Number Of Iraqis Slaughtered Since The U.S. Invaded Iraq “1,320,110"
www.justforeignpolicy.org/iraq/iraqdeaths.html

Number of U.S. Military Personnel Sacrificed (Officially acknowledged) In America’sWar On Iraq 4,278
icasualties.org/oif/

The War in Iraq Costs
$664,675,618,603
See the cost in your community
nationalpriorities.org/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=182

Spanish Court Opens Investigation of Guantánamo Torture Allegations
Allegations include sexual abuse and beating
By Giles Tremlett in Madrid and agencies
Judge Baltasar Garzón, an investigating magistrate at the National Court in Madrid, said he would investigate allegations made by four detainees who were held at the centre and later released without charges, according to a court document quoted by the Spanish press.
informationclearinghouse.info/article22519.htm

Torture Memos Expose Dark, Imperial Presidency
By Robert S. Becker
This was not a happy week for the torture lobby, nor its defenders, derailing months of charm offensive by Bush-Cheney legacy boosters. A wary President Obama backed off attempts to defuse the torture parade – fretting over divisive investigations and hard-to-win court convictions.
informationclearinghouse.info/article22520.htm

Condi Rice Pulls A Nixon: When the President Does It, That Means It is Not Illegal
By Cenk Uygur
Condoleezza Rice was recently speaking at Stanford when students asked her an excellent question on waterboarding and torture. They have her answer on tape and it isn’t pretty. Condi Rice absolutely pulls a Nixon.
informationclearinghouse.info/article22523.htm

Somalis Say Illegal Fishing By Foreign Trawlers Drove Them To Piracy
By SHASHANK BENGALI
The international community is shouting about piracy. But long before this, we were shouting to the world about our problems,” said Eid, a bony-cheeked former lobsterman with a bushy goatee. “No one listened.”
informationclearinghouse.info/article22522.htm

DHS Sets Guidelines For Possible Swine Flu Quarantines
Anyone violating a quarantine order can be punished by a $250,000 fine and a one-year prison term.
By Declan McCullagh
A Defense Department planning document summarizing the military’s contingency plan says the Pentagon is prepared to assist in “quarantining groups of people in order to minimize the spread of disease during an influenza pandemic” and aiding in “efforts to restore and maintain order.”
informationclearinghouse.info/article22524.htm

Swine Flu?
A Panic Stoked in Order to Posture and Spend:
By Simon Jenkins
Health scares enable media-hungry doctors, public health officials and drugs companies to benefit by manipulating fright.
informationclearinghouse.info/article22521.htm

At least 34 killed as ethnic violence erupts in Karachi:
“The situation is under control now and we are trying to maintain peace,” Rafiq Engineer, provincial minister for special development, said.
english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2009/04/2009429193253995533.html

14 militants killed in last 24 hours:
A spokesman for Pakistan’s military said Thursday that 14 militants had been killed over the last 24 hours in operations against Islamist insurgents in the country’s northwest.
snipurl.com/h3amd

Taliban holds town near capital hostage:
Army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas says troops are encountering stiff resistance from militants in Buner as the troops fight their way toward insurgent strongholds.
snipurl.com/h3anv

Manufacturing Consent For Attacks On Pakistan?
Obama Says Pakistan’s Government Is ‘Very Fragile’:
The government doesn’t “seem to have the capacity to deliver basic services: schools, health care, rule of law and a judicial system that works for the majority of the people,” Obama said at a White House news conference last night.
www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=2060
1070&sid=ahRFijhU0pvQ&refer=politics

Taliban Advance in Pakistan Prompts Shift by U.S.:
New consideration is being given to a long-dormant proposal to allow U.S. counterinsurgency training for Pakistani troops somewhere outside the country, circumventing Pakistan’s refusal to allow American “boots on the ground” there.
snipurl.com/h3apr

Osama still alive, suggests Obama:
Addressing a town hall meeting in the central state of Missouri, the US President also reiterated his administration’s position that Al-Qaeda and the Taliban “are the single most direct threat to our national security interests.”
news.rediff.com/interview/2009/apr/30/
osama-still-alive-suggests-obama.htm

German Occupation Force Soldier Killed, Nine Injured in Afghan Attacks : –
A German soldier was killed and nine injured in two separate attacks in northern Afghanistan’s Kunduz province, where the army is suffering more frequent insurgent assaults.
snipurl.com/h3arf

US occupation force soldiers kill two in northern Iraq:
Two people were shot dead and another wounded when US forces opened fire on attackers near the troubled northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk on Wednesday, US and Iraqi officials said.
news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090429/wl_mideast_afp/iraqunrestuskirkuk

Turkish Warplanes Attack Kurdish Rebels In Iraq -Army:
“The targets… have been hit effectively and with full accuracy,” the statement said, adding all the planes returned safely to base.
snipurl.com/h3asm

Britain ends combat operations in Iraq:
The British military formally ended combat operations in Iraq on Thursday after six years of conflict by handing over control of its main base in Basra to an American brigade.
www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/04/30/britain-iraq.html

