The ongoing radiation catastrophe stemming from three out-of-control nuclear reactors in Fukushima, Japan, has taken a back seat to far graver news events of late: Michael Jackson's doctor, fund-raising by presidential hopefuls, the World Series and Netflix stock.

Meanwhile, reporting about the on-going disaster relentlessly repeats the minimization and trivialization of radiation risk that began March 11, with the largest earthquake in Japanese history and the unprecedented tsunami that left over 26,000 people dead or missing and 80,000 still living in shelters.

Radioactive contamination of soil, tap water, rain water, groundwater, beef, fish, vegetables, animal feed and incinerator ash are almost always said to be of little or "no immediate" danger, which helps explain why Fukushima has faded from public consciousness.

Israel has refused to reassure President Barack Obama that it would warn him in advance of any pre-emptive strike on Iran's nuclear capabilities, raising fears that it may be planning a go-it-alone attack as early as next summer.

The US leader was rebuffed last month when he demanded private guarantees that no strike would go ahead without White House notification, suggesting Israel no longer plans to "seek Washington's permission", sources said. The disclosure, made by insiders briefed on a top-secret meeting between America's most senior defence chief and Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's hawkish prime minister, comes amid concerns that Iran's continuing progress towards nuclear weapons capability means the Jewish state has all but lost hope for a diplomatic solution.

On Tuesday, UN weapons inspectors released their most damning report to date into Iran's nuclear activities, saying for the first time that the Islamic republic appeared to be building a nuclear weapon. It was with that grave possiblity in mind that Leon Panetta, the US defence secretary, flew into Israel last month on what was ostensibly a routine trip.

Officially, his brief was restricted to the Middle East peace process, but the most important part of his mission was a private meeting with Mr Netanyahu and the defence minister, Ehud Barak. Once all but a handful of trusted staff had left the room, Mr Panetta conveyed an urgent message from Barack Obama. The president, Mr Panetta said, wanted an unshakable guarantee that Israel would not carry out a unilateral military strike against Iran's nuclear installations without first seeking Washington's clearance.

The two Israelis were notably evasive in their response, according to sources both in Israel and the United States.

"They did not suggest that military action was being planned or was imminent, but neither did they give any assurances that Israel would first seek Washington's permission, or even inform the White House in advance that a mission was underway," one said.

As the Supreme Court gets ready to hear oral arguments in a case Tuesday that could determine if authorities can track U.S. citizens with GPS vehicle trackers without a warrant, a young man in California has come forward to Wired to reveal that he found not one but two different devices on his vehicle recently.

The 25-year-old resident of San Jose, California, says he found the first one about three weeks ago on his Volvo SUV while visiting his mother in Modesto, about 80 miles northeast of San Jose. After contacting Wired and allowing a photographer to snap pictures of the device, it was swapped out and replaced with a second tracking device. A witness also reported seeing a strange man looking beneath the vehicle of the young man's girlfriend while her car was parked at work, suggesting that a tracking device may have been retrieved from her car.

Then things got really weird when police showed up during a Wired interview with the man.

The young man, who asked to be identified only as Greg, is one among an increasing number of U.S. citizens who are finding themselves tracked with the high-tech devices.

Today the Israeli intelligence website DEBKAfile claimed that their usual unnamed sources reported that one of the explosions in Iran was actually caused by a failed attempt to affix a nuclear warhead to a Shahab-3 medium-range ballistic missile.

According to the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), an organization listed as a terrorist group by the U.S. State Department which is oddly characterized as an "Iran exile group" by USA Today, the explosion wasn't an accidental incident at an ammunition depot but instead was a missile base run by the Revolutionary Guard.

DEBKAfile is a site which is given a disturbing amount of credence given their less-than-stellar track record in terms of accuracy and their highly questionable links to Israeli intelligence agencies like Mossad.

The nature of most of DEBKAfile's reports is also suspicious, given that they tend to solely cite anonymous, supposedly insider sources.

I could easily claim I have insider sources and publish disinformation based on these "sources" that I have made up, but of course I'm not going to do that because this site is about getting at the truth, not clouding the discussion with even more lies.

Due to the incredibly unreliable nature of all of DEBKAfile's reports, this claim should be taken with a large grain of salt and not accepted as fact.

DEBKAfile consistently presents the hawkish Israeli position, demonizing Iran, Palestine, and any other nation that stands up to Israel's crimes.

The United States or other countries should not launch a military strike against Iran over its nuclear program based on "Mossad's lies," a US journalist says.

"No one should allow Israel or anyone else to go to war on account of flagrant deception such as the Mossad has offered," Richard Silverstein wrote in an article.

He said the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) made a mistake by relying on evidence provided by the Israeli spy agency in compiling the report on Iran.

