Romney aide, Rick Gorka, frustrated by questions about a series of gaffes made by Mitt Romney while in Britain and Israel, exploded on Monday.

During a visit to a memorial to Pope John Paul II in Poland, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney ignored questions from reporters about his overseas gaffes and his suggestion that Israelis were culturally superior to Palestinians.

Traveling press secretary Gorka responded with rage: "This is a holy site for the Polish people. Show some respect."

The reporter said: "We haven't had another chance to ask some questions."

Gorka answered: "Kiss my ass. This is a holy site for the Polish people. Shove it."

If you've ever wondered how Monsanto―a company that admits it wants to own the world's food supply through its patented genetically engineered seeds―gets away with not having to label its products, all you have to do is follow the trail of money leading from their coffers into the pockets and campaign funds of well-placed politicians and regulators.According to OpenSecrets.org, Monsanto basically lives at the doorsteps of legislators in Washington, where it spent $5.3 million last year lobbying the nation's lawmakers, and has already spent $1.4 million in the first three months of this yearNeedless to say, they can afford it. According to OpenSecrets.org, Monsanto had an annual revenue of $11.8 billion last year, so a $5.3 million lobbying investment is far less than one percent of one percent of their revenues.

The influence they're trying to buy doesn't stop in Congress, though. Monsanto's legislative agenda also includes the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); all of which have a say in whether or not you get to know whether the food you're eating has been genetically engineered.

Can You Trust a System Powered by Lobbying?

The power of Monsanto can be seen through its contributions to Rep. Frank D. Lucas, who's received the most money so far from Monsanto. Lucas just happens to be chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, through which every farm-related piece of legislation must pass. But he's certainly not the only one wheel getting greased by this biotech giant.

According to OpenSecrets.org:

"'...So far this election cycle, Monsanto's PAC has given $77,500 to 17 members of the House agriculture committee, or their leadership PACs.'" ...Monsanto's interests in Washington are diverse.

It lobbied bills ranging from the American Research and Competitiveness Act of 2011, which would extend tax credits for companies doing research, to several bills that would change the way the Department of Homeland Security handles security at chemical facilities -- chemicals being a big part of Monsanto's product portfolio.

... Another upcoming matter of great interest to Monsanto: the new farm bill, an omnibus piece of legislation that sets the nation's agricultural policy and deals with nearly every aspect of the country's farming and food industries. The current bill expires in 2013; when it went through Congress, Monsanto filed more lobbying reports on it than any other organization. The process of piecing together a new proposal is already well under way."

Such lobbying efforts can, and do, have a tremendous impact on the lives and health of every American, not to mention the environment. It directly impacts the food you end up with on your plate, and whether or not you're allowed to know what's in the food you eat to begin with.Monsanto and other biotech companies involved with genetic engineering of crop seeds are currently fighting tooth and nail to prevent labeling of genetically engineered foods, knowing full well that such a label has the potential to destroy their burgeoning industry.

Michael J. Potter is one of the last little big men left in organic food.

More than 40 years ago, Mr. Potter bought into a hippie cafe and "whole earth" grocery here that has since morphed into a major organic foods producer and wholesaler, Eden Foods.

But one morning last May, he hopped on his motorcycle and took off across the Plains to challenge what organic food - or as he might have it, so-called organic food - has become since his tie-dye days in the Haight district of San Francisco.

The fact is, organic food has become a wildly lucrative business for Big Food and a premium-price-means-premium-profit section of the grocery store. The industry's image - contented cows grazing on the green hills of family-owned farms - is mostly pure fantasy. Or rather, pure marketing. Big Food, it turns out, has spawned what might be called Big Organic.

Bear Naked, Wholesome & Hearty, Kashi: all three and more actually belong to the cereals giant Kellogg. Naked Juice? That would be PepsiCo of Pepsi and Fritos fame. And behind the pastoral-sounding Walnut Acres, Health Valley and Spectrum Organics is none other than Hain Celestial, once affiliated with Heinz, the grand old name in ketchup.

Over the last decade, since federal organic standards have come to the fore, giant agri-food corporations like these and others - Coca-Cola, Cargill, ConAgra, General Mills, Kraft and M&M Mars among them - have gobbled up most of the nation's organic food industry. Pure, locally produced ingredients from small family farms? Not so much anymore.

All of which riles Mr. Potter, 62. Which is why he took off in late May from here for Albuquerque, where the cardinals of the $30-billion-a-year organic food industry were meeting to decide which ingredients that didn't exactly sound fresh from the farm should be blessed as allowed ingredients in "organic" products. Ingredients like carrageenan, a seaweed-derived thickener with a somewhat controversial health record. Or synthetic inositol, which is manufactured using chemical processes.

Bankers found to have rigged Libor could face jail after the Serious Fraud Office said it will look to bring criminal charges against those who attempted to manipulate Libor, a key global borrowing rate.

David Green QC, director of the SFO, said existing legislation could be used to bring criminal actions against banks implicated in the Libor rigging scandal.

Mr Green did not specify the precise charges that could be brought but it is possible bankers found guilty of manipulation could receive prison sentences of up to 10 years.

The decision to pursue prosecutions comes just over three weeks after the SFO formally announced an investigation into Libor and in particular whether it was possible to launch criminal proceedings against individual banks and bankers found to have rigged borrowing rates.

