Seven in 10 Americans believe that Iran currently has nuclear weapons, according to a new national poll.

Friday's release of the CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey comes just hours after Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said the Islamic republic isn't seeking and doesn't believe in pursuing nuclear weapons. Khamenei was responding to a draft United Nations report that said that Iran may be working to develop a nuclear weapon.

The poll indicates that 71 percent of the public says Iran has nuclear weapons, with just over one in four disagreeing. More than six in ten think the U.S. should take economic and diplomatic efforts to get Iran to shut down their nuclear program, with only a quarter calling for immediate military action.

Nobel Prize laureate Elie Wiesel said on Tuesday that if Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were assassinated, he would not shed a tear.

"Ahmadinejad is a danger to the world and pathologically sick," Wiesel said during an interview on Army Radio. "He is dangerous because he openly wants to destroy Israel, meaning, to destroy another six million Jews."


Over the last few weeks, Wiesel has gathered signatures from more than 50 Nobel laureates across the world for a petition denouncing Ahmadinejad. The petition will be published in The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune.

For the first time since the introduction of its common currency, the European Union has made a country subject to its diktat. The European Commission intends to rigorously supervise the brutal austerity programme by which the Greek government plans to cut its budget deficit from 13 to 3 percent of the country's gross domestic product within two years.

The basis for the virtual dictatorship of the EU bureaucracy is a plan submitted in January by the Greek government to the European Commission. The plan envisages an overall reduction in public expenditure of 10 percent, public service wage cuts and job cuts, a two-year increase in the retirement age, cuts in the health service, and higher taxes, including a tax surcharge on fuel.

The European Union spent three weeks examining the plan and intends to review its implementation every one to three months. If the Greek government deviates in any way from the plan, Brussels threatens to impose even more sweeping austerity measures.

It's been a year since Obama swept to power on a wave of euphoria many hoped would bring relief from these traumatic times. He has indeed brought hope to some, but not to humanity. He has indeed brought change, alas it is change for the worse. Behind the carefully groomed image of a man of peace, beneath the thinly veiled disguise of benevolent intentions, dark forces wield the US machinery of government as a Weapon of Mass Destruction.

In this month's Connecting the Dots we witness how, at one fell swoop, the Evil Empire decimated and invaded yet another country. Environmental warfare and cyberwarfare have come to the fore and joined forces with the drone Reapers in the frontline of the Pentagon's quest for full-spectrum domination. Al Qaeda's Christmas Day Special was followed up with a wave of hysterical aftershocks in January that have sinister implications at many levels.

Against a backdrop of freezing weather all across the northern hemisphere the tower of global warming is crumbling. The collusion of big government and big pharma to inoculate us against a non-existent pandemic masks the one true pandemic confronting humanity: the psychopaths that bring us targeted assassinations, wars, torture, toxic vaccines... then blame humanity for their consequences. No vaccine can protect conscience, only awareness of the predators in our midst. "Swine Flu" appears to have receded, but the swine are still with us.

If events in 2010 keep up this pace, then humanity is in for a rough ride. Hang on as we navigate the month that was January.

The parents of two brothers whose "toxic" upbringing led them to torture two innocent children face prosecution for neglect and child abuse, police revealed last night.

The brothers were given an indeterminate sentence and must be detained for a minimum of five years for the prolonged sadistic attack in Edlington, near Doncaster, last April. They are considered to pose such a high risk to the public that they may never be released. One is thought to be in danger of becoming a psychopath.

The judge said that the attack was carried out with "chilling detachment" by boys aged 10 and 11 whose tools of choice were "aggression, extreme violence and sexual degradation".

Is David Brooks competing with Pat Robertson to make the most callous commentary on Haiti's earthquake?

As Lawrence E. Harrison explained in his book The Central Liberal Truth, Haiti, like most of the world's poorest nations, suffers from a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences. There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile. There are high levels of social mistrust. Responsibility is often not internalized. Child-rearing practices often involve neglect in the early years and harsh retribution when kids hit 9 or 10.

