As if we were caught up in some science fiction B-movie, a war is being fought over the control of our very souls.

As yet, the conflict is little more than a few light skirmishes - most of us are hardly aware it's happening - but, in the view of many, some mighty battles lie ahead in our cybernetic future.

Perhaps it's pushing it slightly to conflate the computer at which I'm sitting with my soul, but not by much.

My identity, opinions, political and personal affiliations, interests and guilty secrets are all on a hard drive somewhere and are machine-readable.

At the end of every day, I leave a 'digital trail' behind me, rendering me vulnerable to the internet's danger-strangers.

The wildest cowboys of cyberspace have been much in the news recently. There is Julian Assange, whose leaks have posed a threat to global peace and security.

MSNBC has suspended political analyst and Time magazine writer Mark Halperin indefinitely over a remark he made about President Obama Thursday morning.

"Mark Halperin's comments this morning were completely inappropriate and unacceptable," said MSNBC spokesman Jeremy Gaines in a statement. "We apologize to the President, the White House and all of our viewers. We strive for a high level of discourse and comments like these have no place on our air."

Appearing on Morning Joe this morning, Halperin, senior political analyst at Time and MSNBC and co-author of the 2008 election opus Game Change, sought to characterize the president's demeanor at a press briefing the previous day. You can watch the video below--though the term Halperin uses to characterize the president is vulgar, as the partial transcript after the jump will also show:

The case involves child pornography, a Weirton man and false e-mails from a West Virginia State Police trooper.


The case started back in April 2011, when the West Virginia State Police executed a search warrant against Sean Price, 34, of Weirton for allegedly possessing child pornography.

Officers seized three one-terabyte hard drives from Price's home on Washington Street. Investigators are now waiting for the final report from the State Police Forensic Lab for any illegal items on the hard drives seized from Price's home.

However, in a bizarre connection to this case, a false e-mail account was created in the name of a West Virginia State Trooper, involved in the initial search.

United States Attorney William Ihlenfeld said that someone created a false e-mail account using the name of a state trooper and sent three separate e-mails to 37 people in both law enforcement and the media, each containing 17 images depicting child pornography.

Update From Meeting: After an emergency meeting with the board of directors of the Grand River Dam Authority, the board has made a decision regarding the future of Grand Lake.

The board has decided to continue posting signs and advising the public to stay out of the water.

While they recommend the public to not come into contact with the waters of Grand Lake, they are not prohibiting it.

They say the major focus of concern is on pets and young children. Friday's blue-green algae (BGA) levels are higher than ever recorded before in Oklahoma. The GRDA says if algae blooms die all at once, the amount of toxins released into the water would become even more dangerous.

Why has the United States government supported counterinsurgency in Colombia, Guatemala, El Salvador, and many other places around the world, at such a loss of human life to the populations of those nations? Why did it invade tiny Grenada and then Panama? Why did it support mercenary wars against progressive governments in Nicaragua, Mozambique, Angola, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Indonesia, East Timor, Western Sahara, South Yemen, and elsewhere?

Is it because our leaders want to save democracy? Are they concerned about the well-being of these defenseless peoples? Is our national security threatened? I shall try to show that the arguments given to justify U.S. policies are false ones.

But this does not mean the policies themselves are senseless. American intervention may seem "wrongheaded" but, in fact, it is fairly consistent and horribly successful.

The history of the United States has been one of territorial and economic expansionism, with the benefits going mostly to the U.S. business class in the form of growing investments and markets, access to rich natural resources and cheap labor, and the accumulation of enormous profits.

The American people have had to pay the costs of empire, supporting a huge military establishment with their taxes, while suffering the loss of jobs, the neglect of domestic services, and the loss of tens of thousands of American lives in overseas military ventures.

The greatest costs, of course, have been borne by the peoples of the Third World who have endured poverty, pillage, disease, dispossession, exploitation, illiteracy, and the widespread destruction of their lands, cultures, and lives.

As a relative latecomer to the practice of colonialism, the United States could not match the older European powers in the acquisition of overseas territories. But the United States was the earliest and most consummate practitioner of neoimperialism or neocolonialism, the process of dominating the politico-economic life of a nation without benefit of direct possession.

Almost half a century before the British thought to give a colonized land its nominal independence, as in India-while continuing to exploit its labor and resources, and dominate its markets and trade-the United States had perfected this practice in Cuba and elsewhere.

