Barack Obama, America's Conjurer-in-Chief, is trying to entertain the world with a new smoke-and-mirrors trick, with the announcement that his government is recognizing the Syrian National Coalition as "the sole representative of the Syrian people".

The chemical weapons trick seems to have fizzled like a damp squib. So, now it's time for another illusion - the "worthy Syrian opposition".

This motley crew of treasonous exiles - who mysteriously, somehow, have bags of money to trot all over the globe from Doha to Cairo, Tokyo to Marrakech - are all of sudden anointed by the American President as the next government of Syria.


Anyone who has read the Doha Protocol that the SNC willingly signed up to while seduced in a luxury hotel last month by their Qatari sponsors should be under no misapprehension. This group of self-serving opportunists has been cobbled together with the sole purpose of selling Syria's sovereignty to the highest, or even lowest, bidder. The people of Syria have been spared no treachery low enough in the imperialists' manifesto of regime change, including surrender of wealth, natural resources and all of Syria's independent foreign policy principles.

Sen. John Kerry praises Rice following her withdrawal from secretary of state contention.

Susan Rice, the embattled UN ambassador, abruptly withdrew from consideration to be the next U.S. secretary of state on Thursday after a bitter, weekslong standoff with Republican senators who declared they would fight to defeat her nomination.

The reluctant announcement makes Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry the likely choice to be the nation's next top diplomat when Hillary Rodham Clinton departs soon. Rice withdrew when it became clear her political troubles were not going away, and support inside the White House for her potential nomination had been waning in recent days, administration officials said.

In another major part of the upcoming Cabinet shake-up for President Barack Obama's second term, former Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska now is seen as the front-runner to be defence secretary, with official word expected as soon as next week.

For the newly re-elected president, Rice's withdrawal was a sharp political setback and a sign of the difficulties Obama faces in a time of divided and divisive government. Already, he had been privately weighing whether picking Rice would cost him political capital he would need on later votes.

When Rice ended the embarrassment by stepping aside, Obama used the occasion to criticize Republicans who were adamantly opposed to her possible nomination.

Why does it matter if Susan Rice serves as secretary of state? That is a trick question, because in fact, it doesn't matter at all. American foreign policy will be unchanged regardless of who the next secretary may be. The full force of imperialism will be brought to bear against the people of the world under the Obama administration. The democratic president has made real the goals of the neo-con, Project for a New American Century a 21st century version of Manifest Destiny, the belief that the United States should rule the world and do so with a vengeance.

Rice's nomination is a non-issue but is treated as an important one for many black people because of the words of right wing racists. The sight of the embittered sore loser John McCain calling Rice "unqualified" and "not very smart" reminds black people of the slights they are personally subjected to in their lives every day. It is especially galling for the insult to come from McCain, the quintessential entitlement baby. He was admitted to the U.S. Naval Academy because his father and grandfather were admirals. The legacy leg up didn't help much because the mediocre young McCain still graduated at the bottom of his class. McCain's insistence that the obviously sub-par Sarah Palin was a qualified vice presidential candidate makes the racist slaps at Rice all the more offensive.

The yearning to see a black face in one of the highest and most rarified places is a very deep one and not to be easily dismissed, but it is crucial to note that Rice is no different from John McCain in her beliefs of how the United States should conduct itself in the world. The facts against Rice and her predecessors are obscured by a corporate media which hides all the atrocities committed by the United States government, making the Rice story appear like nothing more than that of a high achieving black woman being slandered by evil racists.

The case against Rice or whomever is nominated by the president should be a case made against United States foreign policy and all of the people who now or ever were in charge of carrying it out. The presidents, secretaries of state, United Nations ambassadors, national security advisers and their ilk are held up as paragons of virtue, intelligence and moral rectitude. They emerge from elite institutions and are held up as the "best and the brightest" the country has to offer.

The object that North Korea sent into space on Wednesday appears to be "tumbling out of control" as it orbits the earth, U.S. officials told NBC News.

The officials said that it is indeed some kind of space vehicle, but they still haven't been able to determine exactly what the satellite is supposed to do.

In a statement, the White House said the rocket launch was a highly provocative act that threatens regional security and violates U.N. resolutions.

The United Nations Security Council on Wednesday condemned the launch, calling it a "clear violation" of U.N. resolutions. A spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he "deplores" the launch.

North Korea is banned from conducting missile and nuclear tests, under the terms of U.N. sanctions imposed after a series of nuclear weapons tests in 2006 and 2009.

Missile warning systems detected the launch at 7:49 p.m. ET Tuesday. North American Aerospace Defense Command officials said in a statement that the initial indications were that the first stage fell into the Yellow Sea and the second stage fell into the Philippine Sea.

North Korea said the launch was an attempt to place a satellite into a pole-to-pole orbit. Pyongyang's official KCNA news agency said that the rocket was fired from the Sohae Satellite Launch Center on the secretive country's west coast, and that the Kwangmyongsong weather satellite went into orbit as planned.

But U.S. officials say the launch was a thinly veiled attempt to test a three-stage ballistic missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead as far as the U.S. West Coast.

Whenever the Security Council (sporadically) or the General Assembly (more frequently) lambastes Israel, the reaction from the Jewish state is highly predictable: either launch a military strike on Palestinians or announce new settlements in the occupied territories.