Silverstein said that the UN report claims a number of foreign scientists helped Iran in making nuclear weapons.

The report claims, a Ukrainian (not Russian) nuclear scientist, Vyacheslav Danilenko, is one the scientists employed for five years by the Iranians to work on refining their nuclear designs, Silverstein said.

The American journalist says Danilenko is not a nuclear scientist but a leading expert in producing industrial (nano) diamonds using sophisticated explosives technology.

Banks that received TARP money managed to avoid income tax

Five banks that received federal bailout funds during the financial crisis didn't pay income taxes for one or more years between 2008 and 2010, according to an iWatch News analysis of a new study of tax dodgers.

Wells Fargo & Co., Goldman Sachs Group, PNC Financial Services Group, Capital One Financial Inc. and State Street Corp. were among 78 of America's largest and most profitable corporations that managed to avoid paying income tax in at least one of those years.

Researchers looked at 280 corporations that reported total pretax U.S. profits of $1.4 trillion. The federal corporate tax code "ostensibly requires big corporations to pay a 35 percent corporate income tax rate, on average, the 280 corporations in our study paid only about half that amount."

UK's Daily Mail cites 'unnamed London sources' as saying strike on Tehran's nuclear facility closer than ever. Report's validity questionable.

Is a strike on Iran closer than ever? The Daily Mail claimed Wednesday that "Israel will launch military action to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon as soon as Christmas."

The British publication cites unnamed London "intelligence chiefs" as its source. The report has not been corroborated by any Israeli source, and its validity is considered questionable.

According to the report, UK Foreign Secretary William Hague said that the grave findings by the IAEA on Iran's nuclear ambitions have "completely discredited the Islamic Republic's claims of innocence."

Call it sheer hubris or a woeful misreading of public sentiment: After Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac executives got slammed by Congress over news that they got $12.79 million in bonus pay last year, Edward DeMarco, their chief regulator as acting head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has come out to defend the bonuses paid out to the loss-making government-owned mortgage firms.

According to CBS News, DeMarco sent out a letter to lawmakers in Washington on November 10 justifying big compensation packages for executives by saying they were needed to attract and retain top talent. Wrote DeMarco:

I need to ensure that the companies have people with the skills needed to manage the credit and interest rate risks of $5 trillion worth of mortgage assets and $1 trillion of annual new business that the American taxpayer is supporting. I have concluded that it would be irresponsible of me to risk this enormous contingent taxpayer liability with a rapid turnover of management and staff, replaced with people lacking the institutional, technical, operational, and risk management knowledge requisite to the running of corporations with thousands of employees and more than $2 trillion in financial obligations each.

Yes, the big bonuses are necessary to attract the best management, like the kind that lost $5.1 billion in the third quarter for Fannie Mae and requested for $7.8 billion in bailout money, or the kind that lost $4.4 billion in the same quarter for Freddie Mac and asked for $6 billion in taxpayer money. The nearly $14 billion combined is on top of the two firms' request for $6.6 billion in bailout cash in the second quarter and, lest we forget, the $170 billion from their 2009 bailout. Yes, that kind of talent.

A Shanghai court handed the former chief executive of a large state-owned pharmaceutical company a suspended death sentence for corruption that enabled him to amass more than 50 million yuan ($8 million), an official said Wednesday.

Wu Jianwen, the former head of Shanghai Pharmaceutical Group Ltd., was convicted of accepting bribes, embezzling public funds and other graft charges by the Shanghai Intermediate People's Court, according to a court official surnamed Wang.

Wang said the court handed down a suspended death sentence with a two-year reprieve. Such sentences usually are commuted to life in prison with good behavior.

The punishment comes as China wrestles with food and product safety concerns and appears aimed at showing that authorities are cracking down on rampant corruption.

US Moves to Overturn Ban on Cluster Bombs Cluster bombs are widely deemed inherently indiscriminate weapons, but the US aims to torpedo international ban

The U.S. is leading an effort to water down an international ban on cluster bombs, weapons that are widely considered to be inherently indiscriminate.

The Convention on Cluster Munitions prohibits cluster munitions, requires the destruction of stockpiles within eight years, and has been signed by 111 countries, while the U.S. has steadfastly refused to sign it. In a proposal that meant to neuter the convention, Washington now is pushing to permit the use of cluster bombs as long as they were manufactured after 1980 and had a failure rate of less than one per cent.

The Convention began to take effect in June 2010, just after a U.S.cluster bomb killed 35 women and children in Yemen, with the Pentagon stubbornly refusing to admit to the wrongdoing despite damning evidence compiled by Amnesty International, which was later corroborated by classified diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks.

Cluster bombs are highly imprecise weapons that work by dispersing hundreds of smaller submunitions, often referred to as bomblets or grenades. Often, the bomblets do not initially explode, only to explode later with civilians about.