• Tony Blair was 'dining with friends and family' at Tramshed, east London

• DJ and barman Twiggy Garcia attempted arrest for crimes against peace

• Was inspired to do so after reading site arrestblair.org

A barman tried to put Tony Blair under a citizen's arrest while the former Prime Minister was out having dinner.

Blair was eating at Tramshed in east London when Twiggy Garcia approached him.

The part-time producer said he put his hand on his shoulder and said 'Mr Blair, this is a citizen's arrest for a crime against peace, namely your decision to launch an unprovoked war against Iraq.'

'Monsanto's reign of intimidation is allowed to continue in rural America,' says Food Democracy Now!'s Dave Murphy

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday denied a group of farmers the right to challenge Monsanto's seed patents, a decision critics charge allows the biotech giant's "reign of intimidation" to continue.

The plaintiffs in the suit, Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association (OSGATA) et al v. Monsanto, sought to protect themselves from lawsuits by the corporation for patent infringement should Monsanto's genetically engineered seed contaminate the farmers' crops.

Monsanto has sued over 100 farmers for patent infringement.

Jim Gerritsen, president of lead plaintiff OSGATA, previously explained,

"We are not customers of Monsanto. We don't want their seed. We don't want their gene-spliced technology. We don't want their trespass onto our farms. We don't want their contamination of our crops. We don't want to have to defend ourselves from aggressive assertions of patent infringement because Monsanto refuses to keep their pollution on their side of the fence. We want justice."

Decree gives security agencies the power to impose curfews, detain suspects without charge and censor media

Thailand has announced a two-month state of emergency in Bangkok and neighbouring provinces in response to protests that have seen nine people killed and hundreds injured amid calls for the government to resign.

Anti-government protesters have taken to the streets of the capital since November, cutting off water and power to ministers' homes, besieging government ministries, and forcing the beleaguered prime minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, to rule from offices north of the capital in their attempt to oust her from power.

"The cabinet decided to invoke the emergency decree to take care of the situation and to enforce the law," said deputy prime minister Surapong Tovichaikul on Tuesday.

History is often written to benefit certain groups over others.

Indeed, you will often find the blame for some of the worst events in history placed on the wrong individuals or factors. Most Americans today continue to argue over liberal vs. conservative beliefs, unaware that the vast majority of economy ills plaguing the country originate in neither party but in the Federal Reserve, which has debased the US Dollar by over 95% in the 20th century alone.

With that in mind, I want to consider what actually caused the hyperinflationary period in Weimar Germany. Please consider the quote from Niall Ferguson's book, "The Ascent of Money" regarding what really happened there:

Yet it would be wrong to see the hyperinflation of 1923 as a simple consequence of the Versailles Treaty. That was how the Germans liked to see it, of course...All of this was to overlook the domestic political roots of the monetary crisis. The Weimar tax system was feeble, not least because the new regime lacked legitimacy among higher income groups who declined to pay the taxes imposed on them.

At the same time, public money was spent recklessly, particularly on generous wage settlements for public sector unions. The combination of insufficient taxation and excessive spending created enormous deficits in 1919 and 1920 (in excess of 10 per cent of net national product), before the victors had even presented their reparations bill... Moreover, those in charge of Weimar economic policy in the early 1920s felt they had little incentive to stabilize German fiscal and monetary policy, even when an opportunity presented itself in the middle of 1920.

A common calculation among Germany's financial elites was that runaway currency depreciation would force the Allied powers into revision the reparations settlement, since the effect would be to cheapen German exports.

What the Germans overlooked was that the inflation induced boom of 1920-22, at a time when the US and UK economies were in the depths of a post-war recession, caused an even bigger surge in imports, thus negating the economic pressure they had hoped to exert. At the heart of the German hyperinflation was a miscalculation.

You'll note the frightening similarities to the US's monetary policy today. We see:

• Syria crisis: evidence of 'industrial-scale killing' by regime spurs call for war crimes charges
• Senior war crimes prosecutors say photographs and documents provide 'clear evidence' of systematic killing of 11,000 detainees

Syrian government officials could face war crimes charges in the light of a huge cache of evidence smuggled out of the country showing the "systematic killing" of about 11,000 detainees, according to three eminent international lawyers.

The three, former prosecutors at the criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Sierra Leone, examined thousands of Syrian government photographs and files recording deaths in the custody of regime security forces from March 2011 to last August.

