Citigroup is lucky that Muammar el-Qaddafi was killed when he was. The Libyan leader's death diverted attention from a lethal article involving Citigroup that deserved more attention because it helps to explain why many average Americans have expressed support for the Occupy Wall Street movement. The news was that Citigroup had to pay a $285 million fine to settle a case in which, with one hand, Citibank sold a package of toxic mortgage-backed securities to unsuspecting customers - securities that it knew were likely to go bust - and, with the other hand, shorted the same securities - that is, bet millions of dollars that they would go bust.

It doesn't get any more immoral than this. As the Securities and Exchange Commission civil complaint noted, in 2007, Citigroup exercised "significant influence" over choosing $500 million of the $1 billion worth of assets in the deal, and the global bank deliberately chose collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.'s, built from mortgage loans almost sure to fail. According to The Wall Street Journal, the S.E.C. complaint quoted one unnamed C.D.O. trader outside Citigroup as describing the portfolio as resembling something your dog leaves on your neighbor's lawn. "The deal became largely worthless within months of its creation," The Journal added. "As a result, about 15 hedge funds, investment managers and other firms that invested in the deal lost hundreds of millions of dollars, while Citigroup made $160 million in fees and trading profits."

Citigroup, which is under new and better management now, settled the case without admitting or denying any wrongdoing. James Stewart, a business columnist for The Times, noted that Citigroup's flimflam made "Goldman Sachs mortgage traders look like Boy Scouts. In settling its fraud charges for $550 million last year, Goldman was accused by the S.E.C. of being the middleman in a similar deal, allowing the hedge fund manager John Paulson to help choose the mortgages and then bet against them without disclosing this to the other parties. Citigroup dispensed with a Paulson figure altogether, grabbing those lucrative roles for itself." (Last Thursday, the U.S. District Court judge overseeing the case demanded that the S.E.C. explain how such serious securities fraud could end with the defendant neither admitting nor denying wrongdoing.)

London - Soaring food costs are forcing some children to eat hay and leaves because their parents cannot afford to put food on the table, according to Save the Children.

The aid agency said its research showed that recent price hikes had put 400,000 children at risk.

It called for world leaders meeting at the G20 summit in Cannes this week to keep their funding promises for agriculture in order to ensure children are protected from rising food costs.

Barely a fifth of the $22 billion pledged in 2009 to help the world's poorest farmers over a three-year period has been disbursed, according to the latest available figures.

Eleven of the 13 countries behind this promise - made at the G8 summit in Italy - will be among those meeting in the French city of Cannes from Nov. 3-4.

But the aid agency said it feared the euro zone crisis could squeeze the global food crisis off the G20's agenda.

Associated Press recently reported that Libya's rebel militants have named a new "prime minister" this week. AP depicts the latest unelected Western proxy, as a progressive academic who has spent decades in the United States teaching at Alabama University and leading the local Muslim community. Mentioned briefly as a "former employer," however, is the Petroleum Institute, based in Abu Dhabi, Dubai and sponsored by British Petroleum (BP), Shell, France's Total, the Japan Oil Development Company, and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. El-Keib is listed as a "Professor and Chairman" in his Petroleum Institute profile which also describes extensive research conducted by him sponsored by various US government agencies and departments over the years.

And so begins the farce that is Western "democracy." One corporate-fascist puppet, Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, steps down, another, Abdurrahim el-Keib, takes his place. In reality, it is NATO-states and their corporate sponsors that now determine Libya's fate.

In essence, el-Keib, like his predecessor Jalil, is Libyan in name only and has been working for Western corporations, governments, and institutions for decades. Like Jalil, or Egypt's Mohammed ElBaradei, el-Keib is yet another agent of Western interests masquerading as an indigenous leader in a foreign land. That his rise to power was paved by thousands of NATO strike sorties in a 7 month military operation spearheaded by the United States and at the cost of tens of thousands of Libyan civilians makes his ascension to power in Libya ever more a desecration of Libya's sovereignty.

Rick Perry's fumbling, stumbling campaign to win the Republican presidential nomination can add another gaffe to its growing roster: the Texas governor is the latest conservative to ridicule a fake quote in a satirical Globe and Mail piece in an effort to discredit the Occupy Wall Street protesters.

At an appearance in New Hampshire last week, Mr. Perry, struggling to regain momentum in the race, made reference to the quote, which he said was sent to him by his son.

"This was in Toronto," he told the crowd before paraphrasing the fabricated quote in an Oct. 21 Globe and Mail essay by freelancer Mark Schatzker. The piece was clearly labelled satire.

Mr. Perry summarized the quote as: "I guess greed just makes you work hard."

The actual fake quote in Mr. Schatzker's piece was attributed to "Jeremy, 38," from the Occupy Toronto protests: "It's weird protesting on Bay Street. You get there at 9 a.m. and the rich bankers who you want to hurl insults at and change their world view have been at work for two hours already. And then when it's time to go, they're still there. I guess that's why they call them the one per cent. I mean, who wants to work those kinds of hours? That's the power of greed."

