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Lisa Guilani
Sott.net 2013-04-29 06:27:00
Every night as I lay my head down to sleep, I think of all those who do not have the luxury of doing so. Those sleepy folks in so many faraway places who can't afford to close their eyes because they have to keep a vigilant watch over their families, homes, streets and neighborhoods. People who are constantly kept on a razor's edge of anxiety and fear. People very directly being oppressed, occupied and attacked, living a nightmare reality most here in the West cannot even fathom. And I know these people can't afford to close their eyes because of the actions of psychopaths in power in governments that allegedly represent whole populations of people. They cannot get a decent restful night's sleep because they don't know if their eyes - or the eyes of their children, their parents, etc...will open tomorrow. They can't afford to shut their eyelids because soldiers are stalking their streets and invading their homes on a daily basis and yanking them out into the darkness. Americans mostly have no clue about so many of the things and peoples they claim to 'hate' because they mostly just adopt the attitudes and opinions of those who feed them propaganda and opinion parading as fact and truth. For a people who mostly have not a clue about the reality of the situation with respect to current events, past events, Middle East events, or events pretty much anywhere you can stick a pin on a map, Americans sure do seem to bitch and moan a lot about 'events' and 'foreigners' and 'Islamic terrorists' and 'Muslims'. | |
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Sott Editors
Sott.net 2013-04-27 16:10:00
Although the gruesome sight of mangled body parts is an everyday reality in countries occupied or bombed by the U.S. military, the 'double-tap' bombing in downtown Boston on 'Tax Day', Monday 15th April, was the first terror attack on U.S. soil in 12 years. Anyone with a couple of neurons firing will have noticed by now that the official story is riddled with inconsistencies. In fact, it makes absolutely no sense at all. In fact, there is no 'official story'; U.S. authorities have clearly just been making stuff up as they go along, hoping that the emotional trauma of a terrorist attack will suffice to 'win the hearts and minds of the American people'. So far it appears to be working, but when we discussed this on a recent SOTT Talk Radio show, we had a few callers who were completely exasperated with the contradictory, incomplete, and simply unbelievable accounts of last week's events in Boston. It was a strange week in more ways than one. It was the 20th anniversary of the Waco Massacre. It was the 18th anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombing. It was the 14th anniversary of the Columbine School Massacre. And the bombings happened on the 238th anniversary of the opening shots in the American Revolutionary War. Coincidences? Or by design? And what on Earth careened into the town of West, Texas, just north of Waco and within miles of the Mount Carmel site of the Branch Davidian compound that was burned to the ground by the Feds in 1992? The explosion at a fertilizer depot on Wednesday 18th April killed three times as many people as the Boston Bombings just two days before... was someone sending the bombing perpetrators a message? Tune in to find out more...
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Gabriela Segura, MD.
