Last week the Associated Press reported:

Israeli authorities blockading the Gaza Strip in 2008 went so far as to calculate how many calories would be needed to avert a humanitarian disaster in the impoverished Palestinian territory, according to a newly declassified military document... [Critics said] the document was new evidence that Israel used food as a pressure tactic to try to force Gaza's Hamas rulers from power...

What bothers me are the number of parallels to this right here, throughout US history. We've used chemical, biological, and nuclear warfare against our alleged enemies, have had concentration camps for far more people than the Japanese; starved our enemies with "sanctions" while denying them medical care at the same time; and much worse -back well into the First World War and the Civil War. But people don't like to remember these things, whether they're about Iraq, Iran, Cuba, Vietnam, or Japan or against the enemies in our midst, like the Red Man - and god only knows how many others. Starving people through sanctions or sieges is, as Allen says, just a primitive form of biological warfare.

In its early years, our beloved, exceptional Republic, used germ warfare by deliberately giving small-pox infected blankets to groups of Native Americans, often wiping out entire tribes - and then grabbing their land. The concentration camps we devised for them still exist in places like the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota, the Tohono O'odham desert outside Ajo, Arizona, or the dustlands of Oklahoma. Go back to the Crusades for examples of enforced starvation and creative torture such as the art of burning living people at the stake in the name of religion.

A paid informant for the New York Police Department's intelligence unit was under orders to "bait" Muslims into saying inflammatory things as he lived a double life, snapping pictures inside mosques and collecting the names of innocent people attending study groups on Islam, he told The Associated Press.

Shamiur Rahman, a 19-year-old American of Bangladeshi descent who has now denounced his work as an informant, said police told him to embrace a strategy called "create and capture." He said it involved creating a conversation about jihad or terrorism, then capturing the response to send to the NYPD. For his work, he earned as much as $1,000 a month and goodwill from the police after a string of minor marijuana arrests.

"We need you to pretend to be one of them," Rahman recalled the police telling him. "It's street theater."

More than two-thirds of Israeli Jews say that 2.5 million Palestinians living in the West Bank should be denied the right to vote if the area was annexed by Israel, in effect endorsing an apartheid state, according to an opinion poll reported in Haaretz.

Three out of four are in favour of segregated roads for Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank, and 58% believe Israel already practises apartheid against Palestinians, the poll found.

A third want Arab citizens within Israel to be banned from voting in elections to the country's parliament. Almost six out of 10 say Jews should be given preference to Arabs in government jobs, 49% say Jewish citizens should be treated better than Arabs, 42% would not want to live in the same building as Arabs and the same number do not want their children going to school with Arabs.

A commentary by Gideon Levy, which accompanied the results of the poll, described the findings as disturbing. "Israelis themselves ... are openly, shamelessly and guiltlessly defining themselves as nationalistic racists," he wrote.

Reflecting the Obama legacy and US culture, the Time columnist says: "the bottom line is: 'whose 4-year-olds get killed?'"

On MSNBC's Morning Joe program this morning, which focused on Monday's night presidential debate, the former right-wing Congressman and current host Joe Scarborough voiced an eloquent and impassioned critique of President Obama's ongoing killing of innocent people in the Muslim world using drones. In response, Time Magazine's Joe Klein, a stalwart Obama supporter, offered one of the most nakedly sociopathic defenses yet heard of these killings. This exchange, which begins at roughly the 7:00 minute mark on the video embedded below, is quite revealing in several respects.

The defense bill that lets the government indefinitely detain any US citizen without charge or trial wasn't mentioned once during the three presidential debates, but that didn't stop activists from sounding off: #StopNDAA went worldwide Monday night.

A campaign aimed at drawing awareness to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 and a draconian provision that provides the government the power to lock-up any person on mere suspicion of terrorist ties succeeded during Monday's third and final presidential debate. "#StopNDAA" was among the most popular hashtags included in messages sent over Twitter Monday night, at one point entering the list of top worldwide trends.

Former CIA agent John Kiriakou pleaded guilty Tuesday morning to crimes related to blowing the whistle on the US government's torture of suspected terrorists and was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Kiriakou, 48, agreed to admit to one count of disclosing information identifying a covert agent early Tuesday, just hours after his attorney entered a change of plea in an Alexandria, Virginia courtroom outside of Washington, DC.

