Up to 4-5 thousand European jihadist militants with EU passports are fighting on the side of al-Qaeda in Syria, according to Belgium's state security structures. Meanwhile, battle-hardened jihadists are returning to Europe in increasing numbers, posing a real threat to EU security. Syrian rebels are often seen as heroes to a small section of youths upon return, making them ideal to further foster recruitment.

According to Belgian state security structures, 4-5 thousand jihadist militants with EU passports were fighting against the Assad regime in Syria, mass media of Belgium reported Friday.

There are up to twenty Chechens in the ranks of the Syrian radical Islamists; they went there from different regions of Belgium, a source in the state security agency says.

The counter-intelligence service and the police of Belgium believe that about 200 owners of Belgian passports are fighting in Syria on the side of the Islamists, and about 20 of them were killed.

It is also reported that a group of Belgian Dutch-speaking jihadists, trained in Syria, participated in at least one of the last acts of terrorism on the territory of Iraq. There is information that Belgian Islamic terrorists migrate from Syria into Turkey and Lebanon. The security services possess information about the plans of recruiters to take jihadists trained in Syria to Morocco and Tunisia. Somalia is not excluded either.

Documents from an Ohio National Guard (ONG) training drill conducted last January reveal the details of a mock disaster where Second Amendment supporters with "anti-government" opinions were portrayed as domestic terrorists.

The ONG 52nd Civil Support Team training scenario involved a plot from local school district employees to use biological weapons in order to advance their beliefs about "protecting Gun Rights and Second Amendment rights."

Portsmouth Fire Chief Bill Raison told NBC 3 WSAZ-TV in Huntington, West Virginia that the drill accurately represented "the reality of the world we live in," adding that such training "helps us all be prepared."

Internal ONG documents provided to Media Trackers after repeated delays provide further context to what WSAZ-TV reported last winter.

In the disaster-preparedness scenario, two Portsmouth Junior High School employees poisoned school lunches with mustard gas, acting on orders from white-nationalist leader William Pierce.

The ONG team discovered biological weapons being produced in the school, requiring activation of containment and decontamination procedures.

<sub>President Obama "quipped" today during a visit to Monticello with the French president, "That's the good thing about being president, I can do whatever I want."

Via the pool report:</sub>

<sub>Monticello

At 4:45 POTUS and president Hollande walked out from a portico and strolled in front of your pool with Leslie Bowman, president of the Monticello Foundation. Looking at a terrace she said that Jefferson loved to admire the landscape from there. POTUS said that he'd like to take a look and seemed delighted to "break the protocol".

"That's the good thing as a President, I can do whatever I want" he quipped, walking to the terrace with his guest and Ms. Bowman. Pool now in the mansion as the leaders will come and visit Jefferson's study.</sub>

<sub>The comment came around the time the White House announced it would be delaying the Obamacare mandate for some businesses unilaterally.


The French president is here in the U.S. on a state visit.

More notes from the pool:</sub>

_{Monticello
POTUS and pres Hollande paid a short visit to the study as your pool was looking through an alcove over president Jefferson's bed. They admired contraptions invented by Jefferson to read and write more efficiently such as a lectern and a "polygraph". Hollande noticed that one of the books was written in French.}

"Totalitarian paranoia runs deep in American society, and it now inhabits the highest levels of government... Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, America has succumbed to a form of historical amnesia fed by a culture of fear, militarization and precarity. Relegated to the dustbin of organized forgetting were the long-standing abuses carried out by America's intelligence agencies and the public's long-standing distrust of the FBI, government wiretaps and police actions that threatened privacy rights, civil liberties and those freedoms fundamental to a democracy." - Professor Henry Giroux

Relationships are fragile things, none more so than the relationship between a citizen and his government. Unfortunately for the American people, the contract entered into more than 200 years ago has been reduced to little more than a marriage of convenience and fiscal duty, marked by distrust, lying, infidelity, hostility, disillusion, paranoia and domestic abuse on the part of the government officials entrusted with ensuring the citizenry's safety and happiness.

Don't believe me? Just take a stroll through your city's downtown. Spend an afternoon in your local mall. Get in your car and drive to your parents' house. Catch the next flight to that business conference.

While you're doing so, pay careful attention to how you and your fellow citizens are treated by government officials - the ones whose salaries you are paying.

You might walk past a police officer outfitted in tactical gear, holding an assault rifle, or drive past a police cruiser scanning license plates. There might be a surveillance camera on the street corner tracking your movements. At the airport, you may be put through your paces by government agents who will want to either pat you down or run scans of your body. And each time you make a call or send a text message, your communications will most likely be logged and filed. When you return home, you might find that government agents have been questioning your neighbors about you, as part of a "census" questionnaire. After you retire to sleep, you might find yourself awakened by a SWAT team crashing through your door (you'll later discover they were at the wrong address), and if you make the mistake of reaching for your eyeglasses, you might find yourself shot by a cop who felt threatened.

Is this the behavior of a government that respects you? One that looks upon you as having inviolate rights? One that regards you as its employer, its master, its purpose for being?

Way back on February 13, 1960, France tested its first atomic bomb, "Gerboise Bleue" (Blue Jerboa). Declassified documents released recently show that radiation from the test in the Algerian Sahara desert reached much further than they said at the time.