Sott.net 2013-04-22 09:57:00
As a doctor, I can tell you that stress has reached pandemic levels, though many still hold back from admitting it to themselves or their peers. Our normalcy bias prevents us from taking notice that tens of millions of people in Western countries are dropping like flies from illness, depression and self-destruction. I came across this article by David Kupelain on Americans' health and agreed with some of the observations made about the dire state of affairs:
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Vic Pittman
Salem-News.com 2013-04-28 12:31:00
"I saw men, women and children die during that time. I never thought I would kill that many people. In fact, I thought I couldn't kill anyone at all." - Former US drone operator Brandon Bryant A little after 10:00 p.m., and a serial killer is getting ready to make his move. He has watched and waited for this moment for some time. He watches his victim get out of a cab and dig in his pockets for money. Two of his children run out to the porch to greet their daddy. The killer presses a button and watches as the victim, the taxi driver and the two children are vaporized. Other people in the house, the man's wife, parents and three other children are badly injured and burnt by the high explosive. The house next door partially collapses, killing an elderly woman and injuring her grandson. But this is just the beginning. Neighbors and emergency personnel arrive and begin trying to help the victims. There is chaos...children screaming, people wailing and the cries of the burnt and injured. Several people are trapped under rubble. When enough people have gathered, the killer presses the button again. Fifteen seconds later, all those at the scene are vaporized or blown to shreds. The killer high-fives his partner. In two hours he will be off work! They are planning on driving in to Las Vegas, have some cocktails maybe pick up some girls. On the other side of the world, at the crime scene, the misery, grief and suffering is just beginning. The gathering and grouping of body parts, the burials, the amputations and lifetime medical traumas, the traumatized children, the destroyed lives. But tonight in Vegas, it is party party party for this 22-year old serial killer from Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, some 7550 miles away from the carnage. The biggest threat he will face tonight is a hangover tomorrow. He is a drone "pilot". He and his kind have redefined the words "coward", "terrorist", and "sociopath". He is the new face of American warfare. He is a government trained and equipped serial killer. But unlike Ted Bundy or John Gacy, he does not have to worry about getting caught. It is his job. One thing that the drone terrorism/assassination program has revealed to the world is how racist we Americans are. American life is precious... when Americans die we expect the entire world to weep at our feet along with us. Three Americans die in a senseless act of violence and murder at the Boston Marathon, and the entire country grieves and the president makes heartfelt speeches. Where were all the speeches and expressions of grief when the US bombed the school in Chenagai, Afghanistan? Didn't hear about that senseless act of violence and murder? Of course not. | |
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Dennis and Callaghan Morning Show
Boston resident Linda called in to the Dennis and Callaghan radio show on the morning after the capture and death of the older Tsarnaev brother, Tamerlan. The previous night she was staying at her boyfriend's house which is located in the area where Tamerlan was caught after an alleged "shoot out" with police during which time he allegedly "threw a pressure cooker bomb" at police.2013-04-27 16:23:00 The official story states that Tamerlan was run over by his younger brother, Linda however describes a very different scenario. Please note, neither these radio hosts nor Linda appear to ascribe to any "conspiracy theories" about the Marathon bombing. As such, there is no reason for ANYONE to assume that what Linda reports is not factual. |
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RT
Two missiles were reportedly fired at a Russian plane with at least 159 passengers on board that was flying over Syrian territory. Russian officials admit the jet faced danger, but are not talking of a targeted attack.2013-04-29 16:20:00
The news broke in on Monday as Interfax, citing "an informed source in Moscow," reported that a Russian passenger plane was attacked. "Syrian [officials] informed us that on Monday morning, unidentified forces launched two ground-to-air missiles which exploded in the air very close to a civilian aircraft belonging to a Russian airline," the source told the Russian agency. The pilots reportedly managed to maneuver the plane in time however, "saving the lives of passengers." It is believed the aircraft was intentionally targeted, "but it remains unclear whether the attackers knew it was Russian or not," the source added. | |
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RT
Syrian Prime Minister Wael Halqi survived an attempted bombing assassination in central Damascus on Monday. Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary General, has condemned the attempted assassination, calling it a "terrorist attack".2013-04-29 16:11:00
The explosion struck near a school in a southwestern district of Damascus, and at least ten were killed in the attack. The attack was reported by Syrian state television. "The terrorist explosion in al-Mezze was an attempt to target the convoy of the prime minister. Doctor Wael al-Halqi is well and not hurt at all," the report said. | |
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Robert Johnson
Business Insider 2013-04-29 15:50:00
