The Inconvenient Truths Series #7: Knowledge Is Power Provided We Act Upon It...
Hello everysoul!
After another marathon of work to assemble this compilation for you, I don't have much energy left to add a detailed introductory comment here. There are many blurbs from me throughout this one though.
I'll leave it to you to explore this and do as you see fit with it...
Incidentally, I'll be preparing and issuing by next Saturday the new Meditation Focus #223: Dedicating Oneself to Serve the Will of Good (to be archived HERE)... hoping you were able to join in this Sunday's potent one...
Note to all Canadians: May I recommend to your attention the excellent New Democratic Party's Platform (Intro HERE) Version française ICI (Intro ICI). The swift rise of the NDP in many recent polls especially in Quebec and BC bodes well for the upcoming national elections. Will Canada finally break free next May 2 from the tyranny of Big Money and its corrupting influence over the political establishment that for so long has dominated this country? Let's hope so!
The normal and special features in this compilation are...
To share this material with others, click HERE and then click on the icon(s) of the place(s) (like Facebook Blogger, etc.) where you want to share it, log on, etc. and it will be automatically posted there. You can also access the archived copy of this compilation (link shown above) and click on the “share” button featured under the Google automatic translation button, near the top, and then follow the same steps just mentioned.
Your feedback is as always welcomed and may be included in a coming compilation - unless you prefer it is not. Circulating this compilation (or any part of it) and personally inviting your correspondents to subscribe to this list would also help enlarge the circle of people who have access to this material. Please include in your forwards the URL address for the archived copy above, so others may have the opportunity to explore the original copy.
To unsubscribe from the Earth Rainbow Network automated listserver, or change your listing on it when you have a new email address, you can do it yourself through sending a blank email at earthrainbownetwork-unsubscribe@lists.riseup.net from the email account you wish to unsubscribe and then you subscribe your new email address - from your new email account - through sending a blank email to earthrainbownetwork-subscribe@lists.riseup.net. Or you can also ask me at globalvisionary@earthrainbownetwork.com to do it for you.
THE QUOTES
"The truth is that a very small number of people are gathering more wealth each day, while the majority is getting relentlessly poorer. And the ecological problems are a direct consequence of our societal organization, which promotes exploitation, predation and profit, rather than the forces of life. Once they have seen the reality, the damages it causes, people, in their soul and conscience, will write History, will act according to their own sense of justice and well-being. With this film, I show that all over the world there are people who don’t know one another, yet are doing the same thing, share the same life philosophy, and utilize the land in the same way, on a daily basis. Bringing to light both the simplicity and universality of their solutions was the real reason I made this film."
"When we declare war on a foreign nation, we now also declare war on the Earth, on the soil and plants and animals, the water and wind and people in the most far-reaching and deeply infecting ways. (...) "In the 21st century," he says, "given the precarious state of this planet, we must begin to see war as an outmoded method of solving political problems. ... The anti-war movement must become a No-War movement working alongside those who believe that, if we act now and with determination and without equivocation, it may still be possible to live on this planet for decades and even centuries from today. Sanders has a solution to the environmental devastation the military causes: banning war. This goal, Sanders says, can be achieved if "our efforts ... expand exponentially, in a communitarian movement around the globe the likes of which no one has ever witnessed, one that refuses to make compromises about a basic respect for life." As Sanders writes, "In the 21st century the military is the most sacrosanct institution in our country." So far, almost no one has dared to criticize its policies and practices, let alone its budget. That silence, Sanders insists, must end. Sanders asserts that "very few people ... will speak out for the voiceless, defenseless planet." One of those rare people is Sanders himself, who writes, persuasively and eloquently, on the urgent need to stop the military and warmaking if the biosphere is going to survive."
Countdown to Global Love Day - May 1st - A Celebration of Humanity
It is our vision to unite one and all in a celebration of love and compassion. We honor each May 1st as a symbolic day of unconditional love and call upon all people and all nations to gather together in the wisdom of peace and love. Global Love Day is the universal recognition of our innate oneness through love. When we come from this limitless love we naturally and easily embrace ourselves and our fellow humanity. Opening our heart, we allow unconditional love to be our guide and compassion to be our gift to life. We invite you to celebrate with us by consciously focusing on love and what it means to you throughout this day. We hope that by practicing love in all areas of your life, you will find it easy to love unconditionally all year long. Our Theme: "Love Begins With Me" What You Can Do... Simply be love. Let the love within your heart be the focus of your awareness throughout the day. Allow yourself to be accepting, forgiving, peaceful, joyful and in harmony with yourself and all life around you. Just be! Allowing unconditional love to be your primary intention is the main idea, and if you find yourself also wanting to actually "do" something loving or share the day with others, we provide several categories on our website to help give you ideas of how you may approach the day. We encourage you to come up with your own inspired, creative ideas and expressions. CLIP More details through www.thelovefoundation.com and from globalloveday@thelovefoundation.com
---
I FULLY SUPPORT THIS EXCELLENT CAMPAIGN AND HAVE DONATED TO HELP. WE OUGHT TO TAKE OUR COUNTRY BACK FROM THE JAWS OF THE ANTIDEMOCRATIC ESTABLISHMENT NOW RUNNING IT. PLEASE VOTE STRATEGICALLY - http://www.projectdemocracy.ca/ - http://www.projetdemocratie.org/ - AS SUGGESTED - AND FOR JACK LAYTON'S NDP WHEREVER POSSIBLE!
Date: 19 Apr 2011
From: "Ricken Patel - Avaaz.org" (avaaz@avaaz.org)
Subject: Canada: Take back democracy!
Dear friends across Canada,
This election could finally stop Harper, but our votes are split across the opposition parties. We've helped create a simple strategic voting tool that could tip the balance in several close races. Donate now to fund a massive national advertising campaign to get the word out:
Harper's government has fallen, the first in Canadian history to be found in contempt of Parliament. With insiders saying the opposition parties are finally willing to cooperate, this election could at last bring an end to this government's abuse of power, environmental destruction, and dismantling of democracy.
A majority of Canadians strongly oppose Harper, but our votes are split across 4 opposition parties, so in some ridings Harper's candidate can win with as little as 29% of the vote! Avaaz and Project Democracy are offering a tool to help fix this problem, which tells us whether we live in one of those close ridings, and which party has the most chance of defeating Harper there. Only about 10% of us live in a close race, but if we vote strategically using this tool, all the opposition parties together could win a huge majority of Parliament!
With just two weeks to go before the election, we need to get the word out fast. The tool will be ready in a couple of days, but first we need the funding to launch a nationwide advertising and media campaign that rallies Canadians in close races to come together to use this tool. Avaaz used a similar tool in the 2008 election that opposition leaders said swung 6 seats away from the Conservatives! With just 10 seats separating Harper from the unchecked power of a majority government, small donations from just 5000 of us could make a massive difference to our country's future. Click below to donate:
Over 86% of Avaaz members support this campaign, now it's time to put our plans into action.
Harper's government has launched a full scale assault on our democracy. He abused an arcane rule to shut down our parliament for months, bullied and fired civil service whistleblowers, ignored lawful requests for financial information, created a handbook on how to disrupt parliamentary meetings and processes, and flooded the airwaves with vicious attack ads. His cronies have cheated election laws, altered official documents and used their public office to raise money for re-election. Harper needs to subvert democracy because he knows the Canadian people do not support his ideology. His contempt for the Canada we've built is best summed up by what he called us when meeting with a group of radical right wing Americans. He said: "Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term."
For too long Canada has been ruled by the heavy-handed leader of a radical minority. At a time when democracy is on the march around the world, it's time to take back ours.
Support the Avaaz community! We're entirely funded by donations and receive no money from governments or corporations. Our dedicated team ensures even the smallest contributions go a long way -- donate here.
---
"ALERT" - WE ARE ALL DOOMED (April 14, 2011) Must watch! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEGMSSObeGc Note from Jean: According to this video, both on September 28, 2011 and on November 22, 2011, an Extinction Level Event (ELE) could happen on Earth because "comet Elenin" officially discovered by Russian Astronomer Leonid Elenin on December 10, 2010... -in this video it is alleged that this comet could be the brown dwarf with twice the mass of Jupiter and 4 orbiting planets photographed in 2007 from a South Pole telescope - ...will align with our planet, the sun and other planets as it did on February 27, 2010 when the 5th largest eartquake ever recorded happened in Chile and on March 11, 2011 when the 2nd largest eartquake ever recorded happened in Japan... On October 17 it will be at its closest from the Earth, 4 times closer to it than the Sun. On September 28, 2011 it will pass between our planet and the Sun completely obscuring it... On Google Earth, (Sky option) the portion of the night sky where this brown dwarf would normally be seen is presently obscured. Could it be because the authorities don't want the population to know and be alarmed about this so as to avoid a global panic? It would make sense. Dunno, but these are way too many 'coincidences'... To try to find out more on this matter, I've spent a couple hours searching the Web for some substantiating evidence on these claims. See below what I've found.
"So…your backing up the fact that each times its earth elenin sun it’s a big quake? I mean I’m so uncertain about this. Once is coincidence I could see that. 2 is odd, but still passable. But 3 large destructive quakes the last 3 times it has lined up with us and the sun seems far fetched to call a coincidence. I hear what your saying, and what the gov is saying, and the media….oh wait, they’re not reporting on any of this. But I understand what your saying that it’s not, but the facts and research shows….it is! So what can one possibly think of the situation? It’s extremely difficult to come out with a straight answer anywhere supporting either side. But JPL clearly shows, Feb 27 2010, Sep 5 2010, and March 11 2010 as alignments. These three alignments also sparked unknown anomalies like being moved off the axis? Whirlpools? Weird magnetic field? People NEED and want answers. Not what ifs…they can have those on their own. Thank you. "
(...) "I was in one of those earthquakes listed above, and saw a vivid resonating plasma in the sky above just as the main primary shock wave was generated? For me the correlation is obvious – there are charge couplings occuring.There is no need for an exacting geometric alignment either… when the distance, potential differences, and temperatures etc are tuned to trigger a coupling. "
"Leonid, thank you so much for confronting this pressing question on the minds of so many of your fans. A definite pattern is emerging concerning Comet Elenin and planetary alignments involving both our sun and the Earth. The two largest earthquakes over the past 15 months both occurred during alignments with Comet Elenin and a third alignment on Sept. 3, 2010 resulted in the first Christchurch 7.0 earthquake. The coincidense of these large and extremely rare earthquake events happening during an alignment with a single comet also involving the sun and earth three times are too great to be mathimatically probable in my humble opinion. An object of great mass in our solar system, it would seem to appear could only trigger such rare seismic events. Also the closer Comet Elenin has drawn to the interior of the solar system the more and more earth changes we seem to be experiencing with the incredible increase in worldwide seismic activity and also volcanism. So is it really any wonder that people of the earth are questioning if Elenin truly is a comet or a planetary body of some sort? Also during the last planetary alignment with comet Elenin on March 11, 2011 our sun was also extremely active with an X class solar Flare event occurring on March 9 and also several M class and C class solar Flares occurring at this very same time period. The earth also was experiencing a geomagnetic storm of Level-G1 and Level G-2 for three days from March 10-12 as a result of earth directed solar coronal mass ejections. So it appears that comet Elenin may have some sort of electromagnetic effect upon the sun which also directly effects the Earth. Only time will reveal if the next alignment on Sept. 26, 2011 will bring us even more seismic activity."
Spanish Astronomers Claim Dwarf Sun Beyond Pluto ( February 2 7 , 2 0 1 1 ) Detailed scientific article! http://thewatchers.adorraeli.com/2011/02/27/spanish-astronomers-claim-dwarf-sun-beyond-pluto/
Scientists have deflected inquiries about the discovery of new planet for a few years now, mainly because they feared being associated with these "fringe" theories. But, according to a team of Spanish astronomers who call themselves StarViewer Team they found a brown dwarf star with large satellites encircling it. It's twice the size of Jupiter. The group made the rounds of all the news web sites in the past two weeks, claiming they discovered something very significant. It's almost twice the size of Jupiter and just beyond our furthest planetoid, Pluto. Although it's not a planet, it appears to have planets or large satellites encircling it. It's what astronomers call a "brown dwarf star" and its official name is "G1.9". [according to this Wikipedia entry it is a supernova remnant...]
(...) There is indeed something "out there" that approximates Planet-X, Nibiru, a brown dwarf… It has been proven but not seen. Readers can explore the mathematical models that demonstrate the disruptions in the Oort Cloud, comets and our Sun in a previous article on viewzone. At the present time we seem to be experiencing an unusually quiet period of what was supposed to be the most violent 11-year solar cycle in history. According to the theory of barycenters, this must be due to the gravitational effects of some massive body in our Solar System, preventing the usual disruptions associated with the 11+ year orbits of Jupiter. Recent unpredicted asteroid activity suggests that something is perturbing the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud. But until we can get reliable information from scientists - or even amateurs - who are willing to give their names and share their information for public scrutiny, we will always be suspicious when someone yells, "The sky is falling!"
Comet Elenin Could Hit Earth! (18/01/2011) http://reinep.wordpress.com/2011/01/18/comet-elenin-could-hit-earth/
Comet Elenin was just discovered this past Dec. 2010 by a Russian Astronomer Leonid Elenin. The question is why media hasn't said anything about it? They have always made a big fuzz in the past about found comets. Is it because it is going to be coming a little too close for comfort and they don't want people freaking out? Comet Elenin Could Hit Earth. This is a possibility because of the very unstable predictions of the Comet. Preliminary predictions have Comet Elenin coming within 42 million miles of the Earth with a very favorable comet sun angle for observers in the northern hemisphere. This is likely to change somewhat as additional data will tweak the orbit, but as it stands now we will see a spectacular comet in late October or early November 2011. When Comet Elenin first was discovered in December last 2010 it was calculated to pass 8.8 Au (8.8 times the distance of the Sun form us) away. But now these calculations has once changed again. Today the orbital calculation is down to 0.24 Au with a minimum as low as 0.15. But these data is being recalculated all the time and it could get even closer but that depends what it encounters in the Oort belt. Just so you know the Moon is 0.00256 away from us to give you a comparison. We must be aware the this comet could bring enormous amount of debris with it and Earth will pass through the debris trail. This will probably take place around the 6th November 2011 or later. Could this new long period comet be the original story of Nibiru? Comet Elenin could be the Comet that is mentioned in the Nostradamus quatrains, and it will supposedly shed a quarter of a mile diameter shard that will then impact our planet in the area of the Azores. If this impact occur, it will then cripple much of Europe and the east coast of North America. The entire sequence was originally supposed to begin between August or October of 1999, when the comet is seen by way of an eclipse. But calendars being what they are and our inexact keep of time, the focus is now on Elenin as that mortal messenger. Content of it all is , that if a quarter of a mile (one stadias) comet fragment striking along the mid Atlantic ridge around the Azores it would cause all kinds of problems, including tsunamis, earthquakes, floods and retransmitting pieces of our own planet.
Surviving 2012 and Planet X - Part 1 of 5: The Threat (September 3, 2007) If you wish to go down into the rabbit hole of doomsday thinking, check this out. Otherwise avoid this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8S0bj76389U
Part 1 of 5 shows how the approach of Planet X is already changing our world. Produced and hosted by Marshall Masters, a former CNN science feature field producer, this program offers a straightforward view of this coming human event. As the co-author and publisher of Planet X Forecast and 2012 Survival Guide, Marshall believes that 2012 will be a survivable, evolutionary event. (Jump to 7 min 20 sec if you wish to jump the long bleak introduction.) Part 2 HERE - Part 3 HERE - Part 4 HERE (from 1:35 it gets 'interesting' , this is the part you must watch) - Part 5 HERE (optimistic vision of post-apocalyptic world) More from Marshall Masters in Planet X & 2012 where hwe can read that "He pointed to the Avebury Crop Formation from July of 2008 as a mysterious warning sign of events which will unfold in the future. Masters explained that the formation, which appears to include the planets in our solar system, is a "time stamp reference" to December 21, 2012. Additionally, he observed that the message seems to suggest that Pluto will be greatly affected by Planet X, where it will either "spin out into space or spiral into the sun." As to the origins of the Avebury Crop Formation, Masters ascribed the source to a "benign species that are trying to communicate with us and to convey timely information to warn us to be prepared and to deal with it as a serious threat." With that said, he stressed the need to avoid being afraid of what might unfold and, instead, accept that it is "just a physical process that's going on and we'll get through it."
NASA SCIENTIST SPEAKS THE REAL TRUTH ABOUT THE YEAR 2012 (Nov 16, 2009) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHGaZMC8E0U
NASA scientist David Morrison states: "There is no threat to Earth in 2012." Damage control disinformation from an official NASA scientist or actual scientific facts? You decide. Check also NASA Response to Crazy 2012 Claims - Yet Nasa Warns Of Super Solar Storm 2012 - Check also "Doomsday Seed Vault" in the Arctic - Bill Gates, Rockefeller and the GMO giants know something we don't... AND Investors Behind Doomsday Seed Vault May Provide Clues to Its Purpose - "It's got all the exciting elements of a science fiction novel. A seed bank as strong as a fortress built into the side of a mountain in the remote arctic wilderness built for the purpose of preserving food sources in the event of a disaster. Among the specifications for the bank are dual blast-proof doors with motion sensors, two airlocks, and one-meter thick walls of steel reinforced concrete. Built on the island of Spitsbergen in the Barents Sea near the Arctic Ocean in the country of Norway, a group of wealthy corporations has invested millions of dollars in their project named the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. The mission statement is: "So that crop diversity can be conserved for the future". The seed vault will have the capacity to house up to 4.5 million different varieties of seeds from all over the planet." AND 'Doomsday' Seed Vault Stores 500,000 Crops (10 March 2010)
Giant ocean whirlpools puzzle scientists (12.04.2011) http://english.pravda.ru/science/earth/12-04-2011/117547-ocean_whirlpools-0/
US scientists have discovered two giant whirlpools in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Guyana and Suriname [As shown HERE this natural phenomenon was first documented by scientists in 2004). It became a sensational discovery because this part of the ocean has been studied thoroughly, and no one expected anything like that to appear in the area. More importantly and mysterious, no one can understand where the whirlpools came from and what surprises they may bring to people. According to Brazilian scientist Guilherme Castellane, the two funnels are approximately 400 kilometers in diameter. Until now, these were not known on Earth. The funnels reportedly exert a strong influence on climate changes that have been registered during the recent years. "Funnels rotate clockwise. They are moving in the ocean like giant Frisbee's, two discs thrown into the air. Rotation occurs at a rate of one meter per second, the speed is sufficiently large compared to the speed of oceanic currents, on the border hoppers is a wave-step height of 40 cm," "This is partially probably the effect of Earth's magnetic field weakening" Castellane said. Even during the dry months, when the movement of oceanic currents and the flow of the Amazon River practically comes to a standstill, the funnels do not disappear. Therefore, the nature of the funnels does not depend on the flow of water, which one of the world's biggest rivers brings into the ocean. The natural phenomenon, which creates the whirlpools, is unknown to modern science.
(...) Scientists are currently studying the influence of those giant funnels on the climate of Latin America and Africa. Such whirlpools show influence on the atmosphere and form cyclonical air mass. They can also affect the movement of air mass formed in other places. For the time being, scientists do not know how the newly discovered water craters can affect the climate of Central and South Americas. But scientist are far from sure on this matter. Does these whirlpools appear now, because we are so close to the galactic alignment? Check also Huge whirlpool created after Japan quake
LATEST UPDATES ON THE GLOBAL NUCLEAR CRISIS
Dr Helen Caldicott - Fukushima Nuclear Disaster- You won't hear this on the Main Stream News - MUST WATCH! BEST DESCRIPTION OF THE NUCLEAR NIGHTMARE WE ARE FACING - - 40% of Europe is still radioactive from Chernobyl... She recommends to NOT eat European food! This situation pales in comparison to the deadly legacy of Fukushima! She denounces Canada's exportation of uranium now coming back home to toast us all. From a March 18, 2011 conference she gave in Montreal. "Extremely challenging info" as wrote Ed Elkin (edelkin@gmail.com) who recommended this to my attention... Originally recommended by Jason D. Groode who wrote: "You are going to want to watch this 9 minute video of Dr. Helen Caldicott sharing her view of what the ramifications are of the Fukushima Nuclear 'incidents'. It is mind blowing!!" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ITrXVJMKeQ
Nuclear Facts you'd be more comfortable not knowing from a very clued up professional who will not be bought or intimidated into silence: Dr Helen Caldicott, true to style, tells it as it is/as she sees it/like you wont usually hear it. To find out more about this Morally Driven Woman.. check out the links below. http://www.helencaldicott.com/about.htm -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Caldicott -- http://www.conflict-resolution.org/sitebody/education/lecture_series/Caldicott.htm
4/17/2011 -- HIGH LEVEL FORECAST of Cesium-137 (not shown to public) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnRMS71OpCY
Note from Jean: Check HERE to see how heavily Japan and a large part of China are being potentially contaminated - Unfortunately this simulation doesn't offer earlier dates - just the current 4 day prevision - so if you don't check this right now, you won't see the April 24-28 devastatingly large cloud of potentially radioactive pollution hovering above Japan and China instead of going directly across the Pacific Ocean as in the previous weeks. Of course, not all of it falls to the ground (other simulations show that only a fraction ever goes down with the rain to contaminate the ground) and as explained HERE, this simulation shows what the worst case scenario would be and is not purported to be the actual level radioactive fall out currently occurring. In fact, because of the lack of transparency of TEPCO and of the Japanese government, we may never know the actual figures.
