The public discourse on the jubilee did not so much defy analysis as run screaming from it, presumably to hang itself on a string of bunting. Millions of words were written about a woman sitting for 60 years on an inherited throne, and most of them felt insane. The media eventually bashed itself round the head for its treatment of Princess Diana's mortification and deification - it wrote a story about the story - and this was the same but inverse: life, not death. Six million parties, said the Daily Mail - can that really be true? Who cares? It sounded true and most of the media felt like a manic depressive on an up day last weekend, so drunk with pomp that even the prime minister managed to look middle class. (Perhaps he planned it.) It was too much. Even HM looked embarrassed.

How did they play it? The BBC chose light entertainment duh-speak and was punched by the rightwing press for lacking knowledge of every damp dignitary and seagull on the flotilla, which is fair comment if you want an intellectual framework poised over a reverse lynching. Where, they cried, were the superhero Dimblebys, flying through the air with their gravitas machines? That same rightwing press was so prostrate, so drooling, so repulsively horizontal that its coverage felt like a spoof, a four-day-long Chris Morris gag. When national newspapers and broadcasters fight over exactly how to kiss the royal arse, you wonder if the Enlightenment ever happened, and if we must really walk with the gods and monsters again. This courtier factionalism felt rather Tudor. Which Elizabethan age are we in, again? What is affection worth when it is so indiscriminate?

I did pull one strand of meaning out, but it was entirely unconscious. When Prince Philip developed cystitis after standing in the rain - this was too much detail, although it passed for an international story in these crazy days, and I felt for him - the coverage swung, like a ghostly Britannia, from Beloved Queen to Cystitis Explained to Lonely Queen, positioned somewhere between Henry IV - "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown" - and Ozymandias with big hair. Was it guilt? Because we did this to her? We placed a 26-year-old girl at the head of the state and made her a vessel - for what? Our own inadequacies, obviously. Even a perfectly sane friend of mine, when faced with the flesh-Queen as opposed to the dream-Queen said to her: "I love you." It cannot be easy, reading your retrospective obituary at breakfast. Even so, the ecstasy accelerated. The phrase "Elizabethist" was coined. By Monday, no one looked more of a victim than the Queen.

Nearly every major post-9/11 terrorism-related prosecution has involved a sting operation at the center of which is a government informant, The Nation magazine reports.

The publication cites the findings of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School. The Center has tracked 138 terrorism or national security prosecutions involving informants since 2001.

As the informants work for money or a reduction of their own criminal charges, their testimony may well be tainted. What's particularly distressing, writes Petra Bartosiewicz, a New York City journalist in the July 2nd issue of the magazine, is that the FBI informants "have crossed the line from merely observing potential criminal behavior to encouraging and assisting people to participate in plots that are largely scripted by the FBI itself."

The reporter explains that "Under the FBI's guiding hand, the informants provide the weapons, suggest the targets and even initiate the inflammatory political rhetoric that later elevates the charges to the level of terrorism."

Early count gives PRI candidate 38% of vote and signals return to power for party that ruled Mexico for most of 20th century


Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary party (PRI) is poised to regain the power it lost 12 years ago after seven decades in charge of the country.

The official quick count of a large sample of polling stations announced late on Sunday gave the PRI's candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto, around 38% of the vote and a lead of around seven percentage points over his nearest rival.

"This Sunday Mexico won", Peña Nieto said at his party's headquarters in the capital to the strains of a popular mariachi song, accompanied by his soap opera star wife and children. "Mexico voted for change with direction," he added.

During his speech, the slick, telegenic former governor of the country's most populous state was at pains to address fears that a PRI comeback would mean a return to the periodic authoritarianism, corruption and corporatist hubris that had characterised the party's political hegemony for most of the last century.

No point in voting when the game is rigged

Broadcaster commissioned videos rubbishing rivals of candidate who is now favourite to win presidential race on Sunday, documents seen by the Guardian reveal

A secretive unit inside Mexico's predominant television network set up and funded a campaign for Enrique Peña Nieto, who is the favourite to win Sunday's presidential election, according to people familiar with the operation and documents seen by the Guardian.

The new revelations of bias within Televisa, the world's biggest Spanish-language broadcaster, challenge the company's claim to be politically impartial as well as Peña Nieto's insistence that he never had a special relationship with Televisa.

