A leading Japanese journalist recently made two incredible claims about the Fukushima power plant that suffered a nuclear meltdown in March 2011, sending shockwaves around the world.

First, the former editor of a national newspaper in Japan says the U.S. and Israel knew Fukushima had weapons-grade uranium and plutonium that were exposed to the atmosphere after a massive tsunami wave hit the reactor.

Second, he contends that Israeli intelligence sabotaged the reactor in retaliation for Japan's support of an independent Palestinian state.

According to Yoishi Shimatsu, a former editor of Japan Times Weekly, these nuclear materials were shipped to the plant in 2007 on the orders of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, with the connivance of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

As this year's olive harvest sends Palestinian families across all of historic Palestine out to their olive trees, a new nonviolent resistance group called Refusing to Die In Silence is patrolling the West Bank, protecting harvesters from increased settler violence.

The 2011 olive harvest, which began in early October, has seen a troubling rise in settler attacks. On October 20, OXFAM reported that Israeli settlers have already cost West Bank Palestinian farmers $500,000 this year in destroyed olive trees. In September alone, 2,500 olive trees were destroyed, out of 7,500 destroyed so far this year (and a conservative estimate of 800,000 destroyed since Israel's annexation of the West Bank in 1967). This is particularly damaging because this year's olive harvest is expected to yield only half the oil of last year's harvest, making each tree all the more valuable more farmers.

An interactive map released by the human rights organization Al-Haq illustrates the "alarming increase in violent attacks" throughout the West Bank in September. In response, Refusing to Die in Silence, launched on September 19 in anticipation of increased violence during the UN vote, has organized daily patrols in the regions between Ramallah and Nablus to protect farmers during the olive harvest. Incorporating Palestinian, Israeli and international activists, armed with cameras and guided by a commitment to nonviolent resistance, the group uses a coordinated system of car patrols, directed from a control room in Ramallah, to respond to settler attacks as they occur.

Says Haifam Katib, a coordinator of Refusing to Die In Silence who has been integral to the group since its inception, "we made the group because the settlers attack the villages in Palestine, especially during the month of the harvest. Last year there were many problems and so we decided to protect our people and to help our people pick olives, and to make what is going on well known...to help them, to push them to continue, to not be scared about settlers, to save their land- this is our plan."

European and Israeli diplomats say Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was presented with a compromise proposal, but that he had yet to respond.

The United States and the European Union are in the midst of marathon diplomatic efforts to delay a vote on the admission of Palestine as a full member of UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. The vote is currently expected to take place this week in Paris.

European and Israeli diplomats have said Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has been presented with a compromise proposal that would delay a vote on Palestinian membership in UNESCO, but he has not yet responded. On Monday, the UNESCO General Conference will begin debating the Palestinian membership request, with a vote on the application due to take place on Monday or at the latest, Tuesday.

Israeli airstrikes have killed seven Islamic Jihad fighters in the Gaza Strip, prompting a massive barrage of retaliatory rocket fire, officials have said.

Adham Abu Selmiya, a spokesman for Gaza's emergency services, said on Saturday that five members of the Al-Quds Brigades, Islamic Jihad's armed wing, were killed and three wounded in a first Israeli attack on their camp.

As fighting continued into the night, Israeli aircraft struck four more targets in Gaza, witnesses and Palestinian officials said, killing two fighters and wounding two others allegedly preparing to fire a missile near Rafah, in the south of the strip.

An Israeli strike east of Gaza City and two in the area of Khan Yunis, in the south, caused no casualties, witnesses said.

As rockets and mortar shells were fired into Israel, police said they were raising their national alert to its second-highest level.

New Dehli - In what should send alarm bells ringing in the Indian security establishment, Army Chief Gen VK Singh on Wednesday confirmed the presence of some 4,000 Chinese, including troops belonging to the People's Liberation Army of China in Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir (PoK).

The presence of the Chinese, including members of their defence forces, has been a matter of intense speculation here in India. But it's the first time an Army Chief has gone public with India's assessment about the kin of Chinese presence in PoK.

Earlier this year, Northern Army Commander Lt Gen KT Parnaik, while addressing a seminar in Jammu, had said that Chinese footprint in PoK was "increasing steadily" and its troops are "actually present" along the Line-of-Control.

"Chinese presence in Gilgit-Baltistan and the Northern Areas is increasing steadily... There are many people who are concerned about the fact that if there was to be hostility between us and Pakistan, what would be the complicity of Chinese. Not only they are in the neighbourhood but the fact that they are actually present and stationed along the LoC,'' Lt. Gen Parnaik had said in April this year.

