Europe's air industry has called for an urgent review of flight bans imposed because of volcanic ash from Iceland.

The bodies representing most European airlines and airports have questioned the need for the unprecedented curbs, which affect millions of travellers.

Airlines that have carried out test flights say planes showed no obvious damage after flying through the ash.

EU Transport Commissioner Siim Kallas said he hoped 50% of Europe's airspace would be risk-free on Monday.

He said the current situation was "not sustainable" and European authorities were working to find a solution that did not compromise safety.

"We cannot just wait until this ash cloud dissipates," he added.

Mr Kallas also said EU transport ministers would hold a video teleconference on Monday to assess the situation. About 17 European countries have closed their airspace.

The flight bans came amid fears that the ash - a mixture of glass, sand and rock particles - can seriously damage aircraft engines. Airlines are estimated to be losing some £130m ($200m) a day.

}We are a world at war. Not wars against nations as US Major General Smedley Darlington Butler was referring to when he wrote War is a Racket in 1935. Our war is a never-ending perpetual War Against Terror™, a phrase repeated ad nauseum by the Bush administration since 9/11, where you were either with the Neocons or "you were with the terrorists". Stasi-like draconian surveillance has merged with cutting edge technology to watch, catalog, record the movements, interactions, behavior, communications and interests of every citizen. In this world of precrime we are now treated as if we are potential terrorists. Whether it be a domestic extremist or a radicalized dissenter, there is a phantom enemy in our midst that is only revealed to the world when it enters the duty-free zone at airports. Where trenches marked the front-lines of wars in the past, the front-line in today's perpetual war is the airport boarding gate.

A multi-billion dollar industry has spawned surveillance and security systems with a supporting army of guards, agents, supervisors and security personnel. They keep us in line and keep us safe from the omnipresent threat of an ubiquitous, all-pervasive mythical terror. Thrust at us by a compliant media are over-hyped and sensationalized reports, hysterical speeches and horrifying attacks that almost very nearly happen or, as we are told, WILL happen, sometime soon, and are all so big and so scary that you must place your water bottle in the bin and take your shoes off to survive. It's all designed to paralyze our senses and reduce us to strip-searched carcasses as we sleepwalk along the travelators through naked scanners...

Airport security is a racket. It always has been.

"Deception by an omission of the truth is as bad as a lie."
Jennifer Chiaverini

The mainstream media was quick to publicise the findings of a survey that showed widespread public support for the global drive to install 'naked' full-body scanners at airports.

Articles such as Sky News: UK Holidaymakers Back Use Of Full-Body Scanners and Agence France-Presse: Opinion poll: US anti-terror too lax, uncritically repeated the report's findings without questioning the reliability of the survey or mentioning the conflict of interests held by those in the security industry who stand to profit from rolling out these dangerous machines.

There is one glaring omission from these and the many media reports that published 'news' articles based on the Unisys press release. That is who Unisys is, their connections with government, military, Homeland security, the Transportation Services Authority (TSA) and how they profit from airport security technologies. The failure of the mainstream media to report the true source and motives behind this survey is a clear example of how they lie by omitting the most important facts.

The Russian government prevented the Polish president's plane from landing four times to divert him from a ceremony to mark the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre, according to an MP.

Artur Gorski said the Russians 'came up with some dubious reasons' that the aircraft couldn't land because they feared President Leck Kaczynski's presence would overshadow a similar event hosted by the Russian prime minister a few days before.

And their alleged plan ended in disaster when the Polish pilots made one final and disastrous attempt to land, killing Mr Kaczynski, his wife, and 94 others on board the plane.

'One version of events says that the plane approached the airport four times, because every time the Russians refused it permission to land - they wanted to send the plane with the president to an airport in Moscow or Minsk,' Mr Gorski claimed in an interview published in the newspaper Nasz Dziennik.

'They came up with some dubious reasons: that there was fog over the airport, and that the navigation system didn't work as it was under renovation, and that airport had a short landing strip.'

For the second time in 60 years, Poles around the world have been horrified to learn that their country's best-known leaders have been killed, suddenly and tragically, in a forest outside the western Russian city of Smolensk.

Saturday's crash of an aging Tupolev 154 jet during a fog-blinded landing was a cosmic insult to the Polish imagination, a catastrophe that wiped out a generation of leaders and placed a stark punctuation mark on the political drama that has defined Polish affairs since the defeat of communism in 1989.

It occurs at a moment of glory for Poland, as the formerly poor country, almost alone in Europe, has managed to avoid recession. It is often said by Poles that they are a people who are punished for their triumphs; Saturday seemed to confirm this belief.

