There was plenty of anger but no violent confrontation after a moving cordon of police kept neo-Nazi and anti-racist groups apart at parallel rallies in downtown Calgary on Saturday.

About 200 members of Anti-Racist Action Calgary gathered at Calgary city hall after word that the neo-Nazi group, Blood of Honour, was planning a march.

"We're here to celebrate our diversity - the things that make us the same and different at the same time. We're also here to protest racism, discrimination in its different forms and most explicitly in this case the violent neo-Nazi gangs that exist within our city," said Jason Devine, a spokesman for ARA Calgary.

But the 16 members of Blood of Honour, chanting "White Pride Worldwide" found their paths blocked by Calgary Police officers, including riot squad members, who cordoned off several streets in the downtown.

"Charge me. Arrest me. It would be false imprisonment. Just do it," shouted one of the Blood of Honour group to a police officer.

Helen Thomas is not sorry, nor were the comments that ended her career accidental.

"I knew exactly what I was doing - I was going for broke," she told Playboy in the magazine's April interview. "I had reached the point of no return. You finally get fed up ... I finally wanted to speak the truth."

Thomas, of course, left her perch as the dean of the White House press corps last year after telling a rabbi and blogger that Jews should "get the hell out of Palestine" and "go home" to "Poland, Germany and America and everywhere else." Her family is Lebanese and she grew up in the Detroit area, home to one of the country's densest populations of Arab Americans.

More than 100 anti-war protesters, including the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, were arrested outside the White House on Saturday in demonstrations marking the eighth anniversary of the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

The protesters, some shouting anti-war slogans and singing "We Shall Not Be Moved," were arrested after ignoring orders to move away from the gates of the White House. The demonstrators cheered loudly as Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst who in 1971 leaked the Pentagon's secret history of the Vietnam War that was later published in major newspapers, was arrested and led away by police.

Similar protests marking the start of the Iraq war were also planned Saturday in Chicago, San Francisco and other cities.

The demonstration in Washington on Saturday merged varied causes, including protesters demanding a U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan as well as those supporting Bradley Manning, the jailed Army private suspected of giving classified documents to the website Wikileaks.

One chant that was repeated was: "Stop the War! Expose the Lies! Free Bradley Manning!"

There was little talk of the U.S. missile strikes against Moammar Gadhafi's forces in Libya on Saturday, part of an international effort to protect rebel forces.

Manning is being held in solitary confinement for all but an hour every day at a Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Virginia. He is given a suicide-proof smock to wear to bed and is stripped naked each night. On Sunday, a protest will be held in Quantico, outside the brig where Manning is being held.

Ellsberg has publicly defended Manning, calling him a "brother," and Wikileaks.

A 70-year-old man was stoned to death with a rock stuffed in a sock by a younger friend who alleged the victim made unwanted sexual advances, authorities said.

According to the criminal complaint, John Thomas, 28, of a Philadelphia suburb, told police he killed Murray Seidman of nearby Lansdowne because the Bible refers to stoning homosexuals.

"I stoned Murray with a rock in a sock," Thomas told police, according to the criminal complaint. Thomas was arrested and charged with murder Friday.

According to the complaint, "John Thomas stated that he read in the Old Testament that homosexuals should be stoned in certain situations. The answer John Thomas received from his prayers was to put an end to the victim's life. John Thomas stated that he struck the victim approximately 10 times in the head. After the final blow, John Thomas made sure the victim was dead."

"He is a deeply religious man. Or so he says," said Lansdowne Police Chief Dan Kortan.

Government payouts - including Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance - make up more than a third of total wages and salaries of the U.S. population, a record figure that will only increase if action isn't taken before the majority of Baby Boomers enter retirement.

Even as the economy has recovered, social welfare benefits make up 35 percent of wages and salaries this year, up from 21 percent in 2000 and 10 percent in 1960, according to TrimTabs Investment Research using Bureau of Economic Analysis data.

"The U.S. economy has become alarmingly dependent on government stimulus," said Madeline Schnapp, director of Macroeconomic Research at TrimTabs, in a note to clients. "Consumption supported by wages and salaries is a much stronger foundation for economic growth than consumption based on social welfare benefits."

The economist gives the country two stark choices. In order to get welfare back to its pre-recession ratio of 26 percent of pay, "either wages and salaries would have to increase $2.3 trillion, or 35 percent, to $8.8 trillion, or social welfare benefits would have to decline $500 billion, or 23 percent, to $1.7 trillion," she said.

Nashville, Tenn. - State Sen. Bill Ketron is pushing for Tennessee to study whether the state should create its own currency in the event of a breakdown of the Federal Reserve.

