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Argentine Chief of Cabinet Jorge Capitanich accused U.S. Republican senator Marco Rubio of “imperialist behavior,” after the right-wing politician expressed doubts about the Argentine government's ability to conduct the investigation into the death of the prosecutor Alberto Nisman.  “The Republic of Argentina is an autonomous, sovereign and independent country, Marco Rubio with his imperialist vision fails to recognize the United Nations charter since the meddling in the affairs of other states constitutes imperialist interference,” Capitanich said Friday during a press conference. On Thursday, Rubio urged U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to support the creation of an “independent, internationally assisted investigation” into the case.  “I am increasingly concerned about the ability of the Government of Argentina to conduct a fair and impartial investigation into his death, or its capacity to ensure the independence of a prosecutor that would continue Mr. Nisman's work,” said Rubio, who has spearheaded the push for hostile policies towards left-leaning governments in Latin America. “I thus urge the Administration to support the establishment of an independent, internationally assisted investigation into Mr. Nisman's suspicious death.” Capitanich called the proposal “unwarranted meddling” into the South American country's affairs.

Cables revealed by Wikileaks suggest that Nisman was being advised by U.S. and Israeli intelligence services, and Argentina officials investigating Nisman's death say the attorney’s 300-page report indicate he was manipulated and being fed him false information. Officials also say rogue agents from Argentina own intelligence services were behind the death.  President Cristina Fernandez, whose husband and late President Nestor Kirchner ordered the investigation into the AMIA bombing, was quick to cast doubt on the apparent suicide of the attorney.

Following Friday’s meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin, French President Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel behind closed doors in Moscow, the Normandy Group agreed to jointly draft a document, to be discussed with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko during a telephone conference on Sunday.  The result of Friday’s closed doors meeting between the three European leaders was announced by a not surprisingly relatively tight-lipped Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Pescov who reveled that:

“On the basis of proposals formulated by the French President and the German Chancellor, joint work is in progress to draft the text of a probable document on the implementation of the Minsk Accords, that would incorporate proposals by the Ukrainian President and those which were formulated today and additional proposals by President Putin”. Pescov added that this draft proposal, once it had been agreed upon, would be presented for the approval by all of the conflicting parties. That is, the Ukrainian government and the self-proclaimed People’s Republics of Donetsk and Lughansk.

The French Presidency and the office of the German Chancellor are equally tight-lipped about the five-hour meeting in Moscow. The French, German, Slovakian, Czech, Austrian, Swiss and other European countries position with regards to solving the crisis in Ukraine is substantially different from the positions of the United States and the position of the United Kingdom, Norway, Denmark and other, rather Atlantic Axis aligned European countries.

The FBI and major media outlets yesterday trumpeted the agency’s latest counterterrorism triumph: the arrest of three Brooklyn men, ages 19 to 30, on charges of conspiring to travel to Syria to fight for ISIS (photo of joint FBI/NYPD press conference, above). As my colleague Murtaza Hussain ably documents, “it appears that none of the three men was in any condition to travel or support the Islamic State, without help from the FBI informant.” One of the frightening terrorist villains told the FBI informant that, beyond having no money, he had encountered a significant problem in following through on the FBI’s plot: his mom had taken away his passport. Noting the bizarre and unhinged ranting of one of the suspects, Hussain noted on Twitter that this case “sounds like another victory for the FBI over the mentally ill.” In this regard, this latest arrest appears to be quite similar to the overwhelming majority of terrorism arrests the FBI has proudly touted over the last decade. As my colleague Andrew Fishman and I wrote last month — after the FBI manipulated a 20-year-old loner who lived with his parents into allegedly agreeing to join an FBI-created plot to attack the Capitol — these cases follow a very clear pattern

Once again, we should all pause for a moment to thank the brave men and women of the FBI for saving us from their own terror plots.

