry Kissinger and his brave band of corporate CEOs, high-wealth individuals and heavyweight thinktankers will lock arms with Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands and David Rockefeller, and stand their ground against the economic contagion.

The last thing a bunch of bank bosses and multinational executives wants is for the nation-states of Europe to collapse, allowing their assets to be bought up on the cheap. Right?

The Kayapó people's battle to save their land from flooding as the Bel Monte dam is built follows a pattern across the Americas

The man pictured above is Raoni Txucarramãe, chief of the Kayapó people, who hail from Brazil's northern Pará province. The homeland of the Kayapó is the tropical rainforest surrounding the tributaries of the giant Xingu river, itself a nearly 2,000km long tributary of the Amazon. But the livelihood of the Kayapó people is under grave threat. Brazil's president, Dilma Vana Rousseff, has authorised the construction of a dam that will flood their homeland.

The Belo Monte dam will be the world's third-largest hydroelectric dam (after China's Three Gorges dam, itself with numerous problems, and the Brazilian-Paraguayan Itaipu dam). It will flood 400,000 hectares of the world's largest rainforest, displacing 20,000 to 40,000 people - including the Kayapó. The ecological impact of the project is massive: the Xingu River basin has four times more biodiversity than all of Europe. Flooding of the rainforest will liberate massive amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas far more damaging than carbon dioxide. But the impact on Chief Raoni's people, on an entire society, is unimaginable.

The Kayapó traditionally practised slash-and-burn agriculture on small farms cut into the jungle. The rich resources of their lands (minerals, timber, and potential hydroelectrical power) have brought pressures from outside. Although the Brazilian constitution explicitly prohibits the displacement of "Indians" from their traditional lands, it provides for one convenient exception: where the National Congress deems removal of the people to be "in the interest of the sovereignty of the country". Proponents of the dam argue that its construction is in the nation's interest.

Two of the 12 Americans killed in the 1998 US embassy attack in Nairobi worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, a news service has reported.

The disclosure of Mr Tom Shah's and Ms Molly Huckaby Hardy's actual status comes 13 years after the bombing and coincides with Memorial Day on Monday when the US honours its war dead.



Mr Shah and Ms Hardy "are believed to have been the first CIA casualties" in the clandestine war against al-Qaeda, the Associated Press says in its investigative story.


The news service says its account is based on interviews with half-a-dozen current and former US officials.

Until now, "their service remained a secret in both life and death, marked only by anonymous stars on the wall at CIA headquarters" outside Washington, the AP writes.

[This article originally appeared in Issue 13 of The Dot Connector Magazine]
As a species, you'd think we'd be able to tell the difference by now between image and reality. And yet, with all our acquired scientific knowledge, the gist of which is dutifully drilled into our minds during twelve to twenty years of public and 'higher' education, we still can't get it right. Well, perhaps that isn't fair. I know a few individuals who can sniff out a pair of imitation Nikes or a Britney Spears lip-synch in a heartbeat. So we're experts when it comes to the trivial, but with anything a tad meatier, where our very livelihoods may depend on it, our discernment in separating fact from fiction is deplorable. Why is that?

Growing up, I had the opportunity to sit in on more than a few 'polite' dinner conversations among adults. Not having much to say, I tended to listen. And, more often than not, as one topic led to another, as the pace of speech quickened and voices became slightly higher in pitch, that inevitable conversation stopper reared its head. "No religion or politics!" Such things are off limits, you see, and when discussed in 'polite' company, all rationality seems to fly out the window and a battle of wills ensues.

No great civilization is ever destroyed from without, or conquered by external forces, until it first destroys itself from within. America's leaders should have thought long and hard about that before voting to extend the Patriot Act last week.

Unhappily it's official. We the People are the enemy. We have dared to prod and examine government policy too closely. We have questioned government leadership when we should rightly have obeyed without challenge. Some of us have exposed wrongful government practices and deceptions, expecting to hold Congress and White House leaders accountable to voters. Foolish us!

Last week Congress set the record straight. Breaking campaign promises to defeat the Patriot Act, Congress blocked hearings and debate on amendments that would fix problems in surveillance rules, and rammed a four year extension on the American People. Only 31 Republicans and 122 Democrats voted against the Patriot Act in the House.

A new short film claims that the board of the Organic Trade Association (OTA) is undermining the ethic of of the organic movement. The film, embedded below, was released by an anonymous person or group called Organic Spies, suggests that at least four current board members of the OTA are in conflict of interest because the companies they represent overwhelmingly rely on genetically engineered ingredients, something that is anathema to the organic movement.

I love a shadowy figure as much as the next guy, but I also checked with former OTA director and board member Arran Stephens, CEO of the still independent and fiercely organic cereal company, Nature's Path, to get his take on this breaking scandal.

Early this spring, while the world was distracted by Egypt's uprising, President Barack Obama pushed the Secretary of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to deregulate genetically engineered alfalfa and sugar beets in the United States. The USDA came through as he directed, totally deregulating these Monsanto-patented genes in early February.

In so doing, Obama and the USDA have chosen to override and ignore decisions and injunctions made by the U.S. Supreme Court that banned planting of genetically engineered alfalfa and sugar beets without consideration of the Environmental Impact Assessments, which showed high risks to organic and conventional (chemical) farmers.

So how does this affect you and me? Neither of us remembers seeing alfalfa or sugar beets on our breakfast table or even on our Seder table. Or do we?

Sugar beets provide over 50 percent of the sugar Americans use in their coffee, cereals, and desserts. For the moment, let's not focus on the fact that sugar beets can cross-pollinate with red beets and make our borscht genetically modified.

Alfalfa reaches our tables within milk, cream, butter, and meat, as it is used as a major animal feed in the dairy industry. It is also used to enrich soils in organic farming.