More than a month into the disaster, a host of anecdotal evidence is emerging from reporters, photographers, and TV crews in which BP and Coast Guard officials explicitly target members of the media, restricting and denying them access to oil-covered beaches, staging areas for clean-up efforts, and even flyovers.

Last week, a CBS TV crew was threatened with arrest when attempting to film an oil-covered beach. On Monday, Mother Jones published this firsthand account of one reporter's repeated attempts to gain access to clean-up operations on oil-soaked beaches, and the telling response of local law enforcement. The latest instance of denied press access comes from Belle Chasse, Louisiana-based Southern Seaplane Inc, which was scheduled to take a New Orleans Times-Picayune photographer for a flyover on Tuesday afternoon, and says it was denied permission once BP officials learned that a member of the press would be on board.

"We are not at liberty to fly media, journalists, photographers, or scientists," the company said in a letter it sent on Tuesday to Senator David Vitter (Republican for Louisiana). "We strongly feel that the reason for this massive [temporary flight restriction] is that BP wants to control their exposure to the press."

The ability to document a disaster, particularly through images, is key to focusing the nation's attention on it, and the resulting clean-up efforts. Within days of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, pictures of dead otters, fish, and birds, as well as oil-covered shorelines, ignited nationwide outrage and led to a backlash against Exxon.

With his wits about him (and some basic knowledge of the Bill of Rights), Lance at first refused to show his photographs to local law enforcement. They threatened to detain him (probably under the Patriot Act) if he didn't, so he gave in and let them see the photos. Later, when private BP security personnel asked for Lance's personal information, he refused to give it to them. So - get this - the police turned over his private information to the BP security goon!

This is scary stuff, folks. Now we have a police state in America. No one can deny it. You can't argue the point anymore. It is documented fact, and it's happening right now in the Gulf Coast.

If you pick up a professional camera and start snapping photos of a BP refinery, or a BP cleanup vessel, or a beach with an oil boom on it, you risk being followed, detained, questioned and intimidated. And if you don't surrender your own rights and consent to an illegal search of your photos or film footage, you will be hauled into a federal holding facility and held by the Department of Homeland Security until they feel like letting you go.

Your rights as a free citizen have now been obliterated. America is now a fascist corporatocracy that answers to the financial interests of the corporations - at the expense of the freedoms of the People. What's really scary about this is that BP is a British corporation that is now controlling American law enforcement officials. "These are true police state tactics, and it's now clear that it is part of a pattern. It's been documented for months now that BP and government officials have been acting in unison to block media coverage of the area."

Read full article http://www.naturalnews.com/029153_British_Petroleum_Police_State.html

The Americans launched their first atomic nuclear tests above the Earth's atmosphere in 1958. Atom bombs had little effect on the magnetosphere, but the hydrogen bomb of July 9, 1962, did. Code-named "Starfish Prime" by the military, it literally created an artificial extension of the Van Allen belts that could be seen across the Pacific Ocean, from Hawaii to New Zealand.

In Honolulu, the explosions were front page news. "N-Blast Tonight May Be Dazzling: Good View Likely," said the Honolulu Advertiser. Hotels held what they called "Rainbow Bomb Parties" on rooftops and verandas. When the bomb burst, people told of blackouts and strange electrical malfunctions, like garage doors opening and closing on their own. But the big show was in the sky.

Full story and photo's - http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128170775

In a series of phone conversations and email exchanges last week, he said that no other forecaster was likely to accept his reasoning, which is based on his version of the Elliott Wave theory - a technical approach to market analysis that he embraces with evangelical fervor.

Originating in the writings of Ralph Nelson Elliott, an obscure accountant who found repetitive patterns, or "fractals," in the stock market of the 1930s and '40s, the theory suggests that an epic downswing is under way, Mr Prechter said. But he argued that even skeptical investors should take his advice seriously.

"I'm saying: 'Winter is coming. Buy a coat,'" he said. "Other people are advising people to stay naked. If I'm wrong, you're not hurt. If they're wrong, you're dead. It's pretty benign advice to opt for safety for a while." His advice: individual investors should move completely out of the market and hold cash and cash equivalents, like Treasury bills, for years to come.

