US President Barack Obama speaks during a joint press conference with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan in the White House on May 16, 2013.

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

A federal judge recently ruled that if someone has their cell phone turned on, their location data does not deserve protection under the Fourth Amendment, meaning law enforcement can track individuals without a search warrant.

New York magistrate judge Gary Brown decided in favor of Drug
Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents who were seeking his
approval over a warrant on a doctor who they suspected was being
paid for issuing thousands of prescriptions. The warrant would have
compelled the physician’s phone company to provide real-time
tracking data from his cell. 

Brown, certainly to the delight of police, issued a 30-page
brief outlining his opinion that, by carrying a cell phone, someone
is essentially waiving their Fourth Amendment right to due
process. 

“Given the ubiquity and celebrity of geolocation
technologies, an individual has no legitimate expectation of
privacy in the prospective of a cellular telephone where that
individual has failed to protect his privacy by taking the simple
expedient of powering it off,” Brown wrote. 

“As to control by the user, all of the known tracking
technologies may be defeated by merely turning off the phone.
Indeed — excluding apathy or inattention — the only reason that
users leave cell phones turned on is so that the device can be
located to receive calls. Conversely, individuals who do not want
to be disturbed by unwanted telephone calls at a particular time or
place simply turn their phones off, knowing that they cannot be
located.” 

He goes on to suggest that because there are smartphone
applications available that allow users to locate people in their
area with similar interests, cell phone customers should not expect
their inherent right to privacy to be observed. 

“Given the notoriety surrounding the disclosure of
geolocation data to retailers purveying soap powder and blue jeans
to mall shoppers, the police searching for David Pogue’s iPhone
and, most alarmingly, the creators and users of the Girls Around
You app, cell phone users cannot realistically entertain the notion
that such information would (or should) be withheld from federal
law enforcement agents searching for a fugitive.” 

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has long been a voice
for the American people against governmental overreach and
technological surveillance. Chris Soghoian, a principal
technologist and senior policy analyst at the ACLU, wrote that
Brown’s opinion was “ridiculous.”

 “There is a big difference between location information
you knowingly share with a select group of friends (or, in fact,
the world) and information collected about you without your
knowledge or consent,” he wrote. 

Exactly how common this practice is throughout the law
enforcement community is unclear but it has widely been reported
that a Michigan police force tried to gain information about every
single cell phone within the proximity of a labor
protest. 

Congressional leaders are currently considering two laws that
would address how freely police are able to bug citizens. During an
April hearing on Capitol Hill one detective told Senators that
warrantless geolocation tracking is “essential to obtain in the
early stages of investigations when probable cause has not yet been
established.” 

That attitude, and the wide potential for abuse this kind of law
creates, has the ACLU alarmed.  

“Someone might be happy to share their location with a few
friends by ‘checking in’ using Foursquare while at a music
festival, but not want law enforcement to access that same
information,” Soghoian continued. “And, they would still
reasonably expect that their location a week later at an Alcoholics
Anonymous meeting or abortion clinic should remain private. Sharing
location data isn’t and shouldn’t be all or nothing.”

This article originally appeared on : RT

Oil giant BP has petitioned a US court regarding the company’s payouts stemming from its 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico, accusing a judge of allowing “absurd” compensation claims and a “raid on its coffers.”

BP wants to halt payouts, amounting to millions of dollars, in
what it calls “spurious”
compensation claims to victims of the spill. The incident was
the largest marine oil spill in history, killing 11 rig workers and
discharging some 4.9 million barrels via an uncontrolled leak for
87 days.

The ensuing settlement between BP and the US Department of Justice
in November of 2012 meant that the oil company pleaded guilty to 11
counts of manslaughter, as well as two misdemeanors and one felony
count for lying to Congress. The company is also still in court for
criminal and civil settlements, which have thus far cost the
company $42 billion.

At stake now, according to the new filing by the oil company, are
unchecked payouts being permitted under presiding Judge Carl
Barbier that could increase BP’s liability by $14 billion.
According to The Guardian, BP has expressed in that filing that the
additional billions, which the company has not budgeted for, could
cause the company “irreparable” harm and make it the target
of a takeover. BP was rumored to be a takeover target in late 2012
by Royal Dutch Shell.

BP has absorbed large losses stemming from payouts for the massive
Gulf spill and sold assets to compensate, taking most of the blame
for the extensive damage to surrounding marine and wildlife
habitats, as well as the loss of revenue for local maritime
industry caused by both the spill, as well as cleanup efforts that
involved controversial use of oil dispersant chemicals.

In March, the company completed a deal to sell its half of the
integrated Russian TNK-BP oil company to Rosneft, in return for $27
billion in cash and shares — $4 billion of which it intended to
return to shareholders.

Now, citing increasing payouts to Gulf spill claimants under an
existing deal, BP has complained that it may have to review its
dividend to shareholders. As a result, the company was reportedly
considering approaching Prime Minister David Cameron to raise the
issue with President Obama, who once called the BP Gulf spill
“the worst environmental disaster
in American history.”

According to the legal injunction filed by BP, Gulf coast
businesses in the US are pursuing multi-million dollar claims for
“non-existent, artificially calculated” losses.

In a filing with a New Orleans court last Friday, BP argues that
“while the ultimate amount at stake is at present inestimable,
awards for fictitious losses already are hundreds of millions of
dollars and could reach billions.”

In addition to overseeing payouts to claimants, Judge Barbier is
also overseeing a civil claims trial that seeks to determine blame
for the 2010 Deepwater spill, now in its seventh week.

In response to BP’s claims against him, Judge Barbier accused
the oil company of trying to move the claims process to the Fifth
Circuit Court of Appeals and beyond his jurisdiction.  

“What you’re really trying to do – it’s quite obvious and
there’s no subtlety here – is you’re trying to get this issue to
the Fifth Circuit,” Barbier said.“If you believe you have a
right to appeal, you can take that up with the circuit and then ask
me to stay the order. I don’t know why we’re going through all
these machinations,” Barbier added.

In April both Florida and Mississippi announced suits against BP
and oil rig contractor Halliburton under the Oil Pollution Act,
just within the law’s three-year statute of limitation. Officials
in Florida announced they would seek lost revenues as a result of
the spill, as well as punitive damages “due to the egregious
nature of the misconduct” leading up to the oil rig explosion
and spill.

On Thursday, British officials denied that BP had sought PM
David Cameron’s intervention in reducing compensation claims.

This article originally appeared on : RT

Its four-day meeting occurs annually. It’s a rite of spring. British political economist Will Hutton calls the group the “high priests of globalization.”

Powerful movers and shakers have their own agenda.They discuss key issues.

They do it year round. Once annually they meet face-to-face. They plot strategy to exploit the world’s riches. They want them for themselves.

They try to keep meeting dates, locations, and issues to be discussed secret. Word gets out. It’s official. Britain’s five-star Grove Hotel is this year’s venue. It’s a Hertfordshire, England hotel resort. It calls itself “London’s cosmopolitan country estate.”

This article originally appeared on : Global Research

Armed Yemeni tribesmen lead a blindfolded abductee to an unidentified place. (file photo)

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

Workers demonstrate in La Paz on May 16, 2013, to demand pensions equivalent to 100% of their salaries.

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

Police in a small town in Russia’s Urals have detained a woman suspected of killing her newborn sons by freezing them to death. The bodies were discovered in the freezer of a local food store where they have been kept for five years.

The bodies were found on Tuesday in Verkhnyaya Pyshma in the
Sverdlovsk region by staff at the store. Past inspections of the
store by local officials had failed to uncover the gruesome
find.

The bodies were reportedly said to be in bag bearing the logo of
another food store in a nearby town.

On Thursday Irina, a 30 year old woman, was detained. The woman
almost instantly admitted to the killing.

“The detainee admitted that she gave birth to two boys in
2008 in a rented apartment, after that she put her sons in a
refrigerator at home,” head of the press service of the
Interior Ministry’s local department, Valery Gorelyh noted.
Forensic experts said that children were born alive and died of
hypothermia, as there were traces of oxygen in their
lungs. 

“After the babies died and got frozen, Irina transferred the two
boys to the food store where she worked at the time, and hid them
in a freezer ,” Gorelyh added.

Currently Irina lives with her elderly mother and a nine-year
old daughter. She has been successfully working in the trade sector
for a long time. On Friday she was released, but had to sign an
agreement she would not be leaving Russia till the investigation
and trial finished.

Irina says she did not want the children and hid her pregnancy
from colleagues and even her family, giving birth without anyone’s
help, as tabloid KP.ru reports.

“She is now very depressed. She cannot explain the reason she
kept them in the freezer, she throws up her hands and says she
didn’t know what to do with them. That’s why she carried the bodies
from one freezer to another, wandering around the town with plastic
bags,” the head of the criminal investigation of the Interior
Ministry’s local department Alexander Mazaev told local 4-1
channel.

The woman will be charged with up to 5 years in prison under the
article ‘Murder of a newborn by mother’. Her guilt and
sentencing is likely to hinge on whether experts deem her sane.

This article originally appeared on : RT

A topless Femen activist burning a crucified doll was among dozens protesting against the opening of the ‘Barbie Dreamhouse’ in Berlin. Protesters say the giant dollhouse and “plastic idols” promote an “unhealthy beauty obsession” in kids.

The opening of the Barbie’s European tour in Germany was marred
after activists from several groups engaged into a furious
protest.

Femen activists have expressed uproar at the life-size pink mansion
and the fashion doll the brand promotes. A female activist was seen
in the crowd with the words “Life in plastic is not
fantastic” inscribed on her naked torso, later climbing up a
giant pink shoe-fountain, wielding a burning cross with a crucified
Barbie doll.

The woman shouted slogans against the “sexist icon” and had to be
taken away the by security at the scene.

A “Ritual Barbie’cue with fried meat of the plastic idol was
made to demonstrate the true meaning of the history of commercial
monster Mattel. They have turned a piece of plastic into a god for
millions of girls from all over the world who now seek only to
imitate plastic shapes and stupidity and absurdity of conduct,”
a statement on the Ukraine-based feminist group website later
said.

According to the controversial protest group, the company
“purposefully ” creates the image “dictating… the
appearance of new generations ,” as well a “social role of
reckless beauty finding a reason to exist in the continuous care of
their appearance and the house.” Despite the seemingly
provocative name, another activist campaign “Occupy Barbie
Dreamhouse” noted that its attendees went to demonstrate
peacefully.

“We are here because sexism is being used for capitalist
gains ,” one of the campaigners from a youth socialist group
Linksjugend told The Local.

“This protest is not against the parents who chose to take
their children, nor the children themselves, but against the
unhealthy beauty obsession it breeds ,” protest organizer and a
‘proud male feminist’ Michael Koshitzki added.

Koshitzki was particularly critical of the installation’s
‘dressing room,’ where girls were seemingly encouraged to “make
themselves look like Barbie.”

Stevie Schmiedel from the “Pink Stinks” Initiative has summed
concerns about children’s health many activists were
expressing.

“Fewer and fewer girls feel comfortable in their own skin,
with eating disorders having increased drastically because of
figures like Barbie,” he said as quoted by SAPA.

The Greens were also present at the opening party, equally
disgruntled with the Barbie ideals.

“The Barbie Dreamhouse sends the wrong signal, ” Green
Party women’s affairs expert Karoline Killat said. “What it
suggests to little girls is that they should aim to be beautiful
consumers.” But not everyone has agreed with the protesters
stance.

“Berlin is a free city and Barbie is welcome,” Philipp
Lengsfeld of the conservative Christian Democratic Party told The
Local.

“It’s just one of several interesting attractions in the city
and it is not anyone’s place to say what people should or should
not buy,” Lengsfeld said, adding he was “disappointed”
with the demonstrating crowd.

This article originally appeared on : RT

At least 33 people have lost their lives and some 12 others are missing as rain and hailstorms struck southern parts of China, officials say.

An unnamed Civil Affairs Ministry official and the National Committee for Disaster Reduction said on Thursday that since May 14 rainstorms have caused flooding and landslides in some provinces including Guangdong.

On the same day, the Guangdong Provincial Flood Prevention and Drought Relief Headquarters issued a statement saying that over 2,600 houses were destroyed and some 650,000 people in the province were affected by the heavy rains.

Zhang Dong, a chief forecaster with the Guangdong Provincial Meteorological Station, said that the rainstorms will continue until Friday morning in the province, adding that the Å“heavy rainfall in a short time and prolonged precipitation in some areas can easily trigger flooding and landslides.”

In July 2012, at least 12 people were killed and one went missing in flooding caused by torrential downpours which hit most areas of southwestern and northern China.

Twenty-four people lost their lives and 40 others were injured after torrential rains struck the Minxian county in China’s northwestern Gansu Province in May 2012.

MAM/MHB

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

Mike Adams
Infowars.com
May 16, 2013

Angelina Jolie’s announcement of undergoing a double mastectomy (surgically removing both breasts) even though she had no breast cancer is not the innocent, spontaneous, “heroic choice” that has been portrayed in the mainstream media. Natural News has learned it all coincides with a well-timed for-profit corporate P.R. campaignthat has been planned for months and just happens to coincide with the upcoming U.S. Supreme Court decision on the viability of the BRCA1 patent.

This is the investigation the mainstream media refuses to touch. Here, I explain the corporate financial ties, investors, mergers, human gene patents, lawsuits, medical fear mongering and the trillionsof dollars that are at stake here. If you pull back the curtain on this one, you find far more than an innocent looking woman exercising a “choice.” This is about protecting trillions in profits through the deployment of carefully-crafted public relations campaigns designed to manipulate the public opinion of women.

The signs were all there from the beginning of the scheme: Angelina Jolie’s highly polished and obviously corporate-written op-ed piece at the New York Times, the carefully-crafted talking points invoking “choice” as a politically-charged keyword, and the obvious coaching of even her husband Brad Pitt who carefully describes the entire experience using words like “stronger” and “pride” and “family.”

But the smoking gun is the fact that Angelina Jolie’s seemingly spontaneous announcement magically appeared on the cover of People Magazine this week – a magazine that is usually finalized for publication three weeksbefore it appears on newsstands. That cover, not surprisingly, uses the same language found in the NYT op-ed piece: “HER BRAVE CHOICE” and “This was the right thing to do.” The flowery, pro-choice language is not a coincidence.

What this proves is that Angelina’s Jolie’s announcement was a well-planned corporate P.R. campaignwith carefully-crafted messages designed to influence public opinion. But what could Jolie be seeking to influence?

…how about trillions of dollars in corporate profits?

Upcoming U.S. Supreme Court decision to rule on patent viability for BRCA1 gene

Angelina Jolie’s announcement and all its carefully-crafted language had four notable immediate impacts:

1) It caused women everywhere to be terrified of breast cancer through the publishing of false statistics that drove fear into the hearts of anyone with breasts. (See below for explanation.)

2) It caused women to rush out and seek BRCA1 gene testing procedures. These tests just happen to be patented by a for-profit corporationcalled “Myriad Genetics.” Because of this patent, BRCA1 tests can cost $3,000 — $4,000 each. The testing alone is a multi-billion-dollar market, but only if the patent is upheld in an upcoming Supreme Court decision (see below).

3) It caused the stock price of Myriad Genetics (MYGN) to skyrocket to a 52-week high. “Myriad’s stock closed up 3% Tuesday, following the publication of the New York Times op-ed,” wrote Marketwatch.com.

4) It drove public opinion to influence the upcoming U.S. Supreme Court decision to rule in favor of corporate ownership of human genes (see more below).

Women all over the world are being duped into supporting Angeline Jolie, having no idea that what she’s really doing is selling out women to the for-profit cancer industry. But to fully understand what’s happening, you have to dig deeper…

Myriad Genetics sees stock price skyrocket thanks to Jolie, and Obamacare will funnel billions their way

“Salt Lake City-based Myriad Genetics (MYGN) holds the patent on the test that determined the actress had an 87% chance of developing breast cancer, as well as the genes themselves,” wrote MarketWatch.com.

And that’s only the beginning. If the U.S. Supreme Court can be influenced to uphold Myriad’s patent, it could mean a trillion-dollar industryover just the next few years. Even more, Myriad Genetics is reportedly “ripe for mergers” according to the financial press, because it’s part of the super-hot human genome industry.

“The world’s largest maker of DNA testing and analysis tools, Life Technologies Corp. said that it is set to be acquired by Thermo Fisher Scientific for a record $13.6 billion,” writes MarketWatch.com. “A race that kicked into high gear more than 26 years ago is heating up, with foreign governments and corporations joining the U.S. in funding the quest to map all the human genomes. And even as the recent flurry of mergers and acquisitions in the genomics space has spurred returns, investors still have opportunities to profit from this multibillion-dollar industry.”

The higher Myriad’s stock price goes, the more profitable a merger becomes for its current owners. So Jolie’s P.R. stunt just happened to generate unknown millions of dollars in value for the very people who claim a patent monopoly over the breast cancer genes residing in the bodies of women. Coincidence? Hardly.

Obamacare mandates taxpayers pay for BRCA gene testing: yet another government handout to wealthy corporations

But here’s what’s even more crooked about all this: You know how Obama likes to talk “free market” but actually engages in so-called “crony capitalism” by handing out money to all his corporate buddies, Wall Street insiders and deep-pocketed campaign donors? Part of Obamacare – the “Affordable Care Act” – mandates that taxpayers pay for BRCA1 genetic testing!

Myriad Genetics, in other words, stands to receive a full-scale windfall of profits mandated by government and pushed into mainstream consciousness through a campaign of “medical terror” fronted by Angelina Jolie and the New York Times. Are you starting to see how this all fits together yet?

This is all one big coordinated corporate sellout of women, and it’s all being hidden by playing the “women’s power” card and using “choice” language to more easily manipulate women. Angelina Jolie, remember, is a key spokesperson for the United Nations, an organization already caught engaged in child sex slavery and drug running. Although Jolie obviously isn’t engage in that sort of behavior, her job is to covertly influence American womeninto supporting a carefully-planned, plotted and executed corporate profit campaign that turns women’s bodies into profits.

Here’s why the Supreme Court decision puts trillions of dollars at stake…

Details on the upcoming Supreme Court decision

The ACLU and the Public Patent Foundation filed a lawsuit in 2009, challenging the corporate ownership of human genes. Anyone who believes in women’s rights, human rights, civil rights or even the right to eat non-GMO foods should immediately agree that corporations should NOT be able to patent human genesand then use those patents to rake in billions of dollars in profits while stifling scientific research into those genes.

A question to all women reading this: Do you believe a corporation in Utah owns your body? If not, you should be opposed to corporate ownership of human genes. It also means you should oppose Angelina Jolie’s P.R. campaign because although she’s running a brilliant public relations campaign, behind the scenes her actions are feeding potentially trillions of dollars of profits directly into the for-profit human gene patenting industrythat denies human beings ownership over their own genetic code.

The ACLU explains the basics of its lawsuit against Myriad Genetics as follows:

On May 12, 2009, the ACLU and the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) filed a lawsuit charging that patents on two human genes associated with breast and ovarian cancer, BRCA1 and BRCA2, are unconstitutional and invalid. On November 30, 2012, the Supreme Court agreed to hear argument on the patentability of human genes. The ACLU argued the case before the U.S. Supreme Court on April 15, 2013. We expect a decision this summer.

On behalf of researchers, genetic counselors, women patients, cancer survivors, breast cancer and women’s health groups, and scientific associations representing 150,000 geneticists, pathologists, and laboratory professionals, we have argued that human genes cannot be patented because they are classic products of nature. The suit charges that the gene patents violate the First Amendment and stifle diagnostic testing and research that could lead to cures and that they limit women’s options regarding their medical care.

Got that? If the Supreme Court rules against Myriad Genetics, it will cause a multi-billion-dollar breast cancer genetic testing industry to collapse virtually overnight. This means a huge loss for not just Myriad, but also many other human gene corporations that wish to exploit the human body – including the bodies of women – for monopolistic profits. (All patents are government-granted monopolies.) Ultimately, trillions of dollars in corporate gene patents are at stake here.

Patenting human genes is huge business

Today, about 20 percent of your genes are already patentedby corporations and universities. As the ACLU explains, “A gene patent holder has the right to prevent anyone from studying, testing or even looking at a gene. As a result, scientific research and genetic testing has been delayed, limited or even shut down due to concerns about gene patents.”

This means that when corporations own patents on human genes, it stifles scientific researchwhile granting that corporation a monopoly over the “intellectual property” encoded in your own DNA! (How criminal is that? You decide…)

What this means is that if the Supreme Court rules against Myriad, it would set a precedent that would dismantle the entire human gene patenting industry, affecting trillions of dollars in future profits.

This, I believe, is the real reason behind Angelina Jolie’s announcement. It seems designed to invoke women’s emotional reactions and create a groundswell of support for corporate-owned genes, thereby handing these corporations a Supreme Court precedent that will ensure trillions in future profits. It’s a for-profit PR stunt that tries to trick women into supporting a corporate system of patents and monopolies that claims, right now, to own portions of the bodies of every woman living today.

While most media outlets have no clue about the patent issues at stake here, the Detroit Free Presstook notice, saying:

“The Hollywood star’s decision to get tested for a breast cancer gene mutation, undergo a double mastectomy and then write about it calls attention to a case now pending before the court. The justices have just weeks to decide if Myriad Genetics’ patent on the two genes that can identify an increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer is legal. Critics complain that the company’s monopoly leaves them as the sole source of the $4,000 tests needed to determine each woman’s risk.”

Lying with statistics: Jolie’s 87% risk exaggeration

There’s more to this story than just the patents on BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. Angelina Jolie is also using blatantly misleading statisticsto terrify women into thinking their breasts might kill them.

In the NYT op-ed piece, Jolie claims her doctor told her she has an “87% risk” of developing breast cancer. But what she didn’t tell you is that this number doesn’t apply to the entire population: it’s actually old dataderived almost exclusively from families that were previously documented to have very high risks of breast cancer to begin with.

A study published on the National Human Genome Research Institute website and conducted by scientists from the National Institutes of Health reveals that breast cancer risks associated with BRCA1 genes are significantly lowerthan what’s being hyped up by Jolie and the mainstream media.

In fact, in a large room of 600 women, only ONE will likely have a BRCA mutationin her genetic code. The actual incidence is 0.125 to 0.25 out of 100 women, or 1 in 400 to 1 in 800. I used 600 as the average of 400 and 800.

And out of that 1 in 600 women who has the mutation, her risk of breast cancer is only 56 percent, not 78 percent as claimed by Jolie. But 13 percent of women without the BRCA mutation get breast cancer anyway, according to this scientific research, so the increasedrisk is just 43 out of 100 women.

So what we’re really talking about here is 1 in 600 women having a BRCA gene mutation, then less than half of those getting cancer because of it. In other words, only about 1 in 1200 women will be affected by this

Yet thanks to people like Jolie and the fear-mongering mainstream media, women all across the nation have been terrified into believing their breasts might kill them and the best way to handle the problem is to cut them off!

This, my friends, is the essence of doomsday fear mongering. This issue affects less than one-tenth of one percent of women but is being riled up into a nationwide fear campaign that just happens to feed profits into the for-profit cancer diagnosis and treatment industry, not to mention the monopolistic human gene patenting cartels.

That’s the real story of what’s happening here. Don’t expect to read this in the New York Times.

Corporate media refuses to mention real prevention and treatment options

As part of the breast cancer fear mongering and treatment scam now being run across the mainstream media, nearly all media sources are prohibiting any mention of holistic or natural options for treatment or prevention.

Sure, the media talks about “options,” but all those options just happen to lead back to the for-profit cancer industry. As an example, read this story by ABC News, part of the lying mainstream media that misinforms women and pushes a corporate agenda:

If you do test positive for BRCA, you have options, and you don’t necessarily have to go the Jolie route. Some women choose not to have surgery. Instead, they increase cancer surveillance with imaging tests. These include regular mammograms to test for breast cancer, and regular pelvic sonograms and blood-tests to watch for ovarian cancer.

Nowhere in this article does ABC News mention ways to suppress the BRCA1 gene by, for example, eating raw cruciferous vegetables containing Indole-3-Carbinol (I3C), a potent anti-cancer nutrient that halts breast cancer in its tracks. Nowhere does ABC News mention vitamin D which prevents nearly 4 out of 5 cancersof all types, including breast cancer.

Nope, the “options” being pushed by mainstream media are nothing more than mammograms, surgery, radiation and chemotherapy – all owned and run by the for-profit cancer industry that feeds on women and exploits their bodies for profit.

Nor is their any discussion of the total scam of the “pink ribbons” cancer cure industry which is primarily focused on giving women cancer through “free mammograms.” As any scientist or physicist already knows, mammograms cause cancer because they emit ionizing radiation directly into the breast and heart tissues. Get enough mammograms done and sooner or later they will detect breast cancer because they caused it! To date, 1.3 million women have been harmed by mammography.

Thanks, Angelina, for keeping the wool pulled over the eyes of women everywhere while selling out to for-profit, monopolistic, corporate interests that incessantly seek to exploit women for profit.

Photo credit: PEOPLE Magazine cover, used under Fair Use for public commentary and education.

Mike Adams’ website is Natural News. This article was originally posted there.

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This article was posted: Thursday, May 16, 2013 at 4:54 pm

Tags: domestic news, health, healthcare, money

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This article originally appeared on : Infowars

Turkish protesters blame govt. for blasts

Relatives cry as pallbearers carry the coffin of Fehmi Karaca, 69, a shop owner killed in Saturdayâ„¢s bombings, for burial in Reyhanli, Turkey, Sunday, May 12, 2013.

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

Robert and Alissa Parker leave the Sandy Hook Volunteer Fire House in tears on December 14, 2012, after their daughter Emilie was killed in a mass shooting.

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

May 16, 2013
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Billionaires with an axe to grind, now is your time. Not since the days before a bumbling crew of would-be break-in artists set into motion the fabled Watergate scandal, leading to the first far-reaching restrictions on money in American politics, have you been so free to meddle. There is no limit to the amount of money you can give to elect your friends and allies to political office, to defeat those with whom you disagree, to shape or stunt or kill policy, and above all to influence the tone and content of political discussion in this country.

Today, politics is a rich man’s game. Look no further than the 2012 elections and that season’s biggest donor, 79-year-old casino mogul Sheldon Adelson. He and his wife, Miriam, shocked the political class by first giving $16.5 million in an effort to make Newt Gingrich the Republican presidential nominee. Once Gingrich exited the race, the Adelsons invested more than $30 million in electing Mitt Romney. They donated millions more to support GOP candidates running for the House and Senate, to block a pro-union measure in Michigan, and to bankroll the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other conservative stalwarts (which waged their own campaigns mostly to helpRepublican candidates for Congress). All told, the Adelsons donated $94 million during the 2012 cycle — nearly four times the previous record set by liberal financier George Soros. And that’s only the money we know about. When you add in so-called dark money, one estimate puts their total giving at closer to $150 million.

It was not one of Adelson’s better bets. Romney went down in flames; the Republicans failed to retake the Senate and conceded seats in the House; and the majority of candidates backed by Adelson-funded groups lost, too. But Adelson, who oozes chutzpah as only a gambling tycoon worth $26.5 billion could, is undeterred. Politics, he told the Wall Street Journal in his first post-election interview, is like poker: “I don’t cry when I lose. There’s always a new hand coming up.” He said he could double his 2012 giving in future elections. “I’ll spend that much and more,” he said. “Let’s cut any ambiguity.”

But simply tallying Adelson’s wins and losses — or the Koch brothers’, or George Soros’s, or any other mega-donors’ — misses the bigger point. What matters is that these wealthy funders were able to give so much money in the first place.

With the advent of super PACs and a growing reliance on secretly funded nonprofits, the very wealthy can pour their money into the political system with an ease that didn’t exist as recently as this moment in Barack Obama’s first term in office. For now at least, Sheldon Adelson is an extreme example, but he portends a future in which 1-percenters can flood the system with money in ways beyond the dreams of ordinary Americans. In the meantime, the traditional political parties, barred from taking all that limitless cash, seem to be sliding toward irrelevance. They are losing their grip on the political process, political observers say, leaving motivated millionaires and billionaires to handpick the candidates and the issues. “It’ll be wealthy people getting together and picking horses and riding those horses through a primary process and maybe upending the consensus of the party,” a Democratic strategist recently told me. “We’re in a whole new world.”

The Rise of the Super PAC

She needed something sexy, memorable. In all fairness, anything was an improvement on “independent expenditure-only political action committee.” Eliza Newlin Carney, one of D.C.’s trustiest scribes on the campaign money beat, didn’t want to type out that clunker day after day. She knew this was big news — the name mattered. Then it came to her:

This article originally appeared on : AlterNet

Moscow will make no “backstage” agreements on Syria in exchange for Western concessions on missile defense or any other disputed issues, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said.

“This is not serious. I think that those who try suggest that
indulge in wishful thinking,” Lavrov said in an interview with
Lebanon’s Al Mayadeen TV channel.

“Everyone knows well that Russia’s stance on a whole range of
crucial issues is not opportunistic,” the Russian top diplomat
emphasized.  

At the same time, he pointed out, this does not mean that Moscow’s
position on such issues is definitive.

“We defend only the things that are in the basis of modern world
order – the US Charter principles and other international legal
documents, and we insist on their fulfillment,” Lavrov said.
“We do not want and we will not put up with attempts to distort
reached agreements, particularly the legally binding ones,” he
underlined.

However, within the framework of these principles and agreements,
Moscow is ready to look for compromises, acceptable primarily for
the sides of the conflict.

Lavrov reiterated that Russia does not support President Bashar
Assad in the Syrian conflict. He explained that Moscow acts not
“for the sake of the regime or any person inside of at the top
of this regime” but for the sake of the Syrians. The minister
noted it was Russia’s aim to stop suffering and uphold the basic
principles of international law – such as national sovereignty,
territorial integrity and non-interference in internal affairs.

The fate of Assad is one of the main stumbling blocks in
international efforts to bring the two-year long civil war in Syria
to an end. While the US and other western powers insist the Syrian
leader should step down, Moscow maintains that it is up to Syrian
people to decide on that and that Assad’s resignation should not be
a precondition for peace negotiations.

A new round of international talks on Syria is expected to take
place in June. The fresh plans were announced by Lavrov and his
American counterpart John Kerry after their meeting in Moscow on
May 7. The conference will serve as a follow up to last year’s
gathering in Geneva that led to the drafting of a peace plan known
as the Geneva communiqué.

The joint initiative has been welcomed by Assad’s government and
international players such as the UK and France. Syria’s key
National Coalition opposition group is scheduled to meet in
Istanbul on May 23 to discuss the proposal.  

Lavrov noted that in Russia’s view, representatives of all the
Syrian opposition forces should take part in the talks. “It is
crucially important to know the unified opinion and position of all
the opponents of the Syrian government and a team of negotiators
which would represent all the opposition,” the diplomat
underlined.

“I wouldn’t exclude anyone [from the participation in the forum]
except for terrorists. Such as, for instance, the Al-Nusra Front
listed as terror group by the US. Its leaders openly say that they
get orders from Al-Qaeda,” the Russian minister noted. He
explained that when referring to the opposition “we talk about
political — even armed — opposition but with understanding that
there should be no place for terrorists at the negotiating
table.”  

In Moscow’s opinion Syria’s neighbors and other countries of the
region, including Jordan, Lebanon and Iran, should also take part
in the forum.

This article originally appeared on : RT

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says certain Western states are making efforts to limit the participants in an international peace conference on Syria and to possibly predetermine the outcome of the talks aimed at ending the two-year crisis in the Arab country.

“Among some of our Western colleagues, there is a desire to narrow the circle of external participants and begin the process from a very small group of countries in a framework which, in essence, would predetermine the negotiating teams, agenda, and maybe even the outcome of talks,” Lavrov said in an interview posted on the Foreign Ministryâ„¢s website on Thursday.

Lavrov said the Islamic Republic of Iran must participate in the conference that was proposed by Moscow and Washington last week.

The Islamic Republic has welcomed the proposal and expressed optimism that Tehran would be a part of the peace process.

Earlier this week, the top Russian diplomat accused the United States of seeking to increase the participation of countries which have been supporting foreign-backed militants in Syria.

