Alex welcomes back to the show former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura. Jesse’s latest book is American Conspiracies: Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies that the Government Tells Us, now available from the Infowars store.

Obama has come out in favor of forcing people arrested to submit DNA to a national database.

“President Barack Obama’s embrace of a national database to store the DNA of people arrested but not necessarily convicted of a crime is heartening to backers of the policy but disappointing to criminal-justice reformers, who view it as an invasion of privacy,” reports Politico. “Others also worry the practice would adversely affect minorities.”

It would affect all Americans regardless of race, creed, color, nationality, etc. It would also be a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

Obama made his opinion known during an interview with John Walsh, the host of the TV show America’s Most Wanted. Walsh is known for his anti-crime activism, which he became involved with following the murder of his son in 1981 (see video below).

“We have 18 states who are taking DNA upon arrest,” Walsh said. “It’s no different than fingerprinting or a booking photo. … Since those states have been doing it, it has cleared 200 people that are innocent from jail.”

Obama agreed. “It’s the right thing to do,” he replied. “This is where the national registry becomes so important, because what you have is individual states — they may have a database, but if they’re not sharing it with the state next door, you’ve got a guy from Illinois driving over into Indiana, and they’re not talking to each other.”

Obama did not say if he believes a DNA sample should be removed upon acquittal or if charges are dropped.

A national DNA database is another manifestation of the state posing a threat to our liberties. Mr. Walsh may be interested in keeping tabs on sex offenders and criminals, but the state has other motives — the tracking and surveillance of citizens.

A national DNA database would compliment other efforts by the government to violate our liberty. In 2005 it was first revealed that the NSA has been secretly intercepting Americans’ phone calls and Internet communications (in fact, the NSA has intercepted the personal communications of Americans for decades).

In April of 2009, the FBI joined 15 states that collect DNA samples from those awaiting trial. The FBI currently has a DNA database with 6.7 million profiles and plans to accelerate its growth rate from 80,000 new entries a year to 1.2 million by 2012 — a 15-fold increase, according to the New York Times.

Since September 11, 2001, under the guise of a phony war against government manufactured terrorism, the FBI has infiltrated and monitored entirely legal political organizations, including the Tea Party movement.

On October 31, 2001, then Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a regulation that authorized the monitoring of communications between inmates in the custody of the Bureau of Prisons and their attorneys including those who have not been convicted of any crimes.

The Patriot Act nullified large sections of the Bill of Rights. Under the rubric of a global war on terrorism the executive has been granted sweeping unconstitutional authority to issue executive orders and wage war without congressional consent.

In February, the Justice Department argued in federal court that the FBI and other police agencies don’t need to obtain a search warrant to learn the locations of Americans’ cell phones. “When the government acquires historical cell location information, it effectively commandeers our cell phones and turns them into electronic trackers that report, without our knowledge or consent, where we have been and how long we have spent there,” Susan Freiwald, a law professor at the University of San Francisco told Declan McCullagh of CNet.

As reported earlier this week, Sens. Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) have proposed legislation that, if passed, will require all working Americans to carry biometric ID cards containing fingerprint records and other personal information. The effort is a cynical attempt to establish a national biometric ID card program under the guise of preventing illegal immigration.

The effort to create a DNA database is already under way in several states. In 2004, Californians overwhelmingly passed a ballot measure requiring DNA testing, usually by a swab inside the cheek, for all felony arrests and some others. And in New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has sought to go even further, proposing DNA tests for everyone arrested in the city, even for misdemeanors.

Criminologist James Fox of Northeastern University in Boston told Politico he would rather see Obama deal with ballistic fingerprinting and repeal of the Tiahrt Amendment, which limits gun tracing.

The the Tiahrt Amendment prohibits the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from releasing information from its firearms trace database to anyone other than a law enforcement agency or prosecutor in connection with a criminal investigation.

In a brazen effort to drum out rising Tea Party voices, Obama’s Coffee Party has scheduled a “National Coffee Party Day” to be held on March 13 around the country.

“The Coffee Party Movement gives voice to Americans who want to see cooperation in government,” the Coffee Party USA website explains. “We recognize that the federal government is not the enemy of the people, but the expression of our collective will, and that we must participate in the democratic process in order to address the challenges that we face as Americans. As voters and grassroots volunteers, we will support leaders who work toward positive solutions, and hold accountable those who obstruct them.”