We’re constantly bombarded with dire warnings about the grave threat of home-grown terrorists, “lone wolf” extremists and ISIS. So intensified are these official warnings that The New York Times earlier this month cited anonymous U.S. intelligence officials to warn of the growing ISIS threat and announce “the prospect of a new global war on terror.” But how serious of a threat can all of this be, at least domestically, if the FBI continually has to resort to manufacturing its own plots by trolling the Internet in search of young drifters and/or the mentally ill whom they target, recruit and then manipulate into joining? Does that not, by itself, demonstrate how over-hyped and insubstantial this “threat” actually is? Shouldn’t there be actual plots, ones that are created and fueled without the help of the FBI, that the agency should devote its massive resources to stopping? This FBI tactic would be akin to having the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) constantly warn of the severe threat posed by drug addiction while it simultaneously uses pushers on its payroll to deliberately get people hooked on drugs so that they can arrest the addicts they’ve created and thus justify their own warnings and budgets (and that kind of threat-creation, just by the way, is not all that far off from what the other federal law enforcement agencies, like the FBI, are actually doing). As we noted the last time we wrote about this, the Justice Department is aggressively pressuring U.S. allies to employ these same entrapment tactics in order to create their own terrorists, who can then be paraded around as proof of the grave threat.

As a secular Jew, I don’t do much praying. But this week, as the powerful pro-Israeli- government lobby AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) holds its annual policy meeting in Washington, I’m praying that this year marks the beginning of the end of the lobby’s grip on US foreign policy. From March 1-3, over 10,000 AIPAC supporters will descend on the nation’s capital. The meeting comes at a time when the relationship between President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is at an all-time low. House Speaker John Boehner’s invitation to Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress right after he speaks at the AIPAC conference is seen by the White House as a direct attempt to undermine the president and his administration’s nuclear talks with Iran. In an unprecedented move, over fifty brave members of Congress have decided to skip Netanyahu’s address. AIPAC’s support of the Israeli prime minister over the US president is turning AIPAC into a Republican-biased lobby, which could prove fatal to its future influence in Washington. Here are ten reasons why this would be good for world peace:

Shepherd, who served in Iraq between September 2004 and February 2005 as an Apache helicopter mechanic in the 412th Aviation Support Battalion, deserted in 2007 after being ordered to return to Iraq. He applied for asylum in Germany, where he was based. He remains in Germany."When I read and heard about people being ripped to shreds from machine guns or being blown to bits by the Hellfire missiles I began to feel ashamed about what I was doing," Shepherd told a news conference in Frankfurt in 2008."I could not in good conscience continue to serve," the army specialist from Cleveland, Ohio, said.Shepherd believed he should no longer participate in a war he considered unlawful and in war crimes he believed were committed in Iraq. He said he risked criminal prosecution in the United States because of his desertion.

ussia may consider allowing Chinese investors more than 50 percent stakes in its strategic oil and gas fields, an official said on Friday, an about-face by Moscow that underlines its need for foreign help to develop energy reserves. While closely guarding control of the oil and gas fields that supply the lifeblood of its economy, Russia has forged alliances with some Western companies to obtain the know-how it needs to tap hard-to-reach deposits. But now that Western sanctions over Moscow's role in Ukraine have all but halted that cooperation, Russia has overcome a "psychological barrier" and is ready to deepen its economic ties with China, Deputy Prime MinisterArkady Dvorkovich said. "We have a strategic partnership with China and now decisions are made much faster than before. In particular, we have a gas contract, a second one will be signed soon. Now we know China better: their motives and intentions are understood," he told a conference in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk. "There used to be a psychological barrier. Now it doesn't exist any more. We are interested in maximum investments in new industries. China is an obvious investor for us."