Washington and Moscow renewed their calls for a political solution to the Syrian crisis last week. Lavrov and his US counterpart John Kerry also agreed in Moscow to hold an international peace conference to follow-up on the June 2012 Geneva communiqué, which outlines measures for a peaceful transition of power in Syria.

The June 2012 meeting on Syria was hosted by the United Nations in Geneva under former UN-Arab League special envoy to Syria Kofi Annan.

On Monday, the US and Britain said they had found common ground with Russia on how to proceed on Syria.

At a meeting in Washington, US President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron promised to make diplomatic efforts to find a political solution to the Syrian crisis.

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.

In an interview broadcast on Turkish television on April 5, 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.

GJH/MHB

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

Infowars.com
May 16, 2013

On top of everything else Congress is arguing about in the great Immigration Debate, now there’s a lawyer and a lawyer-wannabe who think we also need to include language to help protect the immigrant’s consumer rights once he becomes a legal U.S. citizen. It’s too much. Doesn’t anyone out there remember that these “undocumented citizens” are actually in our country illegally? By their own choice?

Huffington Post bloggers Joseph Sanderson and Norman I. Silber believe there looms on the horizon a “positive change” for the estimated 12 million Americans whose “immigration status is unauthorized.” (Sounds like they both got the AP memo about “illegal aliens,” right?) But they also believe that once these “Americans whose immigration status is unauthorized” become legal American citizens, they’re going to be plagued by consumer difficulties and we need to do everything within our power to help them make the transition as smoothly as possible.

“Congress therefore should look directly at the experiences faced in the everyday marketplace by those who are undocumented, including at their subjection to deceptive and abusive practices, discouragements from joining the mainstream economy, and the difficulties using consumer remedies without fear of deportation.”

For example, the gentlemen point out that undocumented immigrant consumers have a difficult time setting up bank accounts. They also can’t get credit cards or loans. And the “pathway to citizenship” requires lots of documents, forms and fees.

First, Sanderson and Silber want to know if it’s possible for Congress to include some special clause that will allow these fees to be “engineered to avoid punishing people for being poor, unbanked, and ineligible for decent credit terms?”

Could we possibly waive those fees or stretch them out over a lengthy period of time? Or maybe we could dip into the government coffers and set up some type of subsidy program, which the American taxpayers would surely be happy to pay for.

Next, Sanderson and Silber want Congress to address the problem of “inadequate professional advice and depredations by dishonest immigrations advisers” these undocumented citizens might come up against. What happens if they inadvertently hand their money to a scammer who promises to help them obtain legal citizenship and then disappears with their cash?

The two bloggers argue that “immigrants who fear being deported can’t be expected to exercise the right to protest violations of their consumer rights without fear of retaliation.”

Joseph Sanders byline says he’s a first-year law student at Yale. Norman I. Silber’s byline says he’s a Visiting Professor of Law at Yale. Surely both gentlemen understand that the terms “undocumented citizens,” “Americans whose immigration status is unauthorized”, “those who are undocumented” and “immigrants who fear being deported” all stand for the same thing — illegal immigrants. People who are in our country illegally, of their own free will.

If they were adults when they came here, they knew the laws, and they knew those laws would eventually affect their children. If they were brought here as children, then they have ample time to follow the laws before they’re in danger of being deported. Plenty of children who were brought here illegally have managed to gain legal status.

Granted, the laws may be confusing and convoluted, and it would be nice if the legal waters were easier to navigate. But isn’t it about time that everybody stopped, took a deep breath, and stopped listening to all of this rhetoric about how granting these illegal immigrants a pathway to citizenship will be good for the economy, and America is facing a shortage of workers, and we need “better, brighter” workers?

The simple fact is — these people, for whatever reason, are in this country illegally. They’re breaking the law.

If you, an American citizen, smuggled yourself into a foreign country without papers or a passport you’d automatically know you were committing a crime. You’d also be prepared to do whatever it took to become a legal citizen of that country or suffer the consequences. But you wouldn’t blame your problems on that country and you wouldn’t expect them to take care of your problems for you.

Congress has enough on their plate trying to figure out how to smooth out the pathway to citizenship and protect our borders at the same time. Do we really need to spend more time and money trying to protect the consumer rights of people who have no respect for our laws?

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This article was posted: Thursday, May 16, 2013 at 4:06 pm

Tags: domestic news

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This article originally appeared on : Infowars

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_problem_with_obamas_second_term_20130516/

Posted on May 16, 2013

This article originally appeared on : TruthDig

Even after cutting off the head of al-Qaeda, the United States Department of Defense doesn’t believe an end to the war on terror is in sight. On Thursday, one Pentagon official predicted the mission against al-Qaeda could continue for another two decades.

Speaking to the Senate Armed Services early Thursday, Assistant
Secretary of Defense for Special Operations Michael Sheehan said
the Pentagon has no plans to pull out of its almost 12-year-old war
overseas.

When asked for his take on how long the war on terror could go
on for, Sheehan told lawmakers, “At least 10 to 20
years.”

According to US President Barack Obama, the last combat troops
will move out of Afghanistan in 2014. If remarks from Sheehan and
others are at all accurate, though, in reality the war could last
through the 2030s.

Sheehan was being grilled by members of the Senate committee on
Thursday over not just the future of the war, but what rules are in
play to continue the operation. Congress granted then-President
George W. Bush the power to go after al-Qaeda in 2001 by signing
the Authorization to Use Military Force, a legislation that
essentially gave the go-ahead to use America’s might by any means
necessary to avenge the attacks of 9/11. Nearly 13 years later,
though, some members of the Senate saw that the overly broad powers
extended to the commander-in-chief through the AUMF are being used
to justify a widening war that now has soldiers targeting
insurgents in venue like Yemen and Somalia.

The scope of America’s counterterrorism program, Sheehan said,
stretches “from Boston to the FATA,” referring to the region
of Pakistan considered a hotbed of terrorism. Because of that
widening arena, some senators said it’s time to rewrite the
law.

“It has spread throughout North Africa, throughout the
Maghreb,” Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) said during the
hearing. “The situation’s changed dramatically.

But while some lawmakers suggested it was time to revise the
AUMF, Pentagon officials said the 2012 National Defense
Authorization Act updated the law to grant the president power not
just to target overseas terrorists, but suspects believed to be
associated forces.

Robert Taylor, the acting general counsel of the Department of
Defense, said that the NDAA’s update to the Bush-era bill means
that even suspects born after the September 11 attacks could be
targeted as warriors in the war on terror.

“As long as they become an associated force under the legal
standard that was set out,” Taylor testified, according to
Wired’s Spencer Ackermnn.

Sen. Angus King, an Independent from Maine, suggested the
Pentagon was uninterested in changing the AUMF because they are
using it to justify a war that wouldn’t otherwise be legal.

“This is the most disturbing hearing I’ve been to in some
time,” King said. “You guys have rewritten the Constitution
today.”

“You guys have invented this term, associated forces, that’s
nowhere in this document,” King said. “It’s the
justification for everything, and it renders the war powers of
Congress null and void.”

“I assume [the AUMF] does suit you well because you’re
reading it to fit everything, and it doesn’t, the general rule of
war applies,” King said.

Even McCain, who has been by and large considered a hawkish
member of the Senate, spoke out against the Pentagon’s reluctance
to re-write a law that they are using to justify a war that could
take US troops to all corners of the globe for the unforeseeable
future.

“For you to come here and say, ‘We don’t need to change it,’
I think, is disturbing,” McCain said.

Before stepping down as secretary of defense, former Pentagon
chief Leon Panetta said in late 2011, “We’re winning this very
tough conflict.” Osama bin Laden was executed five months
later, and the Central Intelligence Agency and DoD have
continuously utilized strikes to weaken al-Qaeda substantially
since.

This article originally appeared on : RT

Part I

5. The calculations of Eric Sprott: the theft of gold from central banks continues

Erik Sprott, a billionaire and well-known investor with 35-years of experience working in financial markets and a great connoisseur of the intricacies of the gold trade, believes that official statistics clearly do not fully take into account the actual demand for gold on the world market (typically estimated to be between 4,000 and 4,500 tonnes per year). According to his calculations, the actual demand for this precious metal over the last decade was an average of 2,300 tonnes higher than the official figures cited by the World Gold Council and other reputable organisations8. The supply of gold through new mining operations and scrap gold is clearly not enough to cover the world’s actual gold demand. Some kind of secret source of gold exists which is covering an unaccounted-for demand of approximately 2,300 tonnes per year. According to Eric Sprott, the volumes of gold coming onto the market from the vaults of central banks are not enough. Since the beginning of the 21st century, additional supplies have been provided by the central banks of economically developed countries — the US, Western Europe, Japan — as well as international organisations with their own gold reserves — the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank. In the first decade of the 21st century, the total gold reserves of these central banks and international organisations, according to official figures, have remained very much unaltered and stand at a level of 23,000 tonnes.

If Sprott is correct, then it turns out that the gold reserves of central banks in economically developed countries have only been available to meet the additional unaccounted-for demand for ten years. So in theory, by around 2011, the vaults of central banks in countries that are part of the «golden billion» zone should have been empty. But it is now already 2013. Moreover, it is worth remembering that these vaults were already half-empty by the beginning of this century, which follows from Veneroso’s estimates in Part 1. As early as 1998, almost half the official gold reserves of all the central banks had «gone walking» beyond the central banks’ walls. So, by way of example, of the 23,000 tonnes of official reserves in the central banks of the «golden billion» zone in 2001, the vaults only actually contained 11,500 tonnes. At best, this would only be enough gold to cover the additional unaccounted-for demand for five years. So the gold vaults of the «golden billion» should have been empty by 2006, not 2011. It is some kind of mysticism!

6. They are not only stealing their own gold, but other people’s as well

The mysticism disappears if we remember that the central banks of certain countries are not only using their vaults to store gold listed on their balance sheets, but also gold belonging to foreigners (primarily to the central banks and treasuries of other countries). However, their storage services are also used by private structures, first and foremost by major banks. In connection with the story of Germany’s plans to repatriate their gold from other countries, we found out that of the total volume of this country’s official reserves, equalling approximately 3,400 tonnes, more than two thirds is held outside of the country. Exactly 1,536 tonnes are in the vaults of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 374 tonnes are in the vaults of the Bank of France and 450 tonnes in the vaults of the Bank of England.

We will now attempt to look at the issue of foreign gold from the other side — from the point of view of those countries playing the role of «guardians» or «storekeepers». There are a few of these major «guardians» in the world. These are the same old USA, Great Britain, France and Switzerland. Moreover, in the last country in this list, the role of «guardian» is not just played by the central bank (the National Bank of Switzerland), since Switzerland is also home to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). In this short list, the lion’s share of all foreign gold is accounted for by two countries — the USA and Great Britain (see the table below).

Gold reserves held in the USA and Great Britain (as of 1 October 2012, tonnes)

In order to continue their game with gold, the monetary authorities of the «golden billion» countries needed to dive their hand not just into their own reserves of the precious metal, but also the gold reserves entrusted to them by other countries. It is not difficult to work out that the foreign gold in the vaults of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Bank of England would be enough to cover the additional unaccounted-for demand for gold to the tune of 2,300 tonnes for approximately five years. Of course, the gold reserves of foreign countries held in Switzerland, Canada and Australia still need to be taken into account. It is entirely possible that the central banks of a number of countries outside of the «golden billion» might be involved in the gold games being played by the monetary authorities of the «golden billion» countries on a voluntary-compulsory basis. Taking into account these reserves of the precious metal, the central banks’ gold games might last for another one or two years. This is exactly the opinion of Eric Sprott and a number of other gold experts.The USA and Great Britain, in the vaults of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Bank of England, are holding more than 11,000 tonnes of foreign gold. It is remarkable that in Great Britain there is in excess of 16 times more foreign gold than own gold, while in the USA, foreign gold makes up 76 percent in relation to the country’s own gold reserves. The Bank of England holds the gold of various countries in the British Commonwealth (Australia, Canada, India etc.). Today, the Bank of England plays a major role not just for countries in the Commonwealth, but also for countries in continental Europe. Austria, for example, holds 80 percent of its gold reserves in the Bank of England, Holland holds 18 percent and Germany holds 13 percent. There are also clients from other countries. The Central Bank of Mexico, for example, holds 95 percent of its gold reserves in the Bank of England. Organisations called bullion banks (private banks that deal with physical gold bullion) also put their gold in the Bank of England. Part of the foreign gold in the Bank of England is held on the basis of storage contracts, with foreign clients paying for the service. Part of the gold is held in deposit accounts, on which interest is charged.

7. The «gold game» may come to an end as early as tomorrow

The «moment of truth» may come even earlier than Sprott predicts. Why? Because I believe that in his calculations, he does not take into account, or underestimates, certain confounding moments linked with both supply and demand on the world gold market.

The first moment. China’s demand for gold is growing rapidly. The growth rate of gold imports into China is unprecedentedly high. If the import of gold into China through Hong Kong (according to the official statistics of the latter) equalled 45 tonnes in 2009, then in 2011 it amounted to 431 tonnes and in 2012 exceeded 834 tonnes. As part of its gold policy, China intends to further step up its buying of gold on the world’s markets. China is buying up gold to meet the growing demands of the jewellery industry, growing investment demand and to build up state reserves. Sprott took the «Chinese factor» into accounts in his calculations, but somewhat underestimated it.

The second moment. After the first wave of the financial crisis came to an end, a number of central banks began actively buying up gold on the world market. Beginning in 2009, central banks around the world turned en masse from net sellers of gold to net buyers of gold for the first time in two or more decades. In 2011, net sales of gold by the world’s central banks amounted to 430 tonnes, in 2012, according to preliminary estimates, they may exceed 500 tonnes. Hiding behind these average figures is the vigorous activity of central banks in countries like Mexico (net sales of 98.9 tonnes in 2011), Russia (94.4 tonnes), Turkey (79.3 tonnes), Thailand (52.9 tonnes), the Republic of Korea (40.1 tonnes) and Kazakhstan (14.9 tonnes) to buy up gold. Although the Central Bank of the Republic of China has not changed the size of its gold reserves since 2009, it is nevertheless known that the country is one of the main buyers of gold on the world market. Official Chinese statistics are camouflaging the activities of the Central Bank of the Republic of China.

The third moment. Erik Sprott draws attention to this himself in his latest publications. It refers to the sharp decrease in the supply of gold in the form of scrap metal. On average, during the first decade of the 21st century, the size of this supply amounted to 1,700 tonnes, but this has now been cut in half. As a result, the average annual supply of gold has fallen to 850 tonnes.

The fourth moment. This is a question of the real demands or plans of a number of countries around the world to repatriate official gold reserves from abroad. Germany is already in discussions for the return of its gold from the USA, England and France (a total of 2,360 tonnes). The Netherlands, Switzerland, Ecuador and Azerbaijan have also started preparations for the return of their gold from abroad. The campaign to get gold home could turn into a panic that will seize tens of countries (according to certain information, there is gold belonging to 60 countries in the vaults of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York alone)…

It is therefore possible to argue that a final clearing out of the vaults of central banks in countries that are part of the «golden billion» zone is currently under way. The gold could run out at any moment. Maybe it already has.One of the signs that this is the case is the increasingly frequent scandals that keep flaring up about the so-called «tungsten gold». There is strong suspicion that it was not «invented» by the Chinese (as certain media are alleging), but by the real owners of the «golden billion’s» central banks. It is difficult to imagine what else these owners can come up with to maintain the illusion that there is still gold in the vaults of central banks. A scandal is brewing, and it is going to have global economic and political consequences.

This article originally appeared on : Global Research

The Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei has called on Iranians to turn out massively in the June 14 presidential election in a bid to deal a telling blow to enemies of Iran.

The Leader said in a speech on Wednesday that the Iranians should vote for a pious and revolutionary presidential candidate.

Å“In short, the main criterion should be this: Those whose efforts are directed at preserving the dignity of the country and its march towards the realization of the goals of the revolution,” Ayatollah Khamenei stated.

Å“[The next president] should be firm and determined. He should trust in God and keep himself protected by the remembrance of God and then enter the race,” the Leader noted.

Ayatollah Khamenei also called on the top overseeing body Guardian Council to vet presidential hopefuls for their qualifications based on the bodyâ„¢s constitutional responsibility.

A total of 686 individuals have signed up for the presidential race. They will be vetted by the Guardian Council, which is a 12-member body consisting of six jurists and six theologians, who in addition to vetting hopefuls are tasked with confirming the election results.

The Guardian Council has until May 21 to announce the final list of candidates.

KA/HN

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

Iranâ„¢s former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani waves to photographers after his registration for the June 14 presidential election at the Interior Ministry in Tehran on May 11, 2013.

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

Oil tankers are seen waiting to refill in the water off the Zawiya Refinery, some 40 kilometers west of Tripoli, on October 27, 2011.

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

Vermont is about to become the third US state to legalize doctor-assisted suicide. A bill passed by the state legislature will allow physicians to prescribe lethal drugs to terminally ill patients that want to end their life.

State lawmakers on Monday approved the bill, which
is now awaiting the signature of Gov. Peter Shumlin, who has
already pledged he would sign it. Legalizing assisted suicide
“gives Vermonters who are suffering from a terminal illness and
anticipating excruciating pain peace of mind in knowing that this
is an option,” Shumlin told the Wall Street Journal.

Physician-assisted suicide is already legal in Oregon and
Washington, where it was approved through general elections and
enacted in 1997 and 2009, respectively. A similar bill failed to
garner enough voter support to pass in Massachusetts last November,
and was defeated 51 percent to 49 percent. Vermont is the first US
state to pass such a measure through the legislative assembly.

Vermont’s legislation will let anyone over the age of 18 with an
“incurable and irreversible disease” and a maximum of six
months to live to get a prescription for lethal drugs. The measure
requires two doctors to make the medical determination whether or
not a patient qualifies for assisted suicide. The patient must also
be capable of self-administering drugs, which would be difficult in
the rare instances in which someone is fully paralyzed.

In order to obtain the lethal drugs, a terminally ill patient
must make written and oral requests to the prescribing physician
and wait at least 48 hours before receiving the drugs. The requests
would need to be witnessed by two “disinterested” individuals,
which the bill defines as anyone that is not related to the
patient, doctors or employees of the healthcare facility. Doctors
will not be obliged to help the patient with his or her
suicide.

The state of Vermont has held internal debates on
doctor-assisted suicide for about a decade, and while the decision
might influence other states, Shumlin indicated that not every
legislature has worked on it as long as his.

“We’ve had a very respectful, dignified conversation about a
difficult issue where there are strongly held beliefs on both
sides,” he told Politico.

Vermont’s House passed the bill 75-65, after the Senate’s
passage last week, but some critics and religious institutions have
starkly criticized it. 

“This, in our opinion, is a terrible thing to have happen to
our state… because it sort of sanctions suicide as a way of dealing
with many end-of-life health care issues,” Gerald McMurray, a
board member at True Dignity Vermont, told Politico. The
organization describes itself as a citizen-led, grassroots
initiative in opposition to assisted suicide in Vermont.

The Roman Catholic Dioceses of Burlington has also called on
Vermont residents to urge the bill’s defeat before lawmakers voted
on it Monday.

“Physician-assisted suicide will forever transform the role
of physician from the one who preserves life to one who takes
life,” the dioceses told the WSJ.

But for the governor, the legislature’s passage of the bill is a
victory that both he and his 80-year-old mother are
celebrating.

“For me, it’s watching my own parents grow older and them
begging me… to ensure that they grow older in a state where they
have some peace of mind that if they have a terminal illness that
is extraordinarily painful, they have this option,” Shumlin
told Politico.

Bills legalizing physician-assisted suicide have also been
introduced in Connecticut, Hawaii, Montana, New Hampshire, New
Jersey, and Kansas.

This article originally appeared on : RT

US President Barack Obama and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan hold a joint press conference at the White House in Washington, May 16, 2013.

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
May 16, 2013

The police state brain trust — connected at the hip to the CIA — has merged with Homeland Security. “Science Applications International Corp. is joining the roster of companies involved in a program to protect U.S. infrastructure against cyber threats,” the UPI reports today. “SAIC said it has signed a memorandum of agreement with Homeland Security on joining the initiative. Northrop Grumman announced its participation earlier this week and that it is starting the security accreditation process which is required for the Homeland Security program.”

“SAIC… is the invisible hand behind a huge portion of the national security state — the one sector of the government whose funds are limitless and whose continued growth is assured every time a politician utters the word ‘terrorism,’” Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele wrote for Vantiy Fair in 2007.

The shadowy intelligence contractor’s “past and present board members are a who’s who of vested military brass, high-level intelligence operatives and politicians,” writes Pro Liberty. Its shares a close relationship with the CIA and — along with Booz Hamilton and Lockheed Martin — dominates the private intelligence industry. Its largest customer is the NSA. SAIC’s relationship with the super-secret signals intelligence agency is described as symbiotic. It plays a key role in the war on terror and operates many of the Predator drones used in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

During the reign of the Bush neocons under the aegis of a manufactured war on terror, SAIC — along with AT&T, Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Verizon Communications, Northrop Grumman, L-3 Communications, CACI International and many others — fashioned the high-tech police state now going into place. It is estimated that “some 70% of the personnel employed by U.S. intelligence agencies are now private contractors holding top secret and above security clearances,” Tom Burghardt wrote in 2008.

SAIC’s expertise and its involvement in the Department of Homeland Security’s misnamed “cyber security” operation is particularly worrisome now that the Obama administration has authorized “a new government program involving the interception of communications on Internet service providers, including AT&T–one of the key players in the NSA warrantless wiretapping program,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation noted last month. The initiative eschews the Fourth Amendment and provides transnational telecoms with immunity from prosecution for crimes against the Constitution and the republic.

The secretive and largely covert high-tech surveillance state apparatus was never intended for the likes of Osama bin Laden. It was built for the American people who are considered the real enemies of the national security state. This fact was underscored by former NSA crypto-mathematician and whistleblower William Binney. In 2012, Binney said the high-tech surveillance state now going online is not about foreign terrorists. It is about Americans “who could be a threat to national security” as defined by a centralized federal government. “Even if they think they aren’t doing something wrong, if their position on something is against what the administration has, then they could easily become a target,” Binney warned.

In March, we quoted Richard Davis, the director of the Arkansas State Fusion Center, who said the fusion center in Little Rock does not waste its time surveilling al-Qaeda and other supposed foreign terror threats. “We focus [on] domestic terrorism and certain groups that are anti-government. We want to kind of take a look at that and receive that information.”

Exploiting the government ginned-up ruse of cyber security, the NSA constructed its Utah Data Center near Bluffdale. Reports suggest the facility will store 5 zettabytes of data, the equivalent storage capacity of over three hundred billion iPhone 5s. NSA General Keith Alexander assured the public “we don’t hold data on U.S. citizens” and that the NSA staff “take protecting your civil liberties and privacy as the most important thing that they do, and securing this nation,” ostensibly from phantom terrorists and rogue hackers who dominate the government’s incessant propaganda campaign.

In April, the Republican-controlled House approved the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). The White House claims it will veto the bill “unless more protections for privacy and civil liberties are added,” Fox News reports today. This supposed reluctance by the Obama administration is a ruse, of course. It is nothing more than an effort to persuade Americans and Congress that the federal government is protecting the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In fact, Obama has signed an executive order directing “government officials to set voluntary standards to reduce cybersecurity risk and offer incentives to private companies to adopt them.”

Now that SAIC and the defense industry are working hand-in-hand with Homeland Security and the Pentagon to spy on the American people, we can expect finishing touches to be put on the national security state’s surveillance grid. It will rival by leaps and bounds anything previously imagined or accomplished under COINTELPRO and concurrent illegal operations by the CIA (including Operation CHAOS) and military intelligence.

A technologically advanced Stasi apparatus is designed for 24/7 surveillance of political enemies opposed to a worldwide authoritarian super-state. Its purpose is to reduce resistance to zero and ferret out, persecute, disappear and eliminate enemies of the state.

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This article was posted: Thursday, May 16, 2013 at 3:22 pm

Tags: big brother, domestic news, domestic spying, police state, technology

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This article originally appeared on : Infowars

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Left in legal limbo, desperation continues to drive the Guantanamo hunger strike on its 100th day. Facing a chronic lack of political will from Washington, the fate of the prisoners remains ambiguous, investigative journalist Andy Worthington argues.

On Thursday the number of Guantanamo’s 166 prisoners now taking
part in the mass hunger strike reached 102. Thirty of the detainees
are being force-fed, and three are being observed in the detainee
hospital.

Follow RT’s
day-by-day timeline of the Gitmo hunger strike.

In the eleven and a half years that the prisoners have been held
in the detention camp, some 90 per cent of them have not been
charged with a crime. That, coupled with the fact that many of the
detainees were already cleared for release but have faced stiff
resistance from Congress and equivocation from the White House, has
forced the prisoners to risk life and health to be heard,
Worthington told RT.

RT: You’ve been gathering information on the inmates –
What can you tell us about the conditions for them now.

Andy Worthington: Well the conditions for them are terrible in
the sense that they have literally been abandoned by all three
branches of the United States government. So since President Obama
failed to keep his promise to close the prison within a year — that
was in January 2010 — they have been unable to see any future for
themselves apart from staying in Guantanamo forever. And what
underpins the horror of all of this is that half of these men were
cleared by an interagency task force which the president himself
established. But he then imposed a ban on releasing two-thirds of
them because they’re Yeminis after a failed bomb plot in Christmas
2009. And the rest of the men, in fact all of the men have had
their release blocked or made extremely difficult by Congress.

So it’s become a game of political football, cynically I think
lawmakers are preventing prisoners from being released and the
president himself has been unwilling to expend political capital on
an issue that isn’t popular enough with the voters. So it’s taken
the hunger strike for the prisoners to get noticed.

RT: These men are now taking desperate measures, but
we’ve seen hunger strikes there before. So will this one have any
significant impact?

AW: Well, I think it has to because it’s such a long time
the prison has been open. It’s not as though anyone legitimately is
claiming that there is any reason [for most of] these men to be
held apart from the fact that it’s proven difficult to close the
facility down and to release the majority of them. So I think the
pressing question is: how is the administration going to go about
particularly resolving the issue of the prisoners that its task
force said the US no longer wanted to hold. Those men have to be
released, and there have been good signs this week from [Attorney
General] Eric Holder saying, following what President Obama said
two weeks ago, that they are looking to appoint someone to oversee
the Guantanamo issue and yesterday hinting that this ban on the
Yeminis, which officials reinforced just a few weeks ago, by saying
that maybe they are thinking of lifting the ban. They have to lift
the ban. It’s absolutely critical that these 56 Yeminis are sent
home.

RT: And even Hillary Clinton said yesterday that the 86
who are being held without charge should be released, so in effect
there could be a turn of the tide. At the same time, let’s
concentrate on conditions for those prisoners at the moment,
because it seems that they are getting worse and that the
authorities there are really putting further pressure on them.
That’s according to reports from the prisoners themselves.

AW: Absolutely. I agree with all of the experts who find the
force feeding of prisoners deplorable, but that said, there really
is no way the United States government is going to allow prisoners
to die at Guantanamo if they can help it, whether they should be
allowing them to or not.

RT: So what are the consequences if the prisoners die?
Would that really be a turning point if that did happen?

AW: Well, I think the turning point that needs to happen is the
political turning point. You know, the reason the men are doing
this is because they are in despair. The reason they are doing this
is because half of them were told they are going home and haven’t
gone anywhere. So it needs resolving on that basis. As soon as
there is motion on that, I suspect that the repercussions in the
prison will bring that issue down a little bit. At the moment it
seems to be very much [that] the prison is a kind of terrible
bubble within which the authorities have been trying to regain the
upper hand over the prisoners and have resorted to isolating them,
which is a terrible thing for these men who are already despairing,
and having to force feed them in this manner. If the politics takes
the lead, we’ll actually see some improvement.

RT: If politics takes the lead and let’s say the prison
is closed down, won’t we see another one opening up in its
place?

AW: I don’t think we’re close to seeing this one close down.
We have to get the 86 cleared prisoners released. We then have 80
men left at Guantanamo. Some of these men are supposed to face
trial, those of course have been very, very slow in happening and
46 of them were designated for indefinite detention without charge
or trial by President Obama in an executive order two years ago.
Now at the time, the only thing that made this notion even vaguely
palatable to lawyers and human rights groups was that he promised
there would be periodic reviews of these men’s cases to establish
whether they remain a threat. Those reviews haven’t happened at
all, so they need to happen, and there needs to be a genuine,
objective analysis of quite how many really dangerous prisoners
there are or ever have been in Guantanamo, and these people must be
tried. Everything that we’ve seen over the years, and these are
reports from the inside, suggest that this is no more than a few
dozen of the 166 men who are still being held.

This article originally appeared on : RT

Iranian presidential hopeful Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf has underscored the importance of a presidentâ„¢s adherence to the law and constitutional principles.

Å“The elected president who registers and takes oath [of office] in accordance with the constitution should not circumvent the law. However, he should oblige himself to fully observe the constitution as [something which has] the final say,” Qalibaf said on Thursday, speaking in the Iranian western city of Sanandaj.

Qalibaf underlined the need for promotion of social and economic justice in all parts of the country, adding, Å“In distribution of social opportunities, all religions, tendencies and tastes should be [treated as] equal and no group should have priority over the others.”

The presidential hopeful, who is currently the mayor of Tehran, also noted that he does not make empty promises which he will not be able to fulfill.

Qalibaf is a member of the Coalition of Three, which also comprises Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel, a prominent lawmaker, and Ali-Akbar Velayati, a senior advisor to Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei.

The coalition will pick one of its members with the highest approval rating as its nominee for the June 14th election.

A total of 686 individuals signed up for the race during the registration period, which began on Tuesday March 7 at Iranâ„¢s Interior Ministry and ended on Saturday March 11.

The president of Iran is elected for a four-year term in a national election, and the Guardian Council vets the hopefuls, approving or not approving them for official candidacy.

ASH/HN

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_false_god_of_narrative_20130516/

Posted on May 16, 2013

This article originally appeared on : TruthDig

By Dave Johnson

You will be hearing a lot about the upcoming Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. TPP’s negotiations are being held in secret with details kept secret even from our Congress. But giant corporations are in the loop.

TPP is a “trade” agreement between several Pacific-rim countries that is actually about much more than just trade. It will be sold as a trade agreement (because everyone knows that “trade” is good) but much of it appears to be (from what we know) a corporate end-run around things We the People want to do to reign in the giant corporations – like Wall Street regulation, environmental regulation and corporate taxation.

One-Sided Process

The TPP process appears to be set up to push corporate interests over other interests. The TPP is being negotiated in secret, so what we know about it comes from leaked documents. Even our Congress is being kept out of the loop. But 600 corporate representatives are in the loop while representatives of groups that protect working people, human, political and civil rights and our environment are largely not in the loop.

This one-sided participation unfortunately indicates that the interests of giant corporations are likely to override the interests of working people and those who want to protect non-corporate interests. Otherwise there would be more representation by representatives of organizations representing these concerns, and greater transparency into the process.

TPP Is A Very, Very Big Deal

The coming TPP is a very, very big deal. If it is agreed to by the Senate and signed by the President it will override American laws in many areas. We won’t be allowed to enforce laws and regulations that impede the “rights” granted to big corporations under this agreement, and it will be very hard to rescind the agreement once signed, no matter how much damage might result. Just look at how NAFTA, China’s entry into the WTO and other agreements are causing huge trade deficits and sending jobs, factories and industries out of the country while dramatically increasing income and wealth inequality.

Making the TPP work for We, the People should be up there on our “litmus test” of things we require of our elected officials – right along with pledging no cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

TPP Not Just Trade

It looks like TPP will go way beyond what most of us would consider to be in a normal “trade” agreement. TPP – negotiated by giant corporate interests – appears set to give giant corporations a veto over a country’s ability to set many laws and regulations that are designed to reign in those corporations. Quelle surprise!

Leaked documents appear to show that negotiators are writing provisions that will set rules that are binding on Congress and our state legislatures tell us what laws and regulations our own country can pass or enforce in areas like:

• intellectual property rights like patents and copyrights,
• government procurement like Buy American which would be banned,
• investment and land use,
• service-sector regulation,
• food and product safety,
• corporate competition,
• labor,
• even environmental standards.
• Leaks show that TPP even limits government regulation of financial services!

