Introduction

The MS-13 gang, aka Mara Salvatrucha 13, is one of the most violently dangerous gangs in the United States - and one of the most organized. The MS-13 gang has cliques, or factions, located throughout the United States and is unique in that it retains is ties to its El Salvador counterparts. With cliques in Washington DC, Oregon, Alaska, Arkansas, Texas, Nevada, Utah, Oklahoma, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Maryland, Virginia, Georgia, Florida, Canada, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, and several other South American countries, the MS-13 gang is truly "international" and on the verge of becoming the first gang to be categorized as an "organized crime" entity.

Gang members, who sport numerous tattoos on their bodies and faces, wear blue and white colors taken from the El Salvadoran flag. Their membership is estimated to total over 36,000 in the Honduras alone. Members typically range in age from 11 to 40 years old. Their progressive increase in violent activities and careless disregard for the law (threats and attacks against law enforcement officials is common), has made them the most feared gang in the United States. MS-13 criminal activities include drug smuggling, gun running, people smuggling, hits for hire, theft, drug sales, arson, and of course, strong arming the locals. Their wide-ranging activities and elevated status has even caught the eye of the FBI who recently initiated wide-scale raids against known and suspected gang members netting hundreds of arrests across the country.

Bob Williams/Philadelphia Inquirer/

U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA)

• FBI investigates Rep. Curt Weldon

WASHINGTON - Pennsylvania congressman Curt Weldon, under investigation for allegedly trading his influence to get lobbying business for one of his daughters, also has helped corporations that have hired another daughter, a friend and some of his former aides.

Federal Election Commission reports show that within months of Weldon's advocacy on their behalf, three of these firms and their executives gave more than $95,000 in political contributions to the 10-term Republican.

The New Jersey court decision that gay couples are entitled to the same rights as heterosexual couples was bad news for social conservatives -- the bad news they were hoping for.

"Pro-traditional-marriage organizations ought to give a distinguished service award to the New Jersey Supreme Court," said the Rev. Richard Land, head of the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Land and other conservative religious leaders predicted that the court's 4 to 3 ruling, which was handed down Wednesday, would boost turnout of social conservatives in the midterm elections, particularly in the eight states that have constitutional amendments against same-sex marriage on the Nov. 7 ballot.

Washington, D.C. - About 1,000 documents obtained in a Freedom of Information Act request to the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America show the White House is engaging in collaborative relations with Mexico and Canada outside the U.S. Constitution, says Minuteman columnist and author Dr. Jerome Corsi.

"The documents give clear evidence that the Bush administration has created a 'shadow government,'" Corsi said.

The documents can be viewed here http://stopspp.com/stopspp/?page_id=11, on a special website set up by the Minuteman Project.

The resolution – sponsored by Republican Reps. Virgil Goode Jr. of Virginia, Tom Tancredo of Colorado, Walter Jones of North Carolina, and Ron Paul of Texas – expresses "the sense of Congress that the United States should not engage in the construction of a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) Superhighway System or enter into a North American Union (NAU) with Mexico and Canada."

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Several Israeli cabinet ministers called on Sunday for a military operation to retake control of Gaza's southern border and prevent Palestinian militants smuggling weapons from neighboring Egypt.

"Action must be taken without hesitation. Any hesitation is dangerous and we must act immediately,'' Industry and Trade Minister Eli Yishai of the religious party Shas told reporters.

A hidden crisis is under way. Many government insiders are aware of serious plans for war with Iran, but Congress and the public remain largely in the dark. The current situation is very like that of 1964, the year preceding our overt, open-ended escalation of the Vietnam War, and 2002, the year leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

In both cases, if one or more conscientious insiders had closed the information gap with unauthorized disclosures to the public, a disastrous war might have been averted entirely.

The landlocked state of Afghanistan sits at the crossroads of Central Asia, the Indian sub-continent, and the Middle East. It is geo-strategically and economically important for a number of reasons.

