Iran has built up a stockpile of enough enriched uranium for one nuclear bomb, United Nations officials acknowledged on Thursday.

The failure of banks to count, manage and hedge their risks over the past decade is responsible both for the fantastic growth before 2007 and the crash that followed, according to the Bank of England’s director for financial stability.

Former U.S. ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk said Thursday that he believes that should Likud Chairman Benjamin Netanyahu become Israel's next prime minister, he "will try to deflect American pressure by seeking a deal with Syrians"

"Israel is responsible for blocking Egypt's efforts to broker a [Gaza] truce by adding a new condition at the last minute," Damascus-based Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal was quoted as saying on Tuesday.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Wednesday repeated his call for "real changes" in the U.S. policies, the official IRNA news agency reported.

An Iranian company, Karam, has succeeded with its bid for the project because British and US companies, wary of security conditions, were slow to make offers, the head of investment in Iraq's biggest port told The Times. "The Iranians are going for all the contracts," one British official said in Basra.

Manufacturing sector is shedding jobs; Experts see it changing

Shimon Peres, Israel’s president, has asked Benyamin Netanyahu, the leader of the Likud party, to form a new coalition government within six weeks.

Ecuador's foreign minister announced here Wednesday that U.S. Embassy First Secretary Mark Sullivan is being expelled for interfering in the internal workings of the Andean nation's police.

What was this little girl’s name, I wonder. How old was she? Was she sleeping when the bomb hit her home? Did she die a quick death or a slow, agonizing one? Where are her parents, her siblings? How are they faring?

Of the 1,330 Palestinians killed by the Israeli military during the 22-day invasion of Gaza, 437 were children. Let me repeat that: 437 children — each as beautiful and precious as our own.

Yes, indeed. The administration called upon “human rights” to justify the suppression of speech.

Chief among our federal government’s responsibilities is to protect American citizens from foreign invasion, but it’s done little or nothing to help Barnett. Rather than protecting him, our government instead enables foreign invaders to sue him. That’s how bad it’s gotten.

WHEN the United States Secretary of State warned that a succession battle in North Korea could complicate nuclear negotiations with its government, she broke an informal taboo.

Diplomats do not talk publicly about what comes after Kim Jong-il, the convalescing dictator who has turned North Korea into a rogue nuclear state.

Demonstrators Blow Off 1 a.m. Deadline To Vacate Barricaded Cafeteria; Cops Scuffle With Crowd Outside
Students Want Back-And-Forth On Financial Transparency

This is a transcript from the court trial mentioned in Aaron Russo's "America: From Freedom to Fascism." On page 23 of this transcript, Judge James C. Fox admits that the 16th Amendment to the United States Constitution, the Amendment on which the income tax is based, was never properly ratified.
This is a rare admission for a Judge to make, given that the entire court system (including the Judge's salary) is funded from tax revenues, but in this case, the Judge states what we have known all along; when the relevant documents are actually examined, as opposed to the majority of Judges who simply declare the Amendment ratified by judicial fiat (a power and authority NOT granted to them under the Constitution), it cannot be demonstrated that the 16th amendment was ratified.

Following up on Wednesday's post (UBS Agrees to Pay $780m and Disclose Clients to Settle Tax Fraud Case): the Justice Department has sued UBS, seeking the identities of 52,000 Americans who used the bank to shelter income from the IRS.

US banking shares hit their lowest level since 1992 on Thursday as fears mounted that the government would be forced to nationalise a key institution.

Further heavy selling of key names – Bank of America and Citigroup were once again among the worst performing, down 14 per cent to $3.93 and 13.8 per cent to $2.51, respectively – helped push the Dow Jones Industrial Average to its lowest level in six years.

Harvard Law School Professor Alan M. Dershowitz has called for a “counter-disinvestment campaign” against Hampshire College unless the school explicitly denies claims that their recent decision to withdraw from a mutual fund represents an act of divestment from Israel, reports The Harvard Crimson.

Detroit agreed to let auto workers retire with full pension and benefits after 30 years on the job, regardless of their age. In practice, that meant a worker could start at age 18, retire at 48, and spend more years collecting a pension and free health care than he or she actually spent working.

Rabbi Haskel Lookstein of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun in New York would never have made the mistake of wearing a cross, certainly not in shul. But he nevertheless is in hot water for a similar "Christian" offense to Orthodox sensibilities: He attended a joint interfaith prayer service commemorating President Barack Obama's inauguration, contravening the rules of the Rabbinical Council of America, of which he is a member. And what's worse, he did it in a church.