Dean Baker explains that non-trade items like patents in an agreement like TPP can have a huge effect on us by dramatically increasing prices of items like pharmaceuticals, in Political Corruption and the “Free Trade” Racket,

Tariffs and quotas might raise the price of various items by 20 or 30 percent. By contrast, patent and copyright protection is likely to raise the price of protected items 2,000 percent or even 20,000 percent above the free market price. Drugs that would sell for a few dollars per prescription in a free market would sell for hundreds or even thousands of dollars when the government gives a drug company a patent monopoly.

Again: There are over 600 corporate representatives participating in the TPP process, but few if any representatives of human rights, environmental, civil rights or worker rights organizations. And the resulting agreement will be binding on governments! The corporate powers apparently granted in the TPP can override domestic laws on environmental health and safety, and labor and citizens’ rights. If this agreement becomes law multinationals can claim that those domestic laws and regulations hamper free trade and can sue for millions of dollars in “damages.”

Bad History Of Trade Agreements Harming Economy, Democracy

Our one-sided, corporate-negotiated trade agreements have dramatically enriched Wall Street and a few CEOs. But the devastation that is apparent in many regions of our country along with the hollowing out of our middle class tells the real story of what these agreements can do to an economy. For example, we all know what has happened since China was allowed to enter the WTO. In the 2000s we lost 50,000+ factories and at least 6 million jobs just to China. Because of the massive cost of building a manufacturing infrastructure it will be very difficult to restore even key industries. But the 1% who pushed this made out extremely well.

Even the just-signed Korea Free Trade agreement is already hurting our economy. It has increased the trade deficit, increased imports and decreased exports! A recently-released fact sheet from Public Citizen looks at the damage our economy is already experiencing from the Korea, Panama and Columbia agreements. The section on Korea tells the story: exports to Korea down 10%, trade deficit up 37%:

“One year into the Korea FTA, U.S. goods exports to Korea have declined by 10 percent (a $4.2billion decrease) in comparison to the year before FTA implementation. U.S. meat producers lost a combined $206 million in beef, pork and poultry exports in the first year of the Korea FTA relative to the year before FTA implementation, while the U.S. auto and auto parts industries suffered a 16 percent increase in the U.S. auto trade deficit with Korea. Overall, the U.S. trade deficit with Korea has swelled 37 percent under the FTA.”

Just one of many examples in the fact sheet:

• Imports of cars and auto parts from Korea have soared 15 percent (more than $2.5 billion) under the FTA, driving a 16 percent increase in the U.S. trade deficit with Korea in autos and auto parts relative to the year before FTA implementation.

Also from the fact sheet – loss of 12,000 jobs:

“The combined U.S. trade deficit with Korea, Colombia and Panama under the FTAs has jumped 11percent above pre-FTA levels for the same months as exports to Korea have declined and imports from Korea and Panama have risen substantially. Using the same ratio employed by the Obama administration, this $2.3 billion combined trade deficit expansion implies the net loss of more than 12,000 U.S. jobs in just the first several months of the new FTAs.”

And that’s just the recent Korea agreement, and in just a few months since it went into effect.

Trade Can Be Good Or Bad, Depending…

No question about it, a good trade deal can boost exports, boost the economy, boost employment … And of course this promise is how these trade deals are sold to us.

But the bad trade deals we have gotten ourselves into have instead boosted the trade deficit, boosted unemployment, boosted income and wealth inequality, boosted the loss of factories and industries, boosted the hollowing-out of our middle class and boosted the domination of our politics by the large corporate interests.

All trade deals have winners and losers. NAFTA and letting China into the WTO were obviously big winners for Wall Street, the 1%ers, and their giant multinational corporations. But these and similar trade deals helped break the back of the unions, the middle class and our economy – especially manufacturing and its supply chains. The result of these changes has been that all of the gains from our economy as productivity increases have increasingly gone to fewer and fewer people who are higher and higher up the food chain.

We need an open, democratic process that ensures that We, the People are the winners from our trade deals.

Needed Fixes

The TPP negotiations should not just be negotiated to serve the interests of giant multinational corporations. The process should be opened up to the public and democracy, so people and groups with a huge stake in the outcome – like labor unions, environmental organizations, human rights groups and consumer organizations – can participate. With only corporate participation, only corporate interests will be served. Funny how that works, isn’t it?

The process of democracy should not be subverted by a “fast track” rule that keeps our Congress from fully considering the implications and effects of such an agreement. “Fast track” just extends the lack of citizen involvement in negotiations into a lack of citizen involvement in the finalization!

Last June 130 members of the Congress wrote a letter to the US Trade Representative asking for transparency in the TPP negotiations and consultation with members of Congress. In addition,more than 400 organizations have asked Congress to replace the “Fast Track” system that limits Congress’ (democracy’s) ability to get involved in the process, and to call for a new direction for TPP as well as other trade agreements.

We also need strong tests and irrevocable language about withdrawing from the agreement if it is harming our economy, environment, smaller businesses, tax base and/or our working people.

TPP and all future trade deals must include clear and enforceable rules covering currency manipulation and other ways that countries game the system.

Elizabeth Warren Drives It Home

Watch Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) asking about trends in trading patterns with Korea since the new “free trade” treaty went into effect, and about how TPP looks like an end run around Wall Street regulation.

Get Involved

The next round of TPP talks will be held May 15-24 in Lima, Peru. It is time to start making sure that your voice is heard in D.C. Trade deals can lift people on both sides of trade borders. But only if a true open and democratic process is used to reach agreement. Otherwise these agreements will continue to be gamed to enrich the few at the expense of the many.

One of the best comprehensive sources of information on TPP is at Public Citizen and their Global Trade Watch. They have a landing page just waiting for you: TPP: Corporate Power Tool of the 1%. Go take a look.

The Electronic Freedom Foundation has a TPP page, explaining their concerns about the sections involving Intellectual Property (IP) as well as the general lack of transparency and openness.

Public Knowledge has a TPP landing page expressing similar concerns.

The AFL-CIO has a TPP detail page and offers Trans-Pacific FTA Outline concluding:

“Although not all the news coming from APEC was good, it is too early to tell if the TPP will live up to its promise to create great opportunities for America’s working families. Now is the time to speak up. If you have concerns about some of these announcements, too, now is the time to speak up—the TPP is still being negotiated.”

This post originally appeared at Campaign for America’s Future (CAF) at their Blog for OurFuture & also crossposted at the Huffington Post. the author is a Fellow with CAF.

This article originally appeared on : Global Research

This article originally appeared on : Global Research

Ghatheyya Mifleh al-Khawalda was 15 years old when she fled her home during the Nakba of 1948.

Now 80, Ghatheyya was once a carefree teenager who used to live with her mother and sister in the village of al-Qastina, northeast of Gaza.

Although her early life was marked by tragedy – her grandmother died when she was born and her father passed away on Eid al-Adha – she says she had a happy childhood.

“We had a very nice house, a big house with marble floors in the hallway. My father was a farmer, and we had farmland with orange trees, apple trees, grapefruit trees and others. I used to spend my days playing with my sister and the other girls in the village. We were very happy,” she told the Palestinian Center for Human Rights.

Her life changed dramatically in 1948, when Jewish militias arrived in the area where she lived.

“We had heard stories about attacks on other villages. Still, the attack on al-Qastina came without warning. Before that, there had been a British military camp nearby, but that year the British left and allowed the Jewish groups to take over.”

Some Jewish militia members were wearing uniform and others had civilian clothes, Ghatheyya said, and when they arrived in the village they began firing at people, killing three villagers.

“We ran away, afraid for our safety, and went to Tal al-Safi, a nearby village on a hill. It was within walking distance, and we were in a hurry to leave, so we didn’t take anything with us. It was like Doomsday. It was utter terror. People’s minds were imprisoned by fear. We couldn’t think of anything except leaving, not even simple things like bringing food with us,” she said.

After a few days in Tal es-Safi, militias came again and forced them to leave. Ghatheyya and her family fled to Beit Jibrin to spend the night, but were followed and forced to leave again.

“If you wanted to die, you stayed. If you wanted to live, you left,” she recalls. “Their main aim was not to kill us, but to get rid of us. If they had wanted us all dead, not one of us would have survived. They used fear to force us to leave our land.”

The family walked along the coast until they reached Gaza. There were thousands of people who fled other villages, sleeping in mosques or on the street, Ghatheyya says, and UNRWA began to build tents for the families.

Ghatheyya and her husband Ahmed, also a refugee from al-Qastina, now have 32 grandchildren and live with their son Nehad. She says she thinks often about her village, and had the chance to visit al-Qastina in the early 1980s and 1990s.

“Al-Qastina crosses my mind very often. It doesn’t make sense that I cannot be in my home, on my land, in the place where I grew up. I still dream of the days of the land.”

More than 760,000 Palestinians – estimated today to number 4.8 million with their descendants – were pushed into exile or driven out of their homes in the conflict surrounding Israel’s creation in 1948.

Around 160,000 Palestinians, who remained in Israel after 1948, now number around 1.36 million people, or 20 percent of the country’s population.

This article originally appeared on : Global Research

Has the Obama Department of Justice Violated the Separation of Powers? California Congressman  Devin Nunes (R-CA) says that the Department Of Justice tapped phones in the rooms where Congress members speak informally and off the record, eat, sleep and socialize when they’re not on the floor of the House of Representatives or in their individual offices.These rooms are known as “cloak rooms”, which are the spaces in which a lot of informal conversations occur … both between Congress members, and Congress members and reporters.

Congressman Nunes told Hugh Hewitt:

[Congressman Nunes]: I don’t think people are focusing on the right thing when they talk about going after the AP reporters. The big problem that I see is that they actually tapped right where I’m sitting right now, the Cloak Room.

[Interviewer]: Wait a minute, this is news to me.

Congressman Nunes: The Cloak Room in the House of Representatives.

[Interviewer]: I have no idea what you’re talking about.

Congressman Nunes: So when they went after the AP reporters, right? Went after all of their phone records, they went after the phone records, including right up here in the House Gallery, right up from where I’m sitting right now. So you have a real separation of powers issue that did this really rise to the level that you would have to get phone records that would, that would most likely include members of Congress ….

Now that is a separation of powers issue here ….

Liberals rightfully lambasted the Bush administration for considering doing something similar. As Mother Jones reported in 2009:

James Risen and Eric Lichtblau report in the New York Times today that the NSA may have exceeded the wiretapping authority it was given by Congress in 2008.

***

But then there’s this buried in the middle of the story, which isn’t vague at all:

New details are also emerging about earlier domestic surveillance activities, including the agency’s attempt to wiretap a congressman without court approval on an overseas trip, according to interviews with current and former intelligence officials.

….The agency believed that the congressman, whose identity could not be determined, was in contact as part of a congressional delegation to the Middle East in 2005 or 2006 with an extremist who had possible terrorist ties and was already under surveillance, the official said. The agency then sought to eavesdrop on the congressman’s conversations to gather more intelligence, the official said.

The official said the plan was ultimately blocked because of concerns from some officials in the intelligence community about the idea of using the N.S.A., without court oversight, to spy on a member of Congress.

Jesus. If a member of Congress isn’t a “United States person” protected from warrantless surveillance by every version of FISA that’s ever been on the books, who is? Shouldn’t this have set off alarm bells at every possible level at NSA, rather than merely being “ultimately blocked” because “some” officials had “concerns” about it?

But — even though top expert say that Obama is trampling on separation of powers and Constitutional liberties more than Bush or Nixon — many Democrats are still hypnotized by what liberal writer Glenn Greenwald calls the “cult of personality“.

Update: Nunes’ director of communications — Jack Lagner — has issued a clarification:

What Rep. Nunes meant by “tapped” was that the DOJ seized the phone records, as has been widely reported. There was a little confusion between him and the host during the conversation: He did not mean to refer to phone records of the cloakroom itself, but of the Capitol. This refers to the phone records for the AP from  the House press gallery, which the DOJ admitted to looking at. He was explaining that if those phone records were seized, they would reveal a lot of conversations between the press and members of Congress, since reporters often speak to Members from the press gallery phones. The notion of the DOJ looking at phone records from the Capitol of conversations between Members of Congress and reporters is something that concerns Rep. Nunes, bringing up issues related to the separation of powers.

Nunes’ point still stands, though. The Department of Justice collection of phone records of conversations between Congress members and reporters violates the principal of separation of powers.

This article originally appeared on : Global Research

The chairman and CEO of Monsanto Co. condemned opponents of his major biotech corporation by accusing them of ‘reverse elitism’ being spread through social media.

Just days before a major international demonstration to protest
Monsanto is scheduled to occur around the globe, CEO Hugh Grant
told Bloomberg this week that critics of his company are fueling
anti-GMO sentiment by capitalizing on an increased public interest
in how their food is produced and pushing that agenda through
social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter.

Anti-Monsanto advocates – like the ones planning to protest in
36 countries later this month – say they are opposed to, among
other items, the company’s habit of heralding genetically altered
crops as a solution to third-world poverty by putting profits above
possible health risks. Lab-made crops that are resistant to certain
chemicals and conditions are the bread and butter of Monsanto, but
critics are worried that the company isn’t weighing the full impact
of what spreading GMO crops could do to the environment and
agriculture sector. Additionally, Monsanto’s legal habits of
driving small-time farmers bankrupt over alleged patent
infringement has not made them many friends within America’s
traditional agriculture sector.

Just last week, the US Department of Agriculture set up a
serious roadblock in Monsanto’s way by ordering further assessments
on a number of GMO crops they want to market that can sustain high
concentrations of chemicals used as herbicides that can be toxic in
large doses. Speaking to Bloomberg this week, Grant said the USDA’s
decision won’t be much of a setback, in his opinion, and added that
campaigns to belittle his company are often unfounded or the result
of misunderstood disinformation.

Charles Benbrook, a research professor at Washington State
University’s Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural
Resources, told Bloomberg, “Most of the people that become
motivated to engage the political issues have become convinced that
going down the road of genetically engineered foods is not the way
to meet the needs of a food insecure population.”

According to Grant, those critics aren’t giving his company’s
take on the situation the light of day.

“I’d feel a whole lot better if it was marinated a little on
where is that extra chicken going to come from or who is going to
grow the new bushel,” Grant said. Instead, he said Monsanto
opponents are ruining the opportunity to feed the world using
technological advances.

“There is this strange kind of reverse elitism: If I’m going
to do this, then everything else shouldn’t exist,” Grant told
Bloomberg at Monsanto’s St. Louis headquarters this week. “There
is space in the supermarket shelf for all of us.”

“And the sad piece of this is, it ends up either or,”
Grant said. “So you get conventional agriculture or broad scale
or however you define it, and organic. I think we’re going to look
back on this period and say, ‘How on earth did that ever become the
fight that it became.’”

Monsanto protests on six contents are scheduled to take place on
May 25 as part of an international day of demonstration. Meanwhile,
Monsanto has ended up embroiled in yet another controversy, this
time after State Department cables released by WikiLeaks showed
that the government lobbied foreign nations on behalf of the GMO
kings. Monsanto’s influence over the US government has been
questioned previously after ties were publicly disclosed between
the company and a number of Washington institutions, including the
White House and the Supreme Court of the United States.

This article originally appeared on : RT

The Associated Press and the administration of United States President Barack Obama are at odds over whether or not the AP’s publishing of a May 2012 article on a foiled al-Qaeda bomb threat put the US in danger.

The AP announced on Monday that the US Department of Justice
seized two months’ worth of phone records belonging to journalists,
an act the news agency’s CEO condemned as a “massive and
unprecedented intrusion.” On Tuesday, Attorney General Eric
Holder defended his office’s decision to subpoena the phone history
of AP reporters and editors by citing a crucial investigation into
an intelligence leak. Now as the debate heats up, the AP insists
that they were told by the Central Intelligence Agency that
publishing the article wouldn’t put national security at risk.

Holder admitted Tuesday that he was interviewed in June 2012 by
the Federal Bureau of Investigation to find out if the attorney
general, in his capacity as head of the Justice Department, was
aware of a possible leak of classified information.

According to the AP, the investigation into the news agency’s
phone history is likely the result of a May 7, 2012 article that
revealed the CIA thwarted a bomb plot planned to originate out of
Yemen to avenge the death of former al-Qaeda leader Osama bin
Laden, who was killed by US Navy SEALs one year earlier to the
week. Days before the AP published the bombshell, the US Department
of Homeland Security said there was “no indication of any
specific, credible threats or plots against the US tied to the
one-year anniversary of Bin Laden’s death.”

This week, Holder said that the leaking of intelligence out of
the CIA and to the AP was a major blow to the US and put the
nation’s security at risk.

“I have been a prosecutor since 1976 and I have to say that
this is among, if not the most serious, it is within the top two or
three most serious leaks that I have ever seen,” Holder
said.

“It put the American people at risk, and that is not
hyperbole. It put the American people at risk. And trying to
determine who was responsible for that I think required very
aggressive action.”

But as the Justice Department insists that the probe was
necessary to try and plug any leak to journalists, the AP is
standing by their decision to publish the article – a decision,
says the AP, which was made after consulting the CIA and the White
House.

The Washington Post wrote on Thursday that the AP only published
their article on the foiled bomb plot after a last-minute meeting
with the CIA that came five days after they asked if they could go
to print.

“The CIA officials, who had initially cited national security
concerns in an attempt to delay publication, no longer had those
worries” the Post reported. “Instead, the Obama
administration was planning to announce the successful
counterterrorism operation that Tuesday.”

According to individuals familiar with these exchanges that
occurred last May, the AP refused efforts to negotiate the
publishing of the article after they were assured that it would not
raise any national security concerns. CIA Deputy Director Michael
Morell told former White House national security spokesman Tommy
Vietor that the AP was offered some additional background details
to persuade them to hold off, the Post reported, but the agency
refused to wait any longer when they were told national security
concerns were “no longer an issue” early Monday.

Among the proposals the AP was presented with, Vietor told the
post, was waiting one day before publishing, then going live with
their story one hour before an official announcement. The White
House shut that suggestion down and instead offered the AP five
minutes of exclusivity, after which the Obama administration would
go public with their thwarting of the terror plot. Moments later,
the AP decided to publish it on their terms.

“We did not publish anything until we were assured by
high-ranking officials with direct knowledge of the situation, in
more than one part of the government, that the national security
risk was over and no one was in danger. The only deal was to hold
the story until any security risk was resolved,” AP spokeswoman
Erin Madigan White told the Post.

But even if AP was essentially given the go ahead to do their
report, it does not mean the CIA operative who exposed the details
was permitted to go to the press. The subsequent probe into the
AP’s phone records target the agency’s sources, not necessarily
their story, and could bring the government face-to-face with the
agent who explained a foiled terror plot before the president could
make the announcement himself.

From a Thursday afternoon press conference in Washington, Pres.
Obama stood by Holder and agreed with his interpretation of the
severity of the leaks.

“Leaks related to national security can put people at risk.
They can put men and women in uniform that I’ve sent into the
battlefield at risk. They can put some of our intelligence officers
who are in various dangerous situations that are easily compromised
at risk,” said Obama. “US national security is dependent on
those folks being able to operate with confidence that folks back
home have their backs, so they’re not just left out there high and
dry and potentially put in any more danger.”

“It’s important to recognize that when we express concern
about leaks at a time when I’ve still got 60,000-plus troops in
Afghanistan and I still got a whole bunch of intelligence officers
around the world who are in risky situations,” added the
president.

Current CIA Director John Brennan was also questioned by the FBI
over the leak and denied claims in February that he was the source
of AP’s intelligence. In January, CIA vet John Kiriakou was
sentenced to over two years in jail for leaking the identity of a
covert agent to journalists. Kiriakou is one of seven people
prosecuted by the Obama administration for leaking intelligence
under the Espionage Act of 1917.

This article originally appeared on : RT

Washington, D.C. already has some of the strictest gun-control laws in the country, but the city council is considering a bill that would require prospective gun owners to purchase a $250,000 liability insurance policy.

The proposed bill, B20-170, would mandate insurance coverage for
negligent and intentional acts in which a gun is used in cases
other than self-defense. Even those who already own gun licenses
would be required to purchase the liability insurance within 30
days of the effective date of the bill.

The bill states that its purpose is to compensate victims of gun
violence through the money raised from the licensing mandate, but
critics have scrutinized the measure for possibly inflicting heavy
costs upon gun owners.

It is not yet clear how much a $250,000 liability insurance
policy would cost, but if it is significant, it could serve as a
barrier against purchasing firearms. Democratic Councilmember Mary
Cheh, who introduced the bill, told WTTF-TV that she is willing to
negotiate with critics about the cost.

“I don’t mean it to be a centrifuge as a ban,” she said.
“I want it to really be insurance.”

She also added that guns “are instrumentalities that, if
mishandled or allow others access or mishandling, can cause great
harm,” thereby emphasizing the need for insurance to compensate
victims.

But there is also a gap in the proposed bill: if crimes are
committed using an illegal weapon, victims would not receive any
sort of compensation, since those who buy guns illegally would not
have mandated insurance.

The council committee heard testimonies on the need for such
insurance on Thursday, but D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray’s
administration does not currently support the bill. In a written
testimony to the DC Council, the deputy insurance commissioner
wrote that the mayor “is not convinced that there is currently a
persuasive argument to support the need for insurance for firearms
in the home.”

Three gun owners and two insurance-industry representatives
testified against the bill during the10 a.m.hearing,
while the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence testified in favor
of the proposal, the Associated Press reports.

A number of other states are considering similar measures to the
bill proposed by Cheh, but no such law has yet been passed in the
US.

Meanwhile, the state of Maryland has this week entered the ranks
of states with the most restrictive gun laws. Gov. Martin O’Malley
on Thursday signed a bill that will ban 45 assault rifles and
restrict ammunition magazines to 10 rounds. The legislation also
requires Americans who buy handguns to be fingerprinted.

This article originally appeared on : RT

Warships from Russia’s Pacific Fleet have entered the Mediterranean for the first time in decades. Russia’s Navy Chief says the task force may be reinforced with nuclear submarines, as the country starts building up a permanent fleet in the region.

“The task force has successfully passed through the Suez
Channel and entered the Mediterranean. It is the first time in
decades that Pacific Fleet warships enter this region,” the
Pacific Fleet spokesman, Capt. First Rank Roman Martov told
RIA.

The vessels are now heading to Cyprus and will make a port call
in the city of Limassol, he added.

The group includes destroyer “Admiral Panteleyev,” two
amphibious warfare ships “Peresvet” and “Admiral Nevelskoi,” as
well as a tanker and a tugboat.

The ships left the Far-Eastern port city of Vladivostok on March
19 to join Russia’s Mediterranean task force, which currently
consists of vessels from Northern, Baltic, and the Black Sea
Fleets, including a large anti-submarine ship, a frigate and a
Ropucha-II Class landing ship.

Russian Navy Commander Adm. Viktor Chirkov on Sunday announced
plans for the Mediterranean task force and said that it may
“possibly” be enlarged to include nuclear submarines.

“Overall, already from this year, we plan to have 5-6
warships and support vessels [in the Mediterranean Sea], which will
be replaced on a rotating basis from each of the fleets — the Black
Sea, Baltic, Northern and, in some cases, even the Pacific Fleet.
Depending on the scope of assignments and their complexity, the
number of warships in the task force may be increased,” Chirkov
said, as quoted by RIA.

Russian submarines may be deployed in the region “in
perspective,” the Navy Commander said, reminding that both
nuclear and diesel submarines were present in the Soviet Union’s
5th Mediterranean Squadron.

“Everything will depend on the situation,” Chirkov said,
also leaving the door open for missions in the Atlantic and Indian
Oceans. The task force will be “comprehensively trained” to
meet situations that may arise in these regions too, he said.

The Russian Defense Ministry announced setting up a naval task
force in the Mediterranean in April, while the country’s Defense
Minister Sergey Shoigu has said a permanent naval task force was
needed to defend Russia’s interests in the region.

The permanent fleet’s headquarters will be set up in the summer
of 2013, although their actual location is yet to be announced.

The Mediterranean has recently become a hotspot of military
muscle flexing as global powers seemingly vie for influence.

NATO has been staging major naval war games involving several
countries, last October holding an exercise code-named Noble
Mariner 12. Russia held its largest naval exercises in the region
this January, with drills spanning both the Black and Mediterranean
Seas. The media quickly linked both the NATO and Russian war games
to the situation in Syria.

Another recent naval display, seen as provocative by Israel, was
the deployment of the Iranian Navy’s 24th fleet to patrol the
Mediterranean and convey a “message of peace.” Since then, Israel
has acquired its fifth Dolphin-class submarine allegedly capable of
launching cruise missiles with nuclear warheads.

China has also been increasing its involvement in the area, with
the country’s warships sailing through the Suez Canal, and several
key ports of the region becoming partially China-owned.

Major naval groups serving in the Mediterranean Sea include
NATO’s Standing Maritime Group 2, French Naval Action Force, and
the US Navy 6th Fleet. The only Russian naval installation in the
region has for decades been the maintenance facility in the Syrian
city of Tartus.

This article originally appeared on : RT

A judge in Washington State has sentenced a 10-year-old boy to a minimum of three years in juvenile detention for conspiring to kill a girl in his class.

A second boy, age 11, was also charged in the incident and has a
court hearing in June.

Back in February, a teacher caught the boy and his friend, whose
names are withheld, trying to sneak a gun and knife into Fort
Colville Elementary School in Stevens County, which is some 215
miles east of Seattle. According to the Business Insider, the boy
had a .45 caliber Remington 1911 semi-automatic handgun on him.

Court records state the fifth-graders planned to kill one of
their classmates because “she was really annoying”. Previous news
reports also suggested the two intended to rape the girl.

Judge Allen Nielsen sentenced the boy to three to five years in
a juvenile security facility, which will provide him with schooling
and psychological services.

“It never escapes my mind that these are children. It is very
troubling when children do things adults do — it leaves you
questioning why,” said Prosecutor Tim Rasmussen.

Washington law states that children between the ages of 8 and 12
do not have the mental capacity to intentionally commit crimes, but
Judge Nielson ruled in March that the boys were competent to stand
trial.

The 10-year old had told investigators that he stole the gun
from his older brother, who stole it from his late grandfather.

Police say the boys showed no remorse, although according to
local newspaper the Spokesman Review, the 10-year old cried and
told the judge “I know that this is a bad thing I’ve done.”

“I don’t have an explanation and the explanation that the
boys gave for why they had planned to do this is entirely
inadequate,” Rasmussen told reporters after the trial wrapped
up.

This article originally appeared on : RT

A 62-year-old Bahraini protester has been sentenced to three months in prison for hanging a national flag from his truck during a 2011 rally. The case comes after tougher penalties were introduced for insults to the Gulf nation’s ruler or symbols.

Prosecutors stated that draping the flag over a vehicle during
the 2011 rally was an offense under the new restrictions,
Associated Press reported adding that the specific charges remained
unclear.

Abdulla Sayegh admitted that he attended pro-reform protests,
however maintained that many Bahrainis fly flags from vehicles
during all kinds of gatherings, be it celebrations, anti-government
or pro-government rallies.

The demonstrator plans to appeal the jail sentence and the 100
dinar ($265) fine, according to his defense lawyer Hashim
Saleh.

This comes after six tweeters were jailed on Wednesday for
posting comments about King Hamad bin Issa al Khalifa, which the
court regarded as ‘abusing freedom of expression.’

In April, Bahrain introduced stricter penalties making it
illegal to insult the Gulf state’s King Hamad or national symbols,
charges that carry up to five-year jail sentences.

These measures come against the background of two years of
protests led by the kingdom’s majority Shiites against the minority
Sunni-led government. The protesters are continuingly calling for a
transfer to a democratic system of government. Shiites complain of
discrimination in jobs and government while in turn their loyalty
is questioned by the Al Khalifa ruling family.

Rallies intensified as Bahrain was to host a Formula 1 race on
April 21, protestors labeling the event ‘race for blood’ as
it overshadows the many alleged human rights abuses in the Gulf
kingdom. Human Rights Watch cites multiple reports of physical and
psychological torture that emerged during the grand prix.

Earlier in the week, the kingdom for the second time canceled
the visit of the UN’s special rapporteur on torture, Juan Mendez,
who was to probe police abuses of power.

More than 80 people have died in uprisings since the
pro-democracy protests begun in February 2011, according to Human
Rights Watch. The government denies the allegations of
discrimination and of arbitrary arrests and abuses by security
forces.

This article originally appeared on : RT

Arnold August is a political scientist an author, journalist and lecturer living in Montreal, Canada (Quebec). He is the author of Democracy in Cuba and the 1997—98 Elections (Editorial José Martí). He has also contributed a chapter entitled “Socialism and Elections” for the volume Cuban Socialism in a New Century: Adversity, Survival and Renewal (University Press of Florida).

JL: Tell us about your book Cuba and Its Neighbours: Democracy in Motion why did you write this book and how did you go about it?

AA: Well I think many people will agree that when it comes to international politics, pressure by the countries in the North, especially U.S. and regarding the South in general – Asia, Africa and Latin America — there are very few themes that are raised other than the theme of democracy. It has been this way especially since the 1980′s, since the fall of the former Soviet Bloc, the issue of democracy or rather the pretext of democracy is increasingly being used by the U.S. and Europe as a reason to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries. At the same time, strange as it may seem there are very few books written on that issue of democracy as such. I guess not many people want to address this subject because it is a very loaded term, it’s not easy to deal with, but I always thought it was necessary. It is in fact my second book on the issue of democracy, the first one, written in 1999 dealt specifically with democracy and elections in Cuba.

JL: I guess a lot of people would be surprised to hear that there is democracy in Cuba. What kind of democracy is it?

AA: In Canada and the U.S.especially, the whole issue of democracy is supposed to be completely foreign to the Cuban experience and now of course the same attitude applies to other countries such as Venezuela. I deal with the issue of democracy but as you notice the subtitle of the book is Democracy in Motion. So I don’t deal only with democracy as such. I try to develop the concept of “Democracy in Motion” that is democratisation as a process which never ends and, at the centre of this whole concept, I try to develop the role of participatory democracy, that is, democracy in which the people play a key role on a daily basis to make their own political power effective.

JL: Do you think people in Cuba participate more in the decision making than in Canada or the U.S. for example?

AA: Well I think you’d have to compare Cuba to what the situation was before 1959, before the Revolution. We can’t even compare it, it is so obvious there was a U.S.controlled, a U.S.-led dictatorship in Cuba before 1959 — the Batista dictatorship — and the people were completely excluded from power. In fact, Fidel Castro was running for the opposition in the senate at the time, in the late 1950’s, and it was obvious he and his party were going to win those elections.

Image: Cuban Revolution 1959

The U.S.-backed Batista regime cancelled the elections and organised a coup d’état. So it gives you an idea of the kind of participation there was before 1959. Since 1959 of course it has been developed. In 1959 it was the first time in the history of Cuba that the people obtained political power. I’m not saying it was perfect. It wasn’t perfect then, it isn’t perfect now. But the main feature of the 1959 Revolution is that for the first time, political power was in the hands of the people. Then term “sovereignty invested in the people” became a real meaningful concept in Cuba.

Now we can draw a parallel between the Cuban revolution and the rebellion in Egypt recently. I would call it a revolution because the Egyptian people revolted and actually succeeded in overthrowing the U.S.-backed dictator Mubarak.

Image (right): Tahir Square 2011

What I find interesting there, and it opened my eyes further on the issue of the need for people to look at democracy as an ongoing process, a participatory democracy, is that the people at Tahir Square occupied the public space and it is from that area that millions of people on a daily basis made their decisions: what to do, what their priorities were, which was to overthrow Mubarak.

They would not accept anything less than that. In the meantime, a political power was developing at the base to replace the power of the U.S.-backed Mubarak regime. And in fact they overthrew the Mubarak regime. Now what did the Obama administration do right after that? After having supported the Mubarak regime, hypocritically of course, right to the last second? When he was finally overthrown the U.S. immediately tried to impose what I call in my publication the “U.S.-centric notion of politics”, that is, multi-party democracy.