For the love of the father and of the mother for the child when it has just been born is not like their love for it when it is one year old, and their love for it when it is one year old is not like their love when it is six years old. Consequently if it were left uncircumcised for two or three years, this would necessitate the abandonment of circumcision because of the father's love and affection for it. - Moses ben Maimon Guide for the Perplexed Part III Chapter 39

It seems that secular humanism in Germany has finally completed its decades-old plan to ruin the moral heritage of our grand United Empires of Earth. How? By ending the genital mutilation of children.

For some, circumcision is a religious concern. For others it's simple hygiene. It's well known that the covenant of Judaism is predicated upon the act of circumcision, and a host of other cultures around the world work it into their rites of passage in the most horrendous of ways. For others it was necessary to make it a more universally accepted practice. Therefore, circumcision was medicalised. Some may find it difficult to imagine that Aborigines and African tribes found their genitalia so dirty that they started hacking away at them. Therefore a lot of work has been put into providing "evidence" for circumcision's effectiveness, ranging from protecting against penile cancer, HIV, and just general dirtiness.

So, you see, though it's long been understood by the sane men and women of planet Earth that the only way to guarantee a clean, mature, or holy child is to rip the skin off of their most tender of places when they are too young to be able to put up a good fight, this plausible lie might be at its stretching point. Yet it's easy to see why it has been accepted for so long: who has the bravery to enter the labyrinthine complex surrounding this brutal act and face the monster, within and without, that demands the mutilation of children?

Twitter has brought down a hail of critical tweeting on its own head by suspending the account of a British newspaper's Los Angeles correspondent following his acerbic reporting of NBC's coverage of the Olympics.

The social media network hummed with the indignation of thousands of its users after the Twitter feed of Guy Adams of the Independent disappeared. The paper's deputy editor, Archie Bland, confirmed the suspension, calling it "heavy-handed".

NBC said it had complained to Twitter after Adams published the email address of one of its senior bosses. "We filed a complaint with Twitter because a user tweeted the personal information of one of our executives. According to Twitter, this is a violation of their privacy policy. Twitter alone levies discipline."

Rachael Horwitz, a spokeswoman for the San Francisco-based firm, confirmed that it does not "actively monitor" users' accounts, and added that it was company policy not to comment on individual users.

In his latest exclusive dispatch from Deir el-Zour province, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad meets fighters who have left the Free Syrian Army for the discipline and ideology of global jihad.

As they stood outside the commandeered government building in the town of Mohassen, it was hard to distinguish Abu Khuder's men from any other brigade in the Syrian civil war, in their combat fatigues, T-shirts and beards.

But these were not average members of the Free Syrian Army. Abu Khuder and his men fight for al-Qaida. They call themselves the ghuraba'a, or "strangers", after a famous jihadi poem celebrating Osama bin Laden's time with his followers in the Afghan mountains, and they are one of a number of jihadi organisations establishing a foothold in the east of the country now that the conflict in Syria has stretched well into its second bloody year.

They try to hide their presence. "Some people are worried about carrying the [black] flags," said Abu Khuder. "They fear America will come and fight us. So we fight in secret. Why give Bashar and the west a pretext?" But their existence is common knowledge in Mohassen. Even passers-by joke with the men about car bombs and IEDs.

The NYPD says it will launch an all-seeing "Domain Awareness System" that combines several streams of information to track both criminals and potential terrorists.

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly says the city developed the software with Microsoft.

The program combines city-wide video surveillance with law enforcement databases, according to Kelly.

The Domain Awareness System will include technology deployed in public spaces as part of the counterterrorism program of the NYPD counterterrorism bureau, including: NYPD-owned closed circuit television cameras, license plate readers, and other undisclosed domain awareness devices.

Bukulmez, Turkey - Smoking a cigarette outside a Turkish hospital near the Syrian border, a man in a gray gown and flip-flops held his sleeping 2-year-old daughter, Aya. On Aya's right eye was a bandage. In her left hand was a chocolate bar.

Aya lost her eye when she was struck by shrapnel from a shell that also killed her 8-month-old brother, Mohammad, and their mother. The father and daughter were among some 200,000 people who the U.N. said late Sunday have fled Syria's largest city, Aleppo, during days of clashes between rebels and the military.

Aleppo residents, some severely wounded, are packing up belongings and loading them onto cars, trucks and even motorcycles to seek temporary shelter in rural villages and schools outside the city and dusty tents across the border in Turkey.

In interviews with The Associated Press, refugees described a city besieged by government troops and beset by incessant shelling. Food supplies and gasoline are running low and black market prices for everyday staples are soaring.

Radical Islamists with "British accents" are among the coalition forces looking to topple Bashar Assad, says Jeroen Oerlemans, a photographer who was held hostage in Syria for a week. The UK Foreign Office has launched an investigation.

Oerlemans, a famous Dutch photo journalist, and John Cantlie, another photographer from the UK, were captured by a group of between 30 and 100 anti-Assad fighters when crossing the Syrian border from Turkey last week. They were then blindfolded.

"One of the black jihadists freaked out and shouted: 'These are journalists and now they will see we are preparing an international jihad in this place.'" Oerlemans told NRC Handelsblatt newspaper. He said that none of the fighters was Syrian.