AS delegates from 189 countries gather to prepare for the next Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference, due in 2015, I am reminded of my first official briefing, as a young Australian minister back in the early 1980s, on United States nuclear strategy -- in the bowels of the Pentagon, by a man with a white dust jacket and a pointer who looked uncannily like Woody Allen................Download the full article in pdf attachment (below)

Nancy Hatch Dupree arrived in Kabul in 1962 as a diplomat's wife, blithely unaware that the great love of her life was waiting in a country that would become their shared passion and her home through decades of war and political turmoil. Half a century later she is opening Afghanistan's first centre dedicated to the study of its own history and society, picked over for decades by foreign academics but often hard for Afghan scholars to explore in their country...............Download the full article in pdf attachment (below)

Assoc. Prof. Imam Mohamad Abdalla (Griffith University, Australia) speaks on Australian TV Channel ABC program "Q&A: Islamic Jihad ".

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I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.............Download the full article in pdf attachment (below)

GIVEN how many soothsayers there are in the financial industry, at least one of them should have yelled from the crowd to warn Cyprus of the Ides of March. OK, so the comparison with the assassination of Julius Caesar is a bit over the top. But the meeting of the European Union, International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank in Brussels on March 15, was just as fateful for Cyprus, and contained an element of drama: a key part of the bailout plan was much rumoured, and plotted behind closed doors, with hardly anyone believing it would come to pass..............Download the full article in pdf attachment (below)

Beneath its cumbersome title — “Statement of Saudi Youth Regarding the Guarantee of Freedoms and Ethics of Diversity” — it challenged a central tenet of the kingdom’s ultraconservative religious establishment: That it has the right to impose its strict interpretation of Islam on all Saudis. “No one can claim monopoly of truth or righteousness in the name of Islamic law (Shariah),” declared the statement, many of whose 2,600 signatories were in their 20s............Download the full article in pdf attachment (below)

Ten years ago today the Bush regime invaded Iraq.  It is known that the justification for the invasion was a packet of lies orchestrated by the neoconservative Bush regime in order to deceive the United Nations and the American people. The US Secretary of State at that time, General Colin Powell, has expressed his regrets that he was used by the Bush regime to deceive the United Nations with fake intelligence that the Bush and Blair regimes knew to be fake.  But the despicable presstitute media has not apologized to the American people for serving the corrupt Bush regime as its Ministry of Propaganda and Lies.............Download the full article in pdf attachment (below)

President Obama is going to deliver the annual State of the Union address next Tuesday and if I were to make a wild guess, I’d say he’ll declare the union strong. The economy may be troubled, some people are facing challenges perhaps, but if history’s any guide the president will say the union is special, blessed by god and strong, and there will be applause, no matter that it couldn’t be less true............Download the full article in pdf attachment (below)

THE chaos at the second anniversary of the Tahrir Square uprising is only the latest and most vivid illustration that Egypt's revolution is going off the rails. It has revived talk about the failure of the Arab Spring and even some nostalgia for the old order. But Arab dictators such as Hosni Mubarak could not have held onto power without even greater troubles; look at Syria. Events in the Middle East the past two years underscore that constitutions are as vital as elections and that good leadership is crucial in these transitions............Download the full article in pdf attachment (below)

Hundreds of Britons are converting to Islam every month. Many youngsters in prison are becoming attracted to Islam by the prospect of getting better food and superior treatment. Islam is the fastest-growing religion in England and Wales, according to new census data that the British government says "describes the defining characteristics of the population, who we are, how we live and what we do."...........Download the full article in pdf attachment (below)

In pre-Islamic times the years were measured from hajj to hajj amongst the Arabs, ever since the times of
the prophet Ibrahim – upon whom be peace – who had originally initiated it as a rite at the Behest of God.
This was so, because, apart from its tremendous spiritual significance and meaning, it was probably the
most spectacular socio-economic event in the annual course of the desert life, or rather, it became that in
the course of time. Originally there was none of that; it was a pure ritual of worship without any worldly
diversions from its exclusively spiritual nature. Like everything else, however, within the matrix of the
time-space continuum of phenomenal existence, its spiritual purity was not to last...........Download the full article in pdf attachment (below)