I remember very clearly, and it is chronicled in my publication, that after the overthrow of Mubarak, while the street demonstrations were still going on in Tahir Square and in squares across Egypt, Hillary Clinton said on behalf of Obama that people have to move from protest to politics. So from the U.S. point of view, people in the street organizing themselves on an entirely new basis to somehow take political power, on an entirely different orientation, even though it was only in an embryonic way, is not politics. The only politics that count are electoral politics. Then the US organized elections in Egypt.

JL: Because this way they can control the outcome?

AA: Exactly, that is what they control through elections. The US could not control Tahrir Square, the people at a very low embryonic level aiming to take political power at the top.

JL: And was there a fear there that something like that would happen in the U.S. as well?

AA: Of course, because the first domino effect of Tahir Square was in the United States itself.

The Obama administration had to organize elections and the first thing they did was to eliminate the political party based on the Nasserite tradition which is generally progressive and in favour of socialism, definitely in favour of sovereignty from the U.S. That was illuminated by hook and by crook as they usually do and they were left with only two parties — the Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian National Movement Party. Both are pro-American. Now here’s an important point as far as the electoral process is concerned versus the political process of democracy in motion: only 52% of the people actually voted in the presidential elections between the two opposing candidates. 52%! And there was a call to boycott it. Of course this is not very well known in public circles. They sort of avoid that issue.

Now here are the two things in contradiction. On the one hand you have the people in Tahir Square and other squares looking for new ways to attain political power outside of the multi-party political system controlled by the United States. That’s why only 52% voted. At the same time in order to overthrow Mubarak in that 18 day revolution 850 people were killed and 5500 people were seriously injured. Now I ask you: Is it not easier to deposit a ballot compared to fighting on the streets with the possibility of losing your life or being seriously injured to overthrow? So it’s not because of apathy or lack of interest. It’s basically a rejection of the multi-party system that was reflected in those elections and this is why it’s still going on.

I spent almost 24 hours a day during that 18 day period watching this thing and it allowed me to expand further on the issue of participatory democracy and how elections are used in order to legitimize the status quo. Now that is exactly what Obama did when the Muslim Brotherhood won the election. He phoned Morsi and according to the White House transcript he said “Now you are legitimate.” You have legitimacy to rule in Egypt. That’s how in these countries elections are used when controlled by the U.S.— to legitimize the dictatorship of the old guard.

Image (right): Protests in Montreal, Canada 2012

We can even come closer to home. What happened in Quebec (Canada) last spring? There were millions of people in the streets, literally, students and older people, all over Quebec and what did the Liberal government say? “Well, we were elected.” Of course only 52% of the people voted and the vote split between the two/three parties. “We were elected.” They mean: “We are the legitimate representatives of the people and we can do what we want. We have the mandate to do everything. Anything.” And so the elections are used whether in Egypt, Quebec or other countries to legitimize the rule of the old guard. Now I’m not against elections. I’m not against elections with different political parties, but we have to look concretely how it takes place.

JL: So basically you’re saying that elections don’t guarantee democracy.

AA: It does not guarantee democracy and in many cases it is used as a pretext to completely wipe out any struggle by the people at the base to take political power in their own hands and develop their own type of system.

Image: Protests in Wisconsin’s Capitol building 2011

JL: How would you describe the events surrounding the Occupy Movement in the U.S.?

AA: What is interesting to note is that after the events at Tahir Square, the U.S. were very happy to be able to replace the popular movement with the so-called elections, temporarily, because troubles were still going on and have not been resolved. Now ironically, or paradoxically and with justice, the boomerang effect or the first domino effect took place in Madison, in the U.S. itself, in a very short period after Mubarak was overthrown and people had signs saying: “The governor of Wisconsin is our Mubarak.

We have to fight against the dictatorship”. They were inspired by the occupation of the public spaces in Egypt, in Tahir Square, and they did the same thing in the Capitol of Wisconsin. The Capitol building was occupied for several weeks, people slept there, they made their own decisions, they had manifestos they were building a new political power to challenge that of the establishment political parties. Unfortunately this movement was almost immediately converted into being part of the two-party machinations in the United States so the unions got caught up into a recall struggle against the governor. That is very good, no one can be against that. But the problem is the two-party system and the idea that one party is no good and we have to get rid of it in order to get another party in.

Part II of the interview will focus on the August’s chapter about Obama and the illusion of change.

This article originally appeared on : Global Research

Iranian Ambassador to Baku Mohsen Pak-Aein has hailed the Azerbaijan branch of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) over its efforts to expand media ties between the two countries.

During a visit to the IRIB branch in Baku, Pak-Aein said that the production of cultural programs in this branch is in line with boosting the unity and commonalities between Iran and Azerbaijan.

Å“The Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, with its influential programs, is a strong support for the consolidation of brotherly ties between the two countries (Iran and Azerbaijan),” Pak-Aein said.

The Iranian ambassador further highlighted the reports by the IRIB branch in Baku about the need for a peaceful settlement to Azerbaijanâ„¢s dispute with Armenia over the issue of the Nagorno-Karabakh territory.

Pak-Aein added that the influential activities by the Azerbaijan branch of the IRIB have played a major role in media interactions between the countries.

The Iranian envoy also expressed hope that the Azeri officials would continue their support for the IRIB branch to prepare the ground for the further expansion of media interactions between Tehran and Baku.

MKA/HMV

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

Murat Kunaz a former prisoner in Guantanamo says that the inmates currently on hunger strike will not voluntarily eat again unless they get a fair trial and the detainees cleared for release are discharged.

Kunaz, who languished in Guantanamo for five years even though
the American authorities knew he was innocent after 4 months, told
RT that he was tortured to sign papers saying he was a member of
Al-Qaeda or the Taliban. 

RT: How did you end up in Guantanamo?

Murat Kunaz: I was sold for bounty, $3,000 dollars to the
American government, but as soon as the American government found
out that I was innocent and not a terrorist, they let me go back
home. They knew I was innocent 4 months after I got arrested, but I
stayed 5 years in Guantanamo altogether. They always forced me to
sign papers saying that I should agree that I am a member of
Al-Qaeda and the Taliban and every time I refused to sign those
kinds of papers they tortured me in different kind of ways like
water-boarding and electric shocks. They thought that I would agree
to sign those papers. 

RT: Why, if they knew you were innocent after four
months, were you only released after 5 years? 

MK: I was from the beginning innocent, so they could have
let me go home any time if they wanted. The German government had
to agree that they wanted to take me back, so as soon as they did
this I was allowed to come back home. 

RT: But why did it take so long if they knew you were
innocent? 

MK: Because once you are in the system it’s very
difficult to get out even if the government knows you are innocent.
95% of those prisoners have never had a trail and they still won’t
get one in the future. That means they’ll be staying there all
their life, even though they are innocent. 

RT: Did you ever go on hunger strike when you were in
Guantanamo? 

MK: Yes, I went on hunger strike a couple of times during
my time in Guantanamo. If you have been on hunger strike more than
3-4 weeks, they start force feeding you and that means you get
handcuffed and shackled to a chair so you can’t move and you get
fed food through a pipe up your nose and into your stomach, so they
can keep you alive for many months or years of course.

RT: What is driving prisoners to take these desperate
measures? 

MK: I can understand those detainees, they have been
there more than 11 years, and they still haven’t had a trial. I
think it will be their last hunger strike for most of the
detainees. I believe they will never eat regular meals there again.
They’ll have to be force fed or else they will die. 

RT: Did anything change in Guantanamo when the Obama
administration came into power? 

MK: Yes, a little bit. There were small changes, a couple
of things. It was very important for us to get medication for sick
prisoners. We had some prisoners who were very sick, they needed
medication that they weren’t getting. So, when we started hunger
striking they started giving out medication for those sick
people. 

RT: What needs to be done to close
Guantanamo? 

MK: Of course more pressure needs to be put on the
president of the USA, Barack Obama, including the hunger strike. So
if this continues things might change. 

RT: What do the inmates of Guantanamo
want? 

MK: They want to be tried. This is all they need. As soon
as this happens they will be happy. 

RT: How long do you think this hunger strike will go
on for? 

MK: We can’t compare this hunger strike now with other
ones, which went on for one or two months – this hunger strike is
already over three months. Even the American government has to take
it very seriously now because more than 80% of the prisoners are on
hunger strike.

RT: Have you spoken to anyone else who has been in
Guantanamo? 

MK: I have talked to a couple of prisoners who were
released after I got released, so they told me a couple of things
were much the same, after Barack Obama, a couple of things got
changed but nothing much.

This article originally appeared on : RT

Iranian presidential hopeful Ali Akbar Velayati has reaffirmed his determination to help create unity in the principlist camp in the lead-up to the June 14th presidential election.

Å“We will strive so the principlists can achieve unity in the upcoming election and we are confident that we will win,” Velayati said in a Thursday interview.

Å“I will stay in the scene until the end,” the presidential hopeful, who is currently a top advisor to Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, pointed out.

Velayati, who is also a former foreign minister, called for observance of moral standards in the election campaigns and debates and pledged to adhere to such principles even in the wake of any potential unethical behaviors against him.

Velayati belongs to the principlist Coalition of Three, which also includes Tehran Mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf and lawmaker Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel. The coalition will pick one of its members as its nominee.

A total of 686 individuals signed up for the presidential race during the registration period, which began on March 7 at Iranâ„¢s Interior Ministry and ended on March 11.

They will be vetted by the Guardian Council, which is a 12-member body consisting of six jurists and six theologians who in addition to vetting hopefuls are tasked with confirming the election results.

The Guardian Council will have until the 21st of May to announce the final list of candidates.

ASH/HMV

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

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This article originally appeared on : AlterNet

A new poll indicates that fewer Americans are satisfied with the situation in the United States.

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

A recent survey shows that a majority of people in Western countries oppose sanctions against Iran’s English-language news network Press TV.

A poll asking a total of 6,121 people in Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Spain and the United States indicates that 73-85 percent of the respondents aware of the sanction on Press TV are against the bans.

Moreover, 65 percent opposed the imposition of sanctions on Iran because of the Islamic Republicâ„¢s political standpoint, while 88 percent opposed banning Iranian media only due to their country of origin.

The opinion poll also found out that 90 percent of the respondents believe in the unrestricted expression of various political viewpoints and 77 percent consider sanctions on media as a violation of freedom of speech.

Among the people questioned in the survey, the French and Spaniards were most vociferous against media restrictions, with 87 and 86 percent respectively rejecting any such sanctions.

Press TV and other Iranian broadcasters have been repeatedly targeted by restrictive measures spearheaded by Zionist Israeli elements.

In January, the Arab satellite provider Gulfsat banned Iranâ„¢s movie channel iFilm and its Arabic-language Al-Kawthar under direct pressure from the European satellite company, Eutelsat.

The decision came one day after Eutelsat, owned by Franco-Israeli Michel de Rosen, asked Nilesat to take Press TV off the air.

On December 21, 2012, HispaSat took Iran’s Press TV and Hispan TV off the air, and ordered Overon, a subsidiary satellite company, to stop the transmission of the two international TV channels.

In November 2012, the Hong Kong-based Asia Satellite Telecommunications Co. Ltd. (AsiaSat) also took Iranian channels off the air in East Asia.

Last October, Eutelsat SA and Intelsat SA stopped the broadcast of several Iranian satellite channels, citing pressure by the European Union. The EU, however, denied the claims by the European satellite companies.

MRS/HMV

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) is to slash a further 1,400 jobs over the next two years.

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

Iraqi officials have found three mass graves containing the bodies of about 1,000 people thought to have been executed by US soldiers during their occupation of the country.

The graves were uncovered in Iraq’s western province of al-Anbar. The remains are believed to be from victims killed by US forces during 2004 and 2005 in the city of Fallujah, located roughly 69 kilometers (43 miles) west of Baghdad.

Å“Security forces and rights groups found the three mass graves in Saqlawiyah and Ameriyah of Fallujah near a cemetery north of the city. They contain the remains of about a thousand people,” Deputy Chairman of Anbar’s provincial council, Sadoun Obaid al-Shaalan, said on Wednesday.

He also called on the Iraqi government to order DNA tests on the remains to ascertain the identity of the victims, especially since there are hundreds of families in Anbar – particularly Fallujah – who are trying to discover the fate of their lost children.

The first battle of Fallujah was an unsuccessful attempt by the US military to capture the city in April 2004.

Fighting broke out after four US mercenaries from Blackwater Company were killed, dismembered and hanged from a bridge over the Euphrates River.

On May 1, 2004, the US troops withdrew from Fallujah as Lieutenant General James Conway announced that he had unilaterally decided to turn over operations to the Fallujah Brigade — which composed of local militiamen under the command of former Ba’ath General Muhammed Latif.

Iraq accounts of the first battle of Fallujah put the number of injured or dead at more than 400.

The second battle of Fallujah was a joint American and British offensive in November and December 2004. The Iraqi narrative of the second battle puts the total number of dead and wounded at more than 5,000.

MP/SS

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

Infowars.com
May 16, 2013

In lieu of the recent IRS scandal it might seem a little like a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Nevertheless, it looks like Apple CEO Tim Cook will be appearing in front of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations on Tuesday, May 21, to explain why the company is borrowing money to pay investors when they have $102 billion in offshore funds.

As of March 2013 Apple reported having a total of $145 billion cash on hand, but $102 billion was stashed in offshore funds. On April 24, CEO Tim Cook announced that Apple would return $100 billion to shareholders by the end of 2015. To finance the expanded capital return, Apple will raise its dividend 15 percent and increase its share buyback program six-fold to $60 billion. In other words, Apple is going to go into debt, for the first time in more than a decade, in order to keep investors happy.

Why go into debt? Why not just use some of those offshore billions they’ve got lying around gathering dust? Because, to bring that money into the U.S., Apple would have to pay a 35 percent corporate tax. Why pay an outrageous tax bill when a company with a AA-rating like Apple’s can borrow money at a 1.9% interest rate?

Under current tax laws, money in offshore accounts can not be spent or invested in the United States. It can’t even be given to the shareholders who rightfully own the money, until someone antes up 35% to cover the taxes. At that point, once the taxes are paid, the investors would also be responsible for paying income taxes on their dividends — a double whammy for investors.

It should be noted that the money in these offshore accounts was earned outside the U.S. and the appropriate taxes are paid to the countries involved.

For major corporations like Apple, whch has more money than it knows what to do with, it just makes sense to leave that money in offshore accounts. Analysts estimate that the amount of corporate money in offshore accounts could exceed $1 trillion, money which could be boosting the US economy if it were repatriated.

Apple isn’t the only U.S.-based corporation holding money in offshore accounts. Last year, a lobbying coalition consisting of Google, Microsoft, Cisco and Apple sought a tax holiday, similar to one in 2004, for repatriating offshore funds. In 2004 Congress agreed to let companies repatriate money at a discounted tax rate of only 5 percent.

The 2012 effort was suspended because Republicans were focused more on permanent tax policy and Democrats were worried about the potential loss of tax revenue.

What they failed to understand is that there is no loss of revenue as long as Apple and other major corporations can use those offshore funds to secure low-interest loans right here on American soil. It only makes sense: Why pay a 35% tax when you can get the same results with a 1.9% loan?

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This article was posted: Thursday, May 16, 2013 at 12:23 pm

Tags: domestic news, foreign affairs, money, technology

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This article originally appeared on : Infowars

Mass shortage continues as government dries up supply.

Steve Watson
Infowars.com
May 16, 2013

In the wake of huge shortages of ammunition across the entire nation, police departments are turning to ever more desperate measures to keep their officers armed.

In Proctor, Minnesota, the police chief has become so exasperated with trying to find a supplier that he issued a request to members of the public for help meeting the department’s ammo needs.

Chief Walter Woberg made the public announcement after bullet suppliers notified him that he would have to wait “months” for an order of just 1,000 rounds.

“I go, ‘Do you have 40—caliber qualification rounds?’ And they go, ‘Well, no. It’s going to take six to eight months [to get them],’” Woberg told reporters with NNCNOW.com.

The police chief says that as soon as he issued the call, a Proctor resident immediately offered to loan the police department 1,500 rounds from personal supplies.

“The citizens were like, ‘If you need something, we got plenty here,’” Woberg said, adding that many others also offered to provide bullets to the police department.

“I had several other calls from other citizens that said, ‘Hey, if you need more ammunition we have plenty,’” said Woberg, “I know that if I need ammunition I have citizens out there that will gladly come forward.”

The police department says it will reimburse the resident when it has the supplies to do so.

Chief Woberg also noted that he has written to Mn. Senators to ask for action to counter the ammo shortage.

The nationwide shortage, which comes following massive ammo buys by the Federal government, has seen other police departments having to barter between themselves to meet demand.

Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla. said last week that he believes that the Obama administration is attempting to “dry up the market” and deprive gun owners of bullets.

As we recently reported, the Department of Homeland Security has announced plans to purchase another 360,000 rounds of hollow point ammunition to add to the roughly 2 billion bullets already bought over the past year.

Inhofe has introduced legislation into the Senate that would limit such stockpiling of bullets by federal agencies.

–––––––––––––––––––––-

Steve Watson is the London based writer and editor for Alex Jones’ Infowars.com, and Prisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham, and a Bachelor Of Arts Degree in Literature and Creative Writing from Nottingham Trent University.

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This article was posted: Thursday, May 16, 2013 at 12:17 pm

Tags: gun rights, terrorism

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This article originally appeared on : Infowars

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
May 16, 2013

Photo: Timothy Tsui.

In a frontal assault against the Bill of Rights, the District of Columbia is moving to force firearms owners to purchase prohibitively expensive liability insurance.

California, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York and Pennsylvania have also proposed forcing gun owners to buy liability insurance.

Democrat City Council member Mary Cheh proposed the law. It requires residents purchase at least $250,000 in insurance coverage before city government would consider applications to register a firearm.

If passed, the law will be the first in the country and serve as a precedent for Democrats and gun-grabbers working to dismantle the Second Amendment.

No such insurance policy currently exists, according to the Washington Times. “We oppose proposals that would mandate gun liability insurance as property-casualty insurance does not and cannot cover intentional criminal behavior,” said Willem O. Rijksen, vice president of public affairs for the American Insurance Association.

Not purchasing insurance or allowing a policy to lapse would result in a loss of Second Amendment rights in the District. The legislation would be retroactive and current gun owners would be mandated to purchase insurance within 30 days.

“Conjuring new gun control schemes and further taxing law-abiding residents exercising a constitutional right will not result in a reduction of violent crime in the District. Ensuring that criminals are arrested, prosecuted and punished will,” Andrew Arulanandam, spokesman for the NRA, told the newspaper. “Regrettably, D.C. leaders are focused more on pushing their political and social agendas than on working to keep their residents safe.”

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This article was posted: Thursday, May 16, 2013 at 11:52 am

Tags: constitution, domestic news, gun rights

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This article originally appeared on : Infowars

Carl Schreck
RIA Novosti
May 16, 2013

The US diplomat accused by Moscow this week of being an undercover CIA operative was once a star intern for a prominent Middle East expert at a top Washington think tank, a fellow intern told RIA Novosti.

Ryan Fogle, whom Moscow accused of trying to recruit a Russian intelligence official, wowed his bosses as an intern for Jon Alterman, head of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), said Yousef Casewit, who says he shared a cubicle with Fogle as a fellow intern with the program in 2005.

“We all worked hard, but he was actually quite exceptional,” Casewit, a Ph.D. candidate in Islamic studies at Yale University, told RIA Novosti. “It seemed like he was really out to join the DC kind of rat race.”

Read full article

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This article was posted: Thursday, May 16, 2013 at 11:58 am

Tags: domestic news, foreign affairs

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This article originally appeared on : Infowars

French President Francois Hollande speaks during a press conference at the Elysee Palace in Paris on May 16, 2013.

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

Moscow City Court has upheld the acquittal of former deputy head of the Butyrka detention center Dmitry Kratov, who had been accused of negligence that led to the death of Sergey Magnitsky, a lawyer for Hermitage Capital.

The court has rejected an appeal filed by Magnitsky’s relatives,
contesting Kratov’s acquittal, instead seconding the original
verdict.

In late December, Moscow’s Tverskoy Court ruled that there was
not enough evidence that Kratov was guilty of
negligence. The ex-deputy head of the prison where Magnitsky died
was the only official facing a trial in connection with the
tragedy. 

Kratov says he has not decided yet whether he will demand
compensation for the criminal proceedings lodged against him, now
deemed false. But Interfax reports it’s unlikely he will take it
any further.

The lawyer representing Magnitsky’s family, Nikolay Gorokhov,
said he will study the motivation behind the court’s ruling before
making any decisions to appeal it.

Financial lawyer Sergey Magnitsky, 37, died in pre-trial
detention in Moscow in November 2009.

He was working for the British investment fund Hermitage
Capital, which became embroiled in a series of scandals between
2007-2009. Magnitsky accused a group of Russian officials of
embezzlement. Soon afterwards he was arrested on charges of
assisting Hermitage Capital to evade tax and was awaiting trial in
Moscow’s Butyrka prison. He died in jail in 2009, about a year
after his detention, of what doctors said was a heart attack.
Magnitsky’s family demanded an investigation into his death.

The lawyer’s sudden death caused a huge international scandal
and accusations that Magnitsky had been tortured to make him
withdraw his accusations.

This article originally appeared on : RT

Russian metallurgy and electricity giants have seen their shares nosedive up to 10% after being kicked out of the exclusive MSCI index. Analysts say even more losses lay ahead for the companies.

Russia’s metallurgy giant holdings Novolipetsk Steel Company
(NLMK) and Mechel, as well as electricity major Russian Grids, lost
more than $800 million of their value after Morgan Stanley Capital
excluded them from its MSCI Russia index. The decision was part of
a standard index revision, which usually occurs twice a year.
“May revisions are more serious-investors are shaking up their
portfolios,” Nikolay Podlevskih from Zerich Capital Management
told Gazeta.ru. The changes will become effective from June 3, the
expert added.

The MSCI Russia index calculated by Morgan Stanley, embraces 27
Russian companies, where gas major Gazprom, Russia’s biggest lender
Sberbank and oil giant Lukoil dominate. An MSCI membership makes a
company’s shares easier to trade, thus increasing its
attractiveness to investors and potential profits.

To be a member of an MSCI Russia club a company needs to meet
certain requirements of market capitalization and the amount of
outstanding shares available to the public for trade, or a
so-called free-float.

NLMK was excluded from the club for low free-float volumes, with
Russian Grids being ousted for its low market capitalization,
analysts from Sberbank Investment Research explained.

VTB Capital analysts say the key losers – Novolipetsk Steel
Company (NLMK), Russian steelmaker and miner Mechel, as well as
electricity giant Russian Grids — are going to suffer even
more. After a shut — out from the prestigious index
NLMK is set to see about $271 million outflow from its depositary
receipts, with Mechel expected to have $145 million leaving the
financial instrument, as VTB Capital analysts calculate.

Despite analyst’s forecasts, Phosagro, a Russian fertilizer
producer, wasn’t accepted to the MSCI Russia club. The company
sought acceptance and had placed an additional 8.9% of its shares
shortly before the revision to increase its free-float and bolster
its chances.

However, experts say there will be certain beneficiaries to the
index revision, with Gazprom expected to enjoy another $737 million
coming into its shares and Nornikel having a $124 million
inflow.

This article originally appeared on : RT

The family of Mansour Arbabsiar, an Iranian-American who was arrested in the US on charges of plotting an assassination, say they were deceived about the terms of a plea bargain that he signed, Press TV reports.

In September 2011, Arbabsiar was arrested at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport on charges of planning to assassinate Saudi Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir in a bomb attack at a restaurant in Washington.

Following his arrest, he signed a plea agreement, which was offered to him by US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara.

Arbabsiar had been misled about the plea agreement by Sabrina Shroff, a federal public defender appointed by the court to represent him, his family said. They also said the plea bargain was signed under duress.

Å“After the arrest of my uncle, there was a plea bargain under which in exchange for my uncleâ„¢s confession, the prosecutor would sentence him to three years of house arrest instead of 25 years in prison. If we refused to accept the plea bargain, the case would go to the court,” said his nephew, Mohammad-Hossein Arbabsiar.

Å“My uncleâ„¢s lawyer, Sabrina Shroff, who was appointed by the court, told us about the deal and under her guidance my uncle signed the plea bargain. After postponing the sentencing four times, now the prosecutor is asking for the maximum sentence, 25 years.” he added.

Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Abbas Araqchi also touched upon the issue during a recent press conference.

Å“Iran Foreign Ministryâ„¢s stance about Mansour Arbabsiar has always been clear. He is an American with an Iranian background who is a victim of conspiracy orchestrated by the Zionist regime [of Israel] and other suspicious hands,” Araqchi said.

Å“We have always defended his rights as an individual because of his Iranian background. He is not linked to Iran. We want him to have a fair trial. There have been many question marks about his trial. We are closely following his case,” he added.

In October 2011, the US Justice Department accused Iran of orchestrating the alleged plot to assassinate Jubeir. However, the Islamic Republic rejected the allegation as baseless.

MKA/HMV

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

Today, politics is a rich man’s game. Look no further than the 2012 elections and that season’s biggest donor, 79-year-old casino mogul Sheldon Adelson. He and his wife, Miriam, shocked the political class by first giving $16.5 million in an effort to make Newt Gingrich the Republican presidential nominee. Once Gingrich exited the race, the Adelsons invested more than $30 million in electing Mitt Romney. They donated millions more to support GOP candidates running for the House and Senate, to block a pro-union measure in Michigan, and to bankroll the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other conservative stalwarts (which waged their own campaigns mostly to helpRepublican candidates for Congress). All told, the Adelsons donated $94 million during the 2012 cycle — nearly four times the previous record set by liberal financier George Soros. And that’s only the money we know about. When you add in so-called dark money, one estimate puts their total giving at closer to $150 million.

It was not one of Adelson’s better bets. Romney went down in flames; the Republicans failed to retake the Senate and conceded seats in the House; and the majority of candidates backed by Adelson-funded groups lost, too. But Adelson, who oozes chutzpah as only a gambling tycoon worth $26.5 billion could, is undeterred. Politics, he told the Wall Street Journal in his first post-election interview, is like poker: “I don’t cry when I lose. There’s always a new hand coming up.” He said he could double his 2012 giving in future elections. “I’ll spend that much and more,” he said. “Let’s cut any ambiguity.”

But simply tallying Adelson’s wins and losses — or the Koch brothers’, or George Soros’s, or any other mega-donors’ — misses the bigger point. What matters is that these wealthy funders were able to give so much money in the first place.

With the advent of super PACs and a growing reliance on secretly funded nonprofits, the very wealthy can pour their money into the political system with an ease that didn’t exist as recently as this moment in Barack Obama’s first term in office. For now at least, Sheldon Adelson is an extreme example, but he portends a future in which 1-percenters can flood the system with money in ways beyond the dreams of ordinary Americans. In the meantime, the traditional political parties, barred from taking all that limitless cash, seem to be sliding toward irrelevance. They are losing their grip on the political process, political observers say, leaving motivated millionaires and billionaires to handpick the candidates and the issues. “It’ll be wealthy people getting together and picking horses and riding those horses through a primary process and maybe upending the consensus of the party,” a Democratic strategist recently told me. “We’re in a whole new world.”

The Rise of the Super PAC

She needed something sexy, memorable. In all fairness, anything was an improvement on “independent expenditure-only political action committee.” Eliza Newlin Carney, one of D.C.’s trustiest scribes on the campaign money beat, didn’t want to type out that clunker day after day. She knew this was big news — the name mattered. Then it came to her:

This article originally appeared on : AlterNet

British lawmakers accuse Google of “devious” and “unethical” tax behaviour.

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

Mark Landler
New York Times
May 16, 2013

In a clear warning to Syria to stop the transfer of advanced weapons to Islamic militants in the region, a senior Israeli official signaled on Wednesday that Israel was considering additional military strikes to prevent that from happening and that the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, would face crippling consequences if he retaliated.

“Israel is determined to continue to prevent the transfer of advanced weapons to Hezbollah,” the Israeli official said. “The transfer of such weapons to Hezbollah will destabilize and endanger the entire region.”

“If Syrian President Assad reacts by attacking Israel, or tries to strike Israel through his terrorist proxies,” the official said, “he will risk forfeiting his regime, for Israel will retaliate.”

Read full article

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This article was posted: Thursday, May 16, 2013 at 11:44 am

Tags: foreign affairs, war

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This article originally appeared on : Infowars

Creator of King of the Hill, Beavis & Butt-head sits down for exclusive interview

Infowars.com
May 16, 2013

Comedy icon and animator Mike Judge, creator of King of the Hill and Beavis & Butt-head, sat down at his Austin home for an exclusive in-depth interview with Alex Jones.

In the interview Judge, who also directed the cult 2006 movie Idiocracy, talks about his life growing up, the success of his animated comedy shows as well as political issues such as gun control and geopolitics.

This interview will cover a number of subjects Judge has never discussed, so be sure to sign up at Prison Planet.tv for the full high quality video or watch for free at The Alex Jones Channel.

The interview will air first next Thursday on the nationally syndicated Alex Jones Show.

This is a very powerful interview and will be a news maker, so don’t miss it!

Watch a satire piece created by a listener below in which Beavis and Butt-head discover Infowars.com.

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This article was posted: Thursday, May 16, 2013 at 11:38 am

Tags: entertainment

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This article originally appeared on : Infowars

Error 404 – Not Found

This article originally appeared on : Infowars

Two radioactive goldfish were found swimming in a juice pitcher of nuclear reactor water in an underground steam tunnel at an Ohio power plant. Investigators are baffled as to how the radioactive fish remained unnoticed in the ‘secure’ facility.

Investigators from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and
officials of the plant, which is operated by FirstEnergy Corp.,
have been looking through surveillance tapes to try to identify who
was responsible for leaving the radioactive goldfish in the tunnel
on May 2. 

They believe one of the 700 employees and contractors who work
at the plant smuggled the fish into the facility, Jennifer Young,
spokeswoman for FirstEnergy Corp., told AP. The fishy tale has
served as an embarrassment for the plant, which has already come
under scrutiny for a case in which four contractors were exposed to
life-threatening hard radiation in 2011. The plant has also been
scutinized for a serious lack of security.

“Last year, Perry got into trouble with the NRC about
weaknesses preventing unauthorized access to the plant,” David
Lochbaum, a spokesman at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told
The Plain Dealer. “Goldfish are not authorized to be inside the
tunnel, yet they were there. And Perry cannot determine how they
got there or who put them there.”

Officials believe the goldfish were taken through the front door
and likely hidden in a plastic bag in a worker’s pocket. All
workers are required to pass through security, which detects metal
and bombs but not fish and water. Investigators believe the fish
were left unnoticed in the tunnel for several days before
scaffolding crews discovered them and filed a report.

But despite looking through surveillance tapes for more than a
week, little progress has been made in identifying the
perpetrator(s). 

“While we continue to look at the video for evidence,
identifying folks in the video has been challenging,” Young
told AP.

Both of the 1 ½-inch-long fish died shortly after their
discovery, but officials at the plant claim that neglect and
starvation may have been the cause — not radiation. Chemists found
that the fish were admitting small amounts of radiation, but not
enough to put anyone at risk, including the fish.

“They did not have exposure to enough radioactivity to hurt
them,” Young told The Plain Dealer. “It was probably
due to lack of care before they got to the plant. The radiation
could not have killed them.”

Lochbaum said the story might sound funny to some, but that
smuggling live animals into the plant shows a serious lack of
security. The story has caused some to recall an episode of the
“Simpsons” in which Blinky, an orange fish, has a third eye due to
his exposure to radiation.

“What might be an amusing account of misplaced goldfish today
could become tomorrow’s nightmare story if someone with an axe to
grind, another Timothy McVeigh type, places a bomb instead of two
goldfish in Perry,” Lochbaum told The Plain Dealer, referring
to the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building.

The fish admitted small levels of radiation, but the incident is
most problematic for the plant for once again highlighting the lack
of security — an issue that FirstEnergy Corp. has been scrutinized
for before.

This article originally appeared on : RT

A US judge has dismissed charges against a New York police officer who is accused of shooting dead an unarmed teenager at his grandmotherâ„¢s home.

Bronx Supreme Court Justice Steven Barrett threw out manslaughter charges against Officer Richard Haste on Wednesday, over an error committed by the assistant district attorney.

The judge stated that the prosecution drew a false impression of how Hasteâ„¢s fellow officers influenced his decision to fire his gun, which killed 18-year-old Ramarley Graham on February 2.

