What a shockingly bad lede from A.P. this is:

The U.N. nuclear has found traces of uranium enriched at an Iranian site to a level that is slightly closer to the threshold needed to arm nuclear missiles.

The International Atomic Energy Agency says in a report that its experts have found particles enriched up to 27 percent. That is higher than the 20 percent declared by Iran and closer to the weapons-grade material used in the fissile core of such missiles.

Argh, Iran has stepped over the line! Panic! Start the bombing right now!

Oh wait:

The restricted report says Iran explains the find as a technical glitch. The agency says it is assessing that explanation and has asked for more details, while analysts and diplomats say Iran’s version sounds plausible.

Even David Albright, no stranger to concocting scary Iran stories himself, admits that the trace amounts found are almost certainly a quality control issue and are "embarrassing but not nefarious". Cancel the bombers!

George Jahn, who leads reporting on Iran for the A.P. and wrote this piece, has a long history of banging war drums at every opportunity and a track record of revealing spanner-in-the-works scoops sourced to "an official of a country tracking Iran's nuclear program" which is a "member of the International Atomic Energy Agency" - that is, Israel. Others like the team of man-Judys at the NYT, Broad and Sanger, or Reueters' Deihl, are hardly any better. They usually force themselves to get the truth in there somewhere, but they'll spin it as negatively as possible.

When reading Western media on Iran, it's best to remember the Spanish-American War and that Pullitzer was one of the pioneers of yellow journalism.

But...we should definitely fear Iran's Oompa-Loompa engineers.

The French Tom Friedman, Bernard-Henri Lévy, is calling for war again. Infamous as the man who convinced his pal Sarkozy that a short, victorious war in Libya would help his election chances - leading Sarko to drag in the Brits and Cameron to drag in the US - he's now looking to the UK's Cameron to lead the charge against Syria. The platform is his new nacissistic movie about how he started the Libya intervention.

According to Lévy the film shows why intervention worked in Libya and not Iraq and how the conditions are present in Syria. “In Iraq we had no international mandate, there was no demand on the ground of the people, there was no representative leader for the forces against Saddam Hussein, in Iraq it was Western versus Arab country in Libya there was a real coalition with Arab countries involved in coalition with Emirati and Qatar forces. Intervention is justified if you have these conditions.”

Luckily - since Syria is a very different and far harder proposition than Libya both militarily and socially and in any case the whole notion of "humanitarian intervention" is on a shaky footing - I doubt Cameron will be so easy to fool.

By Michael Collins

"Cameron continues to insist that the inquiry is the best forum to evaluate Hunt’s actions. This signals the beginning of the end for Cameron. He’s proposing a solution for the Hunt investigation that is outside the rules of Parliament, in a forum that has rejected him. Upon closer examination, existing evidence will lead to even stronger condemnation of Hunt’s behaviour. Any new materials produced by the inquiry will bury him.

"Where will that leave Cameron? Finished!" Michael Collins, Independentaustralia.net May 10, 2012

Queens Counsel Robert Jay unearthed a devastating piece of evidence that will surely create calls for the resignation of both culture secretary Jeremy Hunt and Prime Minister David Cameron.

In afternoon testimony at the Leveson Inquiry today (5/24), Jay confronted News Corp lobbyist Frederic Michel with an email rendition of a Hunt to Cameron memo of November 19, 2010 (see testimony/full memo at end of article). Hunt is clearly cheerleading for the News Corp acquisition of immensely profitable pay TV network BSkyB. News Corp owned 39% of the network and wanted to purchase the remaining 61%. This acquisition was absolutely critical to News Corp profitability and as a sign that Rupert and James Murdoch actually knew what they were doing.

One month after he got the biased memo, Cameron appointed Hunt as the government minister in charge of approving the bid. Hunt portrayed his role as "quasi-judicial" and claimed he was an objective judge. The bid was opposed by an alliance of news organizations.

Now we know, without any doubt and from Hunt's own words that he was biased in favor of approving the News Corp bid before he even got the authority to judge.

We also know that PM Cameron knew Hunt's bias and appointed him anyway.

I guess the Saudis, Quataris, Libyans and Turks all want that special rubber stamp of American approval...just in case they need someone to blame later.

