It's been a terrible week for King Juan Carlos of Spain and, more importantly, for elephants.

The 74-year-old potentate broke his hip trying to slaughter elephants on a hunt in Botswana.

News of his accident didn't play well back home, where high unemployment and bad loans darken Spain's economic future.

Unsurprisingly, the king soon apologized for not hanging around to render comfort to his anxious citizens and lament the rising deficit.

Astonishingly, the King is the honorary president of World Wildlife Fund Spain, a conservation group that takes a dim view of shooting animals.

The group's secretary general, Juan Carlos del Olmo, quickly wrote to the palace to "convey WWF's profound discomfort and concern at recent developments in Spain and the world, which has caused outrage from our partners and the general public against hunting elephants, even when it takes place in a legal and regulated environment."

(The Botswana hunt was technically legal, if morally repulsive).

According to del Olmo, tens of thousands of people have registered their dismay on numerous platforms.

The Spanish WWF has been flooded with calls demanding that the king resign his presidency.

The National Afro-Swedish Association has called for Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth to be sacked after she was pictured cutting the 'genital mutilation' cake

A top Swedish politician is at the centre of a race row storm after she was pictured cutting up a cake depicting a naked black woman.

Minister of Culture Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth was pictured enacting female genital mutilation on the racial stereotype cake, prompting calls for her resignation.

The self-confessed 'anti-racist' attended a party at Moderna Museet, the museum of modern art in Stockholm on World Art Day on April 15.

Liljeroth was pictured laughing and joking as she cut the macabre cake was designed by Makode Aj Linde.

The sweet treat featured a black woman's naked torso with the artist's own head, painted black, at the top.

Once cut open, the cake sponge was red, depicting blood.

It is believed the art installation was intended to highlight the issue of female circumcision, as the minister first cut a slice of cake from the 'clitoris'.

The United States Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that a law on the books since 1991 precludes organizations, both political and corporate, from sued for torture or murder outside of the U.S.

In a unanimous ruling on Mohamad v. Palestinian Authority (PDF), Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that the careful text of the Torture Victims Protection Act of 1991, the way it is written "convinces us that Congress did not extend liability to organizations, sovereign or not."

New York apartment buildings that permit smoking would be identified under a new law proposed Wednesday by Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Landlords of buildings with three or more units would have to inform prospective tenants and purchasers whether smoking was allowed in apartments and on balconies, as well as in common outdoor areas like rooftops.

Bloomberg said this would give potential renters the chance to choose a smoke-free environment, free from wafts of cigarette smoke from other apartments.

"Smoking kills and people have the right to know if they are going to be exposed to secondhand smoke," Bloomberg said.

The out-of-control Transportation Security Administration is past patdowns at airports - now it's checkpoints and roadblocks

Ever since 2010, when the Transportation Security Administration started requiring that travelers in American airports submit to sexually intrusive gropings based on the apparent anti-terrorism principle that "If we can't feel your nipples, they must be a bomb", the agency's craven apologists have shouted down all constitutional or human rights objections with the mantra "If you don't like it, don't fly!"

This callous disregard for travelers' rights merely paraphrases the words of Homeland Security director Janet Napolitano, who shares, with the president, ultimate responsibility for all TSA travesties since 2009. In November 2010, with the groping policy only a few weeks old, Napolitano dismissed complaints by saying "people [who] want to travel by some other means" have that right. (In other words: if you don't like it, don't fly.)

The following is the background text of Michel Chossudovsky's public lecture at the Society for the Defense of Civil Rights and Human Dignity (GBM), Berlin, 10-11 December, 2003 and Humboldt University, Berlin, 12 December 2003.

On Human Rights Day, 10 December 2003, Michel Chossudovsky was awarded The 2003 Human's Rights Prize of the Society for the Protection of Civil Rights and Human Dignity (GBM).

America's War for Global Domination

We are the juncture of the most serious crisis in modern history.

The Bush Administration has embarked upon a military adventure which threatens the future of humanity.

The wars on Afghanistan and Iraq are part of a broader military agenda, which was launched at the end of the Cold War. The ongoing war agenda is a continuation of the 1991 Gulf War and the NATO led wars on Yugoslavia (1991-2001).

The post Cold War period has also been marked by numerous US covert intelligence operations within the former Soviet Union, which were instrumental in triggering civil wars in several of the former republics including Chechnya (within the Russian Federation), Georgia and Azerbaijan. In the latter, these covert operations were launched with a view to securing strategic control over oil and gas pipeline corridors.

US military and intelligence operations in the post Cold War era were led in close coordination with the "free market reforms" imposed under IMF guidance in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union and the Balkans, which resulted in the destabilization of national economies and the impoverishment of millions of people.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is working on a project called FAST, the Future Attribute Screening Technology. FAST will remotely monitor physiological and behavioural signals like elevated heart rate, eye movement, body temperature, facial patterns, and body language, and analyse these signals algorithmically for statistical aberrance in an attempt to identify people with criminal or terroristic intentions.

It's useful to briefly talk about a few of the practical problems that such a system would face.

