American rage at Pakistan over the punishment of a CIA-cooperating Pakistani doctor is quite revealing

Americans of all types - Democrats and Republicans, even some Good Progressives - are just livid that a Pakistani tribal court (reportedly in consultation with Pakistani officials) has imposed a 33-year prison sentence on Shakil Afridi, the Pakistani physician who secretly worked with the CIA to find Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil. Their fury tracks the standard American media narrative: by punishing Dr. Afridi for the "crime" of helping the U.S. find bin Laden, Pakistan has revealed that it sympathizes with Al Qaeda and is hostile to the U.S. (NPR headline: "33 Years In Prison For Pakistani Doctor Who Aided Hunt For Bin Laden"; NYT headline: "Prison Term for Helping C.I.A. Find Bin Laden"). Except that's a woefully incomplete narrative: incomplete to the point of being quite misleading.

What Dr. Afridi actually did was concoct a pretextual vaccination program, whereby Pakistani children would be injected with a single Hepatitis B vaccine, with the hope of gaining access to the Abbottabad house where the CIA believed bin Laden was located. The plan was that, under the ruse of vaccinating the children in that province, he would obtain DNA samples that could confirm the presence in the suspected house of the bin Laden family. But the vaccine program he was administering was fake: as Wired's public health reporter Maryn McKenna detailed, "since only one of three doses was delivered, the vaccination was effectively useless." An on-the-ground Guardian investigation documented that "while the vaccine doses themselves were genuine, the medical professionals involved were not following procedures. In an area called Nawa Sher, they did not return a month after the first dose to provide the required second batch. Instead, according to local officials and residents, the team moved on."

Apparently, the United States' Central American law enforcement partners didn't get the memo about Obama ending the "war on drugs," because after killing two pregnant women from a helicopter in which DEA agents were riding shotgun, the Honduran military (and, allegedly, several American contractors) then raided a small village:

Villagers say the drug bust that left four passengers of a riverboat dead after helicopters mistakenly fired on civilians continued into the predawn hours when commandos, including some they think were Americans, raided their town.

One chopper landed in front of Hilaria Zavala's home at about 3 a.m. and the six men who got out kicked down her door. She said a "gringo" threw her husband on the ground and put a gun to his head demanding to know about a trafficker named "El Renco."

"They kept him that way for two hours," said Zavala, who owns a market near the main pier in Ahuas. "They asked if he was El Renco, if he worked for El Renco, if the stuff belonged to El Renco. My husband said he had nothing to do with it."

Celin Eriksson 17, whose cousin Haskel Tom Brooks Wood, 14, died in the boat, was waiting on the dock for his family before the shooting when he saw a white truck and about 50 men coming from Ahuas. He hid because he knew they were traffickers, but saw them load bundles into a boat. When the helicopters appeared, the men ran. He said he heard no gunshots coming from the ground. The boat with bundles went drifting by itself down the river.

The commandos who came off the helicopter handcuffed him, Celin said, and put a gun to his head. Some spoke to him in English, which he also speaks.

"If you don't talk we'll kill you," the boy said he was told. "Where is El Renco? Where is the merchandise?"

The Syrian government denied Sunday its troops were behind an attack on a string of villages that left more than 90 people dead, blaming the killings on "hundreds of heavily-armed gunmen" who also attacked soldiers in the area.

Friday's assault on Houla, an area northwest of the central city of Homs, was one of the bloodiest single events in Syria's 15-month-old uprising. The U.N. says 32 children under 10 were among the dead. The international body and others have issued statements appearing to hold the Syrian regime responsible.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Jihad Makdissi told reporters in Damascus at a news conference that Syria is being subjected to a "tsunami of lies" on Houla. "We categorically deny the responsibility of government forces for the massacre," Makdissi said.

Makdissi said a committee was set up to investigate the incident and results should be out within three days. He added that U.N. envoy Kofi Annan will be in Syria on Monday.

Since the Washington Post's May 16 report on an influx of arms to Syrian opposition forces, the Obama administration's plans for a proxy war against Syria have become clearer still.

The Post wrote of "significantly more and better weapons" reaching oppositionists, "paid for by Persian Gulf nations [Saudi Arabia and Qatar] and coordinated in part by the United States," based upon a perspective that "an expanding military confrontation is inevitable."

Saudi Arabia and Qatar were sending weapons with approval from Washington, which has "expanded contacts with opposition forces to provide the gulf nations with assessments of rebel credibility and command-and-control infrastructure."

An additional source of weaponry is the Muslim Brotherhood, which has "its own supply channel to the rebels, using resources from wealthy private individuals and money from Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, said Mulham al-Drobi, a member of the Brotherhood's executive committee."

Vatican City, Italy - The Vatican's inquisition into the source of leaked documents has yielded its first target with the arrest of the pope's butler, but the investigation is continuing into a scandal that has embarrassed the Holy See by revealing evidence of internal power struggles, intrigue and corruption in the highest levels of the Catholic Church governance.

The detention of butler Paolo Gabriele, one of the few members of the papal household, capped one of the most convulsive weeks in recent Vatican history and threw the Holy See into chaos as it enters a critical phase in its efforts to show the world it's serious about complying with international norms on financial transparency.

The tumult began with the publication last weekend of a book of leaked Vatican documents including correspondence, notes and memos to the pope and his private secretary. It peaked with the inglorious ouster on Thursday of the president of the Vatican bank. And it concluded with confirmation Saturday that Pope Benedict XVI's own butler was the alleged mole feeding documents to Italian journalists in an apparent bid to discredit the pontiff's No. 2.

"If you wrote this in fiction you wouldn't believe it," said Carl Anderson, a member of the board of the Vatican bank which contributed to the whirlwind with its no-confidence vote in its president, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi. "No editor would let you put it in a novel."