Exposure Levels Going Up Everywhere (April 14th, 2011) http://theintelhub.com/2011/04/14/exposure-levels-going-up-everywhere/
"Radiation is continuing to leak out of the reactors, the situation is not stable at all, radiation continues to leak," says Dr. Michio Kaku, professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York and top graduate of Harvard. "We are looking at a ticking time bomb. It appears stable but the slightest disturbance, a secondary earthquake, a pipe break, evacuation of the crew at Fukishima could set off a full scale melt down at three nuclear power stations-far beyond what we saw at Chernobyl."Aftershocks rattling Japan after the nation's record quake on March 11 may continue for at least six months, increasing the risk of damage to a crippled nuclear plant at the center of the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl. "Aftershocks as big as magnitude-7 are likely to continue hitting in eastern and northern Japan for at least six months," said Teruyuki Kato, a professor at the University of Tokyo's Earthquake Research Institute. This is the main scientist to listen to and it's worthwhile to watch his most recent statements on this April 13 video. Radioactive contamination from the Fukushima power plant has been carried around the world and far out to sea and if current estimates and the situation do not worsen we already will have 10 percent of Chernobyl's radiation spreading around the globe and it looks like each and every month we will see another 10 percent of another Chernobyl's worth of radiation released to contaminate the world further. Dr. Kaku says his family is already leaving Tokyo because they don't believe the statements of the Japanese utility because they have consistently low-balled the dangers, as has everyone else. CLIP
Japan's Nuclear Volcano Erupts (April 14, 2011) http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24324
Shares plunged across Europe, Asia and the United States on Tuesday as the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant deepened and Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency raised its radiological event scale to its highest level. Conditions at the stricken facility have steadily deteriorated despite the valiant efforts of emergency workers. The station continues to spew lethal amounts of radiation and other toxins into the atmosphere and around the world. A French nuclear group has warned that children and pregnant mothers should protect themselves from the fallout. According to Euractiv: "The risks associated with iodine-131 contamination in Europe are no longer ‘negligible,’ according to CRIIRAD, a French research body on radioactivity. The NGO is advising pregnant women and infants against ‘risky behavior,’ such as consuming fresh milk or vegetables with large leaves." The group's warning underlines the dangers posed by the out-of-control facility which is causing unprecedented damage to earth, sea and sky. But while the disaster continues to grow larger by the day, the government's only response has been to expand the evacuation zone and try to shape news to minimize the public backlash. Emergency crews have braved high levels of radiation to bring the plant back under control, but with little success. A number of violent tremors and a second smaller tsunami have made their jobs nearly impossible. Thousands of gallons of radioactive water that was used as coolant has been flushed into the sea threatening marine life and sensitive habitat. The toxic release of radiation now poses an incalculable risk to the battered fishing industry and to fish-stocks around the world. This is from an article at Global Research:"Fish in nearby waters are now being measured at 4,000% above the Codex Alimentarius limits for Iodine-131 and 447% of Caesium-137. Radioactive caesium has a half-life of 30 years. Radiation levels for the isotope are not considered “safe” for 10 to 20 times longer. The caesium released today will remain dangerous six centuries from now....“Fukushima has become the dirty bomb of the Pacific"....("Radiation Spreads Worldwide", Freedom Against Censorship Thailand, Global Research, April 14, 2011) - Check also Radioactive Fukushima Plutonium And Strontium Bombarding US West Coast Since March 18th (April 21, 2011)
Japanese government censors Fukushima reports that contradict official story (April 22, 2011) http://www.naturalnews.com/032159_Japanese_government_Fukushima.html
Censorship of the truth about what is really going on at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility has been taken to a whole new level of corruption. According to a recent report from the Shingetsu News Agency, the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication (MIAC), in conjunction with the National Police Agency and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), has established a special project team to crack down on independent and freelance news agencies that criticize or otherwise scrutinize the official Japanese government position concerning Fukushima.The Japanese government appears to be working closely with both the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) and the nation's mainstream media outlets to maintain the facade that everything is just fine, and that the nuclear meltdown situation is largely mitigated and under control. But recent prodding and questioning by certain media sources outside this "good ol' boys" club have struck a nerve with authorities, sparking the new crackdown on those who oppose the official story. Authorities say such scrutiny is a threat to national security.For the most part, the mainstream Japanese media has been the only type of media invited to most of the press conferences concerning Fukushima. And the reporters who attend these events merely reiterate what TEPCO and others are saying about the situation, without asking any hard questions or investigating the situation. But the few press conferences at which independent and freelance reporters have been permitted to attend have been rife with the tough, hardball questions that nobody else has been asking -- and this has caused quite an upset." Freelance journalists and foreign media are pursuing the facts, even going into the radiation exclusion zone," explained Uesugi Takashi, an independent journalist that has been pushing the Japanese government to be more forthcoming with the truth about the situation. "However, surprisingly, the Japan government continues to prevent freelance journalists and overseas media from gaining access to official press conferences at the prime minister's house and government."One of the biggest and most obvious questions that many independent journalists, as well as Japanese citizens, are asking concerns the near-total blackout of information on the current status of Fukushima. Authorities continue to repeat that the situation is under control, but where is the actual evidence to back this claim? And if those in power have nothing to hide, then why have all the meetings between TEPCO officials and the government been private, closed-door meetings that exclude actual journalists? Meanwhile, empty reassurances that the Fukushima situation is essential "over" have drawn many citizens who previously evacuated the Fukushima exclusion zone back into these dangerous areas. This occurs, of course, as radiation readings around the world continue to rise in response to the Fukushima disaster.
EU Secretly Authorizes Emergency Order Allowing Large Increase Of Radiation In Food (April 3, 2011) MIND-BOGGLING STUPIDITY AND DUPLICITY! IT IS PROBABLY THE SAME EVERYWHERE... http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2011/04/03/eu-secretly-implements-large-increases-food-radiation-limits-informing-public-13636/
Kopp Online, Xander News and other non-English news agencies are reporting that the EU implemented a secret “emergency” order without informing the public which increases the amount of radiation in food by up to 20 times previous food standards. According to EU bylaws radiation limits may be raised during a nuclear emergency to prevent food shortages. But there is anger across Europe because this emergency order was issued while officials say there is no threat to the food.Foodwatch is quoted “These rules now to bring into force is absurd, because in Europe there are no nuclear emergency, and certainly no shortage of food.” The European Union has authorized radioactive load in foods in Japan has increased substantially. Until now, a maximum of 600 becquerels of radioactivity (cesium 134 and cesium 137) per kilogram allowed, but since last weekend for example oil or herbal suddenly 12,500 becquerels per kilogram, more than 20 times as high. The increase was recorded in Emergency Ordinance 297/2011 on March 27 and was in force.While politicians talk about “enhanced control measures” and “special protection standards” is universally silent on the huge increase in the allowable limits in food in Japan. Nevertheless we are reassured with the assurance that we have no worry about radioactive products from Japan. Explain why a 20 times as high value would make no difference for the consumer safety did not come. According to the Food Watch advocacy does this policy provides greater confidence of European citizens in the EU measures. Food Watch wants an immediate ban on all goods coming from the affected region are Japanese. Incidentally, in Europe there is very little food imported from Japan.
(...) This is from the Wall Street Journal: “Fukushima Daiichi operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. warned Tuesday that since the Fukushima Daiichi plant is still releasing radioactive materials, the total level of radiation released could eventually exceed that of Chernobyl, a spokesman said.“The new assessment comes as Japan admits that the effects of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident—which has already caused the evacuation of tens of thousands of people and spread radiation through groundwater and farms over a broad section of eastern Japan—are likely to be long-lasting and grave.....“Japanese nuclear regulators determined that after the accident, the plant has likely released tens of thousands of terabecquerels—or a mind-boggling tens of thousands of trillions of becquerels—of radiation in the immediate area. That's a level that's been recorded only during the Chernobyl accident." ("Japanese Declare Crisis at Level of Chernobyl", Wall Street Journal) Experts anticipate that the troubles at Fukushima will persist for months if not years. In the meantime, life-threatening levels of toxic radioactive material will be released into the air, water and soil. Small children and the unborn are at greatest risk, but incidents of adult thyroid cancer, immune system disorders and other maladies will increase exponentially as well. The future of the nuclear industry has never been more uncertain, and for good reason.
Fukushima Radiation Exposure Much Higher Than Mainstream Media Admits (April 22, 2011) http://www.prisonplanet.com/fukushima-radiation-exposure-much-higher-than-mainstream-media-admits.html
While Americans are busy focusing on the most ridiculous forms of entertainment such as Dancing With The Stars, American Idol, and whatever mindless reality show currently keeps them glued to their couches, the entire country is in the process of being covered with a cloud of toxic radiation seeping into their food, water, skin, and lungs. Sadly, even if one were to turn the channel in an effort to keep up with the latest in current affairs, there is virtually no chance of one being made aware of the level of contamination the country now faces. Regardless, since the beginning of the disaster, government regulatory agencies such as the EPA, USDA, CDC, and the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) have all claimed that there is no danger in the radiation coming from the damaged Fukushima nuclear plants. The mainstream media has obediently repeated these claims as fact. Some media pundits such as Ann Coulter even have promoted the Orwellian and absurd notion that radiation is actually good for you, and that it prevents cancer. (Coulter has yet to explain why she has not purchased an airline ticket for Japan so she can have the opportunity to bathe in it.)Yet, while numerous states (South Carolina, North Carolina, Florida, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, California, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington) have reported through their state agencies that radiation has been detected in drinking water, soil, and milk (among other things), the Federal regulatory agencies and their media subsidiaries refuse to admit that there is any reason for concern. Virtually every media report given about the Fukushima fallout contains the suggestion that the radiation now blanketing the United States is “harmless,” “minute,” or “miniscule,” and that there is no need for alarm.Yet, these claims now stand in direct contradiction to the conclusions reached by the National Academies of Science released in 2005.The BEIR VII — meaning the seventh Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation report on “Health Risks From Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation” — came to a much different conclusion than the EPA, CDC, and the NRC. NAS actually concluded that there is NO SAFE LEVEL or threshold ionizing radiation exposure.So even if the exposure to the Fukushima radiation was “miniscule,” there would still be a cause for concern because “miniscule” exposure can still cause cancer. Indeed, in a press release dealing with the release of the BEIR VII issued from the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, the NIRS states that it is well known that “even very low doses [of ionizing radiation] can cause cancer” [emphasis added]. It goes on to say that, “Risks from low dose radiation are equal or greater than previously thought” CLIP
Japan Nuclear Radiation In Hawaii Milk At LEAST 600% Above Federal Drinking Water Limits (April 11th, 2011) http://theintelhub.com/2011/04/11/japan-nuclear-radiation-in-hawaii-milk-2033-above-federal-drinking-water-limits/
New EPA milk samples in Hawaii show radiation in milk at 800% above limits for Cs-134, 633% above limits for Cs-137 and 600% above EPA maximum for I-131 for a total of 2033%, or 20.33 times, above the federal drinking water limits. New readings have also been posted for Phoenix AZ with milk being above the federal limit and Los Angeles with milk being slightly below the limit for Iodine. Montpelier VT milk has tested positive for radioactive CS-137, above about 2/3rds the EPA maximum and Spokane WA milk testing less than half the limit for i-131. A reader of my blog recently posted a YouTube video of my article on food contaminated with Japan nuclear radiation being sold on store shelves in California stores. Japan Nuclear Radiation Found In Food Being Bought In California Stores. As reported live last night on the Intel Hub radio show and again today on The Alexander Higgins Show, Japan nuclear radiation including i-131, Caesium 134 and Caesium 137 are now being detected in a wide variety of foods being bought on store shelves in California. In the first food chain tests made public radioactive contamination was found in spinach, strawberries, topsoil, grass, and milk. Of the isotopes detected, radioactive iodine has a half-life of 8 days outside of the human body and 100 days inside of the body. The C-134 ha a half-life of 2.0652 years and the c-137 has a half-life of 30.17. C-135 with a half-life of over 2.3 million years is not reported as detected. CLIP
Surviving Planet Earth in the Next 90 days... (04/18/2011) http://lucaswhitefieldhixson.com/surviving-planet-earth-next-90-days
Earlier this week, TEPCO released its two step plan for bringing the Fukushima Daiichi emergency under control. The plan is already in motion, and it has been stated that it will be completed within 9 months. For everyone else, the question remains: How will the world look in 9 months? Japan undoubtedly will experience many more earthquakes, monsoons, and volcanic activity during the time required to bring the situation back under control. It is unclear still how much radiation has been released, and an exact list of the radioactive isotopes that have been introduced to the environment is still not forthcoming. The purpose of this investigation is to show how volatile the situation really is, and the global implications it contains. We want to express to our readers the dangers of monsoon season, when radiation in the air will be brought back to the ground in the form of radioactive rain. So that our readers understand that with all of the volcanic activity in Japan, radiation attaches itself to the volcanic ash and can be carried and distributed to different countries. We want people to understand the potential global economic effects that might occur when Japan raises money to pay for the cleanup. CLIP
Giant UFO Over Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant in German News Footage? ( April 14, 2011) ARE THEY SECRETLY HELPING US ALL? LET'S HOPE SO!!! http://deathby1000papercuts.com/2011/04/giant-ufo-over-fukushima-nuclear-power-plant-in-german-news-footage/
There's a new 'UFO' video up at Youtube that caught our eye, Giant UFO Hovering Over Fukushima Nuclear Plant, April 12. The video, a clip from a German news video report. The video posted by 'SuperGia007' who posted the following info: "At 55 seconds into the clip a giant UFO can be seen hovering above the nuclear plant. Obviously this was a slip up on behalf of NDR and the Asian news outlet the group received the footage from. Top secret government departments worldwide collude to censor out any clear and obvious proof of the alien activity that is occurring at all times on planet earth. Only news that fits in with the program the international UFO cover-up has initiated to slowly make people aware of an alien presence on Earth is allowed to reach the public via mainstream media outlets. This was either a slip-up or a leak and no doubt behind closed doors there will heated discussion over this footage that proves without doubt that aliens are here. The second video is of a UFO fleet that was filmed above Japan around three weeks ago." CLIP - More such UFO videos HERE like this ONE - Check also Multiple UFOs Sighted in Japan the Past Month -- The following video is PRETTY AMAZING! UFO Japan March 25, 2011 (at the end it vanishes in thin air) - Identical spaceships in THIS ONE - Here is ANOTHER ONE
(Tiny!) 'Dead alien' found in Siberian snow (April 20, 2011) http://au.news.yahoo.com/amazing-stories/a/-/article/9231932/dead-alien-body-found-in-russia/
It may just be an elaborate hoax, but a video has surfaced showing the body of an alien found dead in snow in Siberia. The slender, badly damaged corpse was found lying on a bed of snow with its head to one side and mouth slightly open, the Daily Mail reported.The video, posted on April 17 on YouTube, has already had over 100,000 views and showed the body of the unidentified "creature". Irkutsk, Russia is apparently a known UFO hotspot, and UFO believers think the body was left behind by alien visitors after an accident, or was missed in a clean-up by the Russian government as part of some sort of alien cover-up. Dozens of UFO sightings are reported every year in the area, and only last month there were reports of an unidentified object hurtling into the nearby Irkutsk region of Siberia. "We couldn't believe it when we saw it. And what was spooky is that there was no sign of the spaceship. Perhaps that was taken away and the body overlooked," said Igor Molovic, one of the pair that uploaded the video. CLIP - Check also Video reportedly shows dead space alien in Russia (April 20th, 2011) This dead alien is almost certainly a fake... YOU DECIDE...
Was JFK killed because of his interest in aliens? Secret memo shows president demanded UFO files 10 days before death (19th April 2011) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1378284/Secret-memo-shows-JFK-demanded-UFO-files-10-days-assassination.html
An uncovered letter written by John F Kennedy to the head of the CIA shows that the president demanded to be shown highly confidential documents about UFOs 10 days before his assassination. The secret memo is one of two letters written by JFK asking for information about the paranormal on November 12 1963, which have been released by the CIA for the first time. Author William Lester said the CIA released the documents to him under the Freedom of Information Act after he made a request while researching his new book 'A Celebration of Freedom: JFK and the New Frontier.' The president's interest in UFOs shortly before his death is likely to fuel conspiracy theories about his assassination, according to AOL News.Alien researchers say the latest documents, released to Mr Lester by the CIA, add weight to the suggestion that the president could have been shot to stop him discovering the truth about UFOs.
(...) 'One of his concerns was that a lot of these UFOs were being seen over the Soviet Union and he was very concerned that the Soviets might misinterpret these UFOs as U.S. aggression, believing that it was some of our technology,' Mr Lester told AOL News.'I think this is one of the reasons why he wanted to get his hands on this information and get it away from the jurisdiction of NASA so he could say to the Soviets, "Look, that's not us, we're not doing it, we're not being provocative. ". But conspiracy theorists said the documents add interest to a disputed file, nicknamed the 'burned memo', which a UFO investigator claims he received in the 1990s. The document, which has scorch marks, is claimed to have been posted to UFO hunter Timothy Cooper in 1999 by an unknown CIA leak, but has never been verified. In a note sent with the document, the apparent leaker said he worked for CIA between 1960 and 1974 and pulled the memo from a fire when the agency was burning some of its most sensitive files. The undated memo contains a reference to 'Lancer', which was JFK's Secret Service code name.On the first page, the director of Central Intelligence wrote: 'As you must know, Lancer has made some inquiries regarding our activities, which we cannot allow.' CLIP
We live in a multiverse - ETs, ITs, UFOs, dimensions - Alfred Lambremont Webre (part 1/2) Part 2 HERE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=af2TsrYV62M
Alfred shares much of his life story and his understanding about lots of things in this interview by Lilou for her Juicy Living Tour show. VERY interesting! Around 30 minutes into it Alfred really gets into his groove and shares lots of fascinating views that will resonate with most of you... But if you have more time it is worth watching it all...
Deadly time vortex appears over Antarctica (12 April 2011) http://beforeitsnews.com/story/553/845/Deadly_time_vortex_appears_over_Antarctica.html&NL
Disturbing news has been leaking out from the giant continent at the bottom of the world. Some scientists manning lonely outposts under the drifting and shifting aurora are nearly paralyzed with fear. Their clipped reports are being reviewed by astonished superiors back in the home countries. Russian researchers posted near the giant South Pole sub-glacial Lake Vostok have reported eerie anomalies and incidents over the past few years that sometimes seem to border on the frayed edge of creeping madness.
(...) Deciding to explore the odd phenomenon, the group took one of its weather balloons and attached a meteorological instrument to it that calibrated temperature, barometric pressure, humidity, windspeed and a scientific chronometer to record the times of the readings. After attaching a cable to the balloon, and securing the other end to a winch, they released it. The balloon and instrument package soared upwards and were immediately sucked into the gaping maw of the swirling vortex. The balloon and instruments disappeared. After a several minutes, they decided to retrieve the balloon. Despite some difficulty with the winch they succeeded in bringing the balloon back to earth and checked the instruments. McLein stated that everyone was stunned by the readout on the chronometer. It displayed a date decades in the past: January 27, 1965. McLein claimed the experiment was repeated several times with the same result. Later, she said, the entire episode was reported to military intelligence and passed on to the White House. Presumably the strange vortex phenomenon--a highly magnetic tunnel to the past--was code named The Time Gate by military intelligence. As the phenomenon was generated in the same general vicinity as the discovery of the giant apparatus deep under the ice, it's thought the two may be related. If indeed a magnetic time vortex is appearing and disappearing over Antarctica--and if the phenomena is not natural, but generated by some unknown technology deep under the ice cap--it may reveal the physics of time and could potentially allow control of the past, and by implication the future. If true, it's no wonder the military is so intensely interested and so closed-mouthed about it.
