A man is brought to a hospital in the Syrian town of Khan al-Assal, southwest of Aleppo, where militants used chemical weapons for the first time in March 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Britainâ„¢s House of Commons Speaker John Bercow has bought himself harsh criticism for suggesting eastern European immigrants have more “aptitude and commitment” to work than Britons.

During an official visit to Romania last week, Bercow was asked about the lifting of immigration restrictions on Romanians and Bulgarians in 2014.

He answered certain restrictions would remain in place but stressed that critics of Eastern European immigrants had used a “bellicose and strident tone” in their criticism as immigrants had “great advantages”.

“There has been an important wave of immigrants that came to Great Britain from new member states and in many cases they came with aptitudes and a commitment, an involvement we haven’t always seen in our labour force,” he added.

His remarks have outraged the anti-Europe UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage who said it was unacceptable to Å“comment on matters that are both highly political and deeply contentious”.

Farage also branded Bercow a Å“disgrace” to the office of Speaker.

This comes as Conservative MP Philip Hollobone challenged Farage saying Bercow made the remarks while answering Romanian MPs questions, which is Å“absolutely right”.

Ministers say they will introduce a series of measures to limit the scale of immigration from Romania and Bulgaria after the current controls are lifted in the New Year, including restrictions on rights of incomers to claim benefits and use the NHS or other public services.

AMR/HE

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

There is a large police presence around the city court where hearings into last year’s Bolotnaya Square riots opened on Thursday.

The case is being heard by a district court, but the sessions
have been moved to the larger city court building due to the
public interest and the need for additional security measures.

The court case involves 12 people who have been charged with
inciting and taking part in mass unrest on May 6th 2012, the day
before President Vladimir Putin’s inauguration.

The sanctioned rally in support of democracy and against alleged
violations in the 2011 parliamentary elections turned violent as
some of the demonstrators attempted to break through police
lines. Defense attorneys and some human rights advocates claim
that the police tried to force the protesters into a confined
area. Police say they were attacked by rioters who used
flagpoles, stones and pieces of asphalt injuring about 40
officers and damaging their riot gear.

In the course of the May 6 riots over 80 policemen sustained
injuries and the total damage caused by the clashes is estimated
at over 28 million roubles (US$900,000), according to the
Prosecutor General’s Office.

A representative of the defense team has told the press that they
intended to ask the judge to return the case to prosecutors as it
was not yet fully prepared for hearings.

On the previous evening several people held single-pickets
protests on Moscow’s Manezhnaya Square, in front of the Lower
House HQ. The protesters held slogans suggesting that the trial
of the 12 protesters was politically motivated and accused
authorities of repression. More protests were scheduled on
Thursday evening.

In a connected case Russian prosecutors charged several leftist
activists with plotting and organizing the unrest using money received from foreign sources —
in particular, Georgian MP Givi Targamadze. The suspects include
Sergey Udaltsov, the head of the unregistered movement Leftist
Front, that specializes in street protests. One of Udaltsov’s
aides, Konstantin Lebedev entered a plea deal and was sentenced to two and a half years in
prison in late April this year.

In November last year, one of the Bolotnaya Square rioters
– Maksim Luzyanin – was sentenced to 4.5 years in
prison behind bars.

One suspect in the case — Mikhail Kosenko — has been officially
recognized as mentally ill and prosecutors now seek his forced
treatment, not criminal punishment.

This article originally appeared on: RT

A Dutch court has ruled that the owners of the cafés in the Netherlands selling marijuana must be partially compensated for losses after the introduction of a new marijuana law last year.

The so-called “cannabis card” law was introduced on May 1 last
year in three southern provinces. It’s aimed at
transforming coffee shops into private clubs, requiring them to
only sell cannabis to registered members who are Dutch residents
and to stop sales to foreigners. The law has also addressed the
downsides of drug tourism – traffic jams, street dealing and
rowdy late-night partying.

“Part of the cannabis card law has disproportionately infringed
the interests of coffee shop clients, leading to financial losses
during several months,” The Hague District Court reportedly ruled
on Wednesday.

“Clients have been scared away,” the court said referring to
Dutch smokers who would have been put off from visiting coffee
shops because they were required to provide their identities.

The court said, the state will have to compensate a number of
coffee shops in the provinces of Limburg, North Brabant and
Zeeland. However it upheld the ban on sales to foreigners, saying
it should reduce problems of cross-border drug tourism in the
southern part of the country.

The Dutch association of retail cannabis traders and a number of
coffee shops took the government to court in September last year
to ask judges to declare the ban on cannabis sales to foreigners
illegal, association spokesman Michael Veling told AFP.

“Compensation is a good thing, but (in this case) it’s rather
limited because traders won’t be repaid for drinks they haven’t
sold and that kind of thing,” Veling added.

A new, more left wing government shelved the cannabis card law in
November, but said individual city authorities could still decide
whether to apply the law affecting some 650 establishments across
the country, according to their economic or social priorities.

Amsterdam, whose coffee shops are a major tourist attraction,
said it would continue to allow tourists to buy cannabis in the
cafés, the Guardian reports.

Although cannabis is technically illegal, the Netherlands
decriminalized possession of less than five grams of the
substance in 1976.

This article originally appeared on: RT

Army vehicles are seen in Kasserine, capital of the western region of Mount Chaambi, Tunisia, May 7, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

[unable to retrieve full-text content]At least one civilian has been killed and 15 others injured in a bomb blast that hit a hotel in northern Afghanistan.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

[unable to retrieve full-text content]The militants in Syria have taken over the Quneitra crossing between Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, the Israeli army radio says.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Two soldiers have been killed and two others wounded in Tunisia in a bomb attack targeting an army vehicle.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

After failing in their efforts to recruit Scots living outside Scotland to vote against the Scottish independence referendum, British Conservatives have now turned to another strategy to use the immigrant Scots to reinforce the no-to-independence campaign.

Better Together campaign wants thousands of Scots living in England, Wales and Northern Ireland to Å“lovebomb” their friends and family in Scotland to persuade them to vote against the Scottish independence.

Back in October, British Conservative councilor, Rob Mckellar, called for a change of regulations to give some 800,000 Scottish citizens, living outside Scotland, the right to take part in the plebiscite.

He based his argument, presented in a motion to the parliament, on the claim that the Scots living in other parts of the UK would be deprived of their nationality if they cannot vote.

The motion, if approved, would have been a great boost to the no-to-independence campaign as Scotland is home to just 5.2 million people and 800,000 extra no votes would have left a significant impact on the results.

With the motion defeated, the No Campaign now wants relatives and friends of Scots living in Scotland to convince them that they do not have to make a Å“false choice” between being Scottish and British.

In response to the new strategy, spearheaded by Shadow Chancellor and Better Together chairman Alistair Darling, Scotlandâ„¢s ruling Scottish National Party (SNP) described the resort to a Scottish identity as a deception to undermine the pro-Scottish independence cause.

Å“People living in Scotland have a range of identities – Scottish, British, English, Pakistani, French, Irish, Polish, and many more besides – and that will continue to be the case regardless of our constitutional relationship with the rest of the UK,” SNP said.

AMR/HE

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

The US has strongly condemned Syrian Armyâ„¢s liberation of the countryâ„¢s border city of Qusayr, which had served as the major stronghold of foreign-sponsored armed insurgents that sought to overthrow Syriaâ„¢s government.

Å“The United States condemns in the strongest possible terms the al-Assad regime’s assault on al-Qusayr, which has killed untold numbers of civilians and is causing tremendous humanitarian suffering,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney claimed in a Wednesday statement.

The apparent US rage over the success of the Syrian forces to drive out the foreign-backed militant gangs that have terrorized the nation over the past two years, comes amid widely reported US plans to offer direct military support to the anti-Damascus militants with the announced aim of overthrowing the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

The White House official further called for “safe access” to evacuate injured insurgents and provide Å“medical supplies,” a call that apparently was not considered worthy of a response by Syrian officials.

Washington has also blasted the Lebanese Islamic resistance movement Hezbollah for its support role behind the Syrian military triumph over the insurgents, who received massive amounts of arms and supplies from US-backed regimes in the region, including Jordan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and even the Israeli regime.

This is while Hezbollah has described the recent military victory over Qusayr as a major blow to the US-Israeli-Takfiri triangle in Syria that sought to remove the only Arab government in the region that effectively remained behind Palestinian resistance against the Israeli occupation.

Takfiris are ultra-radical Muslims closely tied to the Saudi-invented Wahhabi brand of Islam that openly seeks to kill or neutralize any Muslim that opposes their radical worldviews and approaches.

Most Takfiris have identified themselves with the shadowy al-Qaeda terror network and are widely known to have committed countless atrocities in Syria against civilians as well as government forces.

Hezbollah Deputy Secretary-General Sheikh Naim Qassem, meanwhile, has reiterated that those who wish to see the fall of the Syrian government are deeply flawed.

Moreover, the Syrian army further vowed on Wednesday to entirely crush the remainder of the foreign-backed insurgents across the country following its triumph in Qusayr after weeks of fierce battles.

Hundreds of insurgents have been killed and many captured in the course of the recent fighting.

Yet, they have also vowed to continue the armed insurgency against the Damascus government despite their heavy loss in Qusayr.

MFB/MFB

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/plenty_of_surprises_as_world_warms_20130606/

Posted on Jun 6, 2013

This article originally appeared on: TruthDig

Turkish protesters shout anti-government slogans during a demonstration in Ankara, June 4, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

An undated family photo released on April 25, 2013, shows US filmmaker Timothy Tracy inside of a vehicle in Venezuela.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

An office of the French state-run employment agency, Pole Emploi, in the northern Paris suburb of Pantin (file photo)

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

This article originally appeared on: RT

The photo shows the ceremony of the diversion of the Blue Nile in Guba, Ethiopia, May 28, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

June 3, 2013
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The following article first appeared on the Nation.com. For more great content from the Nation, sign up for their email newsletters here. 

Nearly 200 students, parents, community members and union leaders rallied at Sallie Mae’s annual shareholder meeting in Newark, Delaware, yesterday. On the agenda: first, demand that the nation’s largest private student loan lender meet directly with students to discuss their crushing debt burden; and second, introduce a shareholder resolution calling for disclosure of the corporation’s lobbying practices and membership in groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

Outside of Sallie Mae’s corporate headquarters, the activists were met by “dozens of police, blockades and K-9 units,” according to participants. Sarita Gupta, executive director of Jobs with Justice—American Rights at Work, urged the crowd to confront Sallie Mae executives and board members “about their role in America’s student debt crisis.”

More than 38 million people now owe over $1.1 trillion in student debt; Sallie Mae owns approximately 15 percent of that debt, or $162.5 billion. Students owe an average of $27,000 when they graduate from college and many have a debt load several times greater than that amount. Nearly one in ten will default on their loans within two years.

Gupta noted that Sallie Mae “spent $16 million on federal lobbying from 2008 to 2012 and has more than sixty state lobbyists.” The corporation has lobbied at the federal level “to block student loan reform,” and at the state level “for reduced public investment in higher education, forcing more students to rely on private student loans.”

“They’re in the business of condemning students to a lifetime of debt, not making education a reality,” said Sara Fitouri, a law student at the University of Denver, who owes $145,000 in student debt.

“They show that when we privatize something that used to be in the public realm it can lead to horrible results,” said Sam Nelson, a junior at George Washington University who expects to graduate with approximately $50,000 in student loan debt.

Sallie Mae was indeed created as a government-sponsored enterprise in 1972, and transitioned to a fully privatized bank lender between 1997 and 2004. Organizers say that as the largest lender it now sets the trends and standards for the industry.

Gupta spoke out against profit margins that continue to increase for Sallie Mae as “student debt and student loan defaults escalate at an unsustainable pace.” She noted that the senior management team of five executives made more than $20 million combined in 2011; the former CEO–who just announced his retirement–was paid $35 million from 2007 to 2011.

Twenty of the activists entered Sallie Mae headquarters as legal proxies for shareholders with a right to vote. The groups they represented included: the United States Student Association, the Student Labor Action Project, Common Cause, the Responsible Endowment Coalition, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and Jobs with Justice—American Rights at Work. Sallie Mae personnel attempted to restrict these individuals to a holding area but the activists successfully negotiated their way into the meeting.

Prior to introducing the shareholders resolution, Randi Weingarten, president of the AFT, whose members’ pension plans have more than $1 trillion in assets and are long-term shareholders of Sallie Mae, said, “As Sallie Mae profits from billions of dollars of student loans, it has an obligation to students, educators and shareholders to be transparent about its lobbying efforts, including on student loan reform.”

The resolution asked that the board disclose in an annual report the corporation’s policies, procedures and payments for direct and indirect lobbying; as well as its membership and payments to any tax-exempt organization “that writes and endorses model legislation.” (See: ALEC.) Although there has yet to be a tally of the vote, organizers hope that they received the support of approximately 30 percent of the shareholders.

This article originally appeared on: AlterNet

June 4, 2013
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This week, Connecticut won the honor of becoming the first state to pass a law requiring genetically-engineered foods to be labeled. (The governor has indicated he will sign.) It was really only a matter of time. The disappointing defeat of Prop 37 last fall in California (thanks to a massive industry disinformation campaign) sparked a national movement that has resulted in labeling bills getting introduced in about half the states.

But how did the small state of Connecticut make this happen?

I spoke at length with the leader of the effort, Tara Cook-Littman of GMO Free CT, who worked for the past two years as a volunteer. (See the group’s impressive list of coalition partners.)

She said for a long time, efforts to pass labeling bills went nowhere, but things started to change two years ago once advocates formally organized themselves. While at first she and others “were dismissed as a bunch of crazy moms and environmentalists,” things started to pick up last year “when advocates were able to show themselves to be a serious movement with political power.”

What about the opposition? Cook-Littman said it was formidable, and that industry made all the same fear-mongering arguments we heard last year during Prop 37 in California about higher food prices and confusing consumers.

She and others suspect the biotech industry was funneling money through the trade group, the Connecticut Food Association, which represents retailers and wholesalers. Also in opposition was the Grocery Manufacturers Association, the national trade group for food makers, which firmly stated its opposition to Prop 37 last year, calling it the organization’s “single-highest priority.”

In addition, Cook-Littman told me about the front group industry formed to oppose the bill, called: “ Connecticut Farm to Food.” (For more about front groups, see my recent report.) This group’s home page claims boldly if inexplicably: “Forced labeling will drive business and science out of Connecticut.” Listed as sponsors are three groups: The Council for Biotechnology Information (a trade group for the biotech industry; its website is: whybiotech.com), the Connecticut Retail Merchants Association, and the previously-mentioned Grocery Manufacturers Association. In other words, two of these three groups behind this “Connecticut” organization are based in Washington DC.

The toughest opposition though, Cook-Littman said, came from the Connecticut Farm Bureau, which claimed the bill would hurt farmers, despite the bill not even being about farming, but rather food products. “They claimed that farmers’ sales of value-added products would be destroyed if they had to be labeled,” she said. But, as a strong counter-weight, advocates had the support of the state’s numerous organic farmers, led by the Connecticut chapter of the Northeast Organic Farming Association, who Cook-Littman called “our truest partner.”

Still, how did this grassroots group fight off such high-powered lobbyists representing at least three major industries — biotech, food retailers, and food manufacturers? She said, “We just got louder.”

What exactly was the turning point for the movement? Cook-Littman said face-to-face meetings with politicians were critical. “We spent a lot of time developing relationships with our representatives. Just spending that time with them was invaluable,” she said.

Also, the group’s social media presence, especially on Facebook, allowed non-paid advocates to engage in less time-consuming ways. “We told our representatives: ‘look at what’s happening on Facebook.’”

And simply showing up in massive numbers when it counted: at two critical rallies, one before the legislative session began, another just weeks ago, along with a huge turnout for the hearing.

Cook-Littman credits the national advocacy group Food Democracy Now! for being a vital partner in the effort. “We could not have done it without them. They always believed in us, while others discounted us,” she said. “They also helped drive more than 40,000 phone calls to the governor’s office and provided strategic advice along the way.”

This article originally appeared on: AlterNet

June 5, 2013
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What is the true nature of female sexuality? When it comes to women’s priorities, why, once in a secure relationship, is sex no longer on top? Exploring what defines women’s libido and why it becomes depleted, I investigate whether we have unrealistic expectations about our sex drive, who defines what is normal and abnormal, and if ‘low libido’ is in fact the natural order of things. I also provide concrete ways women can work toward defining their own jouissance–a personalized female sexuality that can lead to a more sensual, vibrant life.

1. Don’t believe the hype: our sexuality is culturally relative. Sexuality is shaped by culture and history. For example, a hundred years ago a woman who loved sex could be regarded as being mentally disturbed, whereas today if you don’t love sex you could end up being diagnosed as dysfunctional. With this in mind, it pays to be skeptical of labels that pathologize sexual difference.

2. Our desire to appear desirable exceeds desire itself.

It is well known that media and advertising can have a devastating effect on women’s self-esteem–but it affects our sexual self-esteem too. Feeling like we don’t live up to the physical ideal, women often grow to view themselves, and even their genitalia, as undesirable.

Rather than having sex, many women simply want to look like they are having sex. We are too busy chasing beautiful to want to kiss beautifully. Too busy chasing the veneer of desirability, to desire. Our animal instincts have become inverted: time devoted to preening overrides time devoted to mating and sexual pleasure.

3. Ditch the rom-com storyline. Passionate monogamy, the goal for most, promises lust-ever-after. But we have unrealistic expectations about relationships. In actual fact, it is natural for sexual intensity to decline over the duration of a relationship, as we age, due to life pressures and when we have children. Although lust may dampen, it is possible to maintain love and connection, and increase our chances of desire showing up too.

4. Actually, low female desire is ‘normal.’ Women have been made to feel that having a low libido means something is wrong with them. Currently women with chronic low libido are pathologized as having a type of female sexual dysfunction called hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD). The trouble is, many of the researchers who have come up its nebulous definition have financial ties to pharmaceutical companies.

I argue that in a long-term monogamous relationship it is extremely common to have a lukewarm interest in sex and rarely initiate it. Far from being a disorder, low libido is just the natural state of affairs for many women.

5. The so-called sexless marriage. Consider the current definition of a ‘sexless marriage’–a relationship in which the couple has sex ten times a year or less. Really? So couples that have been together for a decade and are going through the highs and lows of life, have sex nearly once a month. Rather than brandishing a negative label, good for them, I say.

6.The hand that rocks the cradle doesn’t rock the bedroom. Research indicates that one-third of couples experience significant sexual loss upon having children. For instance, across ninety studies, parents had lower marital satisfaction than non-parents, and a strong correlation was found between marital dissatisfaction and greater number of children. For women, it is increasingly difficult to carve out the duel identity of mother andsensual lover. Plus, there is a rival for her affections–children.

7. There is more than one type of sexual prime. As we age, women often experience less desire due to many factors, including illness (their partners’ and their own), and issues associated with self-image. However, although many of us are familiar with the notion ofsexual prime in relation to the physical–body, genitals, and hormones–it is not the full picture. An emotional prime also exists, related to spirit, maturity, and fluidity with life. Physical and emotional factors are intertwined and interact in unpredictable and exciting ways. Many women experience a sexual renaissance in their later years. Fortunately, sexual prime can peak at any age.

This article originally appeared on: AlterNet

June 5, 2013
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Across the U.S., religious healthcare corporations are absorbing once secular and independent hospitals and in the process imposing religious restrictions that pit standard medical practice against theology.

Recently, a woman was traveling across the Midwest when she developed abdominal pain. She and her husband went to the nearest hospital, where she was diagnosed with a potentially fatal ectopic pregnancy. The doctors recommended immediate surgery to remove the fallopian tube containing the misplaced embryo, a procedure that would reduce by half her future chances of conceiving a child. They failed to mention that a simple injection of Methotrexate would solve the problem, leaving her fertility intact. Why the omission? The Catholic hospital where she got diagnosed was subject to the “ Ethical and Religious Directives” of the Catholic bishops, which state, “In case of extrauterine pregnancy, no intervention is morally licit which constitutes a direct abortion.”

According to Catholic moralists, an injection that destroys an ectopic embryo is a direct abortion, while removing the part of a woman’s reproductive system containing the embryo is not. While this may sound strange (or abhorrent) to outsiders, it has its own internal logic. Catholic ethics ultimately are determined by theologically based perceptions of what actions God approves and doesn’t approve. While compassion does matter, the end goal is to improve the spiritual standing or righteousness of the person performing the action. These theological dictates may or may not align with the questions that govern secular medical ethics and practice: how to minimize harm and suffering or maximize wellbeing while respecting patient autonomy.

In 2010, a pregnant Nicaraguan woman with metastatic cancer was denied treatment because chemotherapy could harm her fetus, which doctors refused to remove. Though many Protestants disagree, Catholic theology treats any product of conception as a fully formed human being, with rights equal to a woman from the moment of conception whether or not there is any possibility of it actually becoming a person. This means that abortion is an inherently bad action, regardless of outcomes. Nicaraguan law, rooted in this theology, prohibits all abortion even when a woman’s life is at stake. In 2012, a 16-year-old Dominican girl also was denied treatment for weeks while doctors debated whether chemotherapy would constitute an abortion. She eventually miscarried and later died.

Christianity traditionally has regarded women as vessels–vessels for evil, and for babies. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. But women will be saved through childbearing–if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety (1 Timothy 2: 13-15). As a consequence, Catholic rules addressing reproduction are particularly convoluted, and sometimes patients pay the price:

 A Catholic doctor at a Catholic hospital went against my daughter’s wishes and signed consent to have a hysterectomy because of severe endometriosis. One ovary had already exploded. My daughter had never intended or desired children nor was she in a suitable situation to have a child. She was single, in her late 20s. When she awoke from surgery she learned that the doctor had over-ridden her wishes and consent in an attempt to save her fertility. The operation was botched, leaving my daughter on permanent disability, in pain, with even more health problems than she’d had before. — Comment at Truthout 

Secular medical ethics evolved to promote patient welfare and autonomy. As better treatment options become available, providers are expected to keep their skills and knowledge up to date so that they can provide accurate information about the range of options and offer the services most likely to create the best health outcomes for patients. Violation of these norms is considered malpractice.

This article originally appeared on: AlterNet

June 5, 2013
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A Gallup Poll  on May 29 strikingly titled “U.S. Support for Euthanasia Hinges on How It’s Described” contains unambiguous new evidence that Republicans are more manipulable than Democrats–at least when the question concerns the important issue of whether or not a terminal patient’s request for assistance to die should be carried out by the person’s doctor. It reported that, “A May 2-7 Gallup survey finds 70% of Americans in favor of allowing doctors to hasten a terminally ill patient’s death when the matter is described as allowing doctors to ‘end the patient’s life by some painless means.’ At the same time, far fewer — 51% — support it when the process is described as doctors helping a patient ‘commit suicide.’”

The precise question in the latter instance was “When a person has a disease that cannot be cured and is living in severe pain, do you think doctors should or should not be allowed by law to assist the patient to commit suicide if the patient requests it?”

The remarkable finding was that 71% of Democrats, and 68% of Republicans, support a doctor’s ending a patient’s life by some painless means if the patient requests it and has a terminal illness, but only 60% of Democrats, and 41% of Republicans do when the question it phrased as “to assist the patient to commit suicide.”

That’s a fall-off from 71% down to 60% for Democrats — or a reduction of 15% — of Democrats, who can be manipulated by using different terminology; but it’s a fall-off from 68% down to 41% for Republicans — or a reduction of 40% — of Republicans, who can be manipulated by a mere synonymous rephrasing of the same question.

Or, to put that in the other way, based upon this poll, 85% of Democrats, versus only 60% of Republicans, were not manipulable on this issue — they responded to the issue itself, and not to the wording of it.

There is a vast amount of other empirical evidence showing that conservatives, and Republicans in particular, are more manipulable than non-conservatives.

A famous study by Jost, Glaser, Kruglansky and Sulloway, “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition,” in the May 2003 Psychological Bulletin , found that prejudices were even stronger among conservatives than among the general population.

An October 2003 survey, “Misperceptions, the Media and the Iraq War,” from worldpublicopinion.org (formerly “PIPA,” or Program on International Policy Attitudes) found that the audience of Fox News is highly Republican, but failed to provide any detailed breakdown. A more detailed study of this question, issued by rasmussenreports.com in June 2004, was headlined “Fox Fans Favor Bush 65% to 28%,” and noted, by way of contrast, that “CNN Fans Favor Kerry 63% to 26%.”

Furthermore, this survey found that, “In the race for Congress, Fox fans will vote for GOP candidates by a 56% to 25% margin. The CNN audience will vote Democratic by a 54% to 27% margin.” The PIPA study of “Misperceptions” and “the Iraq War” found: “The extent of Americans’ misperceptions vary significantly depending on their source of news. Those who receive most of their news from Fox News are more likely than average to have misperceptions. Those who receive most of their news from NPR or PBS are less likely to have misperceptions. These variations cannot simply be explained as a result of differences in the demographic characteristics of each audience, because these variations can also be found when comparing the demographic subgroups of each audience.”

On November 22, 2011, thinkprogress.org headlined “Fox News Viewers Are the Most Misinformed: A Seventh Study Arrives to Prove It,” and Chris Mooney linked to each of the seven different studies that had been done of this subject, all of which found the same thing. The latest study was titled “Climate on Cable: The Nature and Impact of Global Warming Coverage on Fox News [FNC], CNN, and MSNBC.” This latest study closed by saying: “In sum, the results overwhelmingly support Hypothesis 4 [that FNC viewers rejected the reality of global warming, whereas CNN/MSNBC viewers accepted its reality], demonstrating that Fox News viewing is associated with lower levels of global warming acceptance, with the reverse true for CNN/MSNBC viewing. … [Moreover, a separate finding was:] The views of Republicans seem to reflect the cable news outlet they watch, regardless of whether it is Fox or CNN/MSNBC. Democrats, on the other hand, do not vary significantly in their global warming beliefs as a function of cable news.”

This article originally appeared on: AlterNet

June 5, 2013
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In late May, a threatening letter laced with the deadly chemical ricin was sent from Shreveport, Louisiana, to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg as a response to the mayor’s outspoken support for stricter gun control laws. Two identical letters, also containing the lethal substance, were addressed to both President Barack Obama and the head of the Washington D.C. lobbying group, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, which is managed and funded by Bloomberg himself.

The contents of the letters are clearly the work of a right-wing gun nut and readas follows: “You will have to kill me and my family before you get my guns. Anyone wants to come to my house will get shot in the face. The right to bear arms is my constitutional, god-given right and I will exercise that right till the day I die. What’s in this letter is nothing compared to what I’ve got planned for you.”

In fact, Bloomberg himself was nonplussed by the whole ordeal, tellingreporters on May 30, “I’m not angry. There are people who I would argue do things that may be irrational, do things that are wrong, but it’s a very complex world out there and we just have to deal with that.”

Yes, Mike, it is a very complex world. This world is so complex, in fact, that an easily identifiable act of terrorism isn’t considered terrorism for one simple reason: it probably wasn’t committed by a Muslim, but rather by some white guy in the South.

Clearly, while white guys who send murderous mail are merely acting irrationally and doing something wrong, potential violence by members of the Muslim faith present a singular threat to our civilized society. So much so, in fact, that Michael Bloomberg himself believes our own laws and the bedrock of that very society are not good enough to defend against such a scourge to humanity.

In April, following the horrific Boston Marathon bombing, Bloomberg declared that the American obsession with privacy, civil rights and basic freedoms were antiquated and trite when compared to the dire threat posed by hypothetical barbarian hordes of “Islamists.”

At a press conference at the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, Bloomberg said, “The people who are worried about privacy have a legitimate worry. But we live in a complex world where you’re going to have to have a level of security greater than you did back in the olden days, if you will. And our laws and our interpretation of the Constitution, I think, have to change.”

Yes, how complex it is. So complex that, although a 2010 study by Duke University and the University of North Carolina found that Islamic terrorism accounted for only six percent of all terrorist attacks in the United States between 1980 and 2005 while a 2012 analysis by the Center for American Progress reported that a whopping“[f]ifty-six percent of domestic terrorist attacks and plots in the U.S. since 1995 have been perpetrated by right-wing extremists,” Michael Bloomberg has made it his duty to illegally spy on and harass Muslim communities in the New York Metro area.

Bloomberg has presided over a massive, illegal covert domestic surveillance and ethno-religious profiling program that have targeted, alienated and traumatized Muslims throughout the Northeast, despite the fact that, following the September 11, 2001 attacks, more Americans have been killed in right-wing terrorist plots than by Islamic terrorists.

This article originally appeared on: AlterNet

June 5, 2013
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If this is the start of a worldwide oral sex shortage, blame Gordon Gekko. In an eyebrow-raising Sunday interview with the Guardian, 68-year-old Oscar winner Michael Douglas has opened about his recent bout of cancer — and what he says caused it.

“Stage 4 cancer and a shit-pot of chemo and radiation,” he admitted, “that’s a rough ride. That can really take it out of you. Plus, the amount of chemo I was getting, it zaps all the good stuff too. It made me very weak.”