Israel is forcing Palestinians out of East Jerusalem as part of a deliberate policy that might constitute a war crime, a prominent Israeli non-governmental organisation said on today.

The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) has presented the United Nations with its findings and demanded an inquiry, saying Israel targeted Palestinians by demolishing homes, revoking residency and eroding quality of life.

"We are witnessing a process of ethnic displacement," said Michael Sfard, a lawyer who helped draw up a 73-page report into the issue. "Israel is manifestly and seriously violating international law ... and the motivation is demographic."

There was no immediate comment from Israeli authorities on the report other than a statement from the mayor's office which said that while East Jerusalem had suffered from a lack of investment in the past that had now changed.

"Jerusalem, under the leadership of Mayor Nir Barkat, has invested an unprecedented amount of resources and efforts to improve the quality of life of Muslim residents of Jerusalem after decades of neglect by previous administrations," it said.

Internet service is completely cut off in Gaza Tuesday and partially shut down in the West Bank after an attack on the main Internet provider to the Palestinian territories, according to a minister with the Palestinian Authority.

"This is a very serious and vicious attack," Dr. Mashour Abu-Daqqa, the minister of Communications and Information Technology, told CNN. The attack, which affected most of the Palestinian Internet communication network, also targeted domain addresses, said Abu-Daqqa.

The minister said hackers are using international IP servers originating in Germany, China, and Slovenia to send millions of attacks in the form of viruses to penetrate and disrupt the Internet communications.

There is no word on who, exactly, is behind the attacks.

The president-elect promised to let the lease on the base, which provides a supply route to troops in Afghanistan, expire in 2014

Kyrgyzstan's president-elect firmly told the United States on Tuesday to leave its military air base just outside the capital Bishkek when its lease expires in 2014.

Almazbek Atambayev is the prime minister but won the presidential election on Sunday. "When I was appointed prime minister last year, and again this year, I warned employees and leaders of the US embassy and visiting representatives that, in 2014 and in line with our obligations, the United States should leave the base," he said.

Atambayev spoke about potential resentment towards his country from other players in the region for helping America conduct the war in Afghanistan. "We know that the United States very often participates in various military conflicts. It happened in Iraq, in Afghanistan and now there is a tense situation with Iran," he said. "I wouldn't want any of these countries one day to make a return strike on the military base."

Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou faced calls from within his own party to step down on Tuesday after he threw his country's eurozone membership into jeoprady by calling for a referendum on a bailout package agreed to only last week, reports Reuters.

A leading lawmaker from Papandreou's socailist party resigned, while two others said that Greece needed a change of government and quick elections.

French and German officials were caught off gaurd by Papandreou's call for a referendum and expressed increduiltiy at the announcement.

"The Greek prime minister has taken this decision without talking it through with his European collegues," said Jean-Claude Juncker, chair of the eurozone finance ministers.

The constitutional arguments against the Central Intelligence Agency's assassinations of Anwar al-Awlaki and, two weeks later, his 16-year-old son have been widely discussed. Less well known, however, is the case against CIA assassinations to be made on the basis of the law of war.

Into the breach has stepped Howard University law professor Morris Davis, who in a recent column presented a well-researched case that the CIA's drone assassination program is illegal under the law of war and that, as a result, CIA personnel participating in drone strikes could be prosecuted for murder.

Davis knows his subject well. He was a U.S. Air Force judge advocate for 25 years and served as chief prosecutor of the Guantanamo Bay military commissions from 2005 to 2007, resigning from that post in disgust at the use of torture to extract evidence from prisoners and the interference in the proceedings from the Pentagon. He is now executive director and counsel of the Crimes of War Education Project. In other words, Davis' opinion on the matter of war crimes should not be taken lightly.

Central to Davis' argument is the indisputable fact that the CIA is not an arm of the military but "a civilian agency made up of civilian employees and civilian contractors." For those still not convinced, columnist Nat Hentoff reminds us that "when Gen. David Petraeus (who had led U.S. forces in Afghanistan) became the present head of the CIA, he removed his military uniform."

The scene: the war games suite of the mightiest military power in the world.

The guests were assembled in the Warfare Analysis Laboratory, surrounded by uniformed officers from the highest levels of the Pentagon and a dizzying array of screens normally used to simulate nuclear world war.

The gentlemen were called to order and the games began.

"If you imagine the war room in Dr. Strangelove, you're not far off," says participant James Rickards.

Yet this was no traditional battle game, but rather the Pentagon's first economic war game, and the authorities are loath to talk about it.

Economic war? It sounds preposterous. Except it gets less so with every dollar of debt run up by the US.

Behind the scenes, the military are worried about the market. For who owns much of this debt? China, the US's most powerful rival and threat. And that makes America vulnerable to a new kind of bloodless but ruthless war.

Rickards is not a soldier but a banker. He was joined in the war game by dozens of his Wall Street colleagues, flown in from Manhattan to this bunker at the Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland for the two-day event in 2009, when the Pentagon started to get really alarmed.