Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal said Monday that Israeli leaders bring "war and occupation" thus blocking peace talks on the Palestinians, Syria and Lebanon.

Mashaal spoke after a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Msocow.

His statement leaves in doubt Russia's desire to host a Mideast peace conference and to involve Hamas, despite strong opposition from Israel and the US.

The Russian Foreign Ministry issued no information about Monday's meeting between Mashaal and Lavrov. Moscow hopes to host a Middle East peace conference but has not yet set a date.

The economists are ill qualified to analyse the current economic situation since they lack the overview of historians such as himself.

"There are economic professors in American universities who think they are masters of the universe, but they don't have any historical knowledge. I have never believed that markets are self correcting. No historian could."

More than half of U.S. voters who describe themselves as independents disapprove of President Barack Obama’s job performance for the first time since he took office in January 2009, according to a poll released today.

Fewer registered voters nationwide — 44% — approve of President Barack Obama’s job performance than disapprove — 47%, according to a new Marist College poll. When Marist last asked about the president’s approval rating in December, 46% thought well of Obama’s job performance while 44% gave him low marks.

At first glance it appeared there was a typo in the headlines. The national media reported that, in January, another 20,000 more jobs were lost. Somehow, the unemployment rate dropped, from 10 percent to 9.7 percent. Nobody thought this paradox was worth explaining; instead, the media’s attitude was “more good news” about the economy.

But there was other evidence of an obliterated job market hiding behind the cheerful headlines. After revising the employment numbers in 2009, The New York Times reported, “…the economy lost 150,000 jobs in December, far more than the 85,000 initially reported.” Overall in 2009, the adjusted numbers showed an additional “…1.36 million fewer jobs…” (February 5, 2010).

Late last night Occupation forces raided the Stop the Wall offices in Ramallah. Some 10 military jeeps, hummers and an armoured bus surrounded the building as soldiers searched rooms, turning the office upside down and confiscating computer hard disks, laptops, and video cameras along with paper documents, CDs, and video cassettes.

Though both parties were cited in the report by Richard Goldstone, a South African judge, Israel faces far more serious charges. It is accused of deliberately targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure in a conflict that saw over 1,400 Palestinians killed—compared with 13 Israelis killed—and the full or partial destruction of more than 21,000 buildings and apartments, including more than 200 major factories.

Third, among the few sectors of the economy showing net employment growth over the past year is the federal government. The federal civil service is rapidly expanding as Obama increases the size of government, with 33,000 new positions being added in January alone. Only 9,000 of those new slots were for temporary census jobs. In other words, what we are seeing is good times for the public sector and the growing prospect of a continuing and perhaps even deepening recession for everybody else.

Iran on Monday informed the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in an official letter that stating from Tuesday, it will begin enriching higher-grade nuclear fuel.

"Today we handed over the letter," Iran's envoy to the IAEA, Ali-Asghar Soltanieh, told Press TV. He added that Tehran will use its nuclear stockpile to enrich uranium to up to 20 percent to supply the Tehran research reactor which produces medical isotopes.

The fuel will be be produced at the Natanz enrichment plant.

Iran says as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), it is entitled to enrich uranium for civilian purposes.

Position: 63 Degrees 43 Minutes South 81 Degrees 26 Minutes East

The Sea Shepherd ship Steve Irwin joined the Sea Shepherd ship Bob Barker this morning at 0700 Hours (Sydney time). Both Sea Shepherd ships are now on the tail of the Japanese factory ship Nisshin Maru.

The Japanese fleet was running fast to the Northeast not knowing that the Steve Irwin was on a course of Southwest coming directly for them. With the fleet doing 15 knots, and the Steve Irwin doing 15 knots, the Steve Irwin and the whaling fleet closed the gap at 30 knots cutting the rendezvous time in half.

Heavy snowfall has seriously disrupted transport in Bulgaria and neighboring Romania, blocking highways and leaving cars stranded in snow.

Officials in Bulgaria say the weather caused power outages in parts of that country Monday, and delayed most flights for about an hour at Sofia International Airport. Off-road vehicles are being used to free stranded drivers and transport patients requiring emergency treatment to the hospital.

People who drink two or more sweetened soft drinks a week have a much higher risk of pancreatic cancer, an unusual but deadly cancer, researchers reported on Monday.

The state Legislature is looking to add back jobs sliced from the state Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism, including those lost when most of the state Film Office staff was let go.

*Israel is preparing to invade Lebanon with massive ground troops.