In places like the Philippines, Haiti, and Nicaragua, and when dealing with Native American nations, U.S. imperialism proved itself as brutal as the French in Indochina, the Belgians in the Congo, the Spaniards in South America, the Portuguese in Angola, the Italians in Libya, the Germans in Southwest Africa, and the British almost everywhere else. Not long ago, U.S. military forces delivered a destruction upon Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia that surpassed anything perpetuated by the older colonizers. And today, the U.S. counterinsurgency apparatus and surrogate security forces in Latin America and elsewhere sustain a system of political assassination, torture, and repression unequaled in technological sophistication and ruthlessness.

All this is common knowledge to progressive critics of U.S policy, but most Americans would be astonished to hear of it. They have been taught that, unlike other nations, their country has escaped the sins of empire and has been a champion of peace and justice among nations. This enormous gap between what the United States does in the world and what Americans think their nation is doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology.

It should be noted, though, that despite the endless propaganda barrage emanating from official sources and the corporate-owned major media, large sectors of the public have throughout U.S. history displayed an anti-interventionist sentiment, an unwillingness to commit U.S. troops to overseas actions-a sentiment facilely labeled "isolationism" by the interventionists.

As weapons and propaganda become even more sophisticated, the nature of war is developing into an 'electronic battlefield' in which journalists play a key role, and civilians are the victims. But who is the real enemy? Follow the money trail behind 9/11 and you will know. The enemy is inside the gates...

This movie has just been banned in the US -- Get a copy while you can!

The War You Don't See is directed by John Pilger (award winning journalist, investigative reporter and documentary film pioneer) and Alan Lowery, and features many candid interviews.

The War You Don't See is a powerful and timely investigation into the media's role in war, tracing the history of 'embedded' and independent reporting from the carnage of World War One to the destruction of Hiroshima, and from the invasion of Vietnam to the current war in Afghanistan and disaster in Iraq.

Los Angeles: American pop star Lady Gaga is accused of misrepresenting charitable donations from wristbands sold to benefit tsunami and earthquake victims in Japan earlier this year.

The complaint, filed in a Michigan court on Friday by 1800lawfirm, says the star as well as her record label, Universal Music Group, and the Bravado International Group, lacked transparency surrounding the amount of money that was raised from sales of the wristbands and whether those funds were 100 per cent allocated to earthquake and tsunami victims.

After the earthquake and tsunami disasters in March 2011 that devastated Japan, Lady Gaga created the rubber wristbands and the singer's website advertised that all proceeds from sales of the wristband would benefit victims.

Marie Joseph's body overlooked for 2 days while Massachusetts-run pool was open.

The pro-labor coalition We Are Ohio delivered nearly 1.3 million signatures Wednesday to repeal SB 5, a new law restricting the collective-bargaining rights of public employees, placing it on the November 8 ballot.

People's World reported that the 1,298,301 signatures were delivered to the Secretary of State's office by a semi-truck packed with 1502 boxes of petitions and accompanied by a large "People's Parade."

We Are Ohio collected more signatures than any other petition drive in Ohio history thanks to the work of more than 10,000 volunteers.

The signatures must now be validated by each county board of elections office.

"Today we celebrate the unprecedented achievement of the more than one million Ohioans who want to repeal SB 5," Melissa Fazekas, spokeswoman for We Are Ohio, said in a statement. "This historic number of signatures sends a strong, clear message to the extreme politicians who played political tricks to pass SB 5 and to the rest of the country."

Caracas - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez revealed that he is fighting cancer after having a tumor removed in Cuba, raising uncertainty about his political future even as he assured his country he expects to fully recover.

Chavez was noticeably thinner and paler as he appeared on television Tuesday night, reading from a prepared speech with a serious and at times sad expression. He said he is resolved to "be victorious in this new battle that life has placed before us."

Chavez said he has undergone two operations in Cuba, including one that removed a tumor in which there were "cancerous cells." The 56-year-old president said the surgery was performed after an initial operation nearly three weeks ago for the removal of a pelvic abscess.

Chavez said the tumor was in the pelvic region but didn't say exactly where or what type of cancer was involved. He said he is continuing to receive treatment in Cuba but did not give details.

He said it was a mistake not have taken better care of his health through medical checkups.