But when writer Xan Brooks asked the actor, who in 1992 did a stint in rehab for drug and alcohol dependence, if he felt his hard living had contributed to his cancer, Douglas demurred. “No,” he said. “No. Because, without wanting to get too specific, this particular cancer is caused by HPV [human papillomavirus], which actually comes about from cunnilingus.”

Kind of makes you wonder what constitutes “not too specific” in the Michael Douglas household. He continued, “I did worry if the stress caused by my son’s incarceration didn’t help trigger it. But yeah, it’s a sexually transmitted disease that causes cancer. And if you have it, cunnilingus is also the best cure for it. That’s right. It giveth and it taketh.” Somewhere right now, Catherine Zeta-Jones is accepting the “My husband just said the most mortifying thing EVER” award from Jennifer Garner.

Incredible as Douglas’ words may seem to cunnilingus enthusiasts, he’s got science to back up his claim. An April study in the American Journal of Gastroenterology “detected HPV in about 66 percent of those with oesophageal cancer.” As the National Cancer Institute points out, “more than half of the cancers diagnosed in the oropharynx are linked to HPV-16,” a particular strain of the virus. It does not, however, offer any advice on curing it via a little trip downtown — chemo and radiation are probably still a safer bet in that department. As Sydney University’s Faculty of Dentistry professor Mark Schifter told the Sydney Morning Herald Monday, “It would be very hard to get a randomized, controlled study to prove that” oral sex cures cancer.

You’d probably get a lot of volunteers for the trial, though.

Douglas’ openness could be interpreted in certain circles as a useful bit of awareness-raising; after all, the cancer risks of HPV to men are rarely discussed. It’s an important factor to consider in our ongoing conversations about the HPV vaccine and its long-term public health implications for both men and women — less HPV leads to better consequences for everybody. It certainly gives weight to the case for HPV vaccination for boys as well as girls, a movement that has been far too slow to get off the ground – because HPV is still largely viewed as a lady virus.

But HPV is not just – as the makers of Gardasil itself discreetly suggest – about “vaginal cancer and vulvar cancer.” Or, as Martha Plimpton tweeted Monday, “Just so we’re clear here: it’s HUMAN Papilloma Virus. Not LADIES Papilloma Virus.” And Douglas’ admission certainly suggests we need to be far more forthright in how we talk about oral cancers and their causes.

However, statistics don’t tell the entire story. It’s not shocking that the HPV virus is found in such a high percentage of individuals with cancer. The Centers for Disease Control notes that “Approximately 79 million Americans are currently infected with HPV. About 14 million people become newly infected each year.” And here’s the kicker: “HPV is so common that nearly all sexually active men and women will get at least one type of HPV at some point in their lives.” Like the vast majority of people who’ve had sex, I too have had HPV. But I’m not yet ready to send out a SORRY FOR THE CANCER email to all my previous partners. The CDC points out that “Other factors, notably tobacco and alcohol use, may also play a role with HPV to cause these cancers.”

This article originally appeared on: AlterNet

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_business_of_standing_in_line_20130605/

Posted on Jun 5, 2013

This article originally appeared on: TruthDig

[unable to retrieve full-text content]At least three people have lost their lives in an airstrike carried out by a US assassination drone in Afghanistan’s northeastern province of Kunar.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

[unable to retrieve full-text content]At least three people have lost their lives in an airstrike carried out by a US assassination drone in Afghanistan’s northeastern province of Kunar.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

China’s Ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Cheng Jingye has reaffirmed his countryâ„¢s firm stance on supporting dialog to resolve the Western dispute over Iranâ„¢s nuclear energy issue.

Addressing a meeting of the UN nuclear agency’s Board of Governors in Vienna, Austria, on Wednesday, Cheng said that Beijing is firmly committed to pursuing dialog and negotiations to settle the issue over Iran’s peaceful nuclear activities.

He added that China has been playing a constructive role in resuming talks between Iran and the P5+1 group of world powers and maintaining a diplomatic process in resolving the issue.

Å“Iranian nuclear issue is complicated and sensitive, time and wisdom are needed to resolve this issue,” the Chinese envoy added.

Iran and the P5+1 group of world powers – Russia, China, France, Britain, and the US plus Germany – have held several rounds of talks, mainly over the Iranian nuclear energy program.

The latest round of negotiations between the two sides was held in Istanbul, Turkey, on May 16. Two earlier meetings were also held in the Kazakh city of Almaty on April 5-6 and February 26-27.

As a permanent member of the UN Security Council and a member state of the P5+1, China has always reaffirmed Iran’s right to use nuclear technology for peaceful purposes and stressed that negotiations and dialog are the right approach to address the dispute over the Islamic Republic’s nuclear energy program.

The West, led by the United States and Israel, accuses Iran of following non-civilian purposes in its nuclear energy program.

Iran has vehemently rejected the allegation, arguing that as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and a member of the IAEA, it is entitled to develop and acquire nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.

SF/NN/HJL

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Turkish police fire tear gas during a demonstration in the capital, Ankara, June 3, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Bars and cafeterias at the Spanish Parliament will stop serving discounted liquor after public outrage in the economically troubled country prompted a committee to axe the privilege. Beer, wine and coffee will still be sold at a discount.

A commission ruled unanimously this week that after a new
catering firm is chosen for Parliament in autumn, market prices
will be charged for most alcoholic drinks served in the building.
A scandal emerged last week when Spanish media reported that
prices at Parliament’s nine restaurants are as low as half that
of other establishments in the area.

Catering for the Spanish Parliament will cost more than $1.15
million in 2013. Spanish social media was rife with scalding
remarks on the scandal — some MPs said that voters suggested they
should work from inside the cafeterias.

In recent months, the Spanish government, led by Prime Minister
Mariano Rajoy, has been forced to raise taxes and cut public
spending on schools and hospitals in a bid to stabilize the
budget.

“It makes citizens upset, and they are right, so the
leadership has decided to change it,” said Alfonso Alonso, a
spokesperson for Rajoy’s People’s Party in the lower house
Congress, according to Reuters. Alonso added that the situation
branded MPs with a “frivolous image,” something the new
measure aims to mitigate. 

However, beer and Rioja wine will still be served at €0.95
($1.25) and €1.65 ($2.15) respectively, compared to roughly €1.90
and €2.40 elsewhere in central Madrid.

Defenders say that the current pricing scheme is available to all
who visit the building, not just MPs. In addition to its 350
deputies, Parliament usually hosts around 400 staffers, 300
temporary employees and about 150 media professional, as well as
police and other visitors.

Cafeteria staffers told Spanish newspapers that liquor is not
nearly as popular as beer, soft drinks and meals.

Jesus Posada, President of the Congress, said it “is not easy
to find candidates” to take catering jobs at Parliament,
because it’s a complex task “with many hours of service.”
Currently, two firms have submitted offers to service Parliament;
one will be selected by September.

The drinks scandal has damaged the already-battered image of
Spanish politicians. A recent poll revealed they are seen as one
of the country’s four worst problems, along with the economy,
unemployment and general corruption and fraud. Another survey
gave politicians a 93 percent disapproval rating.

This article originally appeared on: RT

British counter-terrorism police have started investigations into a fire, blamed on far-right British groups, that razed a Somali Islamic center in London.

The investigations follow the discovery of far-right anti-Islam graffiti reading Å“EDL” (English Defense League) at the scene of the blaze.

In the early hours on Wednesday, police and firefighters were called to a serious fire at the Somali Bravanese Welfare Association in north London.

The Metropolitan Police has announced that the investigations have been handed to the counter-terrorism department following the graffiti find.

“Graffiti reading EDL has been found on the building. Police are investigating any potential connection between the graffiti and the fire,” the force said.

Several British mosques have been attacked since a soldier was killed by alleged Muslims in London last month.

Far-right groups have also exploited the situation to intensify their hate-preaching in the form of anti-Islam rallies.

AMR/HE

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

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Russian stocks are expected to trade lower on Thursday due to negative sentiments on major floors worldwide, including weak data on US private jobs and disappointment over Japan’s efforts to boost its economy.

“Given the downward motion on Asian floors, losses on US
floors and also weak dynamics in oil prices, Russian markets are
expected to open with another slide,” Investcafe analyst
Darya Pichugina said.

Russian stocks ended Wednesday’s trading session in the red: The
RTS fell 1.61 percent to 1,301.08 and the MICEX declined 1.11
percent to 1,326.78.

Asian floors likewise started Thursday’s session in negative
territory, with Japan’s Nikkei down 0.45 percent, China’s
Shanghai Composite down 0.24 percent, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng down
0.69 percent and Australia’s ASX/S&P200 down 0.65 percent.

One major reason for the negative trends on Asian floors was
Japan — Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s ‘Third Arrow’ program
to revitalize the country’s economy is seen as being largely
ineffective.

US stocks fell sharply on Wednesday: The Dow Jones dropped 1.4
percent, ending below 15,000 for the first time since May 6, the
S&P 500 lost 1.4 percent and the Nasdaq declined 1.3 percent.
Wednesday’s losses were the worst in almost two months for both
the Dow and Nasdaq.

Fears that the US Federal Reserve will scale back its stimulus
program remain a key concern for investors worldwide. The central
bank’s heads — including Richard Fisher of the Fed’s Dallas
branch and Ester George of Kansas City — have announced an
impending tightening of US monetary policy. “Though such
statements aim to sugarcoat the termination of QE, they are still
raising tensions among investors,” Pichugina said.

In the Fed’s Beige Book report, an analysis of regional economic
activity, the bank described the US economic recovery as
“modest,” “moderate” and “measured.” Payroll firm
ADP reported Wednesday that the private sector in the US created
135,000 jobs during May, less than the 165,000 expected.

European floors also ended Wednesday in negative territory: The
UK’s FTSE100 fell2.12 percent, Germany’s DAX lost 1.2 percent and
France’s CAC40 fell 1.87 percent.

Investors have faced headwinds from recent weak European
macroeconomic data. The eurozone’s revised Q1 GDP fell 1.1
percent, 0.1 percent below forecast. Retail figures also
worsened, with sales in April dropping 0.5 percent.

This article originally appeared on: RT

US National Security Agency (NSA) is the world’s largest spy organization.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

This file photo shows a Russian-made S-300 air defense system.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

US Secretary of State John Kerry says the United States will engage in dialogue with Venezuela with the aim of restoring ambassador-level relations.

Following a meeting with Venezuelaâ„¢s Foreign Minister Elias Jose in Guatemala, Kerry, who is on his first trip to Latin America after taking office, said Wednesday that he was hopeful that a rapprochement could be attained.

Kerry said after the meeting, which took place on the sidelines of the annual Organization of American States general assembly, that the US and Venezuela Å“agreed today there would be an ongoing, continuing dialogue at a high-level between the State Department and the foreign ministry and we will try to set out an agenda on which we agree on things we can work on together.”

The US secretary of state added that the two sides aim to Å“begin to change the dialogue between our countries.” He expressed hope that the US and Venezuela Å“quickly move to the appointment of ambassadors.”

Caracas and Washington have not had ambassadors since 2010. Late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez rejected the US nominee at the time on accusation of making disrespectful remarks about the Venezuelan government. Washington later revoked the visa of Venezuelaâ„¢s envoy to the US.

In March, Caracas expelled a US Embassy attaché over allegations of meeting with Venezuelan military officials and plotting to destabilize Venezuela.

Washington also angered Caracas by supporting Venezuelan opposition leader Henrique Capriles, who disputed the results of the April presidential election, in which Nicolas Maduro won the race with 50.7 percent of the vote against 49.1 percent for Capriles.

MR/HSN

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Gazprom and Rosneft are officially the only companies with the right to explore the Russian Artic shelf, as they both received exclusive extraction licenses in return for large cash payments.

In 2009, Rosneft agreed to pay 1.4 billion roubles ($450 million)
and Gazprom 1.2 billion in a resolution passed by the state Duma,
but the exact amount paid on Wednesday for the licenses is
unknown.

Russia has passed a law that only companies in which the state
owns more than half and have at least 5 years of Arctic
experience are eligible for permits

Lukoil, the country’s second largest oil company, is publicly
owned, and Sugtneftegas, known to have close ties with the
Kremlin, is also publicly owned, and therefore not up for a
permit.

Tatneft is the country’s sixth largest and operates out of the
Republic of Tatarstan, which is also the company’s primary
shareholder.

In March, it was reported the companies were in competition for
the same areas of the shelf, but in late May, in a decree signed
by Prime Minister Dimitry Medvedev, exploration and extraction
rights have been awarded to Rosneft for two deposits in the
Barents Sea, and three in the Kara Sea have been given to
Gazprom.

Earlier this year, the government approved bids by both companies
for offshore fields and handed Gazprom licenses for 17 offshore
sites and Rosneft 12.

Another area in the East Siberian Sea is likely to be split
equally between the two companies, Natural Resources Minister
Sergey Donskoy said in May.

The Russian government has urged the two energy giants to team up
in a joint venture, in order to efficiently develop and explore
the uncharted waters in the Siberian Sea.

The two fields granted to Rosneft, the Albanovsky and Varneksky
sections of the Arctic shelf, have a combined area of 64,329
square meters. An assessment in 2009 estimated that the
Albanovsky section of the shelf contained 144.2 million tonnes of
oil, 43.3 million which is extractable, and 1,254.4 billion cubic
meters of gas. The deposits at Varnetsky are estimated to be
2,081 million tonnes, of which 542 million is extractable.

The Maritime, Nyarmeisky and Skuratovsky deposits partitioned to
Gazprom total 7,339 square kilometers. Gas deposits are pegged at
2,867 billion cubic meters.

On Wednesday Gazprom held its annual shareholder’s meeting, as it
celebrates its 20th anniversary. At the conference, management
touted that Gazprom is the largest gas supplier to the domestic
market, citing its 73.1 percent market share in 2012.

Rosneft, fresh from its TNK-BP acquisition in March, is challenging Gazprom as largest producer, and hopes
to seize at least 20 percent of the natural gas market by 2020,
Bloomberg reports. 

Rosneft has already attracted a range of foreign partners in its
offshore ventures, striking deals with Royal Dutch Shell, Italy’s
Eni, Norway’s Statoil, and Japan’s Inpex.

Gazprom is keen to retain its share of the Russian gas market and
has attracted Shell as an offshore partner.

This article originally appeared on: RT

A huge public rally will take place in Londonâ„¢s Hyde Park this Saturday in time with the Å“Nutrition for Growth” event, hosted by the British government just a week before the 39th Group of Eight summit.

The British government is co-hosting the Nutrition for Growth event, with t he Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), and the Government of Brazil , in an alleged bid to bring together business leaders, scientists and governments to make political and financial commitments to prevent undernutrition globally.

In response to the conference, which is a prelude to the G8 summit on 17 and 18 June in Northern Ireland, thousands of Big If campaigners, including American business magnate Bill Gates, former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and UNICEF ambassador the footballer David Beckham, will gather in Hyde Park to call on the G8 leaders to tackle the causes of global hunger.

The campaigners will create a huge visual petition to demonstrate the scale of public support for the Big IF campaign.

The petition will be made up of 250,000 spinning flowers, with a total of two million petals representing the two million children who die of hunger every year thanks to inaction of world leaders especially those at the G8.

The Saturday event will launch Big Ifâ„¢s ten-day campaign to call for an end to malnutrition internationally.

Big If says the global hunger will be addressed Å“If we stop poor families being forced off their land, and we grow crops for food not fuel”, Å“If governments stop big companies dodging tax in poor countries, so million so people can free themselves from hunger”, Å“If governments and big companies are honest about their action that stop people getting enough food” and Å“If we giver life-saving aid to stop children dying from hunger and help the poorest families feed themselves”.

AMR/HE

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

This file photo shows South Korean soldiers setting up barricades across the road to the Kaesong joint industrial zone.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Abbas Araqchi has extended Iran’s congratulations to Pakistanâ„¢s newly-elected Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on his election, pledging to improve mutual relations with Islamabad.

In a message to the new Pakistani premier on Wednesday, the Iranian spokesperson expressed confidence that the ties between Tehran and Islamabad would be further strengthened in various political, cultural and economic fields during Sharifâ„¢s tenure.

Å“During Nawaz Sharifâ„¢s tenure, the two countries will also witness the growing consolidation of peace and stability in Pakistan and across the region,” Araqchi added.

On Wednesday, Pakistani lawmakers endorsed Sharif as the countryâ„¢s new prime minister, electing him to an unprecedented third term.

More than a decade after Sharif was ousted in a coup, the 63-year-old former two-time premier was elected for the position for a third time in Pakistanâ„¢s National Assembly.

During general elections held on May 11, Sharifâ„¢s center-right party secured 176 seats of the 342-member lower house of the assembly. His party received 244 votes in the 342-seat parliament.

Sharif served twice as prime minister in the 1990s before being ousted in a military coup. Following the coup, Sharif spent eight years in exile.

SF/NN/HJL

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Tens of thousands of people in northern Yemen have demonstrated against the US and the Israeli regime. (File photo)

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

[unable to retrieve full-text content]South Korea has agreed to a North Korean proposal for official talks on reopening the Kaesong joint industrial zone, which had been closed due to tensions between Seoul and Pyongyang.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

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File photo shows a South Korean soldier beside barricades on the road leading to the Kaesong joint industrial complex.

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This article originally appeared on: World Socialist Web Site

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This article originally appeared on: World Socialist Web Site

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This article originally appeared on: World Socialist Web Site

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This article originally appeared on: World Socialist Web Site

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This article originally appeared on: World Socialist Web Site

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This article originally appeared on: World Socialist Web Site

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This article originally appeared on: World Socialist Web Site

Days after Philadelphia officials pushed the city one step closer to a so-called “doomsday” education plan that would see two dozen schools close, construction began on a $400-million prison said to be the second-most expensive state project ever.

Pennsylvania’s School Reform Commission voted on June 1 to
approve a $2.4 billion budget, ignoring hours of pleas from
students, parents, educators and community members who warned the
budget would cripple city schools. 

The plan would close 23 public schools, roughly 10 per cent of
the city’s total. Commissioners rejected a proposal that would
have only closed four of the 27 schools that were on the block
for closure. 

Without the means to cover a $304 million debt, the Philadelphia
Inquirer reported, students can expect to go back to school in
September without new books, paper, counselors, clubs,
librarians, assistant principals or secretaries. All athletics,
art and music programs would be eliminated and as many as 3,000
people could lose their jobs. 

Only one of five state commissioners voted against the proposal,
warning that Republican Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett’s
administration had not looked hard enough elsewhere for proper
funds. 

That $304 million windfall is unlikely to be filled because the
Republican-controlled Pennsylvania House of Representatives
recently passed a tax break for corporations that will cost
Pennsylvania residents an estimated $600 million to $800 million
annually.

Newly unemployed teachers might consider submitting their resumes
to the Department of Corrections, though, with the news that the
supposedly cash-strapped government is digging deep to spend $400
million for the construction of State Correctional Institutions
Phoenix I and II. 

The penitentiary, which is technically two facilities, will
supplement at least two existing jails, the Western Penitentiary
at Pittsburgh and Fayette County Jail. Pittsburgh’s Western
Penitentiary was built in 2003 with the original intention of
replacing Fayette County Jail, but the prison has struggled with
lawsuits claiming widespread physical and sexual abuse of
prisoners. 

Scheduled to be completed in 2015, the new prison’s cell blocks
and classroom will be capable of housing almost 5,000 inmates.
Officials said there will be buildings for female inmates, the
mentally ill and a death row population. 

This article originally appeared on: RT

A review of classified US intelligence records has revealed that the CIA could not confirm the identity of about a quarter of the people killed by drone strikes in Pakistan during a period spanning from 2010 to 2011.

According to a purportedly exclusive report by NBC News that
mirrors findings of an April analysis by McClatchy, between
September 3, 2010 and October 30, 2011 the agency’s drone program
over Pakistan routinely designated those killed as “other
militants,” a label used when the CIA could not determine
affiliation, if any.

The review by NBC News paints both a confusing and troubling
picture of the CIA’s reported drone strike success, which three
former Obama administration officials feared could have missed or
simply ignored mistakes.

Of the 14 months worth of classified documents reviewed, 26 out
of 114 attacks designate fatalities as “other militants,” while in four
other attacks those killed are only described as “foreign fighters.”

Even more irregular are the cases when entry records conflict on
the number of those killed, with one such example indicating a
drone attack had killed seven to 10 combatants, and another
estimating 20 to 22 fatalities.

By comparison, McClatchy’s April review of drone strikes revealed
that at least 265 of up to 482 people that the CIA killed during
a 12-month period ending in September 2011 were not senior
al-Qaeda leaders, but were instead “assessed” as Afghan, Pakistani and
“unknown extremists.”
Corroborating media accounts show that US drones killed only six
top al-Qaeda leaders during the same period.

One key term in analyzing drone strike records are what are known
as “signature” strikes,
when drones kill suspects based on behavior patterns but without
positive identification, versus “personality” strike, which is when
drone targets are known terrorist affiliates whose identities are
verified.

According to an anonymous senior intelligence official who spoke
to NBC, at the peak of drone operations in Pakistan in 2009 and
2010 as many as half of all kills were classified as “signature” strikes.

One former senior intelligence official said that at the height
of the drone program in Pakistan in 2009 and 2010, as many as
half of the strikes were classified as signature strikes.

Retired Admiral Dennis Blair, the former Director of National
Intelligence from 2009 to 2010, addressed NBC’s report with the
claim that the precision of drone strikes was superior to those
of traditional battlefield weapons.

“In Afghanistan and Iraq and
places where you have troops in combat … you know better with
drones who you’re killing than you do when you’re calling in
artillery fire from a spotter [or] calling in an airplane
strike,” he said.

“This is no different from
decisions that are made on the battlefield all the time by
soldiers and Marines who are being shot at, not knowing who fired
the shot, having to make judgments on shooting back or not. This
is the nature of warfare,” added Blair.

As to just how analysts arrive at determining unverified,
“signature” drone
targets, that system relies on data which draws connections
between the unidentified individuals and known militants. That
might entail monitoring everything from the frequency that a
suspect visits a particular location, meets certain individuals,
or makes phone calls and sends emails.  

During a key speech defending his administration’s use of
targeted drone killings in May, President Obama defended the
CIA’s drone program as a “legal,” “lethal” and “effective” counterterrorism tool,
while at the same time acknowledging some civilian casualties.

A report entitled “Living Under
Drones,” jointly released by Stanford University and New
York University in 2012, is far less muted on civilian
casualties, and argues that the civilian death toll in drone
strikes over Pakistan is far higher than is reported.

In the classified reports reviewed by NBC News, for example, of
the 600 some killed only one is listed as a civilian, a statistic
which Micah Zenko, a drone expert at the Council on Foreign
Relations described as “incredible.”

The Stanford-NYU report, for its part, bases its conclusions on
130 interviews, as well as a review of media reports, though the
methodology employed can itself be a subject of debate.

Separately, an Associated Press investigation in 2012 reported
that out of 10 drone strikes over a period of 18 months,
Pakistani villagers claimed that only 70 per cent of those killed
by US strikes were militants, with the rest either civilians or
tribal police.

This article originally appeared on: RT

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The aftermath of an explosion on a bus carrying Israeli tourists at Burgas International Airport in Bulgaria on July 18, 2012

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

The US National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of unwitting individuals via a secret court order issued in April obtained by The Guardian newspaper, which has posted it online.

Unlike warrants that have been issued to collect the information
of suspects targetted by intelligence agencies, the newly
disclosed top secret order requires Verizon, one of the largest
telecom agencies in the US, to provide both the FBI and the NSA
information on all telephone calls made through its systems, both
domestically and to foreign countries.

According to a copy of the order, Verizon is required to disclose
the numbers of both parties during a call, as well as location,
call duration, and other unique data on an “ongoing, daily basis.” Meaning
that, regardless of whether an individual is suspected of or
linked to any crime, the data of all Verizon customers is
currently being delivered in bulk to the intelligence agency.

As to the authority claimed by the government via this order,
that is specifically cited to fall under the “business records”
provision of the PATRIOT Act of 2001, which was granted a
four-year extension by President Obama in May of 2011.

It remains unclear as to whether the order, which spans a
three-month period, represents a single instance, or is
indicative of recurring cases of Verizon and other telephony
providers being ordered to disclose all their clients’ call
records.

The order itself, signed by Judge Roger Vinson of the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court, prohibits Verizon from alerting
its customers of the FBI’s request for their records.

According to The Guardian, its reporters approached Verizon, the
National Security Agency, the White House and the Department of
Justice for comment ahead of its story, though all declined.

Though the agencies have yet to respond to the publication of the
secret order, justification for the thus far unprecedented,
warrantless request made to Verizon in April would fall under the
interpretation of such “business records.” The latter applies to
a wide-ranging amount of electronic “metadata,” though not the actual
content of texts and voice calls.

The order seems likely to be associated with the NSA’s
longstanding collection program over telephone, Internet and
email data, which was secretly authorized by former president
Bush in 2001, though not disclosed publicly until a 2006 USA
Today report. That particular authorization applied to multiple
carriers: AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, and was intended to
allow US intelligence services “to analyze calling patterns in an
effort to detect terrorist activity.”

Julian Sanchez, a surveillance expert with the libertarian Cato
Institute who spoke to The Guardian believes that the newly
disclosed court order undermines the legal definition of
reasonable suspicion.

“We’ve certainly seen the
government increasingly strain the bounds of ‘relevance’ to
collect large numbers of records at once – everyone at one or two
degrees of separation from a target – but vacuuming all metadata
up indiscriminately would be an extraordinary repudiation of any
pretense of constraint or particularized suspicion,” said
Sanchez.

This article originally appeared on: RT

French President Francois Hollande gives a speech after he received at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris on June 5, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Latvia has won the approval of the European Commission and the European Central Bank (ECB) to enter the eurozone and become the bloc’s 18th member on January 1, 2014.

The commission and the ECB gave Latvia the green light for membership on Wednesday, making the country the second of the Baltic states, along with Estonia, to use the euro.

“Latvia’s desire to adopt the euro is a sign of confidence in our common currency. It is further evidence that those who predicted a disintegration of the euro were indeed behind the curve and simply wrong,” said Olli Rehn, the European Union’s top economic and monetary official.

“It is further evidence that those who predicted a disintegration of the euro were indeed behind the curb and simply wrong,” he noted.

The tiny Baltic state will start using the euro — instead of its national currency, the lat — at the beginning of 2014 after meeting the criteria for membership, including low inflation and long-term interest rates, as well as low public debt.

Latvia committed to join the euro in 2004 when it joined the EU.

Latvia’s Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis hailed the decision as “the next step for growth.”

European finance ministers will make the final decision on Latvia on July 9, but they are unlikely to block the countryâ„¢s entry.

Latvia suffered the sharpest recession of any European country in 2009 when the economy contracted by over 17.7 percent.

The country then underwent one of Europe’s toughest austerity programs and has bounced back with the EU’s fastest growth rate, hitting 5.6 percent last year.

Many in the country of 2 million are however, skeptical of the need to join in the midst of the eurozone’s debt troubles.

Anti-euro parties won more than half of the vote in local elections in the capital Riga last weekend.

Euro opponent Andris Orols, head of “Latvia for the Lat,” vowed to ask the constitutional court to review the government’s decision.

“We are against the euro because we believe that an independent and sovereign country cannot exist without its own money which it controls,” he said.

The 17-nation eurozone is currently struggling with a crisis over huge government debts, a stubborn recession, and 12.2 percent unemployment.

MN/MHB

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

In order to understand the liberal and progressive agenda, one must know something about their world vision and values. Let’s examine some of the evidence.

Why the 1970s struggle to ban DDT? Alexander King, founder of the Malthusian Club of Rome, wrote in a 1990 biographical essay: “My own doubts came when DDT was introduced for civilian use. In Guyana, within two years, it had almost eliminated malaria, but at the same time the birth rate had doubled. So my chief quarrel with DDT, in hindsight, is that it has greatly added to the population problem.”

Dr. Charles Wurster, former chief scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, was once asked whether he thought a ban on DDT would result in the use of more dangerous chemicals and more malaria cases in Sri Lanka. He replied: “Probably. So what? People are the cause of all the problems. We have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them, and (malaria) is as good a way as any.”

According to Earthbound, a collection of essays on environmental ethics, William Aiken said: “Massive human diebacks would be good. It is our duty to cause them. It is our species’ duty, relative to the whole, to eliminate 90 percent of our numbers.”

Former National Park Service research biologist David Graber opined, “Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet…. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth…. Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.”

Speaking of viruses, Prince Philip – Duke of Edinburgh and patron of the World Wildlife Fund – said, “If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.” The late Jacques Cousteau told The UNESCO Courier: “One America burdens the earth much more than twenty Bangladeshes. This is a terrible thing to say. In order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it’s just as bad not to say it.”

