Many civil liberties groups in the US are up in arms over Thursday's Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United V Federal Election Commission, that gives corporations free reign to spend as much money as they can afford (which is a lot) to influence American political election outcomes. This is the same gaggle of Supreme Court Justices (more or less) that gave us, literally, the glorious reign of George Dubya Bush. MSNBC's Keith Olbermann dedicated one of his 'special messages' to the ruling which he said made all US politicians 'prostitutes' to big corporations.

Eh....so what's new?

Vital evidence which could solve the mystery of the death of Government weapons inspector Dr David Kelly will be kept under wraps for up to 70 years.

In a draconian - and highly unusual - order, Lord Hutton, the peer who chaired the controversial inquiry into the Dr Kelly scandal, has secretly barred the release of all medical records, including the results of the post mortem, and unpublished evidence.

The move, which will stoke fresh speculation about the true circumstances of Dr Kelly's death, comes just days before Tony Blair appears before the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War.

It is also bound to revive claims of an establishment cover-up and fresh questions about the verdict that Dr Kelly killed himself.

According to Russia Today, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez Frías evoked the possibility that the United States are behind the series of earthquakes that struck the Caribben region last week, including the one that devastated Haiti. However, according to Vive Tv, the allegation originated with the Russian armed forces. Be that as it may, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua have requested the UN Security Council to convene an emergency session. This forum will be expected to examine these charges and look into the "humanitarian" invasion of Haiti by US troops.

(Editor's Note: The following article was written and published by ViveTv, a Venezuelan public channel. The video was broadcasted by Russia Today, a Russian public channel. Oddly enough, the Venezuelan channel designates the Russian Army as the source of these claims which, in turn, attributes them to President Chávez.)

Roughly 20,000 U.S. troops will be supporting relief efforts in Haiti by Jan. 24, military officials said, adding to the 13,000-strong American force currently there.

Comprising the force will be the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit, the 82nd Airborne Division's 2nd Brigade and thousands of other troops operating afloat off the Haitian coast and on shore, distributing provisions, assisting in medical operations and helping to maintain security. Some 2,200 Marines of the 24th MarineExpeditionary Unit are slated to arrive within 48 hours, military officials said.

"The 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit is a huge part of enabling us to extend our reach to places around the country that may need our assistance but we just haven't been there yet," Army Lt. Gen. P.K. Keen, the top U.S. commander in Haiti, said on The Pentagon Channel today.

The additional forces come as international aid continues pouring into Haiti following a magnitude 7 earthquake that struck Jan. 12, creating what an official called one of the greatest humanitarian emergencies in the history of the Americas.

A Haiti disaster relief scenario had been envisaged at the headquarters of US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) in Miami one day prior to the earthquake.

The holding of pre-disaster simulations pertained to the impacts of a hurricane in Haiti. They were held on January 11. (Bob Brewin, 'Defense launches online system to coordinate Haiti relief efforts' (1/15/10) -- GovExec.com, complete text of article is contained in Annex below)

The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), which is under the jurisdiction of the Department of Defense (DoD), was involved in organizing these scenarios on behalf of US Southern Command.(SOUTHCOM).

The death toll has risen to 464 after four days of clashes between Christians and Muslims in the central Nigerian city of Jos.

"We found more than 200 bodies gathered at the mosque in Kuru Gada Biu and 22 more at Mai Adiko," said a senior mosque official, Muhammad Tanko Shittu.

Residents of Jos claim that the clashes were ignited over the reconstruction of a mosque in a Christian neighborhood of the Nassarawa Gwom city, according to Reuters.

The Nigerian government has imposed a 24-hour curfew to control the riots, but sporadic gunfire can still be heard throughout the night. Additional troops have been deployed to Jos to maintain order.

As much as the U.S. government has touted its love of democracy, the affection often has been conditional, based not on the will of a nation's population but on the elected leader's acceptance of American economic and political dictates.

No place has that been more true than in Haiti where American-favored dictators like the Duvaliers were long tolerated while popularly chosen leaders, such as Jean-Bertrand Aristide, found American officials siding with anti-democratic thugs, as David Swanson notes regarding the 2004 coup.

1. "Asymmetrical Warfare"

When President Barack Obama took office last year, he promised to "restore the standards of due process and the core constitutional values that have made this country great." Toward that end, the president issued an executive order declaring that the extra-constitutional prison camp at Guantánamo "shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than one year from the date of this order." Obama has failed to fulfill his promise. Some prisoners are being charged with crimes, others released, but the date for closing the camp seems to recede steadily into the future. Furthermore, new evidence now emerging may entangle Obama's young administration with crimes that occurred during the Bush presidency, evidence that suggests the current administration failed to investigate seriously - and may even have continued - a cover-up of the possible homicides of three prisoners at Guantánamo in 2006.

Late in the evening on June 9 that year, three prisoners at Guantánamo died suddenly and violently. Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, from Yemen, was thirty-seven. Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, from Saudi Arabia, was thirty. Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, also from Saudi Arabia, was twenty-two, and had been imprisoned at Guantánamo since he was captured at the age of seventeen. None of the men had been charged with a crime, though all three had been engaged in hunger strikes to protest the conditions of their imprisonment. They were being held in a cell block, known as Alpha Block, reserved for particularly troublesome or high-value prisoners.

As news of the deaths emerged the following day, the camp quickly went into lockdown. The authorities ordered nearly all the reporters at Guantánamo to leave and those en route to turn back. The commander at Guantánamo, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, then declared the deaths "suicides." In an unusual move, he also used the announcement to attack the dead men. "I believe this was not an act of desperation," he said, "but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us." Reporters accepted the official account, and even lawyers for the prisoners appeared to believe that they had killed themselves. Only the prisoners' families in Saudi Arabia and Yemen rejected the notion.

Ahead of an Israeli-German cabinet meeting in Berlin, media reports indicate that Israel intends to station one of its German-made Dolphin submarines in the waters of the Persian Gulf.

"Israel's use of the dolphin submarine in exercises in the Red Sea aroused fears that Israel may seek to maintain a continued presence in the Persian Gulf as soon as it receives its submarines form Germany in 2011-2012," the Tagesspiegel said on Sunday.

The meeting, delayed in November due to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's illness, is expected to focus on Israel's push to buy a sixth Dolphin-class nuclear submarine from the Germans.

During the day-long trip by the centre-right government, Netanyahu seeks to expand Tel Aviv's submarine fleet.

Israel has previously received three submarines as a donation form the government of the then German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.

In a series of articles, Israeli writer Barry Chamish reviews Israeli television's 2004 expose of the deliberate mass radiation poisoning of 100,000 young Israeli immigrants from North African and Middle Eastern countries (Sephardim) with a screening of the award winning 2003 documentary film, The Ringworm Children.

The story goes like this: With vast evidence from Nazi experiments in the concentration camps and the atomic bombing of Japan, the scientific community was well aware by 1951 of the short and long-term dangers of radiation, especially on children. The American government had banned forced radiation testing based on eugenics on humans prisoners, the mentally feeble, etc., but wanted human lab rats for its nuclear and other programs.

In 1951, the director general of the Israeli Health Ministry, Dr. Chaim Sheba, flew to America and agreed, on behalf of the Israeli government, to supply the humans in exchange for money and nuclear secrets. Dr. Sheba returned to Israel with 7 x-ray machines, supplied to him by the American army.