Amid reports that the Syrian military is secretly stockpiling chemical weapons, U.N. human rights investigators allegedly have testimony indicating Syrian rebels have used sarin gas. Interviews with victims and doctors have provided “strong, concrete suspicions” that rebels used the deadly nerve agent, according to a lead investigator, though the U.N. does not have “incontrovertible proof.” There’s no evidence yet that the Syrian military used sarin. The latest Geneva-based investigation is separate from U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s currently stalled inquiry into the use of chemical weapons in Syria.

Reuters:

U.N. human rights investigators have gathered testimony from casualties of Syria's civil war and medical staff indicating that rebel forces have used the nerve agent sarin, one of the lead investigators said on Sunday.

The United Nations independent commission of inquiry on Syria has not yet seen evidence of government forces having used chemical weapons, which are banned under international law, said commission member Carla Del Ponte.

"Our investigators have been in neighboring countries interviewing victims, doctors and field hospitals and, according to their report of last week which I have seen, there are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated," Del Ponte said in an interview with Swiss-Italian television.

"This was use on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities," she added, speaking in Italian.

Del Ponte, a former Swiss attorney-general who also served as prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, gave no details as to when or where sarin may have been used.

Israeli warplanes have targeted Syria twice in the last three days, and now Israel is deploying two batteries of its Iron Dome rocket defense system to the north of the country. The second airstrike early Sunday, hit a military facility just north of the capital, a Western intelligence expert confirmed. Israel declined to comment. “The sky was red all night,” said one man who lives less than a mile from the facility. “We didn’t sleep a single second. The explosions started after midnight and continued throughout the night.” The facility reportedly held Iranian-supplied missiles, which Israel contends were headed for Lebanon’s Hezbollah. Israel attacked the same site three months ago. President Obama, meanwhile, defended Israel on Sunday.

After enduring a traumatic childhood and two years in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War, Tom Faunce made an oath to spend the rest of his life helping those in need. Four decades later, he discovers a mysterious man in Southeast Asia claiming to be an American Special Forces soldier listed as 'Killed In Action.' Working against government forces trying to cover up the story, Tom struggles to prove the lost soldier's identity and reunite him with his family.

A new documentary called Unclaimed claims to introduce the world to former Army Sergeant John Robertson, lost over Vietnam in 1968 and left behind for over four decades.

The Toronto Star reports:

Special Forces Green Beret Master Sgt. John Hartley Robertson had forgotten how to speak English over the 44 years since he was left behind in the Vietnam War. But he never forgot that he was a father, husband and an American soldier, born in Alabama, shot down over Laos in a 1968 classified mission.

Had Hollywood told the story of the discovery of a long-forgotten soldier, found miraculously still alive in Vietnam after surviving a horrific helicopter attack and crash, it would have involved a dramatic and dangerous jungle rescue followed by a homecoming parade.

Instead, in Emmy-winning Edmonton filmmaker Michael Jorgensen’s documentary Unclaimed, we meet a slightly stooped, wiry 76-year-old man living in a remote village in south-central Vietnam who trembles with frustration or pounds his forehead when he is unable to remember his birthday or his American children’s names. He is only able to speak Vietnamese.

Unclaimed has its world premiere at Toronto’s 20th Hot Docs festival on April 30.

Robertson says he was confined to a bamboo cage in the jungle by North Vietnamese captors and, accused of being a CIA spy, was tortured for a year. Confused and badly injured, he was released and married the Vietnamese nurse who helped care for him. He assumed the name of her dead husband. They had children.

The filmmaker struggled with roadblocks along the way from the military -- especially when it came to contacting Robertson’s family -- to be convinced that, as one high-placed government source told him, “It’s not that the Vietnamese won’t let him (Robertson) go; it’s that our government doesn’t want him.”

There is also a video interview with Michael Jorgensen on the Toronto Star's website, here,

The hacktivist collective known as Anonymous is calling for an internet blackout on Monday, April 22, in protest of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) that recently passed the House of Representatives.

The group is also "encouraging" all web developers and website owners to go dark on Monday, and display a message as to why, and encourage others to do the same.

The call for a blackout is being spread with a newly released video (above) and also on a Facebook page.

Text of the video statement follows:

Dear citizens of the internet,

We are Anonymous.

The United States Government is again attempting to control and censor the internet. The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act has just recently passed the house.