The Free Syrian Army (FSA) reports that Israeli fighter jets slipped into Damascus over the weekend and bombed a chemical weapons depot outside the city. Neither Damascus nor Jerusalem have yet confirmed the attack, according to UPI. According to The Jewish Press (JP) "many" reports came in over the weekend confirming the mission. Sources told the JP Israeli jets arrived over Damascus early Saturday morning and circled Assad's presidential compound before moving on to target the weapons site. The Israeli jets reportedly received fire but returned to base unscathed. The Lebanese Daily Star confirms heavy FSA fighting occurred near the plant, theScientific Studies and Research Center, but troops lacked the resources to breach the heavily fortified site. | |
Comment: Difficult to verify the validity of the report but WMD lies are being used to justify military intervention in Syria
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Stephen Lendman
Global Research 2013-04-27 15:41:00
What's ongoing now bears eerie resemblance to events preceding Bush's Iraq war. Obama's replicating a familiar scenario. Waging war requires a pretext to do so. When none exists, it's invented. It's easy. Lies substitute for truth. Claims about Syria using chemical weapons don't wash. Repetition gets people to believe them. We've seen it all before. Colin Power's infamous February 5, 2003 Security Council speech led to war. It was shameless deception. Later he admitted WMD claims were false. It was too late to matter. Plans were set. The die was cast. Weeks later, America bombed, invaded and occupied Iraq. The cradle of civilization was destroyed. No WMDs existed. It was well-known but ignored. More on that below. | |
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Sharmine Narwani
Alakhbar English 2013-04-27 15:16:00
Let us be clear. The United States can verify absolutely nothing about the use of chemical weapons (CWs) in Syria. Any suggestion to the contrary is entirely false. Don't take it from me - here is what US officials have to say about the subject: A mere 24 hours after Washington heavyweights from the White House, Pentagon, and State Department brushed aside Israeli allegations of chemical weapons use in Syria, US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and the White House changed their minds. They now believe "with varying degrees of confidence" that CWs have been used "on a small scale" inside Syria. For the uninitiated, "varying degrees of confidence" can mean anything from "no confidence whatsoever" to "the Israelis told us" - which, translated, also means "no confidence whatsoever." Too cavalier? I don't think so. The White House introduced another important caveat in its detailed briefing on Thursday: | |
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Meghan Keneally, Joshua Gardner, Snejana Farberov and Associated Press Reporter
The Mail Online 2013-04-27 16:23:00
New York City police are looking into the extraordinary claims that the landing gear from a 9/11 plane, found this week in downtown Manhattan, could have been planted by opponents to the proposed Ground Zero mosque. The airplane part was discovered wedged between 51 Park Place, the site of the proposed 13-story Islamic cultural center Park51, and 50 Murray Street, a luxury apartment building in TriBeCa. Now a lawyer for the proposed religious site has suggested to the New York Post that the piece was intentionally placed near the center as part of a 'gimmick.' | |
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Damian Carrington
Last-ditch lobbying to sway vote in Brussels to halt use of killer nerve agentsThe Guardian 2013-04-28 15:07:00
Europe is on the brink of a landmark ban on the world's most widely used insecticides, which have increasingly been linked to serious declines in bee numbers. Despite intense secret lobbying by British ministers and chemical companies against the ban, revealed in documents obtained by the Observer, a vote in Brussels on Monday is expected to lead to the suspension of the nerve agents. Bees and other insects are vital for global food production as they pollinate three-quarters of all crops. The plummeting numbers of pollinators in recent years has been blamed on disease, loss of habitat and, increasingly, the near ubiquitous use of neonicotinoid pesticides. The prospect of a ban has prompted a fierce behind-the-scenes campaign. In a letter released to the Observer under freedom of information rules, the environment secretary, Owen Paterson, told the chemicals company Syngenta last week that he was "extremely disappointed" by the European commission's proposed ban. He said that "the UK has been very active" in opposing it and "our efforts will continue and intensify in the coming days". Publicly, ministers have expressed concern for bees, with David Cameron saying: "If we do not look after our bee populations, very serious consequences will follow." The chemical companies, which make billions from the products, have also lobbied hard, with Syngenta even threatening to sue individual European Union officials involved in publishing a report that found the pesticides posed an unacceptable risk to bees, according to documents seen by the Observer. The report, from the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), led the commission to propose a two-year ban on three neonicotinoids. "EFSA has provided a strong, substantive and scientific case for the suspension," a commission spokesman said. A series of high-profile scientific studies has linked neonicotinoids to huge losses in the number of queens produced and big increases in "disappeared" bees - those that fail to return from foraging trips. Pesticide manufacturers and UK ministers have argued that the science is inconclusive and that a ban would harm food production, but conservationists say harm stemming from dying pollinators is even greater. "It's a landmark vote," said Joan Walley MP, chairwoman of parliament's green watchdog, the environmental audit committee, whose recent report on pollinators condemned the government's "extraordinary complacency". Walley said: "You have to have scientific evidence, but you also have to have the precautionary principle - that's the heart of this debate." | |