The ruling brought forth a volley of cheers from police officers who prowled the courtroom, as the victimâ„¢s parents and friends sobbed bitter tears.

Å“There is nothing to cheer here,” said Jeffrey Emdin, attorney for the Graham family, adding that Å“a young man lost his life, and that is the man who took that life…. It puts salt in the wounds.”

Graham was shot dead after the police officer chased him to his grandmotherâ„¢s apartment, kicking the door open and shooting him in the chest, while he was reportedly attempting to flush a bag of marijuana down the toilet.

Haste said he mistakenly believed he saw the teenager carrying a firearm.

The fatal confrontation was also considered to be against the law as police were not in possession of a warrant to enter the house.

Haste is currently undergoing another court case in connection with the beating and wrongful arrest of a Bronx man.

The February killing sparked large street protests in New York, raising renewed concerns about the prospect of the New York Police Departmentâ„¢s (NYPD) application of aggressive tactics.

Experts say the shooting can be linked to the NYPDâ„¢s aggressive street policing program called ËœStop-and-Frisk.â„¢ Critics say the program predominately targets low-income minority neighborhoods.

GMA/SS

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

foxnews.com
May 16, 2013

President Obama announced Wednesday that acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller would resign in the wake of the agency scandal in which conservative groups were targeted – though Miller was apparently set to step down anyway.

An official close to Miller told Fox News, shortly after Obama’s brief announcement, that the IRS chief was “set to resign the position of acting commission as of early June.” He was planning to leave the IRS entirely a “couple of months later, regardless of the current controversy,” the source said.

These details were not mentioned by the president as he announced Wednesday evening Miller was resigning. Obama spoke following a meeting with Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew and other top department officials in which they reviewed a highly critical inspector general’s report on the practice. The report concluded poor management allowed agents to improperly target Tea Party and other groups for more than 18 months, starting in 2010.

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This article was posted: Thursday, May 16, 2013 at 11:21 am

Tags: domestic news, government corruption

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This article originally appeared on : Infowars

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/hey_hollywood_remember_the_ladies_20130516/

Posted on May 16, 2013

This article originally appeared on : TruthDig

A tire shop in Detroit, Michigan is in trouble with the law for allegedly compensation employees with crack rocks instead of paychecks.

Detroit’s WDIV News reported this week that a federal probe into
an apparent counterfeiting scheme at Big C’s Tire Shop in the
city’s Morningside neighborhood led investigators to discover a
slew of other crimes.

“Word on the street was the ‘C’ stood for ‘crack
cocaine,’” WDIV’s Kevin Dietz reported.

Investigators approached Christopher Townes of Detroit last year
in an attempt to learn more about a counterfeiting scheme he was
thought to be involved with. According to an Associated Press
report from November, Townes admitted to investigators that he paid
people to make copies of their legitimate United State Postal
Service paychecks as part of an elaborate scheme that stole upwards
of $140,000 from the federal government.

Townes also told them about his unusual payment plan he worked
out for the employees of Big C.

According to court papers obtained by WDIV, Townes owned up to
paying employees with crack during an interview that led to the
filing of counterfeiting charges. Law enforcement became suspicious
when they traced the bogus checks back to Big C’s, where a sweep of
the auto garage turned up laser printers, computers, blank
identification cards and check stock paper to make the fake notes –
and some other items that raised the suspicion of police.

“When asked about the drug packaging material that was
discovered in his office, Townes stated that he would buy drugs to
pay people to do work for him. His examples were that in return for
mowing the grass or stacking the tires, Townes would pay the people
in crack cocaine,” the court papers read. .

Even after that admission, though, investigators opted to not
pursue the drug charges. According to WDIV, federal agents involved
in the case say the evidence in the counterfeit check case is
stronger, so they’re not going to charge the owner with trafficking
drugs.

This article originally appeared on : RT

Greek teachers and students take part in a protest march against cutbacks in the public education system due to the government’s austerity measures in central Athens on March 2, 2013.

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

Krista Kapralos
Religion News Service
May 16, 2013

A German family seeking asylum in the U.S. so they can home-school their children lost their appeal in federal court on Tuesday (May 14), but their lawyers say they’re prepared to petition the U.S. Supreme Court to take the case.

The German government persecuted the Romeike family for their faith, said Mike Donnelly, a lawyer with the Home School Legal Defense Association, a religious organization that is representing the Romeike family.

“It is treating people who home-school for religious or philosophical reasons differently,” he added.

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This article was posted: Thursday, May 16, 2013 at 10:39 am

Tags: domestic news, education

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This article originally appeared on : Infowars

Iranâ„¢s former President Seyyed Mohammad Khatami has voiced support for presidential hopeful Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and called on the Iranian public to back him in the June 14th presidential race.

Speaking at a Thursday meeting with reformist activists, Khatami underlined the need for countering the effects of external threats against Iran and alleviating the economic pressures on the nation.

Å“Considering all these issues, Mr. Hashemi Rafsanjani is the most appropriate figure whose presence can be effective and with new plans and views he can play a highly important role,” the former president pointed out.

Before the registration for presidential hopefuls ended, there were major speculations over the participation of the two-time former presidents Khatami and Rafsanjani in the presidential race.

Ultimately, however, it was Rafsanjani who signed up for the presidential race in the last minutes of the registration on Saturday.

Khatami, Iranâ„¢s reformist president from 1997 to 2005, described Rafsanjaniâ„¢s presence in the presidential race as Å“self-sacrifice” for Å“national interests,” saying, Å“Now it is the peopleâ„¢s turn to enter the scene with bravery and responsibility and assist him.”

Å“The reformists enthusiastically welcome Mr. Hashemi [Rafsanjani]â„¢s presence and see themselves on his side,” the former president pointed out.

Å“I am sure he will also win a portion of the votes of prudent principlists. Hashemi is not exclusive to any specific current,” he added.

Hashemi Rafsanjani, who is currently the chairman of the Expediency Council served as Iranâ„¢s president from 1989 to 1997. In 2005, he ran for a third term in office, but he lost the race to his rival Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The registration for the 11th presidential election of Iran ended on May 11, with 686 individuals having signed up for the race. They will be vetted by the Guardian Council, which is a 12-member body consisting of six jurists and six theologians who in addition to vetting hopefuls are tasked with confirming the election results.

The Guardian Council will have until the 21st of May to announce the final list of candidates.

ASH/HMV

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

James Nye
dailymail.co.uk
May 16, 2013

The then CIA-Director David Petraeus strongly objected to the Obama administration’s version of events of the terror attack on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, newly released emails reveal.

Petraeus, who was forced to resign in disgrace in November after an extra-marital affair became public, wanted to see more detail made available, including a warning issued from the CIA about plans for an embassy attack.

The documents give a glimpse into the administration’s message control as officials carefully debated via email which details U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice should highlight when she went on talk shows five days later to discuss the September 11 assault on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya.

The White House on Wednesday released 99 pages of emails and a single page of hand-written notes made by Petraeus’ deputy, Mike Morell, after a meeting at the White House the day before U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice began giving interviews to the media based on the agreed ‘talking points.’

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This article was posted: Thursday, May 16, 2013 at 10:30 am

Tags: domestic news, foreign affairs, terrorism

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This article originally appeared on : Infowars

May 14, 2013
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Pastor David Loveless is the third megachurch leader in the Fla. area to resign in the wake of a sexual affair in the last half of a year.  Loveless, former lead pastor of Discovery Church in Orlando, follows Isaac Hunter–former lead pastor at Orlando’s Summit Church, and Sam Hinn–former pastor of the Gathering Place Worship Center in Stanford, Fla. in his resignition following an extramarital sexual encounter.

Loveless has been married 37 years according to Christian Post, and co-authored the book Church Wounds, which examines the mishaps and blemishes of the modern-day church and its sometimes negative effects on Christians. He and his wife Caron have three married sons and seven grandchildren, according to his blog.

In her article Why Megachurch Pastors Keep Falling Into Sexual Immorality,  Jennifer LeClaire, editor of the right-leaning Christian news site Charisma, points out that pastors Loveless, Hunter and Hinn aren’t the only three to “rock their churches with sexual scandals” in recent times. LeClaire, author of a book titled  Spiritual Warrior’s Guide to Defeating Jezebel, takes the uncommon position of holding male Christian leaders accountable for their adulterous behaviors–well sort of. LeClaire attributes immorality and idolatry to the “spirit of seduction” of the biblical character Jezebel, who “woos people into sexual immorality and idolatry.”

She writes, “Sadly, the spirit of Jezebel is picking off pastors one by one as they succumb to the evil desires in their own hearts. Too few recognize the sinister workings of Jezebel’s covert seduction. They’ve bought into what I call the ‘Jezebel deception’ and are either tolerating sexual immorality in the church or merely failing to recognize the true Jezebel in operation because they are on a witch hunt for controlling, manipulative women.”

Brent Bailey founded the Direction Church Orlando seven months ago, and has been in ministry for 20 years. He told The Christian Post (CP) that hearing about the moral failure of other pastors saddens him and causes him to reflect on his own vulnerabilities.

“It also makes us realize how vulnerable every human being is no matter how long they’ve been in ministry or how many lives they’ve touched,” he told CP. “There really is an enemy out there that’s trying to do his best to take every one of us out.”

This article originally appeared on : AlterNet

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This article originally appeared on : AlterNet

An alleged World War II-era Coca-Cola secret recipe auctioned on eBay found a buyer — a 15-year-old who now has three days to somehow rustle up $15.19 million to pay for it.

Georgia antiques dealer Cliff Kluge claims that he has obtained
a document of one of corporate America’s secrets that has been
guarded for 125 years. He says he discovered the formula among of
stack of papers he recently purchased at the estate sale of a
prominent Chattanooga chemist.

The opening bid for the yellowing typewritten document of $5
million rose to a buy-it-now $15 million as the famed formula was sold to a
teenager.

“It would have been a wonderful thing if it had found a
genuine buyer”, Kluge said, as quoted by AFP, “but some
15-year-old kid bid on it – and it’s not a legitimate bid”

According to eBay rules, the buyer has a three-day period during
which he has to pay for the item. Kluge said he will relist the
‘historic document’ if the kid doesn’t find the money.

However Coca-Cola claims that its secret concocted over a
century ago by Dr. John S. Pemberton is kept in a vault at its
World of Coca-Cola museum in Atlanta.

“We sleep well at night knowing the secret formula is safe
and secure with us,” Coca-Cola spokesman Petro Kacur said.

Coca-Cola denies the recipe is an original, but admits it may
come close to it.

“It’s for a cola. But not Coca-Cola,” said the company’s
archivist, Ted Ryan, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.

The antiques dealer acknowledges on eBay that “there is no
doubt (at least in my mind) that whoever typed the letter had seen
the original recipe for Coca Cola … more evidence and external
factors are falling in place to bolster the fact that this could be
the original, with an emphasis on the word ‘could’.”

In 2011, the public radio show ‘This American Life’
claimed it had discovered a supposed handwritten original recipe
for Coca-Cola within a photograph accompanying an article published
34 years ago. In its earliest form the beverage was believed to
have had cocaine among its ingredients. The beverage company
insisted that the recipe was not original.

As it stands, no one can authenticate any alleged copy of the
secret formula unless Coca-Cola shows the original recipe – and
that will probably never happen.

This article originally appeared on : RT

Foreign-sponsored militants in Syria continue to suffer heavy losses as the Syrian army troops have killed many gunmen during mop-up operations around the cities of Homs and Daraâ„¢a.

On Thursday, a number of militants were killed during intense clashes with Syrian soldiers in the city of Talbiseh, located about 10 kilometers (six miles) north of Homs, the official SANA news agency reported.

A unit of government forces also shot dead scores of armed men in the town of al-Dar al-Kabir.

Moreover, Syrian troops clashed with militants in the villages of al-Ghanto and al-Bowida al-Sharqiyah and the city of al-Rastan — located 25 kilometers (16 miles) north of Homs, killing and injuring a number of them.

Clashes were reported in the districts of Wadi al-Sayeh, Bab Hood, Juret al-Shayah and al-Qarabis in Homs city, where many armed men were killed by the Syrian soldiers.

Syrian forces stormed terrorist hideouts in the village of Houla, located about 32 kilometers (20 miles) northwest of Homs, on Thursday. Large amounts of weapons and munitions were also destroyed after the fierce clashes.

Separately, Syrian army forces drove back a group of militants who were attempting to launch an attack on a military checkpoint on the outskirts of the city of Daraâ„¢a, located about 90 kilometers (56 miles) south of the capital Damascus.

The gunmen tried to enter the checkpoint from three sides, but were repelled and forced to flee.

In addition, bomb disposal teams found and defused 19 remote-controlled improvised explosive devices, each weighing about 50 kilograms, on the road linking the northwestern town of Sarmin to the city of Idlib.

Meanwhile, Syrian troops seized a truck full of ammunition on the road between the villages of al-Qaryatein and al-Nasiriya in Homs province.

Turmoil has gripped Syria since March 2011, and many people, including large numbers of Syrian security forces, have been killed in the unrest.

MP/SS

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

Iranian border guards display packets of seized drugs near the border with Afghanistan. (File photo)

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

A US museum has been pressured into excluding the names of two deceased Palestinian journalists from its memorial ceremony honoring fallen correspondents, Press TV reports.

Pro-Israeli groups were successful in persuading the Newseum museum to drop the names of Hussam Salama and Mahmoud al-Kumi — two al-Aqsa cameramen — from its Journalists Memorial ceremony held in Washington D.C. on Monday.

The two were excluded from a list of 82 other reporters, correspondents and cameraman who died while delivering news from conflict areas.

Salama and al-Kumi were killed during an Israeli airstrike in the Gaza Strip on November 20.

Å“Actually, I think a cameraman looks like a soldier in the war. But, the difference: the soldier supports the government, but the cameraman shows the true point of war,” said Mohammad Salah, an Iraqi photographer.

Free speech advocates criticized the move, which was brought on by Jewish groups and conservatives who said that al-Aqsa is run by Hamas – a terrorist group that threatens the Israeli entity.

This incident reflected ongoing Zionist manipulation in US domestic and foreign policy, particularly influencing Washingtonâ„¢s vigorous campaign to stop countries from declaring their recognition of an independent Palestinian state.

GMA/SS

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

A helipad has been built in Moscow’s Kremlin for President Vladimir Putin to commute to his office by air. The move comes amid growing public criticism of the presidential motorcade disrupting the capital’s already notoriously heavy traffic.

The helipad — located in the Kremlin’s Tainitsky (Secret) Garden
– has already been tested.

“The president will use it as soon as reasonably practicable,”
Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov told journalists. Currently,
Putin is at his summer residence in the Black Sea resort of
Sochi.

To commute to the Kremlin from his official residence in
Novo-Ogaryvo, just outside Moscow, Putin will use a Russian-made
Mi-8 chopper. It is “the only kind of helicopter” the president
flies on, Peskov noted.

The use of such heavy aircraft as an Mi-8, will cause no damage
to the buildings, palaces and cathedrals in the Kremlin — Moscow’s
architectural pearl.

“All the possible effects on the architecture were thought
ahead before the site for this heliport was picked,” Peskov
assured. “A scientific approach and a great deal of sensors”
were used during the construction, he added.

Both Putin and his initial presidential predecessor, the late
Boris Yeltsin, occasionally used to fly to work on choppers which
landed on the Kremlin’s Ivanovskaya Square, the spokesperson
recalled. That spot, however, was not entirely suitable as it was
quite crowded with tourists.

Official motorcades agitate drivers in Moscow, where traffic is
already a nightmare. The long cavalcades of black vehicles carrying
authorities – accompanied by sirens and police bikes — only add to
the headaches. Every time they cross the city, police block the
roads and ordinary drivers have to wait in long traffic jams.

According to Peskov, though, motorcades do not really worsen the
situation with traffic, but only cause “temporary
difficulties.” 

Still, taking into account public anger, Putin and Prime
Minister Dmitry Medvedev minimized their trips to downtown Moscow,
working from their residences outside the city whenever
possible.

Medvedev has been using a helicopter for several months now to
get to his office in the White House — the Russian government
headquarters.

“The Prime Minister uses a helicopter whenever weather
conditions are suitable. It has practically become his main mode of
transport,” Medvedev’s spokesperson Natalya Timakova said,
cites Itar-Tass. The head of the government prefers flying in Mi-8
and, also, European AgustaWestland helicopters.

This article originally appeared on : RT

A powerful bomb explosion has ripped through a US military convoy in Kabul, killing at least six US-led soldiers and several Afghan civilians.

The casualties came after the strong explosion targeted a convoy of vehicles carrying US-led foreign forces in Afghanistanâ„¢s capital, Kabul, on Thursday morning.

Afghan officials say the blast killed six foreign troops, including two Americans, and also eight Afghan civilians. But the US-led Western military alliance said two American soldiers and four contractors died in the deadly blast.

Media reports say nearly three dozen Afghan civilians were injured in the incident

Afghanistan’s Islamic Party led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar has claimed responsibility for the fresh bombing.

Over seventy US-led foreign troops have been killed in Afghanistan so far this year. Most of those who have died are Americans.

The latest deaths bring the number of US-led soldiers killed in Afghanistan this year to at least 65.

According to the latest figures released by the website icasualties.org, 3,314 foreign soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan since the US-led war began in October 2001.

The number of casualties among foreign troops peaks at this time of year, known as the Taliban spring offensive, as the militants step up their attacks on US-led forces during this period.

The United States and its allies invaded Afghanistan as part of Washingtonâ„¢s so-called war on terror. The offensive removed the Taliban from power, but the country is still gripped by insecurity.

The Afghan conflict has seen a surge in attacks on foreign troops in recent months. More than four hundred foreign soldiers were killed in the war-torn country last year alone.

The increasing number of military casualties in Afghanistan has caused widespread anger in the US and other NATO member states, undermining public support for the Afghan war.

JR/SS

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

As the Guantanamo hunger strike enters day 100, the inmates’ lawyers have revealed details of abuses their clients are subject to, while the prison authorities keep denying they are resorting to practices violating human rights.

A fair trial would have been a natural step. To have all of the
parties heard and resolve the crisis, believes Clive Stafford
Smith, founder of legal group Reprieve, and an attorney for several
detainees in the Guantánamo Bay camp.

RT spoke to the activist who was first to reveal some of the
harsh methods allegedly used in Guantanamo, including degrading
body searches, which inmates have to undergo just to phone their
representatives.

RT: Why haven’t the U.S. authorities tried to
negotiate an end to the hunger strike – instead of using
controversial tactics like force-feeding or denying drinking
water?

Clive Stafford Smith: Of course in order to negotiate an
end to the strike, we have to give justice to these prisoners. And
we are talking about 96 of the 166 prisoners, who have been cleared
for release, and that’s 52 per cent of them, including most of the
people I represent. There’s only one way to end this strike fairly,
and that’s to take prisoners who’ve been cleared for release and
set them free. And Shaker Aamer, the last British resident, he
could come back to London tomorrow if only President Obama would
show him redemption and use the National Defense Authorization Act
to let people go free. That’s the only way to solve this
problem.

RT: Is it not possible though, because Washington is
stuck between a rock and a hard place. Here we have people who were
scooped up from places like Afghanistan, put into Guantanamo Bay.
Even if they weren’t radicalized before they arrived, they may have
become radicalized because of their prison
experience. 

CSS: I’ve been radicalized, I’m radicalized for justice
not for violence. And that’s true for all the people I’ve
represented. Every single prisoner, who’s been set free in Great
Britain, and there’s been 14 of them, has behaved impeccably, when
they came back here. Unless you think it’s wrong to go around
telling the truth, giving speeches and writing books. None of them
have done any criminal offense, save for one who got a traffic
ticket one time. And it would be so perverse if we argued that we
can snatch innocent people, abuse them for 11 years and say,
because we’ve abused them, they might hate us, therefore we keep
them forever. That’s ridiculous.  

RT: The hunger strike has gone on for 100 days. It is
a long time without food. What can you tell us about the health
conditions of your clients?

CSS: Well I can, and I’m actually glad that a standard
operating procedure for Guantanamo Bay was leaked this Monday. I
have a copy of it. It’s not classified. And it corroborates
everything my clients have been telling me about how the
force-feeding is being done. And you know what’s really worrying
about this is General Bantz Craddock of SOUTHCOM – back when they
changed the protocol to make it more painful for prisoners – said
they were doing it to make it “inconvenient” for the prisoners to
keep on hunger striking. In the earlier days they used a smaller
tube up one’s nose, it’s a 120cm long, and they would leave that
tube in for weeks at a time. Now what they are doing is they are
using larger tubes and they are sticking those up one’s nose twice
a day and pulling them out again.

RT: You revealed that Guantanamo detainees undergo
full body cavity searches before they can contact their
representatives. Camp authorities claim everything they do is
lawful and justified. Isn’t this just normal practice in
prisons?

CSS: No, it’s not normal practice. But let’s face it —
when my clients are coming to have a telephone call with me they
can’t smuggle anything on a telephone line. And so the idea that
they threaten the prisoners with full body search, and I won’t go
into the really graphic part, but it’s basically a sexual assault,
is just a threat to try to get them not to talk to us and frankly
the reason for this is fairly obvious. That there’s been an awful
lot of information coming out of Guantanamo Bay that doesn’t suit
the authorities. Now they say what they say is the truth, we say
what we say is the truth. Of course, the natural thing to do about
this is to have a proper trial, but we are not allowed one of
those. I’m confident that my clients are telling me the truth and
just want that truth to come out of there.

RT: How long has the practice of body searches been in
place and has it prevented inmates from contacting their
lawyers?

CSS: The threat of the anal cavity search only came about
ten or twelve days ago, and yes indeed it has. Last Friday two of
my clients refused to have a call with me for the simple reason
that they didn’t want to go through that process. I had one of the
other lawyers from Reprieve, who was at the base last week and
twice prisoners didn’t want to come out for a visit, because of
what they’ve been threatened with. This is just not civilized. I
speak as an American when I say we should not be doing this sort of
thing. We are upholding the rule of law, not trying to suppress
it. 

What’s sad about it is of course people at Guantanamo have
studied what Muslim man are particularly sensitive to. And so one
thing that obviously a conservative traditional Muslim male is not
used to is having a stranger basically assault them sexually. And
this is something which is far more humiliating for someone from
Yemen, than it would be for someone perhaps from America. And these
things have been studied rather carefully, so it’s a great tragedy
that the US has used studies on how to be sensitive to Muslims and
turned these around to use them to humiliate them.

This article originally appeared on : RT

The head of the Russian branch of France’s Societe Generale faces up to seven years in prison on bribery allegations after Russian investigators released a sting operation video of him with wads of cash on his desk.

Investigators announced they have opened an official criminal
case against Vladimir Golubkov and his senior VP Tamara
Polyanitsyna.

The video footage shows armed police forcefully entering the
bank, jumping counters and cornering Golubkov in his office. He
stood behind his desk, which had several piles of 5,000 rouble
($150) notes stacked on it.

The investigators said the cash totaled 5 million roubles
($160,000), and the video shows the banknotes carefully laid out
across the desk.

“Golubkov demanded, via his subordinate Polyanitsyna, more
than $1 million from a businessman to extend the maturity and
reduce the interest rate on a multi-million dollar loan,” the
Investigative Committee alleges.

Golubkov’s lawyer, Dmitry Kharitonov, claimed his client is
innocent: “He is being held for 48 hours by the Investigative
Committee and faces up to seven years if convicted,” Kharitonov
said.

According to various media reports on Thursday, an executive at
a car dealership informed on Golubkov after he paid several
instalments of a bribe to restructure an $80 million loan.

Many western banks have already packed up and left the Russian
market, dominated by state giants VTB and Sberbank. Foreign banks
have complained about a lack of competition and an even playing
field, and the recent corruption probe could result in further
retraction of international investors in Russia.

47-year old Golubkov became CEO of Rosbank in 2008.

Many bankers have voiced suspicions about the authenticity of
the sting, and some have even suggested it was a set up.

“I know him to be a good man,” Garegin Tosunyan,
president of the Association of Russian Banks, told Reuters.
“The accusations simply don’t fit – although the law enforcement
authorities are entitled to their theory and to
investigate.”

“If you ask me, it is unlikely that he would stoop to such
commercial bribery. I hope that investigators will consider the
possibility that he was deliberately set up.”

Russian tycoon and a leader of the Civil Platform Party Mikhail
Prokhorov also stuck up for Golubkov and signed a petition to the
court not to arrest the man, giving his personal guarantees.

“I know him very well. He has always been an honest and
professional man, and I am sure he will not hide anywhere,”
Prokhorov advocated.

This article originally appeared on : RT

Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) Saeed Jalili has condemned the recent deadly bombings in Turkeyâ„¢s border region with Syria.

During a press conference in the Iranian Consulate in Istanbul on Thursday, Jalili denounced the massacre of innocent people, adding, Å“Borders between the countries in the region should be the borders of friendship, cooperation and security.”

On May 11, at least 51 people were killed and more than 140 others injured after a series of blasts hit the Turkish town of Reihanly in the southern province of Hatay near the border with Syria. Turkey has accused Syria of being behind the bomb attacks, while Damascus dismisses the allegation.

Jalili further underlined the need for the formation of a security framework within the region, saying that the enemies should not be allowed to conduct any acts against the nations in the region.

Å“Today, the countries in the region should utilize all their facilities in line with synergy. There are good capabilities in the region” Jalili said, adding that Turkey has good capacities for both the region and the Islamic world.

The senior Iranian official further stated that Syria is also an important force against the Zionist regime of Israel and in supporting the resistance movement.

Å“We make use of all of our facilities to boost ties between the countries in the region, and if there is any discord, we try to minimize it. The friendlier the relations, the more secure and prosperous the region will become.”

Turmoil has gripped Syria for over two years, and many people, including large numbers of Syrian soldiers and security personnel, have been killed in the foreign-sponsored militancy.

Turkey has openly voiced support for militants fighting against the Syrian government since the beginning of the ongoing unrest in the Arab country.

MKA/HMV

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

This article originally appeared on : RT

Egyptian Bedouins gather at the scene of an explosion in the Sinai Peninsula. (File photo)

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

Boyko Borisov, the leader of the GERB Party and a former Prime Minister, casting his ballot at a polling station during the general election in Sofia on May 12, 2013.

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

This article originally appeared on : RT

Egyptian Bedouins gather at the scene of an explosion in the Sinai Peninsula. (File photo)

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

Boyko Borisov, the leader of the GERB Party and a former Prime Minister, casting his ballot at a polling station during the general election in Sofia on May 12, 2013.

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

Battered and bloody, Boston bombings suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev reportedly scrawled a confession inside the hull of a boat police found him in after a day-long manhunt. The note says the April marathon bombing was revenge for US actions against Muslims.

The confession specifically named US military actions in
Afghanistan and Iraq as motives for the attack, and called the
Boston Marathon bombing victims ‘collateral damage’ in the same
vein that Muslim civilians had been killed in American led wars,
CBS news reports.

“When you attack one Muslim, you attack all Muslims,” the
note allegedly added.

Dzhokhar reportedly declared he did not mourn the death of his
older brother Tamerlan — the other suspect in the bombings, who
died from injured received during a shootout with police — saying
he was already a martyr in paradise. Dzhokhar added that he
expected to join his brother in the afterlife.

Law enforcement sources told the network the wall the note had been
scribbled on was riddled with bullet holes. Police unloaded a
volley of shots after Dzhokhar lifted up the tarpaulin, claiming
they feared he had another bomb.

He had sustained multiple gunshot wounds and was severely bleeding
from injuries to his left ear, neck and thigh. Initial reports said
his neck wound was possibly from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in
a botched suicide attempt, though it was later revealed that
Dzhokhar was unarmed when captured in Suburban Watertown
Massachusetts on April 19.

His arrest followed a massive manhunt which brought the greater
Boston area to a standstill.

Police say the contents of the confession mirror many of the things
he communicated to investigators while recovering from his injuries
at a hospital several days later. The confession will be admissible
in court.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, is currently convalescing in a federal
prison hospital in Massachusetts and has been charged with using a
weapon of mass destruction in the deadly attack which killed three
people and injured 264 near the marathon finish line on April
15.

If found guilty, he could face the death penalty.

This article originally appeared on : RT

Bahraini demonstrators shout slogans during a rally in Isa Town, south of Manama, on May 1, 2013.

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

The controversy over last year’s Al Qaeda assault on US diplomatic and CIA facilities in Benghazi, Libya has been revived amid a deepening political crisis of the Obama administration.

Even as the debate between the Obama White House and its Republican opponents becomes more heated, however, the real issues underlying the September 11, 2012 attack, which claimed the lives of the US ambassador, Christopher Stevens, and three other Americans, remain hidden.

Some Republicans have gone so far as to suggest that administration’s handling of the Benghazi affair could become grounds for impeachment of the Democratic president. There is a sense that Obama, also embroiled in controversies over state spying on the media and IRS harassment of groups politically opposed to the administration, is in serious trouble as a result of anti-democratic and militarist policies pursued behind the backs of the American people.

As always, the presentation of these developments by the American media is dishonest and deliberately misleading.

The media has largely reduced the matter to the small change of electoral politics; whether the White House–aiming to fend off a Republican attack on the eve of the 2012 election–had a hand in altering “talking points” prepared for then-US Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, who provided the first public explanation of the fatal assault in Benghazi.

This thesis, advanced by the Republicans, suggests that the White House was determined to prevent the truth about Benghazi from interfering with Obama’s plan to run on his record of supposed successes in the “war on terror”–most notably the assassination of Osama bin Laden. Thus, the administration misrepresented the Benghazi assault as a spontaneous anti-American demonstration by Libyans outraged over an anti-Muslim video produced in the US and aired over the Internet.

Some 100 pages of emails released by the White House Wednesday in an attempt to quash the controversy show that the CIA, the State Department, the Pentagon, the FBI, the National Security Council and the White House all intervened in the editing of Rice’s script, with the State Department exerting the greatest pressure to remove references to Al Qaeda and Libyan Islamist militias that were present in its first drafts.

These concerns suggest that there was far more at stake than denying the Republicans an opportunity to tarnish Obama’s record, or that the current controversy stems merely from a Republican strategy for torpedoing the anticipated 2016 Democratic presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton.

The overriding motive for concealing the identity of those who laid siege to the US facilities in Benghazi has its source in the tangled relationship that Washington had established with the elements that carried it out. Neither the Democratic White House nor the Republican leadership in Congress has any interest in probing this essential question.

For over a decade now, Washington under both Bush and Obama has sought to justify its military interventions abroad and its attacks on democratic rights at home in the name of a never-ending global war on terror, and specifically a supposed struggle to eradicate Al Qaeda.

The reality, however, is that the US and its intelligence agencies have long had a far more complex relationship with these forces than anyone in the US government cares to admit.

These are ties that stretch back to the founding of Al Qaeda as an adjunct to the CIA’s efforts to foment and finance an Islamist insurgency against the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan beginning in the late 1970s. Before that, American intelligence had long viewed reactionary Islamist organizations in the Middle East, Iran, and Indonesia as useful assets in the struggle against socialist and left nationalist influences in these areas.

September 11, 2001, we have long been told, “changed everything,” but it did not fully change this relationship, which was so closely bound up with the terrorist attacks of that day.

In its intervention in Libya, Washington utilized Al Qaeda-linked fighters as a proxy ground force in the war to topple the secular regime of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, arming and advising them and using them to follow up the massive US-NATO bombing campaign.

Christopher Stevens was very much the point man in this relationship, having carefully studied the Islamist opponents of Gaddafi before the launching of the war for regime-change. He was deployed in April 2011 to Benghazi, where he coordinated the arming, funding and training of the so-called rebels, elements previously denounced by the US as terrorists and, in some cases, abducted, imprisoned and tortured by the CIA.

In October 2011, the imperialist intervention in Libya achieved its victory with the lynch-mob murder of Gaddafi, carried out by these US-backed forces.

One of the reasons that the Benghazi affair continues to roil political waters in Washington is that this same strategy is now being employed on an even larger scale in Syria, where once again even more dangerous Al Qaeda-connected militias are serving as the most important fighting force in the war to bring down Bashar al-Assad. As in Libya, the aim is to solidify US hegemony over the region’s oil wealth at the expense of American capitalism’s rivals, particularly Russia and China. In addition, regime-change in Damascus is sought as a means of preparing an even wider war against Iran.

