‘Stuart Littlewood
highlights the BBC’s chronic pro-Israel bias, from allowing
untruths about Israel’s onslaught on Gaza in 2008-09 to go
unchallenged, to its failure to provide accurate context about the
Israeli township of Sderot, to its routine willingness to give
disproportionate airtime to Israeli spokesmen and lobbyists.
”[The BBC] gives a
disproportionate amount of air-time to pro-Israel figures such as the
Israeli ambassador, the regime’s spokesman Mark Regev, the chief
rabbi and assorted politicians who wave the flag for Israel…
“The BBC also
adopts Israel’s language and definitions. Palestinians not Israelis are
the militants. Hamas, not the murdering occupiers, are the terrorists.
A single captured Israeli soldier is deemed more newsworthy than the
10,000 abducted Palestinians (some of them women and children) rotting
in Israeli jails”.’
Decades after he died penniless, Nikola Tesla is elbowing aside his old adversary Thomas Edison in the pantheon of geek gods.
When California engineers wanted to brand their new $100,000 electric sports car, one name stood out: Tesla. When circuit designers at microchip producer Nvidia Corp. in 2007 launched a new line of advanced processors, they called them Tesla. And when videogame writers at Capcom Entertainment in Silicon Valley needed a character who could understand alien spaceships for their new Dark Void saga, they found him in Nikola Tesla.
Tesla was a scientist and inventor who achieved fame and fortune in the 1880s for figuring out how to make alternating current work on a grand scale, electrifying the world. He created the first major hydroelectric dam, at Niagara Falls. He thrilled packed theaters with presentations in which he ran high voltage through his body to illuminate a fluorescent light in his hand. His inventions helped Guglielmo Marconi develop radio.
And his rivalry with Edison—called the Battle of the Currents because Edison had bet on direct current—was legendary. Tesla won the contest, when his AC equipment powered an unprecedented display of electric light at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.
Fifty years later, the 86-year-old Serbian emigré died in obscurity at a New York hotel, unmarried, childless and bereft of friends. Meanwhile, Edison was lionized for generations as one of America’s greatest inventors.
But Tesla has been rediscovered by technophiles, including Google Inc. co-founder Larry Page, who frequently cites him as an early inspiration. And Teslamania is going increasingly mainstream.
An early hint was “Tesla Girls,” a 1984 single from the British technopop band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. Performance artist Laurie Anderson has said she was fascinated by Tesla. David Bowie played a fictionalized version of him in the 2006 film “The Prestige,” alongside Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman. Director Terry Gilliam described Tesla in a recent documentary film as “more of an artist than a scientist in some strange way.”
Tesla, in short, is cool.
“He was a kind of crazy, interesting dude,” says Melody Pfeiffer, spokeswoman for the Dark Void game’s distributor, Capcom Entertainment.
Edison, meanwhile, is less au courant than he used to be, says Paul Israel, director of the Thomas Edison Papers, a scholarly project at Rutgers University, in Piscataway, N.J.
Many significant Edison inventions—including the phonograph and the motion-picture camera—are becoming historical curios. The European Union has banned old-fashioned incandescent light bulbs, another Edison innovation. The EU is urging consumers to replace them with more-efficient fluorescent lights descended from those Tesla favored.
“Edison is so 20th century, much like Henry Ford,” says Bernie Carlson, a professor of Science, Technology and Society at the University of Virginia.
Once, Edison was revered as the Wizard of Menlo Park, after the New Jersey town—since renamed Edison—where he built a laboratory and movie studio. But Edison biographies have started focusing on his role in establishing monopolies in the electricity and movie industries.
Tesla shows off its all-electric, zero-emission vehicle, the Roadster Sport, at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. WSJ’s Lee Hawkins reports.
Recent portrayals of Edison have highlighted his darker side. In the 1998 HBO miniseries “From the Earth to the Moon,” Tom Hanks plays a French filmmaker who was financially ruined when Edison secretly copied and then released his 1902 epic, “A Trip to the Moon,” without paying its creator.