Firstly, Afghanistan is a major geo-strategic hub that conveniently flanks Iran, the former Soviet Union, and China. Afghanistan’s location has always been significant. For most of its history, the geographic area has been a frontier between Iran, India, and China. Later, since its Independence from Iran, it has acted as a buffer state between Iran, Tsarist Russia succeeded by the Soviet Union, and India under British colonial rule—later succeeded by the Republic of India and Pakistan. Afghanistan is an ideal place to create a wedge between the major Eurasian powers and to establish a permanent military presence for future operations in Eurasia.

Secondly, Afghanistan also constitutes a doorstep into energy-rich Central Asia, which bypasses the territories of Iran, the Russian Federation, and China. This is an important factor because external forces from outside the region such as the United States or Britain can use Afghanistan to circumvent these rival regional powers. A pipeline corridor running through Pakistan and Afghanistan from the oil and gas fields of Turkmenistan and Central Asia has been a major project for the United States and its oil corporations for years.

NATO combat missions, under the auspices of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) are concentrated in Southwest and Northwest Afghanistan where the strategic oil and gas pipeline corridor from Central Asia to the Indian Ocean is to be located.

Officials at the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade were surprised three years ago to be invited to a luncheon in honor of visiting Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), hosted by Bogoljub Karic, a wealthy Serbian businessman who had been barred from visiting or trading with the United States because of his close ties to former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic.

Weldon "was visiting solely because of Karic," whom he was trying to get off the U.S. blacklist, a former senior embassy official familiar with the visit concluded. "It seemed odd" at the time, because Karic had no obvious tie to Weldon's district outside Philadelphia, and Weldon should have known the embassy was shunning contacts with him, the official said.

The FBI is investigating whether Rep. Curt Weldon used his influence to benefit himself or his daughter. (Matt Rourke - AP)

History should record October 17, 2006, as the reverse of July 4, 1776.

From the noble American ideal of each human being possessing “unalienable rights” as declared by the Founders 230 years ago amid the ringing of bells in Philadelphia, the United States effectively rescinded that concept on a dreary fall day in Washington.

At a crimped ceremony in the East Room of the White House, President George W. Bush signed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 while sitting behind a sign reading “Protecting America.”

It's accepted wisdom that the United States, despite recent problems, is still the strongest growth locomotive for the world economy, the pillar of the global system. What if we were to discover that, instead of being the pillar, that the United States was, in fact, the heart of a dysfunctional economic system, which is spreading instability, unemployment, and depression globally?

No other nation on earth comes near to the commanding US military superiority in smart bombs, military IT, or in sheer force capabilities. The US position in the world since 1945, and especially since 1971, has rested on two pillars, however: The superiority of the US military over all, and, the role of the dollar as world reserve currency. That dollar is the Achilles heel of American hegemony today.

But the Bush administration's hostility toward Iran is not simply an outgrowth of the current crisis. War with Iran has been in the works for the past five years, shaped in almost complete secrecy by a small group of senior Pentagon officials attached to the Office of Special Plans. The man who created the OSP was Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy. A former Middle East specialist on the National Security Council in the Reagan administration, Feith had long urged Israel to secure its borders in the Middle East by attacking Iraq and Iran. After Bush's election, Feith went to work to make that vision a reality, putting together a team of neoconservative hawks determined to drive the U.S. to attack Tehran. Before Bush had been in office a year, Feith's team had arranged a covert meeting in Rome with a group of Iranians to discuss their clandestine help.

The meeting was arranged by Michael Ledeen, a member of the cabal brought aboard by Feith because of his connections in Iran. Described by The Jerusalem Post as "Washington's neoconservative guru," Ledeen grew up in California during the 1940s. His father designed the air-conditioning system for Walt Disney Studios, and Ledeen spent much of his early life surrounded by a world of fantasy. "All through my childhood we were an adjunct of the Disney universe," he once recalled. "According to family legend, my mother was the model for Snow White, and we have a picture of her that does indeed look just like the movie character."

