Another draft mental health bill, this time in Australia is mirroring global efforts in what is now an international and deliberate surge by government officials to remove parental consent. If passed, the shocking new law will allow children who are considered sufficiently mature, to be subjected to horrifying procedures including sterilization and electroshock.

An important message by the Director of Applied Scholastics in Western Australia based in Perth, Alison Tarrant was sent to the public on behalf of The Athena School. "Some very disturbing information has come across our path in relation to a Draft Mental Health Bill which concerns our precious children and our rights as parents," said Tarrant in a statement in the February 29, 2012 letter.

Tarrant initially thought the information lacked authenticity and was later astonished when she found out the document was legitimate. "When I read it I was quite shocked and thought someone was playing a joke on me but then I went onto the main website which is the Government Department of the Mental Health Commission and looked at the actual Draft Bill," she added.

PreventDisease.com recently reported that vaccinating without parental knowledge will soon become the norm across the world. There is now a confirmed global initiative to remove any consent parents have to safeguard their children's health while simultaneously removing any chance of informed consent by those who are considered of "mature" age regardless of their status as a child or teenager. These proposed bills are poised to become law and their frequency is increasing especially in the U.S, U.K, Canada, Australia.

As the first anniversary of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster arrives, the cover-up involving nuclear power is more extensive than ever.

The Big Lie was integral to the nuclear push from its start.

Promoters of nuclear power discounted the seriousness of nuclear plant accidents, although government documents acknowledged the vast scale of catastrophe. As the Atomic Energy Commission's "WASH-740 update," done at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the 1960s, repeatedly states about a major nuclear plant accident: "The possible size of the area of such a disaster might be equal to that of the State of Pennsylvania."

They pushed the "peaceful atom" - although knowing that any nation with a nuclear plant would have the materiel from it (the plutonium produced as a byproduct) and trained personnel to make atomic weapons.

They downplayed the effects of radioactivity claiming it needed to reach a "threshold" to cause harm - even as it became clear that any amount of radioactivity can injure and kill.

And nuclear power would be "too cheap to meter," they insisted.

And on and on...

A bill passed Monday in the US House of Representatives and Thursday in the Senate would make it a felony - a serious criminal offense punishable by lengthy terms of incarceration - to participate in many forms of protest associated with the Occupy Wall Street protests of last year. Several commentators have dubbed it the "anti-Occupy" law, but its implications are far broader.

The bill - H.R. 347, or the "Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011" - was passed by unanimous consent in the Senate, while only Ron Paul and two other Republicans voted against the bill in the House of Representatives (the bill passed 388-3). Not a single Democratic politician voted against the bill.

The virtually unanimous passage of H.R. 347 starkly exposes the fact that, despite all the posturing, the Democrats and the Republicans stand shoulder to shoulder with the corporate and financial oligarchy, which regarded last year's popular protests against social inequality with a mixture of fear and hostility.

Among the central provisions of H.R. 347 is a section that would make it a criminal offense to "enter or remain in" an area designated as "restricted."

The bill defines the areas that qualify as "restricted" in extremely vague and broad terms. Restricted areas can include "a building or grounds where the President or other person protected by the Secret Service is or will be temporarily visiting" and "a building or grounds so restricted in conjunction with an event designated as a special event of national significance."

Gaza's poor infrastructure and lack of building material and equipments due to the blockade has led the war battered infrastructure to deteriorate.

Palestine - Dozens of homes were flooded in central Gaza by untreated sewage water after Israel opened a dam located in the eastern side of the impoverished territory which leads to the Gaza Valley off the Mediterranean .

With Egypt's refusal to allow fuel into the blockaded coastal enclave, it was extremely difficult for rescue crews to tackle the problem.

Families in the flooded area have been struggling since the early hours of the morning trying to retrieve their belongings. Some area residents described the flooding of as another Israeli aggression demanding international protection.

In 2007 Israel placed the Territory under an unprecedented blockade on nearly all movement and supplies in and out of the Strip.
To add insult to injury Gazans have to deal with 18 hours of power outage because Gaza's sole power generating plant has stopped working again after Egypt blocked the flow of diesel fuel through underground tunnels.