Vanessa Hessler, who has long been the face of the telecoms firm told a magazine that not only was the Qaddafi family normal, but that the rebels who ousted the dictator were financed by foreigners and that the Libyan people had prospered under him.

"It was a passionate story; we were together for four years," the 23-year-old model told the Italian magazine Diva e Donna, speaking of her relationship with Mutassim, who was killed on October 20.

"At the moment everything disgusts me apart from Libya. I don't like to think that it is true. It is all very sad."

She said the Qaddafi family were "normal people."

Foreign powers had interfered in the country, she said. "We - France and Great Britain - financed the rebels. The people don't know what they are doing," she said.

The Libyan people were not particularly poor nor fanatic, she said. "You must not believe everything you hear."

Alice owner, the Italian firm Telefonica, said it expected her to distance herself from the comments. Spokesman Albert Fetsch said they were private comments which in no way reflected the opinions of the company. "Everything is being considered," he said of her future as poster girl for the Alice firm.

There's so much wrong with the CBC's Conspiracy Rising that it's difficult to know where to begin.

For the most part, the show, screening as part of the CBC's Doc Zone, is much like various other confused efforts that bundle together a bunch of unrelated things - JFK, Princess Di, 9/11, Roswell, elite reptilians, you name it - in order to sweep them all away in a smug gust of intellectual dishonesty. Indeed, that's why professional debunkers like Michael Shermer were invented.

As is the convention with Shermer and his ilk, you're either a conspiracy theorist - as represented in Conspiracy Rising by Alex Jones, seen frequently here at his apoplectic worst - or you're a professor of psychology like the University of New England's David Livingstone Smith, who gravely intones that a society enamoured with conspiracy theory is "sliding into barbarity." Bloodshed is the logical conclusion, he states (cue footage of Hitler).

Typically, there are no shades of grey in Conspiracy Rising. If you think there are reasonable grounds to suspect 9/11 was inadequately investigated, but you feel that Alex Jones is a fairly despicable invention of fringe marketing - well, you don't exist.

I suspect that most people would like to believe that societies, no matter how base their origins, become better over time. Unfortunately history belies this notion; societies have often grown worse over time. The United States of America is no exception. It was not benign at its origin and has now descended to a region of depravity seldom matched by even the worst nations of history.

Although it is impossible to find hard numbers to prove that morality in America has declined, anecdotal evidence is everywhere to be seen. Almost everyone can cite situations in which the welfare of people was sacrificed for the sake of public or private institutions, but it seems impossible to cite a single instance of a public or private institution's having been sacrificed for the sake of people. If morality has to do with how people are dealt with, one can legitimately ask where morality plays a role in what happens in America? The answer seems to be, "Nowhere!" So what has happened in America to account for the current epidemic of claims that morality in America has collapsed? Well the culture has changed drastically in the last half century, that's what.

Once upon a time in America, the American character was defined in terms of what was called the Protestant Ethic. The sociologist, Max Weber, attributed Capitalism's success to it. Unfortunately Max was lax; he got it wrong, completely wrong. Capitalism and the Protestant ethic are inconsistent with each other. Neither can have been responsible for the other.

An interesting interview in which the 'news anchors' defend the party line against one of the CIA's more honest alumni, former counter-terrorism analyst and head of the Bin Laden station, Michael Scheuer. He is currently adjunct professor at Georgetown University's Center for Peace and Security Studies.

Experts on Africa who have traveled extensively in Libya contend that the stories emanating from the Western media that portray Libya's leader, Muammar Gaddafi, as engaging the services of black mercenaries from Sahara and sub-Sahara Africa is a disinformation ploy by the CIA to stoke racist fervor among Libyans rebelling against Gaddafi.

After Western news sources "reported" that Gaddafi had hired black African mercenaries to fight against Libyan rebels, thousand of black African workers in Libya were set upon by angry mobs who believed the Western propaganda that the black workers were fighting for Gaddafi.

The role of President Obama in stoking a CIA-engineered racist response by Libyan rebels has not been lost on a number of African-Americans. One leading African-American activist in Washington, DC wrote in an email: "Not demanding the accountability of a black president will garner us the same things as not holding a white President accountable - nothing."

Western news organization reported that Libyan rebels were "hunting down" black African mercenaries but many of these were merely workers who came to Libya from their economically-depressed nations to seek employment in mainly the Libyan oil services, agricultural, and construction sectors. Ironically, a number of the Africans targeted by angry mobs spurred on by CIA and other Western intelligence planted news stories are from Kenya, the land that Obama claims as his paternal ancestral home.