The Ox-Files: 'Mass cow sacrifices by aliens' sent White House into panic, FBI records reveal (13th April 2011) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1376533/8-000-cow-abductions-reported-southern-U-S-sent-White-House-panic.html
Cows were sacrificed by aliens sending the White House into a panic declassified FBI files have revealed. It is claimed that more than 8,000 cows were abducted by UFOs before they were mutilated and thrown back down to earth over the southern United States during the 1970s.The memo is one of thousands of previously unreleased classified files that the bureau has made public in a new online resource called The Vault. The files detail how the aliens took trophies from their victims in the form of body parts and in some cases they drained the animals entirely of their blood. One investigator's theory was that 'these animals are picked up by aircraft, mutilated elsewhere and returned and dropped from aircraft.' Identical mutilations have been taking place all over the south west. whoever is responsible is well organised with boundless technology, financing and secrecy. 'When news of the cow abductions reached the White House in 1979, there was fear.' The materials sent to me indicate one of the strangest phenomenon in my memory,' said the then US Attorney General Griffin Bell in a letter to senator Harrison Schmitt, according to The Sun newspaper.Mr Schmitt represented New Mexico, where countless incidents were reported at a ranch in Dulce, a small town in the north of the State. (...) FBI agents were dispatched to farms across the country upon reports to probe the abductions. A report from the farm in Dulce during 1976 said that a suspect aircraft had landed and left three pod marks in a triangular shape. (...) The documents about the cows is just one among thousands of files released by the FBI. Another secret document released as part of the projects detailed how police and army officers witnessed a UFO exploding over Utah in April 1949. The top secret document reveals how an army guard, a policeman and a highway patrol, who were all miles apart, each saw a UFO, which they said exploded over mountains near Logan, north of Salt Lake City. CLIP
Whole country in deep sorrow: Advani on Sai Baba - he left at 7:40 a.m. (India time) April 24, 2011 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jJ4WZuyoGE&NR=1
Senior BJP leader LK Advani paid an emotional tribute to Sri Sathya Sai Baba and said his passing away has plunged the whole country in deep sorrow. Sathya Sai Baba supported a variety of free educational institutions, hospitals, and other charitable works in over 166 countries. - The good deeds accomplished around the world through his organizations are immeasurable but not widely known... Check also Reputation for miracles and clairvoyance (...) Some of the reported miracles included levitation (both indoors and outdoors), bilocation, physical disappearances, changing granite into sugar candy, changing water into another drink, changing water into gasoline, producing objects on demand, changing the color of his gown while wearing it, multiplying food, healing acute and chronic diseases, appearing in visions and dreams, making different fruits appear on any tree hanging from actual stems, controlling the weather, physically transforming into various deities and physically emitting brilliant light. CLIP
US Navy's Laser Test Could Put Heat on Pirates (April 13, 2011) http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/04/14/navys-laser-test-heat-pirates/
The Navy for the first time last week successfully tested a solid-state high-energy laser from a ship. The beam, which was aimed at a boat moving through turbulent Pacific Ocean waters, set the target's engine on fire.The Office of Naval Research says the laser traveled over "miles, not yards." For now, the test is a proof of concept, and it's not yet known when it might be deployed as a weapon.The baseball-sized laser beam, though, could be used to stop small crafts from approaching naval ships. It could also target pirates."You can use the laser to ward off an attack, or you can dial it down to a non-lethal level where it basically becomes a very bright light so they know they are being targeted," Michael Deitchman, the director of air warfare and weapons at the Office of Naval Research, said Wednesday. Deitchman said the laser provides two benefits not seen in other military weapons. The laser is precise, unlike bullets that can ricochet and hit unintended targets, and the laser's strength can be dialed down from a lethal level to a nuisance level.Graeme Gibbon-Brooks, the head of Dryad Maritime Intelligence, said the test was "remarkable" for how the Navy was able to concentrate the beam over such a long distance at sea, and given how the boat was being tossed about in rough water. CLIP - Note from Jean: This laser weaponry reminds me of a long-forgotten war between Atlantis and ancient India as alluded to in the Mahabharata - check HERE where the use of nuclear bombs is also described: "When you turn it gave a ray of light which when focused on any target, immediately “devoured her with his strength.” (...) Very significantly in the “Mahabharata” is described, and other terrible and destructive weapons. The most terrible of them were used against vrish. In the epic, said: “Gurkha flying in his swift and powerful Wiman, threw three cities vrishi and andhakov single projectile charged the full force of the universe.Incandescent column of smoke and fire, bright as 10,000 suns, rose in all its glory. It was an unknown weapon, an iron thunderbolt, a gigantic messenger of death which has turned to ashes the entire race and vrishi andhakov." More on this in The Evidence For Ancient Atomic Warfare
Fracking Hell: The Untold Story - The true cost of America Gas Rush (January 11, 2011) Nightmarish! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEB_Wwe-uBM
An original investigative report by Earth Focus and UK's Ecologist Film Unit looks at the risks of natural gas development in the Marcellus Shale. From toxic chemicals in drinking water to unregulated interstate dumping of potentially radioactive waste that experts fear can contaminate water supplies in major population centers including New York City, are the health consequences worth the economic gains? Marcellus Shale contains enough natural gas to supply all US gas needs for 14 years. But as gas drilling takes place, using a process called hydraulic fracturing or "fracking," toxic chemicals and methane gas seep into drinking water. Now experts fear that unacceptable levels of radioactive Radium 226 in gas development waste. Fracking chemicals are linked to bone, liver and breast cancers, gastrointestinal, circulatory, respiratory, developmental as well as brain and nervous system disorders. Such chemicals are present in frack waste and may find their way into drinking water and air. Waste from Pennsylvania gas wells -- waste that may also contain unacceptable levels of radium -- is routinely dumped across state lines into landfills in New York, Ohio and West Virginia. New York does not require testing waste for radioactivity prior to dumping or treatment. So drill cuttings from Pennsylvania have been dumped in New York's Chemung and other counties and liquid waste is shipped to treatment plants in Auburn and Watertown New York. How radioactive is this waste? Experts are calling are for testing to find out. New York State may have been the first state in the nation to put a temporary hold on fracking pending a safety review, but it allows other states to dump toxic frack waste within its boundaries.With a gas production boom underway in the Marcellus Shale and plans for some 400,000 wells in the coming decades, the cumulative impact of dumping potential lethal waste without adequate oversight is a catastrophe waiting to happen. And now U.S. companies are exporting fracking to Europe. Watch more Earth Focus at http://www.linktv.org/earthfocus - Note aux abonné-e-s francophones: Voilà ce qui se produit déjà en Alberta avec la bénédiction de Harper et ce qui risque d'arriver au Québec si les Québécois se laissent berner par le gouvernement Charest et cette industrie infernale... Sachons tirer les leçons du désastre écologique et humain en cours aux États-Unis.
Democratic report: carcinogens injected into wells (APRIL 17, 2011) http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ghjewZpN2kZF0306S4OLN0axAWmA?docId=03423a334f364af8bc307250639ffffa
WASHINGTON (AP) — Millions of gallons of potentially hazardous chemicals and known carcinogens were injected into wells by leading oil and gas service companies from 2005-2009, a report by three House Democrats said Saturday. The report said 29 of the chemicals injected were known-or-suspected human carcinogens. They either were regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act as risks to human health or listed as hazardous air pollutants under the Clean Air Act. Methanol was the most widely used chemical. The substance is a hazardous air pollutant and is on the candidate list for potential regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act. The report was issued by Reps. Henry Waxman of California, Edward Markey of Massachusetts and Diana DeGette of Colorado. The chemicals are injected during hydraulic fracturing, a process used in combination with horizontal drilling to allow access to natural gas reserves previously considered uneconomical. CLIP
Tell Congress to implement the recommendations of the presidential oil spill commission to prevent another Gulf oil disaster https://secure.nrdconline.org/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=2111&s_src=fb&utm_source=socmed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=gulfspill
The bipartisan commission appointed by President Obama in the wake of the Gulf oil disaster recently released its findings that the disaster was not a one-time fluke, but a result of systemic failures in government oversight and industry management. Urge your senators and representatives to support and implement the commission's recommendations to reform offshore oil and gas drilling, and to protect and restore our oceans. Learn more about this issue » This action is for U.S. residents only. Please do not attempt to take action without a U.S. mailing address. Check also the Gulf Declaration to End the Era of Oil recommended to you last July. Sign it HERE 14,859 have signed it so far.
Save the Mekong River! (April 21, 2011) http://www.earthaction.org/2011/04/save-the-mekong-river.html
The Mekong is one of the world’s great rivers. With its source in Tibet, the Mekong River runs through six Southeast Asian countries - China, Burma, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. The Mekong River, already heavily dammed, is under a severe threat as the governments of Thailand, Laos and Cambodia are planning to build 11 additional big hydropower dams on its lower mainstream. If built, the Xayaburi Dam —the most advanced one—threatens to cause unprecedented damage to the river’s ecology and fisheries by blocking the migratory route of at least 23 fish species and threatening the extinction of 41 more, including the critically endangered Mekong Giant Catfish. This in turn will have devastating impacts on the livelihoods and food security of millions of people living along the river who depend on its natural resources. In September 2010, the Xayaburi Dam became the first mainstream dam to be submitted for approval by the four countries’ governments (Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam) through a regional decision-making process called the "Procedures for Notification, Prior Consultation and Agreement" (PNPCA), facilitated by the Mekong River Commission (MRC). For two years, communities, governmental officials and NGO representatives have been expressing their opposition to the construction of the dam. Despite this clear public opposition, the approval process continues to move forward. A final decision on whether the dam will be built will be made as early as tomorrow, April 22, 2011. Visit http://www.savethemekong.org to learn more. What you can do: Click HERE to sign the Save the Mekong Coalition’s online petition that will be sent to the Prime Ministers of Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam.
WikiLeaks Ron Paul Reveals Secret Baghdad Embassy Cable to Congress http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbyiVpLNZ3A
Confirmed: Saddam Hussein was given the green light to attack Koweit thus falling in the trap set by Bush Sr.
Solutions locales pour un désordre global - Bande-annonce http://www.solutionslocales-lefilm.com/
"Les films d’alertes et catastrophistes ont été tournés, ils ont eu leur utilité, mais maintenant il faut montrer qu’il existe des solutions, faire entendre les réflexions des philosophes et économistes qui, tout en expliquant pourquoi notre modèle de société s’est embourbé dans la crise écologique, financière et politique que nous connaissons, inventent et expérimentent des alternatives." Coline Serreau Pour regarder ce documentaire au complet commencer ICI (pour les 5 autres parties voir dans la colonne de droite)
À la droite de Harper (les chrétiens évangéliques ont un accès privilégié à Ottawa) (10 février 2011) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Gi92N0sFB4
À voir avant les élections!!! Très révélateur sur l'extrême droite religieuse qui domine chez les Conservateurs
Chercher le courant - À voir! Excellent documentaire!! Diffusé sur Zone Doc à Radio-Canada le 22 avril dernier http://www.chercherlecourant.com/
En 2008, Nicolas Boisclair et Alexis de Gheldere, accompagnés de deux environnementalistes, ont décidé de parcourir la rivière Romaine qui sera le théâtre d’un grand projet hydroélectrique d’Hydro-Québec. Durant le parcours de 500 km, ils documentent le paysage et les impacts qu’aura le projet sur celui-ci. Aussi, avec le comédien Roy Dupuis, les deux hommes se questionnent sur les manières de produire et de consommer l’énergie dans le Québec d’aujourd’hui. Note de Jean: C'est bien triste de savoir qu'une si belle rivière comme la Romaine - une autre ! - est sacrifiée sur l'autel de l'incompétence et du manque de vision de nos dirigeants politiques et des mégalocastors d'Hydro-Québec. Comme on peut le constater au Thierry Vandal, le président et directeur général d'Hydro-Québec depuis 2005, (voir À quand le congédiement de Thierry Vandal ?) par un gestionnaire ouvert aux autres formes d'énergie que l'hydraulique, mais aussi de changer le nom même d'Hydro-Québec pour celui d'Énergie-Québec afin de bien faire comprendre à tout le monde que l'ère des barrages tous azimuts est terminée... Si vous avez manqué la télédiffusion de ce documentaire, vous pouvez maintenant le regarder Sur TouTv à http://www.tou.tv/chercher-le-courant - Même si une partie des travaux est commencée, il n'est pas trop tard pour faire arrêter ce massacre inutile de ce qui devrait plutôt devenir un nouveau parc national. Cela nous sauvera plus de $10 milliards de nouvelles dettes pour une électricité dont nous n'avons ABSOLUMENT PAS BESOIN et qui fournira un kilowatt/heure à plus de 10 cents (sans compter les intérêts sur la dette!) alors que les principaux clients américains d'Hydro-Québec ont clairement indiqué n'ont pas du tout l'intention de payer un tel prix exhorbitant pour notre électricité. Leur rêve de l'or bleu n'est qu'un mirage. Imaginez si au lieu de gaspiller cette masse d'argent pour harnacher la Romaine, Hydro-Québec subventionnait la moitié des coûts d'installations de systèmes géothermiques dans des dizaines de milliers de foyers au Québec (au lieu du maigre $3000 - environ - présentement offert sur le coût total d'environ $23,000 selon ce Guide d'achat d'un système géothermique résidentiel - voir aussi Géothermie, cout et subventions applicables) les propriétaires payant l'autre moitié... Il faudrait une véritable révolution à la tête d'Hydro pour qu'un tel virage stratégique se produise, car ce faisant Hydro, qui a besoin des revenus réguliers de sa clientèle pour payer son énorme dette accumulée pour la construction de ses précédents barrages, ne voudra jamais se tirer dans le pied, figurativement parlant, en faisant en sorte de diminuer ses revenus en subventionnant ses clients pour qu'ils diminuent considérablement leurs besoins en électricité. Comme ils l'expliquent dans le documentaire, pour un même investissement le potentiel à tirer d'une meilleure efficacité énergétique du parc immobilier québécois équivaut au triple de ce que produiront les 4 barrages du complexe de la Romaine. Si vous avez décidé de doter enfin votre résidence d'un chauffe-eau solaire tel qu'illustré dans le documentaire, visiter le http://www.solairquebec.ca/ et, pour en savoir plus, visitez le site de l'Agence de l'efficacité énergétique du Québec au http://www.aee.gouv.qc.ca/ où vous pouvez notamment découvrir quels sont les Programmes et aides financières disponibles dont surtout ce qui est offert pour les énergies émergentes
KEY INTERNATIONAL NEWS
Note: The situation in Libya, Syria, Afghanistan and Bahrain is covered in more details in the main articles section below.
Gunfire as Syrian troops move into Deraa (25 Apr 2011) http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2011/04/20114255333825461.html
Hundreds of soldiers move into flashpoint town, as Syrian intellectuals denounce continuing violence against protesters. -- Hundreds of Syrian troops backed by armour early Monday have moved into the flashpoint southern Syrian town of Deraa where heavy shooting was heard, according to witnesses on the scene."Hundreds of security service men entered the town, accompanied by tanks and armoured vehicles," Abdullah Al-Harriri, an activist, told the AFP news agency in Nicosia by telephone. "The men are firing in all directions and advancing behind the armour which is protecting them," he added."Electricity is cut off and telephone communications are virtually impossible," he said.Footage aired on the opposition news organisation on Monday, transmitted via satellite, appeared to show Syrian military firing at unseen targets with sniper rifles. The latest confrontation comes as Syrian intellectuals expressed their outrage over the violence, with a declaration on Monday signed by 102 writers and exiles from all the country’s main sects.The current protests against the regime started in Deraa where dozens of Syrians have been killed in the violent repression of demonstrations by the security forces. Thousands of residents of Deraa province buried several victims of the repression after prayers on Sunday. CLIP
NATO air strike pounds Gaddafi compound (25 April 2011) How many more innocent civilians will be maimed, killed and contaminated with depleted uranium bombs to satisfy the urge of Western oil companies to put their hands on Libya's oil fields? http://english.aljazeera.net/news/africa/2011/04/201142521716965313.html
NATO forces flattened a building inside Muammar Gaddafi's Bab al-Aziziyah compound early on Monday, in what a press official from Gaddafi's government said was an attempt on the Libyan leader's life. Firefighters were still working to extinguish flames in a part of the ruined building a few hours after the attack, when foreign journalists were brought to the scene in Tripoli. The press official, who asked not to be identified, said 45 people were hurt in the strike, 15 of them seriously, and some were still missing. That could not be independently confirmed. Gaddafi's compound has been struck before, but NATO forces appear to be stepping up the pace of strikes in Tripoli in recent days. A target nearby, which the government called a car park but which appeared to cover a bunker, was hit two days ago. The United States, Britain and France say they will not stop their air campaign over Libya until Gaddafi leaves power. CLIP - Check also Who The Hell Do You Think You Are? Minister Louis Farrakhan Warns Obama About The CIA Plants In Libya - Strong words against Obama's attack against Libya - or 'Obushobama' as one comment put it.
Libya offers “verifiable” ceasefire, U.N.-supervised elections (April 20, 2011) NO WESTERN PROPAGANDA MEDIA HAS REPORTED THIS! http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/article1712559.ece
Libya’s Foreign Minister Abdul Ati al-Obeidi on Wednesday offered a “properly verifiable” ceasefire supervised by foreign observers to pave the way for talks which could cover “any issue” including, he implied, the future of Colonel Muammar Qadhafi. He proposed a six-month transition period to be followed by elections under U.N. supervision as proposed by the African Union. British Government dismissed the offer saying. “We need actions, not words from Qadhafi’s regime.” Mr. Obeidi’s remarks in a BBC interview came as France and Italy, taking a cue from Britain, announced that they too would send teams of military officers to Libya to help rebels fighting government forces - a move that Mr. Obeidi said would “encourage” anti-Qadhafi groups to “become more defiant” and hinder any peace initiative. Critics warned that by sending military personnel to Libya, the Western alliance could be in breach of the U.N. mandate which specifically prohibited “boots on the ground”. British Foreign Secretary William Hague claimed the military teams would not be involved in any combat operations and provide only logistics and intelligence training to rebel forces. Mr. Obeidi called foreign military presence a “step backwards” and said ultimately it would have to be a “Libyan solution”.“Any military presence by Britain or any other country will not help peace and dialogue. Any solution will be and should be Libyan-Libyan... We think any military presence is a step backwards and we are sure that if this bombing is stopped and there is a real ceasefire we could have a dialogue among all Libyans about what they want - democracy, political reform, constitution, election. This could not be done with what is going on now,” he said. Describing the rebels as “our brothers”, Mr. Obeidi said: “We are all Libyans. They are our brothers. The blood is Libyan and whoever is killed is dear to all of us.” CLIP - Check also Russian FM calls for ceasefire in Libya (April 25, 2011)
UN chief urges Libya ceasefire (18 April 2011) http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_world/view/1123509/1/.html
BUDAPEST: UN chief Ban Ki-moon on Monday called for an immediate ceasefire and a political solution to the conflict in Libya and said the United Nations would open a humanitarian mission in Tripoli."We have three objectives: first, an immediate, effective ceasefire; second, to extend our humanitarian assistance to the needy; third, we have to continue to have a political dialogue and a political resolution to the issue," Ban told reporters on a three-day visit to Hungary. "Considering the magnitude of the crisis if the fighting continues, it is absolutely necessary that Libyan authorities stop fighting and killing people," he said [HE SHOULD HAVE INDICATED THAT THE NATO BOMBING AND KILLING MUST ALSO STOP...]. With efforts to find a political solution continuing, Ban called for international action "in concert and coordination with the Libyan people"."Once a ceasefire is reached, Libya will need wide-ranging efforts in peace-making and peace-keeping as well as reconstruction," he said. There were tens of thousands of people in need of humanitarian assistance, the UN chief said. "We have a serious problem," he added, especially in towns directly caught up in the fighting. Ban said the UN -- which already has a humanitarian base in Benghazi to cater for nearly half a million people who have fled their homes -- would also set up a mission in Tripoli with the Red Cross and the Red Crescent.
