South Africa: behind the painted smile (and applicable to every political system)
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Author: NW0.eu
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This Common Food Ingredient Is As Addictive as Cocaine?
‘Dr. Richard Johnson is professor of medicine at the University of Colorado, where he runs the kidney division and is in charge of transplantation and research in blood pressure. He has also written the best book on the market on the dangers of fructose called The Sugar Fix.
About 70 percent of his work involves research and, for a number of years, he has been studying the effects of fructose on the metabolic system in animals and cell culture, as well as in clinical studies.
Most of this research is focused on how fructose might cause obesity, high blood pressure, kidney disease, fatty liver, and other health-related problems.
Here, Dr. Johnson discusses how uric acid in your blood can wreak havoc on your blood pressure, insulin production and even kidney function.’
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Israeli Deception
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Karl Rove: I’m Proud of Using Waterboarding to Break Terrorists
‘George W Bush’s top political adviser has said he was ‘proud’ of controversial techniques such as waterboarding, which he claimed broke the will of terrorist. Karl Rove – known as the former president’s ‘brain’ – said he did not believe that the interrogation method amounted to torture. In an interview with the BBC, he claimed that waterboarding – which simulates drowning – had helped prevent terrorist attacks.’
Read more: Karl Rove: I’m Proud of Using Waterboarding to Break Terrorists
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Obama Supports a National DNA Database
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
March 13, 2010Obama has come out in favor of forcing people arrested to submit DNA to a national database.
“President Barack Obama’s embrace of a national database to store the DNA of people arrested but not necessarily convicted of a crime is heartening to backers of the policy but disappointing to criminal-justice reformers, who view it as an invasion of privacy,” reports Politico. “Others also worry the practice would adversely affect minorities.”
It would affect all Americans regardless of race, creed, color, nationality, etc. It would also be a violation of the Fourth Amendment.
Obama made his opinion known during an interview with John Walsh, the host of the TV show America’s Most Wanted. Walsh is known for his anti-crime activism, which he became involved with following the murder of his son in 1981 (see video below).
“We have 18 states who are taking DNA upon arrest,” Walsh said. “It’s no different than fingerprinting or a booking photo. … Since those states have been doing it, it has cleared 200 people that are innocent from jail.”
Obama agreed. “It’s the right thing to do,” he replied. “This is where the national registry becomes so important, because what you have is individual states — they may have a database, but if they’re not sharing it with the state next door, you’ve got a guy from Illinois driving over into Indiana, and they’re not talking to each other.”
Obama did not say if he believes a DNA sample should be removed upon acquittal or if charges are dropped.
A national DNA database is another manifestation of the state posing a threat to our liberties. Mr. Walsh may be interested in keeping tabs on sex offenders and criminals, but the state has other motives — the tracking and surveillance of citizens.
A national DNA database would compliment other efforts by the government to violate our liberty. In 2005 it was first revealed that the NSA has been secretly intercepting Americans’ phone calls and Internet communications (in fact, the NSA has intercepted the personal communications of Americans for decades).
In April of 2009, the FBI joined 15 states that collect DNA samples from those awaiting trial. The FBI currently has a DNA database with 6.7 million profiles and plans to accelerate its growth rate from 80,000 new entries a year to 1.2 million by 2012 — a 15-fold increase, according to the New York Times.
Since September 11, 2001, under the guise of a phony war against government manufactured terrorism, the FBI has infiltrated and monitored entirely legal political organizations, including the Tea Party movement.
On October 31, 2001, then Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a regulation that authorized the monitoring of communications between inmates in the custody of the Bureau of Prisons and their attorneys including those who have not been convicted of any crimes.
The Patriot Act nullified large sections of the Bill of Rights. Under the rubric of a global war on terrorism the executive has been granted sweeping unconstitutional authority to issue executive orders and wage war without congressional consent.
In February, the Justice Department argued in federal court that the FBI and other police agencies don’t need to obtain a search warrant to learn the locations of Americans’ cell phones. “When the government acquires historical cell location information, it effectively commandeers our cell phones and turns them into electronic trackers that report, without our knowledge or consent, where we have been and how long we have spent there,” Susan Freiwald, a law professor at the University of San Francisco told Declan McCullagh of CNet.
As reported earlier this week, Sens. Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) have proposed legislation that, if passed, will require all working Americans to carry biometric ID cards containing fingerprint records and other personal information. The effort is a cynical attempt to establish a national biometric ID card program under the guise of preventing illegal immigration.