If Hill Republicans thought Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Tuesday address would build broad support for having Congress review any nuclear deal with Iran, they thought wrong. By the end of the day Tuesday, key Democratic senators had pulled their support for just such a bill after Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) announced he was fast-tracking the legislation, bringing it to the Senate floor for debate as soon as next week, short-circuiting committee deliberations that Democrats say are necessary to perfect it. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Tim Kaine (D-Va.) introduced the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act late last week, which would provide for 60 days of congressional review for any deal that comes out of the pending "P5+1" negotiations in Geneva, where the United States, Germany, Russia, China, Britain and France are now at the table with the Iranian regime. Once submitted to Congress, lawmakers could approve, disapprove, or take no action on the deal. The talks are currently scheduled to end on March 24.

The legislation had not only two Democratic sponsors but four co-sponsors in the Democratic conference, giving the measure a filibuster-proof level of support. But that was before McConnell moved to place the bill on next week's legislative calendar -- guaranteeing a Senate vote while negotiators are still at the table. "We think the timing is important," McConnell said Tuesday. "We think it will help prevent the administration from entering into a bad deal, but if they do, then it will provide an opportunity for Congress to weigh in." On Tuesday evening, Menendez, ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee and a fierce critic of the Iranian regime, went to the Senate floor to withdraw his support for the bill, suggesting that McConnell's move represented an effort to influence or derail the negotiations now underway rather than a bona fide desire to review whatever deal is reached.

"I can't imagine why the majority leader would seek to short circuit the process unless the goals are political rather than substantive, and I regret to say these actions make clear an intention that isn't substantive, that is political," Menendez said. "The majority leader is single-handedly undermining our bipartisan efforts."

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has taken his campaign of violent incitement against Palestinians to new extremes with a call for those disloyal to Israel to have their heads chopped off. He also repeated his long-standing demands for expulsion of Palestinian citizens of Israel. “Anyone who’s with us should be given everything – up to half the kingdom. Anyone who’s against us, there’s nothing to do – we should raise an axe and cut off his head; otherwise we won’t survive here,” Lieberman said at an election event Sunday, in reference to Palestinian citizens of Israel. According to Israel’s Mako news website, Lieberman made his comments in an interview with journalist Udi Segal during the “Electing Democracy in 2015” conference at IDC Herzliya, an Israeli college.

There are about 1.5 million Palestinians, survivors and descendants of those who escaped expulsion from present-day Israel in 1948, who are nominally citizens of Israel. Palestinians commemorate this ethnic cleansing, which they call the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”) every year on 15 May.

Bolivian President Evo Morales demanded on Friday that U.S. President Barack Obama ask Venezuela for “forgiveness” following his threats.  Obama issued an executive order Monday declaring a “national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by the situation in Venezuela.” Speaking at a press conference in Cochabamba, Morales criticized the executive order, saying that it wasn’t just a threat to Venezuela ,but also to all of Latin America. “If Obama doesn’t want to meet his match at the Summit of the Americas, he should ask Latin America, and especially Venezuela, for forgiveness. If he doesn’t, he’ll be up against anti-imperialist presidents and governments,” said Morales.  Thirty-five heads of state will come together for the summit on April 10 and 11. Bolivia will ask that the discussion about the issue at the summit be public. Morales has expressed his belief that the executive order represents possible U.S. military intervention plans. He also suggested that Obama lift the blockade on Cuba before the summit.

Forcibly taking down websites deemed to be supportive of terrorism, or criminalizing speech deemed to “advocate” terrorism, is a major trend in both Europe and the West generally. Last month in Brussels, the European Union’s counter-terrorism coordinator issued a memo proclaiming that “Europe is facing an unprecedented, diverse and serious terrorist threat,” and argued that increased state control over the Internet is crucial to combating it. The memo noted that “the EU and its Member States have developed several initiatives related to countering radicalisation and terrorism on the Internet,” yet argued that more must be done. It argued that the focus should be on “working with the main players in the Internet industry [a]s the best way to limit the circulation of terrorist material online.” It specifically hailed the tactics of the U.K. Counter-Terrorism Internet Referral Unit (CTIRU), which has succeeded in causing the removal of large amounts of material it deems “extremist”:

