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.

Washington declared Afghanistan a major non-NATO ally on Saturday, a largely symbolic status reinforcing its message to Afghans that they will not be abandoned as the war winds down.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the decision, made by President Barack Obama, during her unannounced visit to Kabul where she met President Hamid Karzai on the eve of a major donors' conference in Tokyo which will draw pledges for aid.

The status upgrade may help Afghanistan acquire U.S. defense supplies and have greater access to U.S. training as the Afghan army takes more responsibility for the country's security ahead of the 2014 withdrawal of most NATO combat troops.

"Please know that the United States will be your friend and your partner. We are not even imagining abandoning Afghanistan. Quite the opposite," Clinton told a press briefing with Karzai before jetting off to Tokyo.

Obama's decision meets a pledge he made on a visit to Afghanistan this year to upgrade Kabul to a special security status given to only a limited number of U.S. partners -- including close allies like Israel and Japan -- which are not members of NATO.

Participants at the Tokyo meeting are expected to commit just under $4 billion annually in development aid for Afghanistan at Sunday's meeting, though the central bank has said the country needs at least $6 billion a year to foster economic growth over the next decade.

This is on top of the $4.1 billion committed annually by NATO and its partners for Afghanistan's security forces, pledged at a Chicago summit in May.

U.S. officials with Clinton declined to say how much aid the United States would pledge, which has significantly reduced aid since the peak year of 2010 when more than $6 billion was given, two thirds from Washington.

Why Is the Libor Scandal So Important to You?

There have been numerous big banking scandals recently.

But the Libor scandal is the biggest financial scam in world history. See this and this.

The former CEO of Barclays said today that banks across the world were fixing interest rates in the run-up to the financial crisis .


Professor of economics and law Bill Black notes:

It is the largest rigging of prices in the history of the world by many orders of magnitude.

A military Bible paints war as religious devotion. What could go wrong?

Can a Bible be a "threat to national security"?

For years, the government has employed the risk of "national security" excuse to infringe on a wide range of freedoms - like the right to pass through an airport security checkpoint unmolested, or read library books without Big Brother peeking over your shoulder.

Michael L. "Mikey" Weinstein is trying to prove that there is more than one way to put the country at risk, and he's found it in a heretofore unlikely place: the Bible.

Well, the Holman Bible. To be more exact, a version of the Bible that, for reasons still undetermined, was authorized with the trademarked official insignia of the U.S. Armed Forces emblazoned on the front cover. There is The Soldier's Bible with the Army's seal, The Marine's Bible with the Marine Corps seal, The Sailor's Bible and The Airman's Bible, both with their respective insignia. The books have been sold for nearly six years throughout Christian bookstores, commissaries and PXs on U.S. military installations - and are still available on Christianbook.com, Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.

It's not the King James Version that the Gideons leave behind in hotel rooms drawers. The Holman Bible was commissioned and published by LifeWay Christian Resources, a subsidiary of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Baptist denomination in the world, in 2003.

In a 1999 press release announcing the edition's progress, Broadman & Holman Publishers called the new version "a fresh, precise translation of the Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek of the Old and New Testaments." LifeWay President James T. Draper Jr. weighed in, saying there was a "serious need for a 21st-century Bible translation in American English that combines accuracy and readability," adding, "the Holman Christian Standard Bible is an accurate, literal rendering with a smoothness and readability that invites memorization, reading aloud and dedicated study."

July 1 marked the start of a new round of sanctions designed to destroy the economy of Iran, create widespread suffering among the Iranian people, and thereby effect regime change in that country. The ostensible reason for the sanctions is that Iran has a nuclear program, which Washington and its allies allege is leading to the development of nuclear weapons. The Iranian government has denied any such intention, stating that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.

Iran is far from the first country to suffer from a cutoff or sharp reduction in trade due to sanctions. Over the past several decades, the U.S. - sometimes through the United Nations Security Council, sometimes in coordination with its imperialist allies, sometimes on its own - has imposed sanctions, embargoes and blockades on dozens of countries. Some of the sanctions regimes have lasted for decades, in the case of Cuba a half-century.

The justifications for imposing sanctions have included alleged human rights violations, lack of democracy, military aggression in violation of international law, and engaging in terrorist acts. But a giant asterisk must be attached here, with a notation reading: "Not applicable to the United States, its imperialist allies, surrogates and puppets."