The effort to create a DNA database is already under way in several states. In 2004, Californians overwhelmingly passed a ballot measure requiring DNA testing, usually by a swab inside the cheek, for all felony arrests and some others. And in New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has sought to go even further, proposing DNA tests for everyone arrested in the city, even for misdemeanors.
Criminologist James Fox of Northeastern University in Boston told Politico he would rather see Obama deal with ballistic fingerprinting and repeal of the Tiahrt Amendment, which limits gun tracing.
The the Tiahrt Amendment prohibits the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from releasing information from its firearms trace database to anyone other than a law enforcement agency or prosecutor in connection with a criminal investigation.
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Google to Shut China Search Engine
Richard Waters
Financial Times
Saturday, March 13, 2010Google has drawn up detailed plans for the closure of its Chinese search engine and is now “99.9 per cent” certain to go ahead as talks over censorship with the Chinese authorities have reached an apparent impasse, according to a person familiar with the company’s thinking.
In a hardening of positions on both sides, the Chinese government also on Friday threw down a direct public challenge to the US search company, with a warning that it was not prepared to compromise on internet censorship to stop Google leaving.
The signs that Google was on the brink of closing Google.cn, its local search service in China, came two months after it promised to stop bowing to censorship there. But while a decision could be made very soon, the company is likely to take some time to follow through with the plan as it seeks an orderly closure and takes steps to protect local employees from retaliation by the authorities, the person familiar with its position said.
Google is also seeking ways to keep its other operations in China going, although some executives fear that a backlash from the Chinese authorities could make it almost impossible to keep a presence in the country.
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Google Faces Storm Over Naked Child on Street View
Daily Mail
Saturday, March 13, 2010Comment: How come people are outraged when Google takes naked photos of our children, but when the government does it with airport body scanners, it’s just fine?
Google has apologised after its Street View photo mapping service showed a frontal view of a naked child on a family day out.
Images of the blond boy, aged four or five, went live on Thursday in an update for the service.
They pictured him with his trousers down after going to the toilet on Wimbledon Common, South-West London.
The photos, showing the child’s mother or nanny helping him dress and a man looking on, have sparked fears that paedophiles will have a new way to search for photos or targets online.
Google had blurred the child’s face but not the registration plate of the family’s car, making it possible to trace their address.
The photos were removed soon after Google was alerted yesterday.
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IRS Cranks Up Hysteria in Wake of Joe Stack Attack
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
March 13, 2010According to the CIA’s favorite newspaper, The Washington Post, threats against the IRS “continue to pour in after last month’s plane crash at agency offices in Austin, according to union officials.”
The threats consist of inappropriate comments made to agency workers by taxpayers, according to National Treasury Employees Union President Colleen M. Kelley. She would not specify if the tax collection agency received threats of violence because the number of threats are under investigation by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration and the IRS.
“It would be a little naive to think that we don’t get some threats over the course of doing business,” said IRS Communications Director Terry Lemons. For the government and the IRS, “business” consists of extracting money at gunpoint and giving it to bankers who “hold” the national debt.
The Washington Post admits that “attacks” (negative comments and support for Joe Stack) are nothing new for the government sanctioned shakedown operation.
On the more radical end of the spectrum, people have rammed cars into offices as well as set them on fire, according to Lemons. The comments and futile acting out against the IRS is not confined to “tax day” (a day of national fear of hefty fines, prison time, and SWAT teams), said the bureaucrat.
The Post made sure to tie in the suicidal shooting of two Pentagon cops by a deranged man earlier this month. “The ongoing probe is unfolding in the aftermath of last week’s attack on the Pentagon in which a gunman wounded two police officers outside the entrance before he was fatally shot.” The event had nothing to do with the IRS.
Maybe the IRS should spend less time investigating angry tax payers and dedicate more resources to investigating their own. Last week, for instance, two IRS Service Center employees in Covington, Kentucky, were charged with stealing “government money” (money extracted from producers to pay banksters), according to The Enquirer. The employees made off with thousands of dollars before they were caught.
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Black and White Homegrown al-Qaeda
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
March 12, 2010Sharif Mobley: the latest face of the homegrown terror threat according to the government.
Earlier in the week we learned about Colleen LaRose, a woman described as insane by her neighbors who, according to the government, morphed into “Jihad Jane” in short order and teamed up with supposed Muslim terrorists in Ireland and plotted to kill an artist for drawing a degrading cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed. LaRose was arrested in October, but her indictment was rolled out this week to coincide with other terror-related propaganda.