With the Syrian intervention floundering, the Benghazi fiasco serves as a cautionary example of the potential rewards for success in these ventures. There are evidently bitter divisions within the American state apparatus over this policy.

The most likely explanation for the bloody events in Benghazi last September is that the relationship forged with Al Qaeda of the Maghreb turned sour in the aftermath of Gaddafi’s overthrow, perhaps with the Islamists believing that American promises had gone unfulfilled and they had not been adequately compensated for their services. With the assassination of Stevens, who was the US envoy to the “Libyan revolution,” they were sending a definite message to Washington.

This kind of “blowback” has a long and ugly history in US imperialism’s global interventions. On September 11, 2001, those blamed for the terrorist attacks had previously been hailed by Washington as “freedom fighters” and supported in the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Even earlier, the Kennedy administration’s backing for the Cuban “gusanos” in the abortive 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba produced a layer of extreme right-wing terrorists in the US who were convinced that they were the victims of a political double-cross. This poisoned relationship in all likelihood played a role in the violent end of the Kennedy administration itself.

In the final analysis, the concerted efforts of the Obama administration, the State Department and the various intelligence agencies to avoid mention of Al Qaeda in the account of the Benghazi attacks was aimed at covering up the enduring covert relationship with this terrorist network and the fact that it is once again creating explosive crises in which the peoples of the Middle East and potentially the US itself are the innocent victims.

This article originally appeared on : Global Research

Two days after the Associated Press revealed that the Justice Department had secretly seized telephone records of its editors and reporters, the Obama administration continued to defend its actions. A House committee that heard testimony from Attorney General Eric Holder initiated a bipartisan whitewash of the virtually unprecedented assault on press freedom.

The Justice Department has rejected AP demands that it return the thousands of telephone records it subpoenaed, without prior notice to the press agency, and destroy all copies. It has refused to answer inquiries from newspapers and television networks as to other possible subpoenas of internal media communications.

In connection with a criminal investigation ordered by Holder last June of an alleged leak of classified information in an article published the previous month by the AP, the Justice Department last February obtained a subpoena for records of all calls from some 20 telephone lines over a two-month period prior to the appearance of the article. The lines that were tracked included the national office of the AP in Washington DC and news offices in Washington DC, New York and Hartford, as well as the telephone used by AP reporters in the congressional press gallery in the Capitol.

Also targeted were the home and cell phones of at least one editor and at least five reporters who were involved in the story, an exposè of a covert CIA operation in Yemen. The story was denounced at the time by John Brennan, then President Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser, as an “irresponsible and damaging leak of classified information.” Brennan is currently the director of the CIA.

Holder last June also ordered a criminal probe of alleged national security breaches in connection with New York Times articles on Obama’s drone assassination program and the White House “kill list,” and on US collaboration with Israel in the production of the Stuxnet computer virus, which was used to attack Iran’s nuclear program.

In a letter Tuesday to Holder and Deputy Attorney General James Cole, a media coalition headed by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press said its members were “stunned” to learn of the Justice Department’s actions. The press organization is comprised of more than 50 news organizations, including the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal .

The letter stated: “In the thirty years since the Department issued guidelines governing its subpoena practice as it relates to phone records from journalists, none of us can remember an instance where such an overreaching dragnet for newsgathering materials was deployed by the Department, particularly without notice to the affected reporters or an opportunity to seek judicial review.”

The signatories added that the Justice Department “should announce whether it has served any other pending news media-related subpoenas that have not yet been disclosed.”

The revelations of illegal government spying on the press coincide with a burgeoning scandal over the targeting by the Internal Revenue Service of organizations at odds with the policies of the administration. The IRS has admitted to improperly tagging for more intrusive investigation organizations applying for tax-exempt status that it believed were linked to the Tea Party and other Republican groups.

In the midst of these scandals arising from the anti-democratic methods and policies of the Obama administration, Attorney General Holder testified for some four hours on Wednesday before the House Judiciary Committee. What the hearing revealed, however, was not only indifference among both Democrats and Republicans to the escalating assault on democratic rights, but overwhelming support for the expansion of police state measures that is being carried out in the name of the “war on terror,” of which the attack on press freedom and prosecution of whistle-blowers is a part.

In his opening statement to the committee, Holder began by hailing the role of federal, state and local police and intelligence agencies in the police-military lockdown of metropolitan Boston following the bombings last month at the Boston Marathon. He made no mention of either the IRS scandal or the dragnet of AP phone records. Holder had previously announced that he had recused himself from the AP leak investigation and played no role in the decision to subpoena the information. He has referred all questions on the matter to his deputy, James Cole.

However, Holder implicitly defended the actions of the Justice Department with the preposterous assertion, “We’ve utilized essential intelligence-gathering and surveillance capabilities in a manner that’s consistent with the rule of law, and with our most treasured values.” And while he refused to answer specific questions about the AP case, he repeated previous assurances that Deputy Attorney General Cole and the US attorney in Washington DC had followed all appropriate Justice Department rules and regulations.

The tone for what was to follow was set in the opening statements of the committee chairman, Republican Bob Goodlatte, and the ranking Democrat, John Conyers. Both Goodlatte and Conyers praised the FBI and the other law enforcement agencies for their de facto state of siege in Boston.

In his questioning of Holder, Goodlatte cited the supposed failure of the FBI, CIA and Department of Homeland Security to “connect the dots” prior to the bombing and suggested that the rules for interrogators be loosened. Holder replied by saying, “I think you’re right, Mr. Chairman.” He offered to work with the Republican congressman toward that end.

Goodlatte also criticized Holder and the Justice Department for not delaying reading the bombing suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, his Miranda rights longer than 48 hours. This line of attack on the right to remain silent and the right to counsel was taken up by a number of other Republicans on the committee.

The chairman questioned the extent of the seizure of AP phone records and the failure of the Justice Department to give the news service advance notice, but he did not pursue the matter when Holder dodged the questions.

In his questioning, Conyers did not even mention the attack on the Associated Press, setting the pattern for almost all of the other Democrats on the committee. Only two Democrats, Zoe Lofgren of California and Hakeem Jeffries of New York, directly criticized the Justice Department’s dragnet of phone records, and both did so quickly and perfunctorily.

Lofgren, for example, stated that the Justice Department’s actions had “impaired the First Amendment,” but went on to suggest that this “impairment” might be justified by the “criminal violation” under investigation. When Holder said an “after-action analysis” of the AP case might be appropriate, Lofgren thanked him and said, “That might be good.”

Two Democrats, Hank Johnson of Georgia and Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, openly supported the attack on press freedom. Defending the seizure of the phone records, Johnson said, “The Espionage Act of 1917 would authorize prosecution of anyone who published classified information.”

The Republicans for the most part avoided the AP issue, concentrating instead on the IRS scandal and partisan attacks on Thomas Perez, the current head of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, who has been nominated by Obama to become the new labor secretary.

This article originally appeared on : Global Research

British government’s austerity measures could exacerbate child poverty and child wellbeing, a landmark report from the British Medical Association (BMA) says.

The Growing up in the UK report from the BMA warned that cuts to welfare benefits and social care could worsen UK child poverty and widen inequalities.

The BMA report pointed to the Department of Health’s 2012 report, according to which “more children and young people are dying in the UK than in other countries in northern and western Europe”.

Moreover, the 250-page report revealed that the most recent international work places the country 16th out of 29 nations as far as child wellbeing is concerned.

Doctors, however, believe this is not all about child poverty in the UK, adding that the comments Å“does not reflect the impact of policies implemented post the 2010 election”.

“The BMA is particularly concerned that any improvements in tackling child poverty are in danger of being eroded by some government welfare policies. Children should not pay the price for the economic downturn,” said chair of the BMA’s board of science Averil Mansfield.

Earlier in May, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) warned that More than one million children in Britain will fall into poverty by 2020, saying that tax and benefit reforms introduced since April 2010 are the main factors leading to the increase in the UK child poverty.

MOS/HE

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

dailymail.co.uk
May 16, 2013

The prospect of cloned babies has moved a step closer after scientists extracted stem cells from human embryos created in a laboratory.

The breakthrough could lead to customised cells to help treat and even cure a range of diseases, from Alzheimer’s to multiple sclerosis.

However, it also raises the spectre of babies being cloned in laboratories. This could allow couples who lose a child to pay for the creation of a ‘duplicate’.

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This article was posted: Thursday, May 16, 2013 at 8:38 am

Tags: science, technology

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This article originally appeared on : Infowars

It was recently announced at the World Economic Forum in Cape Town, South Africa that MasterCard and the Nigerian National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) under the government of Nigeria would form a partnership to distribute a new identity card to every Nigerian citizen. The purpose of the card is to have all Nigerian citizens participate in the financial services sector under the control of MasterCard, a multinational financial services corporation headquartered in New York. MasterCard’s press release ‘MasterCard to Power Nigerian Identity Card Program’ stated:

As part of the program, in its first phase, Nigerians 16 years and older, and all residents in the country for more than two years, will get the new multipurpose identity card which has 13 applications including MasterCard’s prepaid payment technology that will provide cardholders with the safety, convenience and reliability of electronic payments. This will have a significant and positive impact on the lives of these Nigerians who have not previously had access to financial services.

The program is also designed to move Nigeria into a cashless society, one that is dependent on financial institutions, Wall Street and the Nigerian government. It will be managed by the financial elites of Wall Street, technocrats and of course Washington. All forms of financial transactions would be exchanged through plastic credit and debit cards that would have implanted RFID chips. Michael Miebach, President of the Middle East and Africa division at MasterCard  supports the Nigerian government’s decision for a new cashless society, “Today’s announcement is the first phase of an unprecedented project in terms of scale and scope for Nigeria,” said Michael Miebach

“MasterCard has been a firm supporter of the Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN) Cashless Policy as we share a vision of a world beyond cash. From the program’s inception, we have provided the Federal Government of Nigeria with global insights and best practices on how electronic payments can enable economic growth and create a more financially inclusive economy.”

The problem with a cashless society is that the state can terminate your electronic financial lifeline if anything were to happen within the country, for example any form of protests, economic downturns, a war or if a financial institution such as MasterCard were to go bankrupt. There are many other reasons that the state or its’ corporate backers can decide to turn off the RFID chip.  When you a have a powerful financial institution issuing payments electronically with a government that is supported and controlled by Washington, unlimited control of the populace becomes inevitable. 70% of Nigeria’s population is living below the poverty line as of 2010. How can MasterCard and the Nigerian government benefit millions of Nigerians who are living in abject poverty? Is MasterCard going to offer low interest rates on its credit cards in a country that has a more than 70% of the population in poverty with many living with less than a dollar a day?

Another aspect about the National Identity Smart card is that it can be used for surveillance of individuals under the state.  With Nigeria facing a civil war between Islamists insurgents and minority ethnic groups from the oil rich Niger Delta, the National Identity Smart cards can be used to identify its enemies. The MasterCard press release stated how it identifies the individual cardholder:

The new National Identity Smart Card will incorporate the unique National Identification Numbers (NIN) of duly registered persons in the country. The enrollment process involves the recording of an individual’s demographic data and biometric data (capture of 10 fingerprints, facial picture and digital signature) that are used to authenticate the cardholder and eliminate fraud and embezzlement. The resultant National Identity Database will provide the platform for several other value propositions of the NIMC including identity authentication and verification

According to MasterCard, the purpose of the Nigerian Identity Card Program is for the economic prosperity of Nigerian people. Is it a facade? Is the Nigerian government on the verge of controlling its population financially with Washington’s support? With MasterCard and Wall Street involved, Washington will support the Nigerian government in order for it to succeed with the plan:

The announcement was witnessed by Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister for the Economy in Nigeria, who stressed the importance of the National Identity Smart Card Scheme in moving Nigeria to an electronic platform. This program is good practice for us to bring all the citizens on a common platform for interacting with the various government agencies and for transacting electronically. We will implement this initiative in a collaborative manner between the public and private sectors, to achieve its full potential of inclusive citizenship and more effective governance,”

The Nigerian based independent newspaper The Guardian with reporter Marcel Mbamalu along with the Africa Press Organisation (APO) interviewed the Division President of Sub Sahara Africa for MasterCard, Daniel Monehin in an article called ‘Identity Card: Biometric Data of Nigerians Remain with FG, Not MasterCard, Says Monehin’:    

Marcel Mbamalu: You talk of something close to general application of the card; yet, the finance Minister was quoted as saying that it will begin with government pensions before…

Daniel Monehin: That was in response to the question that was asked the honorable Minister as to what would be the criteria for selecting the pilot citizens. She responded that she’s really excited at the auspicious time that this is going on because there’s a lot of work that is being done centrally for central treasury and for payment within the federal government, and she would like to see pensioners being part of this first group of the pilot, so that the federal government can begin to load their payment automatically, take out the physical nature of it so that the old tale of people dying on the line while trying to wait on the line to collect their pension would be a thing of the past.

The whole thing that is happening is that this is a platform not just for receiving government tension but for receiving government pensions, benefits, bursary payments, NGO’s that are funding private segments of the society can be funded directly; salaries can be paid directly. Anybody with that card has a whole new world opened to him or her. So, from government-to-people payments, from people-to-people payments, ATM all of those platforms or avenues are open. This is not a card that is restricted, its not even restricted to Nigeria; it is loaded.

You can go out of Nigeria to Ghana, Gambia, USA, China and use it. It is accepted in 210 countries and territories, and over 35 million acceptance locations around the world.

So, in terms of potential, this is a massive platform and what the minister just alluded to is just one segment of its use, not all.

The issuance is starting within the next three months. The National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) is going to do an event locally to flag it off.

Nigeria’s decision to have a cashless society under corporate control in the near future is a disturbing trend for humanity. Let’s hope that the Nigerian people resist MasterCard and the government and find an alternative economic solution that will allow them to live in free society they deserve.

This article originally appeared on : Global Research

File photo shows an injured US soldier.

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

Jeff Mason
reuters.com
May 16, 2013

The White House on Wednesday sought to defuse controversy over its handling of last year’s killing of four Americans in Benghazi, releasing emails that show how Obama administration officials presented a scrubbed-down version of the attacks to the public.

The documents gave a glimpse into the administration’s message control as officials carefully debated via email which details U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice should highlight when she went on talk shows five days later to discuss the September 11 assault on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya.

There was little in the roughly 100 pages of emails about Rice’s “talking points” that had not been leaked previously.

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This article was posted: Thursday, May 16, 2013 at 8:13 am

Tags: domestic news, foreign affairs, terrorism

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This article originally appeared on : Infowars

Jim Hoft
thegatewaypundit.com
May 16, 2013

The IRS is facing a lawsuit after stealing 60 million medical records from 10 million patients.
Healthcare IT News reported:

The Internal Revenue Service is now facing a class action lawsuit over allegations that it improperly accessed and stole the health records of some 10 million Americans, including medical records of all California state judges.

According to a report by Courthousenews.com, an unnamed HIPAA-covered entity in California is suing the IRS, alleging that some 60 million medical records from 10 million patients were stolen by 15 IRS agents. The personal health information seized on March 11, 2011, included psychological counseling, gynecological counseling, sexual/drug treatment and other medical treatment data.

“This is an action involving the corruption and abuse of power by several Internal Revenue Service agents,” the complaint reads. “No search warrant authorized the seizure of these records; no subpoena authorized the seizure of these records; none of the 10,000,000 Americans were under any kind of known criminal or civil investigation and their medical records had no relevance whatsoever to the IRS search. IT personnel at the scene, a HIPPA facility warning on the building and the IT portion of the searched premises, and the company executives each warned the IRS agents of these privileged records,” it continued.

According to the case, the IRS agents had a search warrant for financial data pertaining to a former employee of the John Doe company, however, “it did not authorize any seizure of any healthcare or medical record of any persons, least of all third parties completely unrelated to the matter,” the complaint read.

The lawsuit is seeking punitive damages for constitutional violations, as well as $25,000 “per violation per individual” in compensatory damages. Those damages could start at a minimum total of $250 billion.

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This article was posted: Thursday, May 16, 2013 at 8:23 am

Tags: domestic news, government corruption, healthcare

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This article originally appeared on : Infowars

Larry Bell
forbes.com
May 16, 2013

A couple of new studies reveal the gun-control hypesters’ worst nightmare…more people are buying firearms, while firearm-related homicides and suicides are steadily diminishing. What crackpots came up with these conclusions? One set of statistics was compiled by the U.S. Department of Justice. The other was reported by the Pew Research Center.

According to DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. gun-related homicides dropped 39 percent over the course of 18 years, from 18,253 during 1993, to 11,101 in 2011. During the same period, non-fatal firearm crimes decreased even more, a whopping 69 percent. The majority of those declines in both categories occurred during the first 10 years of that time frame. Firearm homicides declined from 1993 to 1999, rose through 2006, and then declined again through 2011. Non-fatal firearm violence declined from 1993 through 2004, then fluctuated in the mid-to-late 2000s.

And where did the bad people who did the shooting get most of their guns? Were those gun show “loopholes” responsible? Nope. According to surveys DOJ conducted of state prison inmates during 2004 (the most recent year of data available), only two percent who owned a gun at the time of their offense bought it at either a gun show or flea market. About 10 percent said they purchased their gun from a retail shop or pawnshop, 37 percent obtained it from family or friends, and another 40 percent obtained it from an illegal source.

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This article was posted: Thursday, May 16, 2013 at 8:09 am

Tags: constitution, domestic news, gun rights

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This article originally appeared on : Infowars

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speaks in the southern port city of Bandar Abbas, May 16, 2013.

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

Two people have been killed after a military aircraft suffered a technical glitch and went down in northern Jordan, killing both the pilot and the trainee on board.

A statement released by the Jordanian General Command said the British-built two-seat Fairey Firefly plane crashed at 6:55 a.m. local time (0355 GMT) on Thursday.

The statement added that the aircraft faced a technical failure during a routine training flight, and fell in an area west of King Hussein Air College in the city of Mafraq, situated about 80 kilometers (49 miles) north of the capital Amman.

The victims were identified as the pilot Lieutenant Colonel Maen Duheisat, and the trainee Nael Khashman.

In January 2012, a Jordanian pilot was killed after his military aircraft crashed on a training flight due to a technical problem.

Another Jordanian air force plane crashed during a military exercise in September 2010, killing the pilot.

The crash took place in a military zone and technical malfunction was blamed for the mishap.

MP/SS

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

Daniel Taylor
Infowars.com
May 16, 2013

The secretive Bilderberg Group has had more exposure in the past several years than it has since its founding in 1954. This is due mostly to the alternative media pushing the issue to the forefront. Today Bilderberg appears to be grooming itself for a new era and coming into the open. As reported by Paul Joseph Watson, Google and Bilderberg are apparently merging.

What is the end game of this merger? It is possible to reverse-engineer the Google-Berg plan by sifting through open source information. In this article we will be connecting the dots to paint a picture of what is very likely the big picture plan of the Google-Bilderberg partnership. This partnership entails the networking of powerful individuals who operate vast networks of influence. Among these include Banks, technology developers, CEO’s of corporations and Prime Ministers.

In his 2011 book How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance, Parag Khanna — Director of the Global Governance Initiative at the New America Foundation – outlines a vision for the future in which mega corporations, NGO’s and governments team up to govern the globe. As the Asia Times reports “Apart from the usual government/institutional suspects, Khanna includes an array of extra players in the new rulers of the world, mostly powerful NGOs such as the Gates Foundation. These players are particularly fond of the global conference circuit — from the annual bash at in Davos of the World Economic Forum (WEF) to the seductively mysterious Bilderberg Group.”

An example of these individuals “fondness of the global conference circuit” is a 2009 meeting in New York at the home of Sir Paul Nurse, President of the Rockefeller Foundation. As to the secrecy of the meeting, a guest said, “They wanted to speak rich to rich without worrying anything they said would end up in the newspapers, painting them as an alternative world government.”

This is the backdrop to the Google-Berg merger. Governments are going broke. Globalist influences have broken down national borders. Tax exempt foundations and mega corporations are filling the gap.

These groups are essentially hijacking national government’s policies and advancing a top down, authoritarian system of control. In an interview with the Seattle Times, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was asked, “Some say the emergence of super rich philanthropies like the Gates Foundation has undermined the effectiveness of the U.N. and its member organizations, like the WHO.” Moon responded,

“On the contrary that is what we really want – contributions from the business community as well as philanthropies. We need to have political support, but it doesn’t give us all that we need. NGOs and philanthropies and many foundations such as Bill Gates Foundation – they’re taking a very important role…”

The Gates Foundation has successfully hijacked America’s national education policy. To demonstrate the intimate relationship that the Gates Foundation has with the Obama administration, this 2009 article points out that within the first four months of his Presidency, Obama appointed four high ranking officials from the Gates Foundation.

The Bilderberg conglomerate is tapping into this immense power to advance its objectives.

Planned-Opolis

What will the future look like under the direction of mega corporations and philanthropic organizations?

Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna write in Foreign Policy magazine, “As we move into the Hybrid Age, whoever has the capacity to mange the intersection of technology, capital, and identity can become a pole of power.” As we have seen, tax exempt foundations and corporations like Google have taken on a powerful role in global affairs. Governments are increasingly taking a back seat to the influence of these groups. Some have charged that they are “monopolizing development.”

In joining with Bilderberg, Google is preparing to enter this “Hybrid Age” of advancing technology and rapidly changing geopolitical landscapes with its hands gripped tightly on the reigns of power. With this merger, the world is set to be shaped into a highly surveilled and planned system at the direction of unelected elitists.

In 2010 the Forum for the Future presented a vision of the future in which mega-cities are run by supercomputers and citizens lives are tightly controlled. The Forum for the Future is backed by Bank of America, Sony, the City of London Corporation, PepsiCo UK, Time Warner, and Royal Dutch Shell. Each of these entities have representatives at the Bilderberg Group.

Their vision for the future was called “Planned-Opolis”:

These mega-cities will likely be based on an ongoing project in a South Korean city called New Songdo. The “U-City” will deploy so called “ubiquitous computing” technology that enables the monitoring of citizens 24/7 via pressure sensitive floors that track your walk to computer chips that are embedded everywhere in the environment. U-cities are described as places where “…all major information systems (residential, medical, business, governmental and the like) share data, and computers (e.g., RFID, smart cards and sensor-based devices) are built into the houses, streets, bridges and office buildings.”

Bill Gates’ Microsoft Corporation is playing a key role in developing technology for New Songdo. While a large portion of the technology is being developed in the U.S., it is being tested in South Korea where there are historically less traditional, ethical and social blockades to prevent its acceptance and use.

Google chairman Eric Schmidt — who expects to be swallowing nanobots in the not too distant future — envisions life in this technological age as a streamlined and convenient existence. Google’s driverless cars — now legal in California and Nevada — will no doubt find their way into Planned-Opolis.

The Hybrid Age

Are we headed to a Rollerball like future in which corporations have replaced countries? According to Parag and Ayesha Khanna we are indeed headed in that direction. In the Hybrid Age, mega coporations will provide advanced technology to their constituents and thus gain loyalty. As we stray away from broken governments to provide security and prosperity, these entities will fill the gap.

“Employees of Facebook or Google can spend their days on campuses that are effectively full-service communes; the same is happening in companies in Russia, India, and China. One day a corporate passport might afford them greater freedom of mobility than their national citizenship.”

In 2008 the Washington Post published an article titled “Washington’s Future, a History.” The Post gathered trends analysts, university heads and government officials to look into the future and develop potential scenarios. The Post depicts a future in which small scale terror attacks and angry rioters plague the streets while implantable ID chips allow government workers to pass through checkpoints unmolested. Economic decline and cyber terrorism fracture the country. Bobbie Kilberg, president of the Northern Virginia Technology Council, told the Washington Post, “Basic functions of government will be outsourced.”

In the Post’s vision of the future, “Google LifeServices” provide the wealthy with employment at “work pods,” goods, and other services in one complex. Those who subscribe have access to,

“…entertainment and socializing… gathering goods, eating and working. The new subscription retailing was catching on in cavernous buildings, old big box stores that had been reconstituted as workspaces. Here, people could spend a good chunk of their day, moving seamlessly from their work pod to take in a movie with a friend, choose the dinner items that would be delivered before they got home, and take care of the day’s errands, all while staying in constant touch with colleagues, and all for one monthly Google LifeServices subscription fee.”

The global elite are pushing the globe toward a dystopic future in which all aspects of life are in some way managed by their interests. Humanity cannot afford to blindly accept this future, no matter how attractive the propaganda might seem. On June 6 the Bilderberg conference will commence. The future of humanity will be discussed by a handful of elites with agendas that will have a far reaching impact on all of our lives.

Daniel Taylor’s website is Old-thinker News.

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This article was posted: Thursday, May 16, 2013 at 8:02 am

Tags: big brother, technology

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This article originally appeared on : Infowars

From tattoo tips to background checks on online dates, the UK Foreign Office has revealed a list of odd requests from citizens abroad. Diplomats mostly deal with arrests and deaths, but silencing the odd noisy rooster can also creep on to their agenda.

The British Foreign Office published an annual report detailing
the various requests they received in 2012, including some of the
more unorthodox queries. One man in Stockholm approached the
Diplomatic Mission to ask whether it could carry out an identity
check on a woman he had met on an online dating site. Then there
was the Rome embassy, which got a request from an individual asking
for a translation of a tattoo he wanted.

Meanwhile, a desperate housewife in Tel Aviv solicited the UK’s
diplomatic services to coerce her corpulent husband into slimming
down so the couple could have children.

Enquiries as to the best place to watch the football ranked the
highest in the list of bizarre requests filed to UK consular
services around the world. Additionally, tight-fisted sports fans
pestered British Embassies the world over, looking to scrounge free
tickets to the London Olympics in 2012.

One of the most farfetched communications received by a British
Embassy last year was a request to silence a particularly loud
rooster. Sticking with the theme of animal-related woes, a man in
Cambodia who required medical attention when a monkey dislodged a
stone that fell on him called on the diplomatic mission to help him
get monetary compensation.

Upon releasing the report the UK Foreign Office did stress that it
helped over 50,000 British nationals in difficulties abroad in
2012. Most of these problems included arrests, hospitalizations and
deaths.

Consular Affairs Minister Mark Simmonds emphasized the “Foreign
Office staff help many thousands of British nationals facing
serious difficulties around the world every year.”

“We are not in a position to help people make travel
arrangements or social plans, but we do help those who face real
problems,” he warned.

Simmonds told press that the Foreign Office receives over a million
inquiries every year and it is logistically impossible to answer
everyone. He added that in the coming year the institution will
seek to help those most in need, this evidently will not include
requests for Phil Collins’ telephone number and Prince Charles’
shoe size, which came up in a previous year’s report.  

The UK’s diplomatic mission in Spain received so many inquiries
that it was forced to open a special contact center in the southern
city of Malaga. The center reports that over 39 per cent of the
requests that were lodged concerned lifestyle queries.

This article originally appeared on : RT

Aside from the international media frenzy surrounding the sacking and trial of opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim for sodomy, and the occasional anti-imperialist tirades of former Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia has rarely made international headlines. That is partly because this resource rich multi-ethnic state has been an island of stability since its independence in 1957, preaching a moderate-brand of Islam with a steady focus on economic development.

Malaysia is unique in contrast to other states in the region and throughout the Muslim world in that it has given unprecedented cultural and religious autonomy to non-Muslim ethnic Chinese and Indian minorities who wield significant influence over the economy. Although the country has practiced participatory politics and democratic elections from its inception, the ruling party, responsible for steering all developmental efforts since independence, has never been unseated. Covering local politics in the heart of Southeast Asia is a fast-paced exercise, and in Malaysia, mistrust is rampant and grand allegations are exchanged between political factions like bank notes in a marketplace.

In the fallout of a heated election held in early May, which saw the incumbent Prime Minister Najib Razak and his Barisan Nasional coalition continue its uninterrupted rule, passions are high and those of the social-media generation are advertising their discontent in the streets, thirsty to challenge the infallibility of the regime. Since his coalition failed to take power following the closest fought general election in Malaysian history, opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim has been leading protest rallies throughout the country alleging that the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition resorted to “massive fraud” to secure victory in the polls. Over the course of my time in Malaysia,

I have reviewed various assessments of Mr. Ibrahim; I’ve had in depth discussions with his former political allies who defected from his opposition coalition, and I’ve sat down with former PM Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, the man who saw Anwar as a son, who groomed him to lead the nation, only to condemn him to political free-fall for rampant corruption and allegations that he sodomised a male aid.

No matter if they were formerly from the government or the opposition, everyone told me the same things about Anwar: that he is narcissistic chameleon, a genius of political opportunism, a master of public rallying and street-theatre, and that he has a ravenous obsession with becoming the Prime Minister of Malaysia. Months before the election Mahathir sat across from me, 87 and still sharp and healthy as ever, and told me how Anwar planned to bring down the government through street action, taking after the Arab Spring uprisings. “The opposition is already receiving money from NGOs that are financed by the US government,” hold told me. “Apparently they would like to see regime change in Malaysia, and they have in mind someone who is known to be very pro-American and in defense of Israel.” To the average Malaysian democracy activist who is ever critical of Mahathir’s shortcomings, this rhetoric is absolute rubbish, seen as diversionary tactic to distract people from the Barisan Nasional’s own corrupt dealings and monopoly on power. Unfortunately for those activists, this author is readily convinced that the Doctor’s prescription is spot on.

Who is Anwar Ibrahim?

What I’ve observed from speaking to rally-goers and social-medialites is that most Malaysians under 30 know very little about Anwar Ibrahim’s past dealings in government, his flirtation with Wahhabi Islam, and his unabashed shoulder-rubbing with neoconservatives in the Bush administration. Anwar was a man of humble beginnings, raised by a middle-class family. From his early days in politics, he established close alliances with both Wahhabi missionaries and the Muslim Brotherhood; he called for Malaysia to be ruled by a 14th century interpretation of the Koran and sharia law. Anwar was part and parcel of Saudi Arabia’s approach to religious expansion, whereby missionaries are used to recruit Islamists in moderate Sunni states, injecting an alien brand of political Islam with the intention of undermining secular Muslim regimes. Riyadh’s drive to Arabize states in Southeast Asia had a lot to do with offsetting the influence of revolutionary Iran, which inspired much of the politically ambitious religious establishment in Malaysia and elsewhere. 

Anwar was given his start in government by none other than Dr. Mahathir Mohamad. At the time, Mahathir’s biggest political competition was the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS), an Islamist political party that remains a strong component in the opposition coalition even today. Mahathir brought Anwar onboard as the Minister of Culture, Youth, and Sports to offset PAS’s influence. Once in government, he began working closely with banks tied to the Muslim Brotherhood and the Wahhabis to build the necessary financial resources needed for his political ascent. Anwar was promoted to Education Minister where he worked to advance the spread of Wahhabi Islamic doctrine in the schools as part of policy that attempted to re-order Malaysian society from the top down. In schools, Muslim prayers were publicly recited, sermons preached, and Islamic festivals celebrated as part of the curriculum, a far-reaching departure from the heretofore multi-ethnic character in national schools.

Mahathir allowed this on his watch, apparently to shore up his support base against PAS, who preached that Malaysia’s leadership were decadent, untrue Muslims. During his time in government, Anwar was known to have amassed a significant fortune, in the multi-millions through elite corruption and kickbacks from cronies at Petronas, the state oil company. Anwar had dealings with Al Baraka Bank, the world’s largest source of Islamic finance, which generously funded Saudi proxies and their causes from the madrassas in Pakistan to the glitzy capital cities of Southeast Asia. Anwar formed an NGO in the United States, the International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT), which labeled itself a harbinger of moderate Islam, and was utilized to influence policymakers in the US government and academia — the likes of Paul Wolfowitz, Al Gore, Dick Cheney, Grover Norquist, Bill Cohen, Richard Perle, Madeleine Albright, William Perry, Colin Powell, Richard Holbrooke — the same individuals who would cry foul and threaten Malaysia with diplomatic consequences over Anwar’s six-year detainment after being charged with corruption.