That represents the values of some progressives, but what about their predictions? In 1972, a report was written for the Club of Rome to warn that the world would run out of gold by 1981, mercury and silver by 1985, tin by 1987, and petroleum, copper, lead and natural gas by 1992. It turns out that each of these resources is more plentiful today. Gordon Taylor, in his 1970 book, The Doomsday Book, said that Americans were using 50 percent of the world’s resources and that “by 2000 (Americans) will, if permitted, be using all of them.” In 1975, the Environment Fund took out full-page ads warning, “The World as we know it will likely be ruined by the year 2000.” Harvard University Nobel laureate biologist George Wald in 1970 warned, “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” Former Sen. Gaylord Nelson, quoting Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, warned, in Look magazine (1970), that by 1995, “somewhere between 75 and 85 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.” In 1974, the U.S. Geological Survey said the U.S. had only a 10-year supply of natural gas. The fact of the matter, according to the American Gas Association, is that there’s more than a 110-year supply.

In 1986, Lester Brown, who had been predicting global starvation for 40 years, received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award, along with a stipend. The foundation also gave Dr. Paul Ehrlich, who predicted millions of Americans would die of starvation, the “genius” award in 1990. Note that these $300,000 to $400,000 awards were granted well after enough time had passed to demonstrate that Brown and Ehrlich were insanely wrong.

Just think: Congress listens to people like these and formulates public policy on their dire predictions that we’re running out of something.

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2013 CREATORS.COM

This article originally appeared on: The New American

The infamous annual Bilderberg meetings, which bring together global power-brokers from government, business, finance, intelligence, royalty, media, central banking, academia, and more, are set to begin this week in the United Kingdom. In line with an apparent trend developing in recent years, the veil of secrecy surrounding the mere existence of the controversial confab has slowly been pierced as more and more major media outlets report on the gathering. Taxpayers will be picking up much of the tab, but the growing numbers of protesters and reporters seeking answers will not be allowed in.

Even though Bilderberg has recently started publicly offering some details about its secretive meetings – partial guest lists and supposed topics of discussion, for example – critics say the real agenda remains hidden from the public at large. Around the world, however, outraged citizens and even excluded leaders have become increasingly suspicious of the gathering, blasting what they perceive as the planet’s self-styled “elite” making decisions for humanity behind closed doors.     

Of course, Bilderberg leaders try to frame the annual gathering as simply a forum to discuss global issues in private. Indeed, if it were known that attendees were formulating policy, at least American participants would likely be committing a felony by violating the Logan Act, which makes it a crime for Americans to formulate policy in secret with foreigners. Leaks and public statements by Bilderberg participants over the years, however, suggest that the meetings are about much more than just off-the-record discussions.

On the Bilderberg website, organizers offer few details. “Founded in 1954, Bilderberg is an annual conference designed to foster dialogue between Europe and North America,” the site claims without mentioning the key role of Nazi SS member Prince Bernhard of Holland in founding the events. “Every year, between 120-150 political leaders and experts from industry, finance, academia and the media are invited to take part in the conference. About two thirds of the participants come from Europe and the rest from North America; one third from politics and government and the rest from other fields.”

Commenting about the meetings themselves, Bilderberg claims online that the conference has always been a “forum for informal, off-the-record discussions about megatrends and the major issues facing the world.” Because the gathering is private and closed to the public, it continues, “participants are not bound by the conventions of office or by pre-agreed positions” so they can take time to “listen, reflect and gather insights.”

According to the Bilderberg site, key topics for discussion this year include economic growth and job creation in the United States and Europe. Also among the primary subjects: entitlement, debt, how “big data” is changing almost everything, nationalism, populism, U.S. foreign policy, Africa, cyber warfare, trends in medical research, online education, politics of the European Union, developments in the Middle East, and current affairs. 

Of course, because Bilderberg is so secretive, there is no way to confirm that the few details and talking points provided on its website bear any resemblance to the truth. Indeed, critics say the site is not trustworthy, citing the fact that enormously influential attendees have been left off of the “official” list of participants posted on the site in previous years and the obvious point that many attendees are politicians. The brief Bilderberg statement concludes with this: “There is no detailed agenda, no resolutions are proposed, no votes are taken, and no policy statements are issued.”   

Among the 140 or so publicly acknowledged participants this year are many of the usual suspects from Europe’s public sector: Former Maoist revolutionary and current president of the European Commission José Manuel Barroso, who recently claimed again that a federal EU would be a reality within a few years; International Monetary Fund (IMF) boss Christine Lagarde, who recently dodged corruption charges in France; Bilderberg leader Mario Monti, appointed by bankers and EU officials rather than voters to serve as Prime Minister of Italy; “Commander” Olivier de Bavinchove with the fledgling European military force known as Eurocorps; and many others. More than a few top political leaders and even royalty will also be attending.

From the private sector in Europe, numerous business chiefs and banking magnates will also be in attendance. Among them: Chairman Peter Mandelson of banking behemoth Lazard International; Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait with the increasingly discredited establishment magazine The Economist; Peter Sutherland, chairman of Goldman Sachs International; and many more. Multiple CEOs from banking, energy, finance, and other sectors will also be in attendance.

Attendees from the United States, meanwhile, also include a virtual “who’s who” list of the political, media, and business establishment. Many of the figures have long and dubious careers in government and the private sector, as well as in powerful so-called “think tanks” and non-profit foundations notorious for attacking U.S. liberties and national sovereignty. Unsurprisingly, virtually all of the American attendees wield tremendous influence both in the United States and abroad within their respective fields. 

Among this year’s American participants: Vice Chairman Michael Evans with Goldman Sachs; former Obama administration Treasury boss Timothy Geithner; Washington Post CEO Donald Graham; former Secretary of State and population control zealot Henry Kissinger, a top establishment figure who openly and regularly calls for a “New World Order” and was recently exposed boasting about his illegal and unconstitutional activities in official documents; President Jessica Mathews of the controversial Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; neocon extraordinaire Richard Perle with the American Enterprise Institute; retired Army general and disgraced former CIA boss David Petraeus; ex-Treasury chief Robert Rubin, who also serves as co-chairman of the global government-promoting Council on Foreign Relations; Google boss Eric Schmidt; and more.         

When they receive any attention at all, the meetings have largely been portrayed in the establishment press as some sort of gathering for super-capitalists and their lackeys only. That characterization, however, is only partially accurate, as money does not appear to be among the most important criteria for receiving an invitation. As in years past, this year’s guest list actually includes more than a few prominent socialists including Secretary General António José Seguro with the Portuguese Socialist Party and Party Leader Stefan Löfven with the Swedish Social Democratic Party, among others.

Representatives of the ruthless communist dictatorship ruling mainland China, which Bilderberg luminary David Rockefeller openly praised in the New York Times after tens of millions of innocent people were exterminated, have also attended the meetings in years past. At least one Russian “oligarch” was invited in 2011, too.

In recent years, media reports about the shadowy conference have been proliferating – a stark contrast with decades of virtual blackouts on the gathering of some of the world’s most powerful figures. This year has seen an even greater explosion of interest among the press, with news outlets around the world openly reporting on the confab even before it officially begins on June 6. Major media sources have also started calling for more transparency amid fears that representative government is being undermined by the secretive meetings. Large numbers of protesters, too, are expected to converge on this year’s meeting, which will run until June 9 in Watford, near London.     

Despite claims that no official decisions are made at Bilderberg, growing amounts of evidence suggest the opposite is true. The emerging Brussels-based super-state, which is desperately seeking to become an all-powerful regime ruling over the formerly sovereign nations of Europe, for example, has been widely attributed to Bilderberg efforts – even by participants themselves. The single euro currency, increasingly unstable, was also brought about in a similar fashion, insiders have admitted.

Anecdotal evidence, meanwhile, appears to show that the meetings wield tremendous power over political affairs even in the United States. Consider Bill Clinton, for example; he attended the summit as a little-known governor in 1991, yet became president the following year. Barack Obama reportedly went in 2008 before being elected president, too. In Europe, similar phenomena have become evident as well. 

While the true agenda and purpose of this year’s Bilderberg conference will almost certainly remain hidden, at least for a long time to come, analysts who track the meetings closely say some participants are pushing for more openness. However, even if Bilderberg were to completely disappear as an annual event, the power-brokers behind it are unlikely to be going anywhere anytime soon – especially not if humanity continues to allow itself to be ruled by unaccountable, out-of-touch “elites.”

Alex Newman, a foreign correspondent for The New American, is currently based in Europe. He can be reached at
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Elite Bilderberg 2011 Meeting Draws Scrutiny

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This article originally appeared on: The New American

On Monday, June 3, 67 countries signed the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty. It’s been just two months since representatives of the United States of America joined the delegations of 153 other nations in voting to approve the treaty at the General Assembly.

By a vote of 154-3 (with 23 abstentions), the UN governing body adopted the treaty, overcoming an earlier failure to adopt the global gun control agreement by consensus during the conference attended by this reporter.

The United States of America was noticeably absent, however, from the line-up of countries that formally signed the treaty on Monday.

Considering the events of Monday as a landmark moment on the road to global “peace and security,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon congratulated the delegations who showed up at UN headquarters to sign the treaty. “I commend all of you on achieving this great step forward in strengthening the rule of law in the field of disarmament,” said Moon. “From now on,” he added, “weapons and ammunition should only cross borders after the exporter confirms that the transfer complies with internationally agreed standards.”

UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs Angela Kane echoed the secretary general’s sentiments in her own statement. “It [the Arms Trade Treaty] requires States to regulate arms brokering and to assess the risk that exports of arms and ammunition would be used in the commission of grave violations of international humanitarian law or human rights law,” Kane explained. “And it encourages international cooperation and assistance in order to ensure that all States Parties will have the information and the capacity to implement the Treaty.”

Despite the globalists’ glee, thankfully there yet remain U.S. federal lawmakers determined to prevent the UN from infringing upon the right to keep and bear arms protected by the Second Amendment.

Representative Mike Kelly (R-Pa.) issued a statement on May 30 regarding a bipartisan letter he authored and submitted to President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry petitioning the administration not to sign the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty.

The letter is signed by a total of 130 members of Congress – including Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.), Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), and Rules Committee Chairman Pete Sessions (R-Texas) – and declares all of the signatories’ opposition to “both the ratification of the Arms Trade Treaty and any effort to treat it as internationally or domestically binding upon the United States.”

Rep. Kelly further states in the letter,

As the signing period for the ATT gets underway next week, President Obama has an opportunity to take a monumental stand for our national sovereignty and our Constitutional rights. The ATT threatens both of these things and should be fully rejected. Any treaty that would put the United States – the world’s defender of peace and freedom – on equal footing with the world’s worst dictatorships and terror-sponsors ought to be condemned, dismissed, and ultimately denied our country’s signature. I sincerely hope the administration will listen to the very real objections my colleagues from both parties in Congress share and rightly decide that joining the ATT is not at all in America’s interest.

Ratification of the treaty faces an uphill battle in the Senate, as well. As The New American reported in March, by a vote of 53-46, the Senate passed an amendment to the budget bill sponsored by Senator Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.). The measure aims “to uphold Second Amendment rights and prevent the United States from entering into the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty.”

A resolution of similar intent sponsored by Senator Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) is currently pending before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Moran’s measure declares that it is the sense of Congress that:

the President should not sign the Arms Trade Treaty, and that, if he transmits the treaty with his signature to the Senate, the Senate should not ratify the Arms Trade Treaty; and

until the Arms Trade Treaty has been signed by the President, received the advice and consent of the Senate, and has been the subject of implementing legislation by Congress, no Federal funds should be appropriated or authorized to implement the Arms Trade Treaty, or any similar agreement, or to conduct activities relevant to the Arms Trade Treaty, or any similar agreement.

On Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry sought to squelch the opposition in the Senate and reassure citizens that the U.S. delegation to the UN would not surrender the sovereignty and constitutional rights of Americans. “The ATT will not undermine the legitimate international trade in conventional weapons, interfere with national sovereignty, or infringe on the rights of American citizens, including our Second Amendment rights,” Kerry claimed.

In an earlier statement, Kerry expressed similar sentiments. The United Nations approved “a strong, effective and implementable Arms Trade Treaty that can strengthen global security while protecting the sovereign right of states to conduct legitimate arms trade,” said Secretary Kerry in a statement.

“Nothing in this treaty could ever infringe on the rights of American citizens under our domestic law or the Constitution, including the Second Amendment,” he added.

As we have reported, several provisions of this treaty significantly diminish the scope of the right to keep and bear arms.

First, the Arms Trade Treaty grants a monopoly over all weaponry in the hands of the very entity (approved regimes) responsible for over 300 million murders in the 20th century. 

Furthermore, the treaty leaves private citizens powerless to oppose future slaughters. 

An irrefutable fact of armed violence unaddressed by the UN in its gun grab is that all the murders committed by all the serial killers in history don’t amount to a fraction of the brutal killings committed by “authorized state parties” using the very weapons over which they will exercise absolute control under the terms of the Arms Trade Treaty.

Article 2 of the treaty defines the scope of the treaty’s prohibitions. The right to own, buy, sell, trade, or transfer all means of armed resistance, including handguns, is denied to civilians by this section of the Arms Trade Treaty.

Article 3 places the “ammunition/munitions fired, launched or delivered by the conventional arms covered under Article 2” within the scope of the treaty’s prohibitions, as well.

Article 4 rounds out the regulations, also placing all “parts and components” of weapons within the scheme.

Perhaps the most immediate threat to the rights of gun owners in the Arms Trade Treaty is found in Article 5. Under the title of “General Implementation,” Article 5 mandates that all countries participating in the treaty “shall establish and maintain a national control system, including a national control list.”

This list should “apply the provisions of this Treaty to the broadest range of conventional arms.”

Mark it down: Within months, the federal government (likely under the management of the Department of Homeland Security) will begin compiling a list of who owns, buys, sells, trades, or transfers any firearm, as well as the ammunition, parts, and components of those weapons.

After creating this database, the federal government will be required under the provisions of Article 5(4) of the Arms Trade Treaty to “provide its national control list to the Secretariat, which shall make it available to other States Parties.”

That’s right. The UN demands that the list of gun and ammunition owners not only be in the hands of our own government, but be sent to foreign regimes, as well. This provision will guarantee that should an American owner of a legally purchased firearm decide to emigrate, he will be on the radar of the ruling regime in his new home.

Americans are right to recognize this registry as the first step toward confiscation. Without such a registry, it would be impossible to monitor weapons transfers effectively because governments can’t track weapons exchanges and transfers unless they know who has them to begin with.

Article 12 adds to the record-keeping requirement, mandating that the list include “the quantity, value, model/type, authorized international transfers of conventional arms,” as well as the identity of the “end users” of these items.

In very clear terms, the Arms Trade Treaty requires that the federal government of the United States force gun owners to add their names to the national registry. Citizens will be required to report the amount and type of all firearms and ammunition they possess.

Section 4 of Article 12 requires that the list be kept for at least 10 years.

Although the White House has not announced when the president will sign the document, Secretary Kerry said that in the United States “we look forward to signing it [the Arms Trade Treaty] as soon as the process of conforming the official translations is completed satisfactorily.”

The fight for the right to keep and bear arms is just beginning. As explained by the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA):

Once a treaty has been signed, it normally remains available for the Senate to ratify in perpetuity, unless a later president withdraws from it. This means that American gun owners must remain vigilant in ensuring this treaty is never ratified.

Citizens determined to prevent unelected, unaccountable globalist bureaucrats from doing a “victory lap” around the Second Amendment must pressure elected officials on the federal level to oppose ratification and encourage state lawmakers to pass laws nullifying any attempt by the federal government to unconstitutionally infringe upon the God-given rights protected by the Second Amendment.

Joe A. Wolverton, II, J.D. is a correspondent for The New American and travels frequently nationwide speaking on topics of nullification, the NDAA, and the surveillance state. He can be reached at
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This article originally appeared on: The New American

The Louisiana State Legislature has given its final approval to a bill that affirms the right of students to hold prayer meetings in the state’s public schools. On June 1 the state Senate voted unanimously in favor of House Bill 724, which was previously approved by the state Assembly. Introduced in the Senate by Democrat Katrina Jackson, the bill confirms that students of any faith background can receive permission from school officials to use classrooms, assembly halls, or other available space for prayer or reflection. Additionally, noted the Shreveport Times, “a teacher or school administrator, parent or someone from the community may be invited to participate or supervise.”

Another of the bill’s sponsors, Democratic Senator Sharon Broome, conceded that students can already do what the bill specifies, but she said that many are not aware of their rights, or have been intimidated into silence by secular groups attempting stop religious expression. Broome told the Times that she believes more prayer in schools is needed “with all the challenges young people face today.” Republican Senator Mike Walsworth, another of the bill’s supporters, said that when students become aware of the law, “I think more will gather together at a more peaceful time, holding hands.”

While the bill does not change the present climate for religious expression in Louisiana’s public schools, the atheist group Americans United for Separation of Church and State (AU) nonetheless took the opportunity to criticize the state legislature for publicly affirming the right of students to pray. “Let’s get something straight,” simpered the AU atheists in a statement. “Truly voluntary student prayer has always been legal in public schools. Neither the Constitution, nor the Supreme Court has ever said otherwise. But this divisive bill goes far beyond that fact and pushes school districts into problematic territory.”

The secular group complained that with the passage of H.B. 724, “the Louisiana legislature has invited sectarian tensions into a place where all children should feel welcome regardless of their feelings about faith. It is shameful that not one single Louisiana legislator had the courage to stand up and say this bill is wrong.” The AU concluded by issuing its predictable subtle threat, warning that “we’ll be watching carefully to see how this measure plays out at the local level. If it results in abuses of the rights of students, lawsuits are almost certain to occur.”

Meanwhile, while the AU and other atheist attack groups weren’t watching, a South Carolina high school valedictorian took the law into his own hands, setting aside his school-district approved graduation speech in front of parents, teachers, and school officials, and replacing it with a bold recitation of the Lord’s Prayer.

On June 1 Roy Costner IV, valedictorian of Liberty High School in Pickens County, South Carolina, stepped up to the podium at his high school graduation with approved speech in hand. The school board had previously decided to halt the tradition of prayer at the school’s graduation ceremony, citing threats from both the ACLU and the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

But, as reported by the Christian News Network, moments after beginning to speak from his prepared script, Costner shifted gears, thanking his parents for raising him as a Christian. “Those that we look up to, they have helped carve and mold us into the young adults that we are today,” Costner told his audience. “I’m so glad that both of my parents led me to the Lord at a young age.”

Costner then told those assembled, “I think most of you will understand when I say,” following up with, “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name,. Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

Reported the Christian News Network: “As attendees realized that Costner was reciting the Lord’s Prayer, applause began to break out in the coliseum. Within seconds, the applause was accompanied by loud cheers. ‘Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,’ he continued. ‘For Thine is the Kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.’”

Pickens County School District spokesman John Eby told local reporters covering the story that Costner would not be disciplined for his impromptu acknowledgement of God. “The bottom line is, we’re not going to punish students for expressing their religious faith,” Eby said. “He’s a graduate now. There’s nothing we can do about it, even if we wanted to.”

As for the AU, ACLU, Freedom From Religion Foundation, and other atheist complainers, all declined to weigh in on the incident. However, less than a week after Costner’s speech nearly 45,000 individuals had logged on to YouTube to view the clip (below) of Costner’s reverent display and to offer overwhelming support for his humble defiance of those attempting to silence expressions of faith in the public square.

“Brilliant young man!” posted one individual in response to the video. “Bless you for standing up for your right!” Wrote another: “That is what the 1st Amendment is all about,” followed by another comment that read: “Well played sir! Congratulations on that!” Even a self-identified atheist responded to the video with, “I applaud this man.”

[EMBED YOU TUBE VIDEO]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nIr4zBz18E&feature=player_embedded

This article originally appeared on: The New American

National Security Advisor Thomas E. Donilon will resign his post next month and will be replaced by U.S. Ambassador to the UN Susan E. Rice (shown), White House officials announced on June 5. The Washington Post and other news sources reported that Donilon’s resignation will become effective in early July.

A report in the Los Angeles Times noted that Donilon has been a member of President Obama’s national security staff for four years and replaced Gen. James Jones as Obama’s national security advisor (officially called the assistant to the president for national security affairs) in 2010. 

The Times reported that Donilon helped to formulate the Obama administration’s policy for drawdown in Afghanistan and that he advised caution in the U.S. raid conducted to kill Osama bin Laden.

Donilon was a former chief of staff to Secretary of State Warren Christopher, during the Clinton administration. In one of his last official acts, he traveled to Beijing in May to help lay the groundwork for the president’s upcoming summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

An AP report carried by the Boston Globe recalled that Rice, described as “a close Obama confidante,” came under intense criticism from Republicans during investigations into the deadly attack on a U.S. compound in Benghazi resulting in the deaths of the United States Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens and three others. Relying on incorrect information provided by the intelligence community, Rice said in television interviews that the attacks were likely spontaneous, which was later proven incorrect.

The president had proposed Rice as a possible replacement for retiring Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, but her mixed and sometimes inaccurate statements concerning the Benghazi attack made her a lighting rod for criticism. On November 19, 2012, 97 House Republicans sent a letter to President Obama saying that Rice’s statements about Benghazi were “misleading” and that she should therefore not be considered a candidate to succeed Clinton as secretary of state.

On December 13, 2012, she announced that she was withdrawing her name from consideration saying that if nominated “the confirmation process would be lengthy, disruptive, and costly.”

Obama then submitted the name of John Kerry for the cabinet position at State and the well-known former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee won easy confirmation.

Unlike the secretary of state post, the position of national security advisor does not require Senate confirmation.

The Post report observed that some of Rice’s toughest critics have indicated that they are prepared to cooperate with Rice in her new position.

“She’s going to have her plate full, if she’s chosen,” said Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) “I will not be petty. I will put my differences on Benghazi aside and work with her.”

The Globe article reported that Obama will also nominate Samantha Power, a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School identified as “a human rights expert and former White House adviser,” to replace Rice at the UN. 

Power won a Pulitzer Prize for her book, A Problem From Hell, about the U.S. response to genocide. The Post reported that she served as a senior director for multilateral affairs and human rights on the National Security Council during Obama’s first term, continuing into the beginning of his second term.

She wrote in an article critical of the Security Council in The New Republic in 2003: “The U.N. Security Council is anachronistic, undemocratic, and consists of countries that lack the standing to be considered good faith arbiters of how to balance the stability against democracy, peace against justice, and security against human rights.”

The position of ambassador to the United Nations will require Senate confirmation.

The president’s decision to replace Donilon with Rice continues a long-standing practice among presidents of both parties in recent decades to move members of the internationalist Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) into top position. Both Donilon and Rice are CFR members. 

A look at previous national security advisors also turns up a heavy dose of CFR members, including: Stephen Hadley (2005-2009), Condoleezza Rice (2001-2005), Samuel R. Berger (1997-2001), Brent Scowcroft (1989-1993), Colin Powell (1987-1989), Frank Carlucci (1986-1987), Robert C. McFarlane (1983-1985), Richard V. Allen (1981-1982), Zbigniew Brzezinski (1977-1981), Henry Kissinger (1969-1975), Walt Rostow (1966-1969), McGeorge Bundy (1961-1966), Gordon Gray (1958-1961), and Dillon Anderson (1955-1966). The first National Security Director, Robert Cutler (1953-1955 and 1957-1958) wrote an article for the April 1956 issue of Foreign Affairs (the CFR’s official publication) entitled “The Development of the National Security Council.”

^{Photo of Susan Rice: AP Images}

This article originally appeared on: The New American

“What we know for sure the [Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act] will do is that it will lower the cost of buying non-group health insurance,” ObamaCare architect Jon Gruber told the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein in 2009.

But as insurance companies release their proposed rates for 2014 – the year that most of ObamaCare actually goes into effect – it is becoming increasingly clear that the law is, in fact, causing individual insurance rates to skyrocket. Maryland’s largest insurer of individuals, for instance, has proposed a 25-percent rate hike for next year. And new insurer proposals from California, despite the state’s best efforts to portray them otherwise, show that individual rates in the Golden State are likely to experience even greater increases.

On May 23, Covered California, the state’s insurance exchange, issued a press release announcing that in 2014, 13 health plans will be available to individuals via the exchange. Then, through some sleight-of-hand, the exchange went on to claim that the premiums for these plans would be either slightly higher or significantly lower than comparable existing plans.

“It is difficult to make a direct comparison of these rates to existing premiums in the commercial individual market because in 2014, there will be new standard benefit designs under the Affordable Care Act, and the actual change in an individual’s premium will depend on the person’s current insurance coverage,” Covered California wrote.

In other words, because ObamaCare piles on so many mandates, individual plans in 2014 will be significantly different from those in 2013, complicating the matter of comparing the plans’ premiums.

The exchange came up with a seemingly ingenious but actually disingenuous way around this problem:

Covered California believes that a valuable frame of reference for its premiums, is comparing them to the small employer market in California. Both the small employer market and Covered California are competitive markets, and offer guaranteed issue – you cannot be denied for pre-existing condition[s].

The rates submitted to Covered California for the 2014 individual market ranged from two percent above to 29 percent below the 2013 average premium for small employer plans in California’s most populous regions….

“This is a home run for consumers in every region of California,” said Peter V. Lee, Executive Director of Covered California. “Our active negotiating will not only benefit potential enrollees to Covered California, but will benefit all Californians by making health care affordable.”

The problem with this approach is that it compares this year’s small-business rates to next year’s individual rates and finds little difference between the two (or even a sizeable year-over-year decrease). That is like claiming that a small wheat crop this year will not cause bread prices to rise next year because next year’s bread price will resemble this year’s already higher milk price.

“Covered California is creating for itself a very favorable and already higher baseline from which to compare next year’s individual health insurance premiums,” observed Bloomberg View columnist Lanhee Chen. “That’s how they’re able to create the appearance that Obamacare’s reforms will lower individual premiums.”

“To put it simply: Covered California is trying to make consumers think they’re getting more for less when, in fact, they’re just getting the same while paying more.”

How much more? Avik Roy of Forbes ran the numbers for a 25-year-old male nonsmoker, the sort of person likely to obtain the lowest rates on the individual market. He found that the current “median cost of the five cheapest plans was only $92” per month, while under ObamaCare, the two least expensive plans for that same individual will cost, on average, $184 a month and $205 a month. “In other words,” he wrote, “for the typical 25-year-old male non-smoking Californian, Obamacare will drive premiums up by between 100 and 123 percent.”

Worse still, those over 30 cannot participate in the very cheapest plan at all under ObamaCare. Thus, Roy calculated, for a 40-year-old male nonsmoker, his least expensive coverage option will rise from an average of $121 a month to an average of $261 a month – a 116-percent increase.

Overall, Roy found that individual premiums in California are likely to grow by anywhere from 64 percent to 146 percent, depending on the individual’s age, health, location, and current level of coverage.

Chen did his own comparison using an actual individual health plan that very much resembles what will be available next year. The “hypothetical male living in San Francisco and making more than $46,000 a year” can today “buy a PPO plan from a major insurer with a $5,000 deductible, 30 percent coinsurance, a $10 co-pay for generic prescription drugs, and a $7,000 out-of-pocket maximum for $177 a month,” he wrote.

Meanwhile, the cheapest plan on the exchange offering “nearly the same benefits, including a slightly lower out-of-pocket maximum of $6,350, will cost him between $245 and $270 a month,” Chen found. “That’s anywhere from 38 percent to 53 percent more than he’ll have to pay this year for comparable coverage! Sounds a lot different than the possible 29 percent ‘decrease’ touted by Covered California in their faulty comparison.”

In short, any fair comparison of pre- and post-ObamaCare individual rates in California shows that they will be shooting up significantly next year. And as the House Energy and Commerce Committee has found more than once, they will probably do the same thing in most other states.

Even the Obama administration has given up claiming that the healthcare law will bring down insurance premiums. “After extensive research,” the New York Times reported, “the administration said it was unwise to tell consumers that they could get ‘health insurance that fits your budget.’ That message, it said, is ‘seen as highly motivational, but not as believable.’”

This has left ObamaCare supporters to try a new tack: arguing that while insurance rates may increase significantly, the shock will be minimal for low-income individuals because they will get subsidies to buy insurance. While that is true, as Roy points out, those not eligible for subsidies will “face a double-whammy: higher taxes to pay for those subsidies, and higher indvidual-market [sic] insurance costs for [themselves].”

In addition, those who are not subsidized will have an even more powerful incentive not to buy coverage considering that the penalty for not having insurance will be far lower than the cost of insurance. Much of ObamaCare’s success depends on having a large pool of young and healthy individuals buying insurance to offset insurers’ costs of covering all the old and unhealthy people they now must accept at the same rates. If the young and healthy decide to forego coverage, insurers will be stuck paying vastly more in benefits than they receive in premiums – a plainly untenable situation.

The ObamaCare house of cards is already teetering on the brink of disaster. The only question remaining is how elected officials will respond when it finally comes crashing down. Will they repeal it? Or will they try to “fix” it with more interventions, culminating in a complete federal takeover of the healthcare system – and even greater disaster?