Everyone in the world knows America’s invasion of Iraq was a lie, an oil raid, from day one.  Everyone who stood against Bush and Cheney is dead, in jail or in hiding. Similarly, anyone who, from day one, knew 9/11 had a “smell” about it was eliminated, down to academics, diplomats, intelligence agents, anyone who spoke up and thousands did ON 9/11..........To read the full article click here

Never in the history of the United States have we witnessed crimes committed on the scale and scope of the present day by both private and state elites. An economist of impeccable credentials, James Henry, former chief economist at the prestigious consulting firm McKinsey & Company, has researched and documented tax evasion. He found that the super-wealthy and their families have as much as $32 trillion (USD) of hidden assets in offshore tax havens, representing up to $280 billion in lost income tax revenue! This study excluded such non-financial assets as real estate, precious metals, jewels, yachts, race horses, luxury vehicles and so on. Of the $32 trillion in hidden assets, $23 trillion is held by the super-rich of North America and Europe.......... Download the full article in pdf attachment (below)

At least $21 trillion of unreported private financial wealth was owned by wealthy individuals via tax havens at the end of 2010.This sum is equivalent to the size of the United States and Japanese economies combined. There may be as much as $32 trillion of hidden financial assets held offshore by high net worth individuals (HNWIs), according to our report The Price of Offshore Revisited1, which is thought to be the most detailed and rigorous study ever made of financial assets held in offshore financial centres and secrecy structures.......... Download the full article in pdf attachment (below)

At one time, calling the large multinational banks a “cartel” branded you as a conspiracy theorist.   Today the banking giants are being called that and worse, not just in the major media but in court documents intended to prove the allegations as facts.  Charges include racketeering (organized crime under the U.S. Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act or RICO), antitrust violations, wire fraud, bid-rigging, and price-fixing.  Damning charges have already been proven, and major damages and penalties assessed.  Conspiracy theory has become established fact........... Download the full article in pdf attachment (below)

The bodies of Afghan civilians loaded into the back of a truck in Alkozai village of Panjwayi district of Kandahar (AFP) "Great shapes like big machines rose out of the dimness, and cast grotesque black shadows, in which dim spectral Morlocks sheltered from the glare...there was an altogether new element in the sickening quality of the Morlocks — a something inhuman and malign...I wondered vaguely what foul villainy it might be that the Morlocks did under the new moon."

Nearly eight years ago, on April 1, 2004, former speech writer and Special Assistant to Ronald Reagan, Peggy Noonan wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal, where she was a contributing editor. It began like this (emphasis in original):

The world is used to bad news and always has been, but now and then there occurs something so brutal, so outside the normal limits of what used to be called man's inhumanity to man,

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"Viscous nasty business" ... "aggressive pressure ... by US diplomats", "ferocious pressure on weaker non-permanent members", the "type of pressure [that] is very, very difficult for weaker countries ... to resist.''

That's how a former British diplomat at the United Nations, Carne Ross, described last September's UN showdown over the Palestinian Authority's bid for recognition for statehood. [1] "This is how power works." he said.

He might have added "money", for route to the UN Security Council ......... Download the full article in pdf attachment (below)

Saudi Arabia is building its first stadium especially designed to allow women who are currently barred from attending soccer matches because of the kingdom’s strict public gender segregation to watch games.

The stadium in the Red Sea port city of Jeddah is scheduled to be completed in 2014 and will have private cabins and balconies to accommodate female spectators, according to Al Sharq, a state-owned newspaper.......... Download the full article in pdf attachment (below)

Before a somber seminar on the country's future in Petaling Jaya, Selangor, last week, Mohmand tried to lighten his pessimism by exaggerating for effect. But between the candour and humour of his chat at the International Institute of Advanced Islamic Studies Malaysia was a sorrow that could not be concealed by bluffness........ Download the full article in pdf attachment (below)