In the wake of the LaRose story, the corporate media today is playing up the arrest of Sharif Mobley in Yemen. According to the Associated Press, Mobley is a “suspected member of the same branch of al-Qaida that’s linked to the failed Christmas Day bombing attempt of a Detroit-bound jet.” He sits in a Yemen jail because he stands accused of killing a guard in an attempt to break out of a hospital.
The Associated Press cuts right to the chase:
Mobley, a former laborer at several nuclear power plants in the U.S., appears to be the latest example of the phenomenon of Americans joining terror movements overseas, which U.S. intelligence officials have warned of.
His case surfaces days after charges of terrorist connections were brought against Colleen LaRose, an American-born woman known as “Jihad Jane” who lived for years in Pennsylvania.
Mobley, a 26-year-old natural-born U.S. citizen, was identified by Yemeni officials as a Somali-American. A former neighbor said he moved to Yemen about two years ago, supposedly to learn Arabic and study Islam.
A suspected terrorist linked to al-Qaeda in Yemen worked at nuclear power plant. This is major ammo for the ongoing and intensifying propaganda campaign that increasingly warns that America is at risk from homegrown terrorists. Terrorists blowing up a nuclear power plant is a worst case scenario.
The government offers the usual caveat in regard to Mobley’s employment:
“An FBI spokesman did not immediately return a call, but a law enforcement official told The Associated Press that authorities don’t believe Mobley’s job at the nuclear plant was related to his activities in Yemen. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter.”
Russia Today covers the “Jihad Jane” case.
In order to spike the story and send the message that homegrowners are a threat, the Associated Press rolls in Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood last year.
As for Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the fizzle pants non-bomber apprehended over Christmas, the State Department refused to revoke his visa, even though he was on a terror watch list. He was allowed to board a plane in Amsterdam.
After a barrage of sensationalistic and misleading headlines and stories designed to rekindle the flagging war on terror, authorities quietly reversed the official story behind the aborted attack and acknowledged that an accomplice was involved, despite weeks of denial and derision of eyewitness Kurt Haskell’s description of a sharp-dressed man who helped Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab board Flight 253 headed for Detroit.
“The Delta 253 incident was just one of the dozens of terror busts and stings since 9/11 to have been orchestrated by handlers aiding the accused terrorists at every turn,” Paul Joseph Watson wrote on March 6, 2010. “We have never come across a major case where the terrorists involved in a plot were not being prodded by the FBI and federal informants, or where clear prior knowledge and forewarning was not evident.”
Finally, in addition to creating the specter of homegrown terrorism, the corporate media has launched an orchestrated propaganda effort to demonize the internet as a medium that supposedly facilitates terrorism.
“From charismatic clerics who spout hate online, to thousands of extremist websites, chat rooms and social networking pages that raise money and spread radical propaganda, the Internet has become a crucial front in the ever-shifting war on terrorism,” reports the Los Angeles Times. “From their side, law enforcement and intelligence agencies are scrambling to monitor the Internet and penetrate radical websites to track suspects, set up sting operations or unravel plots before they are carried out.”
“They have really improved their ability to radicalize people and bring them into the fight, which of course severely hampers our ability to disrupt and get ourselves involved in the process,” Garry Reid, deputy assistant secretary of Defense, told the Senate subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities on Wednesday.
The Christian Science Monitor linked this supposed threat directly to Colleen LaRose, the reportedly mentally disturbed all-American jihadist who was tracked down by a group of neocon sleuths in search of terror on the internet. “The anonymity of the Internet, current regulations governing its surveillance and the sheer speed of communications across it make it an easy tool for recruitment,” the Christian Science Monitor declared on March 10.
Expect more shrill demands on the part of the government and its lapdog corporate media to regulate and surveil the internet in the days and weeks ahead.
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Nato ‘covered up’ botched night raid in Afghanistan that killed five
Jerome Starkey
London Times
March 13, 2010A night raid carried out by US and Afghan gunmen led to the deaths of two pregnant women, a teenage girl and two local officials in an atrocity which Nato then tried to cover up, survivors have told The Times.
The operation on Friday, February 12, was a botched pre-dawn assault on a policeman’s home a few miles outside Gardez, the capital of Paktia province, eastern Afghanistan. In a statement after the raid titled “Joint force operating in Gardez makes gruesome discovery”, Nato claimed that the force had found the women’s bodies “tied up, gagged and killed” in a room.
A Times investigation suggests that Nato’s claims are either wilfully false or, at best, misleading. More than a dozen survivors, officials, police chiefs and a religious leader interviewed at and around the scene of the attack maintain that the perpetrators were US and Afghan gunmen. The identity and status of the soldiers is unknown.
