Documentary of how the United States used chemical warfare indiscriminately in Iraq.
26 Apr 2009
Swine Flu Is Deadly Mix Of Never-Before-Seen Viruses
Swine flu panic is spreading in Mexico and soldiers are patrolling the streets after it was confirmed that human to human transmission is occurring and that the virus is a brand new strain which is seemingly affecting young, healthy people the worst, and that the bug is a never-before-seen intercontinental mixture of human, avian and pig viruses from America, Europe and Asia.
Clues that the virus may be a synthetic creation are already manifesting.
According to reports, the virus is a “never-before-seen form of the flu that combines pig, bird and human viruses” which consists of an intercontinental mix of viruses from North America, Europe and Asia.
“CDC officials detected a virus with a unique combination of gene segments that have not been seen in people or pigs before,” according to an Associated Press report.
The fact that the properties of the strain are completely new, that the virus is spreading from people to people, and that the young and healthy are being hit worst, has disturbing parallels to the deadly 1918 pandemic that killed millions.
It is unclear as to why, if the virus is a brand new strain, that public health officials are so confident programs of mass vaccination, which are already being prepared, would necessarily be effective. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that deadly flu viruses have been concocted in labs and then dispatched with the intention of creating a pandemic. See here for more information: Steve Watson / Infowars
25 Apr 2009
Guilty of Being Poor
The jailers of the 19th century — even in the pre-Civil War South — largely abandoned the practice of imprisoning people for falling into debt as counterproductive and ultimately barbaric. In the 1970s and ’80s, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that incarcerating people who can’t pay fines because of poverty violates the U.S. Constitution.
Apparently, though, some states and county jails never got the memo. Welcome to the debtors’ prisons of the 21st century. “Edwina Nowlin, a poor Michigan resident, was ordered to reimburse a juvenile detention center $104 a month for holding her 16-year-old son,” the New York Times wrote in an editorial.
“When she explained to the court that she could not afford to pay, Ms. Nowlin was sent to prison. The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, which helped get her out last week after she spent 28 days behind bars, says it is seeing more people being sent to jail because they cannot make various court-ordered payments. That is both barbaric and unconstitutional.”
The IMF: Raping The World, One Poor Nation at a Time
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been described as one of the enforcers of globalization. Nations who receive IMF assistance are often forced to surrender more sovereignty and further open up their borders to international banks and multinational corporations. Much of their wealth is then sucked dry by foreign predators with its resources and population essentially becoming the collateral for such financial aid. As a result of the global economic crisis, many more nations are having to turn to the IMF for help. At the recent G-20 Summit in London, the IMF’s role was expanded and its powers enhanced. There was little mention of its failed policies and its less then stellar record of effectively promoting development and democracy around the world. While some talk of reform, the IMF continues to rape the world, one poor nation at a time.
The IMF, along with the World Bank were established as financial sister institutions with both originating out of the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement. They are part of the United Nations system. The IMF was designed to help stabilize the post-World War II international financial system and is the framework for a central bank of issue. It provides short term financial assistance to nations that qualify, but this is at a very high price. These countries are placed in an economic straitjacket with the IMF and World Bank working in tandem, dictating large portions of public policy.
UN report discloses Sri Lanka dead
Nearly 6,500 civilians have been killed and 13,000 wounded in fighting in Sri Lanka over the past three months, according to a UN report.
The release of the document on Friday comes two days after Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, said in Brussels he was sending a team of humanitarian experts to the country as part of efforts to "try to do whatever we can to protect the civilian population".
According to the UN figures, 6,432 civilians have been killed in the fighting since 20 January and another 13,946 wounded.
Speaking in New York, Catherine Bragg, the UN assistant secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, said the organisation continued to receive reports that "heavy weaponry is being used ... and the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) is preventing people form leaving that area and using the civilians as human shields".
This is Waterboarding
From http://www.vf.com. How does it feel to be "aggressively interrogated"? Christopher Hitchens found out for himself, submitting to a brutal waterboarding session in an effort to understand the human cost of America's use of harsh tactics at Guantánamo and elsewhere. VF.com has the footage. Related: "Believe Me, It's Torture," from the August 2008 issue, http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/fe...
Interview conducted by David Rose and filmed by Arya Surowidjojo.
24 Apr 2009
Swine Flu, Mexico Lung Illness Heighten Pandemic Risk
Disease trackers are asking U.S. hospitals to help follow a new strain of swine flu and are trying to determine whether it’s related to hundreds of illnesses and 57 deaths in Mexico.