A glitch in satellite sensors caused scientists to underestimate the extent of Arctic sea ice by 500,000 square kilometers (193,000 square miles), a California- size area, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center said.

The error, due to a problem called “sensor drift,” began in early January and caused a slowly growing underestimation of sea ice extent until mid-February. That’s when “puzzled readers” alerted the NSIDC about data showing ice-covered areas as stretches of open ocean, the Boulder, Colorado-based group said on its Web site.

Yet with Israel's pullout in 2005, the Palestinian experience has not improved. Rather, it has become even more unpredictable and isolated. Palestinians who celebrated the exodus of the Israeli settlers and the return of their land could not have imagined what would follow and how Israel would subsequently unleash its brutal force against them. As the saying goes, nothing in life is free and the Palestinians have paid, and continue to pay, a dear and unforgivable price for Israel's withdrawal from their legally rightful land.

Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn) and others have alleged that the contract for 28 Marine One helicopters was awarded to the Italian firm Finmeccanica as a thank you for Italy's participation in the Iraq War. The evidence, however, indicates that the contract was more specifically a payoff to the Italian government for supplying the forged documents showing Saddam had obtained weapons grade uranium from Niger. President Bush famously used this fraudulent "yellowcake" intelligence to justify launching the war.

Congress should push the Pentagon to restrain defense spending, as there is no rival conventional force that requires a Cold War budget, an analysis suggests.

American occupation army announced it will present tomorrow 10.000 wrecked military vehicles which were brought to Iraq to use in attack against Iraqi population. Most of military vehicles were destroyed at Iraqi Resistance strikes and are still being targeted and destructed by the successful resistance

WMR has also learned that the kid glove treatment given by federal authorities to Madoff, including allowing him to remain in his Upper East Side luxury town home, is because Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was part of a much larger operation, one involving top officials of both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, as well as the notorious Russian-Israeli Mafia.

For years, the US has been inundated with claims that it should follow Brazil’s lead on biofuels. These arguments have largely been made by a small, but influential group of neoconservatives who claim that the US should quit using oil altogether. They claim that using more ethanol – produced from sugar cane, or corn, or some other substance – will impoverish OPEC and America will once again be returned to prosperity.

Three weeks after the Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip, 16-year-old Maysa al-Louh sits stoically on the pile of sand that consumes half her home in Beit Lahiya. Under the sand, churned up by Israeli bulldozers during incursions into the area on 4 January 2009 lie all her report cards and school awards that were testament to her excellent academic record.

The glaring discrepancy he notes -- between (a) the consensus of our political class that workers must endlessly give up wage, health and other benefits even as (b) we shovel trillions of dollars in government subsidies to Wall Street for ongoing massive executive bonuses and the like for the very people who caused the collapse -- is one that (whether you agree or disagree with it) is rarely heard in our mainstream debate with such clarity and passion.

Argentina has given a Roman Catholic bishop who denies the extent of the Holocaust 10 days to leave the country or else he will be expelled, the government said today.

Bishop Richard Williamson, an ultra-traditionalist who headed a seminary near Buenos Aires until earlier this month, has said he believes there were no gas chambers and that no more than 300,000 Jews died in Nazi concentration camps, rather than the 6 million figure that is widely accepted by historians.

Cindy Dreeszen and her husband live in one of the wealthiest counties in the United States. They have steady jobs, his at a movie theater and hers at a government office. Together, they earn about $55,000 a year.

But with a 17-month-old son, another baby on the way, and, as Ms. Dreeszen put it, “the cost of everything going up and up,” the couple went to a food pantry last week to ask for some free groceries.

Nearly all of the employees in the Defense Department's new personnel system were rewarded for their job performance in their first paychecks of 2009, with the average pay raise and bonus totaling 8.35 percent.

Former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said on Tuesday the current global recession will "surely be the longest and deepest" since the 1930s and more government rescue funds are needed to stabilize the U.S. financial system.

The global financial crisis could lead to an economic meltdown - and to instable democratic structures in the western world. Because governments spend more billions than they possess, the outcome will probably be a massive inflation connected with millions of lost jobs - or even the total collapse.

Eight crew were feared dead after Russian Coast Guard vessels fired on a Chinese ship that was fleeing port after a dispute over a rice cargo, Chinese and Russian sources said Thursday.