The raid came more than a fortnight after the commander of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan issued new guidelines designed to limit the use of night raids. Special forces and Western intelligence agencies that run covert operations in Afghanistan have been criticised for night raids based on dubious or false intelligence leading to civilian casualties.
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Al-Qaeda suspect, Sharif Mobley, worked at US nuclear plants
Tim Reid
London Times
March 13, 2010An American citizen who is being held in Yemen accused of being an al-Qaeda militant worked for six years at a series of US nuclear power plants, it emerged yesterday.
Sharif Mobley, 26, who started a gun battle as he tried to escape from a hospital in Yemen last week, killing one person and wounding several others, worked at three nuclear reactors in his native New Jersey between 2002 and 2008.
Mr Mobley was among 11 al-Qaeda suspects arrested during a series of raids in the Yemeni capital Sanaa in this month, and is believed to have links to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian radical who tried to blow up a US aircraft on Christmas Day.
Before moving to Yemen in 2008, supposedly to learn Arabic and study Islam, Mr Mobley worked at Salem and Hope Creek nuclear power stations and at another plant on Artificial Island in Lower Alloways Creek.
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Israeli Historian: Israel Could Find Itself Forced To Wipe Out Europe
‘Noted Israeli military historian Martin Karfeld stated that Israel could find itself one day forced to exterminate the European continent using all kinds of weapons including its nuclear arsenal if it felt its demise neared, stressing that Israel also considers Europe a hostile target.
This came in a press interview broadcast by the seventh Hebrew radio and was translated on Wednesday into Arabic by the press information analysis and study center.
“We have hundreds of nuclear warheads and missiles that can reach different targets in the heart of the European continent, including beyond the borders of Rome, the Italian capital,” Karfeld said, adding that most of the European capitals would become preferred targets for the Israeli air force.
The Israeli historian reiterated Israel’s ability to destroy the whole world whenever it felt its existence would be doomed to extinction.’
Read more: Israeli Historian: Israel Could Find Itself Forced To Wipe Out Europe
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Look What Harry Reid Hid Deep in the Health Care Bill
‘Buried in his massive amendment to the Senate version of Obamacare is Reid’s anti-democratic poison pill designed to prevent any future Congress from repealing the central feature of this monstrous legislation! ∴ Beginning on page 1,000 of the measure, Section 3403 reads in part: ” it shall not be in order in the Senate or the House of Representatives to consider any bill, resolution, amendment or conference report that would repeal or otherwise change this subsection.” ∴ In other words, if President Barack Obama signs this measure into law, no future Senate or House will be able to change a single word of Section 3403, regardless whether future Americans or their representatives in Congress wish otherwise!
Note that the subsection at issue here concerns the regulatory power of the Independent Medicare Advisory Board (IMAB) to “reduce the per capita rate of growth in Medicare spending.” That is precisely the kind of open-ended grant of regulatory power that effectively establishes the IMAB as the ultimate arbiter of the cost, quality and quantity of health care to be made available to the American people. And Reid wants the decisions of this group of unelected federal bureaucrats to be untouchable for all time.’
Read more: Look What Harry Reid Hid Deep in the Health Care Bill
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BT Boss Condemns Government Piracy Measures
‘BT chief executive Ian Livingstone has joined a group of industry executives and high profile figures – from organisations including Orange, Virgin Media, Google and the Open Rights Group – in writing an open letter to the Financial Times, urging that changes be made to the Digital Economy Bill.
The letter criticises the most recent amendment to the Bill – Amendment 120A – which would enable courts to issue an injunction against any website accused of hosting a “substantial proportion” of material that infringes copyright. This could ultimately result in sites such as YouTube being forced offline.
“This amendment not only significantly changes the injunctions procedure in the UK but will lead to an increase in Internet service providers blocking websites accused of illegally hosting copyrighted material without cases even reaching a judge,” the letter warned. “The amendment seeks to address the legitimate concerns of rights-holders but would have unintended consequences that far outweigh any benefits it could bring”.’
Read more: BT Boss Condemns Government Piracy Measures
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‘Bottled Ghosts’ Sold in New Zealand Auction
Two glass phials said to contain the ghosts of an old man and a young girl have sold for NZ $2,000 (U.S. $1,395 / £935) in an online auction in New Zealand. The auction attracted more than 200,000 page views on the Trade Me website.
Avie Woodbury said the ghosts had been captured in her Christchurch house by an exorcist and stored in holy water. The top bidder, an electronic cigarette company, said it was looking for ideas on what to do with the ghosts.
Ms Woodbury told bidders she had experienced “bizarre activity” in her home.
