President Shimon Peres has cancelled his visit to the Olympic Games in London due to the refusal of the Olympic organizing committee to allow him to sleep in the Olympic village over Shabbat night.

The Israeli president, despite not being religious, does not travel publicly on Shabbat and will therefore not be able to attend the Olympic opening ceremony.

The President's office has been working on the visit to London for months. Peres had planned, along with dozens of other heads of state, to watch the opening ceremony in 17 days.

However, when his staff realized that the ceremony will go on for hours and will end at the beginning of Shabbat at sundown on Friday afternoon, they began looking for alternatives to travel back to his hotel by car.

It's puzzling how the US can treat radical Islamists in Syria as allies while fighting against them as enemies in Afghanistan, says the chair of the Russian parliament's Committee on Foreign Affairs.

­Washington's double standard approach is evident in the Syrian crisis. It supports the armed opposition, which wants to turn the country into a dictatorship, claiming that their war against the Assad government has democracy as the goal, Aleksey Pushkov told RT.

RT: Do you think the events unfolding in Syria are in line with the interests of the Syrian people?

Aleksey Pushkov: There is a civil war going on in Syria, and it is only the Syrian political opposition that is benefiting from it. The opposition took up arms and uses violence to achieve their goal. I am convinced that most Syrians don't want to have this armed conflict.

It is well-known that the armed opposition groups persecute the Christian community in Syria. Thousands of Christians were driven out of their towns and villages. Shia Muslims, a minority in the country - they make up 13 per cent - are also targeted by armed Sunni radicals who represent the majority in the armed opposition.

Minorities are killed, as we saw in Houla, and driven out. There is a town in Syria called Hama, right now it is controlled by the militants. And there are basically no local residents left in Hama. They have either been killed or fled the city.

The Pentagon is considering awarding a Distinguished Warfare Medal to drone pilots who work on military bases often far removed from the battlefield.

Pentagon officials have been briefed on the medal's "unique concept," Charles V. Mugno, head of the Army Institute of Heraldry, told a recent meeting of the Commission of Fine Arts, according to a report in Coin World by our former colleague Bill McAllister.

Mugno said most combat decorations require "boots on the ground" in a combat zone, but he noted that "emerging technologies" such as drones and cyber combat missions are now handled by troops far removed from combat.

OH - CANADA

As a Canadian, I would like to propose that Canada is a much larger belligerent aggressor per capita in the world than media, the public and organizations like the United Nations recognize. Canada's silent role as a (perhaps 'the') major world leader in living off of the trade proceeds of war, death, injury and destruction, remains outside public consciousness. Canada and the USA seem to act as indivisible twins of death, yet Canada hides behind a media-military-industrial-complex which continues to portray Canada as a 'pacifist' nation.

Canada has only 33,000,000 people, 1/10th the US population and seemingly not a leader, when in fact the world's leading aggressor. This article addresses Canada's infamy 'per-capita' meaning livelihood generation 'per-person' in energy, materials & arms as proportions of our national economy. We can understand both Canada and the US as leading aggressors, # 1 & 2, because of un-matched histories of colonial genocide against the First Nations of the Americas, which form our 'world-view'. Mutual-Aid and compassion are not the foundations of the societies we have formed. We've only barely gained a sense of the massacre in which we are involved as part of our lifestyles and colonial-chauvinistic attitudes. The Residential-Schools death / abuse is a point of popular confusion but not yet of moral direction.

In the following seven categories A - G, Canada is and has been for over 150 years (# = Number):

President Obama has quietly issued an executive order that, in a state of emergency, prioritizes government communication over civilian. Brooke speaks with Amie Stepanovich of the Electronic Privacy Information Center about this new executive order and how she feels President Obama's promises of government transparency have not filtered down from the White House.

Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy on Wednesday announced sweeping cuts and tax increases totalling €65bn (£51bn) in austerity measures that opposition politicians warned would sink Spain further into recession.

In a spectacular U-turn, Rajoy raised sales tax by three percentage points, contradicting his government's insistence that this would damage consumer spending, strangle growth and punish the poor.

He also cut unemployment payments, pledged to bring forward a move to retirement at 68 years old and reduced civil service pay. Promised changes to energy laws looked likely to increase electricity tariffs.

The measures came the day after a leaked memorandum of agreement between eurozone countries and Spain revealed strict conditions for a banking bailout of up to €100bn.