As one diplomatic effort after another fails to end more than a year of brutal violence in Syria, the Obama administration is preparing a plan that would essentially give U.S. nods of approval to arms transfers from Arab nations to some Syrian opposition fighters.

The effort, U.S. officials told The Associated Press, would vet members of the Free Syrian Army and other groups to determine whether they are suitable recipients of munitions to fight the Assad government and to ensure that weapons don’t wind up in the hands of al-Qaida-linked terrorists or other extremist groups such as Hezbollah that could target Israel.

The EU's Ashton says the next round of talks will be in Moscow on June 18-19. Forget all the did-they-didn't-they-make-progress media reports - those are just reporters looking for an easy and headlineable narrative (and in some cases, working the agenda of those who'd rather see talks fail). The truth is captured perfectly by Ashton's spokes: "If there wasn’t progress, we wouldn’t still be holding the talks," Mann told reporters in the Iraqi capital. "Progress has been made." The process is the progress. That's a whole 'nother month there won't be war.

Racist attacks on black Africans - they're not just for Libyans.

Demonstrators have attacked African migrants in Tel Aviv in a protest against refugees and asylum-seekers that indicates an increasingly volatile mood in Israel over what it terms as "infiltrators".

Miri Regev, a member of the Israeli parliament, told the crowd "the Sudanese are a cancer in our body". The vast majority of asylum-seekers in Israel are from Sudan and Eritrea.

Around 1,000 demonstrators took part in the demonstration on Wednesday night, waving signs saying: "Infiltrators, get out of our homes" and "Our streets are no longer safe for our children." A car containing Africans was attacked and shops serving the refugee community were looted. Seventeen people were arrested.

A reporter for the Israeli daily Maariv described it as an "unbridled rampage" and explosion of "pent-up rage".

Seems to me everyone in the North has it in for sub-Saharans. But I do wonder whether the Israeli bigots have a heirarchy of racism which ranks Arabs and black Africans on a scale of hateability. The bigots would doubtless complain that their hate is also about "infiltrators" taking jobs and causing crime. As Ta-Nehisi Coates notes today though, "Complicating racism with other factors doesn't make it any better. It just makes it racism. Again." That's as true in Israel as it is anywhere else.

Assange

Bradley Manning

When you compare them head-to-head, the Obama and Romney tax plans are nearly identical:

Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate, is offering a 20 percent tax cut for everyone. Given the mood of the conservatives in the United States today, that may not surprise you. But even President Barack Obama, who is routinely described as a socialist by his opponents, is peddling a plan under which 99 percent of Americans would pay less than they did under the last Democrat in the White House, Bill Clinton.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is like a phlegmatic dominatrix. She enjoys delivering pain, lots of it, but she does so in a sluggish fashion, without any flair. She's had a free ride for too long. Now, her day has come. Merkel is the last impediment to throwing austerity overboard in Europe and the United States. Correction: the last impediment to appearing to throw austerity overboard.

Obama gave up the rhetoric of austerity before the kickoff of his 2012 campaign. His opening speech in Columbus, Ohio was so populist-infused; you might have thought he was campaigning against himself.

Newly elected President of France François Hollande arrived at the right time to lead the move away from austerity. Andrew Grice of The Independent noted, "The French leader said the EU had to consider all ways to increase growth. And eurobonds are part of the discussion."

From OilPrice.com:

Song Xiaojun, a former senior officer of the People's Liberation Army, warned that Australia cannot juggle its relationships with the United States and China indefinitely and Australia has to find a godfather sooner or later. Australia always has to depend on somebody else, whether it is to be the 'son' of the US or 'son' of China.

What is also notable about Song's remarks is that they coincided with Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr's first official visit to China, where Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi urged Australia to dismiss its alliance with the United States, a decades-old bipartisan and central pillar of the nation's foreign policy, as "the time for Cold War alliances has passed."

The Guardian's Nick Hopkins reports that British defense chiefs are dusting off and updating contingency plans after being told by M.I.6 that there's still a "25-50% chance" that Israel will decide to attack Iran before the US elections in November, inevitably drawing in the US and UK.