Israel will not spare any kind of weaponry, including phosphorous and cluster bombs.

Israel is secretly evacuating its northern region residents.

Israel intends to create a new security zone inside Lebanon, south of the Litani to enhance her long term occupation.

While the war of words is escalating around the clock between Israel on the one side and Hezbollah and Syria on the other, analysts in the Middle East and Europe strongly believe that war is inevitable and will break out within a few months.

A former Philadelphia cop faces charges for shooting and killing Bill Panas in their neighborhood.

Subversives who think government is corrupt and should be controlled by the people face 10 years in prison and a $25,000 dollar fine if they fail to register with authorities in South Carolina, in another chilling example of how free speech and dissent is being criminalized in America.

The state’s “Subversive Activities Registration Act” is now officially on the books and mandates that “Every member of a subversive organization, or an organization subject to foreign control, every foreign agent and every person who advocates, teaches, advises or practices the duty, necessity or propriety of controlling, conducting, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States … shall register with the Secretary of State.”

Ohio's tax coffers are nearly $100 million lighter than officials had expected by this point in the fiscal year, largely due to a January income tax shortfall.

I don’t want this column to be seen as bashing the US. However, there is much to validly criticize about the current model in the US and much to dissent from, also.

Maui's commercial real estate industry sure isn't as bad as on the Mainland, said veteran local leasing broker Ed Bello of Bello Realty Inc., who on a recent business trip to Colorado saw a bankrupt big-box store converted into a charter school and a former Blockbuster Video into a veterinary clinic.

If they had any tenants at all.

When he looks around at Maui's shopping centers, Bello said, rather than maybe one empty storefront, there may be four. Three more vacant spaces is a big shift for an island that just two years ago had a nearly 100 percent occupancy rate, he said.

The Geneva-based laboratory would like to invite an astronomer from the Vatican Observatory to collaborate on studies concerning the origin of the universe, said Ugo Amaldi,

Ex-Downing Street communications chief Alastair Campbell has emotionally denied Tony Blair misled MPs over the intelligence ahead of the Iraq war.

On Feb. 15, the collider will start up again. Soon thereafter, it will start producing scientific data for the first time. This year, the plan is to ramp up the collider to unprecedented levels of speed in order to test traditional physics theories. If all goes well, Myers expects the LHC to run at full energy – accelerating particles to nearly the speed of light – in 2011.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will visit Moscow to persuade the Kremlin into backing tougher sanctions against Iran, days after media reports revealed that Tel Aviv has dispatched two warships to the Persian Gulf.

The three-day trip, planned weeks ago, will see Netanyahu making every effort in convincing Russian government officials to join the Western-led campaign for additional sanctions against Iran's enrichment activities.

The IDF acknowledged Sunday that there are problems with some of the fences surrounding minefields on the Golan Heights, and in some of the areas the fences are not visible.

Through a little-known visa program that connects international fortunes to depressed economies around the country, Gaithersburg-based NobleOutReach has set out to rebuild parts of New Orleans through investments from wealthy foreigners seeking a gateway for immigration.

As the descent into the slippery slope of racism continues nabated in this land of apartheid, the angle and degree of the slide seem to surprise many. The Israeli parliament (Knesset) has a “Constitution, Law and Justice Committee” terms that only sound similar to what exists in a Western democracy. But the “Jewish state” is “special” where a committee with this name drafts laws to discourage inter-religious marriages, to deny Jerusalemites residency rights, to declare it legal to take land for Jewish
development from those natives who happen to be non-Jews, and to flaunt many other basic rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

THERE IS a danger that all these struggles will become something like “cities of refuge” for young idealists, who desire to devote themselves to a noble cause, but have no desire to take part in the main struggle.

This is another example of "Environment" being used to force us to buy products that we might not want. The CFCs do not last anywhere near as long as the package claims. The ones I bought from Home Depot started failing after just 1 month. Contrary to the package claims, they do NOT put out the same amount of light as the regular bulb of thus and such wattage; I checked with light meter.

Finally, CFCs are TOXIC! If they break, you get mercury vapor in your homes. And unless you dispose of them at special collection sites, the mercury goes into the water table at whatever landfill the bulbs and sent to, along with the toxic materials on the circuit board and the tiny radioisotope that initiates the lamp when switched on.

Not everyone was happy that it passed by voice vote. It's an election year and senators want some Iran-bashing credit with their donors.