See the Obama Coffee Party video:

As noted in its mission statement, Obama’s Coffee Party will attempt to drown out Americans demanding the government adhere to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It will propagandize against Americans outraged by an out of control federal government that has socked future generations with an astronomical debt that will be paid to bankers. Obama’s Coffee Party is a thinly veiled attempt to support the bankster plan to bankrupt the country and turn it into a third world cesspool and slave labor gulag based on the China model.

“We are 100% grassroots,” declares the Coffee Party USA “About” page. “No lobbyists here. No pundits. And no hyper-partisan strategists calling the shots in this movement. We are a spontaneous and collective expression of our desire to forge a culture of civic engagement that is solution-oriented, not blame-oriented.”

The claim is less than honest. On March 3, writing for Prison Planet, Paul Joseph Watson revealed that the Coffee Party USA’s founder is an Obama campaign operative. “Park campaigned for Obama in 2008 and was one of the organizers and operators of the influential United for Obama video channel at YouTube,” writes Watson. “She made over twenty promotional videos for the Obama campaign that drew tens of thousands of views.”

In addition, Annabel Park worked for The New York Times as a Strategy Analyst. Both the Times and the CIA’s favorite newspaper, The Washington Post, have published fawning accounts of Park’s effort to bring Americans back into the government fold. The New York Times acted as a propaganda outlet for neocon lies that ultimately resulted in the murder of over a million Iraqis.

In the above video, we are told the Coffee Party will work with all Americans to ensure respect for their “collective will” (not their god-given individual rights, but a socialist Borg hive collective will no doubt determined by limo libs in Washington).

As Watson notes, however, Park harbors animosity toward millions of Americans who either follow or participate in the Tea Party movement. “Park’s various tweets reveal that, far from being open to working with Tea Party activists, Park appears to have a vitriolic hatred of them,” he writes. Park refers to Tea Party activists and supporters as “teabaggers,” a pornographic term taken up by the corporate media, most notably Keith Olbermann who works for MSNBC, the state propaganda organ owned by the death merchant General Electric, a “defense” contractor that sells attack helicopters and various murder accouterments to the Pentagon.

“The Coffee Party simply is part of the perpetual Obama campaign, a means by which to subvert the real grassroots Tea Party movement by co-opting part of the message, but in a way which supports keeping Obama in power,” writes William A. Jacobson in a blog post aptly entitled “Coffee Party Parasites.” Jacobson says the Coffee Party is a political parasite which presents itself as something it is not.

The Obama Coffee Party is basically a sweep-up operation designed to marginalize those of us not co-opted by Glenn Beck and the neocon Republicans who hijacked the real Tea Party months ago. The neocon Tea Party now insists supporters follow the Republican party platform of more war and unending favors for plutocrats and Wall Street mobsters and drug money launderers.

Obama operative Park’s Coffee Party represents the “collective will” of the bankers and one-world globalists who dominate the Obama administration.

“In fact, when you examine the Obama leadership team, you stumble into a smorgasbord of politically elite favorites, tied to organizations that promote international management,” writes Carl Teichrib. The Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, and the Council On Foreign Relations are well represented in Obama’s inner core.

Timothy F. Geithner is a former Treasury boss at the influential New York Fed. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and was director of a CFR Task Force on trade policy. He is also part of the Bilderberg Group and is connected to Rand Corporation, a premier military-industrial “think-tank” that has lobbied the Pentagon to start World War Three and thus “save” the economy Geithner and his cronies helped destroy at the behest of the bankers.

Lawrence Summers is a former economist at the globalist loan sharking operation, the World Bank, notorious for imposing “austerity” measures on third world countries and thus starving untold numbers to death or at minimum condemning them to lives of unspeakable misery. He is a former Secretary of the Treasury. Summers is directly linked to the Council on Foreign Relations, having chaired the CFR’s Independent Task Force on Transatlantic Relations, along with Henry Kissinger, according to Teichrib’s research. He has also been an active member of the Trilateral Commission.

Paul Volcker, who heads up Obama’s Economic Recovery Committee, was the Chairman of the Federal Reserve during the Jimmy Carter presidency. Volcker is an advocate for a single global currency and an international monetary structure. He is a founding member of the Trilateral Commission, a member of the CFR, and is intimately associated with the bankster elite through the Rockefeller family. “Volcker thinks Americans have been living above their means for too long,” The Los Angeles Times reported in December, 2008. “It is the United States as a whole that became addicted to spending and consuming beyond its capacity to produce,” Volcker told the Economic Club of New York. Mr. Volcker failed to mention that his bankster buddies and their transnational corporations exported that capacity to Asian slave gulags years ago.

