I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in — and the West in general — into an unbearable hell and a choking life. — Osama bin Laden (October 2001), as reported by CNN

What a strange and harrowing road we've walked since September 11, 2001, littered with the debris of our once-vaunted liberties. We have gone from a nation that took great pride in being a model of a representative democracy to being a model of how to persuade a freedom-loving people to march in lockstep with a police state.

Our losses are mounting with every passing day.

What began with the post-9/11 passage of the USA Patriot Act has snowballed into the eradication of every vital safeguard against government overreach, corruption and abuse.

The citizenry's unquestioning acquiescence to anything the government wants to do in exchange for the phantom promise of safety and security has resulted in a society where the nation has been locked down into a militarized, mechanized, hypersensitive, legalistic, self-righteous, goose-stepping antithesis of every principle upon which this nation was founded.

Set against a backdrop of government surveillance, militarized police, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, eminent domain, overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body scanners, stop and frisk searches, police violence and the like — all of which have been sanctioned by Congress, the White House and the courts — our constitutional freedoms have been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded.

The rights embodied in the Constitution, if not already eviscerated, are on life support.

Free speech, the right to protest, the right to challenge government wrongdoing, due process, a presumption of innocence, the right to self-defense, accountability and transparency in government, privacy, press, sovereignty, assembly, bodily integrity, representative government: all of these and more have become casualties in the government's war on the American people, a war that has grown more pronounced since 9/11.

Indeed, since the towers fell on 9/11, the U.S. government has posed a greater threat to our freedoms than any terrorist, extremist or foreign entity ever could.

With all these decades and — in the case of the oldest democracies — centuries of broken political promises, you'd think that the public would have caught on to the game by now. But, if anything, recent events have revealed that people are becoming more addicted to this politician-peddled hopium even as the lies and broken promises become ever more ridiculous. . . .

The wildlife rescuers at Kalyan's Gandhare road area on Mumbai's outskirts rescued a two headed Russel viper snake last Thursday, and the visuals of dangerous reptile are viral ever since. The snake reportedly measures 11 cm with both its heads out there with approximately 2 cm dimensions.

Found mostly in and around country's both Eastern and Western Ghats, the Russell's Viper snake is one of the most venomous snake species found in India, and reportedly also causes one of the most incidents of snake bites.

The snake was rescued by Mumbai-based War Rescue Foundation, after the wildlife conservation group received a call from a Kalyan resident Dimple Shah, following which two rescuers managed to to rescue the snake from the spot, Mumbai Live reported.

For years the families of 9/11 victims have been pursuing a lawsuit against the Saudi Arabian government, believing it was associated with the attacks that left over 2,000 dead.

Despite the overwhelming evidence that supports this theory, the United States government has prevented the declassification of critical documents. This includes the identification of the official that is believed to have assisted two of the 9/11 hijackers. Last week, however, the FBI revealed his name, by accident. His name is Mussaed Ahmed al-Jarrah. He worked at the Saudi Embassy from 1999 to 2000.

These allegations have escaped the headlines of the mainstream media. That is, until prime time cable host Tucker Carlson decided to report on it.

The ACLU has released an important white paper on airport facial recognition by ACLU senior policy analyst Jay Stanley. Citing some of our previous reporting and analysis, the ACLU white paper focuses, appropriately, not so much on the details of current use of facial recognition at airports, but on where governments and the aviation industry — who share a an explicitly-recognized interest in common use of facial recognition — say it will lead if we don't stop them.

Driving the dystopian trend called out in the ACLU white paper is the malign convergence of interest between governments that want to use facial recognition and other techniques of compelled and automated identification for surveillance and control of travelers' movements, and airlines, airports, and other businesses that want to share use of the same identification systems and data for business process automation and commercial tracking and profiling of travel customers.

A critically endangered orca is presumed dead following a six-month span without a single sighting, according to a nonprofit dedicated to saving the species.

The orca, of the Southern Resident population and named L41 Mega, was not seen with his family on Jan. 24 off Washington's coast, according to Shari Tarantino, president of the Orca Conservancy.

Tarantino said the last time L41 was seen was in August 2019.

"I hope he comes back, but I don't think so," she told ABC News on Thursday.

The presumed loss of L41 is the latest difficulty facing the dwindling population.

Earlier this month, President Hassan Rouhani said that Tehran wants to stabilise the situation in the region and strengthen the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, also known as the Iran nuclear deal.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has stated that Tehran would never look to obtain an atomic weapon, with or without the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), according to his website President.Ir.

"We have never sought nuclear weapons [...]. With or without the nuclear deal we will never seek nuclear weapon [...]. The European powers will be responsible for the consequences of violating the pact."

The statement comes a week after Rouhani rejected a proposal for a new "Trump deal" to resolve a nuclear spat as a "strange" offer, blaming the US President for his failure to deliver on promises.

A French publisher has apologised after a history textbook that appeared in bookshops in recent weeks suggested the 11 September 2001 attacks were probably "orchestrated by the CIA".


The debunked conspiracy theory was apparently highlighted on social media initially by a group of schoolteachers.

The book History of the 20th Century in Flash Cards is aimed at undergraduate students.

Washington: The National Institute for Standards in Truth (NIST) issued the final update of its 9/11 investigation today, announcing that all anomalies troubling 9/11 Truther loons have been rationalized, thanks to new evidence provided by NASA. "They can all take their tinfoil hats off now," said NIST chief Henry Swallowfirth. "Science, not moonbat conspiracy theory, has triumphed."

The new evidence, from NASA's deep-space probe Voyager 2, puts to rest the three so-called "physical anomalies" that have deranged Truthers:

1. Three steel-framed skyscrapers free-fall collapsing due to fire in a single day, when no others burning far longer have fallen before or since.
2. The aluminum nose and hollow fuselage of Flight 77 plowing through five rings of reinforced concrete at the Pentagon
3. The Shanksville "Gopher Hole" swallowing Flight 93 before burping up a widespread debris field.

The latter had particularly troubled NIST, says Mr. Swallowfirth. "How a crater engulfed an entire jetliner, leaving no bodies or parts larger than a thumb drive before vomiting out an engine over 2000 feet away and other debris over eight miles away... we've been reviewing that diligently, but frankly, none of our field investigators wanted to go near that hole. We feared it was some kind of geomagnetic Bermuda Triangle thing that could suck us in and spit us out, too. Pretty damn spooky. But now it's all settled."

North Korea's ambassador to the UN has rejected Washington's call for "sustained and substantial dialogue," saying that the denuclearization sought by the Trump administration is already "gone out (sic) of the negotiating table."

"We do not need to have lengthy talks with the US now and denuclearization is already gone out of the [sic] negotiating table," ambassador Kim Song said in a statement on Saturday. Song added that the Trump administration's calls for dialogue are a "time-saving trick" to push the denuclearization issue past next year's election.

As Song released Pyongyang's latest statement, US President Donald Trump and South Korean President Moon Jae-in held a telephone discussion, brainstorming ways to restart diplomacy with North Korea.

Pyongyang has given the United States a year-end deadline to abandon its demand for unilateral denuclearization, lest leader Kim Jong-un choose a "new approach."