Military commanders in the Libyan city of Misrata said Saturday that no post-mortem would be carried out on the body of Moamer Kadhafi despite concerns over how the toppled dictator died.

Interim leader Mustafa Abdel Jalil said an investigation was being conducted into the circumstances of Kadhafi's killing following his capture, bloodied but still alive, during the fall of his hometown Sirte on Thursday, after several foreign governments and human rights watchdogs posed questions.

But the military leadership in Misrata, where Kadhafi's body had been stored in a vegetable market freezer overnight and was again put on display for hundreds of curious onlookers on Saturday, insisted the inquiry would involve no autopsy.

"There will be no post-mortem today, nor any day," Misrata military council spokesman Fathi al-Bashaagha told AFP. "No one is going to open up his body."

His comments were confirmed by two other Misrata military chiefs.

Bashaagha said that the new regime's military commander for the capital, Abdelhakim Belhaj, was expected to travel to Misrata later on Saturday to view the corpse of the man who ruled Libya with an iron rod for 42 years.

A former NYPD narcotics detective snared in a corruption scandal testified it was common practice to fabricate drug charges against innocent people to meet arrest quotas.

The bombshell testimony from Stephen Anderson is the first public account of the twisted culture behind the false arrests in the Brooklyn South and Queens narc squads, which led to the arrests of eight cops and a massive shakeup.

Anderson, testifying under a cooperation agreement with prosecutors, was busted for planting cocaine, a practice known as "flaking," on four men in a Queens bar in 2008 to help out fellow cop Henry Tavarez, whose buy-and-bust activity had been low.

"Tavarez was ... was worried about getting sent back [to patrol] and, you know, the supervisors getting on his case," he recounted at the corruption trial of Brooklyn South narcotics Detective Jason Arbeeny.

"I had decided to give him [Tavarez] the drugs to help him out so that he could say he had a buy," Anderson testified last week in Brooklyn Supreme Court.

"Politics is the management of people. It is important to understand the psychology as well as the symptoms of problems." - Henry Kissinger. The quote is from a Time Magazine article by Hugh Sidey called, "The Presidency: Majesty, Poetry and Power," that was published on October 20, 1980.

"People first feel things without noticing them, then notice them with inner distress and disturbance, and finally reflect on them with a clear mind." - Giambattista Vico; The New Science, pg. 94.

"No, the demons are not banished; that is a difficult task that still lies ahead. Now that the angel of history has abandoned the Germans, the demons will seek a new victim. And that won't be difficult. Every man who loses his shadow, every nation that falls into self-righteousness, is their prey.... We should not forget that exactly the same fatal tendency to collectivization is present in the victorious nations as in the Germans, that they can just as suddenly become a victim of the demonic powers." - Carl Jung; The Postwar Psychic Problems of the Germans (1945).

"Politics," said Henry Kissinger, "is the management of people." Based on this definition, shadow politics is the management of the mass death of people. Specifically, it is the management of public perceptions about acts of mass destruction and mass death as carried out by government leaders.

The premeditated destruction of Iraq by the United States government provides a present-day example of how government leaders justify the mass murder of foreign populations to their own people. Neoconservative thinking was the ideological source of both the destruction of Iraq and the destruction of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.

Neoconservatism and Environmentalism are the two schools of thought in this age that call for the mass destruction and mass death of human communities. Neocons want to conquer the Earth, and Environmentalists want to save it. Both groups are politically powerful, media savvy, financed by big money, and filled with psychotics who have fantasies of mass destruction and mass death.

Superb investigative journalism by the New York Times has brought the paper under attack by the natural gas industry. That campaign of intimidation and obfuscation has been orchestrated by top shelf players like Exxon and Chesapeake aligned with the industry's worst bottom feeders. This coalition has launched an impressive propaganda effort carried by slick PR firms, industry funded front groups and a predictable cabal of right wing industry toadies from cable TV and talk radio. In pitting itself against public disclosure and reasonable regulation, the natural gas industry is once again proving that it is its own worst enemy.