Big time globalist and Rockefeller minion Zbigniew Brzezinski supported Obama during the election, as did master war criminal and Rockefeller associate Henry Kissinger. “I think that his task will be to develop an overall strategy for America in this period, when really a ‘new world order’ can be created,” Kissinger said from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange last January.

Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Richard Haass, Dennis Ross, Richard Holbrooke, George Mitchell, Robert Gates, Arne Duncan, Ray LaHood, Janet Napolitano, Eric Holder, General James Jones, Leon Panetta, Rahm Emanuel — the list is long — these are only a sampled taste of the sort of insiders, CFR, Trilateral, and Bilderberg members working directly for the Obama administration against the “collective” interest of the American people.

Annabel Park and the contrivance known as the Coffee Party USA work indirectly for these insiders and the global elite.

If you’d like to participate in the real Coffee Party, follow this link. Updates coming soon.

According to the CIA’s favorite newspaper, The Washington Post, threats against the IRS “continue to pour in after last month’s plane crash at agency offices in Austin, according to union officials.”

The threats consist of inappropriate comments made to agency workers by taxpayers, according to National Treasury Employees Union President Colleen M. Kelley. She would not specify if the tax collection agency received threats of violence because the number of threats are under investigation by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration and the IRS.

“It would be a little naive to think that we don’t get some threats over the course of doing business,” said IRS Communications Director Terry Lemons. For the government and the IRS, “business” consists of extracting money at gunpoint and giving it to bankers who “hold” the national debt.

The Washington Post admits that “attacks” (negative comments and support for Joe Stack) are nothing new for the government sanctioned shakedown operation.

On the more radical end of the spectrum, people have rammed cars into offices as well as set them on fire, according to Lemons. The comments and futile acting out against the IRS is not confined to “tax day” (a day of national fear of hefty fines, prison time, and SWAT teams), said the bureaucrat.

The Post made sure to tie in the suicidal shooting of two Pentagon cops by a deranged man earlier this month. “The ongoing probe is unfolding in the aftermath of last week’s attack on the Pentagon in which a gunman wounded two police officers outside the entrance before he was fatally shot.” The event had nothing to do with the IRS.

Maybe the IRS should spend less time investigating angry tax payers and dedicate more resources to investigating their own. Last week, for instance, two IRS Service Center employees in Covington, Kentucky, were charged with stealing “government money” (money extracted from producers to pay banksters), according to The Enquirer. The employees made off with thousands of dollars before they were caught.

Sharif Mobley: the latest face of the homegrown terror threat according to the government.

Earlier in the week we learned about Colleen LaRose, a woman described as insane by her neighbors who, according to the government, morphed into “Jihad Jane” in short order and teamed up with supposed Muslim terrorists in Ireland and plotted to kill an artist for drawing a degrading cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed. LaRose was arrested in October, but her indictment was rolled out this week to coincide with other terror-related propaganda.

In the wake of the LaRose story, the corporate media today is playing up the arrest of Sharif Mobley in Yemen. According to the Associated Press, Mobley is a “suspected member of the same branch of al-Qaida that’s linked to the failed Christmas Day bombing attempt of a Detroit-bound jet.” He sits in a Yemen jail because he stands accused of killing a guard in an attempt to break out of a hospital.

The Associated Press cuts right to the chase:

Mobley, a former laborer at several nuclear power plants in the U.S., appears to be the latest example of the phenomenon of Americans joining terror movements overseas, which U.S. intelligence officials have warned of.

His case surfaces days after charges of terrorist connections were brought against Colleen LaRose, an American-born woman known as “Jihad Jane” who lived for years in Pennsylvania.

Mobley, a 26-year-old natural-born U.S. citizen, was identified by Yemeni officials as a Somali-American. A former neighbor said he moved to Yemen about two years ago, supposedly to learn Arabic and study Islam.

A suspected terrorist linked to al-Qaeda in Yemen worked at nuclear power plant. This is major ammo for the ongoing and intensifying propaganda campaign that increasingly warns that America is at risk from homegrown terrorists. Terrorists blowing up a nuclear power plant is a worst case scenario.