For a rough parallel, he said, go all the way back to England and the collapse of the South Sea Bubble in 1720, a crash that deterred people "from buying stocks for 100 years," he said. This time, he said, "If I'm right, it will be such a shock that people will be telling their grandkids many years from now, 'Don't touch stocks.'"

A grand cycle is ending, he says, and the time for reckoning is near.

In a reflective speech to an assembly whose members states have increased from 77 to 192 since her last visit, the Queen praised the UN for its work in reducing conflict, offering humanitarian assistance and tackling the effects of poverty. The "waging of peace" was "perhaps the hardest leadership of all", she said. However, she warned that "so much remains to be done", quoting Dag Hammarskjold, a former UN secretary-general, who "once said that 'constant attention by a good nurse may be just as important as a major operation by a surgeon'."

She added: "Good nurses get better with practice; sadly the supply of patients never ceases." The Queen also warned that "new challenges" such as terrorism and global warming had emerged that had "tested this organisation as much as its member states". On climate change, "careful account must be taken of the risks facing smaller, more vulnerable nations, many of them from the Commonwealth", she said. She said she hoped that, in another 53 years, "our sincerity, our willingness to take a lead, and our determination to do the right thing, will stand the test of time".

The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh spent only five hours in New York, sweltering under heat health warnings as temperatures soared to a record 103 degrees. After addressing the General Assembly, the Queen briefly met Commonwealth leaders before she was driven to the site of the World Trade Centre.

There, she laid a wreath to victims of the September 11 terror attacks and, accompanied by Michael Bloomberg, the city's mayor, met rescue workers and relatives of those who died.

The IFS, which has built a powerful reputation through its economic analyses of election proposals and the Budget, went on to suggest that its report "casts doubt" on the Government's aim of preventing family breakdown by promoting marriage.

Ellen Greaves, research economist at the IFS, said: "The evidence suggests that much of the difference in relationship stability between married and cohabiting parents is due to pre-existing differences between the kinds of people who get married before they have children, compared to those that cohabit."

It found that parents who are cohabiting when their baby is born are three times as likely to split up, by the time their child is five, than those who are married. But the IFS says couples who live together tend to be younger and less well off, with fewer educational qualifications, and are less likely to have planned their pregnancy.

It concludes: "While married couples have more stable relationships than couples who cohabit, this is not because they are married, but because of the other characteristics they have that lead to marriage."

The AP investigation uncovered particular concern with 3,500 of the neglected wells - those characterized in federal government records as "temporarily abandoned."

Regulations for temporarily abandoned wells require oil companies to present plans to reuse or permanently plug such wells within a year, but the AP found that the rule is routinely circumvented, and that more than 1,000 wells have lingered in that unfinished condition for more than a decade. About three-quarters of temporarily abandoned wells have been left in that status for more than a year, and many since the 1950s and 1960s - even though sealing procedures for temporary abandonment are not as stringent as those for permanent closures.

As a forceful reminder of the potential harm, the well beneath BP's Deepwater Horizon rig was being sealed with cement for temporary abandonment when it blew April 20, leading to one of the worst environmental disasters in the nation's history. BP alone has abandoned about 600 wells in the Gulf, according to government data.

There's ample reason for worry about all permanently and temporarily abandoned wells - history shows that at least on land, they often leak. Wells are sealed underwater much as they are on land. And wells on land and in water face similar risk of failure. Plus, records reviewed by the AP show that some offshore wells have failed. And manager Wayne Gronlund says it's often impossible to tell leaking wells from natural seeps, where untold thousands of barrels of oil and untold millions of cubic feet of gas escape annually through cracks that permeate the sea floor.

Water levels in many reservoirs and lakes have plummeted to less than half their capacity due to the region's driest start to the year since 1929. The water shortage comes just months after hundreds of properties were flooded in Cumbria following severe storms. More than 1,300 properties were flooded across the county, with Cockermouth, Workington and Keswick worst affected.