Depending on the perspective, Ketron's proposal is either a harmless step toward safeguarding the state in the event of national financial calamity, or proof that the Republican-led General Assembly is distracting itself from the task of creating jobs and improving the economy.

Republican-led General Assembly is distracting itself from the task of creating jobs and improving the economy.

Ketron has filed a joint resolution to create a committee that would study whether Tennessee should adopt a currency as an alternative to the federal dollar in the event of a "major breakdown" of the Federal Reserve.

A parents' rights group has hit out at producers ABC, calling their latest show 'Good Christian Bitches' an 'affront to women'.

The Parents Television Council, who recently attacked MTV's controversial new teen drama Skins, said the title of the new show denigrated women and attacked the world's 'largest faith'.

The show, which is based on a book of the same name, is still in its pilot stage.

Bowing to pressure, ABC has since abbreviated the working title of the show to GCB.

PTC president Tim Winter said: 'The 'B-word' is toxic and is used to degrade, abuse, harass, bully and humiliate women.

'The 'Christian' element only adds insult to injury. Regardless of whether the title ultimately makes it to broadcast, ABC has publicly proclaimed its values and it has tarnished the Disney brand.'

Lifting the Veil of Nuclear Catastrophe and cover-up

As the sun set over quake-stricken Japan on Thursday 17 March 2011, we learned that four of six Fukushima nuclear reactor sites are irradiating the earth, that the fire is burning out of control at Reactor No. 4's pool of spent nuclear fuel, that there are six spent fuel pools at risk all told, and that the sites are too hot to deal with. On March 16 Plumes of White Vapor began pouring from crippled Reactor No. 3 where the spent fuel pool may already be lost. Over the previous days we were told: nothing to worry about. Earthquakes and after shocks, tidal wave, explosions, chemical pollution, the pox of plutonium, contradicting information too obvious to ignore, racism, greed -- add these to the original Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Conquest, War, Famine and Death. The situation is apocalyptic and getting worse. This is one of the most serious challenges humanity has ever faced.

The U.S. nuke industry is blaming Japanese experts, distancing itself from the monster it created. Instead of sending nuclear or health experts to assistance the Japanese people in their time of desperate need, US President Barack Obama first sent teams of intelligence agents and FEMA trained military grunts with special security clearances. The Pentagon floated a naval strike force led by the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan off the coast of Japan: advertised as a 'humanitarian' operation, the strike force was repositioned after it was partially irradiated. Can we trust officials and the corporate news media to tell us what is happening in an honest, timely, transparent manner? Are there precedents to the nuclear crisis in Japan? What is the U.S. defense establishment really concerned with here?

Humanity now faces a deadly serious challenge coming out of Japan -- the epicenter of radiation. Intentional efforts to downplay or dismiss this catastrophe reveal the immaturity of western civilization and some of our most acute human pathologies, including our worship of technology and our psychopathology of denial. The widespread distortion and cover-ups to protect private profits, national and corporate interests, to fool and betray the people, are unacceptable. Here are some of the deeper whats and whys and hows -- some technical issues and the kinds of questions people need to ask -- about the nuclear apocalypse unfolding on planet earth. Prayers are not enough. It's time to question everything, to put politics aside, to take personal action to halt nuclear expansion and defend ourselves from this industrial juggernaut.

Washington D.C. "Day of Rage" Scheduled To Detain War Criminals For Prosecution at The Hague

Joseph Zrnchik, the author of a new book available on Amazon called Assange and Government in a Wikileaks World, calls for a "Day of Rage" in Washington D.C. on June 30, 2011. In his call for prosecution of U.S. officials for war crimes he states:

The crimes against humanity committed by the U.S. government and its proxies, that can only be described as an ongoing global crime spree beginning with the 1953 overthrow of the Iranian government and continuing on with the current wars in the Middle East, which have been aggravated by a hegemonic drive to weave a globalist system controlled by the power elite, has resulted in many reprisals of which one was the terrorist attack on 9/11. The elites crimes have made tens of thousands of Americans victims of reprisal or casualties in war by those seeking defense from or retribution for the power elites international lawlessness over the last fifty years. Americans now have the power of mass communication and hence the means to end these atrocities and cease being made victims as the result of criminal actions by a government being run by a ruling elite using a two-tiered justice system that allows the state to turn Americans into corpses without legal redress. We have the power to take back our freedom and hold criminals responsible with their lives. We can end the tyranny. The U.S. government no longer has anything to offer the people after allowing the theft of their wealth by the financial elite, but we the people now have the power to get justice.