Kiriakou was originally charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 after he went public with the Central Intelligence Agency's use of waterboarding on captured insurgents in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack. On Monday morning, though, legal counsel for the accused former CIA agent informed the court that Kiriakou was willing to plead guilty to a lesser crime.

Initially, Kiriakou pleaded not guilty to the charge that he had outted two intelligence agents directly tied to the drowning-simulation method by going to the press with their identities.

The United States has blocked a draft statement, proposed by Russia, on the resolution of violence in the Libyan town of Bani Walid, which has been under siege for weeks. The statement called for a peaceful solution to the conflict.

Russia's envoy to the UN, Vitaly Churkin said the move "can't be serious," reminding the American delegation of the deadly attack in Benghazi that claimed the lives of four US diplomats in September.

"Blocking a draft statement that called to solve the country's political problems without violence is very strange," Churkin said. "This is a case when it is difficult to explain the US delegation's actions in rational terms."

Back in mid September when the gold price was trying to break above $1777 and hold there, something that it attempted several times but eventually failed, we cited the $1720 level as a place where any significant pull-back should be supported:

Should $1770 not hold decent support can be found at the $1720 level.

And that is exactly what has happened. On friday, and as usual just after the jobs report in the States, we got another smash in gold taking the price all the way down to $1720.

This morning there was initial selling but the gold price has turned around and is now holding around the $1727 area.
As you can see on the chart above that $1720 area is also right at the 50 day moving average.

The Lebanese Army announced the capture of foreign terrorists armed with different types of weapons.

The Lebanese media reported that the country's army has arrested large numbers of terrorists who carried foreign nationalities and were armed with various types of weapons.

The Lebanese Al-Manar TV said in other operations the Army also arrested a number of armed people affiliated to the March 14th Coalition, an opposition to the Lebanese government, as well as more foreign terrorists in al-Qabbe district and another region where American nationals mostly reside.

The Lebanese army has deployed in the streets of Beirut and Tripoli in a bid to calm tensions.

Former Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, a leader of the Western-backed March 14th opposition bloc, was expected to meet President Michel Suleiman to discuss the latest developments in Lebanon, especially after General Wissam al-Hassan, the intelligence chief of Lebanon's Internal Security Forces, was killed in a blast on Friday.

A deadly bomb attack in the capital on Friday killed eight people, including General Wissam al-Hassan. Scores of others were also wounded.

The explosion occurred in Beirut's Eastern Ashrafiya district, which is a predominantly Christian district, and near the headquarters of the Phalange, a Maronite Christian party. Several buildings were damaged and many cars were set on fire as a result of the blast.

Regional observers blamed the US and Israel for the assassination of a Wissam in Beirut, and dismissed the western media claims against Damascus as a plot to darken the ties between Lebanon and Syria.

"The assassination of Brigadier General Wissam al-Hassan was carried out due to his successes and moves against the Zionist regime's intelligence apparatus and the regime's mercenaries in Lebanon," Mohsen Saleh told FNA on Monday, adding that Wissam's stances and role in defusing the Zionist regime's seditious plots in Lebanon angered the Israeli regime and caused his assassination.

He also dismissed the western media allegations about Syria's involvement in the assassination of the Lebanese intelligence official, and said, "They seek to darken the relations between Syria and Lebanon as demanded by the US and the Zionist regime."

I have travelled this world much more extensively than either Obama or Romney, and I still do. I find everywhere, even in areas of conflict and economic difficulty, the vast majority of people are friendly, even kind, and have very similar aspirations, across cultures, to personal development and emotional fulfilment.

The striking thing about last night's US Presidential "foreign policy" debate, is when it did occasionally discuss foreign policy, the world out there was discussed not as a place of vast potential, but as a deeply disturbing place full of foreigners who are, apparently, all evil except the Israelis, who are perfect.

The vast benefits from cooperation and trade with "abroad" were not mentioned once that I noticed (though I confess the thing was so awful my attention wandered occasionally). Europe apparently doesn't exist, other than Greece which is nothing more than a terrible warning of the dangers of not being right wing enough.