U.S., Latin American and European investigators widened probes on Thursday into the far-flung financial empire of Texas billionaire Allen Stanford, accused of "massive fraud," and Venezuela seized one of his banks.

About 220,000 stores may close this year in America, says our guest, retail consultant Howard Davidowitz of Davidowitz & Associates. As more Americans save and spend less, it's clear there's too much retail space. Just visit Web site deadmalls.com and track retail's growing body count. And luxury retailers? They're on "life support," Davidowitz says.

Sen. John Kerry came to the Gaza Strip on Thursday, the highest-level visit by a U.S. official since the Hamas militant group seized power in the territory nearly two years ago.

Kerry did not meet with anyone from Hamas, which the U.S. shuns as a terrorist group, and used the visit to urge the group to end its violent campaign against Israel.

The number of laid-off workers receiving unemployment benefits has jumped to an all-time high near 5 million while new jobless claims remain well above 600,000. Both figures were worse than expected and new projections from the Federal Reserve show unemployment rising for the rest of this year.

In the April 19 issue, American Free Press reported on the little-noticed point that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the purported chief of operations of the Al Qaeda terrorist network, had told U.S. interrogators that the Sears Tower in Chicago was also an intended Al Qaeda target-a significant fact in light of evidence that Israeli operatives taken into custody on U.S. soil after the 9-11 terrorist attacks were carrying detailed videotapes of the Sears Tower.

It was last fall, as Americans dared hope that a new administration would take office just in time to save America, Bush announced a first big 'bailout' which would, we were told, prevent a financial collapse, a great depression, a panic! Not least among many reasons the bailout failed is the fact that the wrong people got the money. Although Richard Nixon had famously claimed "We are all Keynesians now", nothing could be further from the truth now.

Thanks to the misplaced reverence for Augustus Reagan, we are all still Friedman monetarists --not Keynesians. That is why the bailout failed and it is the reason future bailouts will fail unless something is done to address the root cause of collapse: the wrong people got the money!

Gunmen killed a member of Iraq's largest Sunni Arab party on Wednesday, police said, the latest in a number of political assassinations following recent local polls that brought a major shift to Iraqi politics.

Think of it as a galactic garbage dump. With a recent satellite collision still fresh on minds, participants at a meeting in the Austrian capital this week are discussing ways to deal with space debris — junk that is clogging up the orbit around the Earth.

The Securities and Exchange Commission obtained a court order halting an alleged Ponzi scheme by Hawaii-based Billions Coupons and its CEO Marvin R. Cooper that was targeting members of the Deaf community in the U.S. and Japan.

None of this, of course, was new; it was how Hollywood created the myth of the Wild West, which was harmless enough unless you happened to be a Native American; and how the Second World War has been relentlessly glorified, which may be harmless enough unless you happen to be one of countless innocent human beings, from Serbia to Iraq, whose deaths or dispossession are justified by moralizing references to 1939-45. Hollywood's gooks, its Untermenschen, are essential to this crusade – the dispatched Somalis in Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down and the sinister Arabs in movies like Rendition, in which the torturing CIA is absolved by Jake Gyllenhal's good egg.

It is a true story. You can't make this up.

A 60 year old doctor invested $100,000 he had in an IRA with a FINRA broker.

The broker put the funds into an after-tax account, triggering a $35,000 tax liability.

Over the next 14 months, during which time the S&P 500 increased in value, the portfolio lost a whopping $86,000, reducing its value to $14,000.

Glenn Greenwald on why we're bound by law to prosecute torture cases. (Incidentally, he also points out that a new report states that Bush officials were informed that the legal memos submitted to justify torture were slanted to fit administration policy

On Wednesday, federal authorities reported they did not know the whereabouts of Texas banker and scammer Allen Stanford. But what we do know for certain about the financier whose frauds may yet rival the $50 billion Madoff Ponzi scheme is that he donated generously to both political parties in Washington. Of course, that would be news to viewers of CBS Evening News. Because while Stanford gave early and often to Texas Republicans John Cornyn, Tom Delay and George W. Bush, CBS portrayed the fleeing financier as a bagman for Democrats alone.

Money invested 10 years ago in stocks have lost half their real value, matching the worst ten years of the Great Depression

"Truthfully," Williams pointed out, "there is no Social Security 'lock-box.' There are no funds held in reserve today for Social Security and Medicare obligations that are earned each year. It's only a matter of time until the public realizes that the government is truly bankrupt and no taxes are being held in reserve to pay in the future the Social Security and Medicare benefits taxpayers are earning today."