I confess to being an early optimist on natural gas. In July of 2009, I wrote a widely circulated op-ed for the Financial Times predicting that newly accessible deposits of natural gas had the potential to rapidly relieve our country of its deadly addiction to Appalachian coal and end forever catastrophically destructive mountaintop removal mining. At that time, government and industry geologists were predicting that new methods of fracturing gas rich shale beds had provided access to an astounding 2000-5000 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the lower 48 -- enough, they claimed to power our country for a century.

These rich reserves might have allowed America to mothball or throttle back our 336 gigawatts of mainly antiquated and inefficient coal fired electric plants replacing them with underutilized capacity from existing gas generation plants. That transition could reduce U.S. mercury emissions by 20%-25%, dramatically cut deadly particulate matter and the pollutants that cause acid rain and slash America's grid based CO2 by an astonishing 20% -- literally overnight! Gas could have been a natural companion for wind and solar energy with its capacity to transform variable power into base load, and could have been a critical bridge fuel to the new energy economy rooted in America's abundant renewables.

Report finds genetically modified crops fail to increase yields let alone solve hunger, soil erosion and chemical-use issues

British documentary dispatches dealing with the case of the murder of PC Yvonne Fletcher who was shot dead on April 17th 1984 in St. James' Square, London, outside the Libyan embassy. While the official story pointed the finger of blame at Libya, the facts tell a very different story.

Washington - President Barack Obama on Friday declared an end to the Iraq war, one of the longest and most divisive conflicts in U.S. history, announcing that all American troops would be withdrawn from the country by year's end.

Obama's statement put an end to months of wrangling over whether the U.S. would maintain a force in Iraq beyond 2011. He never mentioned the tense and ultimately fruitless negotiations with Iraq over whether to keep several thousand U.S. forces in Iraq as a training force and a hedge against meddling from Iran or other outside forces.

Instead, Obama spoke of a promise kept, a new day for a self-reliant Iraq and a focus on building up the economy at home.

"I can report that, as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year," Obama said. "After nearly nine years, America's war in Iraq will be over."

Obama spoke after a private video conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, and he offered assurances that the two leaders agreed on the decision.

Pathbreaking scholars Norman Finkelstein and John Mearsheimer speak out about the precarious future of the Jewish state.

Shortly before Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas arrived in New York to seek United Nations recognition of a Palestinian state, TAC's Scott McConnell sat down with Norman Finkelstein and John Mearsheimer to discuss the deeper currents shaping the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Since then, President Obama has given a speech shocking in its deference to Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel's right-wing coalition, and there is no immediate prospect for renewed Israeli-Palestinian negotiations - the "peace process" begun with discussions in Oslo, Norway in 1991. Israel has announced fresh plans to move settlers into Palestinian areas of Jerusalem it conquered in 1967.

As daunting as the prospects for peace may be, Israel no longer enjoys immunity from criticism within the American media and academy - thanks in large part to the work of scholars like Mearsheimer and Finkelstein, who have forced a debate among foreign-policy thinkers and the American left over the price Americans, Israelis, and Palestinians all pay for Tel Aviv's policies.

One of America's most important dissident scholars, Norman Finkelstein has written six books touching on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 2007, after he had been recommended by DePaul University's political science department and described by the university as an "outstanding teacher," he was denied tenure thanks to an unprecedented lobbying campaign waged by Alan Dershowitz, who had long sparred with Finkelstein over Israel. Finkelstein is the child of European Jews who survived Auschwitz and Majdanek, which gave added force to his book The Holocaust Industry, critical of ways Israel has exploited the Holocaust for financial and political gain. His most recent work, This Time We Went Too Far, is an analysis of Israel's 2008-09 war against the Palestinians in Gaza.

Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago is one of America's foremost international relations scholars. He created a storm in 2006 when he and co-author Stephen Walt of Harvard University published the essay "The Israel Lobby," which was later expanded into a best-selling book.

Greek's parliament has passed a deeply resented austerity Bill that has led to violent protests on the streets of Athens, despite some dissent from one Socialist politician.

The new measures include pay and staff cuts in the civil service as well as pension cuts and tax hikes for all Greeks. The Bill passed by majority vote in the 300-member parliament.

Former labour minister Louka Katseli voted against one article that scales back collective labour bargaining rights.

She voted in favour of the overall Bill, but prime minister George Papandreou expelled her from the party's parliamentary group, cutting his majority to 153.