No fly zone in Libya fails, ground fighting to cause African war - Margelov (21.04.2011) http://www.itar-tass.com/eng/level2.html?NewsID=16177547&PageNum=0
MOSCOW, (Itar-Tass) -- The situation in Libya is stalled. The no fly zone operation has failed, and an operation on the ground, if it begins, will trigger a large African war, Russian presidential representative for African affairs, chairman of the Federation Council’s international affairs committee, Mikhail Margelov, said on Thursday. “That this is a stalemate situation is seen in the fact that without a ground operation attempts to oust Gaddafi have failed, and resolution 1973 of the UN Security Council the coalition has already interpreted very loosely does not permit interference by infantry or paratroops,” Margelov told Itar-Tass. “The United States, France and Britain think that bombs alone are not enough to fulfill the part of the resolution that concerns the protection of civilian population. In their opinion, as long as there is Gaddafi, there will be a risk to the lives of civilians.”However, if a ground operation begins, then, according to Margelov, "a war of this scale will not be kept within Libya." "The area of ··the Sahel is already unstable, and the countries of that zone – Mali and Niger – are getting arms from the rebels in the theater of military operations in Libya for factions of al-Qaeda,” said the special envoy. This, he warns, "poses a threat to Algeria and Morocco, where the opposition continues to protest and demonstrate. " CLIP
Yemen activists vow to keep pressure on Saleh (24 April 2011) http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2011/04/201142494657612665.html
Protesters concerned that Gulf-brokered deal's 30-day period until Saleh quits, allows him time to "change his mind". -- Protesters in Yemen have reiterated their call for the immediate resignation of Ali Abdullah Saleh, the country's president, after his ruling party accepted a Gulf state-brokered plan for him to quit in 30 days.Demonstrators expressed concern on Sunday that the plan could be a manoeuvre between the president and official opposition parties to share power. The handover plan was drawn up by the Gulf Cooperation Council and endorsed by the official opposition coalition known as the Joint Meeting Parties. The GCC plan would see Saleh submit his resignation to parliament within 30 days, with a presidential vote to be held within two month. He would be granted immunity from prosecution for himself, family and aides. Tariq Shami, a presidential aide, told Al Jazeera on Saturday that the president had accepted in principle the proposal from the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) that would see him step down. "The president has agreed and accepted the initiative of the GCC," he said. "The transition of power in Yemen will take some time. It needs an agreement between the national powers and the opposition at the same time. This thing will happen within 60 days if we have an agreement." The opposition coalition said on Saturday it had agreed to the main elements of the plan, although opposition leaders had rejected a proposal to join a national unity government. Mohammed Qahtan, an opposition spokesman, told Al Jazeera that a basis of trust is lacking for the opposition to join a national unity government, but that the opposition would start a conversation regardless. "The vice-president will take over for a certain period and then we will see what happens," he said. But Ibrahim al-Ba'adani, an opposition activist in the city of Ibb, said he was "surprised" that the formal opposition had accepted the principle of immunity for Saleh. "We will continue sit-ins until the president goes," he said. In the square in Sanaa where protesters have camped out for weeks, protesters shouted: "No negotiation, no dialogue - resign or flee". "There is still one month until the president resigns and we expect him at any moment to change his mind," said activist Mohammed Sharafi. "We will not leave ... until Saleh goes and we achieve our goals of setting up a modern, federal state." Scores of demonstrators demanding Saleh's overthrow have been killed in months of unrest inspired by the wave of rebellion across North Africa and the Middle East that brought down the leaders of Tunisia and Egypt. CLIP
'Saudi Arabia calling shots in Yemen' (April 24, 2011) http://www.presstv.ir/detail/176458.html
Saudi Arabia is dictating the terms of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh's departure amid ongoing nationwide protests demanding his ouster, says a political observer. (...) “The Saudi objective is to minimize the actual reform process.” Steinberg also pointed to the “unanswered question” of “whether or not the demonstrators -- the people demanding fundamental reform -- will be suckered into accepting the idea that things remain more or less the same, but that Saleh is simply removed from the scene.” He went on to say that the Saudis are seeking to “crush” the popular movement in Yemen and that “they have been a little more covert about their military activity in Yemen.” CLIP
Bahrain prince to skip UK royal wedding (24 April 2011)
NOT REVOKING THE INVITATION TO THIS DESPOT WAS A BIG MISTAKE SHOWING AN APPALLING OBLIVIOUSNESS TO THE PLIGHT OF MURDERED AND TORTURED PEACEFUL PROTESTERS... http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2011/04/2011424165555715419.html
Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa declines British royal wedding invite amid criticism by activists following crackdown. (...) Media reports had speculated that the prince would withdraw to avoid embarrassment after the bloody crackdown on mainly Shia Muslim protesters in Bahrain left at least 24 people dead. The prince was one of more than 40 foreign royals invited to attend the British royals' wedding in Westminster Abbey on Friday. The announcement came as Bahrain's state media reported that a military prosecutor has called for seven anti-government protesters to be given the death penalty. The demonstrators are accused of killing two police officers during pro-democracy protests. The defendants' lawyer has denied the charges, with the next hearing set for Thursday. Activists, some of whom petitioned William Hague, the UK foreign minister, to revoke the prince's invitation, had been quick to condemn the decision to invite al-Khalifa to the ceremony. Nabeel Rajab, head of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, an opposition group which has been central to the protests, told Al Jazeera that people in Bahrain were expecting the British to take a "tough stance," rather than invite those accused of grievous human-rights abuses to the major celebrations. Al Jazeera's report on the controversial monarchs on the UK royal guest list. "Calling our crown prince at a time when people are being killed … for demanding their political rights and peacefully protesting, is extremely disappointing," he said in a phone interview. "They're losing the hearts and minds of the people in this region." Like similar protests movements across the Middle East and North Africa, Bahraini demonstrators have been demanding democracy, human rights and freedom of speech since mid-February. Al-Khalifa's government has responded to the calls for constitutional monarchy by deploying massive numbers of troops. Hundreds of doctors, nurses, teachers, unionists have been beaten, sacked or forcibly disappeared in recent days, Rajab said. CLIP
'Bahrain follows Israel genocidal lead' (April 24, 2011) http://www.presstv.ir/detail/176407.html
The Manama regime is following an Israeli pattern in committing genocide against the Bahraini people, a political analyst says. “The ruling regime [in Bahrain] is using a Zionist technique just like the Zionists want to get rid of the Palestinians. The Khalifa wants to get rid of the Shias, which is unfortunate,” Nada Hashwi told Press TV. “It is like a déjà vu to me with how the Israeli-Zionist state is behaving in Palestine with the destruction of homes, mosques and killing of people,” she further pointed out. Hashwi argued that the Manama regime is “trying so hard to bring it (popular uprising) into a sectarian war, but until now it has not happened.” She lashed out at Washington's silence over massive rights violations in Bahrain, saying that is because the Manama regime is a key US “ally” in the Persian Gulf region. “The US gets paid enough to keep its mouth shut regarding the genocide, tortures and killings that have been happening,” she further explained. Bahrain is home to the US Navy Fifth Fleet. CLIP
Israel injures four Palestinians in Gaza (April 22, 2011) http://www.presstv.ir/detail/176109.html
At least four Palestinians have been wounded in separate incidents after Israeli troops attacked the blockaded Gaza Strip, medical sources say. Three Palestinian laborers were injured when Israeli tanks opened fire on a local factory east of Gaza City, a Press TV correspondent reported on Friday. The laborers were moving the rubbles after the Israeli bulldozers destroyed eight factories and industrial zones earlier on Thursday. Meanwhile, Israeli snipers shot a Palestinian farmer in northern Gaza on Thursday night, leaving him injured. Israel has been regularly bombarding Gaza ever since its 22-day war on the impoverished enclave in December 2008 and January 2009, which killed more than 1,400 Palestinians -- many of them women and children. The United Nations and the European Union have called on the Israeli regime to halt its deadly strikes against the Palestinians in the coastal sliver. The assaults come amid Tel Aviv's all-out siege on the enclave since June 2007. Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted earlier this month that Tel Aviv would not stop short of taking any military action against the Gaza Strip. - Check also Israel destroys buildings in Gaza
NAM urges Israel to abide by law (April 22, 2011) http://www.presstv.ir/detail/176081.html
The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) has called on Israel to abide by its responsibilities under international law after Tel Aviv ignored to stop illegal expansion of settlement activities.In a statement on Thursday, Egyptian Ambassador to the UN Maged Abdel Aziz, who spoke on behalf of NAM at the Security Council, said Israel's settlement activities totally contradict its so-called sincerity in achieving a two-state solution. NAM "reiterates its call for the Security Council to be resolute in demanding that Israel abides by its legal obligations," he was quoted as saying by Xinhua news agency. "The Non-Aligned Movement believes that, at this critical juncture, the international community must renew its resolve to uphold its longstanding commitment to the realization of the two-state solution on the basis of international law and the terms of reference of the peace process," Aziz said. Last September, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and acting Palestinian Authority Chief Mahmoud Abbas began US-sponsored direct talks in Washington following a 20-month break. However, the two sides failed to reach any agreements after the Israeli premier refused to extend a partial moratorium on settlement construction in the occupied Palestinian territories. The 10-month freeze expired at the end of September. Palestinians say that settlement construction is aimed at preventing the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. Check also France urges Palestinian statehood
Protesters demand reform in Morocco (25 April 2011) http://english.aljazeera.net/video/africa/2011/04/201142512013759717.html
Demonstrators continue their bid for peaceful social and constitutional reform in the kingdom.-- Thousands of protesters have participated in rallies in cities across Morocco, demanding social and economic reforms. They called for an end to corruption, and want more jobs for the increasing number of university graduates who face joblessness. The peaceful protests are predominately working class in tone, demanding constitutional reforms and new parliamentary elections. The marches on Sunday were organised by the February 20 movement, which has led protests for the past two months, with support from Morocco's best-known Islamist movement, Adl wal Ihsan, which is barred from politics in the North African kingdom. Morocco's King Mohammed VI has already pledged changes to the constitution for the first time in 15 years, but protesters remain sceptical about the possibility of real change.
Omani protesters call for reform (April 22, 201) http://www.presstv.ir/detail/176183.html
Thousands of Omani protesters have reportedly taken to the streets in the southern port city of Salalah after the Friday Prayers to demand political reforms.Witnesses say about 3,000 protesters gathered outside the local government headquarters in Salalah following the Prayers and then staged a rally. Protesters have been staging a peaceful sit-in at Salalah's main square for the past several weeks. Protesters also called for the prosecution of the ministers sacked for corruption following mass demonstrations in February. "The Omani people are not afraid of protesting for as long as it takes for reform, first and foremost is to get government officials, who have been embezzling funds for years, to stand trial," cleric Amer Hargan told demonstrators. Omani demonstrators do not seek regime change and have focused their demands on better wages, jobs and an end to graft. There were no reports of clashes between protesters and security forces in Salalah. Last month, Omani security forces crushed protest demonstrations in the northern city of Sohar, killing at least six demonstrators. Hundreds of protesters were also arrested. Earlier this week Omani authorities announced pardons for over 200 people arrested during protests, but did not say when they would be freed. In March, Oman's ruler, Sultan Qaboos bin Said, who has ruled the sultanate for 40 years, promised 50,000 new civil servant jobs and a cabinet reshuffle in a bid to end nearly two months of demonstrations in Oman.
Saudi counter-revolution cools Arab Spring (24 April 2011) http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/04/2011424133930880573.html
Fueled by fear of rising oil prices, US deference is helping Saudi Arabia implement its agenda in the Gulf. -- As the so-called Arab Spring enters its sixth month, it appears to have run into seriously wintry headwinds. While some observers here have blamed Saudi Arabia and its neighbouring Sunni-led sheikhdoms as a major source of the icy winds that are blasting through the Gulf, the growing contradictions between the US and Western "values" and their interests are adding to the unseasonable weather. Thus, while Washington has privately expressed strong doubts about the wisdom of the increasingly brutal and indiscriminate crackdown against the majority Shia population in Bahrain, home to the US Navy's Fifth Fleet, its failure to clearly and publicly denounce the Saudi-backed repression is only the most blatant example of this trend. Far less noticed - let alone condemned - are actions such as Thursday's dissolution by the government of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) of the board of directors of the Jurist Association, one of the country's most prominent civil society organisations, which earlier this month had the temerity to sign a petition seeking political reform. Human Rights Watch said the move was part of a "broader crackdown on peaceful dissent" by the government, whose de facto defence minister, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, will meet with President Barack Obama here next week, the White House announced on Friday. Indeed, despite his growing - if reluctant - military investment in "regime change" in Libya, Obama's avowed efforts to put Washington "on the right side of history" in the Arab world appear increasingly lame and hypocritical. Not only is the US - not to say the rest of the West - effectively deferring to Saudi policy, particularly in the Gulf, but it also appears to be hedging its bets against truly democratic change elsewhere in the region by, for example, bolstering its support for Egypt's military - while withholding substantial economic aid - in the apparent hope that the army will retain control over the country's defence and foreign policies, especially toward Israel. Meanwhile, the more idealistic youth-led movements that initiated the early "pro-democracy" demonstrations that succeeded in ousting Zine Al Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt have in some cases, as in Yemen and Libya, been displaced or marginalised by less altruistic forces acting on behalf of narrower sectarian, tribal, or clan interests. Current efforts by the Saudi-dominated Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) to mediate the terms of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh's departure - to which Washington has also somewhat reluctantly deferred - could well end up with the replacement of one group of elites by another, with little or no prospect for a significant expansion of democratic freedoms or governance. CLIP
Karzai and Pakistan unite against U.S. but ‘honeymoon’ will be short-lived (April 20th, 2011) http://www.examiner.com/afghanistan-headlines-in-national/karzai-and-pakistan-unite-against-u-s-but-honeymoon-will-be-short-lived
It’s more than a coincidence that Al Qaeda’s reemergence in northeastern Afghanistan is occurring at the same time Pakistan’s relationship with the U.S. is collapsing, according to several tribal elders and a native Afghan policy expert, as Islamabad attempts to align more closely with Kabul to establish a united front against the American-led coalition. Haji Baydar Zazai, a tribal elder from Paktia province, said Pakistani officials are climbing in bed with Afghan President Hamid Karzai so they can achieve their security goals outside the watchful eye of the U.S. - objectives which include blocking India from having any influence in Kabul. Afghan native Khalil Nouri, a policy strategist with the New World Strategies Coalition (NWSC), indicated that although the U.S. has given Islamabad billions of dollars to eliminate militant sanctuaries Pakistan has been enraged by CIA drone strikes and CIA contractors killing civilians, which has prompted Islamabad to “unleash the dogs” in retaliation for the U.S. violating its national sovereignty on a daily basis. Irate Army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani has kicked over 300 U.S. clandestine and Special Forces personnel out of the country and is demanding an end to the CIA’s drone campaign. Meanwhile, Al Qaeda is expanding its network across Kunar and Nuristan in the wake of a U.S. drawdown from the region that began 18 months ago. Experts have said that, although Pakistan can help prevent it, increasing violence by militants has pressured Kabul to bow to Pakistani wishes. CLIP - Check also 65 "militants" killed in Afghan Logar province - Afghan army, backed by NATO-led occupation forces, killed 65 "militants" during a military operation in Baraki Barak district of Logar province, some 60 km south of capital city of Kabul, district chief said on Thursday. AND NATO occupation forces kill 17 militants in northeastern Afghanistan
Nigerian unrest kills more than 200: rights group (April 20, 2011) http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110420/wl_africa_afp/nigeriapoliticsunrest
KANO, Nigeria (AFP) – Post-poll unrest in Nigeria has killed more than 200 people, a rights group said Wednesday, as the Muslim opposition candidate who lost alleged rigging but said he did not instigate the riots.Aid workers rushed to help nearly 40,000 displaced, many of whom had taken refuge in military and police barracks, while victims being treated in hospitals spoke of being hacked with machetes and beaten with clubs.Authorities say many were killed in the violence, which saw corpses burnt beyond recognition and bodies reportedly thrown into wells, but have refused to give a toll, saying it could spark reprisals and would be inaccurate. A well-known Nigerian civil rights group based in the northern city of Kaduna put the toll at more than 200 across the north."In the whole region, from reports reaching Civil Rights Congress, the death toll is over 200," Shehu Sani, head of the organisation, told AFP. There were reports of fresh clashes in an area of the state of Kaduna overnight, with a community leader telling local radio "the killing was unbelievable and the destruction is colossal."
(...) Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation with 150 million people, is roughly divided in half between a mainly Muslim north and predominantly Christian south.The north has long been economically marginalised compared to the oil-rich south, fueling resentment and divisions that Saturday's elections helped expose. Authorities have however argued that the rioting was not based on religion or ethnicity but was instigated by those unhappy with the victory of incumbent Goodluck Jonathan, a southern Christian.Jonathan took over in May 2010 following the death of his predecessor Umaru Yar'Adua, a northern Muslim who had not finished his first term, prompting bitterness in the north over its loss of power.In the most intense rioting Monday, mobs roamed the streets with machetes and clubs, pulling people out of cars and setting homes on fire. Reprisal attacks worsened the situation.
(...) Despite the post-poll riots, observers have hailed the conduct of the vote as a major step forward for Africa's largest oil producer, which has a history of violent and flawed elections, while noting that serious problems remained.US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton congratulated Jonathan, saying the vote marked a "positive new beginning" for Nigeria, but cautioned that the process was "far from perfect."
Sudan: President concedes blame for genocide (21 April 2011) http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/sudan-president-concedes-blame-for-genocide-2270781.html
The President of Sudan has conceded full responsibility for the genocide in Darfur in which around 300,000 people died. In his first interview with the Western media, Omar Bashir said: "I am the President, so I am responsible about everything happening in the country." CLIP
Gunfire erupts in Ivory Coast city (20 Apr 2011) http://english.aljazeera.net/news/africa/2011/04/2011420135714403635.html
Gunfire has been reported in the northern suburbs of Abidjan, the commercial capital of Ivory Coast, as Alassane Ouattara, the Ivorian president, continues his attempt to re-establish security after weeks of violence. The shooting in the northern Yopougon neighbourhood on Wednesday was said to be part of an offensive by Ouattara forces against armed groups loyal to Laurent Gbagbo, the deposed president. "Since 4am local time we have been hearing heavy firing and loud explosions. We were forced to flee the neighbourhood very early," the AFP news agency quoted a Yopougon resident as saying."An FRCI soldier told us that they had come to dislodge pro-Gbagbo's Liberian militia who are still hiding in Yopougon," another resident said, using the acronym for Ouattara's forces. Ouattara emerged as the Ivorian leader after Gbagbo, who had refused to step down following the disputed election last year, was arrested on April 11 with the help UN and French forces.Since then, Ouattara's government has begun exerting its authority in the strife-torn west African country. (...) Hospitals in the city remained overwhelmed with the hundreds of people injured in the recent violence.
OTHER RECOMMENDED NEWS AND INFORMATION
Bilderberg Insider: Kissinger Pushing For US Ground Invasion Of Libya (April 22, 2011) http://www.prisonplanet.com/kissinger-calls-for-us-ground-invasion-of-libya.html
Globalists want protracted war to last through 2012 -- Despite the fact that the United States is embroiled in three major conflicts and can barely service its own gigantic debt, with Standard and Poor this week indicating the US will soon lose its triple-A credit rating, top globalist and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger recently told fellow elitists at three different globalist confabs that the US needs to launch a ground invasion of Libya and keep the war running for at least another year. According to veteran Bilderberg journalist Jim Tucker, whose sources have proven routinely accurate in leaking discussion topics shared by globalists at their regular meetings, Kissinger gave almost the exact same speech at three different conferences over the past two weeks, firstly during an April 8-10 get-together at the George Washington University’s Elliot School of International Affairs, then at an Aspen Institute session on “Values and Diplomacy” at the National Cathedral, and finally during the Bretton Woods II conference in New Hampshire.“Kissinger, visibly depressed, gave a rationale for the war on Libya that the TC (Trilateral Commission) and its brother group, Bilderberg, want to keep rolling, according to an inside source who has proved reliable for years. Both groups want the war extended through 2012 to generate turmoil throughout the Middle East and pressure the United States into attacking Iran on behalf of Israel. Which would also produce huge war profits,” writes Tucker.With President Obama keen to oversee more “mission creep” in Libya, by sending unmanned drones to intensify the air bombardment, Kissinger made it clear that the ultimate intention was to do what Obama specifically promised would never happen, a US ground invasion.
(...) In addition, Kissinger was keen to voice his displeasure at the fact that certain media publications, which the globalists normally rely on to keep such information under wraps, had leaked the news that Al-Qaeda terrorists were playing a key role in helping the Libyan rebels and NATO fight Gaddafi. This information “being forced into the national press makes it more difficult” to sell the invasion of Libya, Kissinger said, according to Tucker’s source.The endgame of the war in Libya is to further isolate Iran in preparation for a US-led attack carried out in the name of protecting Israel. Kissinger was keen to make the connection between Libya and Iran in his speeches, claiming that Gaddafi’s conduct “may tempt the Iranian regime to speed its development of a nuclear weapon. Rogue states have to remain convinced of our determination to resist nuclear proliferation.” In addition to developments in Libya, Jim Tucker appeared on The Alex Jones Show today to divulge the fact that Kissinger and his fellow elitists were determined to run the price of gas up at $7 dollars a gallon by the end of 2012 via a combination of soaring oil prices and a crumbling US dollar. To ensure Americans have their living standards lowered as part of Bilderberg’s planned “post-industrial revolution,” the middle east needs to be kept in a permanent state of flux, causing energy costs to remain unstable. Expanding the conflict in Libya will undoubtedly be a central focus of the upcoming Bilderberg meeting which is set to take place in the resort city of St. Moritz, southeastern Switzerland, from June 9-12. Although the exact location of the conference has yet to be pinned down, it’s widely expected that the luxurious 5-star Grand Hotel Kempinski will be the site of what promises to be one of the most important Bilderberg meetings in recent years. CLIP
The New Corporate World Order By Robert Scheer (April 20, 2011) http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_new_corporate_world_order_20110419/
The debate over Republicans’ insistence on continued tax breaks for the superrich and the corporations they run should come to a screeching halt with the report in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal headlined “Big U.S. Firms Shift Hiring Abroad.” Those tax breaks over the past decade, leaving some corporations such as General Electric to pay no taxes at all, were supposed to lead to job creation, but just the opposite has occurred. As the WSJ put it, the multinational companies “cut their work forces in the U.S. by 2.9 million during the 2000s while increasing employment overseas by 2.4 million, new data from the U.S. Commerce Department show.”General Electric, which was bailed out by taxpayers and which stored so much of its profit abroad that it paid no taxes for the past two years, was forced to tighten up, but while cutting its foreign workforce by 1,000 it cut a far more severe 28,000 in the United States. Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of GE, recently appointed by President Barack Obama as his chief outside economic adviser, admits that this does not involve poorly paid work that Americans don’t want, but instead prime jobs: “We’ve globalized around markets, not cheap labor. The era of globalization around cheap labor is over. Today we go to China, we go to India, because that’s where the customers are.”There is a bitter irony in that statement given that consumer purchasing power is down in the U.S. thanks to the devastating collapse of a housing bubble GE Capital fed with suspect mortgage financing that provided the company with well over half of its profits before the crash. The loss of well-paying jobs at multinationals like GE to other nations—54 percent of the GE workforce is foreign—exacerbates the plight of U.S. consumers while making the foreign customers even more attractive. (...) It is time to admit that we are, in practice if not surface appearance, close to the Chinese communist model of state-sponsored capitalism that sacrifices the interests of ordinary workers, be they in the public or private sector, for the exorbitant profits of the superrich. It is the corporations that need big government to protect their interests, and one would hope they would be willing to pay for the services that their government so faithfully renders to make them obscenely wealthy as it studiously ignores the well-being of the rest of us.
Singing DNC Donors Disrupt Obama At Their Own Fundraiser, Relay Anger Over Bradley Manning (04/21/11) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/21/singing-dnc-donors-disrupt-obama-speech_n_852135.html
WASHINGTON -- Attendees at a high-ticket fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee on Thursday burst into song in the middle of a speech by President Barack Obama, protesting the government's treatment of alleged Wikileaks whistleblower Bradley Manning.Obama was delivering remarks at San Francisco's St. Regis Hotel to a crowd of about 200 donors—some of whom paid $35,800 each to attend—when a woman in a white suit stood up and said, “Mr. President, we wrote you a song,” according to White House pool reports.The president tried to get her to wait, but the woman persisted and “the table of 10 broke into a song that pointed out they'd just spent $5,000 donating to his campaign and went on to protest the treatment of Pfc. Bradley Manning,” the pool report states. (Scroll down for video.) CLIP
Kucinich Responds to Defense Department Moving Pfc. Bradley Manning to a Maximum Security Prison at Fort Leavenworth (April 19, 2011) http://kucinich.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=237796
Demands Written Assurances of Protection of Rights and of Person -- Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today issued the following statement in response to a report by the Associated Press that the Department of Defense will move Private First Class Bradley Manning from Marine Corp Base Quantico to the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, a maximum security prison. "Absolutely nothing the Department of Defense has done so far with respect to Pfc. Manning provides any assurance that his basic human and constitutional rights are being protected. The Department of Defense has refused to provide timely answers to even the most basic questions and have thus far refused to allow me to meet with him."Any move of Pfc. Manning does not change the underlying fact, which has not been disputed by the Department of Defense, that he has been held under conditions which may in fact constitute 'cruel and unusual punishment' in violation of the 8th amendment."I will demand assurances in writing from the highest levels of the Department of Defense that moving Pfc. Manning will ensure his rights are better protected than they were when he was at Marine Corp Base Quantico and he will be kept safe under all circumstances."I will continue my demands that the Department of Defense grant my legitimate request to meet with Pfc. Bradley Manning to fulfill my oversight responsibilities as a member of Congress and a member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The American people demand accountability," said Kucinich. - Check also Kucinich Describes "Kafkaesque" Experience with DoD Over Manning
Afghanistan War Powers Resolution (Statement by Dennis Kucinich) http://kucinich.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=233618
Washington, Mar 17 - In the next 2 hours, we are going to demonstrate that the American people oppose this war by a margin of two to one. I will enter into the Record this Washington Post poll that was published on March 15 which says that nearly two-thirds of Americans say the war isn't worth fighting. In the next 2 hours, we are going to demonstrate that we are spending $100 billion per year on this war. There are those who are saying the war could last at least another 10 years. Are we willing to spend another $1 trillion on a war that doesn't have any exit plan, for which there is no timeframe to get out, no endgame, where we haven't defined our mission? The question is not whether we can afford to leave. The question is, can we afford to stay? And I submit we cannot afford to stay. In the next 2 hours, we are going to demonstrate that the counterintelligence strategy of General Petraeus is an abysmal failure, and it needs to be called as such. So I want to conclude this part of my presentation with an article by Thomas Friedman in The New York Times, which says, "What are we doing spending $110 billion this year supporting corrupt and unpopular regimes in Afghanistan and Pakistan that are almost identical to the governments we are applauding the Arab people for overthrowing?"
