Blackened bodies, mothers who couldn't recognize their charred children and those still alive screaming with pain - these are horrific details the survivors of nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki recall ahead of 70th anniversary of the tragedy.

The US was the first nation to use nuclear weapons against an enemy target when they dropped atomic bombs on Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II on August 6 and 9, 1945.

More than 80,000 civilians died immediately as a result of the Hiroshima bomb - a device nicknamed 'Little Boy' by the US Air Force - and other 80,000 were believed killed in the Nagasaki attack by 'Fat Man'. Thousands died from radiation sickness in the months and years following the blasts.

As of August 2014 the memorials in Hiroshima and Nagasaki list the names of more than 450,000 people who died in the tragedy: 292,325 in Hiroshima and 165,409 in Nagasaki.

Chiyoko Kuwabara, a survivor of Hiroshima atomic bombing, told RT that she was only 13 years old when the tragedy happened but the moments that changed her life forever still "linger in her memory."

When it was obvious that Narendra Modi would become India's prime minister, Pakistan grew alarmed. Modi's party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, is the party that gave India its nuclear status. Indians voted for Modi and the brave India he promised in hopes that his government would not indulge Pakistani predations, and punish them instead.

Pakistan has developed one core strategy in dealing with India over the decades: deploy Islamist militants to attack India while seeking cover from retaliation under its nuclear weapons. It should be noted that while Pakistan is most notorious for supporting Islamist terrorists, it also supports religious and ethnic insurgencies within India as well. Pakistan not only seeks to use terrorism to illegitimately acquire territory in Indian Kashmir, it also wants to resist India's rise in the international system. Until the Modi administration, Pakistan has remained fairly confident that India will not respond militarily to punish Pakistan for its state-sponsored terrorism or to deter it from doing so in the future.

"You see them on the street. You watch them on TV. You might even vote for one this fall. You think they're people just like you. You're wrong. Dead wrong."—They Live

We're living in two worlds, you and I.

There's the world we see (or are made to see) and then there's the one we sense (and occasionally catch a glimpse of), the latter of which is a far cry from the propaganda-driven reality manufactured by the government and its corporate sponsors, including the media.

Indeed, what most Americans perceive as life in America—privileged, progressive and free—is a far cry from reality, where economic inequality is growing, real agendas and real power are buried beneath layers of Orwellian doublespeak and corporate obfuscation, and "freedom," such that it is, is meted out in small, legalistic doses by militarized police armed to the teeth.

All is not as it seems.

This is the premise of John Carpenter's film They Live (1988), in which two migrant workers discover that the world's population is actually being controlled and exploited by aliens working in partnership with an oligarchic elite. All the while, the populace—blissfully unaware of the real agenda at work in their lives—has been lulled into complacency, indoctrinated into compliance, bombarded with media distractions, and hypnotized by subliminal messages beamed out of television and various electronic devices, billboards and the like.

It is only when homeless drifter John Nada (played to the hilt by the late Roddy Piper) discovers a pair of doctored sunglasses—Hoffman lenses—that Nada sees what lies beneath (see video below) the elite's fabricated reality: control and bondage.

When viewed through the lens of truth, the elite, who appear human until stripped of their disguises, are shown to be monsters who have enslaved the citizenry in order to prey on them. Likewise, billboards blare out hidden, authoritative messages: a bikini-clad woman in one ad is actually ordering viewers to "MARRY AND REPRODUCE." Magazine racks scream "CONSUME" and "OBEY." A wad of dollar bills in a vendor's hand proclaims, "THIS IS YOUR GOD."

When viewed through Nada's Hoffman lenses, some of the other hidden messages being drummed into the people's subconscious include: NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT, CONFORM, SUBMIT, STAY ASLEEP, BUY, WATCH TV, NO IMAGINATION, and DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY.

This indoctrination campaign engineered by the elite in They Live is painfully familiar to anyone who has studied the decline of American culture. A citizenry that does not think for themselves, obeys without question, is submissive, does not challenge authority, does not think outside the box, and is content to sit back and be entertained is a citizenry that can be easily controlled.

In this way, the subtle message of They Live provides an apt analogy of our own distorted vision of life in the American police state, what philosopher Slavoj Žižek refers to as dictatorship in democracy, "the invisible order which sustains your apparent freedom."

The deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security has admitted that a new cybersecurity bill could "sweep away" privacy protections, adding that it raises privacy and civil liberties concerns. The bill could hit the Senate floor this week.

Responding to a July query from Minnesota Senator Al Franken, DHS Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said that some provisions of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) "could sweep away important privacy protections"and that proposed legislation "raises privacy and civil liberties concerns."

The bill authorizes companies to share information about cyber threats with "any federal entity." Any company participating in the data sharing would be immune from consumer lawsuits.

If passed, it would mean that sectors of the federal government would begin to receive, store, and circulate sensitive information. The data would be exempt from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) disclosures.

A video apparently showing the torture of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's son during interrogation in prison has been condemned by both HRW, and his legal representative, who told RT that the Gaddafi name alone is enough to guarantee "maximum sentence and maximum mistreatment."