The Tesla-Edison rivalry was intense partly because the highly educated young engineer sailed to America in 1884 to work for Edison. But after less than a year in Edison’s labs, Tesla quit in a spat over pay.
Tesla-boosters note that in Edison’s effort to discredit alternating current a decade later, his staff deliberately electrocuted a murderous circus elephant and profited from a popular film of the killing. To sully Tesla’s ideas, Edison’s men also helped orchestrate the first execution by electric chair.
“I can’t imagine writing a song about Edison…too boringly rich, entrepreneurial and successful!” said Andy McCluskey, a founder of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, in an email. He calls Tesla “a romantic ‘failure’ figure.”
In 1895—after selling his AC patents to industrialist George Westinghouse for a mint and harnessing Niagara Falls—Tesla hobnobbed with Mark Twain, J.P. Morgan and French actress Sarah Bernhardt. But troubles soon began.
Tesla’s laboratory in New York was destroyed by fire, along with years of work and notes. The secretive experimenter then burned through much of his fortune testing radio transmissions in Colorado Springs, Colo. In 1898, he demonstrated a pair of small radio-controlled boats—decades before guided torpedoes—but was rebuffed by the U.S. military. When Marconi changed the world with a trans-Atlantic radio transmission in 1901, Tesla wasn’t mentioned.
Inventor Nikola Tesla pictured in Colorado, achieved fame and fortune in the 1880s for figuring out how to make alternating current on a huge scale. A contemporary of Edison, Tesla died in obscurity but is now being rediscovered and hailed by technophiles, such as Google co-founder Larry Page.
Undaunted, the scientist continued to be far ahead of his time. His papers suggest he stumbled upon—but didn’t pursue—lasers and X-rays, years before their recognized discoveries. He proposed transmitting electricity through the upper atmosphere. He sketched out robots and a death ray he hoped would end all wars.
“There’s a sort of science-fiction aspect to Tesla,” says Prof. Israel at Rutgers.
For marketers at chip makers Nvidia, who were targeting the techno-cognoscenti with a new product line, that aura is priceless.
“A mythology has built up around Tesla that catches people’s imagination,” says Andy Keane, general manager of Tesla Products at Nvidia.
Tesla’s more outlandish pronouncements stoked that mythology. He said he could use electricity to cause earthquakes and control weather. He claimed to have detected signals from Mars while he was in Colorado.
Unlike Edison, who died in 1931 with 1,093 patents to his name, Tesla left few completed blueprints. The shortcoming undercut his legacy but added to the air of mystery surrounding him.
“Tesla’s work is incomplete, so people can read into it what they want to,” says Prof. Carlson at the University of Virginia.
Christopher Priest did just that in writing “The Prestige,” his novel and then movie about rival magicians in Victorian London. In it, one of the magicians visits Tesla in Colorado and pays him to create a machine unlike anything the real Tesla ever mentioned.
“I wanted an ambiguous, mysterious genius,” says Mr. Priest. “Tesla was the man for the job.”
Creators of the Dark Void videogame needed a mentor for their hero, Will, who falls from our world into a parallel realm ruled by sinister aliens bent on annihilating humans.
“We quickly decided that tapping into the conspiracies and geek mystique built up around Nikola Tesla would be awesome,” says senior producer Morgan Gray. “What is cooler than having Tesla reverse-engineer alien technology to build weapons of super science?”
At Tesla Motors, the branding isn’t simply an effort to ride the name’s nerdy snob appeal, says spokeswoman Rachel Konrad. The Tesla Roadster uses an AC motor descended directly from Tesla’s original 1882 design, which he said came to him in a vision.
Still, for all Tesla’s cachet, Edison’s legacy remains inescapable. Ms. Konrad says customers note with irony that Tesla Motors’ main showroom is in Menlo Park, Calif.
To help boost the Tesla name, the automotive start-up has launched a promotional sweepstakes with Capcom around the release of Dark Void. The prize: a Tesla Roadster.
For Nikola Tesla himself, Ms. Konrad says, the prize is overdue recognition.
“You know you’ve gone into mainstream pop glory when you’re in a videogame aimed at 18-year-old boys,” she says.
In new book, he says that near-death accounts transcend cultures and ages.