This article originally appeared on: The New American

There are plenty of obvious reasons to oppose S. 744, the latest “comprehensive immigration reform” or amnesty bill. These reasons include the loss of U.S. sovereignty as borders are gradually erased through planned non-enforcement, the projected expenditure of trillions of taxpayer dollars over the next 25 years for an expansion of entitlement and welfare programs to accommodate illegals beyond current taxpayer-provided “free” medical care and education, and lower wages and higher unemployment for U.S. workers in an increasingly tight job market resulting from an unprecedented influx of millions of illegal immigrants. But what about the disturbing tendency of S. 744 to protect dangerous illegal immigrants, with the predictable consequence of more and more victims of criminal illegal immigrants?

A daughter of a legal immigrant, Maria Espinoza is the founder and director of The Remembrance Project, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, “created in 2009 to honor and remember Americans who have been killed by illegal aliens.” According to her most recent press release, S. 744 “is a disaster in every possible respect”:

As ICE officers and USCIS officers have warned us, this bill will legalize dangerous aliens who have been in and out of prison, who have been previously deported, who have lied to authorities, who have proven they care nothing about our laws, and who have failed to appear in court. This bill also makes it impossible to deport virtually anybody in the future – guaranteeing criminals will take advantage of S. 744 to remain in the country and never leave. It will put innocent civilians in more danger, and it will allow criminal gangs to continue preying upon the innocent.

Our federal legislators seem to have deliberately ignored the dangerous implications of the deliberate relaxation of current law enforcement in S. 744, especially for the victims of criminal illegals. According to Espinoza,

Their bill also completely ignores our interior enforcement needs. It allows for the dangerous sanctuary city policies to continue to operate, it provides no resources for our ICE officers and border patrol agents; and it, in fact, handcuffs our ICE officers from doing their jobs. Any responsible immigration bill would empower ICE officers and all law enforcement – and assist them in protecting our families.

Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) agrees that this bill effectively federalizes law enforcement in favor of criminal illegal immigrants:

Not only does the Gang of Eight’s bill allow the Secretary of Homeland Security to decide for herself whether weak, undefined enforcement measures (“[border security] triggers”) are met, but it grants her unprecedented discretion in determining whether an alien is allowed to enter the country, whether future illegal aliens can be removed from the country, and who is eligible for amnesty in the bill. The net effect of these waivers and discretionary authority is to permanently hamstring and undermine law enforcement and create a new, endless bureaucracy surrounding immigration proceedings. These provisions, carefully crafted by special interest immigration attorneys, serve only one purpose: to weaken current law and make future enforcement impossible.

For instance, this bill would allow the Secretary to overlook convictions for crimes related to gang activity, child abuse, domestic violence, and drunk driving in determining whether an individual is eligible for admission to the country if the person’s admission serves “humanitarian purposes,” “ensure[s] family unity,” or is in the “public interest.” These standards are so broad as to render most current legal restrictions meaningless.

After identifying a series of S. 744 provisions that effectively gut current laws protecting us from dangerous illegal aliens, Senator Sessions summarizes his assessment of the bill with an eye-opening hypothetical example of the kind of miscarriage of justice that would be possible under S. 744:

Rather than enhance border security and ensure future enforcement of the law, S. 744 rewards illegal aliens with criminal records, and creates an incentive for people to illegally enter the United States in the future. In essence, if S. 744 passes as currently drafted, the following scenario is not at all unlikely: An individual who has previously been convicted of a crime and subsequently removed from the United States illegally crosses the border at one of the six sectors not addressed by S. 744. The United States Border Patrol apprehends that individual, and rather than simply expediently removing him from the United States, places that individual into removal proceedings before an Immigration Judge. The Immigration Judge appoints an attorney for the alien at taxpayer expense. The attorney assists the alien in demonstrating that any future removal would cause mere “hardship” to a qualifying relative. The Immigration Judge terminates the case and permits the individual to stay in the United States – presumably indefinitely.

Senator Sessions concludes, “Quite opposite from creating the ‘toughest’ enforcement in history as the proposal’s sponsors promised, this legislation would devastate enforcement and officer morale and disastrously undermine the rule of law for years to come.”

In her press release, Espinoza accuses the authors of S. 744 of working “hand-in-hand with rich businessmen and amnesty advocates while never once considering the rights of the victims of illegal alien violence. Their decisions to provide amnesty to criminal aliens – including gang members – is a slap in the face to every single victim of illegal alien violence.” She concludes, “Congress needs to shred this bill and go back to the drawing board with American families as their priority. They need to listen to the victims of illegal alien violence. If they don’t, there will continue to be thousands more victims as a result of this bill.”

This article originally appeared on: The New American

A report on the U.S. job market from Automatic Data Processing (ADP) on Wednesday morning surprised economists once again by coming in substantially below their expectations. The 135,000 new private-sector jobs created in May were way below the 170,000 estimated by economists polled by Dow Jones Newswires. Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Analytics, which produces the report for ADP, tried to put a positive spin on the disappointment:

The job market continues to expand but growth has slowed since the first of the year.

The softer job market this spring is largely due to significant fiscal drag from [January’s payroll and income] tax increases and [from] government spending cuts.

A closer look behind the headlines reveals that all of the new jobs were in the service sector while manufacturing actually declined. And only four out of 10 of those jobs came from small businesses with fewer than 50 employees. Medium and large employers made up the rest.

On Monday the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) noted that economic activity in the manufacturing sector contracted for the first time since last November, with key elements of its various internal indexes declining significantly. Its primary indicator, the PMI, dropped by nearly two points, to 49 (50 is neutral), while new orders fell even further, from 52.3 to 48.8. Its production index lost even more ground from April, dropping to 48.6 from 53.5. Its backlog of orders index slowed by five points, contracting from 53 to 48, indicating further slowing in the manufacturing sector in the months to come. ISM quoted typical comments from its customers, including this from a maker of fabricated metal products, “General economy seems sluggish and pensive,” while a supplier of heavy machinery said the “downturn in European and Chinese markets is having a negative effect on our business.”

The Baltic Dry Index provides of measure of shipping activity worldwide by comparing demand for cargo ships with the available supply and is considered to be a leading economic indicator because it predicts future economic activity. From a high of 940 in mid-March, the BDI has declined sharply since then to just over 800.

Steve Hanke, a Cato scholar, isn’t surprised by any of this. It’s the unintended consequences of following blindly the Keynesian “remedies” for a soft economy by reducing interest rates through expanding the money supply. This often causes entrepreneurs to make investments that they otherwise wouldn’t, simply because the cost of capital is so cheap. It’s the same belief that caused many homeowners to buy homes they couldn’t afford just simply because terms were so liberal and interest rates were so low.

But this time it isn’t working. Entrepreneurs have gotten burned before, and many have learned their lesson. And, Hanke says, banks aren’t willing to lend, even if an entrepreneur decides to try to borrow. Says Hanke:

As it turns out, the Fed’s “stimulus” policies are actually exacerbating the credit crunch. Since credit is a source of working capital for businesses, a credit crunch acts like a supply constraint on the economy. This has been the case particularly for smaller firms in the U.S. economy.

Hanke explains that when a borrower seeks funds for his enterprise, his banker must assess the risk his bank is willing to assume and whether or not he can sell part of the risk through the “interbank market.” But that market isn’t functioning now, and so rather than risk the bank’s capital, he prefers to keep it safe, usually at the Federal Reserve.

The impact of this Keynesian attempt to jump-start the economy by trying to fool investors into taking risks they otherwise wouldn’t is falling directly on the primary job creators in the economy: small businesses. Hanke points out:

These small businesses make up a big chunk of the U.S. economy – 49.2% of private sector employment and 46% of private sector GDP.

The untold story is that the zero-interest-rate trap has left [small and medium-sized companies] in a financial straitjacket.

The reports from the ADP and the ISM, along with the Baltic Dry Index, merely measure the failure of the Fed’s attempt to stimulate, and are one more indication of how the private market has become non-functional in the process. Let’s not look for jobs to come from small businesses or for growth in the economy until the Fed stops its Keynesian “remedies.”

A graduate of Cornell University and a former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at www.LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at
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This article originally appeared on: The New American

The survey by Australian global-warming activist John Cook, released recently with a massive media sendoff, is rapidly melting, as scientists and statisticians subject it to analysis. And now it’s leaking out that Cook’s e-mails show he was scheming on this fraudulent survey to promote a leftist political agenda for well over a year. Cook made a big media splash in May with the publication of a study by him and several co-authors claiming to prove that climate scientists overwhelmingly support the theory that human activity is warming the planet to dangerous levels. Cook’s claims received their biggest boost on May 16, when President Barack Obama tweeted: “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree:#climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.” 

The mainstream media and climate-alarmist blogosphere uncritically accepted the Cook study and trumpeted the consensus claims as gospel. We reported on May 21 (“Global Warming ‘Consensus’: Cooking the Books”) on the critiques of the Cook study by experts who show that Cook cooked the data. Out of the nearly 12,000 scientific papers Cook’s team evaluated, only 65 endorsed Cook’s alarmist position. That’s less than one percent, not 97 percent. Moreover, as we reported, the Cook study was flawed from the beginning, using selection parameters designed to weight the outcome in favor of the alarmist position.

In a May 22 follow-up article (“Climate ‘Consensus’ Con Game: Desperate Effort Before Release of UN Report”) The New American reported on additional problems with the Cook study and cited a large and growing list of eminent climate scientists – including Nobel Prize recipients and scientists who served on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – who challenge the claim that there is any “scientific consensus” on climate change, or that “the science is settled” in favor of the Al Gore alarmist position.

Oops! Guess We Forgot Those

Now comes another devastating analysis of Cook’s cooked data from a big name in the climate science community: Professor Richard S. J. Tol. Dr. Tol is a professor of the economics of climate change at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and a professor of economics at the University of Sussex, England. He has also served on the UN’s IPCC.

Dr. Tol has statistically deconstructed the 97 percent consensus myth of Cook et al.

Professor Tol utilizes four graphs to demonstrate the biased methods utilized by the Cook team to skew the results of their “research.” One of the major “errors” of the study (whether intentional or the result of incompetence) was the use of the term “global climate change” to search the scientific database for papers that were included in the 12,000 tabulated by Cook and his co-authors.

In his first graph, Dr. Tol points out that by including “global” before “climate change,” Cook et al “dropped 75% of papers and changed disciplinary distribution.”

In his second graph, Dr. Tol demonstrates that by including “global” before “climate change,” the supposedly authoritative Cook study conveniently “dropped many papers by eminent climate researchers.” And Tol lists around 50 of those researchers who were “dropped.” These, of course, represent only a small sampling of the thousands of scientists who have expressed various levels of disagreement with the hysterical climate pronouncements of the IPCC, Al Gore, and John Cook.

Tol’s third graph shows that by including “global” before “climate change” the Cook team “dropped 33 of the 50 most cited papers.”

In his fourth graph, Dr. Tol shows that the Cook team also skewed the results of their findings by the database they chose to draw papers from, using the Web of Science (WoS) rather than SciVerse Scopus. “Choosing exclusive WoS over inclusive Scopus, Cook et al. dropped 35% of papers and changed disciplinary distribution,” Tol observes.

Another E-mail Scandal Reveals Cook’s “97 Percent” Scam

Populartechnology.net has posted e-mails from John Cook’s Skeptical Science website concerning what Cook calls “The Consensus Project” or TCP. The e-mails, from early 2012, reveal the huge promotional campaign Cook was rolling out to publicize the consensus study – before he had even done the study. It is also evident from the e-mails that Cook knew he was cooking the data to reach a preconceived conclusion. In his “Introduction to TCP” e-mail of January 19, 2012, Cook explains to team members:

It’s essential that the public understands that there’s a scientific consensus on AGW [anthropogenic (man-made) global warming]. So Jim Powell, Dana and I have been working on something over the last few months that we hope will have a game changing impact on the public perception of consensus. Basically, we hope to establish that not only is there a consensus, there is a strengthening consensus. Deniers like to portray the myth that the consensus is crumbling, that the tide is turning.

Right from the get-go, it is apparent that Cook is planning to cook up a “game changing” study that will prove the “scientific consensus” he wants the public to accept. Typical of Cook and activists of his ilk is their use of “deniers” when referring to their opposition, an attempt to smear scientists who hold different opinions by equating them with Nazi holocaust deniers. It is hardly the mark of professional civility and collegiality one expects from true scientists.

Cook’s “Introduction” admits that “TCP is basically an update and expansion of Naomi Oreskes’ survey of the peer-reviewed literature with deeper analysis.” That is an interesting admission, since the 2004 Oreskes study – which was the original source for the 97 percent claim – was exposed for the same methodological flaws. Dr. Benny Peiser, a social science professor at John Moores University and visiting fellow at the University of Buckingham, eviscerated the Oreskes study, pointing out that Oreskes had falsified the so-called consensus by her faulty selection criteria in choosing papers to include in her survey. (See here and here.)

In his “Introduction to TCP,” Cook acknowledges that probably only half of the 12,000 papers they’ve selected will either explicitly or implicitly endorse AGW alarmism. But over time, he expects online volunteers to “process” many of the 6,000 non-endorsement papers, “converting” them into endorsements! Here’s Cook: 

I anticipate there will be around 6000 “neutral” papers. So what I was thinking of doing next was a public crowd sourcing project where the public are given the list of neutral papers and links to the full paper – if they find evidence of an endorsement, they submit it to SkS (Skeptical Science)…. Thus over time, we would gradually process the 6000 neutral papers, converting many of them to endorsement papers – and make regular announcements like “hey the consensus just went from 99.75% to 99.8%, here are the latest papers with quotes.”

Cook went on to sketch out an entire promotional campaign utilizing press releases, major media programs, booklets, Kindle/iBooks, blogs, etc. “We beat the consensus drum often and regularly and make SkS the home of the perceived strengthening consensus,” Cook advised.

At least one of the members of his team seems to have recognized that Cook had the emphasis all backwards. Ari Jokimäki responded: 

I have to say that I find this planning of huge marketing strategies somewhat strange when we don’t even have our results in and the research subject is not that revolutionary either (just summarizing existing research). 

“It’s Official; We’re All a Bunch of Leftists” – John Cook

The fanatical AGW commitment of Cook and his coauthors appears to be driven by their leftist ideological devotion. Populartechnology.net provides downloads from the Skeptical Science forum thread entitled, “Political Compass,” in which frequent Skeptical Science commentators and moderators took a political quiz revealing (much to their mock surprise) they all share the same left-wing political ideology. “I’m a damn dirty commie,” said Dana Nuccitelli, one of Cook’s coauthors, after seeing his quiz results. 

Here are comments from some of the other SkS team members: 

“OMG, I’m a closet Leftist!”  exclaimed Daniel Bailey.

“It seems I am on par with Nelson Mandela,” remarked “perseus.”

“I’m still something of leftie, despite all those years in business,” said Andy S.

“The Criticisms of the Skeptics are right – SkSers are obviously all pinko/liberals,” admitted Glenn Tamblyn.

“It’s official, we’re all a bunch of leftists,” said John Cook. 

“Consensus Drums” Aimed at Aiding UN Agenda

However, the fact that the claims of the Cook/Skeptical Science survey have been exploded as bogus and the fact that the Cook/Skeptical Science team have been exposed as self-described “commies,” “leftists,” and “pinko/liberals” haven’t stopped the MSM commentators from citing their fraudulent “research” as gospel. Incredibly, Prof. Eric Alterman of the left-wing Nation magazine cited the Cook survey in a June 4 posting on the left-wing ThinkProgress.org (“Think Again: Blame The News For The Public’s Ignorance About The Climate”) to condemn the mainstream media for not being sufficiently alarmist when in comes to global warming!

Yes, we’ve only been marinating 24/7 for two decades in increasingly hysterical media predictions and pronouncements about the coming AGW apocalypse – and the American public still hasn’t bought the false “consensus.” However, with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) now engaged in another conference in Bonn, Germany, and the UN’s IPCC set to release a new series of reports, we can expect that the Cooked-up consensus results will be cited endlessly. Or, as Cook himself put it: “We beat the consensus drum often and regularly.” 

Related articles:

German Firms Flee to U.S. to Avoid Staggering “Green” Energy Costs

Global Warming “Consensus”: Cooking the Books

Climate “Consensus” Con Game: Desperate Effort Before Release of UN Report

Climate-change Computer Models Fail Again – and Again, and Again

Study Shows Global Warming Data Skewed by Bad Monitoring

New Report: Man-made Global Warming Is a Farce (“Extreme Weather” 2012)

Blaming Climate Change for Hurricane Sandy

This article originally appeared on: The New American

Lawmakers in Iowa City, Iowa, unanimously passed an ordinance on Tuesday that restricts the use of traffic enforcement cameras, drones, and automatic license plate recognitions systems. A second and third vote on the ordinance will take place June 18. It is reportedly the first municipal bill in the country to simultaneously ban all three law enforcement tools.

While red light cameras and drones have long been the subject of controversy for various reasons, lawmakers in Iowa City are addressing in particular the privacy concerns connected with the use of such devices. According to the website arstechnica.com, “Privacy experts say that they’ve never seen a law at any level of government that’s comparable to what Iowa City has proposed, and not just because it’s a three-in-one privacy-minded bill.”

The bill currently reads:

The City shall not:

A. Use any automatic traffic surveillance system or device, automatic license plate recognition system or device, or domestic drone system or device for the enforcement of a qualified traffic law violation, unless a peace officer or Parking Enforcement Attendant is present at the scene, witnesses the event, and personally issues the ticket to the alleged violator at the time and location of the vehicle.

Iowa City’s ordinance was proposed by a citizen group called Stop Big Brother, comprised of Iowa City residents who oppose the increased use of surveillance technology. The group’s website declares:

Surveillance technology, and in particular traffic surveillance technology, is increasingly being pushed by technology vendors and device manufacturers to municipalities across the country under the banner of increased public safety. At its core, though, traffic surveillance has little to do with safety and everything to do with revenue. Worse yet, our liberties, constitutional rights, and this country’s founding principles all end up being the collateral damage.

Stop Big Brother’s initiative has the support of the American Civil Liberties Union, which submitted a legal argument on behalf of the group’s founders, Aleksey Gurtovoy and Martha Hampel, last year when they filed an affidavit to start the initiative.

Though Iowa City does not currently use drones to enforce traffic law, Gurtovoy asserts that the group is being “proactive.”

“The city might say they have no plans (for drones or license plate readers) but it’s been our experience that this can change in a very short amount of time,” Gurtovoy told arstechnica.com. “What usually happens is that someone comes into the city and says that [the city] could use this tech to ‘benefit’ the public.”

City attorney Eleanor Dilkes fully expected the ordinance to pass in the first vote, as well as the second and third.

“The city manager and I talked and that was the recommendation, as that it does not affect our current operations and that its only binding after a period of two years,” said Dilkes, who affirms that the city has no plans to purchase drones or license plate readers at this time.

If the ordinance passes the second and third votes, the law would go into effect on June 27.

Privacy advocates are celebrating the efforts in Iowa City.

Lee Tien, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, called the ordinance “pretty awesome to see.”

Woodrow Hartzog, law professor at the Cumberland School of Law at Samford University, touted a number of benefits the bill provides:

This ordinance would seemingly prevent a host of activities deemed dubious by some citizens, including tickets from red light cameras and automated tickets for moving violations issued via the mail. The ordinance also provides robust privacy protections for citizens by limiting the storage, use, and distribution of data collected by these automated systems to reasons directly pertaining to traffic other criminal violations enforced by an officer on the scene. This ordinance is one of the most comprehensive and vigorous attempts I’ve seen to combat automated law enforcement and surveillance, a practice that is being increasingly rejected by citizens over privacy and due process concerns, among other things.

But Linda Lye of the ACLU of Northern California, a leading proponent on restrictions for the use of domestic drones, believes that the language in the ordinance specifically addressing drones should be even stronger.

“The scope of the restriction is not all that broad,” she told arstechnica.com, “as it limits use of surveillance devices for parking enforcement (unless an officer is personally present) but doesn’t limit use of drones, etc. for other purposes.”

This article originally appeared on: The New American

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The 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.‘s “I Have a Dream” speech is rapidly approaching, commemorating the historic Aug. 28, 1963, March on Washington.

Related Entries

• June 5, 2013 Obama’s Season of Challenge
• June 5, 2013 Holder Happens

This article originally appeared on: TruthDig

UN-Arab League Special Envoy to Syria Lakhdar Brahimi says an international conference to solve the crisis in Syria may be held in July.

“We have come to the conclusion today that it will not be possible to hold this conference in June. We will be continuing our consultations with Russia and the United States to see about windows of opportunity to hold the conference as soon as possible — hopefully in July,” Brahimi said at a news conference after holding preparatory talks with delegations from the United Nations, US, and Russia in Geneva on Wednesday.

The peace talks had originally been planned to be held in June.

Å“The goal of the conference will be to achieve a political solution to the conflict in Syria through a comprehensive agreement between the government of Syria and the Syrian oppositions,” Brahimi said, adding that another preparatory meeting would be held on June 25.

Meanwhile, the Russian Foreign Ministry renewed Moscowâ„¢s call for the participation of Iran in the talks.

Å“This is a matter of principle because the composition of the conference should be balanced,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov told the ITAR-TASS news agency.

The Syria crisis began in March 2011, and many people, including large numbers of soldiers and security personnel, have been killed in the violence.

The Syrian government says that the chaos is being orchestrated from outside the country, and there are reports that a very large number of the militants are foreign nationals.

Damascus says the West and its regional allies, such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, are supporting the militants.

In an interview broadcast on Turkish television in April, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said that if the militants take power in Syria, they could destabilize the entire Middle East region for decades.

Å“If the unrest in Syria leads to the partitioning of the country, or if the terrorist forces take control… the situation will inevitably spill over into neighboring countries and create a domino effect throughout the Middle East and beyond,” he stated.

NT/MHB

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

The widespread use of surveillance technologies to monitor peoples’ communications violates the human rights to privacy and freedom of expression, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression and Opinion stated in his report.

Rapporteur, Frank La Rue, presented his report to the United
Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva on Tuesday.

The document underlined that there’s no way to ensure freedom of
expression without respect of privacy in communications and
called for global attention towards the increased use of
surveillance technologies by many governments.  

“The right to privacy is often understood as an essential
requirement for the realization of the right to freedom of
expression. Undue interference with individuals’ privacy can both
directly and indirectly limit the free development and exchange
of ideas,” the report stated.

La Rue praised the technological innovations, which promote fast,
anonymous, cross-cultural dialogues around the world, but warned
that the same technologies can backfire as concerns about
national security and criminal activity may lead to previously
unseen scale of state surveillance intrusions.

“The Internet has facilitated the development of large amounts
of transactional data by and about individuals. This information,
known as communications data or metadata, includes personal
information on individuals, their location and online activities,
and logs and related information about the e-mails and messages
they send or receive.”

The rapporteur stressed that this communications data is
“storable, accessible and searchable” and when it’s
combined and used by the state it can be “both highly
revelatory and invasive”.

According to La Rue, governments are in possession of multiple
instruments to breach communication privacy as access to the
stored content of an individual’s e-mails and messages can be
obtained through Internet companies and service providers.

Secret services can easily track the movements of mobile phones,
identify all individuals with a mobile phone within a designated
area and intercept calls and text messages.

The majority of digital communication information flows through
fiber-optic cables, so by placing taps on them and applying word,
voice and speech recognition, the governments can achieve almost
complete control of communications, the report warns.

The document mentions Egypt and other governments confronted with
the Arab Spring as one of the most recent examples of such
technologies being used.

The report also noted that the surveillance of human rights
defenders or journalists has been “well documented” by the
governments of many countries.

“On these occasions, human rights defenders and political
activists report having their phone calls and e-mails monitored,
and their movements tracked. Journalists are also particularly
vulnerable to becoming targets of communications surveillance
because of their reliance on online communication. In order to
receive and pursue information from confidential sources,
including whistleblowers, journalists must be able to rely on the
privacy, security and anonymity of their communications.”

La Rue urged governments worldwide to review their national laws
regulating surveillance as they are often inadequate or simply
don’t exist — to ensuring privacy in communication is
protected.  

“Communications surveillance should be regarded as a highly
intrusive act that potentially interferes with the rights to
freedom of expression and privacy and threatens the foundations
of a democratic society. Legislation must stipulate that State
surveillance of communications must only occur under the most
exceptional circumstances and exclusively under the supervision
of an independent judicial authority.”

The document stressed that individuals should be allowed all
technological means to secure their communications and
government’s “should not interfere with the use of encryption
technologies, nor compel the provision of encryption keys”.

This article originally appeared on: RT

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/obamas_season_of_challenge_20130605/

Posted on Jun 5, 2013

This article originally appeared on: TruthDig

The image shows a view of a street in the town of Qusayr in Syria’s central Homs province on June 5, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

The US Transportation Security Administration is unable to prove that an expensive and controversial pat-down program does not screen airline passengers based on race, according to a report by the inspector general in the Department of Homeland Security.

The Screening of Passengers by Observation Technique (SPOT)
program was instituted in 2004 and has long been criticized for
allowing untrained officers to use race as an excuse to
scrutinize travelers. The inspector general found there is no
sufficient way to gauge the program’s effectiveness, and to boot,
the program lacks financial foresight. 

It is illegal in the US to screen passengers based on their race,
ethnicity or religion. 

Thirty TSA officers who worked in Boston’s Logan Airport
complained to the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts
last year that the program was used to question Hispanics
traveling to Florida and African-American men wearing backwards
baseball hats. 

Those officers reported questioning the passengers based on
demands from superiors in upper management, who hoped the closer
inspection would yield arrests on outstanding warrants or
immigration issues, among other charges. 

Law enforcement, acting on referrals from TSA officers, made
1,083 arrests in the first 4.5 years of the SPOT program. Not one
of those arrests, according to Bloomberg News, was for
terrorism-related charges. 

More than 2,800 TSA agents work in the SPOT program, which has so
far cost American taxpayers $878 million.

This article originally appeared on: RT

Delegates from across Haiti and the world gathered in Port-au-Prince for a Continental Conference on May 31 and Jun. 1 to map out a world-wide campaign to bring a rapid end to the United Nations Mission to Stabilize Haiti (MINUSTAH), a 9,000-member military force which has occupied Haiti since Jun. 1, 2004.

The delegates met for the two days at the Plaza Hotel, addressed a rally of several hundred people on May 31 on the Dessalines Plaza of the Champ de Mars, and spoke on several radio shows, including Ranmase, Radio Caraïbes’s highly popular Saturday morning round-table.

“Haitians, this is a battle for our dignity and pride as a people,” Sen. Moïse Jean-Charles, who was a guiding force behind the conference, declared to the enthusiastic outdoor rally in the capital’s main square. Haiti’s founding father General Jean-Jacques “Dessalines fought for us to be masters of this little patch of land. How can we be occupied by a foreign army over 200 years later? We cannot. We will not.”

By the end of the second day of meetings, which included statements and testimony of organizations from all over Haiti, the delegates unanimously approved the following resolution and vowed to continue their struggle.

Resolution of the Continental Conference in Haiti for the Withdrawal of UN-MINUSTAH Troops

To the Governments of Latin America and the Caribbean,

To All the Governments Involved in the Occupation of Haiti

We — the 140 delegates at the conference coming from Haiti, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, El Salvador, the United States, Algeria, and France, mandated by our respective organizations and associations — have received messages of support from Guadeloupe, St. Lucia, Martinique, Trinidad and Tobago, the United States, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, Bolivia (1) and France, among other countries.

On May 31 and June 1, 2013 — after nine years of UN-MINUSTAH occupation of Haiti, the first black republic in the world, established in 1804 after a war of liberation against the French colonial power — we met in Port-au-Prince in response to the call issued by the Host Committee of the Continental Conference in Haiti for the Withdrawal of UN-MINUSTAH Troops: “To Defend Haiti Is to Defend Ourselves.”

1 — We heard the testimonies from Haitian citizens and organizations on the consequences of these nine years of occupation.

The speakers who testified confirmed that the abuses by the MINUSTAH forces continue: rape of the youth in Cayes (Port Salut) by Uruguayan MINUSTAH soldiers, repression of union activities and social protests, proliferation of drug trafficking and distribution of fire-arms.

The testimonies confirmed that the troops are in Haiti to protect the interests of the multinational corporations from the United States and its allies — interests expressed, in particular, in the various [U.S.] HOPE laws (2), but also through the shameless exploitation of workers in export-processing zones and the looting of the country, especially its mineral resources.

The testimonies also noted that three years after the earthquake of January 2010, there are hundreds of thousands of Haitians still living in tents in deplorable conditions — and this on top of the massive cholera epidemic brought into Haiti by MINUSTAH troops from Nepal, an epidemic that has already taken the lives of 9,000 Haitians and infected hundreds of thousands of others.

2 — We also learned about and discussed the report dated March 8, 2013, presented to the United Nations Security Council by the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon (3).

– The UN Secretary-General’s Report states that MINUSTAH is in Haiti to ensure “security” – but whose security? The Report goes on to state that the “UN Mission is faced with widespread and repeated civil unrest, mainly linked to socioeconomic grievances.” The Report also notes that there have been “[f]requent anti-Government demonstrations . . . against the high cost of living, food insecurity and the failure to deliver basic services. From August to October 2012, the number of demonstrations held per month tripled from 22 to 64.”