(...) The people--from Tunisia to Yemen--have come up with their own answer to violent extremism and the abusive regimes we've been propping up. It's called democracy. They have a long way to go to lock it in. It may yet be hijacked by religious forces. But, for now, it is clear that the majority wants to build a future in the 21st century, not the seventh. In other words, the Arab peoples have done for free, on their own and for their own reasons, everything that we were paying their regimes to do in the "war on terrorism" but they never did. And that brings me back to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Last October, Transparency International rated the regime of President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan as the second most corrupt in the world after Somalia's. That is the Afghan regime we will spend more than $110 billion in 2011 to support. And tell me that Pakistan's intelligence service, ISI, which dominates Pakistani politics, isn't the twin of Hosni Mubarak's security service. Pakistan's military leaders play the same game Mubarak played with us for years. First, they whisper in our ears: "Psst, without us, the radical Islamists will rule. So we may not be perfect, but we're the only thing standing in the way of the devil." In reality, though, they are nurturing the devil. The ISI is long alleged to have been fostering anti-Indian radical Muslim groups and masterminding the Afghan Taliban. Apart from radical Islam, the other pretext the Pakistani military uses for its inordinate grip on power is the external enemy. Just as Arab regimes used the conflict with Israel for years to keep their people distracted and to justify huge military budgets, Pakistan's ISI tells itself, the Pakistani people and us that it can't stop sponsoring proxies in Afghanistan because of the "threat" from India. Here's a secret: India is not going to invade Pakistan. It is an utterly bogus argument. India wants to focus on its own development, not owning Pakistan's problems. India has the second-largest Muslim population on the planet, more even than Pakistan. And while Indian Muslims are not without their economic and political grievances, they are, on the whole, integrated into India's democracy because it is a democracy. There are no Indian Muslims in Guantanamo Bay.
Finally, you did not need to dig very far in Egypt or Jordan to hear that one reason for the rebellion in Egypt and protests in Jordan was the in-your-face corruption and crony capitalism that everyone in the public knew about. That same kind of pillaging of assets--natural resources, development aid, the meager savings of a million Kabul Bank depositors and crony contracts--has fueled a similar anger against the regime in Afghanistan and undermined our nation-building efforts there. The truth is we can't do much to consolidate the democracy movements in Egypt and Tunisia. They'll have to make it work themselves. But we could do what we can, which is divert some of the $110 billion we're lavishing on the Afghan regime and the Pakistani Army and use it for debt relief, schools and scholarships to U.S. universities for young Egyptians and Tunisians who had the courage to take down the very kind of regimes we're still holding up in Kabul and Islamabad. I know we can't just walk out of Afghanistan and Pakistan; there are good people, too, in both places. But our involvement in these two countries--150,000 troops to confront Al Qaeda--is totally out of proportion today with our interests and out of all sync with our values.
Dennis Kucinich is talking out of his...hand (Yeah... but this was a comedy show!!) http://www.wlsam.com/Article.asp?id=2163021
CHICAGO (WLS) - The Democrat who has called for the impeachment of President George W. Bush and, more recently, President Barack Obama, isn't lending much credence to his cause. Kucinich appeared on Thursday's "The Daily Show," where the 64-year-old congressman showed off some skills he likely rarely gets to use in Washington, ventriloquism. Kucinich and his puppet sang a rousing rendition of 'God Bless America' prompting correspondent John Oliver to ask, "How do you keep winning elections?" Via his puppet, Kucinich responded, "You're going to have to ask Dennis."
War Against Libya Constitutionally Illegal; Obama Now Impeachable (March 27, 2011) http://blogcritics.org/politics/article/war-against-libya-constitutionally-illegal-obama1/
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has just inadvertently made the case for President Obama's impeachment. On ABC's This Week, Jake Tapper asked Gates, "Do you think Libya posed an actual or imminent threat to the United States?" Gates responded, "No, no. It was not, it was not a vital national interest to the United States." Now let us recall what Obama said back in 2007, when he was running for president: "The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation." Obama's words in 2007 and his actions in 2011 seem rather contradictory, don't they? And in fact, noted constitutional scholar Barack Obama was correct back in 2007. The War Powers Resolution of 1973 states that the president can only send the armed forces into military action abroad when the Congress has authorized it or if the United States is under attack, or at serious threat of attack. Libya was not attacking us, and was not threatening to attack us. The Congress has not declared war on Libya, nor authorized military action against Libya. Therefore, this is an illegal and unconstitutional war. Violating the Constitution by launching an illegal war surely rises to the level of "high crimes and misdemeanors," which is an impeachable offense. Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul are right. This isn't a Republican issue or a Democrat issue. It isn't a conservative issue or a liberal issue. This is a constitutional issue. Impeach Obama. A final thought: It would be nice to see all those principled anti-war protesters demonstrating against an illegal war launched against an oil-rich Muslim country. Has anyone seen them lately? Maybe we should put them on the side of a milk carton, because they seem to be curiously missing.
First Person Account From Inside The China Protests (April 22, 2011) http://www.prisonplanet.com/first-person-account-from-inside-the-china-protests.html
Over the past two days we reported (here and here) on the Shanghai trucker protests over high has prices and low wages, which from peaceful promptly turned violent as more people joined the clashes against police (it appears only in America do people not protest these things). Today we present a first person recount of what is really happening in China, as unfortunately nothing coming out of the world’s “fastest growing” economy can be relied upon.The protests are very contained, as the gov is obviously powerful enough to stop it before it gets out of hand. My best friend was up in Beijing back in the beginning of March, though, and happened to be there on protest day and she said there were guards, policeman, military and they even brought a tank in! (like Tiananmen Square part II). She got out of Beijing asap as it was quite scary. I have yet to see a protest here in Shanghai, but that’s because they have military dressed up as street cleaners and such in proposed protest spots to keep things in order. There are rumors that the gov itself is organizing the protests to catch anyone who shows up (those who have, have been detained and the talk is that they are likely sentenced to death or life in prison). The gov has also heightened its lockdown on the internet, blocking even more sites and the interest is sooo slow sometimes from all the blocking activity.
(...) Striking truck drivers protested for a third day on Friday in Shanghai’s main harbor district amid heavy police presence and signs the action has already started to curb exports from the world’s busiest container port.The strike is a very public demonstration of anger over rising consumer prices and fuel price increases in China.It comes as the government struggles to contain higher inflation, which hit 5.4 percent in March, fearful that rising prices could fuel protests like those that have rocked the Middle East. CLIP
9/11 Responders To Be Warned They Will Be Screened By FBI's Terrorism Watch List (04/21/11) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/21/911-responders-screened-for-terror-ties_n_852198.html
WASHINGTON -- A provision in the new 9/11 health bill may be adding insult to injury for people who fell sick after their service in the aftermath of the 2001 Al Qaeda attacks, The Huffington Post has learned.The tens of thousands of cops, firefighters, construction workers and others who survived the worst terrorist assault in U.S. history and risked their lives in its wake will soon be informed that their names must be run through the FBI’s terrorism watch list, according to a letter obtained by HuffPost. Any of the responders who are not compared to the database of suspected terrorists would be barred from getting treatment for the numerous, worsening ailments that the James Zadroga 9/11 Health And Compensation Law was passed to address.It’s a requirement that was tacked onto the law during the bitter debates over it last year. The letter from Dr. John Howard, director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, informs medical providers and administrators that they should begin letting patients know before the new program kicks in this July. “This is absurd,” said Glen Kline, a former NYPD emergency services officer. “It’s silly. It’s stupid. It’s asinine.” “It’s comical at best, and I think it’s an insult to everyone who worked on The Pile and is sick and suffering from 9/11,” said John Feal, a former construction worker who lost half a foot at Ground Zero and runs the advocacy group Fealgood Foundation.
US default could be disastrous choice for economy (April 23, 20110 http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jirYFVwn0fcyqiz-3xpL9N3TZL0w?docId=4d28a118fd5146c190bbef2e2c4b9ab3
WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States has never defaulted on its debt and Democrats and Republicans say they don't want it to happen now. But with partisan acrimony running at fever pitch, and Democrats and Republicans so far apart on how to tame the deficit, the unthinkable is suddenly being pondered.The government now borrows about 42 cents of every dollar it spends. Imagine that one day soon, the borrowing slams up against the current debt limit ceiling of $14.3 trillion and Congress fails to raise it. The damage would ripple across the entire economy, eventually affecting nearly every American, and rocking global markets in the process.A default would come if the government actually failed to fulfill a financial obligation, including repaying a loan or interest on that loan. (...) A default would likely trigger another financial panic like the one in 2008 and plunge an economy still reeling from high joblessness and a battered housing market back into recession. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke calls failure to raise the debt limit "a recovery-ending event." U.S. stock markets would likely tank — devastating roughly half of U.S. households that own stocks, either individually or through 401(k) type retirement programs.Eventually, the cost of most credit would rise — from business and consumer loans to home mortgages, auto financing and credit cards.Continued stalemate could also further depress the value of the dollar and challenge the greenback's status as the world's prime "reserve currency."China and other countries that now hold about 50 percent of all U.S. Treasury securities could start dumping them, further pushing up interest rates and swelling the national debt. It would be a vicious cycle of higher and higher interest rates and more and more debt. CLIP
The scam behind the rise in oil, food prices (19 April 2011) http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/04/2011415143212280315.html
Speculation on the futures market, rather than supply and demand, is driving up costs, analysts say. -- The global economy and its recovery, and the living standards of millions of plain folks, are now at risk from the sudden rise in oil and commodity prices.Gas at the pump is up, and going higher. Food prices are following. The consequences are catastrophic for the global poor as their costs go up while their income doesn't. It's menacing American workers too, who in large part have not seen a meaningful raise since the days of Reagan (keeping it this way is clearly behind the current flurry of attacks on unions).Already, unrest in the Middle East and many African countries is being blamed for these dramatic increases. It seems as if this threat to global stability is being largely ignored in our media, one that treats the oil business as just another mystical world of free market trading. Why is it happening? Why all the volatility? Is oil getting scarcer, leading to price increases? Is the cost of food, similarly, a reflection of naturally increasing commodity prices? While it's true that natural disasters and droughts play some role in this unchecked price inflation, it also seems apparent that something else is attracting increasing attention, even if most of our media fails to explore what is a political time bomb, while most political leaders shrug their shoulder and ignore it. President Obama recently said there is nothing he can do about the hike in oil and food prices. Critics say the problem is that government and media outlets alike refuse to recognise what's really going on: unchecked speculation! CLIP
20 Signs That A Horrific Global Food Crisis Is Coming (April 15th, 2011) http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/20-signs-that-a-horrific-global-food-crisis-is-coming
In case you haven't noticed, the world is on the verge of a horrific global food crisis. At some point, this crisis will affect you and your family. It may not be today, and it may not be tomorrow, but it is going to happen. Crazy weather and horrifying natural disasters have played havoc with agricultural production in many areas of the globe over the past couple of years. Meanwhile, the price of oil has begun to skyrocket. The entire global economy is predicated on the ability to use massive amounts of inexpensive oil to cheaply produce food and other goods and transport them over vast distances. Without cheap oil the whole game changes. Topsoil is being depleted at a staggering rate and key aquifers all over the world are being drained at an alarming pace. Global food prices are already at an all-time high and they continue to move up aggressively. So what is going to happen to our world when hundreds of millions more people cannot afford to feed themselves?Most Americans are so accustomed to supermarkets that are absolutely packed to the gills with massive amounts of really inexpensive food that they cannot even imagine that life could be any other way. Unfortunately, that era is ending. There are all kinds of indications that we are now entering a time when there will not be nearly enough food for everyone in the world. As competition for food supplies increases, food prices are going to go up. In fact, at some point they are going to go way up. Let's look at some of the key reasons why an increasing number of people believe that a massive food crisis is on the horizon. The following are 20 signs that a horrific global food crisis is coming.... CLIP
Coming Soon From the Air Force: Mind-Reading Drones (April 19, 2011) http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/04/coming-soon-from-the-air-force-mind-reading-drones/
Scientifically speaking, it's only a matter of time before drones become self-aware and kill us all. Now the Air Force is hastening that day of reckoning. Buried within a seemingly innocuous list of recent Air Force contract awards to small businesses are details of plans for robot planes that not only think, but anticipate the moves of human pilots. And you thought it was just the Navy that was bringing us to the brink of the drone apocalypse. It all starts with a solution for a legitimate problem. It's dangerous to fly and land drones at busy terminals. Manned airplanes can collide with drones, which may not be able to make quick course adjustments based on information from air traffic control as swiftly as a human pilot can. And getting air traffic control involved in the drones cuts against the desire for truly autonomous aircraft. What to do? The answer: Design an algorithm that reads people's minds. Or the next best thing - anticipates a pilot's reaction to a drone flying too close. CLIP
Wild April Weather to be Followed by Wicked May (April 20, 2011) http://www.accuweather.com/blogs/news/story/48539/wild-april-to-be-followed-by-w.asp
Severe weather experts at AccuWeather.com are forecasting the intense weather outbreaks in the U.S. to continue beyond April into much of May. According to Severe Weather Expert Meteorologist Henry Margusity, "We see no let-up in the weather pattern that has led to the outbreaks this month." A pronounced temperature contrast often produces strong storm systems. May is notorious for severe weather and tornadoes in its own right as warmth builds from the strengthening sun, while the upper atmosphere and the low-level air over the northern latitudes remain chilly. The jet stream tends to hover close to the temperature contrast. We cannot say that there is a direct correlation between La Nina and a particular outbreak. However, the ocean water temperature anomaly in the Pacific tends to lead to a strong polar jet stream. While a strong jet stream is a common occurrence in the spring, the presence of a strong, ongoing La Nina has that strong jet stream on steroids. A strong jet stream is a key contributor to severe weather and tornado outbreaks. While the ongoing La Nina may weaken slightly in the coming months, it is still rather strong at present. It could continue to fuel, in an indirect way, frequent strong storm systems and the severe thunderstorms they often breed. CLIP
Study: Petroleum may be abiogenic, not fossil-based (April 20, 2011) http://www.helium.com/items/2141881-petroleum-may-be-abiogenic-not-fossil-based
In another blow to the theory that petroleum is a fossil fuel, a new study reveals evidence that oil is created abiotically by geological processes. During the 16th Century, Russian Georg Agricola developed the theory of abiogenic petroleum. Later, other theories that supported the abiogenic hypothesis explaining the origin of oil were popularized by such luminaries as Alexander von Humboldt, the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev and eminent French chemist, Marcellin Berthelot. After deep exploratory drilling struck oil where no fossilized oil should have existed, Russian and Ukrainian geologists resurrected the theory of abiogenic oil to account for its presence. Their work was carried forward by researcher Thomas Gold in the latter half of the 20th century. If the theory of abiogenic petroleum is true it means that the geological processes of the Earth itself produce oil and that the resource is virtually limitless and no oil shortage can exist—the world will never be able to run out of oil.Believers in the abiogenic theory think oil is formed from carbon deposits deep in the mantle of the Earth. That oil seeps up into the crust where oil drillers can reach it. CLIP
Sick fish suggest oil spill still affecting gulf (April 15, 2011) http://www.tampabay.com/news/environment/wildlife/sick-fish-suggest-oil-spill-still-affecting-gulf/1164042
A year after the oil spill, gulf snapper have awful lesions. Is it coincidence? A year after the Deepwater Horizon disaster spewed oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the Florida beaches are relatively clean, the surf seems clear and the tourists are returning. But there are signs that the disaster is continuing to affect marine life in the gulf far from where humans can observe it.Over the winter, anglers who had been working the gulf for decades began hauling in red snapper that didn't look like anything they had seen before. The fish had dark lesions on their skin, some the size of a 50-cent piece. On some of them, the lesions had eaten a hole straight through to the muscle tissue. Many had fins that were rotting away and discolored or even striped skin. Inside, they had enlarged livers, gallbladders, and bile ducts."The fish have a bacterial infection and a parasite infection that's consistent with a compromised immune system," said Jim Cowan, an oceanographer at Louisiana State University, who has been examining them. "There's no doubt it's associated with a chronic exposure to a toxin." He believes the toxin in question is oil, given where and when the fish were caught, their symptoms, and the similarity to other incidents involving oil spills. But he is awaiting toxicology tests to be certain. Cowan said he hasn't seen anything like these fish in 25 years of studying the gulf, which persuades him that "it would be a pretty big coincidence if it wasn't associated with the oil spill." CLIP
Protected areas cover 44% of the Brazilian Amazon (April 20, 2011) http://news.mongabay.com/2011/0420-protected_amazon.html
Protected areas now cover nearly 44 percent of the Amazon — an area larger than Greenland — but suffer from encroachment and poor management, reports a new study by Imazon and the Instituto Socioambiental (ISA). The report, published in Portuguese, says that by December 2010, protected areas in the Brazilian Amazon amounted to 2,197,485 square kilometers. Conservation units like national parks accounted for just over half the area (50.6 percent), while indigenous territories represented 49.4 percent But while the extent of protected zones on paper is substantial, the report found significant human impacts in many areas. Between 1998 and 2009 12,204 square kilometers of forest within these areas was cleared. Damage was heaviest in designated "sustainable use" reserves. The report faulted poor management as a contributing factor in degradation of protected areas. Half of protected areas in the Brazilian Amazon have no approved management plan and 45 percent has no management council. Staffing in some protected areas is very low — the state of Pará has only one officer per 1,817 square kilometers of forest. The report cites illegal logging and mining as threats to protected areas. It notes that 1,338 mining titles have been granted in protected areas, while 10,348 are awaiting approval. The report comes as Brazil has been experiencing a decline in deforestation. Annual clearing is down more than 75 percent since 2004. CLIP
NASA image reveals extent of 2010 Amazon drought (April 17, 2011) http://news.mongabay.com/2011/0417-hance_nasa_drought.html
NASA has revealed a satellite image of the crippling effect of last year's record-breaking drought on the Amazon ecosystem. For those of you counting, that's two record droughts in the Amazon Basin in 5 years. The 2010 drought appears more extreme then the drought of 2005 according to recent research, including satellite imagery. A new study in Geophysical Research Letters, found nearly a million square miles (2.5 million square kilometers) saw reduced greenness in 2010. This is more than four times the area impacted by the 2005. Adding in signs of drought stress the total impact of the 2010 drought spreads over 1.68 million square miles (4.35 million square kilometers). Scientists are concerned that increasing droughts could turn the Amazon rainforest from a vast carbon sink into a carbon source, emitting excessive carbon due to increased wood rot during drought conditions. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) has argued, and top tropical scientists have concurred, that climate change in combination with deforestation and fire could 'flip' around 40% of the Amazon from tropical rainforest to savannah.
Major paper company clear-cutting key tiger habitat (April 19, 2011) http://news.mongabay.com/2011/0419-april_rapp.html
A pulp supplier for a major paper company is clearing natural forest in a wildlife corridor in central Sumatra, alleges a new investigation conducted by Eyes on the Forest, a coalition of environmental groups. The report says that PT Riau Andalan Pulp and Paper (RAPP), a major timber supplier of Asian Pacific Resources International Holdings Limited (APRIL), last year cleared protected forest in the Indonesian province of Riau. While the company secured a permit to log the land in 2010 — a year prior to when Indonesia's forest moratorium was set to go into effect — Eyes on the Forest says the clear-cutting breaks APRIL's 2005 pledge to not destroy high conservation value forest. It notes that the area is one of "few" tiger conservation in Indonesia.
(...) The pulp and paper industry has taken a heavy toll on Sumatra's rainforests, which disappeared at the highest rate of any island in Indonesia over the past decade. Eyes on the Forest estimates that wood-pulp plantations now occupy more than a million ha of former forest and peatland in Sumatra. "Sumatra's 'Mega Pulp Project' is a climate disaster far worse than the ex Mega Rice Project," stated a report released by Eyes on the Forest last November, referring to the 900,000-hectare project in Central Kalimantan during the 1990s. APRIL uses wood-pulp to manufacture paper products — like PaperOne — sold abroad. APRIL recently said it will spend $4.6 billion to expand its pulp and paper operations in China.
Scientists urge Papua New Guinea to declare moratorium on massive forest clearing (April 19, 2011) http://news.mongabay.com/2011/0419-hance_atbc_sabls.html
Forests spanning an area larger than Costa Rica—5.6 million hectares (13.8 million acres)—have been handed out by the Papua New Guinea government to foreign corporations, largely for logging. Granted under government agreements known as Special Agricultural and Business Leases (SABLs), the land leases circumvent the nation's strong laws pertaining to communal land ownership. Now, the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC), the world's largest professional society devoted to studying and conserving tropical forests, is urging the Papua New Guinea government to declare a moratorium on SABLs. "SABLs, which were originally intended to promote local agricultural development, have been used on a large scale in [Papua New Guinea] to circumvent forestry reforms by granting protracted (often 99-year) land leases, mostly to foreign or multinational corporations," the ATBC states in a resolution. SABLs have been granted without permission of the local community, and, in some cases, without even the community's knowledge, a direct violation of Papua New Guinea's communal land ownership.
(...) In its resolution, ATBC states it is not trying to undercut Papua New Guinea's "urgent goal" to reduce poverty in the country, but that such efforts must be wary of "predatory industrial exploitation of the country’s forests, lands and other natural resources, which far too often fail to yield fair or equitable benefits for the majority of [Papua New Guinea] citizens." Papua New Guinea to date had been thought to have avoided mass deforestation, thereby retaining one of the last great rainforests outside of the Congo and the Amazon. However, a 2009 study found that between 1972-2002, nearly a quarter of the country's forests were already lost or degraded by logging.