The bank, known as the Institute for Religious Works, issued a scathing denunciation of Gotti Tedeschi in a memorandum obtained Saturday by The Associated Press. In it the bank, or IOR by its Italian initials, explained its reasons for ousting Gotti Tedeschi: he routinely missed board meetings, failed to do his job, failed to defend the bank, polarized its personnel and displayed "progressively erratic personal behavior."

For years, American officials have struggled to curb Afghanistan's opium industry, rewriting strategy every few seasons and pouring in more than $6 billion over the past decade to combat the poppies that help finance the insurgency and fuel corruption.

It is a measure of the problem's complexity that officials can find little comfort even in the news this month that blight and bad weather are slashing this year's poppy harvest in the south. They know from past seasons that blight years lead to skyrocketing opium prices and even greater planting efforts to come.

"Now I am desperate, what can I do?" said Mohammed Amin, a poppy farmer in Tirin Kot in Oruzgan Province, who harvested only one kilogram of opium poppy this year compared with 15 last year. "I don't have any cash now to start another business, and if I grow any other crops, I cannot make a profit."

The seemingly unbreakable allure of poppy profits - for producers and traffickers, government officials and Taliban commanders alike - has kept fighting opium at the heart of efforts to improve security. It drove Richard C. Holbrooke, later the special envoy to Afghanistan, to write in 2008: "Breaking the narco-state in Afghanistan is essential, or all else will fail."

The world is rampant with injustice. Injustice against the individual by another or large scale injustice committed against a people by a state. While the individual can often turn to state-run courts to seek amends, peoples and states have to rely on international venues for justice to be served. And that is what the International Criminal Court's (ICC) role was planned for. But sadly, the pursuit to punish the perpetrators of massive damage and harm to human life has been governed by duplicity and double standards.

The ICC has been very active in pursuit of Seif al-Islam, the second son of the deposed Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. Saif Al-Islam, who was disguised as a shepherd, was discovered and captured in the desert by Libyan freedom fighters following the fall of his father's regime.

The ICC had issued a warrant for Saif Al-Islam a year ago June after charges were levied against him and his cohorts of participating in the killing of protesters during the people's revolt that toppled the long-standing Gaddafi regime. There have also been several charges of financial corruption, and rape brought up against him.

The new Libyan government wants to try Saif and Abdullah al-Senussi, his brother-in-law and the former intelligence chief in Libya in their own country and by Libyan judges. They insist that 'there is no intention to hand him (Saif al-Islam) over to the ICC, and Libyan law is the right system to be used to try Saif Gaddafi.'

The ICC on the other hand rejects the Libyan stand, and ordered the Libyan government to 'comply with its obligations to enforce the warrant of arrest and surrender him to the ICC without delay.' They state that a UN Security Council resolution makes it obligatory for Libya to cooperate with the court, and threatened that the country's failure to hand him over 'could result in it being reported to the Council.'

Negotiations between Iran and the United States and other members of the P5+1 group in Baghdad ended in fundamental disagreement Thursday over the position of the P5+1 offering no relief from sanctions against Iran.

The two sides agreed to meet again in Moscow Jun. 18 and 19, but only after Iran had threatened not to schedule another meeting, because the P5+1 had originally failed to respond properly to its five-point plan.

The prospects for agreement are not likely to improve before that meeting, however, mainly because of an inflexible U.S. diplomatic posture that reflects President Barack Obama's need to bow to the demands of Israel and the U.S. Congress on Iran policy.

The U.S. hard line in the Baghdad talks and the failure to set the stage for an early agreement with Iran means that Iran will not only increase but accelerate its accumulation of 20-percent enriched uranium, which has been the ostensible reason for wanting to get Iran to the negotiating table quickly.

Florida is the stingiest state in the country when it comes to providing jobless benefits for the unemployed, two workers' rights groups argued in a complaint lodged with the U.S. Labor Department.

In a letter sent to U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis this month, the National Employment Law Project and Florida Legal Services asked for an investigation into changes to the unemployment compensation system made by Florida Republican Governor Rick Scott's administration.

The nonprofit, workers' rights groups said that revised procedures and bureaucratic hurdles implemented by the Scott administration made it more difficult for Floridians to access unemployment benefits. The changes appear aimed at discouraging people from filing for benefits, the groups said.

The complaint said only 15 percent of eligible unemployed Floridians are receiving jobless benefits. That compares to a national average of 27 percent.

"U.S. Labor Department records reveal that the percentage of jobless workers in Florida who actually receive state unemployment insurance is lower than anywhere else in the country," the groups said in a statement.

Beirut - A Syrian artillery barrage killed more than 90 people, including dozens of children, in the worst violence since the start of a U.N. peace plan to staunch the flow of blood from Syria's uprising, activists said on Saturday.

The bloodied bodies of children, some with their skulls split open, were shown in footage posted to YouTube purporting to show the victims of the shelling in the central town of Houla on Friday. The sound of wailing filled the room.

The reports of the carnage, which could not be confirmed independently, underlined how far Syria is from any negotiated path out of the 14-month-old revolt against President Bashar al-Assad.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius condemned the violence as a "massacre", and said he wanted to arrange a meeting in Paris of the Friends of Syria, a group that brings together Western and Arab countries keen to remove Assad.

Syrian state television aired some of the footage disseminated by activists, calling the bodies victims of a massacre committed by "terrorist" gangs.

It also showed video of bodies with what looked like gunshot wounds to the head, sprawled on bloodstained mattresses.

A British-based opposition group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said residents of Houla were fleeing in fear of more shelling.

It said one person was killed in the northern town of Saraqeb when security forces opened fire on a protest against the killing. Activists distributed footage appearing to show similar protests in Aleppo, the largest city in the north.