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Susie Cagle
Grist 2013-04-24 13:48:00
There's a Paul McCartney quote popular with veg-heads: "If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian." It may not be quite as simple as all that, but he's definitely got a point. For a little over 10 years, groups such as Mercy for Animals, the Humane Society of the United States, and Compassion Over Killing have conducted undercover investigations into abuses and rules violations on factory farms, and publicized what they've documented to lobby for change. It's worked: Individual campaigns have resulted in business closures, criminal charges, and even broader changes in social behavior. That has got Big Animal Ag scared. | |
Comment: Read more about AG Gag laws and how this legislationis reallyabout"corporations protecting business interests at all costs!"
Why You Can Be Branded a Terrorist for Fighting Animal Abuse FBI Says Activists Who Investigate Factory Farms Can Be Prosecuted as Terrorists Shocking: Reporting factory farm abuses to be considered "Act of Terrorism" if new laws pass | |
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Peter Beaumont
The Observer 2013-04-27 18:01:00
Description of attack in which six rebels died adds to uncertainty about claims that sarin has been used in the conflict New questions have emerged over the source of the soil and other samples from Syriawhich, it is claimed, have tested positive for the nerve agent sarin, amid apparent inconsistencies between eyewitness accounts describing one of the attacks and textbook descriptions of the weapon. As questions from arms control experts grow over evidence that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons on a limited scale on several occasions, one incident in particular has come under scrutiny. While the French, UK and US governments have tried to avoid saying where the positive sarin samples came from, comments by officials have narrowed down the locations to Aleppo and Homs. Last week the Obama administration suggested that Syrian government forces may have used the lethal nerve gas in two attacks. Opposition fighters have accused regime forces of firing chemical agents on at least four occasions since December, killing 31 people in the worst of the attacks. A letter from the British government to the UN demanding an investigation said that it had seen "limited but persuasive evidence" of chemical attacks, citing incidents on 19 and 23 March in Aleppo and Damascus and an attack in Homs in December, suggesting strongly that samples were taken at these locations. A US defence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to the Los Angeles Times, appeared to confirm that one of the samples studied by the US was collected in December - suggesting that it too originated in Homs. | |
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Global Research News
2013-04-14 23:19:00
Civilian Cancer Deaths Expected to Skyrocket Following Radiological Incidents The White House has given final approval for dramatically raising permissible radioactive levels in drinking water and soil following "radiological incidents," such as nuclear power-plant accidents and dirty bombs. The final version, slated for Federal Register publication as soon as today, is a win for the nuclear industry which seeks what its proponents call a "new normal" for radiation exposure among the U.S population, according Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). Issued by the Environmental Protection Agency, the radiation guides (called Protective Action Guides or PAGs) allow cleanup many times more lax than anything EPA has ever before accepted. These guides govern evacuations, shelter-in-place orders, food restrictions and other actions following a wide range of "radiological emergencies." The Obama administration blocked a version of these PAGs from going into effect during its first days in office. The version given approval late last Friday is substantially similar to those proposed under Bush but duck some of the most controversial aspects: | |
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John Rubino
Dollar Collaspe 2013-04-25 20:54:00
Last weekend the disturbingly-brilliant Catherine Austin Fitts, publisher of the Solari Report, passed through town, giving us a chance to finally meet face-to-face. In the following excerpt from a much wider-ranging talk she explains the deeper, more sinister reasons for the recent action in precious metals. DollarCollapse: It's great to finally meet you, Catherine. The timing couldn't be better, what with the recent, um, correction in gold and silver. What's your take: was it driven by fundamentals or manipulation? | |
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myfoxny.com
2013-04-24 18:55:00
The New York Police Department is teaming up with a national laboratory to study how chemical weapons could be dispersed through the air into the subway system. Researchers will track the movement of harmless tracer gases. They'll place air sampling devices in specific areas on the street and within the subway system. The gases mimic how a chemical or biological weapon may react if released. Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said the study will help safeguard the city against attacks. "The NYPD works for the best but plans for the worst when it comes to potentially catastrophic attacks such as ones employing radiological contaminants or weaponized anthrax," said Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, adding that, "This field study with Brookhaven's outstanding expertise will help prepare and safeguard the city's population in the event of an actual attack." | |
Comment: Hmmm... could this be another one of those "drills" that coincides with a terror attack? A 4th of July spectacular perhaps?