Since the Israelis last month exercised the first option, causing devastation in Gaza, they opted for 3,000 new settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank immediately after the 193-member General Assembly adopted a resolution last week elevating Palestine from an "observer" to a "non-member state".

The settlements were condemned not only by the United States but also by the European Union and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Paradoxically, the retaliation followed even after Israel disparaged the General Assembly vote as "insignificant", according to a New York Times editorial.

The UK government has agreed to pay £2.2m ($3.5m) to a Libyan dissident and his family who say MI6 was involved in their illegal rendition.

Sami al-Saadi and his family were forcibly transferred to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's Libya in 2004.

Their lawyers say the pay-out ends the family's legal action against the UK, in which they were arguing MI6 was instrumental in their kidnap.

The UK still faces a further allegation of rendition from another Libyan.

Mr al-Saadi was a leading Gaddafi opponent and says that he was forced on board a plane in Hong Kong, along with his wife and four children, in a joint UK-US-Libyan operation.

The family were flown to Libya where Mr al-Saadi was subsequently held and tortured.

Hearing ahead of full inquest also hears Litvinenko was working for MI6 when he was poisoned with polonium-210

The government's evidence relating to the death of Alexander Litvinenko amounts to a "prima facie case" that he was murdered by the Russian government, the coroner investigating his death has been told.

The former KGB officer was a paid MI6 agent at the time of his death in 2006, a pre-inquest hearing also heard, and was also working for the Spanish secret services supplying intelligence on Russian state involvement in organised crime.

Litvinenko died in a London hospital in November 2006, three weeks after drinking tea which had been poisoned with the radioactive isotope polonium-210.

The director of public prosecutions announced in May 2007 that it would seek to charge Andrei Lugovoi, a former KGB officer, with murder, prompting a diplomatic crisis between the UK and Russia, which refused a request for Lugovoi's extradition. Britain expelled four Russian diplomats, which was met by a tit-for-tat expulsion of four British embassy staff from Moscow. Lugovoi denies murder.

DOJ officials unblinkingly insist that the banking giant is too powerful and important to subject to the rule of law

The US is the world's largest prison state, imprisoning more of its citizens than any nation on earth, both in absolute numbers and proportionally. It imprisons people for longer periods of time, more mercilessly, and for more trivial transgressions than any nation in the west. This sprawling penal state has been constructed over decades, by both political parties, and it punishes the poor and racial minorities at overwhelmingly disproportionate rates.

But not everyone is subjected to that system of penal harshness. It all changes radically when the nation's most powerful actors are caught breaking the law. With few exceptions, they are gifted not merely with leniency, but full-scale immunity from criminal punishment. Thus have the most egregious crimes of the last decade been fully shielded from prosecution when committed by those with the greatest political and economic power: the construction of a worldwide torture regime, spying on Americans' communications without the warrants required by criminal law by government agencies and the telecom industry, an aggressive war launched on false pretenses, and massive, systemic financial fraud in the banking and credit industry that triggered the 2008 financial crisis.

The Obama administration overruled recommendations from within the US Department of Homeland Security and implemented new guidelines earlier this year that allow the government to gather and analyze intelligence on every single US citizen.

Since the spring, a little-know intelligence agency outside of Washington, DC has been able to circumvent the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution and conduct dragnet surveillance of the entire country, combing massive datasets using advanced algorithms to search and seize personal info on anyone this wish, reports the Wall Street Journal this week.

There's no safeguard that says only Americans with criminal records are the ones included, and it's not just suspected terrorists that are considered in the searches either. The National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) has been provided with entire government databases and given nearly endless access to intelligence on everyone in the country, regardless of whether or not they've done anything that would have made them a person of interest. As long as data is "reasonably believed" to contain "terrorism information," the agency can do as they wish.

What's more is the NCTC can retain that information for years, reviewing it whenever they'd like to take a look.

The update to the agency's policies, reported by RT at the time and reexamined this week in the Journal, expose any person in the country to invasive and nearly endless government surveillance.

"This is a sea change in the way that the government interacts with the general public," Mary Ellen Callahan is reported by the Journal to have said during a Situation Room meeting earlier this year within the walls of the White House. At the time, Callahan was chief privacy officer at DHS as well as one of the only staffers inside the Obama administration concerned with what was about to happen.

According to documents obtained by the Journal through Freedom of Information Act requests and conversations between the paper and persons familiar with that Situation Room sound-off, Ms. Callahan unsuccessfully argued against updating a 2008 Justice Department memo about what intel the NCTC can have and how they use it. Just weeks after that meeting, new guidelines were authorized and, within months, Ms. Callahan was working elsewhere.

The Government has given the green light for "fracking" for shale gas to resume in the UK.

Moves by gas company Cuadrilla to exploit the unconventional gas in Lancashire were put on hold 18 months ago after fracking, which uses high-pressure liquid to split rock and extract gas, caused two small earthquakes.

Energy Secretary Ed Davey said today that fracking could resume in the UK, subject to new controls which aim to reduce the risk of seismic activity.

Mr Davey said shale gas represented a promising new potential energy resource for the UK, although it was not yet known what contribution it could make to the energy mix, jobs and the economy.

He insisted that exploiting shale gas in this country would not undermine efforts to cut emissions to tackle climate change.