Alert on cancer chemical found in thousands of processed foods (22nd April 2011) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1379458/Acrylamide-cancer-chemical-processed-foods.html
A chemical which causes cancer has been found in a huge range of foods including bread, crisps and baby food. Scientists have identified high levels in thousands of cooked and processed products. The substance, acrylamide, has been linked to several types of cancer including bowel, bladder and kidney, and is known to cause infertility and loss of muscle control. Scientists have known since 2002 that the chemical exists in certain products and have urged the food industry to reduce levels. But a major study by the European Union has confirmed that there are still large amounts in a range of items including chips, instant coffee, bread, biscuits, crisps, breakfast cereals and baby food. Experts are now urging food producers to take stronger action, and are advising the public to cut down on processed food and eat as much fresh produce as possible. Scientists do not know exactly what causes acrylamide to form but they believe it occurs as a result of a chemical process during baking, frying, grilling or toasting.It appears to form when food is heated to above 120c. It is not found in uncooked or boiled food. It is also manufactured for industry and used to make asphalt, glue, dye, paper, fabric and cosmetics as well as to remove impurities in drinking water. CLIP
A New Way to Fight Cancer? (2007-01-23) http://www.newsweek.com/2007/02/22/a-new-way-to-fight-cancer.html
Scientists and patients are buzzing about DCA, an existing drug newly recognized as a potentially powerful cancer treatment. But, of course, more research is needed. -- There are no magic bullets in the fight against cancer: that's the first thing every responsible scientist mentions when discussing a possible new treatment, no matter how promising. If there were a magic bullet, though, it might be something like dichloroacetate, or DCA (Dichloroacetic acid), a drug that kills cancer cells by exploiting a fundamental weakness found in a wide range of solid tumors. So far, though, it kills them just in test tubes and in rats infected with human cancer cells; it has never been tested against cancer in living human beings. DCA ... is an existing drug whose side effects are well-studied and relatively tolerable. Also, it's a small molecule that might be able to cross the blood-brain barrier to reach otherwise intractable brain tumors. Within days after a technical paper on DCA appeared in the journal Cancer Cell last week, the lead author, Dr. Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta, was deluged with calls and e-mails from prospective patients—to whom he can say only, “Hang in there.” DCA is a remarkably simple molecule. It acts in the body to promote the activity of the mitochondria. Researchers have assumed that the mitochondria in cancer cells were irreparably damaged. But Michelakis wondered if that was really true. With his colleagues he used DCA to turn back on the mitochondria in cancer cells—which promptly died. One of the great things about DCA is that it's a simple compound, in the public domain, and could be produced for pennies a dose. But that's also a problem, because big drug companies are unlikely to spend a billion dollars or so on large-scale clinical trials for a compound they can't patent (read "make no money to recoup their investment"). CLIP - Find out more about this HERE and at http://www.thedcasite.com/ and watch this May 12, 2010 video: Generic drug may be potential treatment for deadly brain cancer: U of A medical study and check these Results of phase II clinical trials and see What you can do to help make DCA an accepted cancer treatment (with a video). Click to an online petition: U.S. version - Canadian version - You can get DCA from Medicor Cancer Centres – based in Toronto, ON Canada, but accepting patients from all over. You can read on their DCA (Dichloroacetate) Therapy - and their DCA Therapy FAQs which states that "The cost of DCA treatment at Medicor is about $160-$190 per week depending on body weight. (...) These are available over-the-counter at various pharmacies in Toronto. The cost of supplements is typically less than $75 per month." As we can read HERE "Typical doses are in the range of 20-25mg/kg/day for adults and 25-50mg/kg/day for children. For elderly patients or those with complicating factors, we may use less than 20mg/kg/day." and "106 patients (60%) showed a positive response to DCA."and "In 53 patients (29%), there was no response to DCA treatment. In these patients, the cancer progressed despite DCA treatment, including increased doses." and "a majority of patients and their families are highly satisfied and uplifted by DCA treatment. The main reason for this is likely the fact that DCA substantially changes the outlook of patients who are deemed “end stage palliative”." WHO WOULDN'T PAY $75 A MONTH TO TRY TO GET RID OF A CANCER WITH LITTLE RISKS OF SERIOUS SIDE-EFFECTS???
Nuclear Expert: Smart Meters 100x Radiation Exposure of a Cell Phone (April 21st, 2011) Video http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2011/04/21/18677723.php http://stopsmartmeters.org/2011/04/20/daniel-hirsch-on-ccsts-fuzzy-math/
Stop Smart Meters! caught up on Wednesday evening with Daniel Hirsch, a lecturer and expert in nuclear policy at UCSC who has been widely quoted in the media regarding recent events in Japan. Mr. Hirsch had just finished his talk at Stevenson College, UCSC about the crisis at Fukushima and what it means for the future of nuclear energy. Mr. Hirsch reviewed the report on smart meters and health requested by the state legislature and found some very disturbing anomalies.It appears that many of the distortions that industry has used to deflect concern about such non-ionizing wireless radiation are the same techniques that have been used for many years to downplay ionizing nuclear radiation. From Mr. Hirsch's calculations, smart meters expose residents to about 100x the microwave radiation of a cell phone- precisely opposite what the industry is claiming. Stop Smart Meters! "A large involuntary experiment on a very large population..." Watch this video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6-hcOr-sxA
Compteurs électroniques: Hydro aurait choisi une firme étrangère (21 avril 2011) http://lapresseaffaires.cyberpresse.ca/economie/quebec/201104/21/01-4392254-compteurs-electroniques-hydro-aurait-choisi-une-firme-etrangere.php
L'opposition accuse Hydro-Québec d'abandonner sa mission de développement économique en s'apprêtant à accorder un contrat de 300 millions de dollars à une entreprise étrangère pour des nouveaux compteurs. Deux entreprises québécoises, Trilliant Networks et Varitron Technologies, étaient en lice et elles auraient été rejetées. C'est la société suisse Landis+Gyr qui aurait été retenue pour fabriquer 3,7 millions de compteurs intelligents en remplacement des compteurs actuels, qui arrivent au terme de leur durée de vie. Hydro-Québec a toutefois refusé de confirmer ces renseignements. Le Parti québécois et l'Action démocratique ont tous deux dénoncé ce choix à la période de questions en Chambre jeudi. Les deux entreprises québécoises promettaient de créer des centaines d'emplois au Québec, mais Hydro «a décidé de les écarter et de donner le contrat à une compagnie étrangère qui va fabriquer ces compteurs au Mexique», a dénoncé le député adéquiste François Bonnardel. Il accuse la ministre d'avoir autorisé Hydro à ficeler un contrat sans exiger de contenu québécois. CLIP - Note de Jean: Imaginez le buzz du smog électromagnétique additionnel dans les villes et les campagnes avec tous ces nouveaux émetteurs Wi-Fi surpuissants émettant 24/7/365. De quoi avoir un mal de tête carabiné et de graves insomnies... et pire encore pour le nombre grandissant de personnes devenues hypersensibles (comme une réaction allergique) au smog électromagnétique ambiant. Aller de l'avant avec ce projet dément, alors que l'opposition populaire gronde en Californie et ailleurs dans le monde contre ces compteurs pas brillants du tout, est sans doute la plus stupide décision d'Hydro... Enfin on peut me contester sur ce point, il y en a tant! Et pendant que nos élu-e-s, toujours aussi peu informées que d'habitude à ce sujet, se contentent de dénoncer le fait que ce contrat ne créera pas d'emplois au Québec, personne sur la place publique ne révèle ni ne dénonce le risque insensé que ces millions d'émetteurs Wi-fi feront courir à toute la population, ainsi que l'absurdité terminale de l'idée même de se débarrasser de nos bons vieux compteurs analogiques.
EMF-Omega-News 23. April 2011 http://www.buergerwelle.de/cms/content/view/577/95/
The Electromagnetic Spectrum in Low Intensity Conflict - Is using a cellphone as risky as smoking tobacco? - Personality changes caused by mobile telecommunications - The only possible treatment today is no exposure - An appeal to the WHO for the recognition of the environmental illnesses MCS and EHS - Wireless Radiation Safety Council (WRSC) Press Conference Materials - How pulsed radiofrequency radiation affects the health of mice, rats, and bees - Girl, 11, defeats phone giants in mast battle - Nuclear Expert: Smart Meters 100x Radiation Exposure of a Cell Phone - City resolution opposes SmartMeters - Telus Cell Tower Unwelcome Neighbour, Seizing the Commons - No mobile phone mast after residents' protests - Mobile phone masts 'could harm county' - Families blame transformers for ills - Anger at news phone mast petition may be ignored - Deeside community reacts angrily to phone mast in Shotton - Anger over phone mast planned for Castletree Way - Bid for mobile phone mast in High Street 'beggars belief' - TCRA rejects towers radiation claims - Mast still standing despite order - Fylde Road families protest against phone mast - Hidden iPhone File Tracks Users' Every Move - Next-up News - News from Mast Sanity
Just a thought. The Center for 9/11 Justice will find it impossible to win the lawsuit for April Gallop. Believe me, I don't want to be negative about her chances of winning but there are certain facts involved with my opinion. If this case ever got to the Supreme Court, she would lose because former President Ronald Reagan appointed a couple of Supreme Court Justices. So did former President George H. W. Bush, as well as his son, former President George W. Bush. The US Supreme Court is stacked with justices that are just as evil as the Bushes, Cheney's, Rumsfelds, etc. I think a lot of money will be wasted on behalf of April Gallop, as well as the frustration for her to get any kind of justice for her and her child.
From day one, I knew the Bush cartel was behind 9/11 and I have not changed my mind since that day. They planned it and made it happen. They are a bunch of murderers. You have no idea how upsetting it is for me to see how so many Americans revere the Bush family. Makes me want to throw-up!
I feel for April, her child and the many people that were murdered by these people. If it is any consolation for her and for the families that lost their loved ones in 9/11, they won't win. Of this I am sure. The truth will come out about all of them and once the LIGHT has shone on them, they will not be able to crawl back into the shadows to do any more harm. I truly believe everything that has happened was necessary for people to wake up and SEE what has been going on. Once enough of them do, they will put a stop to this evilness so love and compassion can prevail.
Blessings,
Sandra
AND MY REPLY WAS:
Dear Sandra
Thanks you VERY much for your comment on this. I appreciate it greatly both because I think you are right and also because you are the ONLY one who sent me a comment on this. In fact, 99% of all the issues and information I care to compile and network NEVER elicit a single comment from any of the VERY SILENT majority of subscribers on this list. And THAT is symptomatic of the main reason why the dark ones have been able to get away so far with all their nefarious activities... the millions of souls killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and in all the other unprovoked military aggressions carried by the Illuminati/Cabal controlling the Western governments, the egregious destruction of the environment carried by the corporate titans dominating this planet, and so many other crimes against humanity and this tortured planet that have been made possible mainly because MOST people chose to remain silent; vote with their pocket book through buying the stuff produced through the abuse of our bleeding planet and the exploitation of slave labor working for a pitiful pittance; elect those whose sole mission is to defend the interest of the ultra-wealthy; and prefer to never question the propaganda spewed by the oligarchic media programming and conditioning the public for the sole benefit of their corporate owners.
I know that many people on this list studiously read most of what I network and greatly appreciate being thus informed. Many certainly sign the petitions recommended as I do and pass on some of this material to others, hoping this way, like me, to stir other people into action. That's what most of us do from time to time because it is easy and does not require too much time. But is it enough? Probably not... Even if shaking the tree as I'm now doing may bring me more work in the form of more emails to read and reply to and compile, etc — but, based on past experience I'm not holding my breathe over this, believe me! — I would love to sense that this networking process is leading to some aha moments and some priority changes in those who are at the receiving end of it all. I know we are all very busy and on overwhelm - I certainly am. But when I think about the billions of people who are suffering under dire circumstances because of the unjust system that benefit the privileged few on this planet - and we can certainly all count ourselves among this privileged minority, and when I consider the dark future our collective complacency towards the deteriorating state of this planet is presently breeding, I cannot help but think we ought to be more active, not necessarily through feverishly doing all kinds of things moved by a sense of desperation, which would be only marginally helpful, but through acting as guided, moment to moment, from our divine Self so as to fully incarnate the vast potential for goodness, kindness and compassion we CAN manifest when we let ourselves go with the Flow of Divine Volition in us and stop resisting Its calls for a greater affirmation and manifestation of Who We Are.
Love and blessings to you
Jean
TO WHICH SANDRA REPLIED:
Hello Jean,
It was wonderful receiving your email and response to mine. I fully understand where you are coming from, working so hard and long doing your best to alert your readers to that is really going on in our world and how we are all being duped by the wealthy elite. Believe me, I am very sure ALL of your readers are truly grateful for all your hard work and dedication.
In response to your comment about people being silent, when they should be speaking up, it is my belief they are probably digesting and assimilating the information they are getting from your newsletters. I am also aware that many are also very afraid of repercussions, should they speak out, which is what I experienced recently.
I am sure you are aware of the protest that has been going on in Wisconsin over the union-busting tactics of the Republicans that took power there. Teachers, police, firemen and union factory workers all protested their state government crackdown on their right to protect their wages and work conditions that their unions protect. As a result, they are now targeting their 5th Republican state employee to recall their election to their government position. They are, so far, very successfully ousting these evil government representatives that had previously been elected to office.
That protest in Wisconsin has spread to other states. When we had that protest, here in New Jersey, I went to join that action to support these people, even though I have never been a union member. During the protest, a State Trooper (our State elite police force) came out to our crowd and wanted to know who was the responsible person for the protest. Do you know not one teacher, policeman, fireman or any other union member stepped up to give their name, address and phone number. I have to admit, I was a just a bit stunned that here they were protesting but being part of a crowd, they felt safe in their anonymity. But asking any of them to step up to the plate of identity, none would. I found out why right after I offered my name, address and phone number to the State Trooper. A few of the people that were around me thanked me for doing the honors, with one saying he didn't want to risk losing his job and another said she was a retired teacher and didn't want to risk losing her pension and health benefits out of retaliation for attending that protest. Fear, which the evil ones use against us, is how they control us.
I don't know if you are a religious person and I don't need to know. I can say I am not. I learned at a very early age (11 years old) how my religion (Roman Catholic) brainwashed it's members in a very subversive way, using fear and a sense of entitlement that our religion was the only right one to create intolerant, fearful and dysfunctional thinking amongst its parishioners. Over the years, I discovered the other religions were also teaching and creating fear in their communicants, all to gain control over their thinking, their behaviors and their lives. In my humble opinion, we will never experience true peace until all the people have walked away from their religious teachings. They need to understand that it is the religions that have separated us and taught us to hate each other because we appear to be different from each other, when in reality, we are not. They need to understand that the religions are not teaching us love and compassion. Once they have woken up to that reality, they will leave their religion, and peace, love and compassion will be the order of the day.
Just know, Jean, you are doing a great service to humanity with your dedication to your newsletter. You are doing what you can with the resources you have to spread the Truth. Once the hundredth monkey has woken up, a shift will happen. That hundredth monkey may be one of your readers. I know I appreciate your work and I am very certain most of your readers do, as well. Their silence does not mean they don't. Introspection is a quiet practice and you can be assured you are responsible for hushing the crowd :)
Thank you for that!
Blessings to you, Jean,
Sandra
TO WHICH I REPLIED (in conclusion - unless someone has something else to add on this matter):
Dear Sandra
A great MANY thanks for your enlightening and lucid response to my reaction to your previous email. I guess I had to vent a bit of steam and express some of my dismay at the apparently slow pace of change towards shifting this planet for good towards Peace, Love and Harmony for all.
You provided to me in your reply with exactly the kind of reassuring antidote I needed to allay my concern regarding the seemingly muted acquiescence — silent gives consent... — of most everyone on this list and around the world, except perhaps these days, it seems, in long-oppressed Arab countries. Indeed, your coming forward to give your name, address and phone number to the State Trooper when everyone around you was too afraid of stepping up to the plate is the perfect example everyone needs to emulate right now when it comes to denying our own stealthy oppressors the weapon of fear they have been so cunningly using for so long to cow us into submissive obedience to their edicts. As we have seen in Tunisia, in Egypt and in so many other countries where our brothers and sisters of Arab descent have decided to take their future into their own hands and lead the way towards some of the changes this planet direly needs, it takes a whole lot of fearless courage and determination to overcome such huge adversity as what we are now facing worldwide. And that kind of revolutionary courage based on the values of non violence exemplified by Gandhi, Martin Luther King and the likes is something our oppressors just don't know how to deal with.
Earlier today, I was reading in A New Palestinian Movement: Young, Networked, Nonviolent about the new breed of brave souls who are now emerging in Palestine in the wake of the dynamic and amazing ousting of US-propped up Hosni Mubarak dictatorship by the now famous Tahrir Square movement. The conclusion of this articles shows clearly what is now motivating Syrians, armed only with their outrage and disgust of the Assad regime of bloody criminals, to face for over 5 weeks now the deadly repression meted out of the barrels of snipers' machine guns cowardly killing peaceful protesters: "I think about the dogs unleashed on Martin Luther King in Birmingham," Quran says. "I think about the beatings. That's what it took for Americans to see the justice of his cause. We will be risking our lives, but that is what it takes. I only hope that we're not too well educated to be courageous." Looking at some of the latest emails from other ERN subscribers in my bulging Inbox, I can see that many are indeed both greatly concerned about the rapidly deteriorating state of our planet and taking matters in their own hands to do the job our corrupt propaganda media are not doing to inform people about some of what is really happening right now that needs our attention and benevolent action to correct the wrongs of this world and sow the seeds of a better one.
Here is a sample selection of what I'm talking about:
- Richard Keber (srkeber@msn.com) wrote on April 23 about "Earth Day":
Maybe it was the total JOKE of "celebrating" Earth Day in a year when few humans have even a vague idea how our Survival Rate has and will change with the Spring Atrocity still operating at full speed in Fukushima, after LAST year's Gulf-of-Mexico massive killing debacle. Maybe it was the weird conjunction with Good Friday. After being awake nearly all last night, very surprised at the profoundly deep smoldering rage I had been feeling (but had kept from my conscious self) at my own species, which maliciously or stupidly, appears completely ready, willing (enthusiastic even), and more and more able to TOTALLY, MASSIVELY and INCREASINGLY, without any conscience whatsoever, just f u c k u p the EARTH, our planetary home, until it dies, FOR NOTHING BUT MORE WEALTH, I found myself for the first time literally unable to open my Heart, unable to contact my Spirit Self or its peaceful Stillness, unable to even "allow" or "forgive", activities I practice many times every day and am usually easily able to achieve - it freaked me out - I got up before dawn and composed this article on Facebook. Writing it WAS therapeutic and I was able to quiet my mind and sleep for a few hours afterwards - but, I doubt many of you would see it on FB, so I am sending it out to you in email, hoping it touches your feelings too.
"EARTH DAY" 2011: Ever the Masters of Irony, Humanity celebrated their dominance of the planet this year in combination with Good Friday to commemorate Earth's crucifixion at Fukushima on the cross of their species' Conscienceless Greed and Utter Stupidity. Events around the globe featured music, dancing, and an amazing array of processed foods. Many humans kept a vigil past nightfall, hoping to witness predicted glow-in-the-dark effects. Although this was, by FAR, the most radioactive Earth Day yet, wealthy humans promise much more to come so long as the planet is able to sustain ANY kind of Life - Meanwhile Religious humans are speculating wildly about what might rise on Sunday from the eerily tomb-like, oily, toxic, radioactive, plastic mess that used to be their planet's bright and healing seas and oceans... Will it be some the thousands of dead sea turtles, dolphins, and other sea-creatures from the Gulf?... Or possibly the strange, never-seen-before mutant forms appearing in what was once the Pacific?... Many will awaken before dawn to find out and worship."
- Jens Jerndal (dr.jerndal@gmail.com) also on April 23 wrote in an email entitled "Watching the Wake of the Titanic":
Here is a humble reminder that my Easter Sunday blog is online. This week (in THE SOOTHING REAR VIEW FROM THE TITANIC) it's about the now culminating turbulent transition from one super-paradigm to the next, about the terminal fight between the old social system and the new, about the 9th and last wave of the Mayan Calendar, and about the big chaos that is upon us, and that may be necessary for a new and better world to be created. Any individual, corporation, institution or organization who wants a grip on the future, needs to be aware of what is really going on behind superficial and biased media coverage and government cover-ups. And my blog helps you do just that. Do you remember the frog in the slowly heating water, who gets used to the rising temperature until it's too late so that, unaware of the danger, he is boiled to death? This is an apt metaphor for what is going on right now. We are being trained, little by little, to accept threats, controls, implanted fears, loss of freedoms and constitutional rights in the name of security and faked concern over our welfare, until we find ourselves boiled to death along with our once prized freedoms and human rights. My blog regularly analyses the current global development, "connecting the dots" between conspiracies, "scares", "wars", and current financial and political events, to evoke the larger-than-life plan behind it all. To read my blog, go to www.ParadigmWatch.com (Be patient after opening the envelope...) And do let me know what you think, either by email or in the comment column on the website, next to the blog. Also, don't forget to tell everybody you know about this blog! Some day in the near future they will thank you for it."
You can watch Jens (2 min 30 sec) briefly presenting HERE his interesting take on the emerging new paradigm.
- Jeff Wefferson (therockist@yahoo.com) has also been very active lately on the Fukushima nuclear disaster issue but also has several blogs such as his new Renavigating the Human Process blog which in his April 21 email he introduces this way: "Here I'll be exploring some of the possibilities open to us as living humans here and now, living out what may well be the only life we'll ever have, and in particularly challenging the possibility that we as a whole may continue to refuse to wake up to the gravity of our current situation on this planet. As I see it, the current global scenario is not happening TO us, it is happening BECAUSE of us and being done BY us to OURSELVES, our fellow beings and our planet. We may be asleep, but we don't HAVE to stay that way. We may be destroying the Earth, but we don't HAVE to keep doing it. We each have immense powers of creativity and consciousness; we each ARE the 'ultimate technology.' If we don't fully activate these powers NOW, we may never have another chance. This awakening and activation IS the answer to our current dilemma."