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Redress Online
2013-04-27 17:12:00
It is 65 years since Israel was forced upon the Middle East through terrorism, murder, ethnic cleansing and theft but so little has changed. Then as now, Britain, the occupying power that handed Palestine to the European Jewish colonists on a plate, knew the truth about the Zionists yet chose be the midwife of their offspring, the state of Israel, even as they murdered British soldiers. And now Britain, which is possibly better informed about the reality of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict than anyone other than the primary victims of Israel, remains the loyal international spokesman and facilitator of this terrorist state, working on its behalf from the United Nations to the European Union. This week, British intelligence documents released by UK's National Archives bring into sharp relief the extent to which the British government understood the truth about the Zionist criminals to which it was about to hand over Palestine, to be ethnically cleansed of its citizens and turned into the state of Israel. The documents reveal that, just two weeks before Israel's unilateral declaration of "independence", the British government's high commissioner for Palestine, Alan Cunningham, viewed the behaviour of Jewish terrorists as comparable to that of the Nazis. On 30 April 1948, he wrote to his superiors that as the Jews celebrated military successes their "broadcasts, both in content and in manner of delivery, are remarkably like those of Nazi Germany". | |
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Redress Online
If you thought that American or European Zionists were bad enough, then pause and take a look at their Russian counterparts. These exhibit the standard obnoxiousness of Zionists everywhere - supremacism, racism, exceptionalism - but with an added flavour that is characteristic of most Jews of the former Soviet Union: brutishness, crudeness and lack of human empathy.2013-04-11 16:31:00 On 9 April, 100 Russian Jewish notables wrote to the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, urging him to ignore a recent plea by US Jews to the Israeli government to pursue a peaceful solution to the conflict with the Palestinians. The plea they were objecting to had been made a week earlier by a New-York-based liberal Zionist organization, the Israel Policy Forum, which works for a negotiated two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. |
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Dabney Bailey
Opposing Views 2013-04-24 16:28:00
The Missouri House of Representatives recently passed the Second Amendment Preservation Act with an overwhelming veto-proof majority of 115-41. Sponsored by representative Doug Funderburk (R-St. Peters), this bill will invalidate any federal legislation that steps on Missourians' rights to keep and bear arms. The bill reads, "All federal acts, laws, orders, rules, and regulations, whether past, present, or future, which infringe on the people's right to keep and bear arms as guaranteed by the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution and Article I, Section 23 of the Missouri Constitution shall be invalid in this state, shall not be recognized by this state, shall be specifically rejected by this state, and shall be considered null and void and of no effect in this state." | |
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Rebecca Thomas
The situation is heartbreaking.CBS 5 2013-04-29 16:56:00 A 6-day-old baby is dead and her own mother, who has eight other children, is accused of killing her. The husband of 36-year-old Nina Koistinen has said she suffers from severe mental illness. But according to those who know the family, there might have been another contributing factor - the family's religion. Since Phoenix police arrested Nina Koistinen on Thursday, April 25 - several former members of the Phoenix Laestadian Lutheran Church in Cave Creek have come forward with serious concerns about one of its doctrines. One former Laestadian, who wishes to remain anonymous out of fear of retribution, said it boils down to brainwashing.