Israel must weigh up whether President Obama is likely to take a harder line on pre-emptive action against Iran next year if he has won a second term.

"The Americans might hang out the Israelis to dry after the election, but not before," said a senior Whitehall source. "Obama would have to support Israel if there was an attack before November."

British contingency measures are mostly defensive: making sure British troops in Helmand, Afghanistan are properly prepared for the prospect of Iranian-sponsored attacks as well as by Talibanesque groups and moving UK minesweeping vessels to the Persian Gulf to help keep shipping lanes open if Iran mines the Strait. Hopkins reports that some cabinet ministers would strongly resist UK involvement in any missile or air strikes on Iran by the US if Israel does drag the allies into war. That resistance seems to extend into the British civil service and military establishments.

The Guardian has spoken to a number of Foreign Office and military officials in recent months, and all of them have expressed dread at the thought of a conflict with Iran.

One spoke of fear every time Obama and Cameron are left to discuss the issue and what may have been agreed. "We have our hearts in our mouth," said the source.

I wonder if US officials feel the same way? Probably.

As expected, no-one is offering sanctions relief yet and no-one is talking about a breakthrough. The P5+1 offered a deal:

the proposal includes a requirement that Iran suspend uranium enrichment at the 20 percent level at the underground Fordow facility near Qom and also that Iran agree to send abroad 100 kilograms of uranium enriched to the 20 percent level that is already in its possession.

Iran in return would receive a shipment of nuclear fuel from one of the six powers for the nuclear research reactor in Tehran and also have the old research reactor, which has severe safety problems, upgraded. In addition, the proposal includes the upgrading of the Bushehr reactor, both in safety and in possible assistance in the establishment of a new nuclear research reactor. The package also includes replacement parts for Iran's civilian aviation fleet, which suffers from serious maintenance problems.

But I'm more interested in seeing the details of Iran's counteroffer when they inevitably leak.

Hours later, Iran made its move by offering a counterproposal that includes what one member of its negotiating team called “nuclear and non-nuclear issues.” The official would not discuss details of the plan, but said it would be discussed in private meetings with diplomats from the European Union and China, an Iranian ally.

Talks are expected to continue tomorrow. Softly, softly.

Let's take the last first. Apparently the Great Pacific Plastic Patch, where ocean currents collect discarded plastic junk, has been misrepresented by use of a photo from Manila Harbor, which shows a guy paddling a boat through a layer of garbage, mostly plastic. According to Scripps Institution marine biologist Miriam Goldstein, who has actually been there, it's not like that. The plastic is there, but it's in much smaller pieces and more spread out. The danger to fish and birds, often exemplified by a cut-open stomach crammed with plastic, may be overhyped too. Read the whole thing.

We probably shouldn't be, because something similar could happen to Democrats, eventually:

Washington (CNN) -- When presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney appears before Latino small-business owners in Washington on Wednesday, he'll address a group whose explosive birth rates foreshadow a seismic political shift in GOP strongholds in the Deep South and Southwest.

"The Republicans' problem is their voters are white, aging and dying off," said David Bositis, a senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, who studies minority political engagement.

for the future?

Socialism rears its beautiful head (Article by Gar Alperovitz via Common Dreams).

The broad goal is democratized ownership of the economy for the “99 percent” in an ecologically sustainable and participatory community-building fashion.

In March 2012, the Left Forum held in New York also heard many calls for a return to nationalization.

Might as well try something new - the old way isn't working.

A range of new theorists have also increasingly given intellectual muscle to the movement. Some, like Richard Heinberg, stress the radical implications of ending economic growth. Former presidential adviser James Gustav Speth calls for restructuring the entire system as the only way to deal with ecological problems in general and growth in particular.

TomDispatch/TruthDig, By Chris Hellman & Mattea Kramer, May 22

Recent months have seen a flurry of headlines about cuts (often called “threats”) to the U.S. defense budget. Last week, lawmakers in the House of Representatives even passed a bill that was meant to spare national security spending from future cuts by reducing school-lunch funding and other social programs.

Here, then, is a simple question that, for some curious reason, no one bothers to ask, no less answer: How much are we spending on national security these days? With major wars winding down, has Washington already cut such spending so close to the bone that further reductions would be perilous to our safety?

