According to several aggrieved women who filed a class-action lawsuit against Wal-Mart, the giant retailer's recent employment practices were not based on merit. Instead, those women say, Sam Walton's empire employed a crude form of Marxism.

Men were often paid more than women in the same jobs, according to legal documents, and women who complained were told that the men needed more money because they were expected to support their families. Or, as Karl Marx put it, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."

It would no doubt have come as a surprise to the male managers who endorsed the higher-pay-for-heads-of-households theory that they shared a basic tenet of Marxism. After all, Wal-Mart's image rests solidly on down-home, all-American values with a Southern accent -- God, guns and cheap electronics.

Indeed, Wal-Mart's culture isn't foreign. Its anti-union activities are a commonplace. Over the years, moreover, there have been countless American companies where women employees complained about discrimination -- where they received lower wages for the same work, where they were denied promotions despite stellar work histories, where they complained of sexist antics and crude, juvenile "jokes."

Wal-Mart is not only the world's biggest retailer, but it is also the nation's largest private employer. Its sales are heavily dependent on women, who determine a major portion of most household purchases. Most of Wal-Mart's hourly employees are women, but most of its salaried managers are men.

The retailer has not been judged innocent by the U.S. Supreme Court. Last week, instead, the court rejected the class-action filing, Dukes v. Wal-Mart, that might have allowed as many as 1.5 million current and former female employees to collect financial redress. A conservative majority let the retail empire off the hook because, as Justice Antonin Scalia put it, the plaintiffs "provide no convincing proof of a company-wide discriminatory pay and promotion policy."

I cannot imagine that any American company would have an official policy that supports discrimination. Instead, Wal-Mart appears to have allowed individual managers at various levels to get away with rank sexism. Unfortunately, many of the women who suffered at their hands would be hard-pressed to amass the resources to file individual lawsuits, so a class action was their best hope for justice.

Assange now backs Mathaba's 3 years old claim that Facebook is the greatest spy system ever created

WikiLeaks founder and Australia citizen Julian Assange called Facebook the "greatest espionage tool in history", in an exclusive interview to RT.com, confirming what Mathaba already reported about Facebook many years earlier, as well as Google and Yahoo among other close runner-ups.

Facebook automatically collects confidential data of the registered site users, and Mathaba and now Assange have alleged that this information is then transferred to the U.S. intelligence which provided seed funding for Zuckerberg's Facebook.

Assange said that we are dealing with "a very detailed database about people, their habits, their social ties, addresses, places of residence, relatives, and all these data is located in the United States and available to U.S. intelligence."

In answer to a question concerning the role of social networks Facebook and Twitter in the recent chaos in the Arab countries with the notable exception of Israel, leading to thousands of deaths, Assange, who is himself funded by the jewish international elitist financier George Soros, said that "Facebook in particular is the most disgusting of all espionage tools ever invented."

Within the past year, whistleblower website WikiLeaks has released three of the most significant leaks of classified information in history: the Iraq War Logs, the Guantánamo Bay files and Cablegate. Since then the world has undoubtedly changed. Ambassadors have resigned amid scandals exposed by leaked cables; governments have ordered reviews of their computer security; and pro-democracy movements have swept across the Middle East and North Africa - in part fueled, some believe, by WikiLeaks revelations.

This Saturday, July 2, Amy Goodman will moderate a conversation with WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange and renowned Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek. Sponsored by the Frontline Club, the event will be broadcast from The Troxy theater in London. Democracy Now will broadcast a live stream of the discussion starting at 11am EDT at DemocracyNow.

A top Russian astronomer said on Monday that he expects humanity to encounter alien civilizations within the next 20 years.

According to the Interfax news agency, Andrei Finkelstein, director of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Applied Astronomy Institute, said "The genesis of life is as inevitable as the formation of atoms ... Life exists on other planets and we will find it within 20 years."

Finkelstein said 10 percent of the known planets circling stars in the galaxy resemble Earth.

He said while speaking at an international forum dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial life that if water can be found there, then so can life. He added that aliens would most likely resemble humans with two arms, two legs and a head.