A previously unseen variant of H1N1 swine influenza has sickened at least seven people in California and Texas, the Atlanta-based U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said yesterday. The World Health Organization said 57 people died among more than 800 in the Mexico City region who developed flu-like symptoms in the past month.
Global health experts are studying whether the U.S. and Mexico illnesses pose a threat of pandemic, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. U.S. hospitals today were asked to collect samples from patients with flu-like symptoms, said William Schaffner, a flu expert at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee.
“This has a sense of urgency about it,” Schaffner, chief of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt, said in a telephone interview today. “They are asking us who work in hospitals to go to our emergency rooms and our pediatric wards to gather specimens and start testing them.”
Flu can spread quickly when a new strain emerges, because no one has natural immunity. The so-called 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, which may have killed as many as 50 million people, began when an avian flu virus jumped to people, experts said.
Where does it come from? Killer Flu Created in Lab
Member of UAE Royal Family Tortures Man
A video tape smuggled out of the United Arab Emirates shows a member of the country’s royal family mercilessly torturing a man with whips, electric cattle prods and wooden planks with protruding nails.
A man in a UAE police uniform is seen on the tape tying the victim’s arms and legs, and later holding him down as the Sheikh pours salt on the man’s wounds and then drives over him with his Mercedes SUV.
In a statement to ABC News, the UAE Ministry of the Interior said it had reviewed the tape and acknowledged the involvement of Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al Nahyan, brother of the country’s crown prince, Sheikh Mohammed.
“The incidents depicted in the video tapes were not part of a pattern of behavior,” the Interior Ministry’s statement declared. The Minister of the Interior is also one of Sheikh Issa’s brother.
Rape, beatings and bribery: Iraqi police out of control
In the desperate rush to drag Iraq back from civil war, sweeping powers were granted to its new security forces. Human rights workers, MPs and American officials now believe that they are all too often a law unto themselves: admired when they defeat terrorists but also feared for their widespread abuse of power.
In this vast and largely unaccountable security apparatus, with almost a million people in uniform, corruption is rife. One of the most common ploys is to arrest innocent people and then charge hundreds or even thousands of dollars for them to be released.
“The Iraqi security forces are out of control,” Abu Aliya said. “If you quarrel with a simple soldier, even one out of uniform, he will arrest you and your family. This is happening everywhere, all the time.”
Amel al-Qaadi, a member of the Iraqi Parliament's Integrity Committee, said that she had met a young male student who had been detained and had confessed to membership of a terrorist cell because his jailers threatened to rape him. “There were many others who told me they were actually raped at the headquarters of various security force units,” she said.
23 Apr 2009
Pirate Bay lawyer calls for Retrial
A lawyer representing one of the men convicted in the Pirate Bay trial has called for a retrial after reports that the judge was a member of the same copyright protection organisations as several of the main entertainment industry representatives.
The judge in the Pirate Bay case, Tomas Norström, has been a member of several of the same copyright protection organisations as several of the main entertainment industry representatives, Sveriges Radio's P3 news programme reports.
Peter Althin, the lawyer who represents Pirate Bay spokesperson Peter Sunde, has announced that he plans to demand a retrial.
"I will point that out in my appeal, then the Court of Appeal (Hovrätten) will decide if the district court decision should be set aside and the case revisited," Althin said on Thursday.
Crisis as a Means to Building a Global Totalitarian State
As the world financial and economic crisis comes into its own, the Western political leaders and elites are seeking to impress on mankind the idea that this upheaval will end up ‘turning the world into something different’.
Even though the picture of the 'new world order’ remains vague and fuzzy, the main idea is quite clear: A single global government, goes the argument, has to be established if we don’t want general chaos to prevail.
Every now and again, Western politicians mention the need for a ‘new world order’, a ‘new world financial architecture’, or some kind of ‘supranational control’, calling it a ‘New Deal’ for the world. Nicolas Sarkozy was the first to say so, while addressing the UN General Assembly in September 2007 (that is, before the crisis).