That memorandum insisted that Spain comply with the recommendations made by Brussels to cut a deficit that reached 8.9% of GDP last year.

The government-tasked commission tackles regulators and officials, buts it also makes some unusual assumptions about the March 2011 disaster.

The Japanese government's Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission concluded, in a 641-page report released Thursday, that the March 11, 2011 nuclear incident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant was a "profoundly man-made disaster." The "enormous amount of radioactive material" that was emitted into the environment, the study found, was the result of human negligence, rather than a natural disaster or -- in the parlance of theologians and insurance adjustors -- an act of god. The Commission held 900 hours of hearings and interviewed 1,167 people, finding that the nuclear meltdown was avoidable. The Commission's conclusions leave the jarring implication that regulators believe there is a category of nuclear disaster that might be unavoidable. Americans might be especially concerned, because the chairman of our own Nuclear Regulatory Commission suggested Friday that Fukushima did not violate any American safety standards.

The event that immediate precipitated the meltdown was, of course, the earthquake. At a magnitude of 9.0, it was the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan, and one of the most powerful earthquakes ever measured. It sent a tsunami, a 133-foot-tall wall of water, crashing onto the coast. Together, the trembling earth and thundering water killed over 15,000 people and destroyed hundreds of thousands of buildings. They also overwhelmed the Fukushima plant, triggering a still-disputed chain of events leading to the nuclear disaster.

The plant operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) claimed that its safety infrastructure survived the initial earthquake, succumbing only the subsequent tsunami. The Commission disagreed, finding that many crucial safety systems failed before the flood. Moreover, the Commission characterized TEPCO's explanation as "an attempt to avoid responsibility by putting all the blame on the unexpected (the tsunami) ... and not on the more foreseeable earthquake."

Al Qaeda's bizarre plan to attack America by using an "ember bomb" to ignite wildfires is so impractical that the terror group would be better off armed with a cigarette lighter, according to California fire officials who recently tested an al Qaeda-prescribed incendiary device.

In early May, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and the state's threat assessment center conducted a "practical evaluation" of a home-made "ember bomb," a complex device described in detail in a recent edition of the al Qaeda-produced Inspire magazine under the title "It Is of Your Freedom to Ignite a Firebomb."

"In America, there are more houses built in the [countryside] than in the cities," the Inspire article's author says under the pseudonym The AQ Chef. "It is difficult to choose a better place [than] in the valleys of Montana."

In response, California officials went about building and testing a sophisticated version of the device, complete with time-delay ignition, according to a "For Official Use Only" document published online today by the anti-secrecy website Public Intelligence.

The New Delhi government ordered Indian state-run insurers to provide cover to the country's ships transporting Iranian oil, allowing refiners to avoid any interruption in supplies due to the western sanctions.

United India Insurance Co. has agreed to provide protection and indemnity cover to Indian tankers carrying oil from Iran with General Insurance Corp. offering reinsurance.

The offer brings some relief to Indian shipping companies that aren't getting covers from European insurers since July 1 for carrying shipments from Iran, which is facing sanctions from the US and European Union for its decision to continue using its international nuclear rights.

An oil embargo by the European Union took effect on July 1 and bans firms from insuring Iranian shipments, forcing China and India to ask Iran's oil shipper, NITC, to deliver crude in its vessels.

Almost the entire Iranian fleet, the largest in the world, is employed for exporting oil cargos to various destinations now.

If passed, an amendment in the Agricultural Appropriations Bill will not just allow, but require the secretary of agriculture to grant permits for planting or cultivating GM crops - even if a federal court has given an injunction against it.

Basically, all Monsanto and other biotech companies have to do is ask and the industry gets its way. Issues like crop contamination, damage to farmers or consumers, courts orders or USDA studies all go out the window and the biotech industry cashes in.

Organizations like Food Democracy Now are in a panic, calling all to petition against the bill, which they say "fundamentally undermines the concept of judicial review and would strip judges of their constitutional mandate to protect consumer rights and the environment, while opening up the floodgates for the planting of new untested genetically engineered crops, endangering farmers, consumers and the environment."

Representative Peter DeFazio has been trying to push through an amendment that would kill the havoc-wreaking rider. He has the support of organizations like Organic Consumers Associations, Center for Food Safety and others. Their warnings have been circulating the web, gathering attention and support - but will they be enough to sway the House?