An Israeli lawmaker with close ties to the ousted Egyptian regime says former spy chief Omar Suleiman would be the best president for Egypt in terms of Israeli interests.

Legislator Binyamin Ben-Eliezer says a Muslim Brotherhood leader would threaten Israel's 1979 peace deal with Egypt.

Ben-Eliezer told Army Radio on Monday that former strongman Suleiman views relations with Israel as a strategic "cornerstone."

The 1979 accord is a pillar of stability for both countries.

But Israeli concerns for its future have grown with the rise of Islamist parties in Egypt. The Brotherhood has said it would seek changes, but not cancel the peace deal.

Ben-Eliezer is a longtime friend of toppled Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak. Suleiman announced his candidacy for president last week.

Source: The Associated Press

North Korean space officials have moved all three stages of a long-range rocket into position for a controversial launch, vowing to push ahead with their plan in defiance of international warnings against violating a ban on missile activity.

The Associated Press was among foreign news agencies allowed a firsthand look Sunday at preparations under way at the coastal Sohae Satellite Station in northwestern North Korea.

North Korea announced plans last month to launch an observation satellite using a three-stage rocket during mid-April celebrations of the 100th anniversary of the birth of North Korean founder Kim Il Sung. The U.S., Japan, Britain and other nations have urged North Korea to cancel the launch, warning that firing the long-range rocket would violate U.N. resolutions and North Korea's promise to refrain from engaging in nuclear and missile activity.

North Korea maintains that the launch is a scientific achievement intended to improve the nation's faltering economy by providing detailed surveys of the countryside.

"Our country has the right and also the obligation to develop satellites and launching vehicles," Jang Myong Jin, general manager of the launch facility, said during a tour, citing the U.N. space treaty. "No matter what others say, we are doing this for peaceful purposes."

Experts say the Unha-3 rocket slated for liftoff between April 12 and 16 could also test long-range missile technology that might be used to strike the U.S. and other targets. Unha means galaxy in English.

North Korea has tested two atomic devices, but is not believed to have mastered the technology needed to mount a warhead on a long-range missile.

The world's most hated corporation is at it again, this time in Vermont.

Despite overwhelming public support and support from a clear majority of Vermont's Agriculture Committee, Vermont legislators are dragging their feet on a proposed GMO labeling bill. Why? Because Monsanto has threatened to sue the state if the bill passes.

The popular legislative bill requiring mandatory labels on genetically engineered food (H-722) is languishing in the Vermont House Agriculture Committee, with only four weeks left until the legislature adjourns for the year. Despite thousands of emails and calls from constituents who overwhelmingly support mandatory labeling, despite the fact that a majority (6 to 5) of Agriculture Committee members support passage of the measure, Vermont legislators are holding up the labeling bill and refusing to take a vote.

Instead, they're calling for more public hearings on April 12, in the apparent hope that they can run out the clock until the legislative session ends in early May.

What happened to the formerly staunch legislative champions of Vermont's "right to know" bill? They lost their nerve and abandoned their principles after Monsanto representative recently threatened a public official that the biotech giant would sue Vermont if they dared to pass the bill. Several legislators have rather unconvincingly argued that the Vermont public has a "low appetite" for any bills, even very popular bills like this one, that might end up in court. Others expressed concern about Vermont being the first state to pass a mandatory GMO labeling bill and then having to "go it alone" against Monsanto in court.

The mounting threat of a US-Israeli military attack against Iran is based on several factors including: (1) the recent military history of both countries in the region, (2) public pronouncements by US and Israeli political leaders, (3) recent and on-going attacks on Lebanon and Syria, prominent allies of Iran, (4) armed attacks and assassinations of Iranian scientists and security officials by proxy and/or terrorist groups under US or Mossad control, (5) the failure of economic sanctions and diplomatic coercion, (6) escalating hysteria and extreme demands for Iran to end legal, civilian use-related uranium enrichment, (7) provocative military 'exercises' on Iran's borders and war games designed for intimidation and a dress rehearsal for a preemptive attack, (8) powerful pro-war pressure groups in both Washington and Tel Aviv including the major Israeli political parties and the powerful AIPAC in the US, (9) and lastly the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (Obama's Orwellian Emergency Decree, March 16, 2012).

The US propaganda war operates along two tracks: (1) the dominant message emphasizes the proximity of war and the willingness of the US to use force and violence. This message is directed at Iran and coincides with Israeli announcements of war preparations. (2) The second track targets the 'liberal public' with a handful of marginal 'knowledgeable academics' (or State Department progressives) playing down the war threat and arguing that reasonable policy makers in Tel Aviv and Washington are aware that Iran does not possess nuclear weapons or any capacity to produce them now or in the near future. The purpose of this liberal backpedaling is to confuse and undermine the majority public opinion, which is clearly opposed to more war preparations, and to derail the burgeoning anti-war movement.

Needless to say the pronouncements of the 'rational' warmongers use a 'double discourse' based on the facile dismissal of all the historical and empirical evidence to the contrary. When the US and Israel talk of war, prepare for war and engage in pre-war provocations - they intend to go to war - just as they did against Iraq in 2003. Under present international political and military conditions an attack on Iran, initially by Israel with US support, is extremely likely, even as world economic conditions should dictate otherwise and even as the negative strategic consequences will most likely reverberate throughout the world for decades to come.

Believe me, you don't want the state having the power to strip your clothes off. And yet, it's exactly what is happening.

In a five-four ruling this week, the supreme court decided that anyone can be strip-searched upon arrest for any offense, however minor, at any time. This horror show ruling joins two recent horror show laws: the NDAA, which lets anyone be arrested forever at any time, and HR 347, the "trespass bill", which gives you a 10-year sentence for protesting anywhere near someone with secret service protection. These criminalizations of being human follow, of course, the mini-uprising of the Occupy movement.

