Two Muslim converts were arrested in East London yesterday on suspicion of plotting an attack against the London Olympic canoeing venue.

Sources said the arrests were based on a tip-off after men were seen behaving suspiciously close to the venue in Waltham Abbey, Hertfordshire on Monday.

Hertfordshire police officers began combing the banks after three men were seen in a dinghy on the River Lea.

The two men, aged 18 and 32, were arrested at separate residential addresses in east London, by officers from the Metropolitan Police Counter-Terrorism Command, at 7am on Thursday morning.

They were detained under the Terrorism Act 2000 on suspicion of the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism and held at a central London police station.

A friend of the arrested men named the 18-year-old as Jamal ud-Din and said the older man was someone he knew only as "Zakariya."

Totalitarian governments, like persistent forms of cancer, have latched onto the long history of man, falling and then reemerging from the deep recesses of our cultural biology to wreak havoc upon one unlucky generation to the next. The assumption by most is that these unfortunate empires are the product of bureaucracies gone awry; overtaken by the chaotic maddening hunger for wealth and power, and usually manipulated by the singular ambitions of a mesmerizing dictator. For those of us in the Liberty Movement who are actually educated on the less acknowledged details of history, oligarchy and globalized centralism is much less random than this, and a far more deliberate and devious process than the general unaware public is willing consider.

Unfortunately, the final truth is very complex, even for us...

One cannot place the blame of despotism entirely on the shoulders of globalists. Sadly, the crimes of elites are only possible with a certain amount of complicity from subsections of the populace. Without our penchant for apathy and fear, there can be no control. That is to say, there is no power over us but that which we give away. We pave the road to our own catastrophes.

In the end, a tyrant's primary job is not to crush the masses and rule out of malevolence, but to obtain the voluntary consent of the citizenry, usually through trickery and deceit. Without the permission of the people, subconscious or otherwise, no tyranny can survive.

British lawyers have lodged a complaint at the UN against Israel for allegedly torturing Palestinian children. Their report showed youngsters held in solitary confinement and shackled while in the custody of the Israeli military.

­This is considered torture and in breach of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. A report funded by the UK Foreign Office claims Palestinian youths are routinely abused by Israeli authorities. A delegation of nine British lawyers revealed how Palestinians as young as 12 are treated when arrested and in Israeli custody. They spoke to UN agencies, former Israeli soldiers, Palestinian and Israeli NGOs and Palestinian children.

The report - Children in Military Custody - found that children are arrested by a number of soldiers normally in a night raid on their homes; they are then blindfolded with their wrists bound and transported to an interrogation centre face down on the floor of military vehicles.

"The majority are verbally and physically abused, without being informed of their right to see a lawyer or of their right to silence. They are sometimes held in solitary confinement and made to sign statements they can't read because they are written in Hebrew," the report says.

The following timeline reviews the progression of U.S.-NATO intervention in Syria and counteracts the Big Lie in the corporate media aimed at preparing open imperialist military aggression against the Syrian people.

Sanctions follow establishing opposition

• Washington has funneled money to a right-wing Syrian opposition group since at least 2005. (Washington Post, April 16, 2011)
• The U.S. reopened its embassy in Damascus in January 2011 after six years. This was no thaw in relations. The new ambassador, Robert S. Ford, who served until October 2011, is a protégé of John Negroponte, who organized death squads in El Salvador in the 1970s and in Iraq while ambassador there in 2004-05. There terror squads killed tens of thousands. Ford served directly under Negroponte at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.
• Ford "played a central role in laying the groundwork within Syria as well as establishing contacts with opposition groups." Two months after he arrived in Damascus, the armed insurgency began. (Global Research, May 28)
• Armed opposition to Bashar al-Assad began in March 2011 in Daraa, a small town on the Jordanian border. Mass protest movements usually start in large population centers. Later, Saudi Arabia admitted sending weapons to the opposition via Jordan. (RT, March 13)
• The U. S. and its NATO allies used grassroots protests in Egypt, Syria and elsewhere as a cover to build support for right-wing insurgencies whose goal was not to help the Syrian people but to bring Syria into the pro-imperialist camp. Any excesses or mistakes by the Assad government were not the real issue.
• The Arab League, European Union and U.S. begin imposing economic sanctions, a form of warfare, against Syria in November 2011 on the pretext of stopping state-sanctioned violence against protesters. Stepped-up sanctions and freezing of Syrian assets caused the value of the Syrian pound to drop by 50 percent against the dollar, with the cost of necessities often tripling.
• Exiles who received U.S. funding became part of the Syrian National Council. SNC's Burhan Ghalioun said he would open up Syria to the West, end Syria's strategic relationship with Iran (and with the Lebanese and Palestinian resistance), and realign Syria with the reactionary Arab regimes in the Gulf. (Wall Street Journal, Dec. 2, 2011)

Gunmen stormed a pro-government Syrian TV channel headquarters on Wednesday, bombing buildings and shooting dead three employees, state media said, in one of the boldest attacks yet on a symbol of the authoritarian state.

President Bashar al-Assad declared late on Tuesday that his country was "at war". U.S. intelligence officials said the Syrian government was "holding fairly firm" and digging in for a long struggle against rebel forces who are getting stronger.

The dawn attack on Ikhbariya television's offices, located 20 km (15 miles) south of the capital, as well as overnight fighting on the outskirts of Damascus showed 16 months of violence now rapidly encroaching on the capital.

Ikhbariya resumed broadcasting shortly after the attack, displaying bullet holes in its two-storey concrete building and pools of blood on the floor. One building had been almost completely destroyed.