In fact, the radiation fallout is likely to have reached as far as the southern coast of Spain as well as Sicily and Sardinia in Italy, within just 13 days of the blast.

The French daily newspaper Le Parisien published the military papers on February 14.

Originally the affected zone was said to be restricted to within the Sahara desert in Algeria, but it can be seen from the image below that in reality, it affected northern, eastern and central Africa plus southern Europe.

Brussels - You're not broke, you're adjusted. You're not miserable, you're emotionally fluxed. You're not using meaningful language, you're finding excuses. The politically obsessive EU has decided that the word "bankruptcy" has too much of a stigma.

It would be nice to think that this is just another case of vacuous people producing verbal vacuums, but it's more complex than that, as The Daily Mail explains:

The EU is trying to erase 'bankruptcy' from the English language and replace it with the term 'debt adjustment'.

The idea is being considered as part of wider reforms to harmonise financial arrangements across the EU, including making it less troublesome to open bank accounts in different countries and easier to escape from debt and be 'given a second chance'.

Ah, er, um, hang on... "Making it less troublesome to open bank accounts in different countries and easier to escape from debt...?"

Less troublesome for whom?

Easier for whom?

I feel that this is one of the most important investigations I've ever done. If my findings are correct, each of us might soon experience a severe, if not crippling blow to our personal finances, the confiscation of any wealth some of us have been able to accumulate over our lifetimes, and the end of the financial world as we once knew it. The evidence to support my findings exists in the trail of dead bodies of financial executives across the globe and a missing Wall Street Journal Reporter who was working at the Dow Jones news room at the time of his disappearance.

If the bodies were dots on a piece of paper, connecting them results in a sinister picture being drawn that involves global criminal activity in the financial world the likes of which is almost without precedent. It should serve as a warning that we are at the precipice of something so big, it will shake the financial world as we know it to its core. It seems to illustrate the complicity of big banks and governments, the intelligence community, and the media.

Although the trail of mysterious and bizarre deaths detailed below begin in late January, 2014, there are others. Not only that, there will be more, according to sources within the financial world. Based on my findings, these are not mere random, tragic cases of suicide, but of the methodical silencing of individuals who had the ability to expose financial fraud at the highest levels, and the complicity of certain governmental agencies and individuals who are engaged in the greatest theft of wealth the world has ever seen.

© Dan Himbrechts/AAPRupert Murdoch delivers the 2013 Lowy lecture in Sydney.

Payment revealed by News Corp in US likely to reignite debate over how much tax is paid by international corporations

Rupert Murdoch's media group received a $882m tax rebate from Australia last year in a revelation that is likely to reignite the debate over how much tax is paid by international corporations.

The payment by a "foreign tax authority" was revealed in accounts published by News Corporation in the US earlier this month and related to a $2bn claim by News Corp for historic losses on currency transactions by its Australian subsidiaries.

The payment was estimated to be worth $600m to News Corp but the final figure grew to $882m after interest charges.

It was one of the the biggest single factors in the multi-billion dollar federal budget blowout announced by Australian treasurer Joe Hockey in December.

The Australian Tax Office wanted to challenge the claim but was overruled by the Federal Court of Appeal in July last year, the Australian Financial Review reported on Monday.

The refund amounted to one of the largest ever faced by the ATO but a decision over whether to appeal against the ruling came amid the build-up to the federal election with News Corp's Australian titles launching a series of attacks on the then Labor government.

As Iceland's banking system went into meltdown at the start of the global financial crisis, it came under enormous pressure from the rest of Europe to accept crippling austerity measures that would have burdened its people for generations to come. And yet the tiny island nation stood up to the European Goliath, defiantly opting for democracy even as it stood on the brink of bankruptcy. What can Iceland teach the world about the power of the people and the rule of law?

To discuss these issues, Oksana is joined by the President of Iceland, Olafur Grimsson.

Or take the right to vote. In principle, it is a great privilege. In practice, as recent history has repeatedly shown, the right to vote, by itself, is no guarantee of liberty. Therefore, if you wish to avoid dictatorship by referendum, break up modern society's merely functional collectives into self-governing, voluntarily co-operating groups, capable of functioning outside the bureaucratic systems of Big Business and Big Government.

-Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World Revisited (1958)

Until recent years, the struggle between the forces of "centralization" and "decentralization" was more of a full on slaughter-fest than an actually battle or war. As Americans sat there blissfully asleep for decades, every facet of our lives has been carefully consolidated into the hands of a smaller and smaller group of corporations, and hence individual executives. This trend is undeniable in everything from food, banking, media and everything in between.

Myself and many others saw the financial crisis of 2008 as a gigantic wakeup call. The disasters caused by powerful financial institutions and the greedy people that ran them should have been used as a rallying cry to break these institutions up. To recognize the dangers of too much power in one particular place.This is especially important in something as crucial as banking. However, as we are all painfully aware, this is not what happened. Rather, the institutions were bailed out, the industry consolidated even more than it was before, and the perpetrators of the crisis emerged from it even more wealthy and powerful.

My personal focus on this website has been to expose the unique dangers presented by centralization in the financial industry and the monetary system. However, many others are dedicated to the equally important and disturbing trends in other industries. Consumer goods is one of these areas, and a very telling diagram went around late last year showing how 10 companies basically control everything you buy. Take a look below: