"Web 2.0 Suicide Machine" is no more - at least as we have come to know it - and at least for now.

When last we checked in on the Suicide Machine back in January, it was merrily assisting soon-to-be-former members of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn to automatically, speedily -- and ceremoniously -- eliminate the "friends" they had accumulated using those services. More than 3,000 people had bid a virtual farewell to some quarter of a million accumulated acquaintances.

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A group of Israeli settlers destroy a spring by the village of Qarawat Bani Hassan in the Salfit district of the occupied West Bank. Palestinian villagers were forced to watch helplessly as settlers poured sand and cement into the spring, guarded by five armed members of the Israeli military.

Moves aims to restore public confidence in science of global warming after mistake over melting rates of glaciers.

Teenagers who complete two weeks' work experience at a McDonald's restaurant will be awarded a qualification worth up to a B grade at GCSE.

Youngsters will be offered the 'certificate in work skills' for completing a ten-day programme which includes flipping burgers, serving customers at the tills and cleaning the dining area.

I estimate that as much as 50,000 tonnes of gold have been sold that do not exist. That is equivalent of all the gold reserves in the world that are yet to be mined -- or, put another way, 25 years of gold production.

That is the granddaddy of all short positions.

The fractional reserve operation of the LBMA is likely to be the next Madoff scandal, except multiplied by 100 -- a $5 trillion fraud as opposed to a $50 billion fraud.

A U.S. Transport Security Administration analyst has been indicted with tampering with databases used by the TSA to identify possible terrorists who may be trying to fly in the U.S.

Douglas James Duchak, 46, was indicted by a grand jury Wednesday with two counts of damaging protected computers. According to a federal indictment, Duchak tried to compromise computers at the TSA's Colorado Springs Operations Center (CSOC) on Oct. 22, 2009, seven days after he'd being given two weeks notice that he was being dismissed. He was also charged with tampering with a TSA server that contained data from the U.S. Marshal's Service Warrant Information Network.

As the government has pledged more and more money to cover the companies' losses, it has assured the public that planning was underway for overhauling the firms so the bailouts would end. As recently as December, the Obama administration said it expected to release a preliminary report on how to remake Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac around Feb. 1.

But no plan was produced, and in response to questions from lawmakers, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner clarified last month that it would be another year before the government proposes how to restructure the firms.

Social Security benefits are off–limits to creditors, such as credit–card companies and banks. But the U.S. can collect debts to federal agencies by "offsetting," or withholding Social Security and disability payments.

The year is 2010 and to anyone not in denial, the industrialized nations have entered the greatest calamity the world has ever known:

* 35 Million Americans on Food Stamps: 12 Percent of U.S. Population on Food Stamps Highest Since Records Kept in 1969, and that’s before the Obama administration announced a planned three-year budget freeze on government discretionary spending. (My Budget 360)
* 18 Million empty houses in the United States and 39 million Americans who are no longer working or looking for work, and that’s before Federal Reserve finishes rewriting the rules of American “capitalism” as US Housing, the Automobile Industry and the American Dream are dismantled. (The 31-Year-Old in Charge of Dismantling G.M., David E. Sanger)

Some 50,000 new housing units in Jerusalem neighborhoods beyond the Green Line are in various stages of planning and approval, planning officials told Haaretz. They said Jerusalem's construction plans for the next few years, even decades, are expected to focus on East Jerusalem.

Some New York City chefs and restaurant owners are taking aim at a bill introduced in the New York Legislature that, if passed, would ban the use of salt in restaurant cooking.

But as Joanne Nova, an Australian climate blogger (www.joannenova.com.au) and author of The Skeptics Handbook recently noted, it pales beside the $79 billion the U.S. government alone has spent on climate research and technology since 1989. (Nova rejects the science of anthropogenic global warming, which doesn’t change her point.)

Given that kind of public mega-money invested in climate science and technology in just one country, it makes you wonder about some things.

The House voted down a challenge to President Obama's conduct of the war in Afghanistan Wednesday, rejecting a measure that would have compelled U.S. armed forces to leave the country within 30 days.

New watchdog report says the Treasury Department sank billions into auto finance giant GMAC without an exit strategy or proof the company was viable - a decision that could cost taxpayers $6.3 billion.

Self-proclaimed waterboarding fan Dick Cheney called it a no-brainer in a 2006 radio interview: Terror suspects should get a "a dunk in the water." But recently released internal documents reveal the controversial "enhanced interrogation" practice was far more brutal on detainees than Cheney's description sounds, and was administered with meticulous cruelty.

Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney "specially designed" to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner's nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking – and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.