Shares of U.S. financial stocks turned negative late Thursday morning as investors remained dubious of a series of unprecedented government plans to reinvigorate the nation's economy and financial system.

The failures are affecting a cross section of the global economy. Mervyn’s LLC, Lyondell Chemical Co. and Linens ‘n Things Inc. -- all controlled by buyout firms -- have filed for bankruptcy. Cerberus received U.S. government aid for Chrysler LLC and GMAC, the lender affiliated with General Motors Corp.

To start with, the various individuals who have their snouts in the public trough should be obliged to wear uniforms of a sort. The politicians' clothes might resemble those worn by NASCAR drivers and their crews, hard hats and all. Their political affiliation should be clearly marked by big "Rs," "Ds" and "Is" displayed on their chests sort of like the big red "As" that outed some less-than-distinguished persons many years ago. The politicos' sponsors' logos would be prominently sewn on their clothes and caps. That way, when you are out hustling their favors and votes on one matter or another, you'd know who else is kissing their rings to garner favors — it'd say so right on their uniforms. That way, you could temper your ardor based on the competition or lack thereof.

GM is currently producing 128,000 cars a month, a pace of 1.5M cars for the year. $16Bn on top of the $14Bn we already gave them means it is costing the Untied States $20,000 PER CAR that GM sells to keep them in business. But wait - it’s worse than that…. GM only employs 140,000 workers in the United States and their "plan" is to lay off 47,000 of them. That means they are asking for $16Bn to keep 93,000 workers - that’s $172,000 PER WORKER!

Billionaire Paul Allen is a Microsoft cofounder, the owner of the NFL's Seattle Seahawks and the owner of the NBA's Portland Trailblazers.

And, thanks to the stimulus bill President Obama signed this week, he's also about to be as much as a billion dollars richer.

State and local governments have set aside virtually no money to pay $1 trillion or more in medical benefits for retired civil servants, a USA TODAY survey found.

Coleman is angry because he believes we have been brainwashed into thinking we’re ruining our own planet. He wants to let us off the hook, and give us some good news for a change, because, you see, John Coleman says that climate change is a scam.

A man who told a sheriff's dispatcher he had money problems strangled his wife and 11-year-old son, then shot and killed himself, authorities said Wednesday.

The following survey was given to U.S. Marines at the 29 Palms Marine Corps base in California: DD Form 3206 (Rev 2/96)

The subject of "Sentenced to Science: One Black Man's Story of Imprisonment in America," Anthony can probably be forgiven for believing his story of enduring an array of Cold War medical experiments while incarcerated in the Philadelphia prison system is the equal of anything that appears on Oprah's show.

An Oklahoma City police officer wrongly pulled over a man last week and confiscated an anti-President Barack Obama sign the man had on his vehicle.

The US was secretly flying unmanned drones from the Shamsi airbase in Pakistan's southwestern province of Baluchistan as early as 2006, according to an image of the base from Google Earth.

The image — that is no longer on the site but which was obtained by The News, Pakistan's English language daily newspaper — shows what appear to be three Predator drones outside a hangar at the end of the runway. The Times also obtained a copy of the image, whose co-ordinates confirm that it is the Shamsi airfield, also known as Bandari, about 200 miles southwest of the Pakistani city of Quetta.

The trading floor buzz on whether the government's plan to save the economy will actually help the markets, with Jason Roney, Sharmac Capital; Wilbur Ross Jr., WL Ross & Co. and CNBC's Rick Santelli

A grim picture of spiralling violence and a disintegrating society has emerged in Afghanistan in a confidential Nato report, just as Barack Obama vowed to send 17,000 extra American troops to the country in an attempt to stem a tide of insurgency.

At stake for both of the program’s biggest supporters, Al Quds president Sari Nusseibeh and Bard president Leon Botstein, is nothing less than the future of a Palestinian state, and a critically skilled student population to support such a state. Such a move to work together undoubtedly will cause great consternation among extremists on either side, but it also reflects an increasingly popular Israeli view that supporting the creation of a Palestinian state is the only way to ensure a Jewish future for Israel. (The interest for Palestinians is self-evident.)

In some cases, innocent people may have been imprisoned, even put to death.