The near-death experience story is so common that it has become a bit of a cliché: A medical patient, hanging in a murky limbo between life and death, is drawn through a tunnel of bright light, meets their maker, and is told they must return to the land of living.
But that scenario played out letter-perfectly for Mary Jo Rapini. And her story is getting firm backing by a doctor who has studied some 1,300 near-death experiences. Medical doctor Jeffrey Long chronicles Rapini’s story, along with his own research, in a new book: “Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences.”
In the book, Long contends his study shows that accounts of near-death experiences play out remarkably similarly among the people who have had them, crossing age and cultural boundaries to such a degree that they can’t be chalked up simply to everyone having seen the same Hollywood movie.
Through a tunnel
Appearing with Dr. Long on TODAY Wednesday, Rapini related her near-death experience to Meredith Vieira. A clinical psychologist, Rapini had long worked with terminal cancer patients, and when they told her of their near-death experiences, she would often chalk their stories up as a reaction to their pain medication.
But in April 2003, she faced her own mortality. Rapini told Vieira she suffered an aneurysm while working out a gym and was rushed to the hospital. She was in an intensive care unit for three days when she took a turn for the worse.
“All of a sudden [doctors] were rushing around me and inserting things into me, and they called my husband,” she told Vieira.
“I looked up and I saw this light; it wasn’t a normal light, it was different. It was luminescent. And it grew. I kept looking at it like, ‘What is that?’ Then it grew large and I went into it.
“I went into this tunnel, and I came into this room that was just beautiful. God held me, he called me by name, and he told me, ‘Mary Jo, you can’t stay.’ And I wanted to stay. I protested. I said, ‘I can’t stay? Why not?’ And I started talking about all the reasons; I was a good wife, I was a good mother, I did 24-hour care with cancer patients.
“And he said, ‘Let me ask you one thing — have you ever loved another the way you’ve been loved here?’ And I said, ‘No, it’s impossible. I’m a human.’ And then he just held me and said, ‘You can do better.’ ”
While Rapini’s account may seem far-fetched to naysayers, Long says her recollections mirror nearly all stories of near-death experiences.
When Vieira asked Long whether Rapini might be prone to cultural conditioning — surely she heard similar stories before — he said her story is untouched by preconceived notions.
Crossing cultures and ages
“I think if near-death experiences were culturally determined, then people that had never heard of near-death experiences would have a different experience,” Long argued. “But we’re not finding that. Whether you know or don’t know about near-death experiences at the time it happens, it has no effect on whether the experience happens or not, or what the content is.”
In his book, Long details nine lines of evidence that he says send a “consistent message of an afterlife.” Among them are crystal-clear recollections, heightened senses, reunions with deceased family members and long-lasting effects after the person is brought back to life.
Long noted that he was especially fascinated that very small children who have near-death experiences almost always recount the same stories as adults, even if the concept of death isn’t fully formed in their minds.
“My research involved experiences of young children age 5 and under, and I found the content of their near-death experiences is absolutely identical to older children and adults,” he told Vieira. “It suggests that whether you know about near-death experiences, what your cultural upbringing is, what your awareness of death is, it doesn’t seem to have any effect on the content of the near-death experience.”
Long, a radiation oncologist, said that writing his book has actually made him a better doctor, as well as a believer in the afterlife.
“[It] profoundly changed me as a physician,” he said. “I could fight cancer more courageously. I found patients who died, it wasn’t the end. It made me more compassionate and more confident.”
In the tense new world of air travel, we’re stripped of shoes, told not to take too much shampoo on board, frowned on if we crack a smile. The last thing we expect is a joke from a Transportation Security Administration screener — particularly one this stupid.
Rebecca Solomon is 22 and a student at the University of Michigan, and on Jan. 5 she was flying back to school after holiday break. She made sure she arrived at Philadelphia International Airport 90 minutes before takeoff, given the new regulations.
She would be flying into Detroit on Northwest Airlines, the same city and carrier involved in the attempted bombing on Christmas, just 10 days before. She was tense. What happened to her lasted only 20 seconds, but she says they were the longest 20 seconds of her life.