The undated video, recently released by Arabic Clear News outlet shows a group of men ill-treating several inmates and interrogating a captive who strongly resembles al-Saadi Gaddafi, the third son of the deceased Colonel who ruled the country for almost 40 years.

"It does appear to be Saadi Gaddafi," Melinda Taylor, an international criminal court defense lawyer for Saadi Gaddafi told RT. "He looks the same in sense [that] his head ... [had been] shaved which happened to him last year."

The footage shows the blindfolded man being forced to listen to the screams of at least two other inmates allegedly being tortured by the guards in the next room. Then he is made to watch them being beaten. No legal team is present during the "questioning."

Ukraine's foreign minister is calling on Russia to come to "real negotiations" about a cease-fire and stabilization in Ukraine's war-torn east which will require fair elections that are internationally monitored.

Pavlo Klimkin said in an interview with The Associated Press that Russian military and special forces are "in full command" in the rebel-controlled eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. He cited Ukraine's capture a few days ago of a large Russian truck filled with weapons that was driven by a Russian special forces officer as one of many examples of Russia's presence. Russia has scoffed at the allegations and pro-Russia rebels dismissed the Ukrainian claim as a fabrication.


The Kiev government has had no control over parts of eastern Ukraine since pro-Russian separatist rebels began fighting government forces in April 2014, a conflict that has since claimed more than 6,400 lives and displaced more than 1.5 million people. An armistice signed in the Belarus capital Minsk in February requires both sides to pull back heavy weapons from the front line, but international observers vetting that process regularly note violations.

Former Tory Prime Minister Sir Edward Heath has been accused of rape by an alleged victim, who was 12 years old at the time of the claimed assault. A police inquiry was opened on Monday urging others to come forward.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) launched an inquiry into the alleged cover-up of a criminal investigation after a suspect threatened to expose Heath as a child abuser.

Heath served as a Conservative PM from 1970 to 1974. He died in 2005 at the age of 89. He is the most high profile figure to be accused of historic child sex abuse to date.


The victim, who says he was 12 when the former PM raped him, said he had been abused throughout his childhood by his father and other pedophile connections, including Heath.

He alleges that he was picked up on the A2 road in Kent and taken back to an apartment on Park Lane in London where Heath raped him, the Daily Mirror reported.

The most senior CIA officer on record yet has said he's "comfortable with saying" that waterboarding and related interrogation methods were "torture." He was commenting on the post-9/11 "enhanced interrogation" tactics used by the Bush Administration.

The remarks by former executive director of the CIA, Alvin 'Buzzy' Krongard (2001-2004), were made to BBC's Panorama. The third most senior former official at the agency was asked if he thought waterboarding and related tools amounted to torture.

"Well, let's put it this way, it is meant to make him (the suspect) as uncomfortable as possible. So I assume, without getting into semantics, that's torture. I'm comfortable with saying that."

The torture debate has never let up. President Barack Obama famously put an end to torture in 2009, but failed to prosecute senior Bush-era officials for running such programs.

The US president has reportedly authorized the Air Force to protect Syrian rebels trained by Washington to fight against Islamic State by bombing any force attacking them, including Syrian regular troops.

Thus the US may become involved in the Syrian civil war on the rebel side.

The change was first reported by US officials speaking on condition of anonymity with the Wall Street Journal Sunday. The first airstrikes to protect American trainees in Syria have already taken place on Friday, July 31, when the US Air Force bombed unidentified militants who attacked the compound of the US-trained rebels.

So far the fighter jets of the anti-Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) US-led coalition have been bombing jihadist targets in Syria's north and the national air defense units were turning a blind eye to foreign military aircraft in their airspace.

Meanwhile, President Barack Obama's decision reportedly involves inflicting airstrikes against any force that attacks the Syrian rebel armed force being trained by American instructors and armed on money from the US budget, with the officially-proclaimed aim of dealing with the advances of IS.

Something was Missing at Bernie's talk to the SCLC.

In the final years of his life, the increasingly radical Black Civil Rights, peace, and social justice leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke and wrote against what he called "the triple evils that are interrelated." The first such evil was racism, deeply understood to mean not just prejudiced white sentiments and formal segregation in the U.S. South but the racially separate and unequal functioning of the nation's basic institutions and social structures.

The second evil was poverty and economic inequality - class injustice, which King rooted in capitalism. That system, King felt, "produces beggars" alongside luxuriant opulence, necessitating "the radical redistribution of economic and political power."

The third evil was U.S. military imperialism - no mere afterthought in King's critique of the American System. Explaining why he had turned openly against Washington's monstrous war on Vietnam in 1967, King argued that conscience did not permit him to remain silent on the crimes the "strange [American] liberators" were committing in Southeast Asia. At the same time, he noted, his condemnation of America's role as "the leading purveyor of violence in the world today" (a description that still rings true today) was strongly linked to his struggles against racial and economic disparity in the U.S.