Despite spells of rain over recent weeks, supply levels have failed to sufficiently increase. Anybody caught flouting the ban may face a fine of up to 1,000 pounds. John Sanders, from United Utilities, said: "Despite some recent rainfall in the north of the region, reservoir levels are still significantly lower than we would expect at this time of year and are now at a point where we need to impose some temporary restrictions on our customers. It is not a decision we have taken lightly, but a hosepipe can use as much water in an hour as a family of four would use in one day."

Lord Patten, invited by David Cameron to oversee the planning, said that the significance of the first-ever state visit by a Pope to Britain was greater than the potential costs. He told a press conference: "Even if we had known of the parlous state of the nation's finances, I'm sure that wouldn't have been a consideration because the importance of this visit makes its own claim upon modest public support."

The last governor of Hong Kong said Britain was not returning to the Middle Ages "or the days when we would have had to find a squirrel for the pot". He said he himself had never felt "second-class" as a Catholic in Britain but that if anyone has, the pope's visit will end that feeling. As The Daily Telegraph disclosed on Saturday, the cost to taxpayers of the event in September is now put at up to 12 million pounds, excluding undisclosed security costs, up from 8 million pounds.

The church claims it has now raised about 5 million pounds of its initial estimate of 7 million pounds for the pastoral parts including open-air masses in Glasgow and London and the beatification of Cardinal Newman at a park in Birmingham. But the Most Reverend Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster, insisted that these events are not just for Roman Catholics, even though parishes are organising tickets for the "pilgrim journey". He said: "These are events to which any person is welcome. All they need to do is contact their local Catholic parish."

The National Secular Society, which opposes the papal visit, estimates that the security costs of the trip will increase the burden on taxpayers tenfold. Its president, Terry Sanderson, said: "The NSS is outraged but not surprised by the news that the cost to the taxpayer of the Pope's visit is spiralling towards 100 million pounds. We predicted this would happen at the very beginning, although the previous Government denied it."

Brigadier General Mohammed Asif Jabarkhel sits with folded arms in his office, just a few steps away from the security checkpoint at Kabul International Airport. "Of course I know what's going on here," the 59-year-old head of the airport's customs police grumbles from beneath his thick moustache as a fan whirs in the background. "But, in this country, who's allowed to speak the truth?"

Jabarkhel is referring to the huge amounts of money regularly being secreted out of Afghanistan by plane in boxes and suitcases. According to some estimates, since 2007, at least $3 billion (2.4 billion euros) in cash has left the country in this way. The preferred destination for these funds is Dubai, the tax haven in the Persian Gulf. And, given the fact that Afghanistan's total GDP amounts to the equivalent of $13.5 billion, there is no way that the funds involved in this exodus are merely the proceeds of legal business transactions.

Jabarkhel complains that all of his many attempts to stop this hemorrhaging have failed. "The central bank has reached an agreement with the government that makes these kinds of transfers supposedly legal," he says. "And whenever we try to look into where the money is coming from, pressure comes from the very top."

Since invading Afghanistan in 2001, the United States alone has invested almost $300 billion in military and reconstruction efforts there. But far less progress has been made than what was either hoped for or expected. One major reason for this could be the fact that a significant portion of the millions meant for reconstructive efforts continue to be siphoned off. The people benefiting are often those who enjoy extremely close business ties with the donor countries.

It is clear that much more money is making its way out of Afghanistan through Kabul's airport than is being officially declared and logged.

"Home sales are down. Retail sales are down. Factory orders in May suffered their biggest tumble since March of last year. So what are we doing about it? Less than nothing," he said. California is tightening faster than Greece. State workers have seen a 14 percent fall in earnings this year due to forced furloughs. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is cutting pay for 200,000 state workers to the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour to cover his $19 billion (15 billion pounds) deficit.

Can Illinois be far behind? The state has a deficit of $12 billion and is $5 billion in arrears to schools, nursing homes, child care centres, and prisons. "It is getting worse every single day," said state comptroller Daniel Hynes. "We are not paying bills for absolutely essential services. That is obscene."

