At least 45 Taliban militants have been killed in operations carried out by Afghan and NATO-led troops, the interior ministry said on Sunday. The forces launched 10 "clean-up" operations in Kabul, Laghman, Parwan, Helmand, Uruzgan and Farah provinces, in which 33 militants were killed, Xinhua reported citing a ministry statement.

Six militants were injured and nine were captured during the raids.

The statement, however, did not say if there were any casualties among the security forces.

Eight Taliban militants were killed in a special forces operation in Bati Kot district of eastern Nangarhar province Saturday night, said Ahmad Zia Abdulzai, a spokesman for the provincial government.

Four militants were killed when an anti-tank mine blew up prematurely in Jani Khil district of Pakitka province, the ministry said.

According to figures released by the interior ministry, around 430 militants have been killed, 130 wounded and over 450 others detained since May 1.

Cairo - Egypt's ailing former president Hosni Mubarak is slipping in and out of consciousness eight days after he was transferred to a hospital inside a Cairo prison to serve his life sentence, a security official said on Sunday.

In order to squash rumors of his death, authorities granted his wife, former first lady Suzanne Mubarak, and her two daughters-in-law special permission to visit him early on Sunday morning, according to the official who spoke from inside Torah prison.

Since then, he has suffered from an irregular heartbeat and required assistance in breathing. The official told The Associated Press that Mubarak lives only on liquids and yogurt. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

Mubarak's health is reported to have collapsed since his June 2 conviction for failing to stop the killing of protesters during the uprising that overthrew him in 2011. His life sentence saw him transferred immediately to a prison hospital, instead of the military hospital and other facilities where he had been held since his April 2011 arrest.

Authorities have turned down several requests by Mubarak's family to transfer the ousted president back to a military facility, the official said.

The pro-inflation argument hasn't changed much, if at all, since this clip was made in the 30′s. The logic is just as twisted and short-sighted today as it was then. The idea that temporarily pulling demand forward, and devaluing currency, could ever produce a sustained positive effect is as ridiculous as ever.

It's a fascinating historical piece, and well-worth watching. The pro-FDR aspects are particularly interesting/disturbing.

A 2010 Rockefeller Foundation document entitled "Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development" outlines a scenario which results in the death of 13,000 during the 2012 Olympics.

Rise of Authoritarianism

The first worrying prediction begins in 2012 when 'the pandemic the world had been anticipating for years', finally hits, infecting nearly 20 percent of world population and claiming 8 million lives. Due to this pandemic, the Rockefeller Foundation outlines how the public will welcome a more authoritative government and a tighter control across all aspects of life, including Biometric IDs for all citizens.

The Pentagon has just launched a multi-year national public relations campaign to justify, glorify and honor Washington's catastrophic, aggressive and losing war against Vietnam - America's most controversial and unpopular military conflict.

President Barack Obama opened the militarist event, which was overwhelmingly approved by Congress four years ago, during a speech at the Vietnam Wall on Memorial Day, May 28. The entire campaign, which will consist of tens of thousands of events over the next 13 years, is ostensibly intended to "finally honor" the U.S. troops who fought in Vietnam. The last troops were evacuated nearly 40 years ago.

In reality, the unprecedented project - titled the Vietnam War Commemoration - will utilize the "pro-veteran" extravaganza to accomplish two additional and more long lasting goals:

• The first is to legitimize and intensify a renewed warrior spirit within America as the Pentagon emerges from two counter-productive, ruinously expensive and stalemated unjust wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and prepares for further military adventures in Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Within days of Obama's speech, for instance, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta announced a big increase of U.S. Navy forces in the Pacific, a move obviously targeting China. At the same time the Obama Administration's drone wars are accelerating as the Oval Office's kill list expands, and the president engages in cyber sabotage against Iran.
• The second is to dilute the memory of historic public opposition to the Vietnam war by putting forward the Pentagon's censored account of the conflict in public meetings, parades and educational sessions set to take place across the nation through 2025. These flag-waving, hyper-patriotic occasions will feature veterans, active duty military members, government officials, local politicians, teachers and business leaders who will combine forces to praise those who fought in Vietnam and those on the home front who supported the war. There won't be much - if any - attention focused on the majority of Americans who opposed this imperialist adventure, except as a footnote describing how tolerant U.S. democracy is toward dissent.

The principal theme of the president's address was that American troops have not received sufficient laurels for their efforts to violently prevent the reunification of North and South Vietnam. He did not point out that there would have been no war had the United States permitted nationwide free elections to take place in Vietnam in 1956 as specified by the 1954 Geneva Agreement ending the French colonialism in Indochina. Washington recently decided that the war "officially" began in 1962 (although U.S. involvement dates back to the 1950s), allowing the commemoration to begin during the "50th anniversary" year.

The Defense Department recently fired off a round of letters warning state law enforcement officials to track down every gun, helicopter and Humvee that the military had given them under a $2.6 billion surplus program, or have their access to the handouts cut off.

The problem, according to the states: At least some of them had already turned over that information.

All the same, officials at the Defense Logistics Agency have stopped issuing weapons to thousands of police departments until they're satisfied they've had a full accounting of where all the giveaways have landed.

While some of the state liaisons said they don't expect major hassles complying with the broad review, others said Friday that the letters show the Defense Department's own troubles keeping abreast of paperwork and add another layer to an overly bureaucratic process that, on its face, is fairly straightforward.

The defense agency's Law Enforcement Support Office provides police and sheriffs' departments with equipment ranging from guns and helicopters to computers and air conditioners and even toilet paper. The goods are cheap or free to acquire, but much of them come with strict rules that prohibit them from being sold and dictate how they must be tracked.