In addition to recommending the dissemination of “counter-narratives” by governments, the memo also urged EU member states to “examine the legal and technical possibilities to remove illegal content.” Exploiting terrorism fears to control speech has been a common practice in the West since 9/11, but it is becoming increasingly popular even in countries that have experienced exceedingly few attacks. A new extremist bill advocated by the right-wing Harper government in Canada (also supported by Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau even as he recognizes its dangers) would create new crimes for “advocating terrorism”; specifically: “every person who, by communicating statements, knowingly advocates or promotes the commission of terrorism offences in general” would be a guilty and can be sent to prison for five years for each offense. In justifying the new proposal, the Canadian government admits that “under the current criminal law, it is [already] a crime to counsel or actively encourage others to commit a specific terrorism offence.” This new proposal is about criminalizing ideas and opinions. In the government’s words, it “prohibits the intentional advocacy or promotion of terrorism, knowing or reckless as to whether it would result in terrorism.”

If someone argues that continuous Western violence and interference in the Muslim world for decades justifies violence being returned to the West, or even advocates that governments arm various insurgents considered by some to be “terrorists,” such speech could easily be viewed as constituting a crime. To calm concerns, Canadian authorities point out that “the proposed new offence is similar to one recently enacted by Australia, that prohibits advocating a terrorist act or the commission of a terrorism offence-all while being reckless as to whether another person will engage in this kind of activity.” Indeed, Australia enacted a new law late last year that indisputably targets political speech and ideas, as well as criminalizing journalism considered threatening by the government. Punishing people for their speech deemed extremist or dangerous has been a vibrant practice in both the U.K. and U.S. for some time now, as I detailed (coincidentally) just a couple days before free speech marches broke out in the West after the Charlie Hebdo attacks. Those criminalization-of-speech attacks overwhelmingly target Muslims, and have resulted in the punishment of such classic free speech activities as posting anti-war commentary on Facebook, tweeting links to “extremist” videos, translating and posting “radicalizing” videos to the Internet, writing scholarly articles in defense of Palestinian groups and expressing harsh criticism of Israel, and even including a Hezbollah channel in a cable package.

‘How can Israel have peace if it’s unwilling to delineate a border, end the occupation?’ asks White House Mideast chief, Phillip Gordon, in blistering Tel Aviv speech

srael’s ongoing occupation of the West Bank is wrong and leads to regional instability and dehumanization of Palestinians, a top American government official said Tuesday in Tel Aviv, hinting that the current Israeli government is not committed to peace.

In an unusually harsh major foreign policy address, Philip Gordon, a special assistant to US President Barack Obama and the White House coordinator for the Middle East, appealed to Israeli and Palestinian leaders to make the compromises needed to reach a permanent peace agreement. Jerusalem “should not take for granted the opportunity to negotiate” such a treaty with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who has proven to be a reliable partner, Gordon said. “Israel confronts an undeniable reality: It cannot maintain military control of another people indefinitely. Doing so is not only wrong but a recipe for resentment and recurring instability,” Gordon said. “It will embolden extremists on both sides, tear at Israel’s democratic fabric and feed mutual dehumanization.”

Controversial emergency laws will be introduced into the Commons next Monday to reinforce the powers of security services to require internet and phone companies to keep records of their customers' emails and calls.The move follows private talks over the past week and the laws will have the support of Labour and the Liberal Democrats on the basis that there will be a sunset clause and a new board to oversee the functioning of the powers.Details are due to be announced at a Downing Street press conference on Thursday morning.

he laws will expire in 2016, requiring fresh legislation after the election. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act will be reviewed between now and 2016 to make recommendations for how it could be reformed and updated. Lib Dems insist the new legislation does not represent an extension of existing surveillance powers or the introduction of the snooper's charter sought by the Home Office and long opposed by the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg.There will be no power to look at the content of phone calls, only location, date and the phone numbers. Government sources say they have been forced to act due to European court of justice ruling in April saying the current laws invaded individual privacy. The government says if there had been no new powers there would have been no obligation on phone and internet companies to keep records if there was a UK court challenge to the retention of data.