Peres: Bombing Iran may not be the ‘best solution’:
“I’m not sure that bombing the nuclear facilities is the best solution. You know, the moment there are centrifuges, you can destroy the centrifuges. You cannot destroy the know-how to create centrifuges. You can postpone,” he told Channel 10.
www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1081918.html

Ahmadinejad: West’s claims of democracy “sheer lies”:
“The recent anti-racism conference in Geneva … proved that the West’s claims of freedom of expression and democracy were sheer lies,” Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying.
news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-04/30/content_11291115.htm

Lebanon frees Hariri suspects:
“The evidence available to him currently is not sufficiently credible to request the maintenance and detention of those persons”, Fransen said.
english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/
2009/04/200942913300364820.html

Court rebuffs feds, reinstates torture suit:
A federal appeals court rebuffed the Obama administration’s assertion of secrecy Tuesday and reinstated a lawsuit by five men who say a Bay Area subsidiary of Boeing Co. helped the CIA fly them to foreign countries to be tortured.
www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/04/29/MNC417AH7A.DTL

Obama: ‘I believe waterboarding was torture, and it was a mistake’:
Barack Obama has rejected the former US vice-president Dick Cheney’s defence of waterboarding, citing the refusal of the then British prime minister, Winston Churchill, to resort to torture even at the height of the Blitz in the second world war.
www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/30/obama-waterboarding-mistake

US Attorney General says 30 current Guantanamo detainees approved for release:
Holder spoke hours ahead of a speech appealing for Europe’s help in closing the military detention facility at the U.S. naval base in Cuba. He said the U.S. is weeks away from asking certain countries to take detainees.
snipurl.com/h3axb

Cuba’s Raul Castro repeats offer to U.S. for talks:
We have reiterated that we are willing to talk about everything with the United States, in equality of conditions, but not to negotiate our sovereignty, nor our political and social system, the right to self-determination, nor our internal affairs,” Castro said in a speech to a ministerial meeting in Havana of the Non-Aligned Movement.
snipurl.com/h3axw

Mass. Senate approves pandemic flu prep bill:
The new Senate version would allow the public health commissioner – in a public health emergency – to close or evacuate buildings, enter private property for investigations, and quarantine individuals.
snipurl.com/h3ays

World flu alert goes higher; Mexico plans shutdown:
Mexico took even more drastic action to squelch a swine flu epidemic, ordering a suspension of private business activity and non-essential federal government activities, as the World Health Organization ratcheted up an alert, warning that “all of humanity” is threatened.
www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-04-30-
swineflu-world-thursday_N.htm?csp=34

Swine Flu Devastates Mexico’s Tourism Industry:
The airports are empty. The beach you could have to yourself. The hotel staffs are washing their hands every half-hour when they’re not sanitizing the doorknobs.
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/
article/2009/04/29/AR2009042904650.html

Peru suspends flights to and from Mexico:
Peru suspended from Thursday all flights to and from Mexico over the ongoing flu epidemic, in a decision that Prime Minister Yehude Simon described as “painful but necessary.”
snipurl.com/h3b0w

Swine flu spreads to Netherlands:
The case was reported hours after the World Health Organisation (WHO) warned that the world is on the brink of a pandemic, saying “all humanity is under threat”.
english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2009
/04/200943011236516712.html

UN says Egypt pig cull real mistake:
Clashes were reported in Khanka, 25km north of Cairo, with pig farmers setting up road blocks and smashing the windscreens of veterinary services’ vehicles as they sought to take people’s pigs away.
english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009
/04/200942923217637747.html

Will pandemic be mild, or kill millions?:
Keiji Fukuda, the WHO’s acting assistant director-general, said that swine flu appeared very similar to normal seasonal flu, a disease that is rarely fatal for healthy adults but can kill the elderly and infirm. – Chan acknowledged that the disease may well cause more discomfort than death, noting that many patients infected in the United States have recovered on their own and without medicine.
www.vision.org/visionmedia/article.aspx?id=15304

U.S. Commerce Department: U.S. economy worst in 50 years:
It’s official. The United States is mired in its worst economic downturn in half a century, the U.S. Commerce Department reported Wednesday. Data released by the department show that the U.S. economy shrank by 6.1 percent during the first three months of the year – a full percentage point worse than what analysts polled by Thomson Reuters had been predicting.
www.bizjournals.com/triangle/stories/2009/04/27/daily42.html

Chrysler to File for Bankruptcy:
 U.S. officials had offered Chrysler’s secured lenders $2.25 billion in cash if they would agree to writedown the $6.9 billion in secured debt that the company owed. But a small group of hedge funds refused the 11th-hour deal, forcing an imminent bankruptcy.
snipurl.com/h3b46

U.S. March Consumer Spending Fell More Than Forecast:
Purchases decreased 0.2 percent after a 0.4 percent gain in February that was larger than previously estimated, the Commerce Department said today in Washington. Incomes fell for the fifth time in the last six months.
www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601
087&sid=a_oglDHVKGyI&refer=home