Guantanamo Bay detainees, including David Hicks, were forced to take high dosages of anti-malaria drug mefloquine despite showing no signs of the disease, a practice likened to ''pharmacological waterboarding'' by a US military doctor.

Questions have been raised about whether the mass administration of the drug to detainees was a secret, illegal experiment after a medical journal article last month by an army doctor, Major Remington Nevin, highlighted the ''inappropriate use'' of the drug and asked if its use had been motivated by the drug's psychotic side effects.

The US Centres for Disease Control issued a warning against the use of mefloquine on anyone suffering psychiatric disturbances or having a previous history of depression. Dr Nevin also warned high doses of the drug could cause brain injuries.

Mr Hicks has long claimed he was drugged against his will. Evidence including previously secret reports and witnesses including a Guantanamo guard and New York lawyer Josh Dratel support Mr Hicks' claims.

New evidence has emerged that all Guantanamo Bay detainees, including David Hicks, were drugged involuntarily with a substance that has a long history as a truth serum.

Recently declassified US documents revealing medical procedures have shown that scopolamine was administered to all detainees taken to the Cuban detention centre.

The documents, which were standard operating procedures for nursing staff, were obtained by the independent US news outlet Truthout, and reveal that the rationale for the drug's use on all detainees was to prevent motion sickness.

However, US military experts have said that scopolamine is not recommended for motion sickness because of its severe side effects.

Here's some context behind the claims that Iran will imminently possess a nuclear weapon.

It started a long time ago (but not, unfortunately, in a galaxy far, far away):

1984: Soon after West German engineers visit the unfinished Bushehr nuclear reactor, Jane's Defence Weekly quotes West German intelligence sources saying that Iran's production of a bomb "is entering its final stages."US Senator Alan Cranston claims Iran is seven years away from making a weapon.

Seven years away? And did they have a bomb in 1991?

1992: Israeli parliamentarian Binyamin Netanyahu tells his colleagues that Iran is 3 to 5 years from being able to produce a nuclear weapon - and that the threat had to be "uprooted by an international front headed by the US."

1992: Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres tells French TV that Iran was set to have nuclear warheads by 1999. "Iran is the greatest threat and greatest problem in the Middle East," Peres warned, "because it seeks the nuclear option while holding a highly dangerous stance of extreme religious militancy."

1992: Joseph Alpher, a former official of Israel's Mossad spy agency, says "Iran has to be identified as Enemy No. 1." Iran's nascent nuclear program, he told The New York Times, "really gives Israel the jitters."

So was there a bomb by the late 1990s?

1995: The New York Times conveys the fears of senior US and Israeli officials that "Iran is much closer to producing nuclear weapons than previously thought" - about five years away - and that Iran's nuclear bomb is "at the top of the list" of dangers in the coming decade. The report speaks of an "acceleration of the Iranian nuclear program," claims that Iran "began an intensive campaign to develop and acquire nuclear weapons" in 1987, and says Iran was "believed" to have recruited scientists from the former Soviet Union and Pakistan to advise them.

1997: The Christian Science Monitor reports that US pressure on Iran's nuclear suppliers had "forced Iran to adjust its suspected timetable for a bomb. Experts now say Iran is unlikely to acquire nuclear weapons for eight or 10 years."

So now we're looking at a nuclear-armed Iran by 2007. Scary stuff, right?

2007: President Bush warns that a nuclear-armed Iran could lead to "World War III." Vice President Dick Cheney had previously warned of "serious consequences" if Iran did not give up its nuclear program.

2007: A month later, an unclassified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran is released, which controversially judges with "high confidence" that Iran had given up its nuclear weapons effort in fall 2003.

June 2008: Then-US Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton predicts that Israel will attack Iran before January 2009, taking advantage of a window before the next US president came to office.

May 2009: US Senate Foreign Relations Committee reports states: "There is no sign that Iran's leaders have ordered up a bomb."

And Iran still doesn't have a bomb today - all of those reports, all of that scaremongering and warmongering was wrong. Both the CIA and Mossad agree that there is no specific evidence that Iran is working on nuclear weapons today. And many experts believe that even if Iran were working on a bomb it could take up to ten to fifteen years.

With the advent of the internet came the Information Age, where it has become possible to spread and find information about almost anything with unparalleled ease and convenience - information that, as little as a couple decades ago, would have been extremely difficult if not impossible for most people to obtain. More data than any one of us could ever assimilate is now at our fingertips, and news of most global events is available practically instantaneously. Where information is suppressed, it finds its way to the surface, sooner rather than later. We carry the internet around with us in super-powerful laptop computers and handheld devices, and culturally, in our everyday lives, we now spend more time online than not, whether for work or leisure.

Everything is plugged in! In a relatively short time-frame, our global society has become a vast network of information movers, like a giant brain network, processing and sharing data with our counterparts within this greater body of humanity. It's no wonder our collective paradigm is shifting and it's no wonder the deepest patterns of our subconscious/archetypal makeup - understood as ancient mystery teachings and prophecies, tales of power and spiritual allegories, epic adventure stories and legends of old - have emerged in the forefront of our consciousness, becoming compelling topics of interest.

Paris/Hamburg - Iran's state grains agency GTC has discreetly snapped up around 1 million tonnes of milling wheat in the past 2 weeks mostly from the European Union, traders said on Thursday, showing increased ability to import food despite financial sanctions.

Iran has in the past exported wheat but Western sanctions aimed at its disputed nuclear programme coincided with a bad harvest, forcing the country to quietly enter global markets and make substantial wheat purchases to feed its large population. While sanctions don't target food shipments, they make it difficult for importers to obtain letters of credit or conduct international transfers of funds through banks.

"They are buying bigger volumes than what was expected, they have big needs...," one trader said, adding European origin was currently the most attractive.