– But then the UN Secretary-General’s Report concludes that there is a “need to strengthen the national police and judiciary” and that this “remains a key prerequisite for the Mission’s eventual withdrawal from Haiti.” In other words, if the forces of repression are not strengthened, the MINUSTAH troops would not get out of Haiti.

As an example of why the UN presence is still needed, the UN Secretary-General points to the “[r]iots in Jérémie (Grand-Anse Department) late in November 2012 and in January 2013 [which] underscored the need for MINUSTAH to continue to be able to airlift a quick reaction force to remote areas in support of the national police.”

But these “riots” were in fact mobilizations of the people demanding the completion of the road between Cayes and Jérémie — a road needed to break the region out of its isolation; construction on this road had begun more than three years earlier but was abandoned by the Brazilian OAS construction company.

– The UN Secretary-General also emphasizes the need for legislative (Senate) and municipal elections and for preparing the 2015 presidential elections. But he openly acknowledges that neither the previous elections nor the next ones will be organized by Haitian institutions.

In fact, the U.S. government, through the edifice of the MINUSTAH occupation, persists in trampling upon the rights of the Haitian people, in violation of the Haitian Constitution and the very Charter of the United Nations.

What’s more, the UN Secretary-General’s Report has the gall to state that the UN-MINUSTAH forces are “working to eliminate” the cholera epidemic. These words were stated just a few weeks after the UN refused to take responsibility for the epidemic that was transmitted by the Nepalese troops of MINUSTAH. These words were stated shortly after the UN refused to pay reparations to the victims of the epidemic — under the guise of “diplomatic immunity” of its personnel.

Therefore, it is with horror that we read in the Report, following a series of disclosures that constitute a real indictment against the MINUSTAH occupation of Haiti, the defense by the UN Secretary-General of the decision to maintain the UN-MINUSTAH occupation of Haiti until 2016.

This is unacceptable! This is unbearable!

3 — To the governments of the countries of UNASUR (Union of South American Nations):

We appeal to the governments of the countries of UNASUR, whose founding treaty affirms “full respect for the sovereignty, territorial integrity and inviolability of States and self-determination of peoples.”

To the governments of the countries of CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States):

We appeal to the governments of the countries of CELAC, whose Caracas Declaration also reaffirms the defense of national and popular sovereignty, and moreover welcomes the “more than 200 years of independence of Haiti” and recalls the aid given by the Haitian people to Simon Bolivar in his struggle for independence against the Spanish colonial power.

MINUSTAH is the negation of all that. MINUSTAH is an occupying force in the interests of U.S. multinationals. The so-called “peace” mission of MINUSTAH is a “peace” mission to exploit the workers, the youth, and the natural resources of Haiti.

Our conference was also addressed by delegates from the United States and France, whose governments are permanent members of the Security Council. They denounced the heinous roles of their governments in this occupation — an occupation that is also against the interests of the workers and peoples in the United States and France. The U.S. delegates, in particular, denounced the coup d’etat of February 29, 2004, that overthrew President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

The conference concluded that the military occupation of Haiti is part and parcel of the policies of U.S. imperialism and its allies in response to, and as a consequence of, the crisis of the capitalist system, which is accelerating and in this process furthering its policies of war and looting of peoples worldwide, while trampling upon the freedom and sovereignty of nations.

We also wish to recall the following facts:

– On September 20, 2011, the Haitian Senate unanimously passed a resolution calling upon the Haitian government to “put forward before the Security Council of the United Nations the formal request for a gradual, orderly and definitive withdrawal of all components of MINUSTAH in a period not exceeding one year, or no later than October 15, 2012.”

– In a hearing on July 10, 2012, the Foreign Affairs Minister of Brazil — the country in command of the MINUSTAH troops — stated: “I believe that MINUSTAH has already extended its mission longer than desirable.”

– In October 2012, a delegation was received at the United Nations by Mr. William Gardner, then representative of UN Secretary-General Mr. Ban Ki-moon. Mr. Gardner stated that “the UN Security Council would soon take steps to reduce the number of troops in Haiti.”

A year later, where do we stand?

– In Argentina, in April 2013, at a hearing at the Foreign Affairs Ministry, Argentine diplomat Pablo Tettamanti stated: “It is now a problem of internal security in Haiti, and the MINUSTAH forces are not there for that. Before, it was justified, but not now, because the protests are internal affairs of Haiti, and we have nothing to do with that.”

– Even the interim director of the MINUSTAH forces, Mr. Nigel Fisher, said in an interview in February 2013 that “the presence of MINUSTAH in Haiti is leading to a ‘dead end’.”

– Once again, on May 28, 2013, the Haitian Senate passed a resolution calling “for the withdrawal of MINUSTAH. ”

FOR THE IMMEDIATE WITHDRAWAL OF MINUSTAH!

It follows from these observations that the only measure consistent with the sovereignty of the Haitian people and the Haitian nation is the immediate withdrawal of UN-MINUSTAH troops from Haiti!

It is now, right now, that each and every government can and must decide to withdraw its troops. Not one more day for MINUSTAH in Haiti!

As part of the effort to expand our campaign for the immediate withdrawal of MINUSTAH from Haiti with the broadest unity and determination, the bearers of this Open Letter have been mandated by our Conference to convey to you our urgent and unanimous demands:

– Withdraw your troops from Haiti immediately!

– Vote at the UN against the renewal of the presence of MINUSTAH in Haiti!

– Show your solidarity with the Haitian people by requiring UN compensation/reparations for the victims of cholera!

To Defend Haiti Is to Defend Ourselves!

4 — We, delegates from Haiti, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, El Salvador, the United States, Algeria, and France, meeting in Port-au-Prince in the framework of the Continental Conference for the Withdrawal of MINUSTAH Troops — with the support of organizations, associations, and personalities in a dozen countries, including Uruguay (4);

– Welcome all the mobilizations and activities demanding the withdrawal of UN troops from Haiti that are taking place across the continent this June 1, 2013 — the 9th anniversary of the occupation of Haiti;

– Resolve to constitute a “To Defend Haiti Is to Defend Ourselves! Continental Coordinating Committee” to continue and strengthen the solidarity and unity of the people through an ongoing campaign for the withdrawal of the UN-MINUSTAH troops occupying the Haitian soil.

The Coordinating Committee will aim to strengthen the coordination between the organizations already involved in this fight: the Association of Workers and Peoples of the Caribbean (ATPC); the Sao Paulo Committee “To Defend Haiti Is to Defend Ourselves”; the Guadeloupe-Haiti Campaign Committee, New York; the Host Committee of the Continental Conference in Haiti and the Mexican Committee For the Withdrawal of UN Troops from Haiti, among the many others, and to allow the emergence of other such committees.

– Propose toward this end a Week of Continental Action on July 29 to August 3, 2013 – with mobilizations in all countries, including rallies, demonstrations, delegations to governments, petitions, etc.

– We pledge as of now, if these actions prove to be insufficient to attain our demands, to prepare the sending of an even broader delegation to the UN headquarters in New York in October 2013, at the time of the ratification of the renewal of UN-MINUSTAH mandate in Haiti.

Endnotes

(1) An entire radio program in Bolivia was devoted to this conference in Haiti.

(2) HOPE: Haiti Opportunity Partnership Encouragement act

(3) Report of the Secretary-General on the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (S/2013/139), March 8, 2013

(4) At the initiative of the PIT-CNT trade union federation, several Uruguayan organizations participated in much of the Haiti conference via Skype.

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

Staff Sgt. Robert Bales (L) at the National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California (file photo)

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Staff Sgt. Robert Bales (L) at the National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California (file photo)

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Headquarters of the International Monetary Fund in Washington, DC, United States (file photo)

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

File photo shows a general view of Bekaa Valley near Baalbek town in eastern Lebanon.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Declan Walsh and Salman Masood
nytimes.com
June 5, 2013

nytimes.com
Nawaz Sharif took office as Pakistan’s prime minister for an unparalleled third time on Wednesday, vowing to tackle the country’s crippling electricity crisis and issuing an urgent call for the end of American drone strikes on Pakistani soil.

“The chapter of daily drone attacks should stop,” a grave-faced Mr. Sharif told the packed lower house of Parliament, where he won a comfortable majority of votes to become prime minister. “We respect the sovereignty of other countries, but others should also respect our sovereignty.”

Those comments resonated with many Pakistanis who view the C.I.A. missile strikes as a troubling symbol of American aggression — even if they occasionally kill Pakistan’s own enemies, like the country’s deputy Taliban leader, Wali ur-Rehman, who died in an attack last week.

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

<!–Eric Draitser–>

Eric Draitser is an independent geopolitical analyst based in New York City and the founder of StopImperialism.com.

The appointment of Susan Rice as national security adviser to Obama is instructive in the context of domestic partisan politics. But the true global significance of her appointment will be reflected in US policy in Syria, Africa, and around the world.

Rice, Obama and the Republicans

Undoubtedly the center of this story as presented in the
mainstream US media will be the continued conflict between Obama
and congressional Republicans who have used the attacks in
Benghazi, and Rice’s attempt to cover up the true nature of the
terrorist act, as ammunition in their political assault on the
administration. Conversely, Obama’s appointment will
be seen as a stern response to the Republican bid for “character
assassination” of Rice, as Obama no longer worries about a
reelection campaign.

As Mark Landler wrote in the
New York Times, “[The appointment of Susan Rice] is also a
defiant gesture to Republicans who harshly criticized Ms. Rice
for presenting an erroneous account of the deadly attacks on the
American mission in Benghazi, Libya … For Ms. Rice, the
appointment amounts to redemption.” From the
perspective of the Obama administration, there are two core
political motivations in tapping Rice for the
position. 

First and foremost, it allows the President to present himself as
oppositional to Republicans, as a Democrat willing to stand his
ground and defend one of his own against political and personal
attacks. This point is not to be underestimated as
President Obama continues to be accused by principled
progressives of collusion and collaboration with Republicans on
deficit reduction, cuts to vital social programs and other
austerity-related policies. Essentially, Obama is able to
use Rice as a shield, deflecting attention away from his
destructive economic and political policies in favor of the much
more manageable “controversy” about Susan Rice.

Additionally, by keeping Rice within the top leadership of the
administration, Obama also is able to create the false dichotomy
between African-American woman Susan Rice, and the almost
entirely white male Republican Party. In so doing,
Obama insulates himself and his administration further by adding
the socio-cultural element into the equation; Obama forces white
male Republicans to attack Rice and consequently, left liberals
to defend her. This kabuki theater politics has typified
the clever tactics of the current administration: playing to its
strengths by using the Republicans as a foil.

Of course, what should not be lost on readers is the fact that
not one of the “harshest” attacks on Susan Rice has ever
questioned the fundamental thinking that underlies her entire
world-view: that the United States must use military force,
hegemony, and coercion to maintain and expand its imperial
posture and protect the interests of Wall Street, London, and the
multinational corporations. Obama’s appointment of
Rice is far more than a “defiant gesture,” it is a validation and
ringing endorsement of the “humanitarian war” and “Responsibility
to Protect (R2P)” doctrine espoused by Rice since the Clinton
administration. It is an unequivocal affirmation of the
“righteousness” of US-NATO’s savage war on Libya and continued
destabilization and subversion of Syria. It is the
proclamation of a continued and sustained neo-colonial presence
in Africa. It is here that we can clearly identify the true
significance of this appointment. 

Syria, Africa and Beyond

As national security adviser, Susan Rice will be in perhaps the
most important foreign policy position, helping to craft US
policy rather than being merely the public face of US diplomacy,
as would have been her job as Secretary of State. Perhaps the
most pressing issue that Rice will address is the continued
conflict in Syria. As UN Ambassador, Rice has a long
track record of abrasive and inflammatory remarks disguised as
diplomacy but used to perpetuate and expand the conflict. 
As Rice
stated publicly in February of 2012 after Russia and China
vetoed a one-sided, US-backed resolution which would have laid
the groundwork for intervention in Syria:

First of all, we all felt that it was outrageous in any
instance for Russia and China to veto a resolution that
was really a political expression of support for the Arab League
initiative and for the people of Syria and a condemnation
of violence…but it was even more outrageous that they  
would do so at a time when Assad was stepping up the killing in
such a horrific way.

Not only does this statement demonstrate clearly the belligerent
and undiplomatic rhetoric that has been the hallmark of Susan
Rice’s tenure as UN ambassador, but it also lays bare the
inescapable fact that Rice is the embodiment of “liberal”
imperialism. While admonishing Russia and China for
“shielding a craven tyrant,” implicit in her remarks is that
human rights is merely the cover for intervention and the
expansion of US hegemony. In essence, Rice attacks Russia
and China for preventing the Libya scenario — complete with UN
quasi-authorization — being applied to Syria. She blasted
Moscow and Beijing for “obstruction” in the UN, illustrating in
the most transparent way possible that she, like her predecessors
and the Western ruling class, view the UN and all international
institutions as being subservient to the agenda of
Washington.

Rice, in fact, admitted this
publicly when she stated that Washington would “intensify
efforts outside the Security Council.” She and the
administration cannot publicly acknowledge their military and
material support for the “rebels” in Syria despite the fact that
even the
NY Times acknowledged in June of 2012 that, “A small number
of CIA officers are operating secretly in southern Turkey,
helping allies decide which Syrian opposition fighters will
receive arms.” However, as recently as last week,
Susan Rice was publicly posturing as if she and the
administration are being cautious in not arming the rebels. 
The duplicity and hypocrisy, like her abrasive tone and outright
lies, have been the hallmark of Rice’s tenure at the UN and will
now simply shift to the White House.

Her appointment as national security adviser, just a week after
the European Union chose to end the arms embargo on Syria, paints
a dangerous picture for the immediate future in
Syria. Not only will she be the principal individual
crafting policy, but she brings with her a cadre of advisors,
mentors, and confidantes — including Madeline Albright, Gayle
Smith, and Tony Lake — who have advocated for genocide in Iraq
and military interventions in the Balkans, Africa, and
elsewhere. This is the imperialist milieu from which Rice
emerges, and the world-view she brings with her to the national
security adviser position.

Like Syria, Africa figures prominently in Obama and Rice’s
geostrategic agenda. In the last five years, Rice and
Obama have overseen a brutal war against the peaceful nation of
Libya, the expansion of terror networks and destabilization
throughout much of West Africa, the successful partition of Sudan
into two countries, and the continued expansion of US military
penetration of the continent in the form of AFRICOM, drone bases,
and much more. As Glen Ford wrote for
Black Agenda Report in 2008:

Her [Rice’s] sole concern is projection of US
power by any means — or pretext — that is available…Rice’s
behavior in Africa has been morally inconsistent…after her
promotion to Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, she
failed to publicly advocate action against US allies  
Uganda and by then Tutsi-ruled Rwanda — the main perpetrators in
an ongoing war that has killed millions…Rice embraces a
policy that causes mass death and starvation in Somalia and
ongoing genocide in Congo.

These sorts of ideological and political positions indicate that
Rice means more of the same for US imperialism and
neo-colonialism in Africa. However, given the
accelerating nature of aggressive US policy on the continent, it
is safe to assume that Rice will be one of the principle
architects of an updated “security” strategy in Africa, one that
will utilize the vast military and political infrastructure
created by the US and its imperial partners. From drone
bases in Niger, Djibouti and elsewhere, and using regional
groupings and the African Union itself as proxies, Rice will
direct Obama to project military power on the continent in ways
that have yet to be seen in an attempt to solidify Washington’s
grip on the economic and political development of the
continent.

The appointment of Susan Rice as national security adviser is not
exactly a tremendous departure from current policy. 
There will be no fundamental reevaluation of US policy. 
Rather, Rice will go from international mouthpiece with a hand in
policy, to the primary voice shaping it and whispering in Obama’s
ear. Naturally, the absurd theater of US politics will take
center stage as Susan Rice makes it even easier for Republicans
to attack Obama on foreign policy and national security
issues. Of course, this is no concern for Rice, Obama and
the administration.  If anything, it is precisely
what they want.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

This article originally appeared on: RT

The IRS salutes the Original Series with your wallet.

Infowars.com
June 5, 2013

A treasury report released Friday reveals the IRS spent approximately $50,000 on videos such as this Star Trek spoof for a training conference in Anaheim, California.

The IRS, however, is unsure of the exact costs because unlike the American taxpayer, the agency was not required to track and report expenses. Furthermore, the agency did not even file W-2s on all applicable employees attending the conference. With a sick sense of humor, the IRS organized the conference for their Small Business/Self-Employed division, which handles the taxpayers harassed the most for expense receipts.

The cost of this conference is not unusual for the agency. From 2010 to 2012, the IRS hosted 225 conferences across the nation, six of which cost over $1 million. The total cost for all of the conferences in this period topped $49 million.

Read the full treasury report here

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This article was posted: Wednesday, June 5, 2013 at 4:19 pm

Tags: domestic news, government corruption

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

Infowars.com
June 5, 2013

On Wednesday’s edition of the Alex Jones Show, Alex reported from the road as he prepared to confront members of the secretive globalist organization known as the Bilderberg group in Watford, England.

Alex also reported from the streets of the city of London with Prison Planet editors Paul Joseph Watson and Steve Watson, and Infowars reporter Lee Ann McAdoo.

As Alex attempted to conduct interviews for his daily radio show, dozens of people approached him to say, “Cheers.”

Follow Alex’s streaming video coverage of Bilderberg at ustream.tv/AlexJonesLive

or

on Youtube at the TheAlexJonesChannel and PrisonPlanetLive.

We’ve also got a dedicated Bilderberg page at: Infowars.com/bilderberg

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Tags: bilderberg

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

Dan Christensen and Anthony Summers
Miami Herald
June 5, 2013

Former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham has accused the FBI in court papers of having impeded Congress’s Joint Inquiry into 9/11 by withholding information about a Florida connection to the al-Qaeda attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.

The information, first reported by BrowardBulldog.org in 2011, includes a recently declassified FBI report that ties a Saudi family who once lived in Sarasota “to individuals associated with the terrorist attacks on 9/11/2001.”

“The FBI’s failure to call (to the Joint Inquiry’s attention) documents finding ‘many connections’ between Saudis living in the United States and individuals associated with the terrorist attack(s)…interfered with the Inquiry’s ability to complete its mission,” said Graham, co-chairman of the Joint Inquiry.

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Infowars.com
June 5, 2013

A BBC reporter admitted her job was to “provoke” Alex Jones following an interview in which the reporter attempted to characterise Bilderberg as a conspiracy theory.

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This article was posted: Wednesday, June 5, 2013 at 4:57 pm

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

Pakistanis gather around the bodies of violence victims during a protest in southern Pakistani port city of Karachi on June 5, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

The first week of WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning’s military trial wrapped up Wednesday, recessing until next week when the court-martial of the Army private will resume with a new roster of witnesses scheduled to take the stand.

Day three of the court proceedings kicked off at Ft. Meade,
Maryland Wednesday morning, but concluded earlier than expected
after the prosecution breezed through a number of witnesses on
the docket. The court adjourned just after 3 p.m. following the
conclusion of testimonies from a handful of Army officers who
served close to Manning during his deployment in Iraq.

Col. Denise Lind, the military judge overseeing the
court-martial, said the court could recess until Monday when the
prosecution will again ask its witnesses to testify as to Private
first class Manning, a 25-year-old Army intelligence analyst
accused of sharing a trove of sensitive military files with the
website WikiLeaks. Manning could be sentenced to spend life in
prison if convicted of the most serious of charges, aiding the
enemy.

The quick pace of this week’s proceedings contrasted sharply with
how the trial has progressed in the months – and years – leading
up to this week. The court-martial began Monday at Ft. Meade
outside of Baltimore, but not before Manning spent more than
1,100 days in pretrial confinement. The trial is scheduled to
continue for another 11 weeks.

Army Specialist Jihrleah Showman was called to testify Wednesday
morning and answered questions about Pfc. Manning’s behavior and
attitude in Iraq. Manning was deployed to Forward Opoerating Base
Hammer outside of Baghdad in October 2009, and prosecutors say he
started harvesting the files later published by WikiLeaks just
weeks later.

Bradley Manning Support Network member Nathan Fuller was one of
the roughly 20 journalists in attendance for day three of the
court-martial, and wrote on Twitter that Showman testified that
the accused WikiLeaks source frequently talked about politics
with his Army colleagues, wanted to debate fellow soldiers about
US policy and came off on the “extreme Democractic side.”
Manning punched Showman in the face during a May 2010 outburst
and was demoted from specialist to private first class as a
result. He was arrested for his role in the intelligence leaking
two days after that demotion, but Fuller said the altercation was
never discussed during Wednesday’s hearing.

Other witnesses called Wednesday included Kyle Balonek and Hondo
Hack, two superiors who testified as to Pfc. Manning’s roel as an
intelligence analyst at FOB Hammer.

“Manning was one of if not the most organized intelligence
analysts he’s ever seen,” Fuller recalled of Hack’s
testimony.

Court is expected to reconvene 9:30 a.m. Monday, June 10, and
continue through August. In an editorial last week, WikiLeaks
founder Julian Assange wrote, “The government has prepared for
a good show.”

“The alleged act in respect of which Bradley Manning is
charged is an act of great conscience – the single most important
disclosure of subjugated history, ever,” Assange wrote.

Manning could be sentenced to life in prison if convicted of
aiding the enemy, a charge the government says he is guilty of
because al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden requested and received
military files that the soldier supplied to Assange. Manning
admitted to uploading material to WikiLeaks earlier this year.

This article originally appeared on: RT

[unable to retrieve full-text content]A military judge has accepted a US soldier’s guilty plea to massacre of 16 Afghan villagers, ruling that he would not face the death penalty.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

A group of nearly 800 health professionals has sent a letter to President Obama urging him to take action on the rampant overuse and misuse of antibiotics in livestock which has contributed to the rise in antibiotic-resistant “superbugs” and poses a massive threat to public health.

(Photo: Sparky/cc/flickr) “In our hospitals, and in our communities, antibiotics increasingly are failing to treat drug resistant superbugs,” stated David Wallinga, MD of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and Healthy Food Action. “The huge overuse of these antibiotics on our farms, in meat production, is an important–and unaddressed–contributor to the problem.”

Livestock are given these antibiotics to encourage faster growth and to compensate for the overcrowded, unhealthy conditions the animals are confined to in the industrial agriculture system.

Antibiotics are so used, they write, “over 70 percent of total reported sales of medically important antibiotics in the United States” are used not for human but for animal use.

The group quotes the Director General of the World Health Organization, who warned last year that “a post-antibiotic era means, in effect, an end to modern medicine as we know it.” Similarly, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said earlier this year that there is an alarming rise in antibiotic-resistant, deadly “nightmare bacteria,” a warning echoed by Britain’s top health official, who said that antibiotic resistant “superbugs” pose a “catastrophic threat.”

The health professionals write that the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) actions on this issue are “stalled,” and that the current guidelines that merely encourage the pharmaceutical industry to phase out the overuse of antibiotics in livestock are inadequate.

They are asking Obama “to ensure that FDA moves immediately to use its regulatory authority to withdraw approvals for the non-therapeutic use (i.e., use of antibiotics for purposes other than disease treatment and disease control) of all medically-important antibiotics from food animal production, thus preserving their use for treating sick people.”

Obama must also “improve reporting of agricultural antibiotic sales and distribution, which can help illustrate current use patterns, explain resistance trends, and monitor progress in assuring responsible animal antibiotic use,” they write.

____________________

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

(Photo: Justin Norman/cc/flickr)The U.S. Army Reserve is sending 125 troops from Puerto Rico to serve as additional guards at Guantánamo, the Associated Press reported on Wednesday.

These troops are currently in training in Texas for a month before heading to the prison, AP continues.

The reason these additional guards are needed, the Miami Herald reports, is due to the solitary confinement of nearly all the prisoners and the force-feeding of 39 prisoners on hunger strike.

“When you go to single cell, that takes more people,” the Herald reports Navy Capt. Robert Durand as saying.

________________________

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

Associated Press
nydailynews.com
June 5, 2013

Houston’s police chief told jurors on Tuesday that the 2010 videotaped beating of a black teen burglary suspect made him “sick to my stomach” and gave the police department a “black eye.”

Police Chief Charles McClelland Jr. testified that fired officer Drew Ryser – one of four officers who were indicted in the case – mistreated the teen during his arrest and failed to follow proper procedures.

Ryser, 32, is on trial this week on a misdemeanor charge of official oppression. He faces up to a year in jail if convicted.

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

washington.cbslocal.com
June 5, 2013

U.S. border agents should continue to be allowed to search a traveler’s laptop, cellphone or other electronic device and keep copies of any data on them based on no more than a hunch, according to an internal Homeland Security Department study. It contends limiting such searches would prevent the U.S. from detecting child pornographers or terrorists and expose the government to lawsuits.

The 23-page report, obtained by The Associated Press and the American Civil Liberties Union under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, provides a rare glimpse of the Obama administration’s thinking on the long-standing but controversial practice of border agents and immigration officers searching and in some cases holding for weeks or months the digital devices of anyone trying to enter the U.S.

Since his election, President Barack Obama has taken an expansive view of legal authorities in the name of national security, asserting that he can order the deaths of U.S. citizens abroad who are suspected of terrorism without involvement by courts, investigate reporters as criminals and – in this case – read and copy the contents of computers carried by U.S. travelers without a good reason to suspect wrongdoing.

Read more

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

Moscow police have detained over 200 undocumented foreigners who lived and worked in an underground city made to keep them off the radar of city and federal officials – with a cafe, movie theater, casino and chicken coop.

When police raided the ‘city’ hidden beneath a market in the
capital, they discovered a vast garment complex with 122 sewing
machines.

While the workers -181 Vietnamese and 88 Central Asians – were
sewing brand-name clothes around the clock, people above ground
had no clue what was happening just under their feet. From
outside, the underground tailor shops looked like a normal
transport garage.

There was also time for entertainment in the hidden city. Police
found one room designed to be a Turkish café, with an oven and
brazier. There was also a movie theater with 35 seats and a poker
room. 

The raid itself was carried out on May 31, but police only
recently released video footage of the underground complex.

Raids on migrants are frequent in Russia’s capital, as Moscow is
a destination for millions of people from the former Soviet Union
and beyond seeking better work than is available at home. 

According to some estimates, Moscow is home to 10 migrants
working without a registration for every one working legally. The
Federal Migration Service believes that as many as 3 million
undocumented migrants may currently reside in Russia.

In 2012, federal authorities deported 16,000 foreigners from the
city for working without permits to do so.

This article originally appeared on: RT

The Russian Foreign Ministry has renewed Moscowâ„¢s call for the participation of Iran in an international conference on Syria that is expected to be held in Geneva.

Å“This is a matter of principle because the composition of the conference should be balanced,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov told the ITAR-TASS news agency on Wednesday.

Bogdanov acknowledged Washingtonâ„¢s opposition to inviting Iran to the peace conference, but insisted that Iranâ„¢s absence in the Geneva-1 talks last summer “was a mistake and it should not be repeated.”

Å“Iranians and other influential external players should be invited to the conference,” the diplomat stressed.

Å“The point is that two Syrian sides should negotiate and come to agreement and they should know that they are not abandoned, that there are sympathizing and supporting forces on both sides,” he added.

The remarks followed a trilateral meeting between UN envoy to Syria Lakhdar Brahimi, Russian Deputy Foreign Ministers Gennady Gatilov and Bogdanov, and US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman in Geneva.

US Undersecretary General for Political Affairs Jeffrey Feltman represented the United Nations at the meeting held to pave the way for the widely anticipated international peace conference on Syria.

After the preparatory talks, Brahimi told reporters that the senior diplomats had failed to set a date for the Geneve-2 talks and that the conference could happen “hopefully in July.”

The next preparatory trilateral meeting will be held in Geneva on June 25 at the same level.

On May 28, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stressed the necessity of Iranâ„¢s presence in the upcoming Geneva talks. Å“The issue of Iran is key for us. Iran, without question, is one of the most important nations” he said.

Syria has been gripped by deadly unrest since March 2011, and many people, including large numbers of government forces, have been killed in the violence.

Damascus says the chaos is being orchestrated from outside the country, and there are reports that a very large number of the militants are foreign nationals.

The Syrian government says the West and its regional allies including Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey are supporting the militants.

MRS/MHB

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Eight Grad rockets have fallen on the Lebanese city of Baalbek in the northeast of the country.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

“Without merit.”

That’s what dozens of prominent scientists are saying about key parts of the US State Department’s supplemental environmental impact study (SEIS) of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

What’s more, the growing concern over the scientific integrity of the State Department analysis comes as accusations of impropriety by at least one of the companies hired to perform the review.

As Inside Climate News reports, the letter from dozens of scientists–with expertise in the fields of climate change, public health and ecology–is “one of the more striking criticisms of the EIS to emerge from the bulging docket of more than a million public comments, which are being posted online by the State Department while it considers whether to adjust its findings.”

The draft SEIS, which was released in March, is now under review for final approval as the State Department also pours over the enormous number of public comments submitted following the draft’s release. The climate justice group 350.org claims that they and other anti-pipeline groups were able to collect and submit over one million comments against the project.

