At least 21 people have died and scores of others have gone missing after flash floods triggered by torrential rains destroyed thousands of homes in two provinces in northern Afghanistan, officials have said.

It was reported on Sunday that the floods left thousands of people homeless on Saturday after it struck the provincial capitals of Sari Pul and Takhar.

In Sari Pul, 19 people were killed and about 60 people went missing after the floods hit. Rescuers have searched for survivors across the city, said Sayed Faizullah Sadat, the national disaster director of the city.

He also said that 1,000 houses were destroyed and 10,000 people were forced to find shelter in mosques, schools and a teacher-training center.

The betrayals come in many forms. Here are a few of the more outrageous, and destructive, examples:

Evasion: Corporations suddenly stopped meeting their tax responsibilities

While corporate profits have doubled to $1.9 trillion in less than ten years, the corporate income tax rate, which for thirty years hovered around the 20-25% level, suddenly dropped to 10% after the recession. It has remained there for three years.

We are seeing a manifestation of the Shock Doctrine. Corporations are using the national emergency of the financial collapse to make a statement about taxes, and a traumatized nation is too preoccupied to do anything about it.

If you've ever felt stupider after watching Congress bicker about some issue for a couple of hours, you're not wrong. The nation's lawmakers are, in fact, dumbing themselves down, according to a new report by the Sunlight Foundation.

An analysis weighing congressional speeches against the Flesch-Kincaid scale - best known as that numerical score that tells you how smart you are when you run the word count diagnostic in your word processing software - reveals that legislators speak at a 10.6 grade level.

That's down from 11.5 just seven years ago. In the span of less than a decade, Congress' rhetorical skills have receded nearly a full grade, the Sunlight Foundation discovered. The report readily admits the unreliability of the Flesch-Kincaid test, which grades language on complexity, not clarity. But it is still a decent metric for judging the quality of one's words.

That quality is declining on Capitol Hill, and it's a bipartisan effort. Democrats in the 112th Congress speak at a 10.8 grade level, with Republicans declaiming at a 10.5 mark. But the GOP could take some solace in the knowledge that a reading of Democratic scores showed that the further left a member of Congress is ideologically, the more his or her grade tends to decline.

Incident during violent street protest caught on video


Montreal - A day after a violent protest ending in a series of street fires, police came under criticism Sunday over an altercation caught on video that shows patrons on a bar patio getting pepper sprayed.

Surveillance footage, played in a loop Sunday on one of Quebec's all-news stations, shows several people sprayed by riot police at close range. Customers are seen scrambling to get inside the bar as a police officer knocks over tables and chairs.

NATO arrives everywhere violently. Chicago was no exception. During summit activities, city cops are enforcers. They specialize in serving wealth, power, and imperial interests.

Their guerrilla warfare history is notorious. They're reliable state terror partners.

Their tactics include no-holds barred surveillance, vigilantism, and brutality. They're infamous for physical confrontation, flagrant abuse, and criminal assaults.

From 2002 - 2004 alone, over 10,000 complaints were lodged. Many involve violence, brutality, even torture and murder. Only 18 disciplinary actions followed.

University of Chicago Law Professor Craig Futterman heads its Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project (PAP). It's one of America's leading civil rights initiatives.

It focuses on criminal justice issues. Its aim is improving police accountability and the nation's criminal justice system. It faces long odds as America grows more repressive. Police behavior during Chicago's NATO summit is Exhibit A. More on that below.

If you woke on a beautiful spring Sunday in May on a pond in Maine, what would you do? A canoe ride on water as smooth as glass, and breakfast on the deck, perhaps -- followed by disrupting international war criminal Tony Blair at Colby College graduation in Waterville!

Who knew our protest would lead news coverage of the ceremony? (Washington Post, WGME, Houston Chronicle, and Daily Mail, to name a few.)

Two adjacent items in last Monday's Daily Telegraph highlighted what has become one of the more prominent features of British life. In one, Cristina Odone described how she was asked to speak in favour of marriage at a conference arranged by the World Congress of Families, at the Law Society. At the last minute, the Society cancelled the debate on the grounds that it was "contrary to our diversity policy" - "espousing as it does an ethos which is opposed to same-sex marriage". (Though the society happily hosted a meeting recently to promote assisted suicide which, unlike marriage, is still against the law.)

Adjoining this was a fine rant by Boris Johnson against the BBC: "statist, corporatist, anti-business, Europhile and, above all, overwhelmingly biased to the Left". He called for its next director-general to be a Tory.

The wider point these two pieces illustrated was the success achieved by the upholders of politically correct orthodoxies in taking over the institutions that represent the commanding heights of our society, and using them ruthlessly to ensure that no dissenting voices are heard. Any view contrary to their dogmas becomes what Orwell called, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, a "thoughtcrime".

We saw this for years in the way that those daring to question the euro, or the onward march of the EU to political integration, were dismissed with contempt - by politicians, the BBC and every variety of the great and the good - as "fruitcakes", "xenophobes" and "Little Englanders". We saw it in spades as the promoters of "consensus" on global warming took over the commanding heights of the scientific world - such as the Royal Society, Nature, the universities (on a sea of climate-change related funding). Supported again by politicians and the BBC, they were determined to show the maximum intolerance to those who challenged their orthodoxy, however rationally: these were "deniers", "flat-earthers", "anti-science nutters", who must be "in the pay of Big Oil".

The US corporate superstructure conglomerate - including financial interests, the defense industry, oil companies and the media - brazenly manipulate American society, shares Peter Dale Scott, former diplomat, poet and prominent anti-war advocate.

Man charged with disorderly conduct after Blair's speech interrupted by small group of demonstrators at Colby College

Former British prime minister Tony Blair was heckled by protesters as he tried to issue a plea for world unity during a college commencement speech.

Blair was interrupted by a small group of demonstrators as he attempted to deliver a speech in front of 400 graduates at Colby College in Maine.

Police say the activists shouted "warmonger" and "war criminal" during the address. One person was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct.

Waterville police said the trouble began after Blair took to the podium.

"As Mr Blair was introduced for his address, three protesters began screaming and were removed and escorted from campus.

"A short time later, another protester began screaming and was escorted away from the crowd," a police statement read.

A former agent of the CIA has revealed that al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has died of natural causes five years before the US announced his death.

In an interview with Russia's Channel One, Berkan Yashar, who is also a Turkish politician, said the US has not killed the al-Qaeda leader.

"In September of 1992, I was in Chechnya, that's when I first met the man whose name was Bin Laden. This meeting took place in a two-story house in the city of Grozny; on the top floor was a family of Gamsakhurdia, the Georgian president, who then was kicked out of his country. We met on the bottom floor; Osama lived in the same building," Yashar said.

According to the former CIA agent, he personally knew Bin Laden's three Chechen bodyguards, who had protected him until his death and witnessed his death on June 26, 2006.

"Even if the entire world believed, I could not possibly believe it," Yashar said. "I personally know the Chechens who protected him, they are Sami, Mahmood, and Ayub, and they were with him until the very end."