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RT.com
2013-04-29 16:06:00
New polling numbers suggest that United States citizens are on average more afraid of their own government then the threat of another terrorist attack. Even after a pair of bombings in Boston two weeks ago injured hundreds, more Americans say they are unwilling to sacrifice constitutional liberties for security than those who are. A handful of polls conducted in the days after the Boston Marathon bombings show that US citizens are responding much differently than in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that killed roughly 3,000 people. Not only are Americans more opposed now to giving up personal freedoms for the sake of security than they were after 9/11, but other statistics show that distrust against the federal government continues to climb. Just one day after the April 15 Boston Marathon bombing, pollsters with Fox News asked a sample of Americans, "Would you be willing to give up some of your personal freedom in order to reduce the threat of terrorism?" Forty-three percent of the respondents said they would, while 45 percent said no. Comparatively, 71 percent of Americans asked a similar question in October 2001 said they'd be willing to give up personal freedoms, while only 20 percent opposed at the time. In the dozen years since 9/11, frequent polling conducted by Fox has suggests that the majority of Americans have all the while said they'd give up their freedoms for the sake of security. Only with the latest inquiry though are those answers reversed: the last time a majority of Americans opposed giving up privacy for security was May 2001. | |
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RT
2013-04-28 15:58:00
An apartment building collapsed after an apparent gas explosion in the northern French city of Reims, killing at least three people and injuring fourteen. The blast destroyed 10 apartments in the four-story building at around 11:15am local time. The area was evacuated over fears of a second explosion. Initially two fatalities were reported, but later in the day crews searching for survivors turned up the body of a woman under the rubble, raising the death toll to three. Michel Bernard, the top government official in Reims, said it was unlikely that the toll would rise any higher. One person was hospitalized with serious, but not life-threatening injuries, and another 13 people had minor injuries. The blast at the four-story building was probably caused by a gas leak, Mayor Adeline Hazan told BFM TV, adding that the blast was "very strong" and had shattered windows in other buildings. | |
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The Sydney Morning Herald
A woman desperate for another child forced her 14-year-old daughter to get pregnant using syringes of donor sperm, a British judge says.2013-04-30 15:35:00 In a ruling reported for the first time on Monday, High Court judge Peter Jackson said the mother had behaved in "a wicked and selfish way" that almost defied belief. The judge said the woman, an American divorcee living in Britain with three adopted children, hatched the plan after she was prevented from adopting a fourth. The scheme involved getting her oldest daughter to inseminate herself with syringes of sperm purchased over the internet from a Denmark-based company, Cryos International. Jackson said the daughter, identified only as A, "became pregnant at the mother's request, using donor sperm bought by the mother, with the purpose of providing a fourth child for the mother to bring up as her own". In his ruling, the judge quoted the teenager as saying she was shocked by the suggestion, but thought, "If I do this ... maybe she will love me more." |
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John Hooper
Suspect in attack, which took place as Enrico Letta's new government was being sworn in a mile away, named as Luigi PreitiThe Guardian 2013-04-28 11:23:00
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in serbia
Up to 40 people were injured, 4 of them critical, when a massive blast damaged a building in the center of the Czech capital Prague, as firefighters told AP and Russia Today Reported.2013-04-29 04:59:00
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Judi Lykowski
WBND/CNN 2013-04-26 21:04:00
St. Joseph County, Indiana - An Indiana woman bought a can of green beans on sale for 69 cents, and what she found inside will keep her and her family from ever eating canned green beans again. "We eat a lot of green beans. We do. We did. Nobody wants anymore now," said Gloria Chubb. Gloria, a retired nurse, is disgusted by what she served up at the dinner table for her and her son. "It was meatloaf, mashed potatoes, gravy and green beans," she said. It was what was in the can of Meijer green beans that made them both lose their appetite. | |