“Despite the claims of the EIS that the environmental impacts are minor these assertions are not supported by the science,” the scientists wrote in their official submission to the State Department.

“The assertion that the tar sands will not significantly increase global warming is simply not supported by the facts,” they wrote.

And concluded, “Our scientific judgment is that the actual and potential environmental damage are sufficiently severe to reject the Keystone XL pipeline proposal in order to protect the climate human health and the multiple ecosystems this project threatens.”

Inside Climate News adds:

Many of the 29 signatories, like retired NASA scientist James Hansen and Penn State professor of meteorology Michael Mann, are already well known for their opposition to the pipeline. Fourteen of the signatories were among a group of 18 leading climate scientists who wrote President Obama in January urging him not to approve the pipeline.

Several have played prominent roles in the decades-long work of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, which has produced the overarching scientific consensus on the risks of climate change due to human pollution, mostly from burning fossil fuels.

This letter is significant not only because the group of luminaries is large and their arguments elaborate, but because they wrote specifically to discredit the justification for the pipeline laid out in the State Department’s March 1 draft environmental impact statement, or EIS. The controversial draft EIS said the pipeline wouldn’t have much effect on the environment or climate. It was widely seen as opening the door to the project, which would carry tar sands oil from Alberta to refineries on the Gulf Coast.

Environmental groups and concerned citizens have been highly critical of the draft and controversary was heightened when it emerged that one of the firms hired by the State Dept. to conduct the environmental review, Environmental Resources Management (ERM), had done previous work for TransCanada, the Canadian pipeline company hoping to build the Keystone XL.

As the Huffington Post reports, the Inspector General at the State Department is now reviewing those allegations of conflict-of-interest.

______________________________________________

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

At least ten people have been killed in an operation launched by the Malian army against Tuareg rebels in the northern part of the West African country.

During the Wednesday fighting against the rebels of the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), government troops succeeded to retake control of the village of Anefis, 113 kilometers (70 miles) south of the provincial capital Kidal.

“We counted 10 dead and have captured 28 prisoners,” said Malian army spokesman Souleymane Maiga. He added that two soldiers also sustained injuries during the clashes.

This was the first time that the Malian army engaged in war with the Tuareg rebels since the militant group invaded northern Mali last year, forcing the military to retreat from more than half of the country’s territory.

MNLA spokesman Mossa Ag Attaher, however, said that the rebels had lost just one fighter in the fighting and that they Å“have blown up several vehicles with soldiers inside” and Å“have taken dozens of Malians prisoner.”

MNLA vice-president Mahamadou Djeri Maiga also said the rebel group “never wanted to resolve the situation by war but, as this is so, we will defend ourselves until the end.”

Chaos broke out in the West African country after Malian President Amadou Toumani Toure was toppled in a military coup on March 22, 2012. The coup leaders said they mounted the coup in response to the government’s inability to contain the Tuareg rebellion in the north of the country, which had been going on for two months.

However, in the wake of the coup d’état, the Tuareg rebels took control of the entire northern desert region, but the Ansar Dine extremists then pushed them aside and took control of the region, which is larger than France or Texas.

France also launched a war in Mali on January 11, 2013 under the pretext of halting the advance of fighters in the country.

DB/MHB

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Infowars.com
June 5, 2013

Police chief Steve Lee and various protesters talk with Alex Jones and the Infowars team.

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This article was posted: Wednesday, June 5, 2013 at 3:27 pm

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

by Henri Barbusse

The following text was written by renowned French novelist Henri Barbusse in 1916 at the height of World War I. In 1914, at the age of 41, Barbusse enlisted in the French Army against Germany in World War I. He was wounded in the first year of the war.

The following text is an excerpt from his award winning Le Feu (translated by William Fitzwater Wray as Under Fire) in 1916. The novel depicts his life and the horrors of World War I.

While Barbusse does not provide a particularly optimistic perspective, his grim portrayal and understanding of the history of war, constitutes an important message to the anti-war movement. In many regard, it describes today’s world of profit driven militarization and global warfare.

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, June 5, 2013. Thanks to Rick Rozoff, Stop Nato, for having brought this excerpt to our attention

*   *   *

War will come again after this one. It will come again as long as it can be determined by people other than those who fight. The same causes will produce the same effects, and the living will have to give up all hope.

We cannot say out of what historical conjunctions the final tempests will issue, nor by what fancy names the interchangeable ideals imposed on men will be known in that moment. But the cause – that will perhaps everywhere be fear of the nations’ real freedom. What we do know is that the tempests will come.

Armaments will increase every year amid dizzy enthusiasm. The relentless torture of precision seizes me. We do three years of military training; our children will do five, they will do ten. We pay two thousand million francs a year in preparation for war; we shall pay twenty, we shall pay fifty thousand millions. All that we have will be taken; it will be robbery, insolvency, bankruptcy. War kills wealth as it does men; it goes away in ruins and smoke, and one cannot fabricate gold any more than soldiers. We no longer know how to count; we no longer know anything. A billion – a million millions – the word appears to me printed on the emptiness of things. It sprang yesterday out of war, and I shrink in dismay from the new, incomprehensible word.

There will be nothing else on the earth but preparation for war. All living forces will be absorbed by it; it will monopolize all discovery, all science, all imagination. Supremacy in the air alone, the regular levies for the control of space, will suffice to squander a nation’s fortune. For aerial navigation, at its birth in the middle of envious circles, has become a rich prize which everybody desires, a prey they have immeasurably torn in pieces.

Other expenditure will dry up before that on destruction does, and other longings as well, and all the reasons for living. Such will be the sense of humanity’s last age.

The battlefields were prepared long ago. They cover entire provinces with one black city, with a great metallic reservoir of factories, where iron floors and furnaces tremble, bordered by a land of forests whose trees are steel, and of wells where sleeps the sharp blackness of snares; a country navigated by frantic groups of railway trains in parallel formation, and heavy as attacking columns. At whatever point you may be on the plain, even if you turn away, even if you take flight, the bright tentacles of the rails diverge and shine, and cloudy sheaves of wires rise into the air. Upon that territory of execution there rises and falls and writhes machinery so complex that it has not even names, so vast that it has not even shape; for aloft – above the booming whirlwinds which are linked from east to west in the glow of molten metal whose flashes are great as those of lighthouses, or in the pallor of scattered electric constellations – hardly can one make out the artificial outline of a mountain range, clapped upon space.

This immense city of immense low buildings, rectangular and dark, is not a city. They are assaulting tanks, which a feeble internal gesture sets in motion, ready for the rolling rush of their gigantic knee-caps. These endless cannon, thrust into pits which search into the fiery entrails of the earth, and stand there upright, hardly leaning so much as Pisa’s tower; and these slanting tubes, long as factory chimneys, so long that perspective distorts their lines and sometimes splays them like the trumpets of Apocalypse – these are not cannon; they are machine-guns, fed by continuous ribbons of trains which scoop out in entire regions –and upon a country, if need be – mountains of profundity.

In war, which was once like the open country and is now wholly like towns – and even like one immense building – one hardly sees the men. On the round-ways and the casemates, the footbridges and the movable platforms, among the labyrinth of concrete caves, above the regiment echelonned downwards in the gulf and enormously upright – one sees a haggard herd of wan and stooping men, men black and trickling, men issuing from the peaty turf of night, men who came there to save their country. They earthed themselves up in some zone of the vertical gorges, and one sees them, in this more accursed corner than those where the hurricane reels.

One senses this human material, in the cavities of those smooth grottoes, like Dante’s guilty shades. Infernal glimmers disclose ranged lines of them, as long as roads, slender and trembling spaces of night, which daylight and even sunshine leave befouled with darkness and cyclopean dirt. Solid clouds overhang them and hatchet-charged hurricanes, and leaping flashes set fire every second to the sky’s iron-mines up above the damned whose pale faces change not under the ashes of death. They wait, intent on the solemnity and the significance of that vast and heavy booming against which they are for the moment imprisoned. They will be down forever around the spot where they are. Like others before them, they will be shrouded in perfect oblivion. Their cries will rise above the earth no more than their lips…

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

Ellen Grace Jones
Infowars.com
June 5, 2013

Do you Bilderberg? Or rather, do you know Bilderberg? Nope? Well given the dark cloak of secrecy shrouding the shadowy annual conflab don’t feel bad for not getting the memo. For the uninitiated, each year the world’s elite bankers, royalty, parliamentarians and CEOs self-imprison themselves in some of the most luxurious hotels in the world for a weekend of, well, who knows…?

This year — this Thursday in fact — the Bilderberg Group is descending upon a small corner of Watford and will be holing themselves up at the plush Grove hotel. Not letting the fact my invitation was clearly lost in the post get me down, I will be blogging each day from the site to deliver gossip fresh from the Grove gates.

Now whilst they’d have us believe Bilderberg is just a jolly holiday constituting a few golf rounds, some hardcore breeze-shooting and most certainly hotel suite one-upmanship, the water-tight security, zero accountability and nebulous agenda could suggest it’s a shade more serious than that. Indeed, local residents nearby the Grove will be forced into flashing their passports to police simply to access their homes. That’s some pretty sticky red tape for an apparently, “small, flexible, informal and off-the-record international forum.” A consortium so clandestine it makes Freemasonry look like Watford Lions Club.

So which technocrats can we expect at the mega-summit in 2013? Only one thing’s assured: hardened Bilderberg veterans with a side order of young whipper-snappers. Each year the old guard (Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, Queen Beatrix of Holland) woo iThe Huffington Postncreasingly more young blood into the warmth of the Bilderbosom. Recent years saw the appearance of Google chairman, Eric Schmidt, PayPal’s Peter Thiel, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and Facebook co-founder, Chris Hughes at the Bilderparty.

Reading like a who’s-who of international capitalism, the 150 strong delegate list is always revealed pre-conference for our delectation. Representing Team GB in 2013 is George Osbourne, Ed Balls, Peter Mandelson, Ken Clarke, Barclays chairman, Marcus Agius, BP CEO, Robert Dudley and John Micklethwait, editor of the Economist. Mandelson is a regular and and Clarke is on the steering committee.

It was revealed last week who will be footing the mammoth security bill for this off-the-record meeting. Why it’s us of course! Oh the irony of the uber-elite scratching around in the Great Unwashed’s public purse to secure their weekend sojourn. An uber-elite whose combined wealth hasn’t been witnessed in Watford since Elton John threw the last Watford FC Christmas bash. Probably.

As people have awakened to the hush-hush conference’s existence, thousands of concerned citizens and activists will be flying in from all corners of the world to peacefully express their concern at Bilderberg this Thursday. The meeting’s unaccountability only serves to fuel speculation that (contrary to the ‘innocent meeting’ spin) Bilderberg is potentially used to steer geo-political policy. It is this fundamental gripe which underpins the pro-transparency protestors’ ire.

For the first time ever, 2013 welcomes the Bilderberg Fringe, an event within the grounds of the Grove which will showcase international speakers, acoustic music and spoken word. The application for a license to hold a larger festival at Cassiobury Park was rejected by local authorities. The Fringe will also play host to the first ever press area at Bilderberg.

What implications does Bilderberg have for global governance? We will likely never know for sure. This weekend, however, promises to be a frenzy of activity with activists, media and photographers clamouring to play Spot The Delegate as they zip by in a cavalcade of armoured vehicles.

If you want live Twitter updates from the Bilderberg circus and beyond follow me @EllenGraceJones as well as @Bilderberg_2013. For more information.

Ellen Grace Jones’ post first appeared at The Huffington Post. 

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This article was posted: Wednesday, June 5, 2013 at 3:00 pm

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

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This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

“Without merit.”

That’s what dozens of prominent scientists are saying about key parts of the US State Department’s supplemental environmental impact study (SEIS) of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

What’s more, the growing concern over the scientific integrity of the State Department analysis comes as accusations of impropriety by at least one of the companies hired to perform the review.

As Inside Climate News reports, the letter from dozens of scientists–with expertise in the fields of climate change, public health and ecology–is “one of the more striking criticisms of the EIS to emerge from the bulging docket of more than a million public comments, which are being posted online by the State Department while it considers whether to adjust its findings.”

The draft SEIS, which was released in March, is now under review for final approval as the State Department also pours over the enormous number of public comments submitted following the draft’s release. The climate justice group 350.org claims that they and other anti-pipeline groups were able to collect and submit over one million comments against the project.

“Despite the claims of the EIS that the environmental impacts are minor these assertions are not supported by the science,” the scientists wrote in their official submission to the State Department.

“The assertion that the tar sands will not significantly increase global warming is simply not supported by the facts,” they wrote.

And concluded, “Our scientific judgment is that the actual and potential environmental damage are sufficiently severe to reject the Keystone XL pipeline proposal in order to protect the climate human health and the multiple ecosystems this project threatens.”

Inside Climate News adds:

Many of the 29 signatories, like retired NASA scientist James Hansen and Penn State professor of meteorology Michael Mann, are already well known for their opposition to the pipeline. Fourteen of the signatories were among a group of 18 leading climate scientists who wrote President Obama in January urging him not to approve the pipeline.

Several have played prominent roles in the decades-long work of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, which has produced the overarching scientific consensus on the risks of climate change due to human pollution, mostly from burning fossil fuels.

This letter is significant not only because the group of luminaries is large and their arguments elaborate, but because they wrote specifically to discredit the justification for the pipeline laid out in the State Department’s March 1 draft environmental impact statement, or EIS. The controversial draft EIS said the pipeline wouldn’t have much effect on the environment or climate. It was widely seen as opening the door to the project, which would carry tar sands oil from Alberta to refineries on the Gulf Coast.

Environmental groups and concerned citizens have been highly critical of the draft and controversary was heightened when it emerged that one of the firms hired by the State Dept. to conduct the environmental review, Environmental Resources Management (ERM), had done previous work for TransCanada, the Canadian pipeline company hoping to build the Keystone XL.

As the Huffington Post reports, the Inspector General at the State Department is now reviewing those allegations of conflict-of-interest.

______________________________________________

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

A report on the U.S. job market from Automatic Data Processing (ADP) on Wednesday morning surprised economists once again by coming in substantially below their expectations. The 135,000 new private-sector jobs created in May were way below the 170,000 estimated by economists polled by Dow Jones Newswires. Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Analytics, which produces the report for ADP, tried to put a positive spin on the disappointment:

The job market continues to expand but growth has slowed since the first of the year.

The softer job market this spring is largely due to significant fiscal drag from [January’s payroll and income] tax increases and [from] government spending cuts.

A closer look behind the headlines reveals that all of the new jobs were in the service sector while manufacturing actually declined. And only four out of 10 of those jobs came from small businesses with fewer than 50 employees. Medium and large employers made up the rest.

On Monday the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) noted that economic activity in the manufacturing sector contracted for the first time since last November, with key elements of its various internal indexes declining significantly. Its primary indicator, the PMI, dropped by nearly two points, to 49 (50 is neutral), while new orders fell even further, from 52.3 to 48.8. Its production index lost even more ground from April, dropping to 48.6 from 53.5. Its backlog of orders index slowed by five points, contracting from 53 to 48, indicating further slowing in the manufacturing sector in the months to come. ISM quoted typical comments from its customers, including this from a maker of fabricated metal products, “General economy seems sluggish and pensive,” while a supplier of heavy machinery said the “downturn in European and Chinese markets is having a negative effect on our business.”

The Baltic Dry Index provides of measure of shipping activity worldwide by comparing demand for cargo ships with the available supply and is considered to be a leading economic indicator because it predicts future economic activity. From a high of 940 in mid-March, the BDI has declined sharply since then to just over 800.

Steve Hanke, a Cato scholar, isn’t surprised by any of this. It’s the unintended consequences of following blindly the Keynesian “remedies” for a soft economy by reducing interest rates through expanding the money supply. This often causes entrepreneurs to make investments that they otherwise wouldn’t, simply because the cost of capital is so cheap. It’s the same belief that caused many homeowners to buy homes they couldn’t afford just simply because terms were so liberal and interest rates were so low.

But this time it isn’t working. Entrepreneurs have gotten burned before, and many have learned their lesson. And, Hanke says, banks aren’t willing to lend, even if an entrepreneur decides to try to borrow. Says Hanke:

As it turns out, the Fed’s “stimulus” policies are actually exacerbating the credit crunch. Since credit is a source of working capital for businesses, a credit crunch acts like a supply constraint on the economy. This has been the case particularly for smaller firms in the U.S. economy.

Hanke explains that when a borrower seeks funds for his enterprise, his banker must assess the risk his bank is willing to assume and whether or not he can sell part of the risk through the “interbank market.” But that market isn’t functioning now, and so rather than risk the bank’s capital, he prefers to keep it safe, usually at the Federal Reserve.

The impact of this Keynesian attempt to jump-start the economy by trying to fool investors into taking risks they otherwise wouldn’t is falling directly on the primary job creators in the economy: small businesses. Hanke points out:

These small businesses make up a big chunk of the U.S. economy – 49.2% of private sector employment and 46% of private sector GDP.

The untold story is that the zero-interest-rate trap has left [small and medium-sized companies] in a financial straitjacket.

The reports from the ADP and the ISM, along with the Baltic Dry Index, merely measure the failure of the Fed’s attempt to stimulate, and are one more indication of how the private market has become non-functional in the process. Let’s not look for jobs to come from small businesses or for growth in the economy until the Fed stops its Keynesian “remedies.”

A graduate of Cornell University and a former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at www.LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
.

This article originally appeared on: The New American

The survey by Australian global-warming activist John Cook, released recently with a massive media sendoff, is rapidly melting, as scientists and statisticians subject it to analysis. And now it’s leaking out that Cook’s e-mails show he was scheming on this fraudulent survey to promote a leftist political agenda for well over a year. Cook made a big media splash in May with the publication of a study by him and several co-authors claiming to prove that climate scientists overwhelmingly support the theory that human activity is warming the planet to dangerous levels. Cook’s claims received their biggest boost on May 16, when President Barack Obama tweeted: “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree:#climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.” 

The mainstream media and climate-alarmist blogosphere uncritically accepted the Cook study and trumpeted the consensus claims as gospel. We reported on May 21 (“Global Warming ‘Consensus’: Cooking the Books”) on the critiques of the Cook study by experts who show that Cook cooked the data. Out of the nearly 12,000 scientific papers Cook’s team evaluated, only 65 endorsed Cook’s alarmist position. That’s less than one percent, not 97 percent. Moreover, as we reported, the Cook study was flawed from the beginning, using selection parameters designed to weight the outcome in favor of the alarmist position.

In a May 22 follow-up article (“Climate ‘Consensus’ Con Game: Desperate Effort Before Release of UN Report”) The New American reported on additional problems with the Cook study and cited a large and growing list of eminent climate scientists – including Nobel Prize recipients and scientists who served on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – who challenge the claim that there is any “scientific consensus” on climate change, or that “the science is settled” in favor of the Al Gore alarmist position.

Oops! Guess We Forgot Those

Now comes another devastating analysis of Cook’s cooked data from a big name in the climate science community: Professor Richard S. J. Tol. Dr. Tol is a professor of the economics of climate change at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and a professor of economics at the University of Sussex, England. He has also served on the UN’s IPCC.

Dr. Tol has statistically deconstructed the 97 percent consensus myth of Cook et al.

Professor Tol utilizes four graphs to demonstrate the biased methods utilized by the Cook team to skew the results of their “research.” One of the major “errors” of the study (whether intentional or the result of incompetence) was the use of the term “global climate change” to search the scientific database for papers that were included in the 12,000 tabulated by Cook and his co-authors.

In his first graph, Dr. Tol points out that by including “global” before “climate change,” Cook et al “dropped 75% of papers and changed disciplinary distribution.”

In his second graph, Dr. Tol demonstrates that by including “global” before “climate change,” the supposedly authoritative Cook study conveniently “dropped many papers by eminent climate researchers.” And Tol lists around 50 of those researchers who were “dropped.” These, of course, represent only a small sampling of the thousands of scientists who have expressed various levels of disagreement with the hysterical climate pronouncements of the IPCC, Al Gore, and John Cook.

Tol’s third graph shows that by including “global” before “climate change” the Cook team “dropped 33 of the 50 most cited papers.”

In his fourth graph, Dr. Tol shows that the Cook team also skewed the results of their findings by the database they chose to draw papers from, using the Web of Science (WoS) rather than SciVerse Scopus. “Choosing exclusive WoS over inclusive Scopus, Cook et al. dropped 35% of papers and changed disciplinary distribution,” Tol observes.

Another E-mail Scandal Reveals Cook’s “97 Percent” Scam

Populartechnology.net has posted e-mails from John Cook’s Skeptical Science website concerning what Cook calls “The Consensus Project” or TCP. The e-mails, from early 2012, reveal the huge promotional campaign Cook was rolling out to publicize the consensus study – before he had even done the study. It is also evident from the e-mails that Cook knew he was cooking the data to reach a preconceived conclusion. In his “Introduction to TCP” e-mail of January 19, 2012, Cook explains to team members:

It’s essential that the public understands that there’s a scientific consensus on AGW [anthropogenic (man-made) global warming]. So Jim Powell, Dana and I have been working on something over the last few months that we hope will have a game changing impact on the public perception of consensus. Basically, we hope to establish that not only is there a consensus, there is a strengthening consensus. Deniers like to portray the myth that the consensus is crumbling, that the tide is turning.

Right from the get-go, it is apparent that Cook is planning to cook up a “game changing” study that will prove the “scientific consensus” he wants the public to accept. Typical of Cook and activists of his ilk is their use of “deniers” when referring to their opposition, an attempt to smear scientists who hold different opinions by equating them with Nazi holocaust deniers. It is hardly the mark of professional civility and collegiality one expects from true scientists.

Cook’s “Introduction” admits that “TCP is basically an update and expansion of Naomi Oreskes’ survey of the peer-reviewed literature with deeper analysis.” That is an interesting admission, since the 2004 Oreskes study – which was the original source for the 97 percent claim – was exposed for the same methodological flaws. Dr. Benny Peiser, a social science professor at John Moores University and visiting fellow at the University of Buckingham, eviscerated the Oreskes study, pointing out that Oreskes had falsified the so-called consensus by her faulty selection criteria in choosing papers to include in her survey. (See here and here.)

In his “Introduction to TCP,” Cook acknowledges that probably only half of the 12,000 papers they’ve selected will either explicitly or implicitly endorse AGW alarmism. But over time, he expects online volunteers to “process” many of the 6,000 non-endorsement papers, “converting” them into endorsements! Here’s Cook: 

I anticipate there will be around 6000 “neutral” papers. So what I was thinking of doing next was a public crowd sourcing project where the public are given the list of neutral papers and links to the full paper – if they find evidence of an endorsement, they submit it to SkS (Skeptical Science)…. Thus over time, we would gradually process the 6000 neutral papers, converting many of them to endorsement papers – and make regular announcements like “hey the consensus just went from 99.75% to 99.8%, here are the latest papers with quotes.”

Cook went on to sketch out an entire promotional campaign utilizing press releases, major media programs, booklets, Kindle/iBooks, blogs, etc. “We beat the consensus drum often and regularly and make SkS the home of the perceived strengthening consensus,” Cook advised.

At least one of the members of his team seems to have recognized that Cook had the emphasis all backwards. Ari Jokimäki responded: 

I have to say that I find this planning of huge marketing strategies somewhat strange when we don’t even have our results in and the research subject is not that revolutionary either (just summarizing existing research). 

“It’s Official; We’re All a Bunch of Leftists” – John Cook

The fanatical AGW commitment of Cook and his coauthors appears to be driven by their leftist ideological devotion. Populartechnology.net provides downloads from the Skeptical Science forum thread entitled, “Political Compass,” in which frequent Skeptical Science commentators and moderators took a political quiz revealing (much to their mock surprise) they all share the same left-wing political ideology. “I’m a damn dirty commie,” said Dana Nuccitelli, one of Cook’s coauthors, after seeing his quiz results. 

Here are comments from some of the other SkS team members: 

“OMG, I’m a closet Leftist!”  exclaimed Daniel Bailey.

“It seems I am on par with Nelson Mandela,” remarked “perseus.”

“I’m still something of leftie, despite all those years in business,” said Andy S.

“The Criticisms of the Skeptics are right – SkSers are obviously all pinko/liberals,” admitted Glenn Tamblyn.

“It’s official, we’re all a bunch of leftists,” said John Cook. 

“Consensus Drums” Aimed at Aiding UN Agenda

However, the fact that the claims of the Cook/Skeptical Science survey have been exploded as bogus and the fact that the Cook/Skeptical Science team have been exposed as self-described “commies,” “leftists,” and “pinko/liberals” haven’t stopped the MSM commentators from citing their fraudulent “research” as gospel. Incredibly, Prof. Eric Alterman of the left-wing Nation magazine cited the Cook survey in a June 4 posting on the left-wing ThinkProgress.org (“Think Again: Blame The News For The Public’s Ignorance About The Climate”) to condemn the mainstream media for not being sufficiently alarmist when in comes to global warming!

Yes, we’ve only been marinating 24/7 for two decades in increasingly hysterical media predictions and pronouncements about the coming AGW apocalypse – and the American public still hasn’t bought the false “consensus.” However, with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) now engaged in another conference in Bonn, Germany, and the UN’s IPCC set to release a new series of reports, we can expect that the Cooked-up consensus results will be cited endlessly. Or, as Cook himself put it: “We beat the consensus drum often and regularly.” 

Related articles:

German Firms Flee to U.S. to Avoid Staggering “Green” Energy Costs

Global Warming “Consensus”: Cooking the Books

Climate “Consensus” Con Game: Desperate Effort Before Release of UN Report

Climate-change Computer Models Fail Again – and Again, and Again

Study Shows Global Warming Data Skewed by Bad Monitoring

New Report: Man-made Global Warming Is a Farce (“Extreme Weather” 2012)

Blaming Climate Change for Hurricane Sandy

This article originally appeared on: The New American

At least eight Taliban militants have been killed and several others severely injured when their explosive devices went off prematurely in the troubled southern Afghanistan, the Interior Ministry says.

The Afghan Interior Ministry said in a statement that the deadly blast took place in the house of a Taliban local commander, Mullah Sababullah, in southern province of Zabul on Wednesday.

“A group of eight suicide bombers linked to the Taliban outfit were killed by the accidental blast of their own explosive material while they were organizing terrorist attacks in Now Bahar district of Zabul province today,” the statement read.

Sources say the death toll is expected to rise as some of the injured are said to be in critical condition.

The Taliban recently announced the start of their annual “spring offensive” across Afghanistan and vowed to increase their attacks on US-led troops stationed in the country as well as Afghan forces.

The US-led war in Afghanistan removed the Taliban from power, but insecurity continues to rise across Afghanistan, despite the presence of about many US-led troops there.

The United States and its allies invaded Afghanistan in 2001 as part of so-called war on terror. The offensive removed the Taliban from power, but insecurity remains across the country.

The US-led war in Afghanistan, which has caused record-high civilian and military casualties, has become the longest military conflict in the American history.

JR/AS

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

The Iranian ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) says the Iranian nation is determined to take advantage of peaceful nuclear energy despite the wave of political pressures and US-engineered sanctions.

Å“The Great nation of Iran will not permit anybody to deprive its present and future generation of inalienable right to peaceful nuclear energy, and therefore I can tell you that we will not yield to pressure, sanctions, threats of attack,” Ambassador Ali Asghar Soltanieh said at a press conference in Vienna on Wednesday.

Soltanieh stated that a recent report by the IAEA on the Islamic Republicâ„¢s nuclear energy program is not acceptable as it is meant to create Å“political tension.”

He went on to say that the Israeli and US spy agencies constantly attempt to influence the IAEA reports on Iranâ„¢s nuclear energy program.

Å“They are continuously giving the false information and allegations prepared by the CIA or the Mossad to the agency and keep the agency busy,” the Iranian envoy said.

Soltanieh added that Iran has always been fully committed to protocols that ban the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Å“Our nuclear policy is very clear. The nuclear weapon does not have any place in our nuclear doctrine,” he said.

Weâ„¢ll continue our nuclear activities, including enrichment, without any interruption under the full scope safeguards [agreement] of the IAEA,” the Iranian diplomat said.

The United States, Israel, and some of their allies have repeatedly accused Iran of pursuing non-civilian objectives in its nuclear energy program and have used the unfounded accusation as a pretext to impose illegal sanctions on the Islamic Republic.

Iran rejects the allegations, arguing that as a committed signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and a member of the IAEA, it has the right to use nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.

In addition, the IAEA has conducted numerous inspections of Iranâ„¢s nuclear facilities but has never found any evidence showing that Iranâ„¢s civilian nuclear program has been diverted to nuclear weapons production.

MKA/MHB

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

The American ambassador to the United Nations who came under attack for misrepresenting last year’s terrorist attack in Benghazi has been appointed to be the White House’s new national security advisor.

President Barack Obama confirmed Wednesday that Susan Rice will
walk away from her position as the United States envoy to the UN
in order to take on a new role within his administration.

The president made the remarks Wednesday afternoon from the Rose
Garden outside of the White House just hours after Tom Donilon,
Obama’s security advisor since October 2010, tendered his
resignation.