An American military analyst says the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, organized the attack on the US consulate in the Libyan city of Benghazi, Press TV reports.

Israeli forces produced the anti-Islam film, released it and led the attacks against the US consulate in Benghazi, Gordon Duff said in an interview with Press TV on Friday.

US ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, and three other Americans were killed on September 11, when rocket-propelled grenades were fired on the US consulate in the eastern Libyan city.

The incident took place while a group of people held a demonstration against an anti-Islam movie produced in the United States.

"The attacks against the US consulate in Benghazi were, we believe, stimulated, paid for and organized by Israel's Mossad and they had nothing to do [with the Libyan people]," he added.

Referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Thursday, Duff argued that "it is unusual hearing someone as radical and extremist as Netanyahu talk about others."

The Iraqi government reiterated here Sunday its insistence on the deportation of Iran's opposition Mujahedeen-e-Khalq group from Iraqi territories in spite of a US plan to remove it from the list of terror groups.

The Iraqi Prime Minister's office said in a release that Iraq's position towards the Iranian group remained unchanged, shrugging off a recent US plan to stop listing Mujahedeen-e-Khalq as a terrorist group.

"The Iraqi government's position on this organization, which is involved in terrorist acts against Iraqis, remains unchanged," it said.

"Therefore, its illegitimate presence on Iraqi soil marks a breach of Iraq's constitutional obligations and peaceful policies in the world," the release added.

It called on the UN and all world countries to fulfil their commitments related to fighting terrorist groups.

Iraq had agreed with the UN to transfer the Iranian opposition group's members from the border area with Iran to camp in west Baghdad as a prelude to deporting them.

New York - Prime Minister Stephen Harper called on the international community Thursday to do more to "step up pressure and isolate" Iran, which he labelled a regime "where evil dominates."

Shunning an opportunity to speak at the opening of the United Nations General Assembly, Harper delivered his attack on Iran after receiving the World Statesman Award from the New York-based Appeal of Conscience Foundation (ACF) .

He targeted Iran as a country that constitutes "unambiguously a clear and present danger" to the world both for its pursuit of nuclear weapons, its support of terrorism and its threat to the existence of Israel.

Harper, who recently closed Canada's embassy in Tehran and expelled Iranian diplomats from Ottawa, assured an audience that included former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger and several prominent ACF donors that he is not advocating war.

"I say these things not to counsel any particular action, not to wish any additional hardship on the long-suffering Iranian people and certainly not to advocate war, but rather so that we not shrink from recognizing evil in the world for what it is," he said.

He called Iran's human rights record "appalling" and said its Islamic regime has a "truly malevolent ideology."

Harper also used the annual ACF fundraiser to condemn the anti-American riots around U.S. embassies and the attack on the American consulate in Libya that killed four Americans including the U.S. ambassador.

It's no wonder the Israeli Foreign Ministry initially held back from releasing a transcript of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to the UN General Assembly: Bibi's wackiness doesn't bear close scrutiny. Perhaps "wacky" isn't quite the right word for his 40-minute peroration, during which he pulled out a bomb "diagram" and a red marker to illustrate where he would draw a "red line" defining the outer limits of Iran's nuclear program. Cartoonish is more like it. The cartoonish quality of the bomb drawing underscored the content and tone of the speech, which was the jeremiad of a radical ideologue rather than anything one would expect from a statesman:

"Today a great battle is being waged between the modern and the medieval. Israel stands proudly with the forces of modernity. We protect the right of all our citizens, men and women, Jews and Arabs, Muslims and Christians, all are equal before the law."

Israel, which privileges its priestly caste, has a state religion, and bases its national mythology on a "promise" from G-d, is as medieval as any of its neighbors. Aside from being a lie, however, this statement is interesting because it evokes the very same supremacist spirit that animates the controversial pro-Israel public relations campaign launched by the Jewish state's extremist American supporters. Posters in the public transport system, from New York to San Francisco, proclaim:

"In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat jihad."

No wonder the Israeli consulates in New York and San Francisco won't disavow those vile subway posters: Pamela Geller is the new public face of Israel.

Yes, Israel protects the rights of all citizens - unless they're Palestinians who happen to own property coveted by the "settlers," in which case it doesn't. And the key word here is citizens: of course, the Palestinians in the occupied territories are not citizens, but helots, with no rights, and no protection from fanatical Jewish fundamentalists who have launched hundreds of attacks on their homes, and sought to displace them at every opportunity, with the active complicity of the Israeli government.

In President Obama's remarks to the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, he stated, "... My plan will continue to reduce the carbon pollution that is heating our planet - because climate change is not a hoax. More droughts and floods and wildfires are not a joke. They're a threat to our children's future. And in this election you can do something about it."

The president's remarks support the ideology of climatism - the belief that manmade greenhouse gases are destroying Earth's climate.

Today, the world is in the grip of the madness of climatism. Our president and 191 other world leaders of the United Nations continue to pursue futile policies to stop global warming. Universities preach "sustainable development." Companies tout their "green" programs. Schools teach our children that if we change light bulbs, we can save polar bears. But an increasing body of science shows that the theory of catastrophic manmade warming is nonsense. Climate change is natural, and car emissions are insignificant.

The president did not mention the Keystone Pipeline in his speech. In January 2012, he halted the $7 billion Keystone project on recommendation by the State Department in order to assess potential environmental harm. During the last months of 2011, thousands of protesters gathered in front of the White House to protest the Keystone project. They claimed that the oil the pipeline would transport from Canadian tar sands would cause irreversible global warming. Dr. James Hansen of NASA was one of those arrested at the demonstrations. Media pundits speculated that the president halted the pipeline to strengthen his political support with environmental groups. But could it be that Mr. Obama believes that halting the pipeline was the right policy to save the planet?