"We have 18 pax [passengers] dismounted and spreading out at this time," an Air Force pilot said from a cramped control room at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, 7,000 miles away. He was flying a Predator drone remotely using a joystick, watching its live video transmissions from the Afghan sky and radioing his crew and the unit on the ground.

The Afghans unfolded what looked like blankets and kneeled. "They're praying. They are praying," said the Predator's camera operator, seated near the pilot.

For the 400 US taxpayers with the highest adjusted gross income, the effective federal income tax rate - what they actually pay - fell from almost 30% in 1995 to just under 17% in 2007, according to the IRS.

And for the approximately 1.4 million people who make up the top 1% of taxpayers, the effective federal income tax rate dropped from 29% to 23% in 2008. It may seem too fantastic to be true, but the top 400 end up paying a lower rate than the next 1,399,600 or so.

Was the photo of smiling Obama shaking hands with President Gadhafi taken before or after Obama knew he was a bad Libyan? Did Obama's smile came from constipation, or did God only recently inform him after prayer that Gadhafi was evil? Did Divine consultation convince Obama not to save rebels' lives in Bahrain and Yemen? He did nothing when their nasty leaders murdered them for protesting.

Rupert Murdoch is about to be ambushed by a cross-party group of peers determined to stop the total takeover of BSkyB by News Corp, the Mole can reveal.

While MPs were packing their holiday shorts for the beach and a long holiday until April 26, protests were raised in the House of Lords by former Times journalist and Tory peer Lord Fowler about the latest developments in the telephone hacking saga - the arrests this week of chief reporter Neville Thurlbeck, 50, and former news editor Ian Edmondson, 42, on suspicion of having unlawfully intercepted voicemail messages.

Ted Baillieu, Barry O'Farrell and Colin Barnett's state election victories may augur well federally for the Coalition and badly for Labor. There's clearly a huge swag of voters for whom Labor is on the nose, and while no one can be absolutely sure of the degree to which Labor's floundering federally has played a part, nobody sensible says it played no part.

Even the most jaundiced Coalition campaigner is enthused, and fear strikes in the hearts of Labor marginal seat holders.

I, along with the members of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, support the position that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the four detainees charged with 9/11 crimes should be tried in federal courts and not in military tribunals.

According to information released by WikiLeaks, through The Sydney Morning Herald, Mark Arbib was a 'protected source' of the American Embassy in Canberra.

Writing in The Good Weekend on 12 March, Nikki Barrowclough says in an article, "The Power of One", American diplomatic cables refer to Arbib as 'a tough political operator and evidence-based strategic thinker' who had met with embassy representatives 'repeatedly throughout his political rise'. In other words he met with US representatives over a period of time on a frequent basis over a number of years.

Let's judge the moderates and extremists.

Once in power in 2007 who supported in practice the US led invasion of Iraq, an invasion which has killed more than 1 million civilians? Labor.

Who supported the invasion of Afghanistan and has kept Australian killers there? Labor.

Who supported and now directs the racist Northern Territory intervention and has expanded parts of the welfare quarantining program into other areas of Australia? Labor.

What is the life expectancy gap between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians under Labor? 17 years.

Special flights to Dakar have ferried 167 foreigners, including French and Lebanese nationals, out of the Ivory Coast's violence-hit city of Abidjan, the French military says.

"Seventy-seven, mostly French, left overnight and 90 in the afternoon. These were not evacuations but options given to leave," French military spokesman Frederic Daguillon said on Sunday.

"Commercial flights have not restarted, these are special flights," he said.

Earlier, UN chief Ban Ki-moon demanded Mr Ouattara take action over a massacre of several hundred people blamed on his followers, a UN spokesman said.

On Monday President Obama received an award for transparency, which ironically was given to him during a closed, unannounced meeting. Bestowed upon the President from a group of transparency advocates, the ceremony took place in secret, even though - as of two weeks ago - it was supposed to be open to the press.

If I was an American lawyer who had fought for many years to secure habeas corpus rights for the prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba - in other words, the right to ask an impartial judge to rule on my captors' reasons for slinging me in a legal black hole and leaving me to rot there forever - the latest news from the Court of Appeals in Washington D.C. (also known as the D.C. Circuit Court) would make me sick in a bucket rather than believing any longer that the law - the revered law on which the United States was founded - can bring any meaningful remedy for the prisoners at Guantánamo.

More than any other individual - from a long list of contributors to Labor's appropriately punishing fall from grace in NSW - Edward Moses Obeid is challenged only by John Robertson, perversely the ALP's new leader, for the title of having wreaked greatest damage on the party that governed this state for 52 of the past 70 years.

from Crikey

Problems with pushing new coercive employment policies

Eva Cox writes:

Yesterday Prime Minister Julia Gillard opened the inaugural Gough Whitlam Oration with a few words "adopted from John Curtin, but ever identified with Gough Whitlam". Set against an increasingly hostile political environment, this speech opened with a welcome gesture - Gillard sensibly pointed to the "politics of inclusion".

Gillard pledged, that as "prime minister and federal Labor leader, it is my role to define what it means for Labor to be its best self". She promised Labor has "always understood that we must be the interpreters of the future to the present and must shape the future so it is one of fairness".

The FBI recently announced that its Next Generation Identification System (NGIS) has "reached its initial operating capacity". This vast new biometrics project, for which Lockheed Martin won a $1bn contract in 2008, encompasses not only fingerprints but also, possibly, such biometrics as iris scans, face recognition, bodily scars, marks and tattoos.