The deadline set by the UK's highest court for Julian Assange's extradition to Sweden runs out on Saturday. The whistleblower says he won't leave the safety of the Ecuadorian embassy in London until a decision on his asylum request is made.


­Julian Assange has spent the last two and a half weeks in the Ecuadorian embassy with London police standing guard at every exit should he attempt to leave.

On June 19 he entered the embassy and filed a request for asylum. Ecuador's UK ambassador is personally working on the matter and even had to return home for consultations. An answer was expected to be forthcoming, but as of yet there has been none.

But as Saturday is the deadline for Assange's extradition to Sweden after the whistleblower's failed appeal to the Supreme Court of the UK against the sexual assault allegations, Ecuador will be forced to weigh in on the issue.

Assange may be put on a plane to Sweden Saturday or Ecuadorian officials might grant him asylum in the South American country.

All 3 Libor Defenses Fail

The big banks have been manipulating the world's central economic indicator - Libor - for decades, harming homeowners, students, credit card holders, small businesses, cities and many others.

The sums involved were huge. As the Economist notes:

The sums involved might have been huge. Barclays was a leading trader of these sorts of derivatives, and even relatively small moves in the final value of LIBOR could have resulted in daily profits or losses worth millions of dollars. In 2007, for instance, the loss (or gain) that Barclays stood to make from normal moves in interest rates over any given day was £20m ($40m at the time). In settlements with the Financial Services Authority (FSA) in Britain and America's Department of Justice, Barclays accepted that its traders had manipulated rates on hundreds of occasions.

The Independent notes that potential liability from the Libor suits could wipe out Barclays, RBS and other banks ... and that the big banks have taken inadequate reserves against litigation risks.

It's Branded as a Trade Agreement, But What's Really at Stake?

Trade officials from nine Pacific Rim nations - Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the U.S. and Vietnam - are in intensive, closed-door negotiations to sign a Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade agreement in 2012. Every Pacific Rim nation from China and Russia to Indonesia and Japan could eventually be included. There are draft texts for many of this pact's 26 chapters, most of which have nothing to do with trade, but rather impose limits on domestic food safety, health, environmental, and other policies. The governments won't release the texts to the public. But over 600 U.S. corporate "trade advisors" have full access. America's worst job-offshoring corporations, global banks, agribusiness, and pharmaceutical giants want this deal to be another corporate power tool like NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement.) Consumer, labor, environmental, and other public interest advocates want transparency in the process and a "Fair Deal or No Deal."

A major goal of U.S. multinational corporations for the TPP is to impose on more countries a set of extreme foreign investor privileges and rights and their private enforcement through the notorious "investor-state" system. This system allows foreign corporations to challenge before international tribunals national environmental, land use, health and other laws and regulations that apply to domestic and foreign firms alike. Outrageously, this regime elevates individual corporations and investors to equal standing with each TPP signatory country's government - and above all of us citizens. This regime would empower corporations to skirt national courts and sue our governments before tribunals of private sector lawyers operating under UN and World Bank rules to demand taxpayer compensation for domestic regulatory policies that investors believe diminish their "expected future profits."

If a corporation "wins", the taxpayers of the "losing" country must foot the bill. Over $350 million in compensation has already been paid out to corporations in a series of investor-state cases under NAFTA-style deals alone. This includes attacks on natural resource policies, toxics bans, zoning and permits, health and safety measures, and more. In fact, of the over $12.5 billion in the 17 claims now pending under NAFTA-style deals, all relate to environmental, public health and transportation policy - not traditional trade issues. Governments have paid out over $675 million to investors in investor-state disputes under U.S. FTAs and bilateral investment treaties (BITs) - almost 70 percent of this related to oil, mining and gas disputes.

Holloman Air Force Base, at the eastern edge of New Mexico's White Sands Missile Range, 200 miles south of Albuquerque, was once famous for the daredevil maneuvers of those who trained there. In 1954, Col. John Paul Stapp rode a rocket-propelled sled across the desert, reaching 632 miles per hour, in an attempt to figure out the maximum speed at which jet pilots could safely eject. He slammed on the brakes and was thrust forward with such force that he had to be hauled away on a stretcher, his eyes bleeding from burst capillaries. Six years later, Capt. Joseph Kittinger Jr., testing the height at which pilots could safely bail out, rode a helium-powered balloon up to 102,800 feet. He muttered, "Lord, take care of me now," dropped for 13 minutes 45 seconds and broke the record for the highest parachute jump.

Today many of the pilots at Holloman never get off the ground. The base has been converted into the U.S. Air Force's primary training center for drone operators, where pilots spend their days in sand-colored trailers near a runway from which their planes take off without them. Inside each trailer, a pilot flies his plane from a padded chair, using a joystick and throttle, as his partner, the "sensor operator," focuses on the grainy images moving across a video screen, directing missiles to their targets with a laser.

Holloman sits on almost 60,000 acres of desert badlands, near jagged hills that are frosted with snow for several months of the year - a perfect training ground for pilots who will fly Predators and Reapers over the similarly hostile terrain of Afghanistan. When I visited the base earlier this year with a small group of reporters, we were taken into a command post where a large flat-screen television was broadcasting a video feed from a drone flying overhead. It took a few seconds to figure out exactly what we were looking at. A white S.U.V. traveling along a highway adjacent to the base came into the cross hairs in the center of the screen and was tracked as it headed south along the desert road. When the S.U.V. drove out of the picture, the drone began following another car.