Introduction by Nick Turse: memories of a visit to New York City

When I covered the Occupy Wall Street protests last fall, I just couldn't stay focused, despite the fact that people from across the country and around the world were traveling to that block-long half-acre park of granite walls and honey-locust trees in lower Manhattan to build a new mini-society. It boasted free housing, free food, free medical care, free education, and free music. Every day in Zuccotti Park there were thrilling rap sessions and you could watch direct democracy in action as people came together to exchange ideas in provocative new ways. To steal a well-worn activist phrase, it looked like another world was possible.

© unknownOccupy Wall Street: NYPD evict protestors at Zuccotti Park

And there I was, staring across the street. While it seemed like 99% of the 99% were captivated by the excitement in the park, I was transfixed by the police.

Day after day, I would cover Occupy Wall Street and day after day, I would get hassled by members of the New York City Police Department. They didn't like it when I asked questions about their Sky Watch tower - a two-story-tall, Panopticon-like structure outfitted with black-tinted windows, a spotlight, sensors, and multiple cameras that spied on the park. They got angry when I counted their dozens of police vehicles around the plaza's perimeter, or when I asked questions about the unmarked white truck that just happened to have a camera mounted on a forty-foot pole protruding from its roof.

They trailed me, took pictures of me, demanded my identification, and repeatedly confronted me. One cop even declared my reporting "illegal." But I couldn't help myself. Watching the NYPD was like gawking at a car wreck. I was reminded of the police response to the 2004 Republic National Convention, but on steroids. To take just one example, back then, the NYPD had around 9,000 steel barricades to pen in protesters around the city - enough, that is, to stretch from one tip of Manhattan to the other. More than seven years later, the approximately 150 steel barricades that formed a cordon around Zuccotti Park were part of a NYPD inventory that could enclose the entire island in a formidable ring of steel.

In his latest article, TomDispatch regular Stephan Salisbury assures me that I was never alone in my fixation on the rise of a homeland security state, and his reporting gives even me pause. With Occupy protesters gearing up for a spring resurgence, Salisbury spells out just what activists will be up against - think unmanned drones, tanks, and super-sophisticated surveillance systems from New York City to Scottsbluff, Nebraska - in the months ahead. (To catch Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast audio interview in which Salisbury discusses post-9/11 police "mission creep" in this country, click here, or download it to your iPod here.) Nick Turse

How to Fund an American Police State and get Real Money for an Imaginary War
By Stephan Salisbury

At the height of the Occupy Wall Street evictions, it seemed as though some diminutive version of "shock and awe" had stumbled from Baghdad, Iraq, to Oakland, California. American police forces had been "militarized," many commentators worried, as though the firepower and callous tactics on display were anomalies, surprises bursting upon us from nowhere.

There should have been no surprise. Those flash grenades exploding in Oakland and the sound cannons on New York's streets simply opened small windows onto a national policing landscape long in the process of militarization - a bleak domestic no man's land marked by tanks and drones, robot bomb detectors, grenade launchers, tasers, and most of all, interlinked video surveillance cameras and information databases growing quietly on unobtrusive server farms everywhere.

The ubiquitous fantasy of "homeland security," pushed hard by the federal government in the wake of 9/11, has been widely embraced by the public. It has also excited intense weapons - and techno-envy among police departments and municipalities vying for the latest in armor and spy equipment.

In such a world, deadly gadgetry is just a grant request away, so why shouldn't the 14,000 at-risk souls in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, have a closed-circuit-digital-camera-and-monitor system (cost: $180,000, courtesy of the Homeland Security Department) identical to the one up and running in New York's Times Square?

Tehran - Clerical Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has tightened his grip on Iran's faction-ridden politics after loyalists won over 75 percent of seats in parliamentary elections at the expense of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a near-complete count showed.

The widespread defeat of Ahmadinejad supporters - including his sister, Parvin Ahmadinejad - is expected to reduce the president to a lame duck after he sowed divisions by challenging the utmost authority of Khamenei in the governing hierarchy.

The outcome of Friday's vote, essentially a contest between conservative hardline factions with reformist leaders under house arrest, will have no big impact on Iranian foreign policy, notably its nuclear stand-off with the West. But it will boost Khamenei's influence in next year's presidential election.

With 90 percent of ballot boxes counted, Khamenei acolytes were expected to occupy more than three-quarters of the 290 seats in the Majlis (parliament), according to a list published by the interior ministry on Sunday.

