Do you know people that still believe that America is a free country? Do you have friends or family that are proud to live in "the land of the free and the home of the brave"? If you do, just show them this article. The things that you are about to read are enough to make the blood of any red-blooded American boil. We don't live in a free country anymore. Instead, we live in a "Big Brother" police state control grid that is becoming more restrictive every single day. Most of our politicians seem to be control freaks that are obsessed with running every single little detail of our lives. These days there has to be a "rule" or a "regulation" for everything. The radical social engineers in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and communist China never even dared to try some of the things that are going on in America today. We are all being treated little better than cattle and we are all being taught that it is best to just sit in our homes and absorb all of the television "programming" that is being provided for us. Meanwhile, our public schools have become little more than prison grids. Our children are being taught to enjoy living as docile slaves in a world where imagination, liberty, freedom and adventure are all greatly discouraged.

Unfortunately, none of this is an exaggeration. Our politicians love to give speeches about "liberty" and "freedom", but they always seem to have excuses to justify the endless parade of liberty-killing laws that they are imposing on all the rest of us.

Almost all of the freedoms listed in the Bill of Rights have been severely eroded. In fact, a number of them are almost totally gone at this point.

These are remarks Chris Hedges made in Union Square in New York City last Friday during a protest outside a branch office of the Bank of America.

We stand today before the gates of one of our temples of finance. It is a temple where greed and profit are the highest good, where self-worth is determined by the ability to amass wealth and power at the expense of others, where laws are manipulated, rewritten and broken, where the endless treadmill of consumption defines human progress, where fraud and crimes are the tools of business.

The two most destructive forces of human nature - greed and envy - drive the financiers, the bankers, the corporate mandarins and the leaders of our two major political parties, all of whom profit from this system. They place themselves at the center of creation. They disdain or ignore the cries of those below them. They take from us our rights, our dignity and thwart our capacity for resistance. They seek to make us prisoners in our own land. They view human beings and the natural world as mere commodities to exploit until exhaustion or collapse. Human suffering, wars, climate change, poverty, it is all the price of business. Nothing is sacred. The Lord of Profit is the Lord of Death.

Former IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei says former US President George W. Bush and his administration's officials should be put on trial in the "International Criminal Court" (ICC) for waging war on Iraq.

ElBaradei in a new memoir, The Age of Deception says that the Bush administration officials should face international criminal investigation for the "shame of a needless war" in Iraq.

He accused then-President George Bush and his administration officials of "grotesque distortion" in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq with an excuse to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

The so-called hunt for WMD in Iraq, however, yielded no results.

A passenger screener at Philadelphia International Airport is facing charges that he distributed more than 100 images of child pornography via Facebook, records show.

Federal agents also allege that Transportation Safety Administration Officer Thomas Gordon Jr. of Philadelphia, who routinely searched airline passengers, uploaded explicit pictures of young girls to an Internet site on which he also posted a photograph of himself in his TSA uniform.

Homeland Security agents arrested the TSA officer March 24, and he is being held without bail.

Although the case was unsealed Thursday, neither the indictment nor the news release mentioned Gordon's job searching airline passengers for TSA.

In November, the heat from the underground fires were melting fireman's boots. My feet were hot as I walked across the rubble.

I laugh when all these firemen and cops are portrayed as heroes for responding to 9/11.

Consider me the anti-hero. I arrived at the WTC on the second week and I worked at the WTC and landfill until November. I made the best of it and did what I had to do.

As an Italian American cop from Brooklyn I did my job-nothing more. I was out for me. Throughout my career I made arrests and I was never in trouble yet I knew in the back of my mind that the job would screw me. It did.

I am now sick like thousands of other first responders. The difference is that I'm not bellyaching about what an injustice was dealt to me. Perhaps it is karma.

It is funny how the powers-that-be hide the truth right under your nose, in plain sight. In the early 40s the "Manhattan Project" was started. Years later we all knew about the devastation of the first A-bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. It turns out that no one could fathom that the government would build an Atom bomb right in downtown Manhattan.

Last August, Federal Judge Jeffrey White issued a stinging rebuke to the USDA for its process on approving new genetically modified seeds. He ruled that the agency's practice of "deregulating" novel seed varieties without first performing an environmental impact study violated the National Environmental Policy Act.

The target of Judge White's ire was the USDA's 2005 approval of Monsanto's Roundup Ready sugar beets, engineered to withstand doses of the company's own herbicide. White's ruling effectively revoked the approval of Monsanto's novel beet seeds pending an environmental impact study, and cast doubt upon the USDA's notoriously industry-friendly way of regulating GM seeds.

Beirut - Syrian security forces fired at tens of thousands of people joining funeral processions Saturday after the bloodiest day of the monthlong uprising against President Bashar Assad, bringing the death toll from two days of violence to more than 120 and prompting two lawmakers and a local religious leader to resign in disgust over the killings.

The resignations were a possible sign of cracks developing in the regime's base in a nation where nearly all opposition figures have been either jailed or exiled during the 40-year dynasty of the Assad family.

"I cannot tolerate the blood of our innocent sons and children being shed," Sheikh Rizq Abdul-Rahim Abazeid told The Associated Press after stepping down from his post as the mufti of the Daraa region in southern Syria.

The lawmakers, Nasser Hariri and Khalil Rifai, also are from Daraa, which has become the epicenter of the protest movement after a group of teenagers were arrested there for scrawling anti-regime graffiti on a wall in mid-March.

Since then, the relentless crackdown on demonstrations has only served to invigorate protesters whose rage over the bloodshed has all but eclipsed their earlier demands for modest reforms. Now, many are seeking Assad's downfall.

Washington -- A provision in the new 9/11 health bill may be adding insult to injury for people who fell sick after their service in the aftermath of the 2001 Al Qaeda attacks, The Huffington Post has learned.

The tens of thousands of cops, firefighters, construction workers and others who survived the worst terrorist assault in U.S. history and risked their lives in its wake will soon be informed that their names must be run through the FBI's terrorism watch list, according to a letter obtained by HuffPost.

Any of the responders who are not compared to the database of suspected terrorists would be barred from getting treatment for the numerous, worsening ailments that the James Zadroga 9/11 Health And Compensation Law was passed to address.

Killer Contamination Spreads Worldwide Without Opposition

San Francisco - Radioactive contamination equivalent to the Fukushima, Japan disaster in terms of the hated "Mushroom Cloud" Atomic Bombs is two thousand (2,000) 500 Kiloton Atomic Bombs.* Each 500kt Atomic Bomb is 33 times bigger than the American Bomb that destroyed Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

President G. Bush often referred to the well known "mushroom cloud" as a terrorist signature. Nope, just standard operating procedure (SOP) in the stationary nuclear weapons biz-ness, otherwise known worldwide as "Nuclear Power Reactors." Except, in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Weapons, the biggest ever, the "mushroom" portion is invisible and has engulfed the whole world with 70 Billion Radioactive Lethal Doses* - so far. There's more on the way.

Truly, it is as if the entire world is At War! The dreaded all-out nuclear war that would happen if Russia or the United Stated accidentally "Pressed The Button" is going on right now; it is a done deal. Imagine that! The same thing as detonating 2,000 big Atomic Bombs and not even one "BOOM!" Not a shot fired, yet we could all die!