Yesterday evening’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann began with his traditional ‘heads up’ diary entry at Daily Kos.
Titled ‘Pandora’s Box,’ Olbermann explains before the segment, “Pandora’s box meets the bottomless pit and becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of Halliburton. What the Supreme Court did today. My special comment, could be the last of them, next.”
“Finally tonight, as promised, a special comment on the Supreme Court`s ruling today in the case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.”
“On the cold morning of Friday, March 6th, 1857, a very old man who was born just eight months and 13 days after the Declaration of Independence was adopted, a man who was married to the sister of the man who wrote “The Star Spangled Banner,” a man who was enlightened enough to have freed his own slaves and given pensions to the ones who had become too old to work, read aloud, in a reed-thin voice from a very long, handwritten document.”
“In it, he ruled on a legal case involving a slave brought by his owner to live in a free state yet to remain a slave. The slave sought his freedom and sued. And looking back over legal precedent and the Constitution, and the America in which it was created, this judge ruled that no black man could ever be considered an actual citizen of the United States. “They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order and all together unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations. And so far unfit that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”‘
“The case of course was Dred Scott. The old man was the fifth chief justice of the United States of America, Roger Brooke Taney. The outcome, he believed, would be to remove the burning question of abolition of slavery from the political arena once and for all. The outcome, in fact, was the Civil War.”
“No American ever made a single bigger misjudgment. No American ever carried the responsibility for the deaths and suffering of more Americans on his shoulders. No American was ever more quickly vilified.”
“Within four years, Chief Justice Taney`s rulings were being ignored in the south and the north. Within five, President Lincoln at minimum contemplated arresting him. Within seven, he died in poverty while still chief justice. Within eight, Congress had voted to not place a bust of him alongside those of the other former chief justices.”
“But good news tonight, Roger B. Taney is off the hook. Today, the Supreme Court of Chief Justice John Roberts, in a decision that might actually have more dire implications than Dred Scott v. Sanford, declared that because of the alchemy of its 19th century predecessors in deciding that corporations had all the rights of people, any restrictions on how these corporate beings spend their money on political advertising are unconstitutional.”
“In short, the First Amendment, free speech for persons, which went into effect in 1791, applies to corporations, which were not recognized as the equivalents of persons until 1886. In short, there are now no checks on the ability of corporations or unions or other giant aggregations of power to decide our elections. None.”
“They can spend all the money they want. And if they can spend all the money they want, sooner rather than later, they will implant the legislators of their choice in every office from president to head of the visiting nurse service. And if senators and congressmen and governors and mayors and councilmen and everyone in between are entirely beholden to the corporations for election and reelection to office, soon they will erase whatever checks there might still exist to just slow down the ability of corporations to decide the laws.”
“It is almost literally true that any political science fiction nightmare you can now dream up, no matter whether you are conservative or a liberal, it is now legal. Because the people who can make it legal can now be entirely bought and sold. No actual citizens required in the campaign fund raising process. And the entirely bought and sold politicians can change any laws. And any legal defense you can structure now can be undone by the politicians who will be bought and sold into office this November, or two years from now. And any legal defense which honest politicians can somehow wedge up against them this November or two years from now, that can be undone by the next even larger set of politicians who will be bought and sold into office in 2014 or 2016 or 2018.”
“Mentioning Lincoln`s supposed ruminations about arresting Roger B. Taney, he didn`t say the original of this, but what the hell. Right now you can prostitute all of the politicians some of the time, and prostitute some of the politicians all of the time, but you cannot prostitute all of the politicians all the time.”
“Thanks to Chief Justice Roberts, this will now change. Unless this near mortal blow is somehow undone, within ten years, every politician in this country will be a prostitute.”
“And now let`s contemplate what the perfectly symmetrical money-driven world of that order might look like. Be prepared first for laws criminalizing or at least neutering unions. In today`s court decision, they are the weaker of the non-human sisters unfettered by the court. So, as in ancient Rome or medieval England, they will necessarily be strangled by the stronger sibling, the corporations, so that they pose no further threat to the corporations` total control of our political system.”