No 10 said the ECJ rulings had struck down regulations to retain communications data for law enforcement purposes for up to 12 months. Unless they have a business reason to hold this data, internet and phone companies will start deleting it, which has serious consequences for investigations, which can take many months and which rely on retrospectively accessing data for evidential purposes.Ministers added that some companies had already been calling for a clearer legal frameworkLabour backbencher Tom Watson described the move as a "stitch-up". He said: "There has been a deal and it had been railroaded through so my advice to MPs is there is no point turning up for work next week because there has been a political deal." He said he had not seen the detail of the legislation and promised to vote against the timetable.He added: "The government was aware of this ECJ ruling six weeks ago and what they are doing is railroading this through. No one in civil society has got a chance to be consulted." The shadow cabinet had not seen the proposals until this morning, he added.

All the remaining Snowden documents will be released next month, according t‪o‬ whistle-blowing site ‪Cryptome, which said in a tweet that the release of the info by unnamed third parties would be necessary to head off an unnamed "war".‬‪Cryptome‬ said it would "aid and abet" the release of "57K to 1.7M" new documents that had been "withheld for national security-public debate [sic]". <a href="http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?iu=/6978/reg_security/front&sz=300x250%7C300x600&tile=3&c=33U7RchawQrMoAAHIac14AAAKH&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26unitname%3Dwww_top_mpu%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0" target="_blank"> <img src="http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/ad?iu=/6978/reg_security/front&sz=300x250%7C300x600&tile=3&c=33U7RchawQrMoAAHIac14AAAKH&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26unitname%3Dwww_top_mpu%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0" alt=""></a> The site clarified that will not be publishing the documents itself.Transparency activists would welcome such a release but such a move would be heavily criticised by inteligence agencies and military officials, who argue that Snowden's dump of secret documents has set US and allied (especially British) intelligence efforts back by years.

As things stand, the flow of Snowden disclosures is controlled by those who have access to the Sn‪o‬wden archive, which might possibly include Snowden confidants such as Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. In some cases, even when these people release information to mainstream media organisations, it is then suppressed by these organisations after negotiation with the authorities. (In one such case, some key facts were later revealed by the Register.)"July is when war begins unless headed off by Snowden full release of crippling intel. After war begins not a chance of release," Cryptome tweeted on its official feed."Warmongerers are on a rampage. So, yes, citizens holding Snowden docs will do the right thing," it said.

"For more on Snowden docs release in July watch for Ellsberg, special guest and others at HOPE, July 18-20: http://www.hope.net/schedule.html," it added.HOPE (Hackers On Planet Earth) is a well-regarded and long-running hacking conference organised by 2600 magazine. Previous speakers at the event have included Kevin Mitnick, Steve Wozniak and Jello Biafra.In other developments, ‪Cryptome‬ has started a Kickstarter fund to release its entire archive in the form of a USB stick archive. It wants t‪o‬ raise $100,000 to help it achieve its goal. More than $14,000 has already been raised.The funding drive follows a dispute between ‪Cryptome‬ and its host Network Solutions, which is owned by web.com. Access to the site was bl‪o‬cked f‪o‬ll‪o‬wing a malware infection last week. ‪Cryptome‬ f‪o‬under J‪o‬hn Y‪o‬ung criticised the host, claiming it had ‪o‬ver-reacted and had been sl‪o‬w t‪o‬ rest‪o‬re access t‪o‬ the site, which ‪Cryptome‬ criticised as a form of cens‪o‬rship.In resp‪o‬nse, ‪Cryptome‬ plans to more widely distribute its content across multiple sites as well as releasing the planned USB stick archive. ®

On Friday afternoon a municipal worker, Adnan Al Ashhab ,died of injuries sustained two days earlier. He was targeted when fixing a water well in central Gaza.  Also on Friday, a car with municipal workers in al-Bureij refugee camp was a target of an Israeli pilot, who killed three people in the attack: two workers and a passer-by, a nine-year-old Shahd Al Qreenawi - according to Al Mezan, a human-rights organization in Gaza Strip. Since then, the Gaza water services provider decided to suspend all the maintenance work in the field, fearing further deaths of their employees. "Hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza are now without water. Within days, the entire population of the Strip may be desperately short of water," said Jacques de Maio, head of the ICRC delegation in Israel and the occupied territories.

