Mohamed Merah launched a real 'counter assault' on fifteen elite French police officers who stormed his premises armed with only non-lethal weaponry, RAID chief Amaury de Hautecloque, said in an interview with Le Monde.

­The police had blown the doors and windows open and sent robots with thermal imaging and night vision cameras to search the flat. Merah was discovered in the bathroom standing in 30cm of water wearing a bullet-proof vest beneath his black Arab robe.

"He was waiting in a fighter's stance with unflinching determination," Hautecloque said. "He came out to meet us with three colt 45s of 11.43 caliber."

"This is the first time in my life I've seen someone as we launch an assault come and lead the assault against us," he added.

A former government space scientist was sentenced Wednesday to 13 years in prison after admitting that he tried to sell space and defense secrets to Israel in what turned out to be a sting operation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The man, Stewart Nozette, said he was "paying for a fatal lack of judgment." Mr. Nozette had high-level security clearances during decades of government work on science and space projects at NASA, the Energy Department and the National Space Council.

President Obama's National Defense Resources Preparedness Executive Order of March 16 does to the country as a whole what the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act did to the Constitution in particular - completely eviscerates any due process or judicial oversight for any action by the Government deemed in the interest of "national security." Like the NDAA, the new Executive Order puts the government completely above the law, which, in a democracy, is never supposed to happen. The United States is essentially now under martial law without the exigencies of a national emergency.

Even as the 2012 NDAA was rooted in the Patriot Act and the various executive orders and Congressional bills that ensued to broaden executive power in the "war on terror," so the new Executive Order is rooted in the Defense Production Act of 1950 which gave the Government powers to mobilize national resources in the event of national emergencies, except now virtually every aspect of American life falls under ultimate unchallengeable government control, to be exercised by the president and his secretaries at their discretion.

The fact that the world is being restructured from decentralized diversity to collectivized hierarchy by an authoritarian regime cloaked in green trappings can hardly be disputed.

The final push toward the next and perhaps final phase may be announced this June at the 2012 U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

A Scientific American editorial by Gary Stix highlights a policy article written by several dozen scientists that appeared online March 15 in the journal Science.

The conclusions reached by the scientists, as well as the editorial from a staff member of Scientific American are incredibly unscientific and fly in the face of the many thousands of independent scientists and researchers who have refuted the theory of man-made global warming. Regardless, this small group pushes ahead with their suggestions that the only way to combat such a global catastrophe is of course to solve it through global government. And not just any global government, but one that Scientific American suggests should be "heavy-handed (in its) transnational enforcement powers."

The policy paper entitled, "Navigating the Anthropocene: Improving Earth System Governance" is one of the most blatantly authoritarian among the incrementally more open policy papers that we are witnessing, as global governance continues on its runaway path in the name of saving humanity from itself.

This looks like major trouble.

President Obama has nominated Dartmouth College President Jim Yong Kim for the position of President of the World Bank. All bets were on Jeffrey Sachs. Sachs even thought he was the man, as countries around the world were lining up behind him.

However, President Obama out of the blue nominates Kim. It should be noted that Kim has zero financial background, which in itself may not be bad, since it means he is not a regime bankster. But, his credentials suggest that Obama sees some kind of global social health program along the lines of Obamacare, with the World Bank as a key player.

Kim has been a Professor of Medicine and Social Medicine and Chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. What's "Social Medicine". Wikipedia explains it well:

The field of social medicine seeks to:

understand how social and economic conditions impact health, disease and the practice of medicine and foster conditions in which this understanding can lead to a healthier society.

Translation: It's about central planning for the medical industry.

One should judge Nicolas Sarkozy according to his actions, and not according to his personality. Yet when his doings surprise even his own constituents, it is legitimate to take a detailed look at his biography and question the bonds that brought him to power. Thierry Meyssan has decided to write the truth about the French Republic's president background. All the information included in this article is provable, except for two assertions signalled by the author who alone takes full responsibility.