In fact, with projected cuts added in, the national security budget in fiscal 2013 will be nearly $1 trillion—a staggering enough sum that it’s worth taking a walk through the maze of the national security budget to see just where that money’s lodged.

An Alabama newspaper exposed a scandal May 16 that deserves national prominence. The headline was "Federal judge's lengthy affair with court worker is exposed."

This is a scandal not simply for the judge, Mark Everett Fuller, shown at right in a photo by my research colleague Phil Fleming. It is a lifetime shame for those in the Justice Department, federal court system and the United States Senate who have coddled and protected him for an entire decade during his obvious previous disgraces.

It was fully a decade ago that Fuller was first accused by Alabama's pension officials at their highest level of trying to bilk the system out of $330,000. Yet Alabama's two senators pushed Fuller forward for a lifetime appointment, which Fuller received from voice vote by the United States Senate with no serious discussion of his past. Fuller and his court staff were even able to hide from public view a 180-page impeachment filing against him in 2003 with no apparent attempt at investigation.

A corrupt federal judge is in position to create vast harm in both civil and criminal cases, especially when he controls the court administrative system, as Fuller did during a seven-year term from 2004 to 2011 as chief judge for Alabama's most important federal district. This is the middle district surrounding the capital city of Montgomery.

Tattoo of Leviticus 18:22 forbidding homosexuality: $200. Not knowing that Leviticus 19:28 forbids tattoos: Priceless.

From IPS:

The results from 19 different state-of-the-art climate models project extreme and persistent drought conditions (colored dark red-brown on the maps) for almost all of Mexico, the midwestern United States and most of Central America.

If climate change pushes the global average temperature to 2.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial era levels, as many experts now expect, these regions will be under severe and permanent drought conditions.

Future conditions are projected to be worse than Mexico's current drought or the U.S. Dust Bowl era of the 1930s that forced hundreds of thousands of people to migrate.

These are some of the conclusions of the study "Projections of Future Drought in the Continental United States and Mexico", which was published in the December 2011 issue of the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Hydrometeorology and has gone largely unnoticed.

"Drought conditions will prevail no matter what precipitation rates are in the future," said co-author Michael Wehner, a climate scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a U.S. government research centre in California.

...The 19 models used in the study show that the increased heat will dry soils more than any additional rain can replenish soil moisture levels. Ever warmer air temperatures will cause greater evaporation, drying out soils.

I know I've written about this before, but I'm going to keep repeating the message because this is the biggest danger of climate change to Americans, who need to realise this is coming. American-produced apathy and denialism is one of the biggest drags on world-wide climate change opinion, and thus on action. Maybe this, a disaster for the bulk of America's heartland, will convince Americans to get their collective heads out of their asses.

Over at AmericaBlog, Gaius Publius cogently argues that "if Occupy leaders (organizers) don't take on and reject violence, they will do lasting damage both to Occupy and to the broader movement of which Occupy is just one part." The heart of his argument is that:

You don't stop police violence with non-violence; but you justify it by violent acts of your own. Your violence guarantees escalation of violence on both sides, and guarantees that their violence (police beatings; pepper-swabbed eyeballs and throats; multiple strip searches; extended stays in urine-soaked solitary cells) will be sold as "necessary" by the entire troop of millionaire news-blond(e)s.

But if non-violent protest won't halt police violence, in a time when it is increasingly normalized, what will? And if it cannot be halted, where do we end up?

Washington, DC - Last week we witnessed the capo di tutti capi of political and policy evolution. President Barack Obama, after Vice-President Joe Biden and Education Secretary Arne Duncan played the role of his social-issue Shofar, came out in favour of the equality of marriage for all in the US, regardless of sexual orientation. To put it in simple terms: for the first time in the history of this country, the president of the United States supports gay marriage.

This is obviously a big moment. For those seeking to enter loving relationships recognised by law, nothing has changed in that realm. But culturally, when the president or other major political figures make strong statements on issues, it changes everything. To quote Republican House Leader Shelley Runyon in the film The Contender: "What I say, the American people will believe. And do you know why? Because I will have a very big microphone in front of me."