While the Israeli pilots have mostly targeted residential houses, Gaza’s infrastructure and public buildings suffered too. According to figures from a PLO press conference on Tuesday, the partial damage extended to 72 schools, three hospitals and five other health centers, eight ministries and 64 mosques. Three mosques were completely destroyed. One of the damaged health centers is El-Wafa hospital in Shajjaiyya area, east of Gaza city, hit by five missiles on Friday.

The United Nations's top human rights official has suggested that the United States should abandon its efforts to prosecute Edward Snowden, saying his revelations of massive state surveillance had been in the public interest.The UN high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, credited Snowden, a former US National Security Agency contractor, with starting a global debate that has led to calls for the curtailing of state powers to snoop on citizens online and store their data."Those who disclose human rights violations should be protected: we need them," Pillay told a news conference."I see some of it here in the case of Snowden, because his revelations go to the core of what we are saying about the need for transparency, the need for consultation," she said. "We owe a great deal to him for revealing this kind of information."

The ISIL’s funding father is Erdogan’s personal friend The name of the Saudi businessman Yassin al-Qadi has been linked to organizations classified as terrorist internationally. In particular, the foreign press and the Turkish opposition media describe him as “al-Qaeda’s funding father”. After the events of September 11/2001, al-Qadi- along with other figures- has been included in the world’s list of terrorists, and his name was stereotyped as a terrorist man. This made several countries ban him from entering into their territories, Turkey was one of them. Earlier, the Turkish media documented a photo scandal: Erdogan’s meetings with Yassin al-Qadi as well as long meetings with his son Bilal Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The scandal that was leaked by Turkish security elements came in the context of the case of corruption of which the son of the former Turkish Prime Minister has been accused. Based upon this, a large number of elements of the security corps were arrested being accused of plotting a coup against the government.

Nevertheless, the French journalist Thierry Meyssan describes Yassin al-Qadi as a personal friend of both Dick Cheney (former U.S. Vice President) and Recep Tayyip Erdogan. According to him, al-Qadi visited Turkey four times during 2012, and “his plane used to land at the second airport of Istanbul, and was being welcomed by the Prime Minister personally, without going through the smart gate, and after cutting the security cameras’ power supply”. The Turkish Gmehoriet Newspaper intended to publish details about the investigations conducted by the Turkish judiciary on the same case, and mentioned that Recep Tayyip Erdogan introduced Yassine al-Qadi as a Saudi businessman visiting Turkey to invest and denied that he is a terrorist. It quoted him as saying: “I trust Mr. Al-Qadi just as I trust myself. He is an almsgiver”.

The Turkish newspaper, after publishing Erdogan’s utterances before the Turkish judiciary, revealed that the Turkish police monitored 12 visits made by the Saudi man to Turkey. Seven out of these visits have been made with the help of Erdogan, the period when he was banned from entering Turkey, because his name was added as one of the world wanted terrorists in the list of the American FBI. The newspaper commented saying: “When the Turkish police was looking for al-Qadi, he was holding meetings with the Prime Minister”. Also, it published a photograph that showed separately the aforesaid man, Erdogan, and the Turkish intelligence chief Hakan Fidan, when they were going to a meeting that gathered them. The newspaper noted that Fidan himself met with al-Qadi 5 times when Al-Qadi has been banned from entering the Turkish territory.