Social Security's annual surplus nearly evaporated in 2009 for the first time in 25 years as the recession led hundreds of thousands of workers to retire or claim disability.

While some commentators are concerned with questions to do with the legality of the war, the most crucial issue here is actually the disappearance of ethical judgment from our public and political life. Rather than being concerned with morality and ethics British politicians are concerned with legalism. In other words, if someone would manage to prove that the war was ‘legal’ then the murdering of a million and a half Iraqis would be well justified.

Sarah Palin, the Alaska governor who ran with Sen. John McCain against the Obama-Biden ticket, said on Sunday that U.S. President Barack Obama can win again if he starts backing Israel and decides to attack Iran.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said the U.S. is in no danger of losing its AAA debt rating even though the Obama administration has predicted a $1.6 trillion budget deficit in 2010.

“Absolutely not,” Geithner said, when asked in an ABC News interview broadcast today whether a downgrade is a concern. “That will never happen to this country.”

The South Carolina blog FitsNews describes the new law as "bureaucracy for terrorists."

"In the long and storied history of utterly retarded legislation in South Carolina, we may have finally found the legal statute that takes the cake for sheer stupidity, which we think you’ll agree is saying something," the unsigned blog posting scathingly commented.

The American People should be ashamed of themselves for not seeking the truth of what happened on September 11, 2001, a day of deception that changed their world. Many Americans simply ignore serious problems with an official narrative in which they have been led to believe.

Discover on this website many facts about 911 unpublished by mainline media. Develop your own informed view of events that occured on that historic day.

As in many Jewish Holidays, a humourous way of looking at them is “They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat! That just about sums it up….

Today, the tables are turned….. The Hebrews are the ones doing the killing…. all that seems to be missing is a Chanukah type miracle….. Palestinians want to eat as well!

Political and public pressure is building to bring bingo bling to Alabama’s financially ailing school and general government revenue.

An Iranian assertion that construction on its second enrichment facility began only last year and further analysis of satellite photos of the site have cast fresh doubts on the Barack Obama administration's charge that the construction of the plant near Qom involved a covert decision to violate Iran's obligations to report immediately to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on any decision to build a new facility.

At a Sep. 25 briefing on the site, senior administration officials refused to provide any specific information to back up the claim that construction had begun before the March 2007 Iranian withdrawal from an agreement requiring that it inform the IAEA immediately of any decision to build a nuclear facility.

Syrian President Bashar Assad addressed the voices of war and peace in the Middle East for the first time Sunday evening. Speaking in a meeting with Lebanese Parliament Speaker Nabih Berry, Assad stressed that his government and the Syrian people would stand by Lebanon "in any case of an Israeli attack which it may face."

Official Syrian news agency SANA reported that the two discussed "the repeated Israeli threats against the region's countries and Israeli extremism threatening to destroy the chances for peace by igniting the region with wars and taking it into the unknown."

U.S. President Barack Obama calls the $3.8-trillion US budget he just sent to Congress a major step in restoring America’s economic health.

In fact, it’s another potent fix given to a sick patient deeply addicted to the dangerous drug — debt.

More empires have fallen because of reckless finances than invasion. The latest example was the Soviet Union, which spent itself into ruin by buying tanks.

As we have been forecasting for the last two years, the second wave of mortgage defaults and foreclosures will hit the economy this year. Not only will we have failure in prime loans and option-arm loans, but we are faced with a new crop of subprime and ALT-A loans put into motion by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Ginnie Mae and FHA. In addition, we find it of great interest that the FHA is changing the rules to purchase homes. That, of course, means less homes will be purchased.

The incidence of unemployment may be lessening, but it isn’t going away. Those of you who keep your ear to the ground know that real unemployment is 22.5% and in cities like Detroit it is somewhere near 45 to 50 percent. This is the result of free trade, globalization, offshoring and outsourcing.

Socotra is at the crossroads of the strategic naval waterways of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden (See map below). It is of crucial importance to the US military.

From a military standpoint, the Socotra archipelago is at a strategic location. Socotra is some 3000 km from the US naval base of Diego Garcia, which is among America's largest overseas military facilities.

On January 2nd, 2010, President Saleh and General David Petraeus, Commander of the US Central Command met for high level discussions behind closed doors.

Everything you’ve ever been told about Global Warming is probably untrue. This film blows the whistle on the biggest swindle in modern history. We are told that ‘Man Made Global Warming’ is the biggest ever threat to mankind. There is no room for scientific doubt. Well, watch this film and make up your own mind.