In 1977, after earning a Ph.D. in history and philosophy and teaching in Rome for two years, Ledeen became the first executive director of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a pro-Israel pressure group that served as a flagship of the neoconservative movement. A few years later, after Reagan was elected, Ledeen had become prominent enough to earn a spot as a consultant to the National Security Council alongside Feith. There he played a central role in the worst scandal of Reagan's presidency: the covert deal to provide arms to Iran in exchange for American hostages being held in Lebanon. Ledeen served as the administration's intermediary with Israel in the illegal-arms deal. In 1985, he met with Manucher Ghorbanifar, a one-time Iranian carpet salesman who was widely believed to be an Israeli agent. The CIA considered Ghorbanifar a dangerous con man and had issued a "burn notice" recommending that no U.S. agency have any dealings with him. Unfazed, Ledeen called Ghorbanifar "one of the most honest, educated, honorable men I have ever known." The two men brokered the arms exchange—a transaction that would result in the indictment of fourteen senior officials in the Reagan administration.

The plan to promote alternatives to Hamas includes funding to help restructure Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah group and provide training and strategic advice to politicians and secular parties opposed to Hamas Islamists.

"This project supports (the) objective to create democratic alternatives to authoritarian or radical Islamist political options," one official U.S. document obtained by Reuters said.

The U.S. campaign coincides with signs that Abbas is considering sacking the government led by Hamas, which defeated Fatah in January elections, in a process that could lead to a new parliamentary vote.

U.S. officials and consultants say the effort is being conducted without fanfare in order to protect the Palestinians who are receiving U.S. help - some already branded by Hamas leaders as collaborators with Washington and Israel.

FBI agents investigating U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon (R., Pa.) conducted six raids this morning - including at the homes of his daughter and a longtime friend.

In all, agents executed four search warrants in the Philadelphia area and two in Jacksonville, Fla., officials said.

In Center City, agents searched the law office of John Gallagher, a Weldon friend who has conducted extensive business in Russia and former Soviet Republics.

In Media, agents searched the offices of the public relations firm formed by Weldon's longtime friend Charles P. Sexton Jr., and the congressman's daughter, Karen.

Sexton and Karen Weldon formed Solutions North America in 2002, and won $1 million in contracts from two Russian energy firms and a Serbian family with ties to Slobodan Milosevic.

FBI agents in Jacksonville, Fla., raided the office of one of the Russian energy firms, Itera, and a private residence whose connection to the investigation was not disclosed.

Could wedding bells be far behind? It was all on display, photo included, on www.state.gov. And while you’re cruising the Internet, a little creative Googling will yield a long list of who else is gay, openly and not, in the highest ranks of both the Bush administration and the Republican hierarchy. The openly gay range from Steve Herbits, the prescient right-hand consultant to Donald Rumsfeld who foresees disaster in Iraq in Bob Woodward’s book “State of Denial,” to Israel Hernandez, the former Bush personal aide and current Commerce Department official whom the president nicknamed “Altoid boy.” (Let’s not go there.)

All new faith schools will have to offer up to a quarter of places to non-believers in a move ministers believe will promote integration and ease growing fears that British society is splintering on religious and race grounds.

	Faith schools: places open for non-believers

Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, is expected this week to announce the plans in changes to the Education and Inspection Bill.

The move follows warnings from David Davis, the shadow home secretary, that the country was slipping into a system of "voluntary apartheid" in which there was a danger of creating "a series of closed societies within our open society."

The Church of England has already announced it will set aside a quarter of places at its new schools for people outside the Church.

However, under Mr Johnson's plans Roman Catholic, Jewish and Muslim institutions will be asked to do the same. Where local authorities choose not to invoke the powers, there will be a facility for individuals to appeal to the Education Secretary.

[Ziopedia Editor's note: Sorcha Faal is one of the most sickening cases of Holocultology, but her article on Bush preparing for exile in Paraguay to avoid war crime charges was simply too fascinating to ignore.]