"They may have different color skin, but even we have that," he said at the event.

The Russian Academy of Sciences' Applied Astronomy Institute runs a program launched in the 1960s to watch for and beam out radio signals to outer space.

Did the Prime Minister's office distribute a fake anti-flotilla video? This is exactly what some American bloggers have been claiming, after probing a video that was uploaded to YouTube on Sunday.

The video, nearly three minutes long, featured a young man who called himself Marc and claimed to be a gay and human rights activist. The man recounted a story in which he asked the organizers of the upcoming Gaza flotilla to join their mission, and claimed that his request was allegedly denied on the grounds that participation of the gay and lesbian group with which he was affiliated would not serve the flotilla's "interests."

"Marc" explained in the video that he understood why his request was denied only after he researched the people organizing the aid flotilla and found that they had strong ties to Hamas, "whose foreign minister has called homosexuals a minority of perverts, mentally and morally sick," he said in the video.

"Didn't they hear that Hamas shuts down the offices of human rights NGO's? They are slowly taking away the rights and freedoms of women... these are the people the flotilla groups are hugging," he added.

Yet more hacktivist prankster shenanigans promised

Anonymous claims that members of the notorious (recently disbanded) prankster hacking group LulzSec have joined its group.

"All @LulzSec members have reported aboard" according to an update to the @AnonymousIRC Twitter account. A later post claimed the move has nothing to do with the recent arrest of an alleged member of LulzSec by UK police.

Facebook, Yahoo!, Microsoft? Who knows?

The US government filed more than twice as many demands for data about Google users than any other other country in the past six months, according to figures the search behemoth supplied Monday.

What's more, according to the Google Transparency Report, Google fully or partially complied with the US demands in 94 percent of the cases, a rate that was higher than responses to any other government.

From July to December of last year, Google received 4,601 demands from US-based governments for information relating to one or more of its users, Monday's report stated. Brazil and India were second and third with 1,804 and 1,699 requests respectively.

French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde is expected to be chosen as early as Tuesday to be the new leader of the International Monetary Fund, The Associated Press reported.

Lagarde would be the first woman to lead the organization, replacing the disgraced Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who resigned in May after being charged with sexually assaulting a New York City hotel housekeeper. Lagarde's opponent was Agustin Carstens, a Mexican central banker whose candidacy never caught fire.

Lagarde has widespread support in Europe, and a high-ranking Chinese official said Monday that Beijing supports Lagard, according to several reports.

U.S. officials haven't publicly backed a candidate, though most analysts expect the Obama administration to come out in support of Lagarde.

Together, the United States, Europ, and China hold the majority of votes on the IMF's board.

Even Canada's most ardent monarchists accept that the 2,300-mile gulf between London and the Queen's largest realm is something of a stumbling block.

Having a head of state who only visits the country every two or three years plays right into the hands of republicans, after all.

But as they prepare for the arrival of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge later this week, royalists in Canada have come up with a novel solution to the age-old problem: install Prince Harry as their king.

They want the Prince, who is third in line to the throne, to set up home in the capital, Ottawa, to give the Royal family a permanent presence and to silence those who believe the country should have an elected head of state.

Etienne Boisvert, the Quebec provincial spokesman for the Monarchist League of Canada, pointed out that the Royal family was "an institution that knows how to reinvent itself" and believes now may be the right time for a radical change.

"Prince Harry, who has virtually no chance of becoming king, could set himself up here and found a Canadian branch of the Royal family," he said.

Eamon Gilmore reiterates Ireland's position that Gaza blockade is 'unjust and counterproductive' but does not advise Irish nationals to join the flotilla, which includes the Irish boat MV Saoirse.

As the second "Gaza Freedom Flotilla" gets ready to sail this week, Irish Foreign Minister Eamon Gilmore urged Israel to avoid any repeat of last year's actions against the convoy, Irish media reported Sunday.

"Israel must exercise all possible restraint and avoid any use of military force if attempting to uphold their naval blockade," Gilmore, who also holds the post of trade minister, said after meeting with Israeli Ambassador to Dublin Boaz Moda.