During the February 2009 meeting in Berlin convened to prepare the G20 summit, this was echoed by Gordon Brown, who said that a worldwide New Deal was needed. We are conscious, he added, that where the world financial flows were concerned, we would not be able to emerge from this situation with the help of purely national authorities alone. We need the authorities and world watchdogs to make the activities of financial institutions operating in the world markets totally open to us. Both Sarkozy and Brown are protégés of the Rothschilds. Statements made by certain representatives of ‘the global elite’ indicate that the current crisis is being used as a mechanism for provoking some deepening social upheavals that would make mankind – plunged as it is already into chaos and frightened by the ghost of an all-out violence – urge of its own free will that a ‘supranational’ arbitrator with dictatorial powers intervene into the world affairs.
More on Global Research
More on MajorityRights.com and David Rockefeller and his New World Order on quantumspectrum
22 Apr 2009
Nazi 'super cows' shipped to Devon farm
Their meat will not be reaching the Sunday lunch table any time soon and nobody would dare get close enough to try to milk them. But a herd of "super cows" descended from animals bred in Nazi Germany is making an impressive sight on a farm in the south-west of England.
The "Heck" cattle were designed by brothers Heinz and Lutz Heck in an attempt to recreate the extinct European wild ox, the aurochs, an important beast in German mythology. Guardian.co.uk
Hitler wanted them to be Aryan cows – ancient beasts resurrected from a time before Europe was populated by "racially degenerate" wildlife. Independent.co.uk
21 Apr 2009
UK public are fast losing patience with thuggish policing
The police have always faced a degree of suspicion from the public. The founders of the Met dressed their men in blue rather than the more military red to underline their civilian role. Keeping the peace is one of society's toughest jobs and one that our police have performed sometimes successfully, sometimes not.
Unfortunately, the events of the past week will be remembered as a low point. The arrest, early on Monday, of 114 demonstrators in a school outside Nottingham on suspicion of conspiracy to cause criminal damage and aggravated trespass, long before they managed to get anywhere near the Ratcliffe-on-Soar coal-fired power station, smacked of intimidation; the bail restrictions then placed on them draconian and deeply unsettling in a free society. The investigation into leaks at the Home Office that led to the arrest of Damian Green appears to have gone far beyond remit, with officers fishing for emails to Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty.
Chakrabarti acknowledges that "public order policing is a tough and thankless job". That is indisputable, but to succeed the police must have the trust of the public. It shows just how far we are from that ideal when officers are being spotted at demonstrations with their ID tags deliberately obscured. No police force should tolerate such brutish arrogance.
This aggression is no doubt linked to the government's nasty habit of writing laws that prefer the convenience of security forces to the rights of free citizens. But the police are public servants, not government enforcers. Their job is to keep the peace, not clear the streets of dissent
POLICE STATE UK UPDATE: Unbelievable footage of UK police vs. UK photographers
Envoys walk out of U.N. anti-racism conference
Dozens of international envoys walked out during a speech by Iran's president Monday as he accused Israel of having a "racist government" and committing genocide.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accused the West of making "an entire nation homeless under the pretext of Jewish suffering ... in order to establish a totally racist government in occupied Palestine."
Many delegates at the controversial U.N. anti-racism conference in Geneva, Switzerland, cheered his words as a minority of diplomats -- mostly from Europe -- collected their papers and briefcases and left the room. Cameras at the scene showed empty seats where delegates from France, Finland and Denmark had been sitting.
The British and Spanish delegations also walked out, both countries' foreign affairs divisions confirmed. CNN.com
20 Apr 2009
Crisis? Bank of America profit triples to $4.2bn
Also see The Great American Jobs Scam on pushhamburger.com: Bank of America, for example, received two "job retention" subsidies from New York City, in 1993 and in 2004. The 1993 subsidy was given to induce the bank to move employees into the World Trade Center following the 1993 bombing. In exchange for at least $18 million in benefits, the bank promised to retain at least 1,700 jobs in Tower One for 15 years. Instead, it laid off at least 800 people in 1997 after merging with Security Pacific National Bank. This was such a severe drop in employment that the city cancelled the subsidy in 1998, but didn't require Bank of America to refund any past subsidies.
US tortured 2 suspects with Waterboarding 266 Times
C.I.A. interrogators used waterboarding, the near-drowning technique that top Obama administration officials have described as illegal torture, 266 times on two key prisoners from Al Qaeda, far more than had been previously reported.
The C.I.A. officers used waterboarding at least 83 times in August 2002 against Abu Zubaydah, according to a 2005 Justice Department legal memorandum. Abu Zubaydah has been described as a Qaeda operative.
A former C.I.A. officer, John Kiriakou, told ABC News and other news media organizations in 2007 that Abu Zubaydah had undergone waterboarding for only 35 seconds before agreeing to tell everything he knew.