“Be prepared then for the reduction of taxes for the wealthy, and for the corporations, and the elimination of the social safety nets for everybody else, because money spent on the poor means less money left for the corporations.”
“Be prepared then for wars sold as the new products, which Andy Card once described them as, year after year, as if they were new Fox reality shows, because military industrial complex corporations are still corporations.”
“Be prepared then for the ban on same sex marriage and on abortion and on evolution being taught and on separation of church and state. The most politically agitated group of citizens left are the evangelicals. Throw them some red meat to feed their holier than thou rationalizations and they won`t care what else you do to this corporate nation.”
“Be prepared then for racial and religious profiling, because you have to blame somebody for all the reductions in spending and civil liberties, just to make sure the agitators against the United corporate States of America are kept unheard.”
“Be prepared for those poor, dumb, manipulated bastards, the Tea Partiers, to have a glorious few years as the front men, as the corporations that bank roll them slowly unroll their total control of our political system. And then be prepared to watch them be banished, maybe outlawed, when a few of the brighter ones suddenly realize that the corporations have made them merely the Judas Goats of American freedom.”
“Be prepared then for the bank reforms that President Obama has just this day vowed to enable to be rolled back by his successor, purchased by the banks, with the money President Bush gave them, his successor, presumably President Palin, because if you need a friendly face of fascism, you might as well get one that can wink. And if you need a tool of whichever large industries buy her first, you might as well get somebody who lives up to that word “tool.”‘
“Be prepared for the little changes, too. If there are any small towns left to take over, Wal-Mart can now soften them up with carpet advertising for their Wal-Mart town council candidates brought to you by Wal-Mart.”
“Be prepared for the Richard Mellon Scaifes to drop such inefficiencies as vanity newspapers and simply buy and install their own city governments in the Pittsburghs.”
“Be prepared for the personally wealthy men like John Kerry to become the paupers of the Senate, or the ones like Mike Bloomberg not even surviving the primary against Halliburton`s choice for mayor of New York City.”
“Be prepared for the end of what you`re watching now. I don`t just mean me or this program or this network. I mean all the independent news organizations and the propagandists like Fox, for that matter, because Fox inflames people against the state. And after today`s ruling, the corporations will only need a few more years of inflaming people before the message suddenly shifts to everything`s great.”
“Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh don`t even realize it. Today, John Roberts just cut their throats, too. So with critics silenced and bought off and even the town assessor who lives next door to you elected to office with campaign funds 99.9 percent drawn from corporations coffers, what are you going to do about it? The Internet.”
“The Internet. Ask them about the Internet in China. Kiss net neutrality good-bye. Kiss whatever right to privacy on the net you think you currently have good-bye. And anyway, what are you going to complain about if you don`t even know it happened?”
“In the new world unveiled this morning by John Roberts, who stops Rupert Murdoch from buying the Associated Press? This decision, which in mythology would rank somewhere between the bottomless pit and the opening of Pandora`s Box, got next to no coverage in the right wing media today. Almost nothing in the middle and a lot less than necessary on the left.”
“The right wing won`t even tell their constituents that they are being sold into bondage alongside the rest of us. Why should they? For them, the start of this will be wonderful. The Republicans, the conservatives, the Joe Liebermans, the Tea Partiers are in the front aisle at the political prostitution store. They are especially discounted old favorites for their corporate masters. Like the first years of irreversible climate change, for the conservatives, the previously cold winter will grow delightfully warm.”
“Only later will it be hot, then unbearable, then flames. Then the conservatives will burn with the rest of us and never know what happened
Olbermann’s ‘Special Comment’ continues after the videos below.
From Youtube and MSNBC, Countdown with Keith Olbermann’s ‘Special Comment’ which originally aired on Thursday, Jan. 21, 2010: Part One:
“What are you going to do about it? Turn to free speech advocates? These were the free speech advocates. The lawyer for that homunculus, one who filed this suit, David Bossie — the lawyer is Floyd Abrahams, Floyd Abrahams, who has spent his life defending American freedoms, especially freedom of speech. Apparently, his life was spent this way to guarantee that when it really counted he could help the corporations destroy free speech.”