Roughly a million Americans have dropped out of the jobs market altogether over the past two months. That is the only reason why the headline unemployment rate is not exploding to a post-war high. Let us be honest. The US is still trapped in depression a full 18 months into zero interest rates, quantitative easing (QE), and fiscal stimulus that has pushed the budget deficit above 10 percent of GDP.

The average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks. Nothing like this has been seen before in the post-war era. Jeff Weninger, of Harris Private Bank, said this compares with a peak of 21.2 weeks in the Volcker recession of the early 1980s. "Legions of individuals have been left with stale skills, and little prospect of finding meaningful work, and benefits that are being exhausted. By our math the crop of people who are unemployed but not receiving a check amounts to 9.2 million."

Republicans on Capitol Hill are filibustering a bill to extend the dole for up to 1.2 million jobless facing an imminent cut-off. Dean Heller from Vermont called them "hobos". This really is starting to feel like 1932.

"Those who don't remember history are doomed to repeat it... there was a head and shoulders pattern that developed before the Depression in 1929, then with the recovery in 1930 we had another head and shoulders pattern that preceded a fall in the market, and in the current Dow situation we see an exact repeat of that environment,"

The Dow retreated 457.33 points, or 4.5 percent last week, to close at 9,686 Friday. Guppy said a Dow fall below 9,800 confirmed the head and shoulders pattern.

The Shanghai Composite is seeing a very rapid collapse, falling below 2,500, which suggests the major fall in the Dow, he added.

In the European markets, Guppy says Frankfurt's Dax is witnessing a different pattern to London's FTSE.

Guppy uses the broad trading band as measurement- giving the Dax a downsize target of 1,500. The same head and shoulders pattern seen in the Dow can also be seen in the FTSE, he added.

Watched by his devastated young children, the 38-year-old immediately chased after the intruder as it leapt over a 4ft high fence, and although he managed to wrest Princess from its grip, she was already dead. The attack came after a wild fox attacked twin baby girls as they slept in their cots in London and numerous other incidents of foxes entering people's homes.

Mr Khanna said today he had tried to warn the local authorities about the prowling urban fox long before it killed his dog. Describing the moment he chased after the wild animal, he said: 'We heard this yelp and suddenly the dog was gone - I couldn't believe how quickly it happened'. Mr Khanna continued: 'The fox is obviously getting braver. I presume it came into the garden looking for food'.

'My neighbour has a seven-month-old baby and is very worried'.

The Financial Times newspaper said oil major BP had stopped refueling Iranian jets. BP declined to confirm the report but said: "We fully comply with any international sanctions imposed in countries where we operate." Pressure is mounting on Iran over its nuclear program and the United States has stepped up its push to isolate Tehran economically. On Thursday, President Barack Obama signed into law far-reaching sanctions that aim to squeeze the Islamic Republic's fuel imports and deepen its international isolation.

"Since last week, our planes have been refused fuel at airports in Britain, Germany and UAE because of the sanctions imposed by America," Mehdi Aliyari, secretary of the Iranian Airlines Union, told Iran's ISNA news agency. So far national carrier Iran Air and Mahan Airlines had been affected, he said. Washington has not spelled out whether its new sanctions are intended to require firms to refuse to fuel Iranian jets at airports in third countries, but US officials made clear they were pleased with reports sanctions had begun to bite.

"The costs of doing business with Iran, a country that is shirking its international obligations across the board and engaged in illicit activity, are rising," a senior Obama administration official said on Monday. "The international commercial sector is making the right choices. It's now time for Iran to make the right choice - to fulfil its international obligations - that remains our primary objective," the official said.

"When I became the NASA administrator - or before I became the NASA administrator - he charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science... and math and engineering," Bolden said in the interview.

The NASA administrator was in the Middle East last month marking the one-year anniversary since Obama delivered an address to Muslim nations in Cairo. Bolden spoke in June at the American University in Cairo - in his interview with Al Jazeera, he described space travel as an international collaboration of which Muslim nations must be a part.

"It is a matter of trying to reach out and get the best of all worlds, if you will, and there is much to be gained by drawing in the contributions that are possible from the Muslim (nations)," he said. He held up the International Space Station as a model, praising the contributions there from the Russians and the Chinese.