Most of the victims were young men and many corpses were emaciated, bloodstained and bore signs of torture. Some had no eyes; others showed signs of strangulation or electrocution.

The UN and independent human rights groups have documented abuses by both Bashar al-Assad's government and rebels, but experts say this evidence is more detailed and on a far larger scale than anything else that has yet emerged from the 34-month crisis.

Refiners in Asia, Europe and Russia are shipping around half a million tonnes of heating oil and diesel to the United States this month after bitterly cold weather sharply reduced oil stocks there.

At least a dozen tankers have been booked so far in January to ship gasoil and diesel to the U.S. East Coast, according to traders and shipping data.

The majority of the tankers, or around 300,000 tonnes of oil product, originated from the Baltic Sea and Black Sea.

One tanker, the 100,000-tonne Torm Valborg, was chartered by Reliance , which operates the world's biggest refining complex in western India.

Around three medium-range tankers were booked from Europe on the west-bound transatlantic route, traders said.

Also, around five cargoes of jet fuel heading from the Middle East and Asia to Europe were diverted to the United States in recent days, with several likely to discharge in Florida, traders said.

"U.S. East Coast heating oil stocks are low at the commercial level and are being reduced at the consumer level. That market should remain tight and can't get much incremental supply from the U.S. Gulf due to the Jones Act restricting transport between the two regions by vessel," said Olivier Jakob, analyst at Zug, Switzerland-based Petromatrix.

In response to political scandal and public outrage, official Washington repeatedly uses the same well-worn tactic. It is the one that has been hauled out over decades in response to many of America's most significant political scandals. Predictably, it is the same one that shaped President Obama's much-heralded Friday speech to announce his proposals for "reforming" the National Security Agency in the wake of seven months of intense worldwide controversy.

The crux of this tactic is that US political leaders pretend to validate and even channel public anger by acknowledging that there are "serious questions that have been raised". They vow changes to fix the system and ensure these problems never happen again. And they then set out, with their actions, to do exactly the opposite: to make the system prettier and more politically palatable with empty, cosmetic "reforms" so as to placate public anger while leaving the system fundamentally unchanged, even more immune than before to serious challenge.

This scam has been so frequently used that it is now easily recognizable. In the mid-1970s, the Senate uncovered surveillance abuses that had been ongoing for decades, generating widespread public fury. In response, the US Congress enacted a new law (Fisa) which featured two primary "safeguards": a requirement of judicial review for any domestic surveillance, and newly created committees to ensure legal compliance by the intelligence community.

But the new court was designed to ensure that all of the government's requests were approved: it met in secret, only the government's lawyers could attend, it was staffed with the most pro-government judges, and it was even housed in the executive branch. As planned, the court over the next 30 years virtually never said no to the government.

Identically, the most devoted and slavish loyalists of the National Security State were repeatedly installed as the committee's heads, currently in the form of NSA cheerleaders Democrat Dianne Feinstein in the Senate and Republican Mike Rogers in the House. As the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza put it in a December 2013 article on the joke of Congressional oversight, the committees "more often treat ... senior intelligence officials like matinee idols".

Constitutional scholar Dr. Edwin Vieira sits down with Gary Franchi and answers the question... Has the US Government "become destructive of these ends?"

The latest wave of revelations coming whistleblower like Edward Snowden has divided the people from the government like never before. The Administration is losing not just popular support among Americans, but is now facing legal battles.


American courts have traditionally sided with federal agencies when they claim an action is needed in the name of national security. However, privacy advocates are now launching statewide initiatives and votes that could put a damper on surveillance programs. For the first time, privacy advocates are going on the legal offensive against the intelligence community.

The largest potential change could come from California. There, lawmakers have introduced the Fourth Amendment Protection Act. This will forbid the state from supporting widespread domestic spying. This could include shutting off water and electric supplies to federal buildings.

For decades, it has been rumored the United States government was secretly sponsoring the smuggling of cocaine into the country. Federal officials have long denied such speculation, pointing out the billions of dollars spent intercepting drugs. Newly released documents, and testimony from Justice Department and DEA officials now show the stories of government running cocaine are true.


An investigation conducted in Mexico found the American government allowed that country's largest drug cartel, Sinaloa, to operate without fear of persecution. That groups is estimated to be responsible for 80 percent of the cocaine coming into the country through Chicago. In exchange, the leaders of Sinaloa provided the DEA information on rival gangs.