All signs coming out of Washington, London, Paris and Tel Aviv are pointing towards a pre-emptive military strike against Iran in 2012. But a number of key indicators are also pointing towards an unsuccessful, unlikely operation, whose failure could result in a military and economic tailspin from which the United States and Israel are unlikely to recover.

Currently, the US is following a trajectory of past unsuccessful empires that were unable to sustain themselves resulting in an eventual collapse from within. The US is currently running up a budget deficit which is not only threatening to bankrupt its entire economy, but also threatening the hegemony of its sole instrument for advantage and influence on the world stage – the US dollar. Any threat to the supremacy of the dollar is also a threat to the empire.

read complete aricle here – http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28511

At 12:40 p.m CET (Central European Time) a plane of the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry took off from the Schwechat airport in Vienna to bring the suspects to Moscow. The spy swap itself took just a bit more than an hour. The deported Russians moved from the one plane to the other and without being questioned by the Austrian customs service left for Russia.

The break occurred in a 120-inch, 6- to 7-year-old pipe in Weston and was first noticed between 10 and 11 a.m. yesterday, when workers saw bubbling around the leak on surveillance cameras, officials said. The breach, which occurred where the Metrowest tunnel connects to the Boston tunnel, dumped eight million gallons an hour into the Charles River.

“This is an unprecedented event of this magnitude and at this critical juncture in our water supply system,” Laskey said. “It is highly unusual and catastrophic in nature.”

via http://www.boston.com/

The Associated Press said it had obtained material from the International Atomic Energy Agency which suggested the body was more convinced Iran was trying to make a bomb than its outgoing director, Mohamed ElBaradei, had admitted. ”The agency … assesses that Iran has sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable implosion nuclear device based on HEU [highly enriched uranium] as the fission fuel,” AP quoted a ”secret annexe” to a report on Iran as saying. Western diplomats confirmed that the annexe was authentic. The meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly will come less than a week after Washington dropped its missile shield plans, to the delight of Moscow. On Friday, Mr Medvedev said the decision to abandon plans for defence bases in Poland and the Czech Republic meant he would listen to US concerns more attentively in future but claimed there had been no ”primitive deals”. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin hailed the move as ”brave and correct”.

US officials are hoping that when Mr Medvedev addresses the General Assembly this week he will signal a new approach to international relations. On Friday, there were signs of an immediate thaw in Russia’s icy relations with the West less than 24 hours after Mr Obama’s announcement.
In his first major speech since taking over as NATO secretary-general last month, Anders Fogh Rasmussen suggested that the US, NATO and Russia join forces when it comes to missile defence. ”Both Russia and NATO have a wealth of experience in missile defence,” he said. ”We should now work to combine this experience.”

Dmitry Rogozin, Russia’s hawkish NATO envoy, called the speech ”very positive”, promising it would be carefully analysed in Moscow.

He also confirmed reports that Russia would now shelve plans to fortify its enclave of Kaliningrad with a rocket battery of Iskander missiles and nuclear bombers in response to Washington dropping its missile shield in Eastern Europe.

But the Russian leadership remains divided on the matter of Iran as Moscow enjoys strong commercial and diplomatic ties which it seems reluctant to imperil.

Summoning the optimism, idealism and dedication to public service that his family has long stood for, he reminded his audience that, when his brother John called of going to the moon, he didn’t say it was too far to get there. “This is what we do,” Ted roared. “We reach the moon. We scale the heights. I know it. I’ve seen it. I’ve lived it. And we can do it again.”

He concluded with an echo of his signature phrase, first uttered 28 years earlier at another Democratic convention: “The work begins anew. The hope rises again. And the dream lives on.”

“We’ve lost the irreplaceable center of our family and joyous light in our lives, but the inspiration of his faith, optimism, and perseverance will live on in our hearts forever,” the statement said. “We thank everyone who gave him care and support over this last year, and everyone who stood with him for so many years in his tireless march for progress toward justice, fairness and opportunity for all.”

“I think we’re at the beginning of an unmanned revolution,” Gary Kessler, who oversees unmanned aviation programs for the US Navy and Marines, told AFP.

“We’re spending billions of dollars on unmanned systems.”
Kessler and other Pentagon officials compare the robots to the introduction of the aircraft or the tank, a new technology that dramatically changes strategy and tactics.

According http://www.physorg.com/news169378206.html robots or “unmanned systems” are now deployed by the thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan, spying from the sky for hours on end, searching for booby-traps and firing lethal missiles without putting US soldiers at risk. The use of robotics in the military has exploded in the past several years as technology has advanced while Washington faced a new kind of enemy that required patient, precise surveillance. It’s reported that In 2003, the US military had almost no robots in its arsenal but now has 7,000 unmanned aircraft and at least 10,000 ground vehicles.

The US Air Force, which initially resisted the idea of pilotless planes, said it trains more operators for unmanned aircraft than pilots for its fighter jets and bombers. Peter Singer, author of “Wired for War,” writes that future wars may see tens of thousands of unmanned vehicles in action, possibly facing off against fleets of enemy robots.

Unlike expensive weapons from the Cold War-era, robotic vehicles are not off-limits to countries with modest defense budgets and dozens of governments are investing in unmanned programs.

At the trade show, military officers from the United States, Chile, Australia, Saudi Arabia and India listened to defense contractors promote their robotic vehicles, including a tiny helicopter about two-feet long and L3′s Mobius — a nimble medium-sized drone that reaches speeds of up to 215 knots.

The technology may sometimes resemble something out of “Star Wars” or a toy shop, but the robots determine matters of life and death on the battlefront. In the fight against Al-Qaeda, drones are Washington’s favored weapon.

Predator and Reaper aircraft, armed with precision-guided bombs and Hellfire missiles, regularly carry out strikes in Pakistan’s northwest tribal area, causing an unknown number of civilian casualties. Last week, a drone strike is believed to have have killed the Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud.

The unmanned aircraft in the US military’s inventory range from small Ravens, that can be tossed into the air to see over the next hill, to the giant Global Hawk, a 44-foot-long spy plane that can fly at high altitude for up to 35 hours.

Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters. A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

The pictures, kept secret by Washington during the presidency of George W Bush, were declassified by the White House last week. President Barack Obama is currently trying to galvanise Congress and the American public to take action to halt catastrophic climate change caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

“These are one-metre resolution images, which give you a big picture of the summertime Arctic,” said Thorsten Markus of Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Centre. “This is the main reason why we are so thrilled about it. One-metre resolution is the dimension that’s been missing.”

“Our primary focus is maintaining the continuity of climate observations, and those are at great risk right now because we don’t have the resources to have satellites at the ready and taking the kinds of information that we need,” said Lubchenco, who was appointed by Obama. “We are playing catch-up.”

The satellite would have measured carbon emissions at 100,000 points around the planet every day, providing a wealth of data compared to the 100 or so fixed towers currently in operation in a land-based network.

‘Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,’ concludes the Pentagon analysis. ‘Once again, warfare would define human life.’