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NTDTV
2013-04-26 00:00:00
Protests between police and demonstrators continued into the night in front of the parliament building in Madrid. Around 1,000 demonstrators tried to shut down the government in a protest over the country's austerity measures and tax hikes. The protest turned violent earlier in the day after demonstrators tried to tear down the barrier that blocked the entrance to parliament. The protest happened on the same day the country's unemployment figures were released... a record 27 percent with more than six million people out of work. Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy is expected to announce further reforms to help cut Spain's deficit later on Friday. | |
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YouTube
The major TV news networks in the US are losing viewers tired of opinionated coverage and carefully selected stories, according to a recent study by an American nonpartisan thinktank. RT's Gayane Chichakyan looks into the phenomenon.2013-04-27 00:00:00
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Andrew P. Napolitano
Information Clearing House 2013-04-25 22:16:00
The government's fidelity to the Constitution is never more tested than in a time of crisis. The urge to do something - or to appear to be doing something - is nearly irresistible to those whom we have employed to protect our freedom and to keep us safe. Regrettably, with each passing violent crisis - Waco, Oklahoma City, Columbine, 9/11, Newtown and now the Boston Marathon - our personal freedoms continue to slip away, and the government itself remains the chief engine of that slippage. The American people made a pact with the devil in the weeks and months following 9/11 when they bought the Bush-era argument that by surrendering liberty they could buy safety. But that type of pact has never enhanced either liberty or safety, and its fruits are always bitter. he Constitution is the supreme law of the land. It was written to create and to restrain the federal government. Every person who works for any government in the U.S. has taken an oath of fidelity to the Constitution, not unlike the presidential oath, which induces a promise to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. The chief and final interpreter of the Constitution is the Supreme Court. One may not always agree with its interpretations, but they are, as legal scholars sometimes say, "infallible because they are final." Those interpretations are particularly final when we have relied on them for generations. One of those rulings underscores the primacy of constitutional protections, no matter the environment in which they are claimed. Indeed, after the Civil War had ended and President Lincoln was dead, the Supreme Court in a case called Ex parte Milligan (1866) rebuked and reversed Lincoln's unilateral assaults on personal freedoms in the North and in so doing reminded us that the Constitution was written for good times and for bad, and its protections cover all persons at all times and under all circumstances who have any contact, voluntary or not, with the government. | |
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RT News
2013-04-27 18:48:00
A tank containing diesel fuel at the Marathon Detroit Refinery has reportedly exploded, forcing a mandatory evacuation order for a nearby area. No injuries have been reported so far. The fire is located in one of the refinery's smaller tanks, Marathon spokesman Shane Pochard has told the Detroit Free Press. Marathon's own fire crew are battling the flames, along with first responders from Detroit and surrounding areas, Pochard said. It is unknown if anyone was injured or how the fire started, Pochard said. A HazMat team from the Detroit Fire Department and Senior Fire Chief Carl Smith are at the scene. Reports of the explosion came in just before 6 pm local time. Marathon, based in Findlay, Ohio, has 7 refineries. "Police have blocked Fort Street off by I-75 south ... oh my goodness ... there's an ambulance out here, a fireman standing outside, you know, it doesn't look like they are trying to get close. They are not trying to go in there," one listener told the local radio station | |
Comment: Is there a symbolic significance to the fact that the Marathon Detroit Refinery explodes a few days after bombs go off in the Boston marathon? After the recent explosion of a fertilizer plant in Texas, does anyone think that there have been a little too many things exploding in the US lately?