In the race for the 30 seats in the capital Tehran, a Reuters tally of preliminary returns showed Khamenei supporters had taken 19 and pro-Ahmadinejad candidates the rest. Leading in popularity was Gholam-Ali Haddad Adel, a key ally of Khamenei and father-in-law to the paramount leader's son, Mojtaba.

Vladimir Putin faces new protests on Monday to challenge his victory in a presidential election he said had prevented Russia from falling into the hands of enemies trying to usurp power.

Putin's opponents, complaining of widespread fraud in Sunday's election, said they did not recognize the results and would rally near the Kremlin at 7 p.m..

But the former KGB spy, who after four years as prime minister will be returning to the post he held from 2000 until 2008, said with tears rolling down his cheeks that he had won a "clean" victory.

"I promised you we would win. We have won. Glory to Russia," Putin, dressed in an anorak and flanked by outgoing President Dmitry Medvedev, told tens of thousands of flag-waving supporters on Sunday night under the Kremlin's red walls.

Following the Deepwater Horizon explosion, Greg Palast led a four-continent investigation of BP PLC for Britain's television series Dispatches. From 1989-91, Palast directed the investigation of fraud charges in the Exxon Valdez grounding for Alaska Native villages.

Some deal. BP gets the gold mine and its victims get the shaft. And a few lawyers will get vacation homes - though they won't be so stupid as to build them on the Gulf Coast.

On Friday night, the judge-picked lawyers for 120,000 victims of the Deepwater Horizon blow-out cut a back-room deal with oil company BP PLC which will save the lawyers the hard work of a trial and save the oil giant billions of dollars. It will also save the company the threat of exposing the true and very ugly story of the Gulf of Mexico oil platform blow-out.

I have been to the Gulf and seen the damage -- and the oil that BP says is gone. Miles of it. As an economist who calculated damages for plaintiffs in the Exxon Valdez oil spill case, I can tell you right now that there is no way, no how, that the $7.8 billion BP says it will spend on this settlement will cover that damage, the lost incomes, homes, businesses and boats, let alone the lost lives -- from cancers, fetal deformities, miscarriages, and lung and skin diseases.

There are two things every American needs to know about Bank of America.

The first is that it's corrupt. This bank has systematically defrauded almost everyone with whom it has a significant business relationship, cheating investors, insurers, homeowners, shareholders, depositors, and the state. It is a giant, raging hurricane of theft and fraud, spinning its way through America and leaving a massive trail of wiped-out retirees and foreclosed-upon families in its wake.

The second is that all of us, as taxpayers, are keeping that hurricane raging. Bank of America is not just a private company that systematically steals from American citizens: it's a de facto ward of the state that depends heavily upon public support to stay in business. In fact, without the continued generosity of us taxpayers, and the extraordinary indulgence of our regulators and elected officials, this company long ago would have been swallowed up by scandal, mismanagement, prosecution and litigation, and gone out of business. It would have been liquidated and its component parts sold off, perhaps into a series of smaller regional businesses that would have more respect for the law, and be more responsive to their customers.

But Bank of America hasn't gone out of business, for the simple reason that our government has decided to make it the poster child for the "Too Big To Fail" concept. Because it is considered a "systemically important institution" whose collapse would have a major, Lehman-Brothers-style impact on the economy, two consecutive presidential administrations have taken extraordinary measures to keep Bank of America in business, despite a staggering recent legacy of corruption schemes, many of which were simply overlooked by regulators.

US, Washington - President Barack Obama addressed the largest pro-Israel policy conference Sunday morning in a speech that offered tough words for Iran but an even stronger defense of his administration's own policies toward Israel.

"If during this political season you hear some question of my administration's support for Israel, remember that it's not backed up by the facts," Obama said in his speech at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). "There should not be a shred of doubt right now: When the chips are down, I have Israel's back."

As the specter of a nuclear-armed Iran loomed over the three-day conference, Obama reaffirmed his willingness to use "all elements of American power" -- including military force -- to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, and denounced a policy of containment.

Obama will meet on Monday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House, where the two are expected to vigorously debate Israeli's concern that the U.S. has not done enough to prevent Iran for acquiring a nuclear weapon.

But in his speech, Obama also defended his administration's approach of sanctions and diplomacy, saying that he would rather see diplomatic solutions prevail than military ones, and that he has "a deeply-held preference for peace over war."