“His argument, translated from self-satisfied legal jargon, is that as a function of the first amendment, you must allow for the raping and pillaging of the first amendment by people who can buy the first amendment. He will go down in the history books as the quisling of freedom of speech in this country. That is if the corporations who now buy the school boards which decide which history books get printed approve, if there are still history books.”
“So what are you going to do about it? Russ Feingold told me today there might yet be ways to work around this, to restrict corporate governance and how corporations make and spend their money. I pointed out that any such legislation, even if it somehow sneaked past this the last US Senate not funded by a generous gift from the chub group, would eventually wind up in front of a Supreme Court, and whether or not John Roberts was still at its head would be irrelevant. The next nine men and women on the Supreme Court will get there not because of their judgment nor even their politics. They will get there because they were appointed by purchased presidents and confirmed by purchased senators.”
“This is what John Roberts did today. This is a Supreme Court sanctioned murder of what little actual democracy is left in this democracy. It is government of the people, by the corporations, for the corporations. It is the dark ages. It is our Dred Scott.”
“I would suggest a revolution, but a revolution against the corporations? The corporations that make all the guns and the bullets?”
“Maybe it won`t be this bad. Maybe the corporations, legally defined as human beings but without the pesky occasional human attributes of compassion and conscience, maybe when handed the only keys to the electoral machine, they will simply not redesign America in their own corporate image.”
“Let me leave you with this final question: after today, who is going to stop them? Good night and good luck.”
James Slack UKDaily Mail
Friday, January 22nd, 2010
Labour has created 4,300 new crimes since taking power – including a ban on swimming in the wreck of the Titanic and on the sale of game birds shot on a Sunday.
Gordon Brown has been the worst offender in this unprecedented ‘legislative splurge’, with his Government creating new offences at the rate of 33 a month.
Under Tony Blair, Labour invented 27 new ways of criminalising the public every month.
The ‘crimes’ range from swimming in the hull of the Titanic without the permission of a Cabinet Minister to ‘disturbing a pack of eggs’ when instructed not to by an authorised officer.
In total, between 1997 and 2009, 4,289 new criminal offences were created – approximately one for every day ministers have been in office. It is twice the rate at which new crimes were created under the last Tory administration.
‘As a member of the media
covering the tragedy in Haiti, it’s with a sense of alarm and
astonishment that I’ve witnessed how some senior aid officials have
argued for withholding aid of the utmost urgency because of sensational
claims about violence and insecurity, which appear to be based more on
fantasy than reality.’
‘Fears of a euro breakup
have reached the point where the European Central Bank feels compelled
to issue a legal analysis of what would happen if a country tried to
leave monetary union. “Recent
developments have, perhaps, increased the risk of secession (however
modestly), as well as the urgency of addressing it as a possible
scenario,” said the document, entitled “Withdrawal and Expulsion from
the EU and EMU: Some Reflections.”
The author makes a string
of vaulting, Jesuitical, and mischievous claims, as EU lawyers often
do. Half a century of ever-closer union has created a “new legal order”
that transcends a “largely obsolete concept of sovereignty” and imposes
a “permanent limitation” on the states’ rights.
Those who suspect that
the European Court has the power pretensions of the medieval papacy
will find plenty to validate their fears in this astonishing text. Crucially,
the author argues that eurozone exit entails expulsion from the
European Union as well. All EU members must take part in EMU (except
Britain and Denmark, with opt-outs). This
is a warning shot for Greece, Portugal, Ireland, and Spain. If they
fail to marshal public support for draconian austerity, they risk being
cast into Icelandic oblivion. Or for Greece, back into the clammy
embrace of Asia Minor.’
‘Iceland may be the first
Western democracy to be forced into South-American style debt-slavery.
The IMF, in concert with the UK and the Netherlands, has attempted to
strongarm the recently impoverished Island of 317,000 into paying over
3.6 billion pounds ($6.3bn) — $86,000 per Icelandic family — at 5.5%
interest for the next generation. The money is not conventional government debt, but arises from the collapse of a private
multi-national bank during the financial crisis.