Firstly, the level of accuracy in remote monitoring. Is it possible to engineer a system that can remotely tell you the heart-rate of a hundred passengers passing through a TSA checkpoint? Yes. Is it possible to do so accurately? That is much, much harder. The obvious conclusion is that such a system, were it to be deployed in the wilds of airports (and presumably, other locations where our ever-benevolent technocratic overlords determine "terrorists" or "criminals" may be operating) would - given a large enough number of scans - produce a lot of false positives stemming from erroneous data.

But let's assume that such a system can be calibrated to produce a relatively accurate data set. Now we are faced with the problem of defining "suspicious" behaviour. Surely a passenger with the flu or a cold - who might have an elevated body temperature and a faster heart rate - would set alarm bells ringing. So too would someone suffering from pre-flight anxiety, people taking certain medications, the elderly and so on. Given that TSA screening protocols have prevented precisely zero terrorist attacks on American soil since 9/11 (even in spite of the fact that 630 million passengers fly each year ) this merely suggests that vulnerable people will end up getting hassled by the TSA to an even greater extent than they already would be today. This is no laughing matter - a nervous but otherwise perfectly innocent passenger might end up getting tasered and die - something which of course has happened multiple times already. Or - under the NDAA (2011) - false-positives might end up being indefinitely detained on totally erroneous grounds.

When Mitt Romney strapped his dog to the roof of his family's car to go on vacation, he clearly wasn't thinking. And that decision has come to a haunt this election year as many Americans see this action as animal cruelty. It has been less than a boon to the Romney campaign. So it begs the question: How dimwitted does Mitt Romney have to be to associate with a guy who is guilty of extreme animal cruelty? Because that's exactly what Mitt Romney did on Monday by throwing a birthday fundraising party for his wife Ann at the home of Fred Malek, a Romney supporter who once took part in skinning and barbecuing a poor dog on a rotating spit in a city park in Illinois in 1959. To make matters worse, Malek was also the advisor hired by former Republican President Nixon to purge the Jews from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

According to Dogs Against Romney:

"When asked about the incident in 2006, Malek offered this explanation: He said he went to Peoria in the summer of '59 to visit friends at Bradley University. They got "drunk out of their minds" and he "didn't know why" one of the other men had killed the dog, that he was "not a participant" and that he was in "no position to stop it."

An American soldier says he released the photos to the Los Angeles Times to draw attention to the safety risk of a breakdown in leadership and discipline. The Army has started a criminal investigation.
The paratroopers had their assignment: Check out reports that Afghan police had recovered the mangled remains of an insurgent suicide bomber. Try to get iris scans and fingerprints for identification.

The 82nd Airborne Division soldiers arrived at the police station in Afghanistan's Zabol province in February 2010. They inspected the body parts. Then the mission turned macabre: The paratroopers posed for photos next to Afghan police, grinning while some held - and others squatted beside - the corpse's severed legs.

A few months later, the same platoon was dispatched to investigate the remains of three insurgents who Afghan police said had accidentally blown themselves up. After obtaining a few fingerprints, they posed next to the remains, again grinning and mugging for photographs.

Two soldiers posed holding a dead man's hand with the middle finger raised. A soldier leaned over the bearded corpse while clutching the man's hand. Someone placed an unofficial platoon patch reading "Zombie Hunter" next to other remains and took a picture.

"To educate a man is to unfit him to be a slave." -Frederick Douglass

"The [Senate] Committe has not been able to determine with any greater precision the extent to which COINTELPRO may be continuing."

-Book III, Final Report of the Select Committee, 94th Congress, 2d Session, United States Senate

Terror is carried out in many forms by this nation's corporate government against everyday people both internally and externally, and its most powerful facilitator is apathy.

As the national economy crumbles for everyday Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people, there is in the White House a corporate / military master-president masquerading as the slave, a Congress insatiably feeding from a bottomless corporate trough, and a judiciary that makes an utter mockery of justice, constitutional rights, and human rights. Meanwhile, bloody overt and covert U.S. wars rage on in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and elsewhere abroad. As contempt grows for the hypocritical and diabolical de facto policies of this nation's government, it is everyday people at home and abroad whose lives are being torn assunder and who are quite literally dying, as the banksters and other assorted corporate gangsters grow ever richer and even more vicious.

The corporate-stream so-called "news" media of this nation has sunk to its lowest level since the very inception of the United States of America. It is pathetic as it serves as the propaganda arm, of and for, this actual one-party corporatist / military state. The corporate-stream media serves to keep everyday people misinformed (or not relevantly informed at all), apathetic and lethargic, while being simultaneously terrorized. Its role is to omit, distract, confuse, and discredit: Omit - at all costs - delineating the truth and reality of what is actually occurring and why; distract attention away from how everyday people are being emotionally pimped and economically & politically emaciated by the U.S. corporate / military elite while purposely confusing the issues; and discredit - by any means necessary - those who dare to speak truth to power. Indeed, the function of this corporate-stream media is to keep people mindless, confused, and manipulated. There is no such thing in this nation as consistently serious, honest, and hard-hitting, thought-provoking journalism in the corporate-stream media, for such a thing would be absolutely unacceptable to the corporate elite who financially own the corporate-stream "news" media. Thus, the cycle of terror against everyday people in this nation and around the world is maintained and perpetuated.