In this interview, Kenney states that FEMA was deployed to New York on Monday night, September 10th, to be ready to go into action on Tuesday morning, September 11th.

The government ran up the largest monthly deficit in history in February, keeping the flood of red ink on track to top last year's record for the full year.

The Treasury Department said Wednesday that the February deficit totaled $220.9 billion, 14 percent higher than the previous record set in February of last year.

The Canadian dollar, or loonie as it is affectionately called here, is likely to soar above parity with the US greenback this year, experts at a Canadian bank said Wednesday.

Canadian Imperial Bank of Canada (CIBC) chief economist Avery Shenfeld said the Canadian dollar had already gained several cents in recent weeks as the market firms up expectations of an interest rate hike in July.

If as expected, the central bank "is out in front of the US Federal Reserve by a couple of quarters" in raising interest rates, the Canadian dollar could reach 1.02 dollars versus the US dollar by September, before dipping back to 0.97 dollars by year end," Shenfeld said.

Were Ukraine to sign up, there would be a common economic space encompassing the “Big Four” republics of the Soviet era, with a combined population of 213 million and stretching from the European Union to China. Its political, military and economic centre would be in Moscow, where Mr Putin is expected to reclaim the presidency in 2012 for up to 12 more years.

A common currency would give him an economic lever to challenge the US dollar and the euro by creating a regional reserve currency. Finance Minister Aleksei Kudrin stated last month that Russia, as the world’s largest energy supplier, may soon sell oil in roubles.

The waterboarding sessions that terrorist suspects were subjected to during the Bush administration were "administered with meticulous cruelty" and were in part designed so that detainees acted as "guinea pigs" for future interrogation sessions, says an exhaustive new report.

Drawing on numerous documents about the CIA's torture program that have been released over the past year, Mark Benjamin at Salon.com reports that interrogators went to extreme lengths to ensure that detainees were pushed to their physical limits, including feeding the detainees a liquid diet to make them more capable of ingesting large quantities of water, and replacing their water with a saline solution that would keep detainees from dying when they ingested too much water.

Unemployment rates worsened in 30 states in January:
In other words, unemployment increased in the majority of states.

However, CNN is seeing the glass as half full, noting in a report entitled "State unemployment picture brightens":

An Israeli supermarket chain is using a spoof of surveillance footage showing the alleged assassins of a Hamas commander in a television advert.

The advert's fake grainy surveillance footage shows actors wearing elaborate disguises.

The Senate health-care bill would raise effective marginal tax rates on lower and middle-income singles and families up to 41%.

In yet another example of government overstepping its bounds, the Obama administration is preparing to ban fishing in coastal areas around the country, as well as the Great Lakes and other inland water resources.

Today we are seeing once again the heavy hand of the war profiteers trying to reshape the film industry into a tool to propagandize the public into a high war-fever such that they will gladly trade their own blood for gold to line the pockets of the defense establishment. And those individuals who have the courage to speak out are attacked, and once again they are smeared to silence them. In the 1940s it was "Communist", today it is "Anti-Semite", but aside from the particular label used, the methods, goals, and morality are little changed from the days of Joseph McCarthy.

Some people will object to this conclusion, and will tell me the universe is only 6000 years old, based on a literal interpretation of the Bible. But if the universe and the stars are only 6000 years old, and light appears to have taken billions of years to make that journey, how did that light manage to reach the earth?

An Icelandic savings bank, Icesave, had attracted billions in deposits from hundreds of thousands of British and Dutch citizens, due to the phenomenally high interest rates it offered. Icesave collapsed in 2008, for much the same reason Lehman Brothers, WaMu, and hundreds of local savings banks did: its bankers used their cash to make complicated, bad, leveraged investments, mostly on real estate.

The level of debts written off because defaulting borrowers will never repay them shot up in 2009, Bank of England figures have shown.

In a letter to the CFTC's Chairman, Gary Gensler, GATA Chairman William Murphy shares the following bombshell:

"GATA has evidence that there are enormous physical short positions in the gold and silver markets that cannot be covered."

Even as the CFTC is meeting later this month to establish position limits in the gold, silver, and other precious metals' markets, it could be none other than the CFTC's core banks, and Mr. Gensler's former Goldman bosses, that form the very core of the biggest market manipulation collusion syndicate in the history of the commodity markets.

It's a terrifying image transfixing Washington: President Barack Obama's bruising enforcer Rahm Emanuel, naked, in a communal shower, berating a congressman over perceived political cowardice.

The legend of Emanuel, revered as a master of the US capital's dark arts by allies and foes alike, is being further embroidered by a tour-de-force of score settling by resigning Democratic lawmaker Eric Massa.