Rice was nominated by Obama to be the American ambassador to the
UN only weeks after he was elected to office in late 2008 and
previously served as assistant secretary of state for African
Affairs under President Bill Clinton.

Obama called the role of national security advisor “a
herculean task” and “one of the most critical” in the
government during Wednesday’s remarks, adding that Rice would be
best fit for the role because she “exemplifies the finest
tradition of American diplomacy and leadership.”

The appointment is expected to generate more than just a little
controversy, however, particularly in light of the comments Rice
made last year about the Benghazi incident that made her a
lightning rod for Republican criticism.

In the wake of the September 11, 2012 assault on the US consulate
in Benghazi, Libya, Rice went on several American talk shows and
described the event as a spontaneous response sparked by an
anti-Islamic video produced in California. Rice blamed the
storming of the building on a violent demonstration that erupted
outside of the consulate after a similar one broke out in Egypt,
but intelligence that later went public proved her assessment to
be wrong. Four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens,
were killed in the assault.

More than one month after Rice first remarked publicly about the
Benghazi tragedy, she blamed talking points handed to her from
American intelligence officials for gaffe. She later admitted
that a spontaneous protest never occurred in Benghazi, and today
US officials attribute the attack to terrorists aligned with
al-Qaeda. Even as criticism grew, however, Rice was rumored in
late 2012 to replace outgoing secretary of state Hillary Clinton,
only for reports to trigger a major backlash from Republicans
livid about the Benghazi remarks. Nearly 100 lawmakers from the
GOP opposed the possibility of Rice replacing Sec. Clinton,
sparking the UN rep to withdraw her name from the pool of
potential candidates in December. Obama would later name Sen.
John Kerry (D-Massachusetts) as his new secretary of state.

During Wednesday’s press conference from the Rose Garden, Obama
said he was personally grateful for Donilon’s role as security
advisor, and said, “I’m proud that this work will be carried
on by another exemplary public servant.”

“Susan understands that there is no substitute for American
leadership,” Obama said, calling her “passionate,”
“pragmatic” and “a fierce champion for justice and
human dignity” who “puts her country first.”

As the UN ambassador, Obama said Rice “reinvigorated American
diplomatic efforts” and helped put tough sanctions in place
against Iran and North Korea.

Rice said she was “deeply honored and humbled” to be
appointed by the president, but said “we have vital
opportunities to seizes and ongoing challenges to confront.”

“We have much more to accomplish on behalf of the American
people, and I look forward to continuing to serve on your
national security team to keep our nation strong and safe,”
she said.

Perhaps first on the agenda for Rice, though, will be battling
the criticism that is already been delivered courtesy of her GOP
foes. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) accused Rice of
“misleading” the public regarding the Benghazi attack and
questioned why the White House appointed her to such an important
role in the wake of the actions that are still used by members of
the Republican Party to target the Obama administration.

“How are they going to have the authority for people to
believe what they’re saying, when he’s promoting someone who
directly and deliberately misled the public over Benghazi?”
Paul asked Fox.

“I can’t imagine that we would be keeping Ambassador Rice in
any significant position, much less promoting her to an important
position,” he said

“Obviously I disagree [with Obama’s] appointment of Susan Rice
as Nat’l Security Adviser, but I’ll make every effort to work
[with] her on [important] issues,” Sen. John McCain
(R-Arizona) wrote on Twitter.

Last month, Vice President Joe Biden praised Rice, adding that
even after Benghazi she had “the absolute, total, complete
confidence of the president.”

Samantha Power, a former special assistant to the president and
senior director for multilateral affairs and human rights at the
National Security Council, has been asked to fill Rice’s shoes at
the UN headquarters in New York.

This article originally appeared on: RT

“What we know for sure the [Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act] will do is that it will lower the cost of buying non-group health insurance,” ObamaCare architect Jon Gruber told the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein in 2009.

But as insurance companies release their proposed rates for 2014 – the year that most of ObamaCare actually goes into effect – it is becoming increasingly clear that the law is, in fact, causing individual insurance rates to skyrocket. Maryland’s largest insurer of individuals, for instance, has proposed a 25-percent rate hike for next year. And new insurer proposals from California, despite the state’s best efforts to portray them otherwise, show that individual rates in the Golden State are likely to experience even greater increases.

On May 23, Covered California, the state’s insurance exchange, issued a press release announcing that in 2014, 13 health plans will be available to individuals via the exchange. Then, through some sleight-of-hand, the exchange went on to claim that the premiums for these plans would be either slightly higher or significantly lower than comparable existing plans.

“It is difficult to make a direct comparison of these rates to existing premiums in the commercial individual market because in 2014, there will be new standard benefit designs under the Affordable Care Act, and the actual change in an individual’s premium will depend on the person’s current insurance coverage,” Covered California wrote.

In other words, because ObamaCare piles on so many mandates, individual plans in 2014 will be significantly different from those in 2013, complicating the matter of comparing the plans’ premiums.

The exchange came up with a seemingly ingenious but actually disingenuous way around this problem:

Covered California believes that a valuable frame of reference for its premiums, is comparing them to the small employer market in California. Both the small employer market and Covered California are competitive markets, and offer guaranteed issue – you cannot be denied for pre-existing condition[s].

The rates submitted to Covered California for the 2014 individual market ranged from two percent above to 29 percent below the 2013 average premium for small employer plans in California’s most populous regions….

“This is a home run for consumers in every region of California,” said Peter V. Lee, Executive Director of Covered California. “Our active negotiating will not only benefit potential enrollees to Covered California, but will benefit all Californians by making health care affordable.”

The problem with this approach is that it compares this year’s small-business rates to next year’s individual rates and finds little difference between the two (or even a sizeable year-over-year decrease). That is like claiming that a small wheat crop this year will not cause bread prices to rise next year because next year’s bread price will resemble this year’s already higher milk price.

“Covered California is creating for itself a very favorable and already higher baseline from which to compare next year’s individual health insurance premiums,” observed Bloomberg View columnist Lanhee Chen. “That’s how they’re able to create the appearance that Obamacare’s reforms will lower individual premiums.”

“To put it simply: Covered California is trying to make consumers think they’re getting more for less when, in fact, they’re just getting the same while paying more.”

How much more? Avik Roy of Forbes ran the numbers for a 25-year-old male nonsmoker, the sort of person likely to obtain the lowest rates on the individual market. He found that the current “median cost of the five cheapest plans was only $92” per month, while under ObamaCare, the two least expensive plans for that same individual will cost, on average, $184 a month and $205 a month. “In other words,” he wrote, “for the typical 25-year-old male non-smoking Californian, Obamacare will drive premiums up by between 100 and 123 percent.”

Worse still, those over 30 cannot participate in the very cheapest plan at all under ObamaCare. Thus, Roy calculated, for a 40-year-old male nonsmoker, his least expensive coverage option will rise from an average of $121 a month to an average of $261 a month – a 116-percent increase.

Overall, Roy found that individual premiums in California are likely to grow by anywhere from 64 percent to 146 percent, depending on the individual’s age, health, location, and current level of coverage.

Chen did his own comparison using an actual individual health plan that very much resembles what will be available next year. The “hypothetical male living in San Francisco and making more than $46,000 a year” can today “buy a PPO plan from a major insurer with a $5,000 deductible, 30 percent coinsurance, a $10 co-pay for generic prescription drugs, and a $7,000 out-of-pocket maximum for $177 a month,” he wrote.

Meanwhile, the cheapest plan on the exchange offering “nearly the same benefits, including a slightly lower out-of-pocket maximum of $6,350, will cost him between $245 and $270 a month,” Chen found. “That’s anywhere from 38 percent to 53 percent more than he’ll have to pay this year for comparable coverage! Sounds a lot different than the possible 29 percent ‘decrease’ touted by Covered California in their faulty comparison.”

In short, any fair comparison of pre- and post-ObamaCare individual rates in California shows that they will be shooting up significantly next year. And as the House Energy and Commerce Committee has found more than once, they will probably do the same thing in most other states.

Even the Obama administration has given up claiming that the healthcare law will bring down insurance premiums. “After extensive research,” the New York Times reported, “the administration said it was unwise to tell consumers that they could get ‘health insurance that fits your budget.’ That message, it said, is ‘seen as highly motivational, but not as believable.’”

This has left ObamaCare supporters to try a new tack: arguing that while insurance rates may increase significantly, the shock will be minimal for low-income individuals because they will get subsidies to buy insurance. While that is true, as Roy points out, those not eligible for subsidies will “face a double-whammy: higher taxes to pay for those subsidies, and higher indvidual-market [sic] insurance costs for [themselves].”

In addition, those who are not subsidized will have an even more powerful incentive not to buy coverage considering that the penalty for not having insurance will be far lower than the cost of insurance. Much of ObamaCare’s success depends on having a large pool of young and healthy individuals buying insurance to offset insurers’ costs of covering all the old and unhealthy people they now must accept at the same rates. If the young and healthy decide to forego coverage, insurers will be stuck paying vastly more in benefits than they receive in premiums – a plainly untenable situation.

The ObamaCare house of cards is already teetering on the brink of disaster. The only question remaining is how elected officials will respond when it finally comes crashing down. Will they repeal it? Or will they try to “fix” it with more interventions, culminating in a complete federal takeover of the healthcare system – and even greater disaster?

This article originally appeared on: The New American

There are plenty of obvious reasons to oppose S. 744, the latest “comprehensive immigration reform” or amnesty bill. These reasons include the loss of U.S. sovereignty as borders are gradually erased through planned non-enforcement, the projected expenditure of trillions of taxpayer dollars over the next 25 years for an expansion of entitlement and welfare programs to accommodate illegals beyond current taxpayer-provided “free” medical care and education, and lower wages and higher unemployment for U.S. workers in an increasingly tight job market resulting from an unprecedented influx of millions of illegal immigrants. But what about the disturbing tendency of S. 744 to protect dangerous illegal immigrants, with the predictable consequence of more and more victims of criminal illegal immigrants?

A daughter of a legal immigrant, Maria Espinoza is the founder and director of The Remembrance Project, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, “created in 2009 to honor and remember Americans who have been killed by illegal aliens.” According to her most recent press release, S. 744 “is a disaster in every possible respect”:

As ICE officers and USCIS officers have warned us, this bill will legalize dangerous aliens who have been in and out of prison, who have been previously deported, who have lied to authorities, who have proven they care nothing about our laws, and who have failed to appear in court. This bill also makes it impossible to deport virtually anybody in the future – guaranteeing criminals will take advantage of S. 744 to remain in the country and never leave. It will put innocent civilians in more danger, and it will allow criminal gangs to continue preying upon the innocent.

Our federal legislators seem to have deliberately ignored the dangerous implications of the deliberate relaxation of current law enforcement in S. 744, especially for the victims of criminal illegals. According to Espinoza,

Their bill also completely ignores our interior enforcement needs. It allows for the dangerous sanctuary city policies to continue to operate, it provides no resources for our ICE officers and border patrol agents; and it, in fact, handcuffs our ICE officers from doing their jobs. Any responsible immigration bill would empower ICE officers and all law enforcement – and assist them in protecting our families.

Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) agrees that this bill effectively federalizes law enforcement in favor of criminal illegal immigrants:

Not only does the Gang of Eight’s bill allow the Secretary of Homeland Security to decide for herself whether weak, undefined enforcement measures (“[border security] triggers”) are met, but it grants her unprecedented discretion in determining whether an alien is allowed to enter the country, whether future illegal aliens can be removed from the country, and who is eligible for amnesty in the bill. The net effect of these waivers and discretionary authority is to permanently hamstring and undermine law enforcement and create a new, endless bureaucracy surrounding immigration proceedings. These provisions, carefully crafted by special interest immigration attorneys, serve only one purpose: to weaken current law and make future enforcement impossible.

For instance, this bill would allow the Secretary to overlook convictions for crimes related to gang activity, child abuse, domestic violence, and drunk driving in determining whether an individual is eligible for admission to the country if the person’s admission serves “humanitarian purposes,” “ensure[s] family unity,” or is in the “public interest.” These standards are so broad as to render most current legal restrictions meaningless.

After identifying a series of S. 744 provisions that effectively gut current laws protecting us from dangerous illegal aliens, Senator Sessions summarizes his assessment of the bill with an eye-opening hypothetical example of the kind of miscarriage of justice that would be possible under S. 744:

Rather than enhance border security and ensure future enforcement of the law, S. 744 rewards illegal aliens with criminal records, and creates an incentive for people to illegally enter the United States in the future. In essence, if S. 744 passes as currently drafted, the following scenario is not at all unlikely: An individual who has previously been convicted of a crime and subsequently removed from the United States illegally crosses the border at one of the six sectors not addressed by S. 744. The United States Border Patrol apprehends that individual, and rather than simply expediently removing him from the United States, places that individual into removal proceedings before an Immigration Judge. The Immigration Judge appoints an attorney for the alien at taxpayer expense. The attorney assists the alien in demonstrating that any future removal would cause mere “hardship” to a qualifying relative. The Immigration Judge terminates the case and permits the individual to stay in the United States – presumably indefinitely.

Senator Sessions concludes, “Quite opposite from creating the ‘toughest’ enforcement in history as the proposal’s sponsors promised, this legislation would devastate enforcement and officer morale and disastrously undermine the rule of law for years to come.”

In her press release, Espinoza accuses the authors of S. 744 of working “hand-in-hand with rich businessmen and amnesty advocates while never once considering the rights of the victims of illegal alien violence. Their decisions to provide amnesty to criminal aliens – including gang members – is a slap in the face to every single victim of illegal alien violence.” She concludes, “Congress needs to shred this bill and go back to the drawing board with American families as their priority. They need to listen to the victims of illegal alien violence. If they don’t, there will continue to be thousands more victims as a result of this bill.”

This article originally appeared on: The New American

Susan Rice and Samantha Power

In a foreign policy shakeup at the White House today, President Obama is set to name UN Ambassador Susan Rice as his new National Security Advisor. Rice will replace Tom Donilon, who is resigning. Rice was reportedly going to be nominated Secretary of State but withdrew when Senate Republicans refused to confirm her because of her role in the Benghazi events of last year.

Obama will name Samantha Power to replace Rice as the US Ambassador to the United Nations.

* * *

“The terrorism of the suicide bomber and the terrorism of aerial bombardment are indeed morally equivalent. To say otherwise (as either side might) is to give one moral superiority over the other, and thus serve to perpetuate the horrors of our time.”
– Howard ZinnHere are some progressive voices who have written about both Rice and Power in the past:

This past April, Chris Hedges wrote a piece titled “The Hijacking of Human Rights”:

Obama’s “…new wave of “humanitarian interventionists,” such as Samantha Power, Michael Ignatieff and Susan Rice, who naively see in the U.S. military a vehicle to create a better world. They know little of the reality of war or the actual inner workings of empire. They harbor a childish belief in the innate goodness and ultimate beneficence of American power. The deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents, the horrendous suffering and violent terror inflicted in the name of their utopian goals in Iraq and Afghanistan, barely register on their moral calculus. This makes them at once oblivious and dangerous. “Innocence is a kind of insanity,” Graham Greene wrote in his novel “The Quiet American,” and those who destroy to build are “impregnably armored by … good intentions and … ignorance.”

Glenn Greenwald wrote last December 12th:

…What is remarkable is how so many Democrats are devoting so much energy to defending a possible Susan Rice nomination as Secretary of State without even pretending to care about her record and her beliefs. It’s not even part of the discussion. And now that some writers have begun examining that record, it’s not hard to see the reason for this omission.

Last week, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern extensively documented Rice’s long record of cheering for US wars, including being an outspoken and aggressive advocate of the attack on Iraq, support that persisted for many years. In a New York Times Op-Ed yesterday, Eritrean-American journalist Salem Solomon condemned Rice’s fondness for tyrants in Africa, while Black Agenda Report’s Glen Ford argued – with ample documentation – that her supporters “care not a whit for Africa, whose rape and depopulation has been the focus of Rice’s incredibly destructive career.” A New York Times news article from Monday separately suggests that Rice’s close ties to the ruling regime in Rwanda – that government “was her client when she worked at Intellibridge, a strategic analysis firm in Washington” – has led Washington to tacitly endorse its support for brutal rebels in the Congo.

Meanwhile, so-called “pro-Israel” groups have vocally supported her possible nomination due to her steadfast defense of Israel at the UN, hailing her as “an ardent defender of major Israeli positions in an unfriendly forum.” It was recently discovered that Rice “holds significant investments in more than a dozen Canadian oil companies and banks that would stand to benefit from expansion of the North American tar sands industry and construction of the proposed $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline,” and that “about a third of Rice’s personal net worth is tied up in oil producers, pipeline operators, and related energy industries north of the 49th parallel — including companies with poor environmental and safety records on both U.S. and Canadian soil.”

This is who progressives are devoting their energy to defending and the record they are attempting to further empower as Secretary of State. She’s essentially the classic pro-war, imperial technocrat who has advanced within the Foreign Policy Community by embracing and justifying its destructive orthodoxies.

Margaret Kimberly of Black Agenda Report wrote on December 13, 2012:

…The yearning to see a black face in one of the highest and most rarified places is a very deep one and not to be easily dismissed, but it is crucial to note that Rice is no different from John McCain in her beliefs of how the United States should conduct itself in the world. The facts against Rice and her predecessors are obscured by a corporate media which hides all the atrocities committed by the United States government, making the Rice story appear like nothing more than that of a high achieving black woman being slandered by evil racists.

The case against Rice or whomever is nominated by the president should be a case made against United States foreign policy and all of the people who now or ever were in charge of carrying it out. The presidents, secretaries of state, United Nations ambassadors, national security advisers and their ilk are held up as paragons of virtue, intelligence and moral rectitude. They emerge from elite institutions and are held up as the “best and the brightest” the country has to offer.

Ray McGovern wrote on December 4th, 2012:

…Rice’s biggest disqualification is the fact that she has shown little willingness to challenge the frequently wrongheaded conventional wisdom of Official Washington, including on the critical question of invading Iraq in 2003. At that pivotal moment, Rice essentially went with the flow, rather than standing up for the principles of international law or exposing the pro-war deceptions.

In fall 2002, as President George W. Bush and his administration were pounding the drums for war, Rice wasn’t exactly a profile in courage. A senior fellow at the centrist Brookings Institution, she echoed the neoconservative demands for “regime change” in Iraq and doubted the “need [for] a further [U.N. Security] Council resolution before we can enforce this and previous resolutions” on Iraq, according a compilation of her Iraq War comments compiled by the Institute for Public Accuracy.

In an NPR interview on Dec. 20, 2002, Rice joined the bellicose chorus, declaring: “It’s clear that Iraq poses a major threat. It’s clear that its weapons of mass destruction need to be dealt with forcefully, and that’s the path we’re on. I think the question becomes whether we can keep the diplomatic balls in the air and not drop any, even as we move forward, as we must, on the military side.”

Rice also was wowed by Secretary of State Colin Powell’s deceptive speech to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003. The next day, again on NPR, Rice said, “I think he has proved that Iraq has these weapons and is hiding them, and I don’t think many informed people doubted that.”

The late Howard Zinn wrote this letter to the Editor of the New York Times on August 19, 2007:

To the Editor:

Samantha Power has done extraordinary work in chronicling the genocides of our time, and in exposing how the Western powers were complicit by their inaction.

However, in her review of four books on terrorism, especially Talal Asad’s “On Suicide Bombing” (July 29), she claims a moral distinction between “inadvertent” killing of civilians in bombings and “deliberate” targeting of civilians in suicide attacks. Her position is not only illogical, but (against her intention, I believe) makes it easier to justify such bombings.

She believes that “there is a moral difference between setting out to destroy as many civilians as possible and killing civilians unintentionally and reluctantly in pursuit of a military objective.” Of course, there’s a difference, but is there a “moral” difference? That is, can you say one action is more reprehensible than the other?

In countless news briefings, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, responding to reporters’ questions about civilian deaths in bombing, would say those deaths were “unintentional” or “inadvertent” or “accidental,” as if that disposed of the problem. In the Vietnam War, the massive deaths of civilians by bombing were justified in the same way by Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon and various generals.

These words are misleading because they assume an action is either “deliberate” or “unintentional.” There is something in between, for which the word is “inevitable.” If you engage in an action, like aerial bombing, in which you cannot possibly distinguish between combatants and civilians (as a former Air Force bombardier, I will attest to that), the deaths of civilians are inevitable, even if not “intentional.” Does that difference exonerate you morally?

The terrorism of the suicide bomber and the terrorism of aerial bombardment are indeed morally equivalent. To say otherwise (as either side might) is to give one moral superiority over the other, and thus serve to perpetuate the horrors of our time.

Howard Zinn

# # #

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

Protesters march during a rally in support of Army Pfc. Bradley Manning military court, Saturday, June 1, 2013 (AP) Army whistleblower Pfc. Bradley Manning faces his third day on trial on Wednesday in a military courtroom in Fort Meade, Maryland.

Today will be the last day the court is in session until Monday, June 10.

Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) continues to upload transcripts from each session, after a successful campaign to get a stenographer in the courtroom.

Follow live tweets below for updates throughout the day:

_______________________

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

Mike Adams
Natural News
June 5, 2013

The next wave of farmer backlash against Monsanto has just been unleashed by Ernest Barnes, a wheat farmer in Morton County, Kansas. He filed suit this week in the U.S. District Court in Wichita, Kansas, alleging that Monsanto’s genetic pollution has financially damaged himself and other farmers.

Barnes’ case appears to be well supported by the facts: Last week the USDA announced the shock discovery that genetically engineered wheat strains from Monsanto’s open-field experiments had escaped and spread into commercial wheat farms. Almost immediately, Japan and South Korea cancelled wheat purchase contracts from the United States, and more cancellations are expected to follow. The more countries reject U.S. wheat due to GMO contamination (genetic pollution), the lower wheat prices will plunge and the more economic damage will be felt by U.S. farmers.

Monsanto now a confirmed genetic polluter

GMO wheat (i.e. “GE wheat”) has never been commercially grown in the United States… at least not on purpose. Experimental fields were approved by the USDA and planted across 16 U.S. states. Until now, it was not known that these GE wheat experiments escaped their designated field plots and began to spread as a form of self-replicating genetic pollution.

For the record, Natural News openly warned about this possibility in a 2012 article called, “Stop Out-of-Control Science.” There, I wrote:

Humanity has reached a tipping point of developing technology so profound that it can destroy the human race; yet this rise of “science” has in no way been matched by a rise in consciousness or ethics. Today, science operates with total disregard for the future of life on Earth, and it scoffs at the idea of balancing scientific “progress” with caution, ethics or reasonable safeguards. Unbridled experiments like GMOs have unleashed self-replicating genetic pollution that now threatens the integrity of food crops around the world, potentially threatening the global food supply.

Those words, it turns out, were prophetic. We are now faced with precisely this situation in the U.S. agricultural sector, and farmers are starting to feel the economic losses. GMOs are just one of several areas where so-called “science” actually threatens humanity with total destruction.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

See my infographic of all 12 dangerous sectors of science with this infographic:
http://www.naturalnews.com/Infographic-SOS-Stop-Out-of-Control-Scienc…

Monsanto engaged in genetic contamination

As Yahoo News reports:

The petition filed by Barnes claims Monsanto knew there was a high risk the genetically modified wheat it was testing could contaminate other varieties of wheat, and the company failed to follow proper procedures to keep the wheat contained.

Monsanto tested the wheat in many states, including Kansas, the top U.S. wheat-producing state, but did not disclose to farmers in those states that it was testing the controversial wheat there, the petition states.

Monsanto to sue the farmers?

Monsanto claims it will mount a “vigorous defense” against the lawsuit, expressing that it takes no responsibility whatsoever for all the genetic pollution it spews across America’s farm lands. If Monsanto’s genetically modified, toxin-producing crops just happen to infect your commercial crops, then that’s your fault!

In fact, I’m surprised Monsanto hasn’t announced plans to sue all these farmers for “stealing” its “intellectual property.” That’s what the company has done before, of course: sued farmers whose fields were contaminated by Monsanto’s genetic pollutants.

Is this not the height of corporate evil? When British Petroleum spills billions of gallons of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, it at least pretends to be sorry about it. But when Monsanto spews its genetic pollution all over the planet, it blames the farmers! It would be like if BP drove an oil tanker right into your front yard, dumped a thousand gallons of oil on your lawn, then sued you for stealing their oil.

That’s the Monsanto model. And it’s yet another example of the total runaway criminality of this evil corporation that frankly should have its corporate charter yanked. This is one business that deserves to be permanently put out of business and never allowed to operate again. When corporations become such arrogant, destructive and threatening monsters that stomp on our farmers and spew their genetic jizz all across the planet like a bunch of sicko ag perverts, something has gone terribly wrong and needs to be stopped.

The recent March Against Monsanto was only the beginning. I even foresee a day when millions of citizens from around the world engage in a far more aggressive march on the Monsanto headquarters and literally tear the place apart brick by brick until this corporate demon is permanently excised from our planet.

We are winning the war against Monsanto

I also predict – but do not condone this violence – that if Monsanto continues to engage in its crimes against farmers, nature and humanity, we are going to start seeing well-planned “acts of justice” against Monsanto executives, employees and scientists. I literally had a bizarre, disturbing dream the other night where a band of activists had kidnapped a Monsanto executive, tied him to a chair, and forced him to admit to all the crimes Monsanto has committed while being filmed on camera. The videos were then released on the internet. I realize this sounds a lot like the plot of a major motion picture, but I believe this could become reality if Monsanto continues on its current path.

Again, for the record, I do not condone the kidnapping of Monsanto executives. Kidnappings and executions are no way to resolve problems in a civilized society. If such an act actually takes place, it would actually hurt the anti-GMO movement and allow the government to paint all GMO protesters as “potential terrorists.” So if anyone out there is actually thinking of doing this, please redirect your energy and focus into non-violent protests and other similar actions that are already making tremendous progress. As I said recently on Natural News, I believe we have reached a tipping point of success against Monsanto. Let’s continue to pressure Monsanto in a grassroots, non-violent way, okay?

After all, we are winning this war against Monsanto and GMOs. They are in full retreat and completely surrounded… by the truth.

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This article was posted: Wednesday, June 5, 2013 at 2:13 pm

Tags: eugenics, food, gmo, health, natural health

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

One knows things are bad in Palestine when even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, known for his brutal heavy-handiness against the Palestinians, has to decry what he calls ‘acts of hooliganism’ against them. These behaviors, known as price-tag attacks, are committed against Palestinians and Israeli security forces by Jewish youth living in violation of international law in Israeli settlements on Palestinian land. The point, apparently, is to extract a ‘price’ for actions taken against their illegal settlements. What actions Israeli security forces are taking, or have taken, were not mentioned.

In response, Mr. Netanyahu made this astounding statement: “I wish to condemn two phenomena that we have witnessed recently: Racism against Israeli Arabs and acts of hooliganism against Palestinians, without any provocation or justification”. He promised to “act with all legal means at our disposal to stop them.”

This writer finds these to be most bewildering statements. How, he asks himself, can Mr. Netanyahu decry ‘acts of hooliganism’, which include brutal and vicious assaults, when his Israel Defense Forces (IDF) comprise one of the most brutal and vicious terrorist organizations in the world, killing, maiming and terrorizing Palestinians, on their own land, on a daily basis? How can he promise, with a straight face, to ‘act with all legal means at our disposal to stop them’, when he continually shows his complete disdain for international law by increasing settlement activity on Palestinian land?

And Israel has now devised a new way to torture and humiliate Palestinians. It has somehow developed a horrible smelling substance, ostensibly for use in breaking up unruly crowds of Palestinian demonstrators. The liquid is sprayed on people, and the smell is so offensive that they flee from it.

Well, one supposes this is better than the rubber bullets, which are about the most benign weaponry Israel ever uses against Palestinians and internationals supporting them. Yet current reports indicate that IDF terrorists go into peaceful neighborhoods, and spray the putrid fumes on private homes, where the occupants are merely trying to live as normally as possible under cruel and horrific occupation. Business as usual for apartheid Israel.

But getting back to the original point, Mr. Netanyahu seems to define ‘hooliganism’ somewhat differently than this writer understands the term. Some minor vandalism, graffiti on walls or cars, etc., might be viewed as hooliganism, but the term seems to stop short of assault and battery, and attempted murder. So these rampaging Israeli youths, attacking Palestinians because they dare to object to the theft of their land, are not, in this writer’s view, hooligans. They are criminals, guilty of hate crimes, and should be prosecuted as such. But in an apartheid nation such as Israel, that just isn’t going to happen.

But perhaps these ‘childish’ expressions of displeasure on the part of Israeli youths are excusable. The director of Child and Adolescent Clinical Services, Ruth Pat-Horencyzyk, said that these ‘youngsters’ probably suffer the psychological effects of surviving terrorist acts.  Said she: “Those adolescents were exposed to terrorist attacks and developed post-traumatic symptoms… they tend to exercise twice as much risk-taking behaviors. Attacking innocent people just because they are Arabs, with no provocation whatsoever. And that’s very typical to people who feel in survival mode state.”