The 2005 memo also says that the C.I.A. used waterboarding 183 times in March 2003 against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The New York Times reported in 2007 that Mr. Mohammed had been barraged more than 100 times with harsh interrogation methods (torture), causing C.I.A. officers to worry that they might have crossed legal limits and to halt his questioning. But the precise number and the exact nature of the interrogation method was not previously known.
Secret police intelligence was given to E.ON before planned demo
Government officials handed confidential police intelligence about environmental activists to the energy giant E.ON before a planned peaceful demonstration, according to private emails seen by the Guardian.
Correspondence between civil servants and security officials at the company reveals how intelligence was shared about the peaceful direct action group Climate Camp in the run-up to the demonstration at Kingsnorth, the proposed site of a new coal-fired power station in north Kent.
Intelligence passed to the energy firm by officials from the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) included detailed information about the movements of protesters and their meetings. E.ON was also given a secret strategy document written by environmental campaigners and information from the Police National Information and Coordination Centre (PNICC), which gathers national and international intelligence for emergency planning
19 Apr 2009
18 Apr 2009
The Case for An Animal Bill of Rights
Dr Tom Regan is an American philosopher and animal-rights activist. He is the author of four books on the philosophy of animal rights, including "The Case for Animal Rights", one of a handful of studies that have significantly influenced the animal-liberation movement.
The international monetary system’s breakdown is underway
The next stage of the crisis will result from a Chinese dream. Indeed, what on earth can China be dreaming of, caught – if we listen to Washington – in the “dollar trap” of its 1,400-billion worth of USD-denominated debt? If we believe US leaders and their scores of media experts, China is only dreaming of remaining a prisoner, and even of intensifying the severity of its prison conditions by buying always more US T-Bonds and Dollars.
In fact, everyone knows what prisoners dream of? They dream of escaping of course, of getting out of prison. LEAP/E2020 has therefore no doubt that Beijing is now constantly striving to find the means of disposing of, as early as possible, the mountain of « toxic » assets which US Treasuries and Dollars have become, keeping the wealth of 1,300 billion Chinese citizens prisoner. In this issue of the GEAB (N°34), our team describes the “tunnels and galleries” Beijing has secretively begun to dig in the global financial and economic system in order to escape the « dollar trap » by the end of summer 2009. Once the US has defaulted on its debt, it will be time for the « everyman for himself » rule to prevail in the international system, in line with the final statement of the London G20 Summit which reads as a « chronicle of a geopolitical dislocation », as explained by LEAP/E2020 in this issue of the Global Europe Anticipation Bulletin.
Queen's Day in Amsterdam
Queen's Day festivities on April 30th invite locals and 500-800,000 visitors alike to soak up Amsterdam's open-air fun. In the streets, canals, public houses, pleins (squares), parks and any possible space in between, amidst orange-pride, live music, DJs, and a citywide open market, it's an electric atmosphere not to be missed
Iran jails US reporter for eight years
An Iranian revolutionary court has sentenced US journalist Roxana Saberi to eight years in jail after she was charged with spying for the United States, her lawyer said on Saturday. "Ms Saberi has been sentenced to eight years in jail and I am going to appeal," lawyer Abdolsamad Khoramshahi told AFP. Under Iranian law, the verdict can be appealed within 20 days.
The case against Saberi, a 31-year-old who has US and Iranian nationality, has raised concerns in Washington and among rights groups. She has been detained in the notorious Evin prison in Tehran since January and went on trial behind closed doors on Monday accused of spying for the United States.
She was initially reported to have been detained for buying alcohol, an illegal act in the Islamic republic.
AFP - Free Roxana Saberi: freeroxana.net
US Filmmaker Arrested for Asking Questions at Couric Event
“All I’m trying to do is ask questions!”
John Ziegler went to USC to witness and ask questions about Katie Couric getting the Walter Cronkite journalism award for her interview of Sarah Palin. He intended to also give away copies of his film but was literally prevented from doing so. He did not go there hoping for or expecting any sort of confrontation, especially with law enforcement. He was simply shocked and horrified by what happened there, as should every freedom loving American. He did absolutely nothing wrong and was handcuffed, detained and literally abused by law enforcement at the event. The video speaks for itself, John will have plenty to say about this very disturbing episode. This video was shot and edited by Orange County Films. John Ziegler was not involved the the production or editing of this video in any way.
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