The unit - known as "team Handcock", in what sources say was a Televisa codename for the politician and his allies - commissioned videos promoting the candidate and his PRI party and rubbishing the party's rivals in 2009. The documents suggest the team distributed the videos to thousands of email addresses, and pushed them on Facebook and YouTube, where some of them can still be seen.

Worried Katie Holmes is convinced she is under surveillance by private investigators hired by Scientologists.

Two mystery men were first spotted allegedly keeping watch on her at Tom Cruise's New York home - days BEFORE she filed for divorce from him.

And when Katie and daughter Suri, six, moved to a secret apartment in the Chelsea district of the city, the creepy pair suddenly appeared outside.

A source said: "About three days before the divorce was announced a Mercedes SUV was sitting outside Tom's apartment in Greenwich Village.

"They were sat about a hundred yards from the house - a couple of suspicious-looking characters in sunglasses.

Israel is the "ultimate outside power" that is behind the Syrian crisis and foreign countries' pushes to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's government, says an analyst.

The assertion comes as the foreign ministers of Russia, China, Britain, France, Turkey, Qatar, Kuwait, and Iraq, as well as the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, the Arab League Secretary-General, Nabil El-Araby, and the secretary of state of the United States attended a meeting on the situation in Syria at the United Nations office in Geneva on Saturday.

Press TV has conducted an interview with political commentator Mark Dankof to further discuss the issue.

The video also offers the opinions of an additional guest: Lawrence Freeman of US weekly newsmagazine Executive Intelligence Review.

What follows is an approximate transcription of the interview:

The Guardian has documented 56 cases involving police officers and staff who have been found to have abused their position to inappropriately target, assault or harass vulnerable individuals or have been investigated for such offences.

The cases below involve 48 police officers, five police community support officers, one special constable, one civilian police officer and one member of police staff. The cases took place across the country over the last four years from 2008 to 2012.

Neoclassical Economics Is Based on Myth

Neoclassical economics is a cult which ignores reality in favor of shared myths.

Economics professor Michael Hudson writes: [One Nobel prize winning economist stated,] "In pointing out the consequences of a set of abstract assumptions, one need not be committed unduly as to the relation between reality and these assumptions."

This attitude did not deter him from drawing policy conclusions affecting the material world in which real people live....

Typical of this now widespread attitude is the textbook Microeconomics by William Vickery, winner of the 1997 Nobel Economics Prize:

"Economic theory proper, indeed, is nothing more than a system of logical relations between certain sets of assumptions and the conclusions derived from them... The validity of a theory proper does not depend on the correspondence or lack of it between the assumptions of the theory or its conclusions and observations in the real world. A theory as an internally consistent system is valid if the conclusions follow logically from its premises, and the fact that neither the premises nor the conclusions correspond to reality may show that the theory is not very useful, but does not invalidate it. In any pure theory, all propositions are essentially tautological, in the sense that the results are implicit in the assumptions made."

Such disdain for empirical verification is not found in the physical sciences.

A gunman wearing an Afghan police uniform has killed three Nato staff in the south of the country, the coalition has said.

The gunman was injured and later detained, Nato said.

Officials did not confirm the nationalities of the killed service members, or any other details of the incident.

More than 20 foreign personnel have been killed in so-called rogue shootings this year.

Observers say this has eroded morale among foreign forces.

Tehran - Iran's Revolutionary Guards announced they are to fire ballistic and other missiles at desert targets during three days of war games starting Monday in a warning to threats of military action by Israel and the United States.

"Long-, medium- and short-range surface-to-surface missiles will be fired from different locations in Iran... at replica airbases like those used by out-of-region military forces," the head of the Guards aerospace division in charge of missile systems, Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, said.

"These maneuvers send a message to the adventurous nations that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps is standing up to bullies alongside the determined and unified Iranian nation, and will decisively respond to any trouble they cause," he was quoted as saying by the Guards' official Sepah news website.

Although Iran frequently holds war games, these exercises appeared to underline Tehran's threat to strike U.S. military bases in neighboring countries -- in Afghanistan, Bahrain, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia -- if it comes under attack by Israel or the United States.