Uncle Sam’s Databases of Suspicion A Shadow Form of National ID

We do know that the nation’s domestic-intelligence network is massive, including at least 59 federal agencies, over 300 Defense Department units, and approximately 78 state-based fusion centers, as well as the multitude of law enforcement agencies they serve. We also know that local law enforcement agencies have themselves raised concerns about the system’s lack of privacy protections.

The SAR database is part of an ever-expanding domestic surveillance system established after 9/11 to gather intelligence on potential terrorism threats. At an abstract level, such a system may seem sensible: far better to prevent terrorism before it happens than to investigate and prosecute after a tragedy. Based on that reasoning, the government exhorts Americans to “see something, say something” -- the SAR program’s slogan. Indeed, just this week at a conference in New York City, FBI Director James Comey asked the public to report any suspicions they have to authorities. “When the hair on the back of your neck stands, listen to that instinct and just tell somebody,” said Comey. And seeking to reassure those who do not want to get their fellow Americans in trouble based on instinct alone, the FBI director added, “We investigate in secret for a very good reason, we don't want to smear innocent people.”

Barack Obama, in his post-election press conference yesterday, announced that he would seek an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) from the new Congress, one that would authorize Obama’s bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria—the one he began three months ago. If one were being generous, one could say that seeking congressional authorization for a war that commenced months ago is at least better than fighting a war even after Congress explicitly rejected its authorization, as Obama lawlessly did in the now-collapsed country of Libya.

To get a full scope of American violence in the world, it is worth asking a broader question: how many countries in the Islamic world has the U.S. bombed or occupied since 1980? That answer was provided in a recent Washington Post op-ed by the military historian and former U.S. Army Col. Andrew Bacevich: As America’s efforts to “degrade and ultimately destroy” Islamic State militants extent into Syria, Iraq War III has seamlessly morphed into Greater Middle East Battlefield XIV. That is, Syria has become at least the 14th country in the Islamic world that U.S. forces have invaded or occupied or bombed, and in which American soldiers have killed or been killed. And that’s just since 1980.

Let’s tick them off: Iran (1980, 1987-1988), Libya (1981, 1986, 1989, 2011), Lebanon (1983), Kuwait (1991), Iraq (1991-2011, 2014-), Somalia (1992-1993, 2007-), Bosnia (1995), Saudi Arabia (1991, 1996), Afghanistan (1998, 2001-), Sudan (1998), Kosovo (1999), Yemen (2000, 2002-), Pakistan (2004-) and now Syria. Whew. Bacevich’s count excludes the bombing and occupation of still other predominantly Muslim countries by key U.S. allies such as Israel and Saudi Arabia, carried out with crucial American support. It excludes coups against democratically elected governments, torture, and imprisonment of people with no charges. It also, of course, excludes all the other bombing and invading and occupying that the U.S. has carried out during this time period in other parts of the world, including in Central America and the Caribbean, as well as various proxy wars in Africa.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his current government became incapable of running the country’s affairs, and that he intends to dissolve the Israeli parliament (Knesset), to arrange new general elections as soon as possible. His statements came in a press conference he held, on Tuesday evening, hours after he fired Finance Minister Yair Lapid, and Justice Minister, Tizipi Livni.

Fast-food workers in roughly 190 cities nationwide are set to walk off the job Thursday morning, demanding an industry-wide base wage of $15 per hour and the right to form a union. Thursday’s strike, the latest in a series of day-long labor actions coordinated through a nationwide coalition of various fast food worker groups, may well be the largest work stoppage in the history of the industry, if early organizer estimates prove to be accurate. This will also be the first strike since the campaign began in November 2012 to include work stoppages at businesses other than fast-food restaurants. Organizers say that some employees of dollar stores and convenience stores in about two dozen cities are also walking off the job, a sign that the campaign is extending its reach into other parts of the service and retail sector. By recruiting workers from outside the fast food business, organizers for the fast food campaign appear to be knitting together a broader low-wage campaign that crosses industry barriers. Workers in roughly 150 cities voted by conference call on Nov. 29, the two-year anniversary of the campaign’s first labor action, to approve the strike date.