Since 2000, at least 8,000 Palestinian children have been arrested by the IDF. Have they, and all Palestinians, not also been ‘exposed to terrorist attacks and developed post-traumatic symptoms’? Is this only an excuse for Israeli youths living in illegal settlements to attack Palestinians, but isn’t seen as justification for any violence perpetrated by Palestinian youths, most, if not all, of whom experience horrific terrorist attacks on a frequent basis, including the destruction of their homes to make way for Israeli-only roads and settlements, constant harassment by IDF terrorists, and the continued humiliation of their parents? Is there no sympathy for them when they throw a rock at a U.S.-provided tank that is patrolling their street, taking their land and making them homeless?

Mr. Netanyahu and his co-Zionists will not be satisfied until every vestige of Palestinian existence is purged from Palestine. That in 2013, one country can, with impunity, perpetrate the horrors that Israel inflicts on the Palestinians is beyond shocking. Not in the U.S. , of course, where the American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has bought and paid for most of Congress and the White House. In those hallowed halls, such lofty concepts of ‘human rights’ and peoples’ right to self-determination are only offered conditionally. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, widely seen as the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, said this about Syrian rebels in 2012: “…we cannot ask the opposition to unilaterally give up their struggle for justice, dignity, and self-determination.” Yet during Israel’s barbaric bombardment of the Gaza Strip in November of 2012, she made this amazing statement: “The rocket attacks from terrorist organizations inside Gaza on these (Israeli) cities and towns must end and a broader calm restored.” No comments now about not asking ‘the opposition (Palestine) to unilaterally give up their struggle for justice, dignity, and self-determination.’ Without a powerful lobby to influence and purchase U.S. so-called representatives, Palestinian human rights are not even considered.

If Mr. Netanyahu considers that barbaric assaults by Israeli youths on Palestinians are acts of hooliganism that must be stopped, he might want to consider his own such acts, on steroids, and think about stopping them. But no, a few words to the press to show his great concern, yearning for peace, desire for a fair and equitable solution, etc., etc., are always sufficient to mask his land theft, torture and terrorism towards the Palestinians. The U.S. press is always happy to report those oh-so-appealing sound bites, but somewhat more hesitant to inform their readers and listeners about the unspeakable sufferings endured by the Palestinians at the hands of apartheid Israel.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, the weak, spineless leader of Fatah which supposedly rules the West Bank, hesitates to petition the International Criminal Court for redress. Did he displease his U.S. puppet masters so severely last year, when he successfully petitioned the United Nations for recognition, that he dare not do it again? One can think of no other reason for him not to utilize Palestine’s new position in the United Nations to assist the suffering Palestinian people. Does he think Mr. Netanyahu will suddenly be filled with compassion for the Palestinians? Does he think U.S. president Barack Obama will decide to stop funding Israel and its terrorists? No, even Mr. Abbas is not so naïve.

It is long past time for Palestine’s incompetent and corrupt leadership to risk the financial wrath of the U.S. and go to the United Nations to seek redress for Israel’s countless crimes against Palestine. With each delay, more illegal settlements are planned and built, more Palestinian land is lost, and the prospects for a free, independent and prosperous Palestine fade. It is an unspeakable disgrace that the world community has tolerated this for so long, but it took a giant step toward rectifying the situation last November, when Palestine was admitted to the U.N. as a Non-Member Observer State. With Mr. Abbas recognized internationally as Palestine’s leader, the next move is his to make. That he has delayed this long only compounds his disgrace.
—
David Swanson’s books include “War Is A Lie.”

He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for http://rootsaction.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook.

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

The Infowar circa 500 BC

Infowars.com
June 5, 2013

As the secretive and shadowy Bilderberg Group meets in Watford, UK, this Operation Paul Revere entry from Europe is based on Plato’s Allegory of the Cave – how human perception of reality is manipulated by others. In Plato’s story, people were chained to a wall in a cave, their “reality” merely shadows projected on the wall by their controllers. The InfoWar hasn’t changed much in 2500 years.

THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL: Operation Paul Revere Infowars.com Contest | (Plato’s Allegory of the Cave) from Rob Nelson on Vimeo.

Filmmaker Rob Nelson’s description:

What is really the root of all evil in our world? Is it money, as we are often told? Is it religion, or is it perhaps something more fundamental? This movie provides a different perspective on reality, challenging the idea of randomness and chance, exploring the idea of our lives being manipulated from behind the scenes. An idea that less people find controversial today, as absurdity runs rampant in our personal lives and in world events.

The movie also explains the mechanisms of denial, that keep us from expanding our awareness and from growing individually and collectively as a species.

The concept of manipulating human perception of reality was already explored in The Allegory of the Cave by Plato, in his book The Republic, written around 380 BC. Apart from Plato, the movie features Socrates and Aristotle, with their mindblowing insights that apply so accurately to our world today.

The Root of all Evil is an official entry in Alex Jones’s Operation Paul Revere Infowars.com Contest. We strongly recommend visiting infowars.com for more information about the contest and for unbiased world news.

Do you already feel TRULY free and fulfilled? Then you probably don’t need to watch this film. Do you feel confused or senselessly oppressed by society and your political leaders? Then this movie is for you.
If You liked the movie, please rate it and share with friends and fellow humans.

Happy Viewing!

All the entries for the Operation Paul Revere contest are in. We will be reviewing and posting entries until the winners are announced in July. Showcased videos are selected for general interest and their selection does not imply that they are finalists or have met all the contest requirements. All of the views expressed in the films are not necessarily endorsed by InfoWars.com.

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This article was posted: Wednesday, June 5, 2013 at 1:36 pm

Tags: activism, bilderberg

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

Infowars.com
June 5, 2013

Alex breaks down the global elite’s foreign policy plan and their economic crimes.

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This article was posted: Wednesday, June 5, 2013 at 1:34 pm

Tags: bilderberg, economics, foreign affairs

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

1. “This is a revolt, not (yet) a revolution!” A reference to the famous conversation during the outbreak of the French Revolution between King Louis XVI and one of his advisors.

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

Sibel Edmonds founded the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC). She did so to aid “national security whistleblowers through a variety of methods.”

The ACLU called her “the most gagged person in the history of the United States.”

Since 1977, the Government Accountability Project (GAP) calls itself “the nation’s leading whistleblower protection and advocacy organization.”

“What is a Whistleblower,” it asks?

Anyone “who discloses information that (he or she) reasonably believes is evidence of illegality, gross waste or fraud, mismanagement, abuse of power, general wrongdoing, or a substantial and specific danger to public health and safety.”

“Typically, whistleblowers speak out to parties that can influence and rectify the situation.”

“These parties include the media, organizational managers, hotlines, or Congressional members/staff, to name a few.”

On April 1, activist lawyers launched the Whistleblowers Defense League (WDL). Founding members include Jay Leiderman, Dennis Roberts, and Jason Flores-Williams.

Center for Constitutional Rights President Emeritus Michael Ratner praised their initiative, saying:

“Every effort that focuses on the defense of whistleblowers, internet free speech activists, publishers and others persecuted by the US government is to be applauded.”

“This group joins many other(s) who are already defending those accused of shining light on the dark secrets of government and corporations.”

A WDL announcement said:

“We have entered a dangerous time in America. The FBI and Department of Justice are using harassment and prosecution as a tool to chill and silence journalism, on-line activism and dissent.”

Co-founder Jay Leiberman stressed that “People are being subpoenaed, indicted and incarcerated for simply exploring the truth.”

“The government has amended the constitution with fear.”

“In response, a nation-wide group of expert criminal defense attorneys have formed the Whistleblower Defense League to defend and encourage those willing to investigate and speak out against the corporate and political forces threatening our democracy.”

Candidate Obama promised transparency, accountability, and reform. President Obama targeted more whistleblowers than all his predecessors combined.

He usurped diktat powers to do so. He prioritizes police state harshness. On January 25, he issued a barely noticed memorandum titled:

“Presidential Memorandum — Rulemaking Concerning the Standards for Designating Positions in the Competitive Service as National Security Sensitive and Related Matters”

It pertains to proposed “amended regulations contained in the Office of Personnel Management’s notice of proposed rulemaking in 75 Fed. Reg. 77783 (December 14, 2010),”

Its purpose “is to clarify the requirements and procedures agencies should observe when designating national security positions as required under EO 10450, Security Requirements for Government Employment.”

National security positions are defined as “any position(s) in a department or agency, the occupant of which could bring about, by virtue of the nature of the position, a material adverse effect on the national security.”

“The purpose of the revisions is to clarify the categories of positions which, by virtue of the nature of their duties, have the potential to bring about a material adverse impact on the national security, whether or not the positions require access to classified information.”

Another purpose is to properly designate each position with regard to public trust and national security considerations.

Both are necessary, it says, “for determining appropriate investigative requirements.” Clarification is needed to decide when they’re required.

At issue is establishing standards to give federal officials authorization to fire employees without appeal. They can be designated ineligible to hole “noncritical sensitive” jobs for any reason or none at all.

They can be prosecuted for disclosing information the public has a right to know. Doing so can be called compromising national security.

Longstanding civil service law doesn’t matter. It’s fundamental for protecting whistleblower rights. One of the first laws enacted was the 1863 United False Claims Act. It targeted persons and federal contractors defrauding the government.

The 1978 Civil Service Reform Act (CSRA) abolished the Civil Service Commission. Three new agencies replaced it: the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), and the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA).

OPM advises executive branch agencies. It issues human resources regulations.

FLRA’s responsible for federal employee rights. It focuses on issues related to collective bargaining.

MSPB handles federal employee appeals. It does so with regard to discipline, discrimination and dismissals.

CSRA prohibits discrimination based on marital status, race, religion, political activity or affiliation. Affected employees may petition the Office of Special Counsel.

The 1989 Whistleblower Protection Act protects federal employees who report misconduct. Federal agencies are prohibited from retaliating against those who do so.

Whistleblowers may report law or regulatory violations, gross mismanagement, waste, fraud and/or abuse, or acts endangering public health or safety.

The Office of Special Council is empowered to investigate whistleblower complaints.

The Merit Systems Protection Board adjudicates them.

The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit is the only judicial body authorized to hear whistleblower case appeals. Since the Whistleblower Protection Act was revised in 1994, it ruled on 203 cases. Only three times did whistleblowers prevail.

At least 18 federal statutes protect private sector whistleblowers. They fall short of full protection. What corporations want they get.

They write legislation Congress passes. Sarbanes-Oxley, the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act, and Dodd-Frank are three of many examples.

On November 27, 2012, the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act (WPEA) became law.

Government Accountability Project Legal Director Tom Devine said:

“This reform took 13 years to pass because it can make so much difference against fraud, waste and abuse.”

“Government managers at all levels made pleas and repeatedly blocked the bill through procedural sabotage.”

“But once there were no more secret ‘holds,’ the WPEA passed unanimously, because no politician in a free society can openly oppose freedom of speech.”

Reforms enacted protect federal employees from reprisal for:

• revealing it to co-workers or supervisors;

• disclosing policy decision consequences; or

• doing any or all of the above in relation to their position or duties.

Obama signed the legislation into law. He’s targeted whistleblowers more aggressively than all his predecessors combined. He circumvented or ignored legal provisions.

His January 25 memorandum makes it easier to do so. Whistleblower advocacy groups expressed concern.

During Obama’s first term, he targeted record numbers of government employees, journalists and others.

He did so on national security grounds. Prosecutions were for allegedly leaking classified information. True or false doesn’t matter.

At issue is revealing information Washington wants kept secret. Anyone challenging government authority is vulnerable. So are supporters of right over wrong.

A Final Comment

On May 24, The Government Accountability Project headlined “GAP Praises Long-Overdue Overhaul of Military Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act of 2013 (MMPEA).”

On February 14, HR 704: Military Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act was introduced. It was sent to committee. No further action was taken.

On May 24, Senator Mark Warner (D. VA) introduced a companion bill. It falls short of what’s needed. It relates to sexual assaults. They’re one of many abuses needing addressing and redress.

GAP Legal Director Tom Devine said:

“Sexual assaults in the military continue for the same reasons as other human rights violations — secrecy coupled with weak or nonexistent rights to challenge abuses of power.”

“For 25 years, the Military Whistleblower Protection Act has been so weak that GAP has advised soldiers not to file complaints under it.”

“This legislation would replace token rights with those equivalent to the civil service Whistleblower Protection Act.”

Enactment will be a step in the right direction. Doing so won’t protect whistleblower rights.

Stronger measures with teeth are needed. Everyone deserves them. Fundamental freedoms are on the line. They’re disappearing in plain sight.

Vitally important whistleblower rights alone are threatened. Legislation protecting them falls short of what’s needed. Obama wants laws entirely circumvented.

His January 25 memorandum addresses establishing new standards. He wants them overriding existing protections. He claims his mandate applies solely to positions deemed “sensitive.”

Proposed rules are vague. They provide wiggle room to target anyone for any reason or none at all. So-called “sensitive” positions include any potentially having “a material adverse impact” on national security.

Saying so is in the eye of the beholder. Virtually all government employees are vulnerable. So are journalists, military personnel, activists and others. First Amendment rights are threatened.

Anyone exposing government or military wrongdoing can be fired, fined, prosecuted, court martialed, and/or imprisoned.

Doing so reflects police state justice. America’s on a fast track toward institutionalizing it. It could arrive full-blown any time. Any pretext real or invented could justify it. Rogue states govern that way.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

His new book is titled “Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

It airs Fridays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour

http://www.dailycensored.com/obama-wants-all-whistleblowers-silenced/

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

Syrian regime forces seize control of the strategically important town of Qusayr on the Lebanon border after a long battle with rebel fighters. Victory is being hailed as a turning point in the civil war, rebels blame defeat on the exiled Council.

Two weeks of fierce fighting has left Qusayr, once a city of 30,000, ruined with buildings
devastated and windows shattered. The dome of the local mosque
was damaged by rocket fire and the walls of a church smashed
open.

The opposition claims that more than 500 rebels died and 1,000
were wounded.

Humanitarian agencies earlier this week claimed nearly 1,500
wounded were trapped in the city during the series of attacks by
Assad forces backed by Hezbollah.  

Those who survived the counter-offensives escaped the city
through a corridor overnight, with the rebels completely losing
control of the border city. A security source with ties to
Syrian forces said Assad’s troops deliberately left an escape
route into nearby Debaa and the Lebanese border town of Arsal to
encourage rebel fighters to quit Qusayr.

The decision to withdraw was taken after a day of rocket fire
from the Syrian army and Hezbollah that “leveled what had
remained” of Qusayr, Reuters said citing a rebel commander in
contact with the brigades.

“This victory will have a major impact on the entire course of
the fighting in Syria,” Homs Governor Ahmad Munir told RT.
“The Syrian army liberated the province of Homs and regained
control over its entire territory, and seeks to extend it to the
rest of the country.”

However, the rebels claim that they will take revenge.

Asked by RT if that was true that Free Syrian Army is preparing
to fight back, Muhammad Fatih said “Yes, it’s true.”

“Now reinforcements are arriving from Aleppo, its suburbs and
other areas near Qusayr. We hope that everything will be decided
in the next few hours after the implementation of our planned
operations,” he said.

At the same time, opposition group blamed the defeat on National
Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces (SC),
accusing exiled members of ignoring the situation in Syria and
being more concerned about money than fighting.

Experts believe the victory puts an end not only to rebel control
in Qusayr, but in the whole region.

The city of Aleppo, which has been in rebel hands for the last
year, is predicted to be the next city to be retaken by the
Syrian regime’s army.

“Now the Syrian army will try to regain control over the area
of Aleppo, using the fact that the Turkish army is currently
unable to provide active assistance to the rebels, given the
current unrest in Istanbul and other major Turkish cities,”
Wafeeq Ibrahim, Middle East expert from Beirut told RT. 

“In the coming days we are waiting reports of a new point, I
think it would be Aleppo,” Ilyas Ibrahim, expert from
Damascus, told RT. “Thus, Qusayr was an important turning
point for the Arab Syrian army in the battle for the liberation
of all Syrian territories.”

Ibrahim believes that capturing Qusayr might also play role in
establishing peace in Lebanon.

“It will mark a new stage in the establishment of the peace
process in Lebanon. Of course, there will be an attempt on the
part of the armed opposition to change the balance of power, but
they will fail. The battle in Qusayr is remarkable as it is held
after the Syrian army was retreating for a long time. Winning the
Qusayr will free the area from Akruma in northern Syria to the
area Ursal, located to the east of the Bekaa Valley. Through this
area, as well as across the Turkish border, militants received
weapons and ammunition,” he said.

According to UN figures, more than 80,000 people have been killed
since the uprising against Bashar Assad began in March 2011.

This article originally appeared on: RT

The U.S. government wants to lock away Pvt. Bradley Manning for life because he released hundreds of thousands of classified documents that he believes revealed war crimes and other wrongdoing. But overlooked is how much damage over-classification does to the Republic, says Robert Parry.

I thought of Pvt. Bradley Manning when I recently received a response to one of my Freedom of Information Act requests to Ronald Reagan’s presidential library. I was seeking documents about President Reagan’s secret strategy of aiding Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in its war with Iran.

Reagan’s tilt to Iraq in the early 1980s — while his administration also was winking at Israeli weapons sales to Iran — was part of a clandestine U.S. approach to the region which generated huge profits for arms dealers while feeding sectarian violence and political animosities that echo to the present day. It seemed to me that it was way past time to know the full truth.

However, though many of the events in question are now more than 30 years old — and thus are commonly thought to be readily accessible under FOIA — the reality is that the U.S. government still makes seeing such documents extremely difficult.

The letter from the Reagan library said the archivists would not even begin to process my request for “128 months,” that is more than 10 years, and then the process would involve time-consuming declassification reviews in which various agencies with “equity” interests would each have to sign off, along with whoever the sitting president is.

And, were I to die or lose interest in the interim, the process would go back to square one, waiting for some other interested American citizen to put in a new request and starting the clock again. In other words, we might all be dead before these records will be open to the public.

There is an old saying that “justice delayed is justice denied,” but the concept also applies to historical accountability. History delayed can mean accountability denied.

Plus, there’s no guarantee that some hypothetical historian far into the future will fully understand what the documents mean once they are, hypothetically, released. Since the people who lived through the relevant era might have left the scene, references or details may not be understood. In other words, there’s a great danger that the history will be permanently lost.

Besides the loss of history, there is also a more immediate concern: If the American people don’t know what their government did — and who did it — they can be led down the same dangerous paths by the same people who created the dangers in the first place. On a geopolitical level, it’s a bit like one of those suspense stories in which the young heroine fleeing a serial killer is putting her misguided trust in the villain as he poses as a protector of her safety.

For instance, if the American people had been allowed a full understanding of what George H.W. Bush had done as Vice President and President, would they have been so gullible to have allowed his eldest son to elbow his way into the White House? It was their misguided trust in the elder George Bush that bought Junior the benefit of the doubt. [See Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

Similarly, if the American people knew the complete story about the neocons who were credentialed by the Reagan administration — including their role in Central American atrocities and their clever use of propaganda — would the public have been so easily duped into the Iraq invasion?

Or, if they knew that Robert Gates was a behind-the-scenes figure in some of the scandalous operations of the Reagan era — as much evidence suggests — would they have trusted him as a Wise Man brought in to counsel leaders, such as George W. Bush and Barack Obama on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Would his “words of wisdom” be fawningly transcribed by U.S. journalists? [See Parry’s America’s Stolen Narrative.]

Endangering Democracy

In other words, America’s overly classified history, which is locked away in government vaults for decades, is itself a threat to national security, not to mention an affront to anything close to a meaningful democracy. The hyper-secrecy also creates fertile ground for nutty conspiracy theories, further destabilizing the Republic.

So, the cavalier expression that I often heard in the 1980s when news executives grew bored with Iran-Contra and related scandals — “oh, let’s leave that for the historians!” — wasn’t just bad journalism; it was a threat to the nation and to the world.

To this day, Americans have gotten only glimpses of Reagan’s cynical policies in the Middle East. Snapshots have emerged from the Iran-Contra Affair, which exposed some of the clandestine arms shipments to Iran, and from a sworn affidavit by Howard Teicher, a staffer on Reagan’s National Security Council who disclosed some of the secret collaboration with Iraq.

But nothing close to the full history has ever been revealed — and many conflicting assertions remain, such as whether the Iran side of this operation originated from treacherous Republican-Iranian contacts behind President Jimmy Carter’s back before Election 1980 and whether Teicher’s affidavit is entirely accurate. That is where my FOIA request came in.

Which brings me back to Bradley Manning whose trial for leaking government secrets is set to begin on Monday, with the prosecution seeking life imprisonment for the young private who is accused of aiding the enemy. Most fair-minded people would agree that some of Manning’s information was beneficial to the public’s right to know, revealing details of human rights violations and exposing corrupt government officials around the world.

However, the conventional wisdom within U.S. government circles and the mainstream news media is that Manning’s wholesale release of secrets to WikiLeaks endangered civilians who collaborated with American forces in Afghanistan and elsewhere and impaired U.S. foreign policy by revealing the frank opinions of American diplomats.

Yet, while it may be true — although it remains unproven — that some innocents were put at risk and that U.S. diplomacy has been made more complicated, Manning’s unauthorized release of hundreds of thousands of documents must be weighed against the U.S. government’s hiding of hundreds of millions of documents.

The simple truth is that the vast majority of those “secret” documents do not represent any reasonable threat to national security. And, to the contrary, the continued over-classification represents a clear and present danger to the Republic, both because secrecy undermines democracy and because ignorance makes voters vulnerable to deceptive politicians who, in turn, can inflict serious harm on the real national security.

So, when you hear someone condemning Bradley Manning for releasing government secrets, you might think about my attempt to go through the proper channels to see 30-year-old documents on U.S. policy toward Iraq – and being told that I’ll have to wait at least “128 months.”

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

National Security Advisor Thomas E. Donilon will resign his post next month and will be replaced by U.S. Ambassador to the UN Susan E. Rice (shown), White House officials announced on June 5. The Washington Post and other news sources reported that Donilon’s resignation will become effective in early July.

A report in the Los Angeles Times noted that Donilon has been a member of President Obama’s national security staff for four years and replaced Gen. James Jones as Obama’s national security advisor (officially called the assistant to the president for national security affairs) in 2010. 

The Times reported that Donilon helped to formulate the Obama administration’s policy for drawdown in Afghanistan and that he advised caution in the U.S. raid conducted to kill Osama bin Laden.

Donilon was a former chief of staff to Secretary of State Warren Christopher, during the Clinton administration. In one of his last official acts, he traveled to Beijing in May to help lay the groundwork for the president’s upcoming summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

An AP report carried by the Boston Globe recalled that Rice, described as “a close Obama confidante,” came under intense criticism from Republicans during investigations into the deadly attack on a U.S. compound in Benghazi resulting in the deaths of the United States Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens and three others. Relying on incorrect information provided by the intelligence community, Rice said in television interviews that the attacks were likely spontaneous, which was later proven incorrect.

The president had proposed Rice as a possible replacement for retiring Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, but her mixed and sometimes inaccurate statements concerning the Benghazi attack made her a lighting rod for criticism. On November 19, 2012, 97 House Republicans sent a letter to President Obama saying that Rice’s statements about Benghazi were “misleading” and that she should therefore not be considered a candidate to succeed Clinton as secretary of state.

On December 13, 2012, she announced that she was withdrawing her name from consideration saying that if nominated “the confirmation process would be lengthy, disruptive, and costly.”

Obama then submitted the name of John Kerry for the cabinet position at State and the well-known former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee won easy confirmation.

Unlike the secretary of state post, the position of national security advisor does not require Senate confirmation.

The Post report observed that some of Rice’s toughest critics have indicated that they are prepared to cooperate with Rice in her new position.

“She’s going to have her plate full, if she’s chosen,” said Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) “I will not be petty. I will put my differences on Benghazi aside and work with her.”

The Globe article reported that Obama will also nominate Samantha Power, a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School identified as “a human rights expert and former White House adviser,” to replace Rice at the UN. 

Power won a Pulitzer Prize for her book, A Problem From Hell, about the U.S. response to genocide. The Post reported that she served as a senior director for multilateral affairs and human rights on the National Security Council during Obama’s first term, continuing into the beginning of his second term.

She wrote in an article critical of the Security Council in The New Republic in 2003: “The U.N. Security Council is anachronistic, undemocratic, and consists of countries that lack the standing to be considered good faith arbiters of how to balance the stability against democracy, peace against justice, and security against human rights.”

The position of ambassador to the United Nations will require Senate confirmation.

The president’s decision to replace Donilon with Rice continues a long-standing practice among presidents of both parties in recent decades to move members of the internationalist Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) into top position. Both Donilon and Rice are CFR members. 

A look at previous national security advisors also turns up a heavy dose of CFR members, including: Stephen Hadley (2005-2009), Condoleezza Rice (2001-2005), Samuel R. Berger (1997-2001), Brent Scowcroft (1989-1993), Colin Powell (1987-1989), Frank Carlucci (1986-1987), Robert C. McFarlane (1983-1985), Richard V. Allen (1981-1982), Zbigniew Brzezinski (1977-1981), Henry Kissinger (1969-1975), Walt Rostow (1966-1969), McGeorge Bundy (1961-1966), Gordon Gray (1958-1961), and Dillon Anderson (1955-1966). The first National Security Director, Robert Cutler (1953-1955 and 1957-1958) wrote an article for the April 1956 issue of Foreign Affairs (the CFR’s official publication) entitled “The Development of the National Security Council.”

^{Photo of Susan Rice: AP Images}

This article originally appeared on: The New American

Josh Mitchell and Jeffrey Sparshott
wsj.com
June 5, 2013

Trouble in the manufacturing sector has been mounting for months, and several signals this week indicated the pain could continue into the summer.

The latest data Wednesday showed that the manufacturing sector entered the spring on weaker footing even before the Institute for Supply Management’s factory-sector gauge, released Monday, indicated contraction last month.

Apart from the volatile transportation sector, new orders for factory goods fell 0.1% in April, after falling 2.8% in March, the Commerce Department said Wednesday. Among the biggest slumps was demand for computers, which dropped more than 9%.

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This article was posted: Wednesday, June 5, 2013 at 1:10 pm

Tags: business, domestic news, economics

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

The American soldier charged with murdering 16 Afghan civilians a year ago near Kandahar province pleaded guilty in court on Wednesday.

Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, 39, entered the plea inside of a
military courtroom at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington
state early Wednesday, the Associated Press reported from the
site.

According to the AP, a military judge will hear Bales’ firsthand
account of what happened during the March 2012 outburst before
deciding if the plea will be accepted by the court.

One of the attorney representing Bales, John Henry Browne, told
the AP that he expects his client will admit to “very specific
facts.”

Bales was brought into custody last year after opening fire on
civilians residing within two tiny villages in southern
Afghanistan. He slipped away from his post at Camp Belambay in
Kandahar on the early morning of March 11 equipped with a 9 mm
pistol and an M-4 rifle outfitted with a grenade launcher, then
went on a rampage in the village of Alkozai. He returned after to
his camp covered in blood, told at another soldier about the
attack and then left to kill again, that time attacking civilians
in the village of Najiban.

Bales, an Ohio native and father of two, was charged with 16
counts of premeditated murder – one for each life he took.

In an email to USA TODAY this week, defense attorney Emma Scanlan
wrote that Bales “is ready to accept responsibility for what
he has done.” Browne previously told reports that Bales would
offer the plea in hopes of avoiding the death penalty. He
apparently prepared a 50-page deal that a military judge will
have to review before that determination is made.

The AP wrote Wednesday afternoon that Bales pleaded guilty to all
16 counts, but came short of doing such for another charge lobbed
against him: impeding an investigation. If the judge accepts his
plea, a jury will likely decide later this summer the fate for
the soldier – life, or life without the possibility of parole.

According to an AP reporter at Joint Base Lewis-McCord, Col.
Jeffrey Nance went over a stipulation of facts signed by Bales,
then asked the soldier to confirm whether he understood the four
elements that apply to each of the 16 charges.

A press release issued by the Army stated that certain conditions
would have to apply for Bales to be subjected to the death
penalty, an option unlikely even if his plea is rejected and he’s
convicted of stricter crimes.

“For capital punishment to be imposed, the court-martial
members must unanimously find: the service member is guilty of
the eligible crime; at least one aggravating factor exists; and
that the aggravating factor must substantially outweigh any
extenuating or mitigating circumstances found by the
court-martial members,” the statement read.

“Obviously, avoiding the death penalty is our number one goal.
We’ve accomplished that, assuming the judge accepts the plea, and
we believe he will,” Browne told the AP earlier this week.

No members of the US military have been executed as a result of a
conviction since 1961, although five currently face that
possibility.

Bales was serving his fourth combat deployment with the
atrocities occurred last year, and his lawyer told the court
previously that he had been drinking alcohol and snorting Valium
on the night of the killings. Bales is reported to suffer from
post-traumatic stress disorder, and was facing foreclosure on his
home shortly before the time of the incident. Browne described
the soldier as “crazed” and “broken” last week, but
stopped short of labeling him legally insane.

This article originally appeared on: RT