Anwar, ambitious and aspiring to unseat Mahathir, paraded himself around Washington D.C. as the ideal stooge, a force for good that stood for democracy and free markets. Jonathan Smith vividly describes how US officials “often took with them the belief that if only Anwar were in charge in Malaysia, here at last could be a perfect Muslim democracy. American liberals — amusingly, overwhelmingly Jews — accepted Anwar’s projection at face value. To them, he was their tabula rasa: A Muslim who cared about the environment, about global peace and nuclear disarmament, about social justice — basically, about all of their core beliefs, yet never with any specific detail — Anwar was the noble savage for these men and women who likely believed Malaysia a tropical rainforest where the natives went around naked most of the time.” As time went on, Anwar embraced neoliberalism and more brazenly endorsed the values of the American establishment.

During the Asian financial crisis on 1997, Anwar implemented IMF austerity policies, including cutting government expenditures by 20 per cent, stripping funding from Mahathir’s enormous infrastructure projects that promised to bring Malaysia into the 21st century — a move that dismayed Mahathir and hastened Anwar’s departure from government, which happened dramatically in 1998. In the end, Mahathir rejected the IMF’s medicine and took credit for spearheading Malaysia’s recovery through currency controls and protectionist measures. After Anwar’s stint in prison, he based himself in Washington, where he chaired the Foundation for the Future, a US think-tank established by Elizabeth Cheney, Dick’s daughter. While Ibrahim was on trial for sodomy, Wolfowitz and Al Gore authored a joint opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal in support of Ibrahim, while the Washington Post published an editorial calling for consequences that would affect Malaysia’s relations with Washington if Ibrahim were to be found guilty. Ibrahim enraged many when he stated that he would support policy to protect the security of Israel in an interview with the Wall Street Journal; this is particularly controversial in Malaysia, where support for Palestine is largely unanimous. Malaysian political scientist Dr. Chandra Muzaffar argues:

“It is obvious that by acknowledging the primacy of Israeli security, Anwar was sending a clear message to the deep state and to Tel Aviv and Washington that he is someone that they could trust. In contrast, the [incumbent] Najib government, in spite of its attempts to get closer to Washington, remains critical of Israeli aggression and intransigence. Najib has described the Israeli government as a ‘serial killer’ and a ‘gangster’.” 

Anwar Ibrahim’s closest allies outside of Washington and Riyadh are in Istanbul, where he enjoys close ties with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Foreign Minister Ahmet DavutoÄŸlu, both devout protégés of the House of Saud. Malaysia with Anwar Ibrahim at the helm would bare strong parallels to the political direction taken by Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, which has steered secular Turkey’s domestic policy in a noticeably Islamist direction, while drifting steadily closer into the US-Saudi sphere of influence.  

Popular Grievances & Allegations of Fraud

Because Malaysia exists as a multi-cultural and multi-religious state, both the ruling and opposition coalitions attempt to field candidates that represent the interests of the nation’s largest ethnic groups. Approximately 60 percent of Malaysians are Muslim ethnic-Malays, 25 percent are predominantly Buddhist ethnic-Chinese, and 7 percent are mostly Hindu ethnic-Indians. The main parties in the Barisan Nasional governing coalition have traditionally been the United Malays National Organization (UMNO), the Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA), and the Malaysian Indian Congress (MCI), although support has dwindled in recent times for the latter two parties. Malaysia has become politically divided, and many — especially the online-savvy middle class — feel extremely disillusioned with corruption that pervades all levels of society, from taxi drivers and hawkers to the elite figures in business and government. Citizen equality is a major concern, especially of minorities who feel sidelined over constitutionally protected affirmative action policies that give ethnic Malays advantages in business and education. Opponents of these affirmative action policies routinely call them intentionally discriminatory, alleging they reflect a “Malay dominance” paradigm that has not been shaken from the ruling polity since independence.

Proponents of the policy argue that it was historically justified because some 60 percent of all Malays lived below the poverty line at the time of independence, and the policy is still required, as the Malay majority are still lowest income earners. It’s quite commonplace to find ethnic-Chinese Malaysians railing against their self-perceived status as “second-class citizens,” but these frustrations don’t live up to scrutiny, as the conditions Malaysia’s Chinese community are subjected to do not resemble that of a deprived community by any stretch of the imagination. The Chinese community dominates the middle and upper income earning strata, they are not hindered from attending vernacular schools in their mother tongue, from practicing their respective faiths, and they are a vibrant and active force in politics. One memorable defense of affirmative actions policies I’ve come across came from a Chinese taxi driver, who told me “If not for those policies, the Malays would be window-washers and street sweepers. How many Malays do you see with Chinese drivers?” he joked.

Activists and opposition supporters often criticize on open truth, that the mainstream media is dominated with pro-government views, with most reportage of the opposition being negative. It should also be noted however, that the opposition coalition absolutely dominates social media. The explosion of social media users, up 45% from 2008, was a critical factor in the past general election and the opposition has undeniably made its voice heard through various campaigns that have swayed a large portion of young voters. Facebook profile pictures were replaced with solid black images in protest of the prevailing status quo following the announcement of the election results, as emotional refutations of the poll results went viral, along with slogans such as “R.I.P. Democracy.” Among the poor and in the rural Malay heartlands that have traditionally been Barisan Nasional-strongholds, there is a fear of unknown political terrain that may adversely affect low-income communities, who are most vulnerable to feeling the burn if the economy is mismanaged following a political transition. Barisan Nasional retained its position thanks to support from the rural electorate who felt like the development projects and populist policies on offer were the safest bet.

The opposition coalition, Pakatan Rakyat, currently controls three state governments and is led by Anwar Ibrahim’s Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR), the staunchly Islamist Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS), and the Chinese-led secular Democratic Action Party (DAP), the latter being by far the strongest force in the coalition, reflective in the fact that Chinese voters by and large abandoned Barisan Nasional and voted in their favor. Despite being strange bedfellows, the Pakatan Rakyat opposition coalition won massive gains in the recent elections, firmly entrenching a two-coalition system. It’s not all roses and sunshine though, these three parties have fundamentally different ideologies, and critics have likened their coalition to a marriage of political opportunism. PAS for example, ardently advocates the implementation of sharia law and hudud Islamic penal code, and from its inception has called for the foundation of an Islamic state. DAP stanchly opposes the implementation of hudud law and the concept of an Islamic state, while Anwar, always a man of many masks, plays the middle ground, saying that hudud is not the official policy of the coalition, but that he personally supports it.

Aside from instilling the perception that Malaysia’s electoral process is deeply unfair and rigged in favor of the ruling party, the opposition campaigned on a platform of fighting corruption and creating more equitable wealth distribution, which resonated deeply with the electorate. Pakatan retained their stronghold of Penang while making significant inroads in places like Sabah, Sarawak, and Johor, known to be “fixed deposits” of the ruling party. Even with significant victories achieved by the opposition, Anwar Ibrahim has held steadfast to his pre-election assertion that only “massive fraud” would prevent his coalition’s victory. This statement is inherently problematic, because it presupposes that any election result that yields anything other than Anwar’s victory is: invalid, illegitimate, and fraud. The opposition notably meted out a steady stream of allegations, which largely remain entirely unsubstantiated. Anwar accused Prime Minister Najib Razak’s office of flying in some 40,000 foreign nationals to illegally to vote on behalf of the ruling coalition in key battleground states in Malaysia.

Such an allegation is not only logistically unsound, but bloggers soon pointed out several mathematic discrepancies in the details Anwar provided, and that the feat of transporting such a large volume of individuals could not possibly be accomplished with the alleged flights that took place. At the time of this article being written, he has produced no evidence to validate his accusation. Operators of the airlines Anwar claimed were involved dismissed his claims as baseless rumors. Third-party election monitors, such as the IDEAS Institute, claimed that although structural biases exist, such as in the uneven delineation of voting constituencies and the government’s control of mainstream media, the election process “proceeded smoothly” and that “the vast majority of the glitches were not major” lending credibility away from claims of that “massive fraud” took place. The Merdeka Centre, a widely quoted polling agency, also accused the opposition of making a “host of unsubstantiated allegations about the elections”. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Anwar, always a publicity-junkie, declared Pakatan’s victory over Twitter before any official results were announced, creating mass confusion. If compelling evidence exists that proves Barisan Nasional stole the elections, the opposition hasn’t made it available for public scrutiny.

‘Democracy does not work’

Haris Ibrahim from the pro-opposition group ABU recently vowed to overthrow the ruling coalition by force, stating, “We will take to the streets and take over. If we really want to overthrow them, there is no other way. Democracy does not work.” Members of the opposition coalition hold conflicting views regarding attempts to overthrow the government by force; some have condoned it while others have condemned it. Bersih, an electoral watchdog, has promised to mobilize protestors to descend on Malaysia’s administrative capital, Putrajaya. The National Endowment for Democracy or NED, is a Washington-based foundation that supports democratic initiatives and US-friendly opposition groups abroad; it provides over $1 million to various projects in Malaysia each year, and most of the players now calling for overthrowing the regime are the recipients. According to the NED’s website, it conducts training, research, and leadership cultivation exercises with the governments of Penang and Selangor, key opposition-held states. Members of Barisan Nasional have denounced Ibrahim’s connections to the NED in the Malaysian Parliament, and the lack of transparency surrounding the funding.  

The electoral watchdog group Bersih has organized rallies calling for electoral reform, which many criticized as being as thinly veiled anti-government protests due to the participation of key opposition figures. Tunku Abdul Aziz Ibrahim, a key player in the opposition prior to defecting from the DAP, claimed that Americans from US-based foundations were calling the shots and outlining the functions and operations of Bersih. “In the meeting, I was offered to head the watchdog because they said I have the credentials, integrity and credibility for the post. They told me that the movement was to ensure free and fair elections in the country,” he said, disclosing that he was offered some $4,000 monthly plus other perks and allowances for his position. Aziz also accused Malaysia’s opposition leader of using Bersih to channel support to his political campaign, “Anwar makes good use of his international networking to get these funds. I don’t know whether Bersih leaders knew it or not, but Bersih is Anwar’s vehicle to receive international funds under the guise of democracy and free and fair elections. Bersih is not a non-partisan independent organisation. It’s Anwar’s baby.” Aziz resisted overseas funding because he claims it compromises national integrity and dignity. “Local organisations should justify their existence to Malaysians, not to foreigners. Local organisations should not owe their existence and allegiance to foreigners,” he stressed.

Upon closer examination of the language used by these foundations, when they claim to be working toward “broadening the appeal of political parties,” a critical question comes to mind — when does so-called ‘democracy-promotion’ become political interference? The work of the NED has ostensibly blurred the line between the two, while masking their overt backing for actors they support in the benign language of electoral transparency, freedom and the promotion of human rights. The US has displayed an undeniable resurgence of interest in Southeast Asia as part of its Asia Pivot policy, ostensibly as a response to growing Chinese economic influence in the region. PM Najib Razak has attached primary importance to Malaysia’s relationship with Beijing, Malaysia’s largest trade partner. Washington’s backing for Malaysia’s US-friendly opposition must be seen in the context of its moves to bolster its military muscle and dominance over the Asia-Pacific region in line with its pivot. Malaysia is a key player in Southeast Asia, and Washington is doing what it can to tip the scale in favor of the opposition after its success in the 2008 elections and the 2013 elections. Despite the current administration’s considerable efforts to deepen ties to the US, Anwar’s history makes him more of an asset to US policy than the incumbent.

The ruling coalition is far from perfect, it is has failed to stifle issues of high-level corruption and elite opulence remains a huge problem. However, Malaysia was transformed from an exporter of rubber and tin into a key industrial player with strong domestic industries under its watch; it has overseen stable economic growth, while promising 3.3 million new jobs in the high-income sector and attracting multi-million dollar investments.

The ruling government will likely be able to ride through the coming barrage of protestors out with the express purpose of toppling the government, but analysts say if trends continue, the opposition will likely overcome and take power in the 2018 by the ballot box. PM Najib is now in a delicate position, and he must make greater efforts to address the trust deficit that exists between the people and the Malaysian leadership, and focus on implementing reforms to the EC that are recommended by observer groups to ensure greater transparency. The most pressing and arduous task ahead of him will be reestablishing trust with an angry, highly polarized and wary electorate. Malaysia has never experienced a change in government, but if Anwar Ibrahim ever finds himself at the helm, the nation will walk on unchartered political territory that will bring far-reaching changes, not only in economic and diplomatic directions of the country, but also in the state’s relationship with the moderate brand of Islam it was founded upon.  

Nile Bowie is a Malaysia-based political analyst and a columnist with Russia Today. He also contributes to PressTV, Global Research, and CounterPunch. He can be reached at nilebowie@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on : Global Research

How Rich is Rich?

Growth of the Global Billionaire Population

While nearly 1 in 2 people on this planet have a net worth of less than $10,000, a select few are worth more than a million dollars.

And an even more select group is worth a billion or more.

Image source: www.bestvalueschools.com

How Rich is Rich?

While nearly 1 in 2 people on this planet have a net worth of less than $10,000, a select few are worth more than a million dollars. And an even more select group is worth a billion or more.

Composition of net worth around the world

– >$1 million — 29,000,000
– $100,000-$1 million — 344,000,000
– $10,000-$100,000 — 1,035,000,000
– <$10,000 — 3,184,000,000

Snapshot of Superwealth

Here is a look at the number of billionaires by region, including projections
– Country — 2011 — 2012 — 2022
– Africa — 25 — 35 — 75
– Asia — 496 — 543 — 1191
– Europe — 672 — 708 — 1115
– Latin America — 123 — 145 — 301
– Middle East — 128 — 140 — 203
– North America — 487 — 586 — 1146
– Australasia — 36 — 41 — 45

Growth of global billionaire population

– 2011 — 2012 — 2022
– 1967 — 2198 — 4076

Top 30 global cities by high net worth population ($30 million+), 2012

– New York — 7,580
– London — 6,015
– Tokyo — 5,440
– San Francisco — 4,590
– Los Angeles — 4,520
– Beijing — 2,285
– Mumbai — 2,105
– Hong Kong — 3,205
– Sao Paulo — 1,880
– Rio de Janeiro — 1,740
– Delhi — 1,945
– Mexico City — 2,585
– Osaka — 2,970
– Shanghai — 1,415
– Chicago — 2,615
– Paris — 2,860
– Houston — 2,295
– Washington DC — 2,395
– Dallas — 2,020
– Toronto — 1,765
– Zurich — 1,805
– Munich — 1,670
– Singapore — 1,345
– Sydney — 1,405
– Dusseldorf — 1,420
– Hamburg — 1,370
– Geneva — 1,360
– Melbourne — 1,150
– Frankfurt — 1,220
– Rome — 1,130

Luxury Locations

How many square feet does $1 million buy?
– In Monaco — 14
– In London — 19
– In Paris — 32
– In Moscow — 36
– In New York — 37
– In Sydney — 37
– In Beijing — 49
– In Miami — 57
– In Tokyo — 60
– In Mumbai — 75
– In Istanbul — 85
– In Sao Paolo — 114

Most expensive neighborhoods in the world

– Seventh Arrondissement, Paris, France
– Average home price: $1.2 million

– La Jolla, San Diego, California
– Average home price: $1.7 million

– TriBeCa, New York City
– Average home price: $1.76 million

– Shibuya Neighborhood, Tokyo, Japan
– Average home price: $1.8 million

– Sea Island, Georgia
– Average home price: $2.23 million

– Victoria Peak, Hong Kong
– Average home price: $3.5 million

– Pacific Heights, San Francisco, California
– Average home price: $4.5 million

– Belle Haven, Greenwich, Connecticut
– Average home price: $5 million

– Jupiter Island, Florida
– Average home price: $5.6 million

– Kensington Palace Gardens, London, England
– Average home price: $85 million

Most expensive residential buildings in the world

– One Hyde Park, London — $220 million
– One57, New York — $90 million
– Opus, Hong Kong — $56 million
– Absolute Tower, Mississauga, Canada — $3.1 million
– Aqua, Chicago — $1.1 million

SOURCES

– Knight Frank
– http://www.askmen.com/top_10/travel_top_ten_60/98b_travel_top_ten.html
– http://worth.com/index.php?option=com_listings&view=slideshow&id=12
– http://www.propertyobserver.com.au/overseas/gehry-s-opus-secures-second-record-hong-kong-apartment-price-in-three-months/2012111357824
– http://realestate.yourmoney.ca/2011/12/905-condo-on-the-market-for-32-million.html
– http://www.highrises.com/chicago/aqua-condos/

This article originally appeared on : Global Research

Patrick L Young is expert in global financial markets working in multiple disciplines, ranging from trading independently to running exchanges.

Francois Hollande was elected a year ago. With a bloody-minded determination he is already the least popular President in French history. A double dip recession is hardly a surprise in the face of such concerted incompetence.

We’ll avoid the “c” word as one thing France isn’t doing
is celebrating. A year ago, the electorate ousted the discredited
Psycho-Sarko. The victor Hollande campaigned on a remarkably left
wing manifesto (even by French standards). His redeeming feature
for those of us not blessed with the looks of Brad Pitt, was that
despite being nicknamed after a custard tart, Monsieur Flanby seems
to have a remarkable way with beautiful women.

However, given the lack of empirical evidence that glamorous
women close to the Presidency have actually galvanised economic
growth (in the case of Hollande, even the simple act of buying
engagement rings seems to be a commercial act too far), let’s stick
to the essence of political economy…

To describe the French as in a depressive torpor rather
overstates things. Monsieur Hollande’s first year as President has
delivered a double dip recession. The crescendo of cynicism is
rising about France’s discredited “third way” economics.
Government spends with gusto, taxes with rapacious alacrity and
watches wealth creators flee to South Kensington or Belgium…

Rank Government hypocrisy has further decimated Presidential
credibility: it transpired the Budget Minister held significant
assets offshore to evade his own punitive tax regime.

True, the government recently held high profile meetings to
convince business leaders that the President believes in
enterprise. The tricky point was that this came after months of
increasingly shrill posturing against all forms of wealth creation.
The entrepreneurial actor/national icon Gerard Depardieu ditched
his passport, availing himself of Russia’s pragmatic flat tax
fiscal policies at a fifth of the retrograde 75% rate imposed by
Paris. Historians recall short Frenchmen used to march on Russia
with invasion forces. Had it not been for flawed early adoption of
global warming theory they might have succeeded. Now Frenchmen
arrive in Moscow to renounce their nationality and embrace a
prevailing capitalist culture… How times change, the east
looks progressive, the west is festering in a socialist mess of
centralised planning.

Other tax rises include investment transactions which will help
impoverish future pensioners with the temerity to save. Now a plan
is afoot to tax “smart” devices such as mobile phones and
tablets. The insanity of taxing data – a key future engine of
economic growth – pinpoints the closeted bunker-like attitude of
the government. When faced with the infant Web, the French
bureaucracy actively protected their Minitel network against
‘upstart’ global web standards.

Foreign relations are messy too. The historical Franco-German
axis anchoring the EU looks creaky. Germany wants austerity.
France, having failed to balance their budget since 1974, want the
punchbowl kept at the table to restart the party. To describe
relations between the inept left wingers and their conservative
counterparts as cool is an understatement.

France is tumbling towards a denouement: decades of
irresponsible government promising the people cake have left the
economy on the brink of collapse. The nation is ‘bankrupt’
according to Employment Minister Sapin’s own words in January.
Maintaining the high spending, high tax, 57% government controlled
economy risks disaster and France runs the risk of being just an
auction or two away from becoming the next Mediterranean Bond
market disaster…

Talk of revolution is premature although it preoccupies French
media. Certainly the French political elite is staggeringly out of
touch. When Hollande “relaunched” his Presidency with a
walkabout ‘relaunch’ in Dijon during March, he was “visibly
overwhelmed” by the vocal antipathy to his shambolic regime.
Hollande is a damning indictment of the “grandes ecoles”
system where remote “leaders” are de facto anointed by attending an
elite college.

However, all is not lost. Entrepreneurs may feel crushed by
France’s intransigent anti-capitalist culture but there is much to
celebrate. French multinationals are enormously successful at the
cutting edge of emerging markets: building, producing, supplying
and retailing with panache throughout the world.

Nevertheless, President Hollande is already less popular than
Charles De Gaulle when he sought protection in a German air base
from rioting students in 1968! Clearly Mr ‘Flanby’ has panache: to
be this unpopular after one year demonstrates a certain talent! Now
he needs to focus on actually running a government and not a
juvenile debate which is of lesser quality than on the barricades
of 1968…

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 leader of the Russian Liberal-Democrats has been declared persona non grata in Kyrgyzstan after claiming the Central Asian country’s treasured alpine lake as repayment for Russia forgiving a $500 million national debt.

The parliament of Kyrgyzstan has ruled in favor of banning the
controversial Vladimir Zhirinovsky from the country.

The head of the Russian State Duma Committee on CIS affairs
Leonid Slutsky called on to the Kyrgyz deputies “to be more
restrained.”

However, Zhirinovsky himself considers the ruling of Kyrgyz
parliament an “error and delusion” and doubts that the
Kyrgyz Foreign Ministry will “pursue this path.”

“I think I was misunderstood. I made no official statement
whatsoever. I just expressed a proposal on how to develop
cooperation between our countries so that Russia could continue to
help Kyrgyzstan with credits, and Kyrgyzstan in turn has means to
repay the loans,” he said.

“Of course, I have not spoken in the literal sense that Lake
Issyk-Kul must become a gift [to Russia] – I suggested options.
More specifically, we were talking about the possibility of leasing
the lake for 49 years in order to develop tourism more
actively,” he added.

Zhirinovsky noted that he knows Kyrgyzstan very well, having
lived there, and has relatives there. The last time he visited
Kyrgyzstan was seven years ago, he mentioned.

“I have only good feelings towards this country and its
people,” Zhirinovsky insisted.

The ‘Issyk-Kul incident’ emerged after Zhirinovsky commented on
Russia recently writing off the $500 million national debt of
Kyrgyzstan. He said that in return for forgiving the debt, Russia
should claim huge lake, believed to be Kyrgyzstan’s main tourist
attraction.

Vladimir Zhirinovsky has had a solid reputation as the enfant
terrible of Russian politics for nearly a quarter of a century now
and somehow managed to disentangle himself from countless
unpleasant situations, created mostly by his controversial
utterances. This time, though, his trip of the tongue has fallen on
the wrong ears.

Was it a traditional Zhirinovsky-style joke or not, the Kyrgyz
lawmakers gave the ‘demand’ some serious thought and decided to be
offended for real. The opposition immediately used the situation to
its profit, insisting the remark was a public offense to all Kyrgyz
people and encroachment on Kyrgyzstan’s sovereignty.

The initiative to ban Zhirinovsky came from opposition
parliamentary fraction Ata-Zhurt. Its delegate Zhyldyzkan
Djoldoshova insists that after this controversial comment,
Zhirinovsky “has no moral right to come to Kyrgyzstan.”

The initiative found immediate support in the Kyrgyz parliament
and on May 15 Vladimir Zhirinovsky was proclaimed persona non
grata, Interfax reports.

This article originally appeared on : RT

CIA agents operate most everywhere. Some pose as diplomats.

Diplomacy provides cover for why they’re sent. Christopher Fogle was caught red-handed. He was assigned to Washington’s Moscow embassy political section. He was third secretary.

A web site name search found no match. It’s no surprise why. He was arrested, declared persona non grata, and expelled. He got off easy. He committed espionage. He should have been imprisoned.

On May 14, Voice of Russia (VOR) headlined “FSB catches CIA Agent Controller red handed,” saying:

The previous evening, Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said Fogle “was arrested while in the process of attempting to recruit a member of one of the Russian special services.” No name was mentioned.

According to the embassy’s political section, it

“presents US foreign and security policy positions to the Government of the Russian Federation and interprets for Washington, Russia’s major foreign, defense and security policies.”

“Also, (it) analyzes and reports on significant events and trends in Russian domestic politics (elections, political parties, Kremlin-regional relations, media, human rights etc.) in so far as they affect Russia’s relationship with the US.”

“The section consists of three units: External Affairs, Political-Military Affairs, Internal Affairs.”

In other words, it spies. It does so under cover of diplomacy. It’s much like during Cold War days. Washington spends unknown sums doing it. Black budgets aren’t revealed.

VOR said:

“While the CIA may place an agent or officer under official cover in any position, even ambassador, it is important to note that the section this particular agent was working in would have been responsible for whatever operations the US has connected to the recent Russian opposition and meddling in the elections processes in Russia.”

When Fogle was arrested, FSB said he had technical devices, a disguise, a large stack of 500-euro notes (about $650 each), and Russian instructions for an intelligence agent he tried to recruit.

A photo showed him lying face down. His arms were pinned behind his back. Instructions apparently were in letter form. It was addressed to a “Dear friend,” saying:

“YOUR COOPERATION VALUED”

“This is an advance from someone who has been highly impressed by your professionalism, and who would highly value your cooperation in the future.”

“We are willing to offer you $100,000 and discuss your experience, expertise and cooperation, and payment could be significantly larger, if you are willing to answer concrete questions.”

It added that $1 million annually would be paid for longterm cooperation. Bonuses were promised for special information.

Instructions explained an anonymous Internet cafe gmail account — unbacggdA@gmail.com. Write to the address was said, wait seven days, and check for an answer.

The closing comment was: “Thank you for reading this. We are very anxious for the opportunity to be working with you in the near future. Your friends.”

VOR said embassy undercover work is “old school….(W)hat’s interesting is the apparent desperation the CIA is operating under in attempting to obtain intelligence about Russia.”

Using an anonymous gmail address is another twist. Russia’s FSB said:

“Recently, the US intelligence community has repeatedly attempted to recruit employees of Russian law enforcement agencies and special departments.”

These attempts were “recorded and passed to FSB Counter-Intelligence.” It prevents widespread internal US meddling. It does so effectively.

Various schemes were discovered. Doing so foiled US schemes. VOR said Washington’s color revolution plot failed. USAID was expelled.

On Wednesday, Russia’s Channel 1 television aired comments from a man called an FSB officer. His identify was concealed. He said:

“Over the past two years we have been observing persistent attempts by the CIA to recruit employees of Russian law enforcement and security agencies.”

“We asked our American colleagues to discontinue such disturbing practices with regard to Russian citizens. However, our requests were ignored.”

He added that Russian counterintelligence knew Fogle was a career CIA agent the moment he arrived. He was closely monitored.

His foiled espionage mission wasn’t his first. His amateurish disguise wasn’t the first time he used one.

Other CIA operatives infest Russia. Its counterintelligence perhaps is on to their schemes. It’s had decades learning how. Its Cold War adversary hasn’t changed.

Golos is a so-called independent NGO election monitor. America’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funds it.

In last year’s Russian elections, it alleged over 2,000 irregularities, including 900 in Moscow. Executive director Grigory Melkonyants claimed “massive serious violations.” He was well paid to say it.

NED, its National Democratic Institute (NDI) arm, the International Republican Institute (IRI), USAID, and similar organizations function as destabilizing US foreign policy tools.

Russia’s a prime target. The Cold War never ended. It’s reinvented in new form.

Taking NED or other foreign money violates Russian law. Making baseless accusations compounds malfeasance. Golos is considered a foreign agent.

It’s been fined two or more times. Charges involved violating Russian electoral law. It still operates. Strict new reporting measures are enforced. All NGOs must comply.

Washington’s subversion and destabilization schemes are harder to implement successfully. Fewer opportunities are afforded.

Moscow prefers cooperative relations with America. Good faith offers are made. Washington’s confrontational policies prevent them.

America’s covert war persists. It’s much like the bad old days. Names, faces, strategies and technology alone changed.

Russian effectiveness in preventing CIA subversion exposes a “very large gap in US intelligence,” said VOR.

Michael McFaul is US ambassador. On May 15, he was summoned to Russia’s Foreign Minister to explain. The previous day, he refused to answer journalists’ questions. He faced tougher official ones.

At the same time, Moscow’s Center for Political Information general director Alexei Mukhin believes Russian-US relations won’t change much. “Despite being a very unpleasant incident,” he said, “it is still more or an embarrassment.”

He’s likely right. Both countries know the other spies. Most nations do it. Key is not getting caught. Other issues take precedence. They affect normalized relations.

Last December, America’s Magnitsky Act became law. Putin called it “purely political (and) unfriendly.”

Sergei Magnitsky was a Russian attorney. In 2009, he died in police custody. His death drew international media attention.

He specialized in civil law. He did anti-corruption work. He uncovered evidence of tax fraud. He implicated police, judiciary figures, tax officials, bankers, and Russia’s mafia.

He accused them of stealing around $230 million dollars in 2007 through fraudulent tax refunds.

Initially his death was blamed on medical neglect. Later claims suggested murder. Official investigations began. In July 2011, death by medical neglect was ruled.

Enacting Magnitsky normalized US/Russian trade relations. Doing so came with strings. Moscow raised legitimate objections.

The legislation imposes visa bans, asset freezes, and other sanctions on Russian nationals accused of committing human rights abuses. Other disturbing provisions were included.

Russia responded. The Dima Yakovlev bill was enacted. It imposes visa bans and asset freezes on US officials accused of violating the rights of Russian citizens abroad.

It prohibits US-sponsored NGOs from operating in Russia disruptively. It also targets US citizens associated with them. Another provision bans US citizens from adopting Russian orphans.

At issue is neglect causing harm or death. Dima Yakovlev was a Russian boy. His adoptive father’s reprehensible negligence and abuse caused his death. He was acquitted on manslaughter charges.

Lax US adoption laws and follow-through procedures prevent knowing how other Russian orphans are treated.

US-Russia 2009 reset policies promised a “fresh start.” Rhetoric was more promise than fulfillment. Washington’s intentions prevent normalized relations. Obama is more belligerent than Bush. Conflict is prioritized over diplomacy.

Encircling Russia with US bases is major thorn affecting normalized relations. Militarizing North Africa, the Middle East and part of Eurasia breached GHW Bush’s pledge to Mikhail Gorbachev not to do so.

Washington’s promises aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. Russia understands well. At a time no nation threatens America, the Pentagon maintain a growing network of well over 1,000 global bases. Unknown secret ones exist.

Many are positioned near Russia’s borders. Doing so is provocative and belligerent. So called missile defense systems and advanced tracking radar are for offense, not defense.

Friendly countries don’t treat others this way. Doing so is fraught with risks. Russia knows it’s targeted. US policy destroys trust.

Fogel’s arrest appears strategically timed. On June 17 and 18, Putin and Obama will attend the G8 summit. It’s scheduled for Northern Ireland. They’ll likely talk privately.

In September, they’ll meet again. The G20 summit is scheduled for St. Petersburg. Egg on Obama’s face affords Putin more leverage. How things will play out remains to be seen.

Major bilateral and geopolitical issues must be addressed. On May 15, Russia Today (RT) headlined “Presidential post: Putin’s response to Obama letter to be ‘mailed’ soon.”

Obama’s letter discussed missile defense, nuclear disarmament and transparent interaction. Putin’s response is expected shortly. It’s “exact content” isn’t known.

Russia’s Kommersant daily learned the main topics. RT said Obama proposed a legally binding agreement. He wants to assure neither country plans aggressive moves against the other.

It bears repeating, American promises aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. The 2010 New Start treaty was deeply flawed. It reflected old wine in new bottles.

Nuclear disarmament isn’t planned. Rhetoric changed, not policy. Washington plans new, upgraded weapons. They’ll replace outdated ones.

Dangerous testing continues. First-strike capability is prioritized. Plans include doing so from space. Putin understands the threat.  Mutual distrust won’t change. Putin has just cause for concern.

On May 15, he chaired a council of Russia’s top military officials. Discussion focused on developing defensive missile systems. At issue is countering America’s threat. It’s a menace too great to ignore.

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/russia-catches-cia-spy-red-handed/

This article originally appeared on : Global Research

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is expected to arrive in Russia today to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin said.

During his visit, Ban will hold talks with Putin at his vacation residence in the Black Sea resort of Sochi on Friday, Kremlin said on Thursday without giving details about the agenda of the talks.

The UN chief will pay his official visit to Russia from May 16 to 19. He is also scheduled to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

UN spokesman Martin Nesirky said Ban would discuss Syria and other global issues with the Russian leaders.

US Secretary of State John Kerry, British Prime Minister David Cameron and Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have already held talks with the Russian President over the ongoing crisis in Syria.