We're all supposed to politely respect each other's cultures. But some cultures are more progress-resistant than others, and a horrible tragedy was just exacerbated by one of them.

Yes, poverty is the underlying reason that Port-au-Prince now lies in ruins. But his claim that Haiti's poverty is rooted in its "progress-resistant" culture is otherwise known as blaming the victim. Like all poor people, Haitians are used to being blamed for their own poverty, but David Brooks picked a hell of a time to point his finger.

Pat Robertson, the evangelical Christian who once suggested God was punishing Americans with Hurricane Katrina, says a "pact to the devil" brought on the devastating earthquake in Haiti.

Officials fear more than 100,000 people have died as a result of Tuesday's 7.0-magnitude earthquake in Haiti.

Robertson, the host of the "700 Club," blamed the tragedy on something that "happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it."

The Haitians "were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III and whatever," Robertson said on his broadcast Wednesday. "And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, 'We will serve you if you will get us free from the French.' True story. And so, the devil said, 'OK, it's a deal.' "

Warm winter blessings to our readers this New Year! And midsummer's greetings to our readers in the southern hemisphere! We thought we'd begin this month's Connecting the Dots by welcoming in the new year with some reflection upon the old: 2009 was a truly smashing year in more ways than one.

Climategate broke out just as Connecting the Dots went to print last month. As we felt might happen, the Copenhagen Summit took a mighty hit from the 'truth vibrations' and despite frantic efforts, no binding international treaty came to pass. For now.

The mother of all cosmic ironies was not lost on us as the temperatures plummeted and negotiations at the 'Global Warming' summit froze! But the question remains: is the freezing weather in the northern hemisphere simply explained by regular variations in weather patterns? Or is climate change, in the sense of a fundamental change in the planet's climate, really happening, only not in the way we're being told?

As the solstice is a time for festive fun, we have a special treat for you this month, a pantomime, complete with odd characters in funny costumes and underwear that sparkles! Even Silvio Berlusconi makes a cameo appearance, until his mask nearly breaks in two. Sadly, not everyone saw the funny side, so we'll be looking at some of the darker implications of such episodes. We'll also be assessing the likely impacts upon our lives as a result of the latest phony act of terror.

Venture with us now into the shadow world of espionage and subterfuge, where the heroes refuse to bow before the Evil Empire and the villains do their Zionist master's bidding on the grand stage of power politics. Who are the real terrorists in this Faustian drama? Are they connected to those who claim ownership of the planet's resources for themselves at the expense of humanity? Would they really have us pay for the air we breathe and the water we drink? Is it possible that 'evil' is a real phenomenon?

Researcher and author Dave McGowan has unearthed a tightly held guarded secret for quite some time in his ongoing series, "Inside the LC: The Strange but Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation." While digging around the history of the odd birth of the sixties' music scene in LA when none had existed before with it's constant revelations of celebrities tied to US military intelligence and CIA, he found out about a secret CIA movie studio...

"What would become known as Lookout Mountain Laboratory was originally envisioned as an air defense center. Built in 1941 and nestled in two-and-a-half secluded acres off what is now Wonderland Park Avenue, the installation was hidden from view and surrounded by an electrified fence. By 1947, the facility featured a fully operational movie studio. In fact, it is claimed that it was perhaps the world's only completely self-contained movie studio. With 100,000 square feet of floor space, the covert studio included sound stages, screening rooms, film processing labs, editing facilities, an animation department, and seventeen climate-controlled film vaults. It also had underground parking, a helicopter pad and a bomb shelter.

A general who was once in charge of Israel's nuclear weapons has claimed that Iran is a "very, very, very long way from building a nuclear capability".

Brigadier-General Uzi Eilam, 75, a war hero and pillar of the defence establishment, believes it will probably take Iran seven years to make nuclear weapons.