Matt Stoller explains a stark reality of U.S. (and, increasingly, British) politics:

Most activists and political operatives are under a delusion about American politics, which goes as follows. Politicians will do *anything* to get reelected, and they will pander, beg, borrow, lie, cheat and steal, just to stay in office. It’s all about their job.

This is 100% wrong. The dirty secret of American politics is that, for most politicians, getting elected is just not that important. What matters is post-election employment. It’s all about staying in the elite political class, which means being respected in a dense network of corporate-funded think tanks, high-powered law firms, banks, defense contractors, prestigious universities, and corporations. If you run a campaign based on populist themes, that’s a threat to your post-election employment prospects. This is why rising Democratic star and Newark Mayor Corey Booker reacted so strongly against criticism of private equity – he’s looking out for a potential client after his political career is over, or perhaps, during interludes between offices. Running as a vague populist is manageable, as long as you’re lying to voters. If you actually go after powerful interests while in office, then you better win, because if you don’t, you’ll have basically nowhere to go. And if you lose, but you were a team player, then you’ll have plenty of money and opportunity. The most lucrative scenario is to win and be a team player, which is what Bill and Hillary Clinton did. The Clinton’s are the best at the political game – it’s not a coincidence that deregulation accelerated in the late 1990s, as Clinton and his whole team began thinking about their post-Presidential prospects.

Bill Clinton is nowadays worth around $80 million and admits "I never had any money until I got out of the White House, you know, but I’ve done reasonably well since then." Stoller notes in a tweet that you can substitute "general" for "politician" and understand what makes the Pentagon tick too.

A report from a couple of weeks ago that German police fired only 85 bullets in action during the whole of 2011 is still drawing amazed comment from American friends on Twitter.

Officers fired 36 times at people, killing six and injuring 15. This is a slight decline from 2010, when seven people were killed and 17 injured. Ninety-six shots were fired in 2010.

Meanwhile, in the United States, The Atlantic reported that in April, 84 shots were fired at one murder suspect in Harlem, and another 90 at an unarmed man in Los Angeles.

"Our police officers are no thugs in uniform," Lorenz Caffier, interior minister of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, said at a press conference Tuesday.

People shouldn't be so amazed at the German figure, rather they should be outraged at American statistics. American gun culture is run amuck.

Fret not, drone strike naysayers -- John Brennan has a list, and he's checking it twice:

White House counterterror chief John Brennan has seized the lead in guiding the debate on which terror leaders will be targeted for drone attacks or raids, establishing a new procedure to vet both military and CIA targets.

The move concentrates power over the use of lethal U.S. force outside war zones at the White House.

The process, which is about a month old, means Brennan's staff consults the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies as to who should go on the list, making a previous military-run review process in place since 2009 less relevant, according to two current and three former U.S. officials aware of the evolution in how the government targets terrorists.

In describing Brennan's arrangement to The Associated Press, the officials provided the first detailed description of the military's previous review process that set a schedule for killing or capturing terror leaders around the Arab world and beyond. They spoke on condition of anonymity because U.S. officials are not allowed to publicly describe the classified targeting program.

One senior administration official argues that Brennan's move adds another layer of review that augments rather than detracts from the Pentagon's role. The official says that in fact there will be more people at the table making the decisions, including representatives from every agency involved in counterterrorism, before they are reviewed by senior officials and ultimately the president.

Yep. Nothing beats normalizing the unthinkable via bureaucratic smoke & mirrors. Apparently Arendt's keystone work is to Obama as Orwell's was to W: not a cautionary tale, but, rather, a user's guide.

h/t Roland Paris

That's the pretty interesting, if simplistic, question posed by The Atlantic:

Not everyone is thrilled by the prospect of radical life extension. As funding for anti-aging research has exploded, bioethicists have expressed alarm, reasoning that extreme longevity could have disastrous social effects. Some argue that longer life spans will mean stiffer competition for resources, or a wider gap between rich and poor. Others insist that the aging process is important because it gives death a kind of time release effect, which eases us into accepting it. These concerns are well founded. Life spans of several hundred years are bound to be socially disruptive in one way or another; if we're headed in that direction, it's best to start teasing out the difficulties now.