The issue is so serious that the entire nation will vote on the issue towards the end of February 2010.
‘The state of Oregon should have its own
bank so taxpayer dollars could help fund local businesses instead of
boosting the profits of big multinational banks, says Bill Bradbury,
Democratic candidate for governor and former secretary of state.
Bradbury announced his proposal today in
Portland as part of his plan to find jobs for more Oregonians. The
state bank, modeled on one in North Dakota, would form the cornerstone
of his jobs proposal, he said.
“It’s time to declare economic sovereignty from the multinational banks,” Bradbury said.’
‘The USgovernment is
running out of money… again. So Democrats want to increase the debt
limit by trillions of dollars… again. The newly requested debt limit
increase is a jaw-dropping $1.9 trillion, which would put the total
national debt at $14.3 trillion.
These are more than just
numbers on pieces of paper. It’s easy to get lost in the numbers and
not realize the significance of what’s happening here, but as I’ve
explained many times here on NaturalNews, what you are watching is the
financial crumbling of the American empire.’
‘GE Healthcare, a British subsidiary of
multinational giant General Electric, is suing Henrik Thomsen, a senior
radiologist and professor of radiology, for sounding the alarm about
the dangers of the company’s medical imaging drug, Omniscan. After
witnessing kidney patients who had received the drug develop
potentially fatal conditions, Thomsen publicly exposed the drug’s
dangers which caused a firestorm of controversy.
In an effort to muzzle Thomsen, GE
Healthcare has already spent more than 380,000 British pounds, or about
$610,000, in legal fees pursuing litigation against him. Utilizing
loopholes in Britain’s libel laws, the company is alleging that Thomsen
falsely accused GE of suppressing sensitive information about the
drug’s risks at an Oxford scientific congress presentation in 2007.’
‘Climategate has
shattered that myth. It gives us a peephole into the work of the
scientists investigating possibly the most important issue ever to face
mankind. Instead of seeing large collaborations of meticulous, careful,
critical scientists, we instead see a small team of incompetent
cowboys, abusing almost every aspect of the framework of science to
build a fortress around their “old boys’ club”, to
prevent real scientists from seeing the shambles of their
“research”.
Most people are aghast
that this could have happened; and it is only because “climate
science” exploded from a relatively tiny corner of academia into
a hugely funded industry in a matter of mere years that the
perpetrators were able to get away with it for so long.’
‘I am staggered. There
are 10,000 ‘NGOs’ (Non-Governmental Organizations) in
Haiti, one for every 900 inhabitants and each one of them has no doubt
at least one Westerner working within, yet aside from the Cuban health
workers, it seems they could do nothing until the gringos arrived with
their Blackhawks and nuclear-tipped aircraft carrier and of course, the
82nd Airborne, paying yet another ‘visit’ to this benighted
and super-exploited land to ’secure’ the place for the
locust storm of aid to come (too late for too many).’
An ArkeFly flight carrying 235 people from Amsterdam to Aruba in the
Caribbean was forced to divert to Ireland on Wednesday after an unruly
Dutch passenger made bomb threats during the flight.
ArkeFly said Flight 361 landed at Shannon Airport, where the man was
handed over to authorities. There were 224 passengers and 11 crew
aboard the Boeing 767.
Irish police identified the man as a 44-year-old Dutch national and said he was in custody.
“He came across as a very unstable and aggressive passenger
during the flight and he mentioned several times that he had planted a
bomb in the airplane,” an ArkeFly spokeswoman said.
There was no indication he had attempted to set off any sort of device during the flight, she said.
One person was killed and scores injured last week as
police clashed with villagers in eastern China over the forced eviction
of farmers from rural lands, residents and a human rights group said
Tuesday.
The violence began last Thursday when about 100 hired
thugs beat farmers who had resisted eviction in the city of Pizhou in
Jiangsu province, the Hong Kong-based Information Centre for Human
Rights and Democracy said.
It said the farmers from Hewan village had refused to move off lands where local authorities want to build a chemical plant.