The government offers the usual caveat in regard to Mobley’s employment:

“An FBI spokesman did not immediately return a call, but a law enforcement official told The Associated Press that authorities don’t believe Mobley’s job at the nuclear plant was related to his activities in Yemen. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter.”

Russia Today covers the “Jihad Jane” case.

In order to spike the story and send the message that homegrowners are a threat, the Associated Press rolls in Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood last year.

As for Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the fizzle pants non-bomber apprehended over Christmas, the State Department refused to revoke his visa, even though he was on a terror watch list. He was allowed to board a plane in Amsterdam.

After a barrage of sensationalistic and misleading headlines and stories designed to rekindle the flagging war on terror, authorities quietly reversed the official story behind the aborted attack and acknowledged that an accomplice was involved, despite weeks of denial and derision of eyewitness Kurt Haskell’s description of a sharp-dressed man who helped Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab board Flight 253 headed for Detroit.

“The Delta 253 incident was just one of the dozens of terror busts and stings since 9/11 to have been orchestrated by handlers aiding the accused terrorists at every turn,” Paul Joseph Watson wrote on March 6, 2010. “We have never come across a major case where the terrorists involved in a plot were not being prodded by the FBI and federal informants, or where clear prior knowledge and forewarning was not evident.”

Finally, in addition to creating the specter of homegrown terrorism, the corporate media has launched an orchestrated propaganda effort to demonize the internet as a medium that supposedly facilitates terrorism.

“From charismatic clerics who spout hate online, to thousands of extremist websites, chat rooms and social networking pages that raise money and spread radical propaganda, the Internet has become a crucial front in the ever-shifting war on terrorism,” reports the Los Angeles Times. “From their side, law enforcement and intelligence agencies are scrambling to monitor the Internet and penetrate radical websites to track suspects, set up sting operations or unravel plots before they are carried out.”

“They have really improved their ability to radicalize people and bring them into the fight, which of course severely hampers our ability to disrupt and get ourselves involved in the process,” Garry Reid, deputy assistant secretary of Defense, told the Senate subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities on Wednesday.

The Christian Science Monitor linked this supposed threat directly to Colleen LaRose, the reportedly mentally disturbed all-American jihadist who was tracked down by a group of neocon sleuths in search of terror on the internet. “The anonymity of the Internet, current regulations governing its surveillance and the sheer speed of communications across it make it an easy tool for recruitment,” the Christian Science Monitor declared on March 10.

Expect more shrill demands on the part of the government and its lapdog corporate media to regulate and surveil the internet in the days and weeks ahead.

As I pointed out in November:

A report by University of California, Berkeley economics professor Emmanuel Saez concludes that income inequality in the United States is at an all-time high, surpassing even levels seen during the Great Depression.

The report shows that:

• Income inequality is worse than it has been since at least 1917

• “The top 1 percent incomes captured half of the overall economic growth over the period 1993-2007″

• “In the economic expansion of 2002-2007, the top 1 percent captured two thirds of income growth.”

As others have pointed out, the average wage of Americans, adjusting for inflation, is lower than it was in the 1970s. The minimum wage, adjusting for inflation, is lower than it was in the 1950s. See this.

On the other hand, billionaires have never had it better (and see this).

Now, state-run Russian news service RIA Novosti notes that the number of billionaires has soared during the economic crisis:

The current global financial and economic crisis once again confirms the fact that during economic upheavals the rich get richer and the poor become even more destitute.

On Thursday, Forbes Magazine carried an updated list of the world’s wealthiest people.

As of late 2009, the number of billionaires soared from 793 to 1,011 and their total fortunes from $2.4 trillion to $3.6 trillion. The number of Russian billionaires almost doubled, from 32 to 62.
***

Despite the crisis, the list of billionaires has grown by 200 people and their aggregate capital has expanded by 50%. This may seem paradoxical but only at first glance. This result was predictable, if we recall how governments all over the world have dealt with the economic crisis.

Anti-crisis measures essentially implied massive infusion of money into the economy. The United States alone spent over $10 trillion. Against the backdrop of a global recession, the funding could only be put to good use on stock and raw materials markets, leading to the creation of new financial bubbles.
***

The volume of federal allocations injected by the Russian government into the economy was much higher than in Europe and the U.S. Forbes tactfully referred to this as the government’s cooperation with big business, primarily raw materials companies.