"We must wake up. Right now, we live in a world where human consciousness basically is a function of what we call “mass mind.” The mass mind is controlled and manipulated by – and believes in – governments and the whole range of institutions that are the key factors in modern life. Governments, institutions and the mass-media continuously put out information of a negative nature, negative energy, so that mass mind thrives on negative energy. Governments and institutions support this creation of negativity, and so humanity as a whole is in the grip of a very bad type of cultural hypnosis or civilizational trance. What matters is that we wake up so that we can enjoy the transiting of the beam. We have created such an imbalance through our technological binge, depletion of resources, and pollutions of the planet that we must wake up if we want to continue enjoying the planet. Our waking up will mean that we actually see that technology can’t help us and that we have to go beyond it. If we don’t wake up, the planet will naturally self-destruct because it is already so far out of balance. We’re precisely at the point in time where the difference between a considerable number of us waking up and taking command and not waking up is the difference between the planet going into self-destruction and the planet continuing on its evolutionary path. To continue with the image of spaceship Earth, although we have used up the reserve energy supplies, we still have the central source, the sun, and our own very sophisticated bio-psychic instrumentation, our very beings, our human bodies. In terms of spaceship Earth, the wrong crew is in command, and it’s time for a mutiny."
"Many people are waking up to the signs of the end times. Different people read these signs in different ways. For some it is the crucifixion of Christ-like love they see in the world and feel in their life. When you suffer this 'crucifixion', it's easy to awaken to utter contempt for the whole experience, getting stuck in the suffering sinner/saint syndrome with no resolution. Others will get past the crucifixion with a Resurrection Spirit. A philosophic calm sees the justice that 'just is' in this entire situation of 'end times'. Such Buddhic calm is the Spirit that matters, like a still mountain lake which reflects the heavens and allows depth perception into the still waters of Conscience. Reflections of Perfection; as above, so below. It is this Resurrection Spirit which pricks the Conscience and brings one back to love that is for giving, rather than forgetting and blaming others for what's wrong in your world. Not all people have awakened to that Conscience, but when they do, there's no going back to "DUH" (Dumb, Unconscious & Heartless). When in full Conscience, one is 'resurrected' or otherwise 'enlightened’ and old habits of "DUH" lose their grip. In full Conscience, there is only the pure intention to pay attention for our evolutionary ascension... hearing that still small voice of Christ-like discernment as a 'yea' or 'nay' at each fork in the road ahead. The greater the LOVE, Unity in our Diversity, the greater the natural result with our Common Sense Unity Conscience. (...) A new time follows the 'end times',and that prophetic time is upon us. Indigenous cultures worldwide have known of the prophecy for thousands of years. A big change was coming. Materialism would succeed at the expense of spirituality. The whole world would experience chaos. But this too would pass. The beginning of a new world will indeed be the end of the world as we have known it. As the veil thins with Galactic Alignment in 2011, a 'Prophecy in Motion' is being revealed. Unknowing of the outcome, we are creating a path as we go. All we know for sure is little more than what we feel in our hearts, think in our minds, and do with our hands. The Great Testing of the Great Purification has begun, and either we awaken to eternal salvation with the Spirit that matters, or by default, the DUH momentum of dark-side contempt keeps one on the cross of the 'crucifixion'."
And I could go on and on if I had on hand all the information on all the many such initiatives spearheaded by numerous subscribers to this ERN list.
So thank you Sandra for pointing to me that despite the usual minimal feedback I get from the ERN subscribers as to the material I network for their information and "assimilation" on a smorgasbord of issues, there is much appreciation and certainly much unseen action going on.
Turkey joins US, EU in calls to Syria to stop killings
ANKARA – Hürriyet Daily News -- April 24, 2011
More than a hundred reported deaths among protesters demonstrating against the regime in Syria over the weekend draw sharp responses from Turkey, the US, the EU and other world powers. Turkey’s ruling AKP calls for maximum restraint, but the main opposition CHP says it’s not enough, a diplomatic initiative should be launched.
Turkey has joined world powers, the United States and the European Union in calling on the Syrian leadership to stop using excessive force against its own people demanding more rights, after more than 120 people were reportedly killed over the weekend.
“Turkey appeals [to the authorities] to act with maximum restraint, refrain from excessive use of force and chose the appropriate means of response to mass demonstrations,” the Turkish Foreign Ministry said in a written statement released late Saturday. However, this reaction was evaluated as insufficient by the main opposition party, which called on the government to launch a diplomatic action to prevent anymore killing.
Meanwhile, security forces raided homes across Syria, arresting regime opponents, as funerals were held Sunday for people killed in a bloody crackdown on protests, activists said. Students called for a strike and two members of parliament resigned after at least 13 mourners were shot dead Saturday when Syrians swarmed the streets to bury scores of demonstrators killed in protests the previous day. Witnesses and activists said several people were also rounded up in and around Damascus but could not give exact numbers.
More than 300 people have been killed – including more than 120 on Friday and Saturday – since the uprising against Bashar al-Assad's regime began five weeks ago, according to rights groups. Friday was the deadliest day since 112 were killed when the uprising began, rights groups said.
Voicing deep concern over bloody unrest in neighboring Syria, Turkey called on Damascus to continue its reform process with determination, to complete it as quickly as possible and to put into practice without wasting time.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo?an held phone conversations with Assad in recent weeks to advise him to heed the demands of his people and sent him envoys to convey the message that Ankara will stand by him if he continues in the reform process. The steps Bashar has taken so far are not seen as sufficient in Ankara as well, however, due to close ties between Assad and Erdo?an, observers claim, the Turkish government cannot voice its opposition louder than this.
“We are calling on the Justice and Development Party [AKP] government to end the wait-and-see policy and to launch diplomatic initiatives to the Syrian government,” Osman Korutürk, deputy leader of the Republican People’s Party, or CHP, said in a written statement Sunday.
Describing the situation in Syria as “very critical,” Korutürk called on the Syrian administration to stop using force against civilians and to heed the demands of its people.
Obama condemns Assad
One of the strongest statements on Syria came from U.S. President Barrack Obama, who condemned the Syrian government for using force against demonstrators.
“Instead of listening to their own people, President Assad is blaming outsiders while seeking Iranian assistance in repressing Syria's citizens through the same brutal tactics that have been used by his Iranian allies,” read Obama’s statement. Calling on Assad to change course now and heed the calls of his own people, Obama said:
“We strongly oppose the Syrian government’s treatment of its citizens and we continue to oppose its continued destabilizing behavior more generally, including support for terrorism and terrorist groups. The United States will continue to stand up for democracy and the universal rights that all human beings deserve, in Syria and around the world.”
EU: Intolerable
EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton on Saturday said the brutal Syrian crackdown was “intolerable” and urged Damascus to launch “profound political reforms.”
“The killings are appalling and intolerable. All those responsible for these crimes must be brought to justice and held accountable for their actions,” she said in a statement.
A United Nations spokesman said Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon "condemns the ongoing violence against peaceful demonstrators in Syria ... (and) calls for it to stop immediately."
Ban said Assad's government must "respect international human rights, including the right to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly, as well as the freedom of the press."
He also repeated his demand for an "independent, transparent and effective investigation into the killings."
Assad had issued decrees Thursday scrapping decades of emergency rule, abolishing the state security court and allowing citizens to hold peaceful demonstrations. Far from satisfying the people’s demands, the steps could not soothe the tension on the streets in several cities in Syria.
A coalition of 10 Syrian human rights groups said Sunday that authorities have detained a leading activist, Daniel Saoud, who heads the Committee for the Defense of Democracy, Freedoms and Human Rights, one of the most prominent watchdog groups in Syria.
The New York-based Human Rights Watch also urged the United States and European Union to impose sanctions against Syrian officials accused of using force against demonstrators challenging the authoritarian rule of President Assad.
---
Related articles:
SYRIA: Prominent dissident writer says country is ripe for change (April 21, 2011) http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/babylonbeyond/2011/04/syria-opposition-activist-yassin-hajj-saleh-assad-regime-protests-future-politics-future-security.html
Protests continue to convulse the streets of Syria, and the demonstrations that erupted last month have come to pose the greatest challenge to President Bashar Assad's 11-year rule.Yassin Haj Saleh, a prominent Syrian writer who spent 16 years in prison as a political dissident, has attended demonstrations in violence- and protest-stricken Syrian cities and feels that the country is absolutely "ripe" for change.He recently left his home in fear of reprisals by the Syrian authorities and says he is ready to pay "perhaps everything" for a free Syria. So far he's been living like a hunted man. "I've left home for a fortnight now," he told Babylon & Beyond. "I’m living here and there and trying to be more careful in my movements. But I am speaking to satellite TV and my number is known, and this is a source of anxiety but I can't change it. Only in the streets I use my phone. TV channels will speak to me at any time. And that is why I left home -- to speak freely about the situation in the country."The rest of the interview follows. CLIP
Gwynne Dyer: Middle East will be shaken up if Assad falls in Syria (April 22, 2011) http://www.straight.com/article-388835/vancouver/gwynne-dyer-middle-east-will-be-shaken-if-assad-falls-syria
It’s safe to say that we will never see an alliance between Israel and al-Qaeda. Yet Syria’s government-controlled media hint that this evil alliance exists as they grasp at any explanation, however implausible, that might discredit the antigovernment protests that have shaken the Baath Party’s half-century grip on power. The regime’s security forces have killed more than 200 Syrians since the protests began in mid-March. But government spokesmen insist that they were shot down by “armed elements” who also attacked the police and the army. These armed elements are allegedly in the pay of the Israelis or of al-Qaeda.It’s ridiculous, and nobody believes it, but what else are the official media going to say? That the Syrian people, without distinction of ethnicity or creed, are moving toward a nonviolent revolution aimed at overthrowing President Bashar al-Assad and the whole Baathist apparatus of power? They can’t admit that, so they tell preposterous lies instead. Assad’s response to the threat has followed the pattern of other Arab dictators who have already lost power: he makes concessions, but always too little and too late. On Thursday (April 21), for example, he finally declared the lifting of the 48-year-old “state of emergency”, which allowed the regime to arrest anybody and hold them without charge.It wasn’t much of a concession, really, since the security forces still have immunity no matter what they do. And the courts are under the regime’s thumb. But if Assad had announced it two weeks ago, it might have taken some of the steam out of the protest movement. Now it’s too late. On Friday (April 22) the protesters came out of the mosques after prayers, as usual, and the regime’s troops killed some of them, as usual. The Syrian regime seems even more unimaginative and inflexible than the regimes that have already gone under in Tunisia and Egypt, so it really could go down.It’s time to ask what the fall of Assad and the Syrian Baathists would mean for the whole region. The answer is: it could change everything. CLIP
MESS Report / Assad regime is indeed threatened by Syria protests (24.04.11) http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/mess-report-assad-regime-is-indeed-threatened-by-syria-protests-1.357806
After weekend riots in Syria saw more than 100 dead, the highest number of casualties since the beginning of the unrest in the country, President Bashar Assad’s regime seems to be increasingly unstable. The more film clips that leak, documenting the killing of demonstrators, the more questions arise about Assad’s ability to stop the wave of protest against him.The iron fist policy of the Syrian security forces seems to have failed. Protest is growing gradually stronger and is spreading to other cities, in quite a precise imitation of the successful revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, and of the one that slid into civil war in Libya. A pro-Syrian President Bashar Assad holds his portrait, Beirut, April 12, 2011.Photo by: APAssad may feel he has no choice. If he does not use the same murderous force against the protesters that his father Hafez Assad used against tens of thousands of members of the Muslim Brotherhood in the city of Hama 30 years ago, he will not survive. But times have changed. There were no cell-phone clips of the massacre at Hama, and the stormy funerals of the protesters only bring more violent clashes and bloodshed. At Friday demonstrations the Syrian security forces fired indiscriminately at protesters. The film clips posted on the Internet document bursts of gunfire and dozens of injured in most of Syria’s cities. Yesterday’s funerals saw bigger crowds and more victims of the security forces’ fire.Two members of the Syrian parliament have resigned in response to the rioting, not opposition lawmakers, but rather members of the ruling Ba’ath party. They both hail from Dara’a, the city where the demonstrations against Assad started. They were joined by Dara’a’s mufti, Rizq Abdulrahman Abazeid, who is a government official for all intents and purposes, who announced his resignation on Al Jazeera.Al Jazeera has joined efforts to bring down the regime, broadcasting pictures of the killing of protesters on the outskirts of Damascus, Homs, Dara’a and other places to every home in Syria. CLIP
Once seen as shy reformer, Syria's Assad confounds hopes (April 21, 2011) http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2011/0421/Once-seen-as-shy-reformer-Syria-s-Assad-confounds-hopes
Many thought that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was at heart a reformer. But his response to unprecedented protests and violence suggest otherwise. -- Beirut, Lebanon - Ever since Bashar al-Assad became president of Syria nearly 11 years ago, he has confounded analysts, diplomats, journalists and pundits alike. Is he the shy, slightly goofy character who comes across in his public addresses, whose genuine desire to reform his country has been thwarted by vested interests within the regime and a succession of foreign crises?Or is he, in fact, cast from the same stern mold as his father, Hafez al-Assad, a rigid autocrat who sacrifices freedoms to ensure regime survival and stave off the instability that saw Syria prone to multiple coups in the years before the Baath Party took power in 1963?“It is hard to tell – Assad gives very few clues,” admits Andrew Tabler, a Syria expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who lived in Damascus between 2001 and 2009. The unprecedented and deadly protests that have swept the country over the past five weeks have presented Assad, who is 45, with his sternest challenge yet. While it is the first serious domestic unrest during his decade in power, it is far from being his first crisis. CLIP
Military Surge in Afghanistan Launches Reign of Terror
U.S. officer: ‘You have to show up at their door … and start killing people’
by Brian Becker -- April 21, 2011
“You can’t just convince them through projects and goodwill,” another Marine officer said. “You have to show up at their door with two companies of Marines and start killing people. That’s how you start convincing them.”
This was the comment made by a Marine officer to the Washington Post for its April 16 story about “signs of progress” for President Obama’s surge strategy in southern Afghanistan.
The officer was discussing how the U.S. strategy succeeded in the signing of a security pact between elders of the Alikozai area in southern Afghanistan and the U.S.-backed Karzai government.
Many hundreds of young men from the Alikozai area were killed in an onslaught by U.S./NATO troops in months leading up the agreement, according to the Washington Post account.
“We started stacking bodies like cordwood,” said an officer in Sangin, who like other Marines asked for anonymity to speak frankly. “And they came to a point where they said, ‘Holy [expletive], there aren’t that many of us left.’?”
The Washington Post is an enthusiastic supporter of the expanding war in Afghanistan. The newspaper editorial policy insists that the war is necessary for an improvement in the lives of average Afghans.
Like other U.S. corporate-owned media outlets, the Post pretends that the U.S. counter-insurgency strategy is aimed at winning the hearts and minds of impoverished Afghan villagers. Its own reports about war strategy, however, reveal that the Pentagon cares as much about Afghan villages as it did about those in Vietnam that were razed and burned by U.S. troops to “save them” from falling under the control of Vietnamese communists.
In this recent story, the Post approvingly explains why it was necessary for a battalion of the Army’s 101st Airborne Division to completely destroy the village of Tarok Kolache after seven U.S. soldiers were killed and 70 others wounded in the first 100 days of an operation in the Arghandab district of Kandahar province last July:
… Instead of sipping tea, [Lt. Col. David] Flynn decided to strike back.
An initial target was the village of Tarok Kolache, a collection of about a dozen mud-brick, multi-family housing compounds surrounded by pomegranate orchards. Video from surveillance aircraft indicated that the village had been vacated, save for insurgents who were manufacturing homemade explosives in the walled-off courtyards.
The Post carries before and after pictures of the entirely flattened village. “U.S. B-1B Lancer and A-10 Warthog jets conducted repeated bombing runs. A new ground-launched artillery rocket system also pelted the enclave. All told, almost 25 tons of ordnance was dropped on Tarok Kolache,” the Post states.
The U.S. war in Afghanistan is a terrorist enterprise. By employing these tactics of terror, the Pentagon seeks to force Afghan peasants to end their resistance to foreign occupation. They are succeeding in creating oceans of suffering among people, most of who have never heard of the World Trade Center or the September 11 attacks. In fact, a 2010 survey conducted by the International Council on Security and Development (ICOS) showed that 92 percent of 1,000 Afghan men surveyed in Helmand and Kandahar provinces knew nothing of the hijacked airliner attacks in 2001.
The real goal of the operation is not to “protect the American people.” Rather, it is to create a network of permanent military bases in an energy-rich and geostrategically important region that the U.S. Empire has targeted for enduring domination. The U.S. effort can kill thousands of Afghans and destroy their villages but it will not succeed in liquidating the resistance of the people. From Vietnam to Afghanistan—the Pentagon Brass have learned nothing.
Brian Becker is National Coordinator of the ANSWER Coalition
4.
OK... AND WHY NOT ALSO LABELLING AS INTERNATIONAL CRIMES THE VICIOUS RETRIBUTIVE CRUELTY OF THE 'REBELS' (see related news below) AND THE RANDOM DEATH RAINING DOWN ON LIBYAN CIVILIANS THROUGH THE DRONE ATTACKS JUST ORDERED BY OBAMA?...
UN Commissioner Says Government Attacks in Libya Could Be International Crimes
April 20, 2011
The UN's top rights official has condemned the reported use of cluster munitions and heavy weaponry by Libyan government forces, saying that the attacks could amount to international crimes.
In a statement today, High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay condemned "indiscriminate attacks" on civilians in Misurata and called for a halt to the siege of the rebel-held western city.
PIllay cited reports of a cluster bomb exploding close to a hospital, medical centers being hit by mortars and sniper fire, and snipers targeting citizens.
"I urge the Libyan authorities to face the reality that they are digging themselves and the Libyan population deeper and deeper into the quagmire," she said.
"They must halt the siege of Misurata and allow aid and medical care to reach the victims of the conflict."
Pillay's condemnation came as Western countries stepped up their promises of aid to the rebels fighting long-time ruler Muammar Qaddafi.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy told Mustafa Abdel Jalil, the head of Libya's opposition Transitional National Council (TNC), that Paris would intensify air strikes on Qaddafi's forces and send a small number of military officers to help the rebels.
Jalil is making his first international tour in his new capacity.
"We came here to ask President Sarkozy and the French government for more support and we have been promised that" he told reporters after the talks.
"We promise the international community that we will work to build a democratic society where the head of state is elected by a ballot box and doesn't come [to power] on a tank."
No Ground Troops Will Be Sent
Italy also announced it would send 10 military advisers, following a pledge by Britain to send 20 advisers.
All three countries have stressed, however, that they will send no ground troops to Libya.
Asked if his country would consider sending troops if the Libyan people requested it, French Defense Minister Gerard Longuetl told reporters that it was "a real topic that merits reflection by the international community", but that ultimately the matter was "a case for the UN Security Council."
The new developments come amid battlefield deadlock in the North African country and a humanitarian crisis a month after the start of NATO-led air strikes aimed at protecting Libyan civilians.
The situation in Libya is in a stalemate, with the rebels still controlling most of the east of the country and Qaddafi holding on in the west.
There, Qaddafi's forces have been pounding opposition-held Misurata, Libya's third largest city, with mortars and rockets, a NATO official said on April 19.
World Health Organization (WHO) spokesman Tariq Jasarevic told AP that hospitals were having difficulties performing surgeries and 120 patients needed evacuation.
Stocks of food, fuel and medicine are reportedly becoming depleted. Commissioner Pillay said while the international community doesn't know how many people have died in the two months of fighting in the cut-off city, the numbers are substantial and include women and children.
According to the AFP, a senior rebel official in Misurata implored Britain and France to send troops to help fight Qaddafi on a "humanitarian basis" in the first instance of the insurgents pleading for soldiers on the ground.
AP has reported that Western diplomats are organizing an emergency session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva as soon as next week to discuss government crackdowns on civil unrest, and the situation in Libya would be set for examination. The diplomats spoke anonymously because of the sensitivity of the matter.
Libya Says British Mission Will Only 'Prolong' Fighting
Britain, which has already provided body armor and satellite phones to the Libyan opposition, said on April 19 it would send up to 20 senior soldiers to help coordinate the rebels.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague said, however, that they would not provide arms or assist in military operations.
"As the scale of the humanitarian crisis has grown, so has the urgency of increasing our efforts to defend civilians against the attack from Qaddafi forces," he said.
Officials of Qaddafi's regime have warned against the move. Deputy Foreign Minister Khaled Kaim told AP that the rebels are not well-organized and that the British mission is likely to be a "failure," adding that the plan might only "prolong" the fighting.
NATO Making 'Significant Progress'
NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu, meanwhile, expressed optimism at a press conference on April 19 in Brussels, which marked one month since the beginning of the campaign of air strikes.
"We've struck a broad range of targets: tanks and rocket launchers, armored vehicles and ammunition sites," she said.
"We're keeping up the pressure on the Qaddafi regime's forces to stop their brutal onslaught against civilians.
"It's a challenging task but we're making significant progress in weakening Qaddafi's ability to use his military machine against his own people."
Qaddafi's son, Seif al-Islam, went on state television the same day to say he was "optimistic" of victory.
But Dutch Brigadier General Mark van Uhm, chief of allied operations, told reporters that more than 30 percent of Qaddafi's military capacity has been destroyed:
"We are steadily degrading [Qaddafi's] command and control capability and his ability to sustain forces on the ground," he said.
"We are maintaining a high operational tempo and we adjust our operations on a daily basis against what is clearly a rapidly changing environment on the ground."
Meanwhile, Libyan government spokesman Mussa Ibrahim has questioned what the Libyan people -- outside of the government and the rebel movement -- really want.
"Who decides the future of Libya: the rebels, or any other groups, or the Libyan population?" he was quoted as saying by Reuters to Chinese television in Tripoli.