This bill would allow major internet entities such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google to voluntarily share your personal information with the U.S. Government. This will not only effect users in the United States, but also anyone with an account with these companies.

This upcoming Monday, April the 22nd, we invite you to join Anonymous in a internet blackout. We encourage all web developers and website owners to go dark on this date. Display a message as to why you are going dark, and encourage others to do the same.

We hope, just like the successful protest over the Stop Online Piracy Act, we can encourage the senate to stop this bill.

Spread the message, and inform the world.

We are Anonymous
We are the people
We are the internet

Knowledge is free

The unprecedented level of economic inequality in America is undeniable. In an extended essay, Bill Moyers shares examples of the striking extremes of wealth and poverty across the country, including a video report on California’s Silicon Valley. There, Facebook, Google, and Apple are minting millionaires, while the area’s homeless -- who’ve grown 20 percent in the last two years -- are living in tent cities at their virtual doorsteps.

“A petty, narcissistic, pridefully ignorant politics has come to dominate and paralyze our government,” says Bill, “while millions of people keep falling through the gaping hole that has turned us into the United States of Inequality.”

Full transcript below the fold.

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[This video contains graphic images of war casualties. Viewer discretion is advised.]

I just received this video from Andrew Golis of Frontline, and he adds "This is what it looks like when a government drops bombs on its own people."

When Frontline filmmaker Olly Lambert sat to interview Jamal Maarouf, a Syrian rebel commander, he did not anticipate that bombs from government jets would begin to fall just 300 meters away. Though the first blast knocked him to the ground, Lambert kept his camera rolling. He spent the next hour documenting the impacts of the Oct. 28, 2012 bombing of al-Bara, a village in Idlib province an hour south of Aleppo. The result is a rare, immersive portrait of the immediate aftermath of Syrian government air strikes on a civilian population.

Frontline has condensed the footage into this 36-minute digital feature, vividly narrated by Lambert. It captures the chaos on the ground as villagers try to rescue family and friends trapped under the rubble, the bombing’s effect on ordinary civilians whose lives literally have just been blown apart, the terrible fear when the government jets return for a second bombing run, and the ensuing calls for revenge that illustrate the country’s descent into a no man’s land of hatred, suspicion and terror.

“It’s only when you see things like this that you realize the real impact of civilian casualties in a civil war,” Lambert says about the scenes he witnessed. “When I first arrived in Syria, people would often say to me, ‘Here your life can end in a moment. Any minute now you could be dead.’ And at first I didn’t believe them, but certainly after an experience like this, it’s hard not to feel that they’ve got a point.”

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The destruction of Staten Island’s Great Kills Marina after Super Storm Sandy.

By Robert Lewis, Special to ProPublica, and Al Shaw, ProPublica

This story is being co-published with New York public radio's WNYC.

If Staten Island's Great Kills Marina Café is able to reopen this spring after Sandy ripped apart its interior 2013 blowing out windows and punching through walls 2013 it will be thanks to assistance from the federal government.

The Small Business Administration has approved the restaurant for a disaster loan of almost $1 million.

There's just one problem: Newly drawn FEMA flood maps show the cafe is at high risk of flooding again, raising the question of whether it makes sense to rebuild there or move elsewhere.

The cafe is not alone.

A WNYC and ProPublica analysis of federal data shows at least 10,500 home and business owners have been approved for $766 million in SBA disaster loans to rebuild in areas that the government now says could flood again in the next big storm. The data, which shows loans approved through mid-February, was obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request.

More loans could be going to flood-prone areas. The analysis did not cover Long Island or Connecticut.

The loans require borrowers to get flood insurance, which in turn could encourage some to rebuild properties to be more flood-resistant. However, for many owners there's no requirement they raise their properties to the heights FEMA recommends.

The result: the federal government is helping people rebuild despite the risk that flooding will again destroy the properties.

The SBA says it's not their job to assess whether it's smart to build in flood-prone areas.

"Our mission is to help these homeowners and business become whole again," said Carol Chastang, an SBA spokeswoman. "We really aren't in a position to tell people where or where not to rebuild."

Such a hands-off approach worries a diverse coalition of advocates -- including conservative groups, environmental organizations, insurance associations and housing coalitions. These groups are urging government at all levels to change the way it builds in disaster-prone areas and insures such properties.