However, even high-ranking Russian officials have repeatedly complained that anti-crisis allocations were either used for stock market operations or deposited in foreign bank accounts.

Life is good … but only if you are already mega-wealthy.

Even Alan Greenspan recently called the recovery “extremely unbalanced,” driven largely by high earners benefiting from recovering stock markets and large corporations.

As economics professor and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich writes today in an outstanding piece:

Are we finally in a recovery? Who’s “we,” kemosabe? Big global companies, Wall Street, and high-income Americans who hold their savings in financial instruments are clearly doing better. As to the rest of us — small businesses along Main Streets, and middle and lower-income Americans — forget it.

Business cheerleaders naturally want to emphasize the positive. They assume the economy runs on optimism and that if average consumers think the economy is getting better, they’ll empty their wallets more readily and — presto! — the economy will get better. The cheerleaders fail to understand that regardless of how people feel, they won’t spend if they don’t have the money.

The US economy grew at a 5.9 percent annual rate in the fourth quarter of 2009. That sounds good until you realize GDP figures are badly distorted by structural changes in the economy. For example, part of the increase is due to rising health care costs. When WellPoint ratchets up premiums, that enlarges the GDP. But you’d have to be out of your mind to consider this evidence of a recovery.

Part of the perceived growth in GDP is due to rising government expenditures. But this is smoke and mirrors. The stimulus is reaching its peak and will be smaller in months to come. And a bigger federal debt eventually has to be repaid.

So when you hear some economists say the current recovery is following the traditional path, don’t believe a word. The path itself is being used to construct the GDP data.

Look more closely and the only ones doing better are the people and private-sector institutions at the top … Companies in the Standard&Poor 500 stock index had sales of $2.18 trillion in the fourth quarter, up from $2.02 trillion last year, and their earnings tripled. Why? Mainly because they’re global, and selling into fast-growing markets in places like India, China, and Brazil.

America’s biggest companies are also showing fat profits and productivity gains because they continue to slash payrolls and cut expenditures…

Firms in S&P 500 … can borrow money cheaply. Corporate bond sales are brisk. So far in 2010, big U.S. corporations have issued $195.2 billion of debt, excluding government-guaranteed bonds. Does this spell a recovery? It all depends on what the big companies are doing with all this cash. In fact, they’re doing two things that don’t help at all.

First, they’re buying other companies… This buying doesn’t create new jobs. One of the first things companies do when they buy other companies is fire lots of people who are considered “redundant.” That’s where the so-called merger efficiencies and synergies come from, after all. [My note: As I pointed out a year ago: "The Treasury Department encouraged banks to use the bailout money to buy their competitors, and pushed through an amendment to the tax laws which rewards mergers in the banking industry (this has caused a lot of companies to bite off more than they can chew, destabilizing the acquiring companies)"]

The second thing big companies are doing with all their cash is buying back their own stock, in order to boost their share prices. There were 62 such share buy-backs in February, valued at $40.1 billion. We’re witnessing the biggest share buyback spree since Sept 2008. The major beneficiaries are current shareholders, including top executives, whose pay is linked to share prices. The buy-backs do absolutely nothing for most Americans.

***

The picture on Main Street is quite the opposite. Small businesses aren’t selling much because they have to rely on American — rather than foreign — consumers, and Americans still aren’t buying much.

Small businesses are also finding it difficult to get credit. In the credit survey conducted in February by the National Federation of Independent Businesses, only 34 percent of small businesses reported normal and adequate access to credit. Not incidentally, the NFIB’s “Small Business Optimism Index” fell 1.3 points last month, just about where it’s been since April.

That’s a problem for most Americans. Small businesses are where the jobs are. In fact, small businesses are responsible for almost all job growth in a typical recovery. So if small businesses are hurting, we’re not going to see much job growth any time soon.

The Federal Reserve reported Thursday that American consumers are shedding their debts like mad. Total US household debt, including mortgages and credit card balances, fell 1.7 percent last year – the first drop since the government began recording consumer debt in 1945. Much of the debt-shedding has been through default — consumers simply not repaying and walking away from homes and big-ticket purchases.

This is hardly good news. But here’s the Wall Street Journal’s take on it: “the defaults are leaving many people with more cash to spend and save, jump-starting the financial rehabilitiation” of the economy.