Tired of the overextended presidencies of François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac, the French elected Nicolas Sarkozy counting on his energy to revitalize their country. They were hoping for a break with years of no-change and ideologies of the past. What they got instead was a break with the very principles which founded the French nation, and have been shocked by this "hyper-president", seizing every day a new dossier, attracting towards him the right and the left wing, and tearing apart all points of reference to the point of creating total confusion.

Like children who have just made a boo-boo, the French are too busy trying to find excuses for themselves to admit the magnitude of the damages and of their naiveté, and they refuse all the more to see who Nicolas Sarkozy really is, that they realize they should have known since a long time who he was.

The United States, European allies and even Israel generally agree on three things about Iran's nuclear program: Tehran does not have a bomb, has not decided to build one, and is probably years away from having a deliverable nuclear warhead.

Those conclusions, drawn from extensive interviews with current and former U.S. and European officials with access to intelligence on Iran, contrast starkly with the heated debate surrounding a possible Israeli strike on Tehran's nuclear facilities.

"They're keeping the soup warm but they are not cooking it," a U.S. administration official said.

Reuters has learned that in late 2006 or early 2007, U.S. intelligence intercepted telephone and email communications in which Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a leading figure in Iran's nuclear program, and other scientists complained that the weaponization program had been stopped.

That led to a bombshell conclusion in a controversial 2007 National Intelligence Estimate: American spy agencies had "high confidence" that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in the fall of 2003.

Current and former U.S. officials say they are confident that Iran has no secret uranium-enrichment site outside the purview of U.N. nuclear inspections.

They also have confidence that any Iranian move toward building a functional nuclear weapon would be detected long before a bomb was made.

These intelligence findings are what underpin President Barack Obama's argument that there is still time to see whether economic sanctions will compel Iran's leaders to halt any program.

U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales was charged on Friday with 17 counts of premeditated murder, a capital offense that could lead to the death penalty in the massacre of Afghan civilians, the U.S. military said.

The 38-year-old soldier is accused of walking off a U.S. military base with his 9mm pistol and M-4 rifle, which was outfitted with a grenade launcher, before dawn on March 11, killing nine Afghan children and eight adults and burning some of the bodies. It was the worst allegation of civilian killings by an American and has severely strained U.S.-Afghan ties at a critical time in the decade-old war.

It's unclear what prompted the killings, but the case has drawn new attention to the debate over mental health care for the troops, who have experienced record suicide rates and high incidences of post-traumatic stress and brain injuries during repeated deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Six other Afghans - a man, a woman and four children - were wounded in Panjwai district of Kandahar province, the spiritual birthplace of the Taliban. Bales also was charged with six counts of attempted murder and six counts of assault in those cases, according to Col. Gary Kolb, a spokesman for U.S. forces in Afghanistan who disclosed information from the charging document.

Bales, a father of two from Lake Tapps, Washington, was officially informed of the 29 charges just before noon local time at the U.S. military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he is confined.

Syria now faces punishing sanctions from the Arab League, as a diplomat from the body says Damascus ignored Friday's deadline to accept foreign observers. Meanwhile, France is actively seeking international support for a humanitarian corridor to be set up in the crisis-torn country. This is also the first time a major power has formally called for foreign intervention in the uprising against President Assad. But there are questions about Paris 'go-to' efforts.

Thierry Meyssan has written "Operation Sarkozy".

(Mr Sarkozy and the CIA. Based on Thierry Meyssan's "Operation Sarkozy" )

Here are some of the points Meyssan makes about Sarkozy and his government:

1. The CIA planned Sarkozy's rise to power and has influence on his government.

2. When Sarkozy became president, Alain Bauer was put in charge of the French intelligence services.

Bauer is the grandson of the Grand Rabbi of Lyon.

He is also former Grand-Master of the Grand Orient of France (a top mason).

And he is former number two at the USA National Security Agency in Europe.