The highly secretive pact, dubbed "NAFTA on steroids," is so invasive it would even limit how governments can spend tax dollars

Have you heard about the small U.S. government agency engaged in years of closed-door negotiations that could undermine the Obama administration's declared goals of creating jobs, reregulating the financial sector and lowering healthcare costs?

With the direct participation of 600 corporations and shocking levels of secrecy, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) is rushing to complete the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Branded as a trade agreement (yawn) by its corporate proponents, TPP largely has evaded public and congressional scrutiny since negotiations were launched in 2008 by the George W. Bush administration.

But trade is the least of it. Only two of TPP's 26 chapters actually have to do with trade. The rest is about new enforceable corporate rights and privileges and constraints on government regulation. This includes new extensions of price-raising drug patent monopolies, corporate rights to attack government drug formulary pricing plans, safeguards to facilitate job offshoring and new corporate controls over natural resources.

Also included are severe limits on government regulation of financial services, zoning and land use, product and food safety, energy and other essential services, tobacco, and more. The copyright chapter poses many of the threats to Internet freedom of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which was stalled in Congress under intense public pressure.

The proposed pact is so invasive of domestic policy space that it would even limit how governments can spend tax dollars. Buy America and other Buy Local procurement preferences used to reinvest our tax dollars in the American economy would be banned and sweat-free, human rights or environmental conditions on government contracts would be subject to challenge in closed-door foreign tribunals.

Indeed, signatory countries would be obliged to conform all their domestic laws and regulations to TPP's rules, effecting a quiet corporate coup d'état. And, regardless of election outcomes or changes in public opinion, these extreme rules could not be altered without the consent of all signatory countries. Failure to conform to these rules would subject countries to indefinite trade sanctions.

Police have arrested a seventh person in connection with a suspected plot to carry out a major terrorist attack on British soil.

A 22-year-old woman was detained at an address in Hackney, east London.

She was arrested on suspicion of the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism under the Terrorism Act 2000, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Police said.

The arrest, by officers from the Met's Counter Terrorism Command, follows six others made on Thursday.

The woman is in custody at a south-east London police station.

On Thursday British Muslim convert Richard Dart, 29, was one of the six people arrested over the suspected terror plot.

Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani blasted Washington's double-standard policies on different developments in the region, saying that while the US supports Bahrain's dictatorial regime, it equips terrorists with weapons in Syria

Comparing Obama's outright support for anti-Syria armed gangs in the name of democracy while backing the dictatorial regime in Bahrain, Larijani insisted that "such dual standards cannot be justified by any reason".

"The people of Bahrain are under extreme hardship; they are not demanding anything extraordinary but merely want the right to a ballot in which there is no difference between Shiite and Sunni vote, but the parliament of this state (Bahrain) now only conforms to the American version of justice," he said.

Earlier, a senior Bahraini opposition leader had also lashed out at Washington's double-standard policy and approach towards developments in the region, specially in Bahrain and Syria.

The US-led EU oil sanctions against Iran strike a fatal blow to Europe, a senior analyst said, adding that Washington is sacrificing its European allies for the sake of its own foreign policy.

Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich, a Public Diplomacy Scholar, independent researcher and blogger with a focus on US foreign policy and the role of lobby groups, believes that the US-driven pressures and sanctions on Iran will have dire repercussions for the green continent, specially if Iran reciprocates the European move and blocks the Strait of Hormuz to tankers carrying crude to the EU.

"Although American-led Western allies are flexing their muscles by sending battle ships to the Persian Gulf, Washington's own war game exercise, The Millennium Challenge 2002 with a price tag of $250 million, underscored America's inability to defeat Iran. Oblivious to the lesson of its own making, by sending more warships to the Persian Gulf, the United States is inching towards a full scale conflict. The inherent danger from the naval buildup is that unlike the Cuban Missile Crisis, the forces in the Persian Gulf are not confined to two leaders who would be able to communicate to stop a run-away situation. Nor would the consequences of such a potential conflict be limited to the region," Sepahpour-Ulrich said in an article in Global Research.

Special U.N. envoy Kofi Annan acknowledged in an interview published Saturday that the international community's efforts to find a political solution to the escalating violence in Syria have failed.

Annan also said that more attention needed to be paid to the role of longtime Syrian ally Iran, and that countries supporting military actors in the conflict were making the situation worse.

"The evidence shows that we have not succeeded," he told the French daily Le Monde.

Annan, the special envoy for the United Nations and the Arab League, is the architect of the most prominent international plan to end the crisis in Syria, which activists say has killed more than 14,000 people since March, 2011.

His six-point plan was to begin with a cease-fire in mid-April between government forces and rebels seeking to topple the regime of President Bashar Assad. But the truce never took hold, and now the almost 300 U.N. observers sent to monitor the cease-fire are confined to their hotels because of the escalating violence.

Israeli officials today reiterated their "outrage" at the United Nations Human Rights Council for deciding to probe illegal settlement activity in the occupied West Bank, adding that they would never cooperate with any probes and would bar any members of the mission from entering the territory.

The UN appointed a panel of three experts to conduct a fact-finding mission on how settlements, illegal under international law, impact the Palestinian civilians living under Israeli occupation.

Israeli official statements blasted the panel as inherently flawed, insisting that any investigation of Israel would have to be "biased" and that the UN should focus its investigations exclusively on "non-democratic countries."

Israel had severed all ties with the human rights council months ago when the notion was initially raised. The probe is expected to focus only on the occupation's impact on Palestinians and not its legality, since there seems to be no real question that the occupation is illegal and that the construction of settlement in occupied territory is a violation of the Geneva Conventions.