It was also, as every Pole knows, a freakish repeat of history. It was outside Smolensk, in Katyn forest in March of 1940, that Joseph Stalin's agents machine-gunned as many as 22,000 of Poland's top military, intellectual and civil-service leaders to death and dumped their bodies in mass graves, terminating the country's independence for half a century.

"Seventy years ago, the Soviets murdered the political elite in Katyn," Lech Walesa, the Solidarity hero and former president, said yesterday. "Now, again, the political elite has been killed on its way to the same place."

Smolensk, Russia - Polish President Lech Kaczynski and some of the country's highest military and civilian leaders died on Saturday when the presidential plane crashed as it came in for a landing in thick fog in western Russia, killing 97, officials said.

Russian and Polish officials said there were no survivors on the 26-year-old Tupolev, which was taking the president, his wife and staff to events marking the 70th anniversary of the massacre in Katyn forest of thousands of Polish officers by Soviet secret police.

The crash devastated the upper echelons of Poland's political and military establishments. On board were the army chief of staff, the navy chief commander, and heads of the air and land forces. Also killed were the national bank president, deputy foreign minister, army chaplain, head of the National Security Office, deputy parliament speaker, Olympic Committee head, civil rights commissioner and at least two presidential aides and three lawmakers, the Polish foreign ministry said.

A former care home manager who stole drugs from elderly residents to feed her addiction was today found guilty of killing one of them.

Registered nurse Rachel Baker, 44, gave Lucy Cox, 97, lethal doses of medication while she herself was abusing controlled drugs she stole from Parkfields Residential Care Home, in Butleigh, Somerset.

Baker, of Boundary Way, Glastonbury, was convicted of the manslaughter of Mrs Cox but acquitted by a jury at Bristol Crown Court of the manslaughter of another resident, Frances Hay, 85.

As the northern hemisphere struggles to shake off one of its coldest winters in living memory, controversy in Zion is heating up the race for global supremacy. Has a rupture of potentially seismic proportions set the US and Israel on a collision course with global consequences? Or are we witnessing a scripted drama that's just the latest move on the grand chessboard? The Secret Team hopes to load the dice in its favor whatever the outcome.

Can the waters of 9/11 Truth be held back much longer? After 9 years of successful containment, is it finally breaching the information wall? We'll examine the recent string of blatant attempts to frame Americans for "domestic terrorism" against the background moves to implement full lockdown before 9/11 Truth goes viral. The metro bombings in Moscow bore all the hallmarks of a War of Terror™ false-flag terror attack, replete with premature forensics, the official story contradicting eyewitness accounts and a Bin Laden-style video message. The first question to always ask is, Qui bono?

The Pope hasn't a prayer of coming out of this month unscathed. It's a measure of the visibly pathological state of the Catholic Church that it's hierarchy should invoke the most despicable slur available to stave off its day of reckoning, and in doing so, firmly align itself with that other death cult which invokes "religion" to justify its toxic existence in Palestine. Climategate firmly knocked The Church of Anthropogenic Global Warming out of its pulpit; the only water rising there is denial, with much of the herd still adamant that bovine excrement is causing climate change and must urgently be capped with the help of 'green debt' in the form of Carbon Default Swaps.

We can assure you that there are no real anti-Semites or "Islamo-fascists" out there worth losing any sleep over, but there is a strong whiff of fascism with a distinctly Christian-Zionist odor bubbling up from below like methane from the ocean floor. We'll chart the rise of the Pathocracy's Uruk-hai footsoldiers and note the gains made by far-right parties across Europe in March. Countering the rising fascist tides are hopeful signs of people power and resistance to the entropic trend.

Join us as we connect the dots in March...

Gideon Levy is a rare voice of courage in an Israeli media generally supine towards the political establishment. Since 1988, he has written the "Twilight Zone" column for the Israeli daily Haaretz, documenting unflinchingly the myriad cruelties inflicted on the Palestinian people under occupation. In his new book Gaza, a collection of articles which has just been published in French, Levy utters phrases that, by his own admission, are considered "insane" by most of his compatriots. The Electronic Intifada contributor David Cronin spoke with Gideon Levy about his background and journalism.

A middle-aged man has stabbed eight children to death and injured at least five others at a primary school in south-eastern China.

The suspect attacked the children with a knife at the gate to a primary school in Fujian's Nan-ping city at 7:20 a.m. as the children were waiting to go to school.

According to officials, the suspected attacker, Zheng Mingsheng, a 41-year-old, is a former community clinic doctor who had been dismissed from his post and allegedly had mental problems.

Three children died at the scene, while five others died later during emergency treatment. The victims were reported to be mostly first-graders.