Is American strip-searching benign? The man who had brought the initial suit, Albert Florence, described having been told to "turn around. Squat and cough. Spread your cheeks." He said he felt humiliated: "It made me feel like less of a man."

In surreal reasoning, justice Anthony Kennedy explained that this ruling is necessary because the 9/11 bomber could have been stopped for speeding. How would strip searching him have prevented the attack? Did justice Kennedy imagine that plans to blow up the twin towers had been concealed in a body cavity? In still more bizarre non-logic, his and the other justices' decision rests on concerns about weapons and contraband in prison systems. But people under arrest - that is, who are not yet convicted - haven't been introduced into a prison population.

Our surveillance state shown considerable determination to intrude on citizens sexually. There's the sexual abuse of prisoners at Bagram - der Spiegel reports that "former inmates report incidents of ... various forms of sexual humiliation. In some cases, an interrogator would place his penis along the face of the detainee while he was being questioned. Other inmates were raped with sticks or threatened with anal sex". There was the stripping of Bradley Manning is solitary confinement. And there's the policy set up after the story of the "underwear bomber" to grope US travelers genitally or else force them to go through a machine - made by a company, Rapiscan, owned by terror profiteer and former DHA czar Michael Chertoff - with images so vivid that it has been called the "pornoscanner".

Lawrence Davidson argues that US Pastor John Hagee and his followers, who believe in the divine creation of the state of Israel, are as delusional as people who once believed in the reality of Zeus and his Olympian clan but could one day act as cheerleaders for the ethnic cleansing and mass murder of Palestinians.

Pastor John Hagee's Christians United for Israel (CUfI) announced the "registration of their millionth member" on 18 March 2012. This organization, founded in 2006, with the goal of "realizing the political potential of tens of millions of evangelical Americans who support Israel", can also be said to have the goal of destroying, in the name of God no less, the legitimate political aspiration of Palestinian statehood. In addition, the CUfI now has as much influence with our Republican Congress as does the leading Jewish Zionist lobby group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

Why should the devout Mr Hagee and his one million followers be so enamoured of Israel? Actually, they have no rational reasons to offer. However, they do have a number of non-rational ones. For example, "We support Israel because all other nations were created by an act of man, but Israel was created by an act of God."

While many believed it to be an April Fool's Day joke, Vladimir Putin has confirmed Russia has been testing mind-bending psychotronic guns that can effectively turn people into zombies.

The futuristic weapons - which attack their victims' central nervous system - are being developed by scientists and could be used against Russia's enemies and even its own dissidents by the end of the decade.

Mr Putin has described the guns, which use electromagnetic radiation like that found in microwave ovens, as entirely new instruments for achieving political and strategic goals.

Plans to introduce the super-weapons were announced by Russian defence minister Anatoly Serdyukov.

While the technology has been around for some time, MrTsyganok said the guns were recently tested for crowd control purposes.

"When it was used for dispersing a crowd and it was focused on a man, his body temperature went up immediately as if he was thrown into a hot frying pan," Mr Tsyganok said.

"Still, we know very little about this weapon and even special forces guys can hardly cope with it,'' he said.

It was just over a year ago that NATO began bombing Libya, supposedly to protect the Libyan people from Gaddafi who, NATO claimed, was killing his own people. This was soon proven to be an outright lie. Western powers, the US, France, the UK, and client Arab states, are responsible for the deaths of at least 40,000 Libyan civilians, murdered to 'save them', and take possession of their oil resources.

If you're not outraged, you're not awake.

Things got heated during a Democratic primary debate for the U.S. Senate in Connecticut on Thursday when one candidate told another that he was "whore" over his support of a pro-Israel lobbying group.

"I'm appalled that when I talk about the neoconservatives somehow it's twisted to be some sort of a racist comment," long-shot candidate Lee Whitnum said in response to U.S. Rep. Chris Murphy. "This is documented fact. The neoconservative role in the taking down of Iraq [with an] unnecessary war is fact. It's not opinion."

"I'm dealing with whore here who sells his soul to AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee], who will say anything for the job," Whitnum explained, pointing towards Murphy and then adding that state Rep. William Tong was "ignorant" for defending him.

A British foreign policy think tank has this week released a study claiming that the terror group Al Qaeda is regrouping in Africa creating "an arc of instability" from the Western Sahel to the Eastern Horn.

The Royal United Services Institute, based in Whitehall, London, and closely aligned to official British foreign policy, cites "disturbing new trends" across the continent that "Osama bin Laden's terror network" is seeking influence in Somalia, North Africa and the Western Sahara-Sahel.

"If correct [sic], this assessment would raise the worrying prospect of an arc of regional instability encompassing the whole Sahara-Sahel strip and extending through to East Africa, which the now weakened Al Qaeda-core could well exploit to regroup, reorganise and reinvigorate its terrorist campaign against the West," the report said.

Meanwhile, in other media reports it is claimed that Al Qaeda elements are joining forces with the Tuareg separatists following a military coup in the West Africa country of Mali. The alleged involvement of Al Qaeda in Mali has been cited by former colonial power France in its pledge to crush the coup.

The purported Al Qaeda link in Mali appears incongruous. The Tuareg rebels - a nomadic group inhabiting northern Mali and Niger - were formerly fighting in Libya in support of the Gaddafi government against Western-backed insurgents. The Western-backed Libyan insurgents are known to have comprised Al Qaeda jihadists. Now it is being claimed by France and media reports that Al Qaeda are in league with their former enemies - the Tuareg - in the secession of the northern Mali territory.

What these various reports suggest is that Al Qaeda is being raised as a "spectre" over Africa to justify increased intervention by Western powers in that continent under the guise of "global security".