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t's increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law. There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 80 commandos facing virtually no opposition - except, they claim, from his wife, who lunged towards them. In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress "suspects." In April 2002, the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it "believed" that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan, though implemented in the UAE and Germany. What they only believed in April 2002, they obviously didn't know 8 months earlier, when Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know, because they were instantly dismissed) to extradite bin Laden if they were presented with evidence - which, as we soon learned, Washington didn't have. Thus Obama was simply lying when he said, in his White House statement, that "we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda." Nothing serious has been provided since. There is much talk of bin Laden's "confession," but that is rather like my confession that I won the Boston Marathon. He boasted of what he regarded as a great achievement.

The international media claims that the Obama administration was reckless in handling the security measures for its consulate in Benghazi. On one side, it challenged the long lasting legacy of Hilary Rodham Clinton, and on the other hand, it put Susan Rice in much trouble. But the major trouble rests on President Obama who made contradictory statements regarding the attack The U.S. consulate attack was an attack in reaction to the anti-Muslim film "innocence of the Muslims" and it was a "spontaneous" claim, but earlier the same week Obama claimed that it was an "act of terror". Looking into few statements of President Obama in leading daily papers, we can see Obama's sprawling contradiction:

A definitive review and close reading of medical peer-review journals, and government health statistics shows that American medicine frequently causes more harm than good. The number of people having in-hospital, adverse drug reactions (ADR) to prescribed medicine is 2.2 million. (1) Dr. Richard Besser, of the CDC , in 1995, said the number of unnecessary antibiotics prescribed annually for viral infections was 20 million. Dr. Besser, in 2003, now refers to tens of millions of unnecessary antibiotics. (2, 2a) The number of unnecessary medical and surgical procedures performed annually is 7.5 million. (3) The number of people exposed to unnecessary hospitalization annually is 8.9 million. (4) The total number of iatrogenic [induced inadvertently by a physician or surgeon or by medical treatment or diagnostic procedures] deaths is 783,936. The 2001 heart disease annual death rate is 699,697; the annual cancer death rate is 553,251. (5) It is evident that the American medical system is the leading cause of death and injury in the United States.

The condescension toward these new right-wing standard-bearers seems more cultural than ideological

Reactions to World Bank president Robert Zoellick's suggestion that gold might be used as part of a package of measures to reconstruct the international system ranged from the lukewarm to the bewildered.

In a new study, researchers measured both liberals' and conservatives' reaction to "gaze cues" -- a person's tendency to shift attention in a direction consistent with another person's eye movements. Liberals responded strongly to the prompts, consistently moving their attention in the direction suggested to them by a face on a computer screen. Conservatives, on the other hand, did not

After the assassination of bin Laden I received such a deluge of requests for comment that I was unable to respond individually, and on May 4 and later I sent an unedited form response instead, not intending for it to be posted, and expecting to write it up more fully and carefully later on. But it was posted, then circulated. It can now be found, reposted, here.  That was followed by a deluge of reactions from all over the world. It is far from a scientific sample of course, but nevertheless, the tendencies may be of some interest. Overwhelmingly, those from the "third world" were on the order of "thanks for saying what we think." There were similar ones from the US, but many others were infuriated, often virtually hysterical, with almost no relation to the actual content of the posted form letter. That was true in particular of the posted or published responses brought to my attention. I have received a few requests to comment on several of these. Frankly, it seems to me superfluous. If there is any interest, I'll nevertheless find some time to do so.  The original letter ends with the comment that "There is much more to say, but even the most obvious and elementary facts should provide us with a good deal to think about." Here I will fill in some of the gaps, leaving the original otherwise unchanged in all essentials.  Noam Chomsky  May 2011

The world is not, however, out of the woods if you read Peter Nolan's superb book, "Crossroads: The End of Wild Capitalism and the Future of Humanity." Nolan's thesis is that unrestrained capitalism, its extremes and its contradictions, have put China, the United States and the world of Islam on a collision course that gives the world "the choice of no choice." Either these three models of culture and capitalism will find constructive engagement, or the world as we know it is in extreme peril - either from economic instability and social reaction, military conflict, or environmental destruction, or all of the above.

Reaction to Jeremy Bowen's censure

Officials' dismay at the now famed outburst was uniform. The cyberspace reaction, not so. Two words from one guy.

Andrew Sullivan supported George W. Bush for president in 2000 and praised his initial reactions to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In the years since, Sullivan's become disgusted by the moral morass of American torture and Bush's stalwart defense of it. But Bush, Sullivan writes in a cover-story epistle to the former president in the Atlantic, is the only person who can amend torture's stain on the country. So Sullivan appeals to the conservative and Christian roots he shares with Bush and calls for the former president to "reject categorically the phony legalisms, criminal destruction of crucial evidence, and retrospective rationalizations used to pretend that none of this happened. It happened." Bush must, Sullivan writes, say a public mea culpa to the American people, as Ronald Reagan did in response to the Iran-Contra scandal. If not, Sullivan warns that a future president might "resort to the same brutalizing policy, with the same polarizing, demoralizing, war-crippling results. I am writing you now because it is within your power-and only within your power-to prevent that from happening."

The investigation reported is one of those connected to Burges. Do you notice ... 1. That the authorites are just looking into the members of Burge's crowd, as if they were the only problem on the CPD. Please. Dealing with these thugs is a nice start, but it's only a start. One is left wondering, though, if this is where it will end. 2. That this wasn't exactly late breaking news or unknown in Chicago - the Reader did a series of articles on these fun, fun people back in the 90s, and word had hit the street long before then. Why wasn't anybody looking into this, then? That last question being rhetorical, of course, for reasons I'll get to, in a second. 3. That the human rights abuses mentioned took place during the 1980s, meaning that prosecution has been stalled for so long that, even if caught, most of the offenders will escape justice. 4. When, some years back, I and a few other demonstrators were on the street in Chicago, trying to raise a little consciousness about the issues surrounding the death penalty in Illinois, mentioning this very case, there's a reaction to which we became accustomed. The man on the street seeing absolutely nothing wrong with torturing confessions out of those accused of crimes. This is why, below, you see me suggesting that I was not surprised to see popular acceptance of the Bush administration's lavish use of torture. As a society, we had been there before, and hadn't seemed to be in any great hurry to get anywhere better.

As a US Muslim I abhor the frat boy reaction. We should be celebrating the Arab spring, not this

It remains to be seen whether the Occupy Wall Street protests will change America's direction. Yet the protests have already elicited a remarkably hysterical reaction from Wall Street, the super-rich in general, and politicians and pundits who reliably serve the interests of the wealthiest hundredth of a percent.

I include my reacations to this review in which I think Covel misleads readers about Moore's movie.