Environmental groups like the National Wildlife Federation say the best flood protection are wetlands and to leave stretches of the coast undeveloped.

"Ideally we're going to help people move away from the flood zone and not give them assistance to rebuild exactly as is," said Joshua Saks, the federation's legislative director. "But we recognize it's a very personal decision, it's a local decision."

For Sam Corigliano, the decision is obvious. Corigliano opened the Great Kills Marina Café in 1980 and built it into a neighborhood fixture over the years.

"We've been here 32 years, had 32 years of good luck, and good fortune and laughs. We've had parties here, christenings, family events, a lot of happy times. We had one bad day," Corigliano said. "You don't walk away from one bad day."

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Egyptian Winter from brandon jourdan on Vimeo.

Two years after the revolution in Egypt began, unrest continues across the country as the political and economic situation worsens. As the current government consolidates its power, the demands of the revolution may seem further away than ever. Still the revolution has opened up new spaces for political action, spurring public debate on issues that have gone unacknowledged and unresolved for too long.

This short documentary looks at some of the reasons motivating revolutionaries to keep taking the streets, the obstacles that they are facing, and the tactics that they are using. It looks into the current economic and political problems facing Egyptians, the growing independent union movement, black bloc tactics, and the response of women to sexual assaults.

China's Army might be training the country's next crop of cyberhackers. An investigation by Mandiant, a U.S.-based computer security firm, found that many of the attacks on American corporations and government agencies are coming from a clandestine People’s Liberation Army base on the outskirts of Shanghai. The report found that many members of China's most sophisticated hacking groups are working from around that area, and it's likely that they are run by army officers or contract workers.

NYT:

The building off Datong Road, surrounded by restaurants, massage parlors and a wine importer, is the headquarters of P.L.A. Unit 61398. A growing body of digital forensic evidence — confirmed by American intelligence officials who say they have tapped into the activity of the army unit for years — leaves little doubt that an overwhelming percentage of the attacks on American corporations, organizations and government agencies originate in and around the white tower.

An unusually detailed 60-page study, to be released Tuesday by Mandiant, an American computer security firm, tracks for the first time individual members of the most sophisticated of the Chinese hacking groups — known to many of its victims in the United States as “Comment Crew” or “Shanghai Group” — to the doorstep of the military unit’s headquarters. The firm was not able to place the hackers inside the 12-story building, but makes a case there is no other plausible explanation for why so many attacks come out of one comparatively small area.

“Either they are coming from inside Unit 61398,” said Kevin Mandia, the founder and chief executive of Mandiant, in an interview last week, “or the people who run the most-controlled, most-monitored Internet networks in the world are clueless about thousands of people generating attacks from this one neighborhood.”

Other security firms that have tracked “Comment Crew” say they also believe the group is state-sponsored, and a recent classified National Intelligence, issued as a consensus document for all 16 of the United States intelligence agencies, makes a strong case that many of these hacking groups are either run by army officers or are contractors working for commands like Unit 61398, according to officials with knowledge of its classified content.

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Thousands of demonstrators marched through the streets of 16 Spanish cities Sunday to protest plans to privatize parts of their public health care system, with some questioning the government’s motives.

It was the third “white tide” demonstration in Madrid, named after the color of the medical scrubs many protesters wear. But it was the first time cities other than the capital took part, including Barcelona, Cuenca, Murcia, Pamplona, Toledo and Zaragoza. Protesters marched carrying banners saying “Public health is not to be sold, it’s to be defended.”

Health care and education are administered by Spain’s 17 semiautonomous regions. Some indebted ones, like Madrid, have announced the privatization of some services, with many people openly suspicious that the move is more a political-motivated ploy than an attempt to cut costs.

"White Coat" protesters march in protest in Madrid.

Journalist Matt Taibbi assesses the Obama Administration’s approach to holding banks accountable for their behavior, and early indications are not promising. Taibbi tells Bill Moyers that fearing another economic calamity is no excuse for turning a blind eye to shockingly unethical decisions and management.

“The rule of law isn’t really the rule of law if it doesn’t apply equally to everybody. If you’re going to put somebody in jail for having a joint in his pocket, you can’t let higher ranking HSBC officials off for laundering $800 million for the worst drug dealers in the entire world,” Taibbi tells Bill. “Eventually it eats away at the very fabric of society.”

Watch Bill’s full conversation with Taibbi on this weekend’s Moyers & Company.