“One woman was killed and another woman was severely injured
by dozens of thugs hired by the township government,” a Hewan
resident who gave only his surname, Yang, told AFP by phone.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry said Tuesday it had
evidence that a bomb that killed a Tehran University professor was
planted by “Zionist and American agents”.
“The assassination of Mr Mssoud Ali-Mohammadi, a nuclear
scientist and a committed and revolutionary Tehran University
professor, was detonated by a remote control,” state broadcaster
IRIB said on its website.
“As a result of the bomb planted by Zionist and American
agents two cars and a motorcycle were severely damaged and the windows
in the surrounding residential units were shattered,” it said. Iran usually refers to Israel as the “Zionist regime.”
The state broadcaster earlier said “anti-revolutionary
elements” were behind Mohammadi’s death, describing it as a
terrorist act.
Mohammadi “was martyred this morning in a terrorist act by
anti-revolutionary and arrogant powers’ elements,” IRIB
said on its website. Iran usually refers to its Western foes as
“the global arrogance.”
China has successfully tested its advanced air defence
capabilities, intercepting a missile in mid-flight within its
territory, state media reported.
“The test has achieved the expected objective,” the
official Xinhua news agency quoted the foreign ministry as saying on
Tuesday.
The report on the “ground-based mid-course missile
interception technology” comes amid tensions over US arms sales
to Taiwan.
Last week the US cleared a sale of advanced Patriot air defence
missiles to Taiwan despite opposition from Beijing, a move which could
chill ties at a time when China and the US are also wary about trade
disputes and economic strains.
An Iranian nuclear physics scientist has been killed in a remote-controlled bomb attack in the Iranian capital, Tehran.
Dr. Massoud Ali-Mohammadi, a lecturer at the Tehran University and a
staunch supporter of the Islamic Revolution, was killed in
booby-trapped motorbike blast on Tuesday.
The explosion took place near the professor’s home in Qeytariyeh neighborhood, in northern Tehran.
Iran’s police and security bodies are investigating the terrorist case to identify those behind it.
Press TV correspondent Amir Mehdi Kazemi, reporting from the scene
of the assassination, quoted security officials as saying that the
equipment and system of the bomb used in the attack had been related to
a number of foreign intelligence agencies, particularly Israel’s
Mossad.
Meanwhile, Tehran’s Prosecutor Abbas Jafari-Dolatabadi
confirmed the assassination of the university lecturer on Tuesday
morning and said that he taught neutron nuclear physics at the
University of Tehran.
“No suspect has been arrested yet,” he told the Iranian Students News Agency.
He added that Ali-Mohammadi was killed when a motorbike parked near his car exploded.
The terrorist attack came as Shahram Amiri, an Iranian nuclear
scientist, went missing in the Saudi holy city of Medina while on a
pilgrimage visit in June 2009.
In December, Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Ramin Mehman-Parast
said Tehran had information that authorities in Riyadh had delivered
Amiri to the United States.
He added that Amiri is among eleven Iranian nationals held in detention in US prisons.
It seems the kidnap and assassination of Iranian scientists is on the agenda of the United States.
Household income in China surged in the last six years,
especially for top earners, putting the country on track to eclipse the
United States as the biggest consumer market in a decade, Credit Suisse
said in a report on Tuesday.
The bank’s survey of 2,700 respondents showed a
big rise in property and car purchases, underscoring why many investors
are betting big on a rise in China’s consumer sector.
“The next big theme for China in the new decade is the rise of
private consumption, in our view,” said Dong Tao, China economist
with Credit Suisse in Hong Kong. “It is likely to provide a badly
needed source of spending for the rest of the world, promoting a global
rebalance of trade, consumption and growth.”
Based on growth in household income and estimates of economic
growth, he expects the share of China’s private consumption to
GDP to reach 23.1 percent in 2020, just surpassing the U.S. ratio at
22.9 percent. Critics accuse China of contributing to global economic
imbalances by saving too much. However, the amount that Chinese
consumers save relative to household income has dropped to 12 percent
in 2009 from 26 percent in 2004.
In the tense new world of air travel, we’re stripped of shoes, told not to take too much shampoo on board, frowned on if we crack a smile. The last thing we expect is a joke from a 