Associated Press inquiries into how the program is administered in all 50 states and several U.S. territories, however, show that most of them only keep paper records, and the few states that keep electronic records only recently made the switch from paper.

Police, political, and business forces against combine to take to action against the poor.
US, California - On Tuesday, June 5th, in a 6-1 vote, the City Council passed an ordinance that would make forms of illegal camping a misdemeanor within Modesto. Despite an over-whelming majority of the crowd coming out to shout down the ordinance, calling it a "war on the poor," and claiming that it was leading Modesto into "a police state," everyone on the Council voted in favor of the move except the new Mayor, Garrad Marsh. But Marsh's nay vote didn't come out of his love for the homeless or freedom itself, he was simply concerned that it didn't contain language that would allow parents with homes to allow their children to camp outside. As for those with children and without homes, perhaps if they couldn't eat cake, they could eat whatever the Mission was serving that night...

The decision for the camping criminalization ordinance came when a subcommittee of the City Council allowed members of the Modesto Police Department to write up and create the ordinance. But the criminalization of camping is not just aimed at stamping out the homeless. According to the Modesto Bee:

City officials said the camping ordinance will give police a tool to deal with makeshift camps that increasingly are appearing in Modesto. It also will give police the authority to break up any camps tied to the Occupy movement and prohibit residential property owners from charging rent to campers.

Under the ordinance, anyone who stores personal property, including camping paraphernalia, on public or private property without consent of the owner can be cited on a misdemeanor. Those convicted could be sentenced to jail and probation.

Council members claim that the push for the ordinance came after businesses began complaining of homeless people living in the back of parking lots along McHenry Ave. as well as from people who have complained that they "can't walk their dogs" along the canal on Briggsmore Ave., due to homeless encampments.

We find this recent criminalization of both the homeless and the Occupy Movement in Modesto to not be at all surprising, although it shows the direction in which local elites are heading; giving themselves the legal tools to lock-up, displace, and fine those which threaten downtown development and those who would seek to possibly organize against it. We do not find this latest move surprising because over the past year, City Council members, either through the general council or through subcommittees, have helped produce a variety of ordinances all aimed at removing the homeless from the downtown area through criminalization. These include a ban on dumpster-diving, which further criminalized the act of digging through the garbage and threatens the would be trash expropriator with fines and up to six months in jail. The ordinance was pushed by both the La Loma Association, a notoriously anti-homeless group and the Modesto Police Department. There was also the shutting down of a public park, Paperboy Park, or Rose Garden Park, in 2010, which was located across from the Library. Joe Muratore, a city council member who is also involved in the La Loma Association, helped back the ordinance. He claimed that homeless people were ruining the park and making non-homeless people afraid to use it. Paperboy Park became the first park in Modesto that went from public to only being available to those who paid a user fee. Muratore wanted to continue this work even further with the creation of a private park police force that would harass the homeless, youth, and others in local parks and enforce various municipal codes.

A military judge refused on Friday to dismiss any of the 22 counts against an Army private charged in the biggest leak of government secrets in U.S. history.

Col. Denise Lind also indicated she will postpone Pfc. Bradley Manning's trial, currently set to start Sept. 21, to November or January because of procedural delays.

Manning is charged with knowingly aiding al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula by causing the online publication of hundreds of thousands of classified State Department diplomatic cables and Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, along with some battlefield video clips. Authorities say the 24-year-old Crescent, Okla., native downloaded the files from a Defense Department network and sent them to the secret-sharing website WikiLeaks while working as an intelligence analyst in Baghdad in 2009 and 2010.

He hasn't entered a plea to the charges.

On Friday, the third day of a pretrial hearing, Lind rejected a defense argument that the government used unconstitutionally vague language in charging Manning with eight counts of unauthorized possession and disclosure of classified information. The defense targeted the phrases, "relating to the national defense" and "to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation."

What can one say about people who continue to support war criminals among their elected representatives? It is easy to blame the presidents and the Congress and the media for endless war and rising body counts around the world. They are indeed responsible for promoting mass killing as an acceptable, indeed beneficial means of living among the world's people.

It is true that Americans have far less input into their government's decisions than they seem to think. They play a very small role in choosing elected officials, including the president. The power of money means that rich people and corporations call the shots to a greater extent than citizens of a so-called democracy are willing to admit.

But the people do still have the right to their own opinions. We can proclaim what we do and do not like. When the president feeds a story to the New York Times which proclaims that he gladly accepts responsibility for killing people, he believes that said story will increase his support among voters.

Everyone knows America has too much debt. What they don't know is that things are getting better, not worse.

Little by little, our economy is reducing its debt burden, slowly repairing the damage caused by 10, 20 or 30 years of excess.

If you want to know why economic growth has been so tepid, here's your answer. Four years after the storm hit, the economy is still deleveraging. And it's very hard for any economy to grow when everyone is focused on increasing their savings.

Total domestic - public and private - debt as a share of the economy has declined for 12 quarters in a row after surging over the previous decade.

The rapid rise in federal debt over the past four years has distracted us from the big picture. The level of public debt is indeed worrisome, but it's not as big a worry as the economy's total level of debt - public and private.

Although we have a whole cottage industry devoted to warning us about the dangers of too much public debt, we don't have any comparable Cassandras telling us about the dangers of too much private debt. Yet the history of the past 30 years (or 300) clearly shows that too much debt, of whatever variety, can pose a systemic risk to the national and global economies.