Baloney. As of end of 2009, debt averaged $43, 874 per American, or about 122 percent of annual disposable income. Most economic analysts think a sustainable debt load is around 100 percent of disposable income — assuming a normal level of employment and normal access to credit. But unemployment is still sky-high and it’s becoming harder for most people to get new mortgages and credit cards. And with housing prices still in the doldrums, they can’t refinance their homes or take out new loans on them…

Some cheerleaders say rising stock prices make consumers feel wealthier and therefore readier to spend. But to the extent most Americans have any assets at all their net worth is mostly in their homes, and those homes are still worth less than they were in 2007. The “wealth effect” is relevant mainly to the richest 10 percent of Americans, most of whose net worth is in stocks and bonds. The top 10 percent accounted for about half of total national income in 2007. But they were only about 40 percent of total spending, and a sustainable recovery can’t be based on the top ten percent.

Add to all this the joblessness or fear of it that continues to haunt a large portion of the American population. Add in the trauma of what most of us have been through over the past year and a half. Consider also the extra need to save as tens of millions of boomers see retirement on the horizon. Bottom line: Thrifty consumers are doing the right and sensible thing by holding back from the malls. They saved a little over 4 percent of their disposable income in fourth quarter of 2009. In the months or years ahead they may save more.

Right and sensible for each household but a disaster for the economy as a whole. American consumers accounted for 70 percent of the total demand for goods and services in the American economy before the Great Recession, and a sizable chunk of world demand.

So what happens when the stimulus is over and the Fed begins to tighten again? Where will demand come from to get Main Street back, create jobs, raise middle class wages? Not from big businesses. Certainly not from Wall Street. Not from exports. Not from government.

So, where? That question is the big unknown hanging over the U.S. economy. Until there’s an answer, an economic “recovery” for anyone other than big corporations, Wall Street, and the wealthy is a mirage.

A night raid carried out by US and Afghan gunmen led to the deaths of two pregnant women, a teenage girl and two local officials in an atrocity which Nato then tried to cover up, survivors have told The Times.

The operation on Friday, February 12, was a botched pre-dawn assault on a policeman’s home a few miles outside Gardez, the capital of Paktia province, eastern Afghanistan. In a statement after the raid titled “Joint force operating in Gardez makes gruesome discovery”, Nato claimed that the force had found the women’s bodies “tied up, gagged and killed” in a room.

A Times investigation suggests that Nato’s claims are either wilfully false or, at best, misleading. More than a dozen survivors, officials, police chiefs and a religious leader interviewed at and around the scene of the attack maintain that the perpetrators were US and Afghan gunmen. The identity and status of the soldiers is unknown.

The raid came more than a fortnight after the commander of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan issued new guidelines designed to limit the use of night raids. Special forces and Western intelligence agencies that run covert operations in Afghanistan have been criticised for night raids based on dubious or false intelligence leading to civilian casualties.

Full article here

The euro zone has agreed a multi-billion euro bailout for heavily indebted Greece as part of a package to support the euro, the Guardian newspaper reported on Saturday.

The 16 euro zone members have agreed on “coordinated bilateral contributions” in the form of loans or loan guarantees to Greece if Athens is unable to refinance its debts and asks the European Union for help, the Guardian quoted a senior European Commission official as saying.

The agreement was reached despite strong resistance by Germany, and Berlin has played the pivotal role in organising the deal, the paper quoted other sources as saying.

Euro zone finance ministers will finalise the package on Monday, the paper said.

The aid to be made available by the bailout could reach 25 billion euros, the paper quoted its sources as saying. Greece’s borrowing needs for the whole of 2010 total 53.2 billion euros.

Full article here

An American citizen who is being held in Yemen accused of being an al-Qaeda militant worked for six years at a series of US nuclear power plants, it emerged yesterday.

Sharif Mobley, 26, who started a gun battle as he tried to escape from a hospital in Yemen last week, killing one person and wounding several others, worked at three nuclear reactors in his native New Jersey between 2002 and 2008.

Mr Mobley was among 11 al-Qaeda suspects arrested during a series of raids in the Yemeni capital Sanaa in this month, and is believed to have links to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian radical who tried to blow up a US aircraft on Christmas Day.

Before moving to Yemen in 2008, supposedly to learn Arabic and study Islam, Mr Mobley worked at Salem and Hope Creek nuclear power stations and at another plant on Artificial Island in Lower Alloways Creek.

Full article here