"Everyone moral and logical would say the Libya population should decide. Then what right do the rebels have to precondition the political process for the Libyans? What if the Libyans want the leader, Muammar Qaddafi? Who can say no to them?"
---
Related articles:
Video: Libya Rebels Execute, Behead, Mutilate Gaddafi Army who Surrender! Where is CNN now? (April 16, 2011) http://uruknet.de/?p=m76906
Pro Gaddafi Soldiers who surrender have been Executed by Rebels in Cold Blood ! Blindfolded, hog-tied, beat, Executed, Hung, beheaded, put on fire, had their bodies mutiliated, and in one documented case a Soldier had his heart cut out of his chest when he proclaimed that his "heart is for Gaddafi" and the rebel took a bite out of the heart. In Misrata the Rebels burned some soldiers and then waved and danced around with the charred remains of their corpses. This is incredible but true facts of the kind of people that comprise the bulk of the benghazi terror gangs, aka "Opposition" forces.Yes, This is Hillary Clinton, Cameron, Sarkozy and Obama's proxy neocolonial army at work.. Not very "humanitarian" - the favorite word of the day that the imperialists are employing to bomb and invade Libya. So where is Anderson Cooper and PBS and Rachel Maddow and all the other phony liberal "born - again war-mongers" ? People are being tortured and killed in all sorts of horrible ways but since it is the opposition rebels who are the perpetrators and the Libya Army and Libya Police officers who are the victims, these stories are completely blacklisted from being broadcast in the Imperialist media.
Obama Targets Libyans with Deadly Predator Drones (April 22, 2011) http://www.prisonplanet.com/obama-targets-libyans-with-deadly-predator-drones.html
Obama has authorized the use of deadly predator drones in Libya. During a news conference, Secretary of Defense Gates said the drones offer NATO more precise targeting against enemy forces nestled in crowded areas. “This is good news for the Libyan rebels who have been complaining about NATO’s lack of support in recent days,” writes Michael Hughes for the Examiner.It is not so good news for Libyan civilians. In 2009 alone, CIA operated Predator drones killed around 700 civilians in the tribal area of Pakistan.“The true civilian fatality rate since 2004 according to our analysis is approximately 32 per cent,” said the Washington-based New America Foundation last March. A report released by the organization, The Year of the Drone, studied 114 drone raids in which more than 1200 people were killed. Of those, between 549 and 849 were reliably reported to be militant fighters, while the rest were civilians, the London Telegraph reported.The illegal campaign began under Bush and escalated after Obama assumed office. There were 45 drone attacks during Bush’s two terms. In Obama’s first year alone, there were 51 attacks.In recent months, Pakistani civilians have taken to the street to protest against the relentless attacks. In April, the Pentagon said it would continue the attacks despite official complaint from Islamabad. CLIP - CHECK ALSO US drone strike kills 25 in Pakistan
5.
Forwarded by Jeff Wefferson (therockist@yahoo.com) on 21 April 2011
Use as many low-energy light bulbs as you like, turn down the thermostat and drive a hybrid car, but whatever you do as an individual -- indeed, the sum of what we all do for the environment --does almost nothing to alleviate the U.S. military's destruction of the earth.
In The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism, Barry Sanders writes that like other capitalist institutions, "each military branch ... must grow larger and fatter each year; expansion is the life blood of imperialism." Further, Sanders asserts, "The military can brook limits of no kind whatsoever. ... The Pentagon conducts its business behind very thick and very closed doors. It writes its own rules and either follows them or violates them, depending on the situation."
Almost all "military numbers remain off of official reports, secret and out of sight." Sanders obtained the information he cites in the book by gleaning what he could from "arcane reports" and obscure Web sites belonging to the Department of Defense and Government Accounting Office, plus books and articles.
Sanders describes, in horrifying detail, how the military is "the largest single source of pollution in this country and in the world: the United States military -- in particular the military in its most ferocious and stepped-up mode -- namely, the military at war." He goes on to say, "When we declare war on a foreign nation, we now also declare war on the Earth, on the soil and plants and animals, the water and wind and people in the most far-reaching and deeply infecting ways."
One way the military pollutes is through its staggering use of fuel, from which it creates huge amounts of greenhouse gases. For example, the military's use of armored vehicles, planes and luxury aircraft alone consumes close to 2 million gallons of oil every day. Sanders dramatizes that point by noting that the Pentagon "uses enough oil in one year to run all of the transit systems in the United States for 14 to 22 years." Taxpayers pay an average of $300 a gallon for this fuel.
"Sanders describes, in horrifying detail, how the military is 'the largest single source of pollution in this country and in the world.'" One Abrams tank gets 0.2 miles to the gallon. One aircraft carrier consumes 100,000 gallons a day when stationed on a coast. Half of that fuel goes to the aircraft on the ship. The B-52 Stratocruiser, a bomber, uses 500 gallons per minute, whereas the average driver consumes about 600 gallons a year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The construction of military bases uses a vast amount of fuel, and operating them requires powerful air conditioners that spew out massive amounts of CO2 and other pollutants. The military pollution for one year "equals that which some 14.6 million cars produce driving for one year," according to Sanders.
All the reports and proposals on lessening global warming, however, ignore the military's contribution and are therefore fatally flawed. Then there are the bombs. They have contaminated much of Iraq with depleted uranium (DU). In the first two days of "Shock and Awe" the military bombed Iraq with 320 tons of DU, which has a half-life of 4.7 billion years. Just one of many types of bombs, a single GBU produces 1.5 metric tons of aerosolized DU particles that can cause genetic mutations and death for all those years.
Not to mention the pollution of U.S. residents with perchlorate, a toxic material used in bomb making, and the wartime use of white phosphorus (banned by several international treaties), cluster bombs, and a new and more "effective" version of napalm. Afghanistan receives a whole chapter of its own in the book. Sanders point outs that "over half of the total munitions dropped by the United states over the last three years fell on the Afghanistan countryside in 2006." According to a Human Rights Watch report, only two of Afganistan's 29 provinces are thought to be free of landmines.
"War is so deeply embedded in the democratic system -- in fact, in many ways it is the system -- that we may need to grab it where it lives, and dies, and that's at the level of money," Sanders writes. And, he argues passionately, eliminating its funding is necessary to halt the military's omnicide, killing all things living, using our tax dollars.
As of Feb. 15, Tom Hayden reported for Peace and Justice Resource Center, the Obama administration is requesting $159 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan, plus $33 billion for the recent troop escalation. The Congressional Budget Office says that the overall cost of the wars now reaches $1.08 trillion, including $748 billion for Iraq, $340 billion for Afghanistan and $29 billion for "enhanced security."
Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., has written HR 3699, a bill that cuts $33 billion in funding for the troop escalation in Afghanistan. Rep. Dennis Kucinich has put forward a "privileged resolution" to force a congressional vote on the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as the War Powers Act mandates.
"In the 21st century," he says, "given the precarious state of this planet, we must begin to see war as an outmoded method of solving political problems. ... The anti-war movement must become a No-War movement working alongside those who believe that, if we act now and with determination and without equivocation, it may still be possible to live on this planet for decades and even centuries from today."
"Sanders has a solution to the environmental devastation the military causes: banning war." This goal, Sanders says, can be achieved if "our efforts ... expand exponentially, in a communitarian movement around the globe the likes of which no one has ever witnessed, one that refuses to make compromises about a basic respect for life." As Sanders writes, "In the 21st century the military is the most sacrosanct institution in our country." So far, almost no one has dared to criticize its policies and practices, let alone its budget. That silence, Sanders insists, must end.
Sanders asserts that "very few people ... will speak out for the voiceless, defenseless planet." One of those rare people is Sanders himself, who writes, persuasively and eloquently, on the urgent need to stop the military and warmaking if the biosphere is going to survive.
Linda Greene is an activist and writer in Bloomington, IN. She can be reached at lgreene@bloomington.in.us
---
Related article:
US debt cuts exclude military spending (April 25, 2011) With a video report http://www.presstv.ir/detail/176568.html
The United States' plans to decrease the national debt of about USD 14 trillion exclude America's military spending but include heavy cuts impacting the country's working class. Capitol Hill lawmakers have failed to include cuts in the US military spending as a means of lowering the deficit even though the Pentagon budget is the largest it has ever been, Peace Action West's Paul Martin told Press TV. According to the report, the Republican budget plan this month proposes a military budget of USD 7.5 trillion over the next years, while US President Barack Obama has proposed spending USD 400 billion less, which does not include the costs of actual war-fighting. Another report released by Peace Action West said the total cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars for 2010 reached USD 160 billion, after US Congress spent over USD 30 billion to send 30,000 more troops to war-ravaged Afghanistan. Currently, over 50 cents of every dollar of discretionary federal spending goes to the Pentagon, earlier figures by the New York Times showed. Republican lawmakers have been proposing budget cuts stripping the country's most vulnerable class of benefits and rights, while Democratic lawmakers are proposing heavier taxes on the wealthy. In response to recent budget cut plans, teachers, police officers, students, and union workers have been staging mass demonstrations across the country. Most experts say lowering the Pentagon's budget is the only way to bring the US deficit under control, and that military spending is the first spending that should be cut.
6.
LOOK AT WHAT THEY ARE DOING IN BAHRAIN WITH THE IMPLICIT BLESSING OF THE US ADMINISTRATION...
Ignoring plight of Bahrain's Shiites shames the West
By Harry Sterling, For the Calgary Herald -- April 23, 2011
The unwillingness of many western countries to forcefully criticize the killing of anti-government protesters in Bahrain illustrates the hypocrisy of some western governments who selectively support pro-democracy uprisings only when it serves their own vested interest.
Their silence over atrocities and torture inflicted on Shiite protesters by Bahrain's military and security forces -including systematic destruction of Shiite mosques and holy places -is shocking, especially given the West's support for protesters fighting against other Middle East authoritarian regimes in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Yemen.
In an ominous turn of events, Britain's Independent newspaper reported April 21 that Bahrain security authorities have intimidated and arrested doctors and other medical staff in hospitals, denouncing them for treating individuals wounded during pro-democracy demonstrations. Some doctors have reportedly been held incommunicado or have been "disappeared". All of this is in total violation of the Geneva Convention on treating people injured during conflicts.
Such reticence to condemn the systematic killing of civilians demonstrating against the ruling al-Khalifa family since the protest movement began peacefully Feb. 14 is, however, not unexpected.
While western countries, particularly the United States, were initially reluctant to come out too openly in favour of the pro-democracy movements in places like Tunisia H S and Egypt -some American officials even indicating then president Hosni Mubarak or Egypt could stay in power to maintain stability during a transition to democracy -criticism of Bahrain's Sunni authorities was almost non-existent, limited to predictable exhortations for everyone to exercise restraint during such large-scale demonstrations calling for change.
There was a very compelling reason for the U.S.'s low-key response: Bahrain is the headquarters of the American Fifth Fleet. Given the crucial importance of that naval base, being openly critical of the al-Khalifa elite was to be avoided.
Nor was the Obama administration prepared to question the intervention of 5,000 Saudi military forces, along with 1,000 Gulf state troops, which crossed the causeway onto the island of Bahrain to assist in putting down the perceived threat posed to the Sunni minority al-Khalifa ruling regime led by King Hamad. (It's said Saudi Arabia originally helped finance the 25-kilometre-long causeway to ensure it could contain any threat represented by the Shiite majority to either Bahrain's Sunni regime or Saudi Arabia's Wahhabi Sunni rule.)
According to reports by the Independent newspaper, Saudi military personnel joined Bahraini forces in the deliberate demolition of Shiite mosques and shrines, Shiites regarded by Saudi Arabia's conservative Wahhabis as heretics.
The New York-based group Human Rights Watch says countless people detained by Bahrain's security forces were tortured including a reform-minded Shiite militant, Ali Isa Ibrahim Saqer, who died while in custody, his body showing signs of being beaten.
The low-key response of Washington and London to human rights abuses against Bahrain's Shiites has, as expected, been denounced by Iran.
However, some western governments predictably see Tehran somehow linked to the original demonstrations in the capital of Manama.
But those observing the initial demonstrations at Pearl Square, with even women and children present there in makeshift tents, say the protest movement was essentially homegrown and violence-free, Bahrain's security forces unleashing the violence against demonstrators. On March 18, police totally demolished the encampment at Pearl Square resulting in seven or more protesters killed.
Although the al-Khalifa elite seemingly has opted to end the protest movement by force, they may rue the day they went so far as to actually demolish Shiite holy places. Such a move has the potential to inflame the entire Shiite world community with totally unpredictable consequences, not just for the al-Khalifa family but also for Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, as well as the always-volatile Middle East region -not to mention the strategic interests of the U.S. and other countries, including the European Union.
The implications for Washington have already become apparent. Because of its desire not to alienate Saudi Arabia and the other non-democratic Gulf states -and to ensure the continued use of Bahrain's naval base -the Obama administration now stands accused of total hypocrisy when it comes to supporting democracy and respect for human rights in the Middle East.
In the mind of cynics, what counts for the United States is not democracy for oppressed societies, but rather pure unadulterated self-interest. Washington initially tried to mute criticism of Egypt's Mubarak because of his anti-Islamist policies and peace treaty with Israel, only reversing position when he clearly had become a liability. Similarly, Washington was reluctant to call for Yemen's President Ali Abdullah Saleh to resign because of his co-operation in fighting al-Qaeda.
Some believe U.S. reluctance to criticize Saudi Arabia for its actions was strongly influenced by the issue of petroleum supplies. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States sit on the world's largest oil reserves. The U.S. and European countries, particularly Britain and France, have had strong economic interests in ensuring prowestern regimes remain in power to protect western petroleum interests there.
The West could afford to belatedly turn against then president Mubarak and now President Saleh in Yemen because their oil wealth was almost inconsequential.
But keeping King Abdullah and his brothers happy in Saudi Arabia is an unquestioned priority in the realpolitik world of American governments.
Whether the longoppressed Shiite majority in Bahrain are prepared to accept this "business-isbusiness" reality is yet to be determined.
Harry Sterling, a former diplomat, is an Ottawa-based commentator who writes regularly on Middle East issues.
---
Related articles:
Bahrain's secret terror (21 April 2011) http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/bahrains-secret-terror-2270675.html
Desperate emails speak of 'genocide' as doctors who have treated injured protesters are rounded up -- The intimidation and detention of doctors treating dying and injured pro-democracy protesters in Bahrain is revealed today in a series of chilling emails obtained by The Independent.At least 32 doctors, including surgeons, physicians, paediatricians and obstetricians, have been arrested and detained by Bahrain's police in the last month in a campaign of intimidation that runs directly counter to the Geneva Convention guaranteeing medical care to people wounded in conflict. Doctors around the world have expressed their shock and outrage. One doctor, an intensive care specialist, was held after she was photographed weeping over a dead protester. Another was arrested in the theatre room while operating on a patient. Many of the doctors, aged from 33 to 65, have been "disappeared" – held incommunicado or at undisclosed locations. Their families do not know where they are. Nurses, paramedics and ambulance staff have also been detained.Emails between a Bahraini surgeon and a British colleague, seen by The Independent, describe in vivid detail the threat facing medical staff as they struggle to treat victims of the violence. They provide a glimpse of the terror and exhaustion suffered by the doctors and medical staff.Bahraini government forces backed by Saudi Arabian troops have cracked down hard on demonstrators since the unrest began on 15 February – and the harshness of their response has now been extended to those treating the injured.The author of the emails, a senior surgeon at the Salmaniya Medical Complex, Bahrain's main civil hospital, was taken in for questioning at the headquarters of the interior ministry in Manama. He never re-emerged. No reason has been given for his arrest, nor has there been any news of his condition.In a series of emails, passed on in the hope of drawing attention to the plight of he and his colleagues, the surgeon describes appalling scenes at Salmaniya hospital, with staff being threatened and detained in increasing numbers for treating injured democracy protesters."Interrogation committees question me about our role in treating the injured protesters, who are considered now criminal for protesting against the government," he said, shortly before being detained. "We said we were there to treat patients and have nothing to do with politics."I don't have good feeling about things going on in Bahrain. So many of our consultant surgeon and physician colleagues been arrested at pre-dawn raids and disappear."On 17 February, at the start of the demonstrations, he wrote: "It has been a long day in the theatre with massively injured patients equivalent to a massacre. Things are still volatile and [I] hope there will be no more death."By mid-March the situation had deteriorated rapidly: "Right now I am in the hospital exhausted and overwhelm by number of youth lethally injured casualty, it's genocide to our people and our hospital doctor and nurses are targeted for helping patients by pro government militia, so many doctors and nurses been physically attached for just attending injured one. ambulances smashed or targeted by military. CLIP
Bahrain Opposition Accuses Government of Demolishing 30 Mosques (April 24, 2011) http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-24/bahrain-opposition-accuses-government-of-demolishing-30-mosques.html
Bahrain’s main Shiite opposition group said the Sunni-led government has demolished 30 mosques since quelling political unrest in the Persian Gulf nation last month. The government “can’t justify the demolition,” al-Wefaq said in an e-mailed statement received today. “Any attempt to showcase the measure as a legal action will neither be convincing nor objective,” the opposition bloc said. Bahrain’s security forces have been arresting activists and others including doctors since riot police drove protesters from their rallying point at the Pearl Roundabout in the capital Manama on March 16. The government declared a three-month state of emergency after Saudi Arabian-led troops arrived to help quell mainly Shiite demands for democracy and civil right inspired by the toppling of leaders in Tunisia and Egypt. The Ministry of Justice said the buildings were “illegal” and “unlicensed” and demolished “to protect houses of worship and maintain their sanctity,” Bahrain News Agency said April 22. Justice Minister Sheikh Khalid bin Ali al-Khalifa said describing the situation “otherwise” was an attempt to “undermine the nation’s image and instigate sedition,” according to the news service.Bahrain, an island nation, hosts the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet. Shiites make up about 70 percent of the population of less than 1 million and many retain cultural and family ties with Iran as well as with Muslims of the same sect in Saudi Arabia.
'US wants Bahrain oil, military base' (April 24, 2011) http://www.presstv.ir/detail/176435.html
The West uses Saudi Arabia to suppress popular protests in Bahrain in order to maintain its control over Manama's oil and continue its military presence in the Persian Gulf, a political analyst says. “The West has a stake in Bahrain and a vested interest in keeping our oil supplies,” American columnist Allen Roland told Press TV. He made a reference to the US-led war in Iraq, saying the war that the former US President George W. Bush waged against the country “was always about oil in Iraq.” Roland also pointed to the Fifth Fleet of the US Navy in Bahrain as Washington's main military base in the Persian Gulf, arguing that the US is concerned that any regime change in Manama may pose a significant threat to its military presence in the region. Therefore, quashing the recent anti-government protests is vital for the West; however, “since we can't directly get involved, we will have the Saudis do it for us. They are our enforcers,” he added. CLIP
'Bahrain proof of western hypocrisy' (April 24, 2011) http://www.presstv.ir/detail/176479.html
Secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council Saeed Jalili says the public needs to be aware of the West's double standards regarding Bahrain.Jalili said on Sunday that the West's appalling hypocrisy on human rights has been highlighted in Bahrain, adding that the public needs to be informed of such widespread double standards. The high-ranking Iranian official made the remarks in a seminar with representatives of Iranian overseas mission in Tehran on Sunday, according to a statement released by the Iranian Foreign Ministry. He warned that Western countries are trying to derail the popular revolutions through their plots and called on the nations of the region to be alert against enemy plots. Earlier this month, president of Bahrain's Center for Human Rights Nabeel Rajab said the US media have been ordered not to cover news on the government's brutal crackdown on Bahraini civilians. He went on to say that the US and the Western governments have chosen to keep silent over ongoing atrocities in Bahrain due to their support for the country's authoritarian regime. Dozens of Bahrainis have been killed and thousands of others injured since February 14, when the public started a popular revolution against the royal family that has been ruling the island for decades.
Bahrain forces raid girls school again (April 24, 2011) http://www.presstv.ir/detail/176452.html
Saudi-backed Bahraini forces launch a second raid on an all-girls' school in the north of the country, in line with violent crackdown on the popular revolution the government is facing.Eyewitnesses say the Saudi-backed forces took away several teachers during the Sunday attack on the secondary school, located in the Hamad Town. The parents of students have been notified that their daughters would face interrogation. The school first came under attack less than a week ago. The attack came amid continued thousands-strong peaceful protests across the Persian Gulf Island. The protesters have been calling for a constitutional monarchy since mid-February. On March 13, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates deployed police and military forces in the country at Manama's request to help quell the uprising. Bahrain's biggest political party of al-Wefaq said on Saturday that the forces have destroyed over 30 holy sites, including 16 mosques, since the government's imposition of martial law last month. Other reports say over 28 mosques and 50 mourning halls have been destroyed. The Bahraini regime has reportedly deployed a massive number of security forces in villages to terrorize protesters. Rights groups say government forces have even raided hospitals and tortured doctors and patients as part of their efforts to suppress the protests. They also say that more than 30 medical workers have gone missing. The Amnesty International says it is concerned about the fate of many missing activists and the widespread torture of detained protesters.
Footage reveals Bahrain police brutality (April 25, 2011) http://www.presstv.ir/detail/176575.html
New footage coming from Bahrain shows a protester has been beaten brutally to death by Saudi-backed troops in the capital Manama. Officials in Salmaniyah hospital have pronounced him clinically dead. Another footage from the same hospital indicates two protesters are being brutally beaten by Bahraini troops as well. The victims are shown to have sustained severe injuries in their heads and legs. CLIP
SUBSCRIPTION TO THE EARTH RAINBOW NETWORK E-LIST
If you are not yet a subcriber to the Earth Rainbow Network emailing list and would like to subscribe to its automated listserver and regularly receive similar compilations covering a broad range of subjects, including each new Meditation Focus issued on a regular basis, simply send a blank email at earthrainbownetwork-subscribe@lists.riseup.net from the email account to which you want to receive the material compiled and networked by the Earth Rainbow Network Coordinator. Subscription is FREE!