Russian Intelligence Analysts are reporting today that the American President’s daughter, Jenna Bush, has secured on behalf of her father, the American President, and the Bush Family, the purchase of nearly 100,000 acres of land in the South American Nation of Paraguay, and which is also confirmed by the Latin American News Service, and as we can read as reported in their article titled "Bush Buys Land in Northern Paraguay", and which says:

The 8-year-old Kars-Tbilisi-Baku Railroad Project moves up in the agenda. The reason is that the Armenian lobby in the United States has blocked loans to this project in the U.S. Senate. Immediately afterwards, the fact that Russia, a neocolonial power and master in Armenia, is about to impose an embargo on Georgia, also brings another light to the project. This route will be Turkey's cheapest and shortest access to Central Asia. Also, Georgia, immersed in economic troubles, will become a transit center of the region with the help of this railroad, the Turkish English newspaper Daily News reported.

The payments included a $3 million “birthday present” to current communist leader Kim Jong Il and offshore payments amounting to “several tens of million dollars” to the previous communist dictator, Kim Il Sung, the documents said.

Moon apparently was seeking a business foothold in North Korea, but the transactions also raised potential legal questions for Moon, who appears to have defied U.S. embargos on trade and financial relations with the Pyongyang government. Those legal questions were never pursued, however, apparently because of Moon's powerful political connections within the Republican power structure of Washington, including financial and political ties to the Bush family.

ANDREW COUNCILL/KRT

Representative Curt Weldon in his office in June 2005.

WASHINGTON - The Justice Department is investigating whether Republican Rep. Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania traded his political influence for lucrative lobbying and consulting contracts for his daughter, according to sources with direct knowledge of the inquiry.

In a book entitled Tempting Faith: an Inside Story of Political Seduction, to be published on Monday, Mr Kuo portrays the Bush White House's commitment to evangelical causes as little more than a cynical facade designed to win votes.

As should be clear by now, the Israeli government's fingerprints are all over this BBC "documentary". And that is hardly surprising because the man behind this "independent" production is Israel's leading film-maker: Noam Shalev.

Shalev, a graduate of a New York film school, has been making a spate of documentaries through his production company Highlight Films, based in Herzliya, near Tel Aviv, that have been lapped up by the BBC and other foreign broadcasters. With the BBC's stamp of approval, it is easy for Shalev to sell his films around the world.

When does "collateral damage" so dwarf combatant deaths that war becomes genocide?

Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq has cost 655,000 Iraqis their lives. That is the conclusion of a study financed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for International Studies and conducted by physicians under the direction of Johns Hopkins University epidemiologists. These are deaths over and above the pre-invasion mortality rate. Bush's illegal invasion raised Iraq's mortality rate from 5.5 deaths per 1,000 people per year to 13.3 deaths per 1,000 people per year. The study is published by the distinguished British medical journal, The Lancet, and is available on the journal's Web site [.pdf].

Thomas DiLorenzo’s The Real Lincoln (2002) was as much an event as it was a book. Here was a brutally frank treatment of a political figure we are all expected to treat with a quiet awe, and certainly not with the kind of serious and sustained scrutiny reserved for mere mortals. With every major aspect of the standard narrative that students are taught about Lincoln laughably and grotesquely false, this book was a shocking reminder of suppressed truths. It sold extremely well, managing the truly astonishing feat of reaching number two in Amazon sales rank in the face of (surprise!) a complete media blackout. That kind of success, in the absence of a major marketing and publicity campaign, is almost completely unheard of.

In the wake of his last book, How Capitalism Saved America, DiLorenzo has returned to Lincoln once more in the brand new Lincoln Unmasked. Although readers should without a doubt read both books, Lincoln Unmasked is in some ways even more incisive and relentless than The Real Lincoln. To get an idea of this latest book’s breadth, consider just some of its chapter titles: "The Lincoln Myths – Exposed," "Fake Lincoln Quotes," "The Myth of the Morally Superior ‘Yankee,’" "An Abolitionist Who Despised Lincoln," "The Truth about States’ Rights," "Lincoln’s Big Lie," "A ‘Great Crime’: The Arrest Warrant for the Chief Justice of the United States," "The Great Railroad Lobbyist," "The Great Protectionist," "The Great Inflationist," "Lincolnite Totalitarians," "The Lincoln Cult on Imprisoning War Opponents," and "Contra the Lincoln Cult."