On May 7, Lavrov and Kerry agreed at a joint press conference in Moscow to encourage the Syrian government and the foreign-backed militants to find a political solution to the crisis.

Moscow and Washington agreed to hold an Å“international peace conference” on Syria, which will serve as a follow-up to an earlier Geneva meeting, which was held last year.

On June 30, 2012, foreign ministers of several countries including China, France, Russia, the UK foreign secretary, and the US secretary of state met in Geneva and proposed a resolution to the crisis in Syria on the basis of mutual consent.

Turmoil has gripped Syria since March 2011, and many people, including large numbers of Syrian security forces, have been killed in the unrest.

SAB/SS

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

Oxford paedophile gang convicted at the Old Bailey on Tuesday.

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

Four people have been detained after Russian banks and homes in Moscow were raided by police on suspicion of illegal activity, and the use of fictitious corporate accounts worth 1.5 billion roubles ($47.8 million).

Those detained have been charged with ‘illegal banking
activity’, and face up to seven years in prison and a fine of up to
1 million roubles (roughly $32,000).

The Interior Ministry in Moscow says fake corporate accounts
worth 1.5 billion roubles were established. Client money was
funneled through phony payment orders for ‘business consulting’ and
was transferred to bank accounts at OPM Bank, which collected a 5
percent commission on the transactions.

The illegal activity yielded high profits for the alleged money
launderers, an amount the police have not yet calculated or
released.

The ministry alleges the suspects had engaged in illicit cash
management practices, translation services, and transits, all under
the name of non-existent companies, bypassing registration with
regulatory bodies. According to the police, the false corporate
accounts were opened between May and September 2012.

Interfax first reported 26 banks were raided on Wednesday, and
searches were carried out at OPM Bank and Banke24.ru, but at the
time, no suspects had been detained or identified.

The first 13 searches began in April 2013. The arrest of the
first batch of suspects was reported by Komsomolskaya Pravda
newspaper.

This article originally appeared on : RT

A high-ranking US military general has paid a visit to Baghdad to discuss defense ties and security matters, in particular the Syria conflict, with senior Iraqi officials.

Å“Commander of the US Central Command General Lloyd Austin visited Baghdad on May 14 to 16, 2013, to discuss US-Iraq defense cooperation and regional security issues, including the situation in Syria,” the American Embassy in Baghdad announced in a statement on Thursday.

Austin met with top Iraqi authorities, including Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Acting Defense Minister Saadoun al-Dulaimi, National Security Advisor Falah al-Fayadh and Iraqi military officer General Babaker Zebari.

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

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

Several international human rights organizations have accused militants operating in Syria of committing war crimes.

MP/SS

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

The third and biggest wave of sanctions aimed against Torrent and music file-sharing websites is sweeping the internet, with 25 online addresses set to be blocked by the British Recorded Music Industry trade body.

The websites targeted by the campaign include the biggest
torrent pages and file-hosting search engines, like ExtraTorrent,
Torrentz, TorrentReactor.

The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) is also threatening to
ask courts to block US-based music streaming group
Grooveshark.

While most of the torrent sites currently set to be blocked for
copyright infringement are small operations, Grooveshark is an
exception as a larger company that has been battling the majors in
particular for some time now, Musicweek noted.

“It looks like we could be facing an onslaught of web
blackouts here in the UK,” the leader of the UK Pirate Party
Loz Kaye told RT. “What we’ve seen from 2012 is that it hasn’t
helped with music sales at all, that actually album sales failed 10
per cent.”

Loz Kaye is also sure the record companies will eventually face
their plight if they don’t change their policies.

“Essentially, this is about the record labels trying to
remain gatekeepers and actually push other companies out. But this
approach will not work! It’s going to alienate a generation of
music lovers, and it’s going to perhaps radicalize internet
users.”

However, the BPI told RT in an online statement that their only
intention is to protect the artists’ and legal services’ rights.
They also confirmed that the music licensing group PPL has begun
polling its members on licensing content for particular
websites.

“We’re not really doing any interviews about this. I can say,
though, that it’s correct PPL has asked its members to confirm to
us if they’ve licensed their recorded music to particular websites.
This is part of our ongoing work to ensure that legal music
services can flourish and that artists and labels are rewarded for
their work,” a representative of the British trade body said in
an email to RT.

Now, it seems the BPI is starting the biggest anti-piracy
initiative yet.

“Over the past years, UK music labels have innovated to build
one of the most vibrant digital music sectors in the world.
However, the growth of digital music in the UK is held back by a
raft of illegal businesses commercially exploiting music without a
license from the copyright holders,” the group indicated in
their official statement.

In the latest successful court initiative, the BPI blocked three
torrent sites (KickAssTorrents, H33T and Fenopy) three months ago.
It happened after almost a year ago, an unknown official from the
music industry told the TorrentFreak website that PPL had started
polling its members on the matter of privacy.

This article originally appeared on : RT

The nominee of Iranâ„¢s Coalition of Five Mohammad Hassan Aboutorabi-Fard has promised not to withdraw from the presidential race if he is approved by the Guardian Council.

On May 9, the principlist coalition selected Aboutorabi-Fard as its candidate for the June 14 polls.

Yahya Al-e Eshaq, the chairman of the Tehran Chamber of Commerce, Industries, Mines and Agriculture, former Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, General Inspection Office of Iran Director Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi, and lawmaker Mohammad Reza Bahonar are the other members of the Coalition of Five.

Aboutorabi-Fard said he will try to make use of qualified managers in his government if elected as president.

The principlist hopeful expressed optimism that the 11th presidential election will once again witness a huge turnout of eligible and enthusiastic voters.

Aboutorabi-Fard, who is also the deputy parliament speaker, further stressed that Iran should endeavor to become one of the worldâ„¢s strongest political and economic powers.

A total of 686 individuals signed up for the presidential race during the registration period, which began on May 7 at Iranâ„¢s Interior Ministry and ended on May 11.

The president of Iran is elected for a four-year term in a national election.

The Guardian Council, a 12-member body consisting of six jurists and six theologians, is tasked with vetting the hopefuls and confirming the election results.

ASH/HMV

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

A new landmark stem cell technique in therapeutic cloning opens new horizons in treating rare diseases and disorders caused by gene mutations. Yet, like any kind of human cloning, the research has sparked controversy on either side of the Atlantic.

A decade-long effort of geneticists worldwide has finally been
crowned with success. On May 15, The Cell published report from scientists in
Oregon that they have managed to harvest stem cells from six human
embryos bred from donated eggs.

Two embryos got DNA of a child with a genetic disorder (samples
taken from skin cells), and the other four were raised with DNA
from fetal skin cells.

Shoukhrat Mitalipov, senior scientist at Oregon Health &
Science University, has announced elaboration of a breakthrough
technology enabling production of personalized stem cells to cure
illnesses with this unique human tissue.

“This [research] represents an unparalleled achievement. They
succeeded where many other groups failed, including mine,” stem
cell biologist George Daley of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute
shared with Reuters.

Some illnesses are caused by genetic disorder, by mutations in
mitochondria genes which power cell development. The new technique
makes it possible to replace defective with healthy ones by
supplying tissue with new mitochondrial genes.

Stem cells can develop into any of the over 200 types of tissue
in a human body and replace the diseased tissue with new healthy
cells.

Mitalipov and his team have come a long way to achieve the
long-expected positive result so much anticipated by the developing
stem-cell medical fraternity.

It took six years of experiments with monkey embryos to get
positive results with human ones. In 2009, they cloned Macaque
monkey twins Mito and Tracker, which brought them worldwide fame
for being the first to develop the technology of transplantation of
chromosomal complex into primates’ eggs, thus making cloning of a
primate – and potentially a human — possible.

At the same time Mitalipov particularly stressed that human
embryos made with his technique could not be developed into cloned
babies and he has no desire to check this out.

In September 2010 the US Clinical Events Committee granted
Mitalipov’s team a license to work with human eggs and embryos.
Then there were over two years of hard work that finally ended with
a genetic technology breakthrough.

In word the technique is ‘simple’. DNA from a patient is
implanted into a human egg, which develop into an early embryo with
patient’s DNA. Then the embryo is used to obtain stem cells for
treatment of such diseases as multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s
disorder, various hereditary heart diseases etc.

The greatest achievement of the method is that the tissues
developed with the help of such cells will not be rejected by the
patient’s immune system because the genetic match of the tissue
will be flawless.

Also, the technique could be put to good use to help potential
parents to conceive an absolutely healthy baby without any genetic
defects that might endanger the child’s life or make things
difficult for the parents if the baby has health problems.

If the results of Oregon research can be repeated in other
genetic laboratories, the technique will become the third known
method to produce stem cells. One of the other two methods is
obtaining stem cells from early human embryos (blastocysts), in
large quantities raised in fertility clinics
(1998). Another one is the
way the famous sheep Dolly was cloned in Scotland back in 1996,
when scientists removed DNA from a sheep oocyte (egg), replaced it
with DNA from a sheep mammary gland cell and made it grow without
being fertilized with sperm.

But like many biotech technologies this one has its dark side,
too. The matter is that stem cells harvesting involves destroying
of cloned human embryos, a controversial method with far-reaching
consequences. Many find such approach unethical and in the face of
possible human cloning — even dangerous.

The director of education for National Catholic Bioethics
Center, an independent think tank in Philadelphia, Rev. Tad
Pacholczyk, told Associated Press that the method involves
utilization of “early human beings as repositories for obtaining
desired cells.”

“You’re creating them only to destroy them,” Pacholczyk
said, reiterating Catholic Church’s opposition to embryo
cloning.

Marcy Darnovsky, executive director of the Center for Genetics
and Society in Berkeley, California, shared with AP that she is
glad that Mitalipov is not interested in cloning babies. But the
report in The Cell is yet another good reason for the US Federal
government to ban human reproduction cloning once and for all, she
said.

Same critics come from the other side of the Atlantic, where the
British Human Genetics Alert watchdog group protested Shoukhrat
Mitalipov’s research even before the study was published in The
Cell.

The group’s director Dr. David King acknowledged that scientists
have finally delivered a method for reliably creating cloned human
embryos.

“This makes it imperative that we create an international
legal ban on human cloning before any more research like this takes
place. It is irresponsible in the extreme to have published this
research,” King told Reuters.

This article originally appeared on : RT

Iran’s top electoral supervisory body, Guardian Council (GC), has extended the deadline for announcing the names of approved hopefuls for the June 14 presidential race.

Abbas-Ali Kadkhodaei, the spokesman for the body, said Thursday that the Guardian Council will have until the 21st of May to announce the final list of candidates.

Under Iranâ„¢s Election Law, the Guardian Council, the body responsible for vetting hopefuls, is required to announce the list of approved hopefuls within five days after the end of registration. This period can be extended for another five days if necessary.

After the vetting process is complete, the 12-member supervisory body will release the final list of candidates to the Interior Ministry, which will then publicize the roster.

Meanwhile, Ayatollah Mohammad Moâ„¢men, a member of the Guardian Council, has said that the body might approve more than 10 candidates for the June presidential election.

The registration for the countryâ„¢s 11th presidential election ended on May 11, with some 686 individuals having signed up for the vote.

The president of Iran is elected for a four-year term in a national election.

The Iranian Constitution stipulates that presidential candidates must be religious or political figures, be Iranian in origin, have Iranian citizenship, be resourceful and have managerial skills, have no criminal record, be trustworthy and pious, and have firm belief in the fundamental principles of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the countryâ„¢s official religion.

AR/HMV

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

Patrick Goodenough
CNS News
May 16, 2013

After days of media leaks and back-and-forth wrangling about administration officials’ deliberations on talking points about the Benghazi attack, the White House late Wednesday released documents showing that both CIA and State Department officials pressed for the removal of all references to al-Qaeda and previous terror activity in Libya.

Among the 100 pages released is a draft of talking points being prepared for Congress and then public release about the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, with extensive pen alterations by CIA deputy director Michael Morell.

Dated Sept. 14 but not time-stamped, the document shows that Morell wanted to strike sentences including an entire portion reading:

“The Agency has produced numerous pieces on the threat of extremists linked to al-Qaeda in Benghazi and eastern Libya. Since April, there have been at least five other attacks against foreign interests in Benghazi by unidentified assailants, including the June attack against the British Ambassador’s convoy. We cannot rule out that individuals had previously surveilled the U.S. facilities, also contributing to the efficacy of the attacks.”

Morell did not, however, make amendments to the part of the draft that linked the Benghazi attack to a demonstration at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo hours earlier (by Muslims purportedly enraged by an online video clip denigrating Mohammed.)

Full article here

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This article was posted: Thursday, May 16, 2013 at 6:20 am

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This article originally appeared on : Infowars

Washington’s Blog
May 16, 2013

In the wake of the twin scandals of the IRS targeting conservative groups and the Department of Justice spying on AP reporters, the comparisons between Obama and Nixon are everywhere.

But what do experts say?

Former New York Times general counsel James Goodale — who represented the paper during its Pentagon Papers fight with the Nixon administration — said in an interview yesterday that Obama isworse than Nixon when it comes to press freedoms. And see this.

Former constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald noted last year:

We supposedly learned important lessons from the abuses of power of the Nixon administration, and then of the Bush administration: namely, that we don’t trust government officials to exercise power in the dark, with no judicial oversight, with no obligation to prove their accusations. Yet now we hear exactly this same mentality issuing from Obama, his officials and defenders to justify a  far more extreme power than either Nixon or Bush dreamed of asserting: he’s only killing The Bad Citizens, so there’s no reason to object!

Jonathan Turley — perhaps the top constitutional law expert in the United States (and a liberal) — writes:

The painful fact is that Barack Obama is the president that Nixon always wanted to be.

Four decades ago, Nixon was halted in his determined effort to create an “imperial presidency” with unilateral powers and privileges. In 2013, Obama wields those very same powers openly and without serious opposition. The success of Obama in acquiring the long-denied powers of Nixon is one of his most remarkable, if ignoble, accomplishments. Consider a few examples:

Warrantless surveillance

Nixon’s use of warrantless surveillance led to the creation of a special court called theForeign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA). But the reform turned out to be more form than substance. The secret court turned “probable cause” into a meaningless standard, virtually guaranteeing any surveillance the government wanted. After hundreds of thousands of applications over decades, only a couple have ever been denied.

Last month, the Supreme Court crushed any remaining illusions regarding FISA when itsided with the Obama administration in ruling that potential targets of such spying had to have proof they were spied upon before filing lawsuits, even if the government has declared such evidence to be secret. That’s only the latest among dozens of lawsuits the administration has blocked while surveillance expands exponentially.

Unilateral military action

Nixon’s impeachment included the charge that he evaded Congress’ sole authority to declare war by invading Cambodia. In the Libyan “mission,” Obama announced that only he had the inherent authority to decide what is a “war” and that so long as he called it something different, no congressional approval or even consultation was necessary. He proceeded to bomb a nation’s capital, destroy military units and spend more than a billion dollars in support of one side in a civil war.

Kill lists

Nixon ordered a burglary to find evidence to use against Daniel Ellsberg, who gave the famed Pentagon Papers to the press, and later tried to imprison him. Ellsberg was later told of a secret plot by the White House “plumbers” to “incapacitate” him in a physical attack. It was a shocking revelation. That’s nothing compared with Obama’s assertion of the right to kill any U.S. citizen without a charge, let alone conviction, based on his sole authority. A recently leaked memo argues that the president has a right to kill a citizeneven when he lacks “clear evidence (of) a specific attack” being planned.

Attacking whistle-blowers

Nixon was known for his attacks on whistle-blowers. He used the Espionage Act of 1917to bring a rare criminal case against Ellsberg. Nixon was vilified for the abuse of the law. Obama has brought twice as many such prosecutions as all prior presidents combined [and see this]. While refusing to prosecute anyone for actual torture, the Obama administration has prosecuted former CIA employee John Kiriakou for disclosing the torture program.

Other Nixonesque areas include Obama’s overuse of classification laws and withholding material from Congress. There are even missing tapes. In the torture scandal, CIA officials admitted to destroying tapes that they feared could be used against them in criminal cases. Of course, Nixon had missing tapes, but Rose Mary Woods claimed to have erased them by mistake, as opposed to current officials who openly admit to intentional destruction.

Obama has not only openly asserted powers that were the grounds for Nixon’s impeachment, but he has made many love him for it. More than any figure in history, Obama has been a disaster for the U.S. civil liberties movement. By coming out of the Democratic Party and assuming an iconic position, Obama has ripped the movement in half. Many Democrats and progressive activists find themselves unable to oppose Obama for the authoritarian powers he has assumed. It is not simply a case of personality trumping principle; it is a cult of personality.

Long after Watergate, not only has the presidency changed. We have changed. We have become accustomed to elements of a security state such as massive surveillance and executive authority without judicial oversight. We have finally answered a question left by Benjamin Franklin in 1787, when a Mrs. Powel confronted him after the Constitutional Convention and asked, “Well, Doctor, what have we got – a republic or a monarchy?” His chilling response: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

We appear to have grown weary of the republic and traded it for promises of security from a shining political personality. Somewhere, Nixon must be wondering how it could have been this easy.

Nixon’s “Enemies List” is famous, and the former head of the National Security Agency’s global digital data gathering program says that Obama also has an enemies list … which has been used to take down a wide variety of people, including the head of the CIA. The Washington Post’s Ed Rogers notes:

Obama doesn’t need a traditional Nixonian enemies list. In the digital age, with the Obama machine’s much-celebrated technological capabilities, the president can sort his enemies by keywords.

You’ve heard about the AP spying scandal, and the head of the Department of Justice implies that the government has spied on many other reporters.

Reporters who criticize those in power are being smeared by the government and targeted for arrest(and see this).

Indeed, the Obama administration is treating real reporters as potential terrorists.

After Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges, journalist Naomi Wolf, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and others sued the government to enjoin the NDAA’s allowance of the indefinite detention of Americans — the judge asked the government attorneys 5 times whether journalists like Hedges could be indefinitely detained simply for interviewing and then writing about bad guys. The government refused to promise that journalists like Hedges won’t be thrown in a dungeon for the rest of their lives without any right to talk to a judge.

Wikileaks’ head Julian Assange could face the death penalty for his heinous crime of leaking whistleblower information which make those in power uncomfortable … i.e. being a reporter.

Daniel Ellsberg notes that Obama’s claimed power to indefinitely detain people without charges or access to a lawyer or the courts is a power that even King George didn’t claim. Former judge and adjunct professor of constitutional law Andrew Napolitano points out that Obama’s claim that he can indefinitely detain prisoners even after they are acquitted of their crimes is a power that even Hitler and Stalin didn’t claim.

Indeed, Obama has turned America into the most spied upon nation in world history, and has rolled back liberties to the time of the enactment of the Magna Carta in 1215.

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This article was posted: Thursday, May 16, 2013 at 6:22 am

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This article originally appeared on : Infowars

Infowars.com
May 16, 2013

WARNING: Graphic content. Viewer discretion advised. Aimed only at documenting crimes by FSA terrorists in Syria.

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This article was posted: Thursday, May 16, 2013 at 6:18 am

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This article originally appeared on : Infowars

Infowars.com
May 16, 2013

The UN says we should all be eating insects.

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This article was posted: Thursday, May 16, 2013 at 6:19 am

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This article originally appeared on : Infowars

Mike Adams
Natural News
May 16, 2013

Without any direction from the President, if you believe the current denials, the IRS went on a politically-motivated rampage that turned its own agents into weapons of intimidation and censorship against any non-profit which taught the Constitution or used conservative buzzwords like “We the People.”

As part of its campaign of tyranny, the IRS demanded from the groups titles of all the books they had recently read, details of Facebook posts and names of all their donors. They even asked for the names of students they taught! Applications for non-profit status were routinely denied or delayed, and a huge number of individuals including Catholic priests were warned that if they didn’t stay silent about opposing Obama, they would be “scrutinized” even further (i.e. audited or worse).

Obama says he knows nothing about any of this, even though he was of course the primary beneficiary of all this activity. But let’s assume he’s telling the truth for a moment, as bizarre as that idea may seem to most. If Obama really knew nothing about all this, it paints an even more frightening picture of a rogue government group with unlimited power that answers to no one and does whatever it wants, regardless of the legality of its actions or directions from Washington.

And then, once the truth comes out and the criminal behavior is exposed, those who carried out the crimes say, “We were just doing what our bosses told us” while their bosses – the heads of government – say, “We had no idea what these people were doing. They went rogue!”

Lawless government out of control

What the IRS scandal really proves is that big government is completely out of control. Give an unelected group a bureaucrats enough power – the IRS is run by appointees who don’t answer to voters – and they will sooner or later construct fiefdoms of corruption and criminality.

This is a universal law of bureaucracy. What the IRS did to conservative groups, the FDA is routinely doing to natural products manufacturers and supplement companies. It’s what the DEA is doing to medical marijuana dispensaries and what the FTC is doing to religious ministries that also happen to sell herbs for cancer.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

All bureaucracies become criminal mobs if given enough time and power. This is a screaming red flag with a clear message: Government is TOO BIG, too complex, too powerful and is operating far outside its limits of power.

Government is the biggest threat to freedom and justice in America today.

In fact, this IRS criminality has been going on since at least 2010, and the agency has been getting away with it until just now when a few facts just happen to come to light. No one knows just how many people have been threatened and intimidated, mobster-style, by the IRS which focused its efforts on intimidating those who were speaking out against Obama. Technically, this behavior by the IRS calls into question the validity of the entire 2012 presidential election. Had the IRS not been engaged in overtly criminal activity to suppress the free speech of non-profits critical of big government, the election may have very well turned out differently.

Government bureaucracies answer to no one

What’s even more frightening in all this is that government bureaucracies – FDA, IRS, DEA, FTC, etc. – ultimately answer to no one. And when they break the laws, nobody is held responsible and no one goes to jail.

If you or I commit felony crimes and engage in intimidation of fellow citizens in order to silence their speech and violate their civil rights, we will get drawn up on felony charges by the feds. But when the feds do it, the crimes are ignored.

No wonder everyone is so completely fed up with the IRS and the Obama administration. Across the board, republicans and democrats alike feel outrage at the realization that the Obama government is a rogue criminal mob operating far outside the bounds of law and the constitutional limits of government. There is nothing this government cannot and will not do to stay in power and destroy its critics, including threatening them with IRS attacks if they speak out against Obama.

This is how tyrannies come into being. As Michael Gerson writes in the Washington Post:

In each recent case, government used power in ways that were insular, highly politicized and intimidating. And however individual responsibility is eventually assigned, these attributes are not aberrations in the Obama era. The administration tends to view its actions as above scrutiny and its opponents as beneath contempt.

The result is a paradox. As the ambitions of government in the Obama era have expanded, respect for the institution of government has reached new lows. These scandals add another layer of cynicism. And the practical political effects are very real. Who is more likely this month than last to trust the federal government with the implementation of Obamacare (in part by the IRS), the enforcement of new gun-control laws or the securing of the southern border?

IRS behavior proves conspiracy theorists right

Another interesting realization in all this concerns those of us who have been warning about the runaway criminality of the Obama administration for the last several years. Websites like www.InfoWars.com and www.NaturalNews.com (as well as others) have been blowing the whistle on the criminality of Eric Holder and the Justice Department, which ran Operation Fast and Furious (smuggling guns into Mexico).

We’ve been warning about the selective prosecution of whistleblowers, the rise of government tyranny, government selling out to global banksters and the attempts to intimidate critics of government into silence. All this time, we’ve been labeled “conspiracy theorists” by the mainstream media, which somehow believes there are no such things as conspiracies.

Until now. Suddenly the Associated Press has its phone records seized by the Justice Department in an unlawful attempt to identify the AP’s whistleblower sources who are exposing the criminality of the government itself. The AP has been crying foul over it, taking on almost the exact same kind of tone that InfoWars and NaturalNews have been publishing for years while being accused of “anti-government” leanings. Suddenly the Associated Press is technically the newest “anti-government” group because it’s criticizing the criminality of government gone bad, too. (Yes, in America anyone who points out the criminality of government is instantly labeled “anti-government.”)

Now the world is waking up and realizing the conspiracy theorists were right all along. The Obama administration really is a criminal enterprise run by genuine mobsters and crooks. America really is “occupied” by an enemy force that respects no law and uses its power to dominate and intimidate the people rather than serving them.

We have crossed the Rubicon of criminal government. And the only way to restore liberty at this point is to indict and prosecute the criminals responsible, all the way up the chain as high as it leads.

Because a government that would use the IRS as a political weapon of intimidation would do anything. It makes you think twice about everything you’ve heard on FEMA camps, martial law, false flag attacks, population reduction, fluoride and vaccines, doesn’t it? It forces us all the ask the question: Is there any limit to how far the Obama administration will go to destroy opposition to its agenda of a big government takeover of everything?

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This article was posted: Thursday, May 16, 2013 at 6:21 am

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This article originally appeared on : Infowars

Rainbow flag of “lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender pride movement” allowed

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
May 16, 2013

A local council in England vetoed the display of a St. George’s Cross flag over concerns that it would be “offensive to Muslims,” while allowing the rainbow flag of the “lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender pride movement” to be flown.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

“A local council decided against flying the flag of St George after concerns were raised that it would offend the town’s 16 Muslim residents,” reports the Telegraph. “Eleanor Jackson, a university lecturer, said the red and white symbol could cause upset in Radstock, Somerset, because it was used during the Crusades 1,000 years ago.”

Jackson suggested that use of the flag be dropped for 20 years not only because “it is offensive to some Muslims,” but also due to its use by “the far right.”

Muslim groups reacted to the ban by deriding it as “oversensitive” and “political correctness going a bit too far.”

“Use by the far right is one thing, but to say that Muslims are offended I don’t think is correct. We understand the flag is part of this country’s heritage, and in fact many many Muslims will identify as being British themselves,” said Rizwan Ahmed, a spokesman for the Bristol Muslim Cultural Society.

Muslim Council of Britain spokeswoman Nasima Begum said that England’s patron saint “needs to take his rightful place as a national symbol of inclusivity rather than a symbol of hatred.”

After the decision stoked controversy, the council claimed that the views of Eleanor Jackson were “not really taken into consideration,” and that they had planned on purchasing a Union Jack all along.

The council did not seem to be worried that the display of a rainbow flag at “appropriate” times of the year to represent the “lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender pride movement” would offend anyone.

This is by no means the first time that displaying the national flag of England has been discouraged or banned by authorities over fears it might offend minority immigrant populations.

During the 2010 World Cup, 1200 council staff in Bolton were banned from flying the English flag ”over fears they could deemed as racist.”

When builders in Coventry flew the St. George’s Cross they were told by site managers to take it down within 20 minutes over concerns it might ”offend” the local multi-ethnic community.

In 2009, Labour-run Sandwell Council withdrew funding for a a St George’s Day parade, citing fears that it “might attract far right elements.”

This story again illustrates how, while British people are expected to express their “patriotism” by supporting wars that primarily target Muslim populations in foreign countries, any attempt to display pride in one’s country that isn’t state-approved is routinely demonized as racist and offensive.

Unlike in America, it is also seen as abnormal and a potential indication of racism to display a St. George’s Cross on occasions that are not related to state or royal pageantry, such as the 2012 royal wedding.

While the former Labour government and many of its councilors who are still in power set about demonizing the display of the English flag as racist, they simultaneously oversaw a deliberate ”mass influx of immigrants” in order to “change the make-up of Britain” and “rub the Right’s nose in diversity.”

Lord Mandelson, who served in a number of different Cabinet positions under both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, admitted: “In 2004 when as a Labour government, we were not only welcoming people to come into this country to work, we were sending out search parties for people and encouraging them, in some cases, to take up work in this country.”

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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a host for Infowars Nightly News.

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This article was posted: Thursday, May 16, 2013 at 6:12 am

Tags: police state

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This article originally appeared on : Infowars

Michael Snyder
Economic Collapse
May 16, 2013

Is it right for Barack Obama to use IRS audits to punish his political enemies? As crazy as that sounds, there is a mounting body of evidence that indicates that this is actually happening. And if this can be proven, it is a much, much larger scandal than the IRS giving “extra scrutiny” to the applications of conservative non-profit groups. Let me be clear — if Barack Obama has been using IRS audits to punish his political enemies, that is an impeachable offense. Of all of the other scandals that are out there right now, this is the one that could actually bring down the presidency of Barack Obama. That is how serious this is. As you will read about below, there is a huge amount of circumstantial evidence that political enemies of Barack Obama have been singled out for IRS audits. We need to find out who initiated these audits. Whether you are a Republican, a Democrat or an Independent, this kind of abuse of government power should sicken and horrify you. If it can be proven that Barack Obama has been using IRS audits to attack his enemies, every single U.S. citizen should be calling for him to resign. This is something that is beyond politics — this is a direct threat to the very integrity of our system.

The recent revelation that the IRS has been specifically targeting patriot groups and Tea Party organizations for “extra scrutiny” has opened up the floodgates. In recent days, a large number of highly respected people have come forward claiming that they were the subject of IRS audits that were politically motivated.

For example, Larry Conners, a respected local news anchor at KMOV Channel 4 in St. Louis, Missouri says that he was hit with an IRS audit almost immediately after he conducted an interview with Barack Obama in April 2012…

Shortly after I did my April 2012 interview with President Obama, my wife, friends and some viewers suggested that I might need to watch out for the IRS.

I don’t accept “conspiracy theories”, but I do know that almost immediately after the interview, the IRS started hammering me.

At the time, I dismissed the “co-incidence”, but now, I have concerns … after revelations about the IRS targeting various groups and their members.

Originally, the IRS apologized for red-flagging conservative groups and their members if they had “Tea Party” or “patriot” in their name.

Today, there are allegations that the IRS focused on various groups and/or individuals questioning or criticizing government spending, taxes, debt or how the government is run … any involved in limiting/expanding government, educating on the constitution and bill of rights, or social economic reform/movement.

In that April 2012 interview, I questioned President Obama on several topics: the Buffet Rule, his public remarks about the Supreme Court before the ruling on the Affordable Care Act. I also asked why he wasn’t doing more to help Sen. Claire McCaskill who at that time was expected to lose. The Obama interview caught fire and got wide-spread attention because I questioned his spending.

I said some viewers expressed concern, saying they think he’s “out of touch” because of his personal and family trips in the midst of our economic crisis.

The President’s face clearly showed his anger; afterwards, his staff which had been so polite … suddenly went cold.

That’s to be expected, and I can deal with that just as I did with President George H. Bush’s staff when he didn’t like my questions.

Journalistic integrity is of the utmost importance to me. My job is to ask the hard questions, because I believe viewers have a right to be well-informed. I cannot and will not promote anyone’s agenda — political or otherwise — at the expense of the reporting the truth.

What I don’t like to even consider … is that because of the Obama interview … the IRS put a target on me.

Can I prove it? At this time, no.

But it is a fact that since that April 2012 interview … the IRS has been pressuring me.

Reverend Franklin Graham, the son of Reverend Billy Graham, recently wrote a letter to Barack Obama claiming that the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Samaritan’s Purse were both hit with IRS audits very shortly after they ran full-page ads supporting North Carolina’s Marriage amendment. In fact, both organizations were notified about the audits on the same day. The following is from a recent article posted on redstate.com…

The man known as America’s pastor was among those targeted by the Internal Revenue Service after the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association ran newspaper advertisements promoting traditional marriage and biblical values.

“I am bringing this to your attention because I believe that someone in the Administration was targeting and attempting to intimidate us,” wrote Franklin Graham in a letter to President Obama. “This is morally wrong and unethical — indeed some would call it ‘un-American.’”

Graham is president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association as well as the international charity Samaritan’s Purse. Both organizations received word of audits on the same day — not long after they ran full —page ads supporting North Carolina’s Marriage amendment.

The ads encouraged voters to “cast our ballots for candidates who base their decisions on biblical principles and support the nation of Israel.”

The ad concluded with the words, “Vote for biblical values this November 6, and pray with me (Billy Graham) that America will remain one nation under God.”

Graham said on Sept. 6, 2012 they received notification that the IRS would audit their taxes.

“In light of what the IRS admitted to on Friday, May 10, 2013, and subsequent revelations from other sources, I do not believe that the IRS audit of our two organizations last year is a coincidence — or justifiable,” Graham wrote.