“I would get things like the jug boiling itself, touching on the back of my neck, voices from other rooms, and items going missing then turning up in weird places,” she said.
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Abandon All Hope – The Lehman Bros. Report
Numerian has a new article out that will help interested parties understand the 2200 page report on the Lehman collapse. The report was produced by a court-appointed examiner. It’s 2200 pages and cost over $40 million to produce. The results are devastating for Lehman, the Bush administration (which gutted the SEC), and Wall Street. The analysis and summary of the report can be found at the link. Abandon hope that Wall Street will ever reform on it’s own. Full article at The AgonistBook Mark it-> del.icio.us | Reddit | Slashdot | Digg | Facebook | Technorati | Google | StumbleUpon | Window Live | Tailrank | Furl | Netscape | Yahoo | BlinkList
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Florida Woman Arrested for Shaving Private Parts While Driving
CBS4 reports:CUDJOE KEY ― You’ve heard of the dangers of texting while driving, and talking on the phone while behind the wheel of a car. But how many people actually debate the merits of doing a little, well, “landscaping” while on the road?
According to the Florida Highway Patrol, a two-car crash on Cudjoe Key was caused by a 37-year-old woman who was shaving her bikini area while in the driver’s seat. Her ex-husband was steering from the passenger seat.
Trooper Gary Dunick explained, “She said she was meeting her boyfriend in Key West and wanted to be ready for the visit.”
Megan Mariah Barnes and her ex-husband Charles Judy were driving southbound Tuesday morning when they slammed into the back of a pick-up driven by David Schoff of Palm Bay after he slowed to take a turn.
Read More: CBS4
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Disinformation Interviews Jesse Ventura on ‘American Conspiracies’ and More
Former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura has a new bestselling book out, American Conspiracies: Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies that the Government Tells Us. Following my recent interview with June Sarpong, a member of the investigative team for his TV series Conspiracy Theory With Jesse Ventura, Jesse agreed to meet with the disinformation® New York crew at the legendary Russian Tea Room.
I asked Jesse why he’s digging up dirt where other public figures fear to tread, what we should do with the information he’s revealing, who he thinks is really behind the myriad conspiracies in his book — from JFK to 9/11 — and much more. Enjoy the video — we’ll post some extra clips where we talk off the record about everything from surfing to rock & roll … soon!
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Celebrate Pi Day
Sunday March 14th is Pi Day, as well as Albert Einstein’s birthday.
Animation of the act of unrolling a circle’s circumference, illustrating the ratio π. Author: John Reid (GNU)
Self-confessed geek Elizabeth Landau reports for CNN on how nerds everywhere plan to celebrate:
The sound of meditation for some people is full of deep breaths or gentle humming. For Marc Umile, it’s “3.14159265358979…”
Whether in the shower, driving to work, or walking down the street, he’ll mentally rattle off digits of pi to pass the time. Holding 10th place in the world for pi memorization — he typed out 15,314 digits from memory in 2007 — Umile meditates through one of the most beloved and mysterious numbers in all of mathematics.
Pi, the ratio of circumference to diameter of a circle, has captivated imaginations for thousands of years — perhaps even since the first person tried to draw a perfect circle on the ground or wondered how to construct something round like a wheel. Approximately 3.14, the number has its own holiday on March 14 — 3-14, get it? — which also happens to be Albert Einstein’s birthday.
You won’t get off school for Pi Day, but you might be doing something special in school on Friday (the last weekday before Pi Day). Mathematicians, teachers, museum directors, math students of all ages and other aficionados celebrate the number with pi recitations, pie-baking, pie-eating contests and math-related activities.
The holiday has gained popularity worldwide every year during the last decade as enthusiasm has spread on the Web, said David Blatner, author of “The Joy of Pi.”
One of the oldest, if not the first, established Pi Day celebrations is at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, California, which boasts 22 years of pi mayhem. The day is even recognized by the U.S. government: Last March, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution supporting Pi Day and encouraging schools to teach children about the number.
It doesn’t take a math whiz to appreciate pi…
[continues at CNN]
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Einstein’s Theory Of Relativity On Show
By Anne Barker for ABC News Australia:
The original manuscript of Albert Einstein’s famous theory of relativity is going on display in its entirety for the first time, almost 100 years after it was written.
Einstein’s groundbreaking theory helped explain a raft of scientific questions, from black holes to the big bang.
The former Nobel prize winner donated the manuscript to Israel’s Hebrew University in 1925.
Now, Israel’s Academy of Sciences and Humanities is putting it on show, in time for the 131st anniversary of Einstein’s birth…
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Via