This is a huge story:

On Wednesday, Barclays won the race to reach a deal with U.S. and British regulators, beating UBS, which was reportedly the first bank to begin cooperating with international antitrust authorities. Barclays agreed to pay at least $450 million to resolve government investigations of manipulation of Libor and the Euro interbank offered rate (or Euribor): $200 million to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, $160 million tothe criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice and $92.8 million to Britain's Financial Services Authority.

I wrote about the Libor investigation in the current issue of Rolling Stone, in "The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia," about muni bond bid-rigging. Throughout this spring, while the Carollo bid-rigging case played out in a Manhattan courtroom, negotiations between banks and regulators were going on in this far larger cartel-corruption case. It's been clear for some time now that a number of players had begun cooperating, and the only question was which bank was going to settle first.

Despite widespread expectation that it would be UBS, it turned out to be Barclays. You know how in Law and Order Jack McCoy always puts the two murder accomplices in separate rooms and tells them both that whoever talks first wins? Something like that happened here. In any case, the Department of Justice filing on the settlement contained excerpts of emails and other evidence that recall the taped phone conversations in the Carollo case: once again, we have seemingly incontrovertible evidence of wide-scale market manipulation. From Alison Frankel at Reuters:

Barclays employees agreed to manipulate the rates they submitted to the banking authority that oversees the daily Libor report for seemingly anyone who asked them to monkey with it: senior Barclays officials concerned that the bank would look weak if it reported too high a borrowing rate; interest rate swap traders trying to improve Barclays' derivatives trading position; even former Barclays traders begging for favors. We're talking naked, blatant manipulation. Here's one exchange cited in the DOJ filing:

Trader: "Can you pls continue to go in for 3m Libor at 5.365 or lower, we are all very long cash here in ny."

Libor rate submitter: "How long?"

Trader: "Until the effective date goes over year end (i.e. turn drops out) if possible."

Submitter: "Will do my best sir."

The United States Army's team of scientists are busy at work developing a device that will shoot lightning bolts down laser beams to destroy its target.

And they are doing it with gusto - announcing their work with a hearty: 'Soldiers and science fiction fans, you're welcome.'

The Laser-Induced Plasma Channel, or LIPC, is designed to take out targets that conduct electricity better than the air or ground that surrounds them.

And the research is a lot of work, but as George Fischer, lead scientist on the project, said: 'We never got tired of the lightning bolts zapping our (simulated) targets.'

The idea is for a laser beam to be sent in the direction of the target.

When it approaches, the target, such as an enemy vehicle, will be a better conductor than the ground it sits on, leading to a massive current rocketing through it.

According to a report by Iraqi Nakhel news agency, Iraqi resistance groups in separate statements have released the information and details of such undercover places and entities in different regions of Iraq, including Taji, Kirkuk and Baghdad, and announced that they have targeted these Israeli sites.

Nakhel quoted a numbers of Iraqi prisoners as saying that they had been handed over to Israeli interrogators by the US troops.

These prisoners said that the Israelis asked them questions about popularity of the Lebanese Hezbollah, Palestinian Hamas Islamic Resistance groups and the role of Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) in the region.

Nakhel further quoted a report by Israeli daily Ma'ariv as saying that Israelis are active in Iraq under the guise of Jordanian companies, the most prominent figure among them is Israel's intelligence minister in Ehud Barak's cabinet, who runs Barak's company.

"Most of the Israeli companies are active under the cover of Jordanian companies and are using Jordanian currency for their transactions," Nakhel quoted an official in the information office of Barak's company as saying.

In relevant remarks in May, former Iraqi National Security Advisor Moafaq al-Rubaie said that the Israeli spy agency has infiltrated its agents into Iraq under different guises and assassinated the country's elites.

Pleas from Spain and Italy for urgent financial aid from the eurozone to bring down borrowing costs were dismissed by Angela Merkel as divisions hardened on the eve of a critical summit.

Germany's Chancellor angrily rejected desperate pleading by Italy and Spain as a Franco-German rift over eurozone debt sharing threatened to unravel efforts to find a fix for the single currency at a meeting of European leaders on Thursday.

Before flying last night to Paris for emergency talks with Francois Hollande, the French President, Mrs Merkel told German MPs that instead of more cash the eurozone needed to step up debt reduction and economic reforms.

"I fear that at the summit we will talk too much about all these ideas for joint liability and too little about improved controls and structural measures," she said.

Mariano Rajoy, the Spanish Prime Minister, said he would plead with other leaders to allow euro bail-out funds or the European Central Bank to stabilise financial markets by helping to reduce borrowing costs, running at nearly 7pc for Spain.

"We can't keep funding ourselves for a long time at the prices we're currently funding ourselves," he said. "There are institutions and also financial entities that cannot access the markets. It is happening in Spain, it is happening in Italy and it is happening in other countries."

The 2012 London olympics start in 4 weeks time. Exclusive interview with investigative journalist Lee Hazledean who is training undercover as a security guard for the London olympics with private security firm G4S. Lee is a filmmaker and investigative TV journalist. He has also been involved in major stories on the IRA and how British Army infiltrated the organisation and carried out false flag operations. He has managed to get undercover as part of the security team at the 2012 Olympics with G4S. He has found there is a media black out on all major news outlets to do with the Olympics unless the story is broken in a news paper or foreign news agency it's unlikely to see the light of day. Security training and officers are so appalling that the safety and security of the London 2012 Olympics are in jeopardy.