Sometimes the Universe speaks with symbols, but who is listening? | |
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Michael Allen
Opposing Views 2013-04-25 18:49:00
Dean Saxton, a junior at the University of Arizona, protested a campus sexual assault awareness event on Tuesday with a sign that read, "You deserve rape." "If you dress like a whore, act like a whore, you're probably going to get raped," Saxton toldthe Arizona Daily Wildcat. "I think that girls that dress and act like it, they should realize that they do have partial responsibility, because I believe that they're pretty much asking for it." Saxton, who is majoring in religious studies, often preaches on campus under the name "Brother Dean Samuel." | |
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Voice of America
2013-04-27 17:34:00
Police in New York City are guarding what appears to be a piece of wreckage from one of the jets that crashed into the World Trade Center during the terrorist attacks on the United States almost 12 years ago. Surveyors checking a narrow alley between two buildings in a neighborhood several hundred meters from the site of the disastrous attack on September 11, 2001, found what appeared to be a portion of an airliner's landing gear. The large piece of metal debris - more than 150 centimeters long and about 43 cm wide - is at the bottom of a space between the two buildings that is less than 46 cm wide. Rope attached to what appears to be a broken pulley is wrapped around part of the landing gear, indicating the wreckage may have been lowered to its current resting place from the roof of one of the two buildings. Police said wreckage and debris from the explosions and fires resulting from the September 11 attacks had been found during the weeks and months after the attacks in 2001. They said they would attempt to remove the landing gear during the coming week, after checks to make sure the alley does not contain any hazardous materials or toxins. | |
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Evan Bleier
Opposing Views 2013-04-25 16:35:00
A Missouri mother was found guilty Tuesday of third-degree assault, a class A misdemeanor, for beating her son's drug provider with a baseball bat. Sherrie Gavan, 54, tried everything to keep her son, Clayton, away from heroin, his drug of choice. She slept next to him while he went through withdrawals, put him in a new school and even took him to work with her. She finally just decided to go after the source and attacked Joshua Loyd, the person who got her son his stuff. As a result of her actions, she may now be facing a $1,000 fine and a year in jail. "I don't know what happens from here," Sherrie said after the verdict was handed down. "I just know you can't protect your child anymore." The jury took about two hours to make their decision. | |
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Michael Allen
Opposing Views 2013-04-24 16:31:00
A 3-year-old girl accidentally shot her 10-month-old infant sibling in the side of the face this week in Middleton, Idaho (video below). According to Canyon County Sheriff Kieran Donahue, an unidentified mother left her two children in the car while she went into the house. The 3-year-old girl found a loaded pistol in the car and shot her brother in the left cheek. He was treated at St. Luke's Boise Medical Center in Boise, Idaho, reports KOBI-TV. | |
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| Secret History |
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Traci Watson
National Geographic News 2013-04-29 14:15:00
They lived in well-planned cities, made exquisite jewelry, and enjoyed the ancient world's best plumbing. But the people of the sophisticated Indus civilization - which flourished four millennia ago in what is now Pakistan and western India - remain tantalizingly mysterious. Unable to decipher the Indus script, archaeologists have pored over beads, slivers of pottery, and other artifacts for insights into one of the world's first city-building cultures. Now scientists are turning to long-silent witnesses: human bones. In two new studies of skeletons from Indus cemeteries, researchers have found intriguing clues to the makeup of one city's population - and hints that the society there was not as peaceful as it has been portrayed. Peaceful or not, the Indus civilization accomplished great things. At its peak, its settlements spanned an area greater than that of ancient Egypt, a contemporary culture. Indus jewelry was so coveted that examples have been found as far as Mesopotamia, some 1,500 miles (2,500 kilometers) away. Indus cities boasted blocks of houses built on a grid pattern anddrains that funneled sewage from homes to dumping grounds outside the city walls. | |
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Amanda Williams
The Daily Mail 2013-04-28 15:10:00
A controversial theory that humans evolved from amphibious apes has won new support. The aquatic ape theory, whose supporters include David Attenborough, suggests that apes emerged from the water, lost their fur, started to walk upright and then developed big brains. While it has been treated with scorn by some scientists since it first emerged 50 years ago, it is backed by a committed group of academics, including Sir David. The group will hold a major London conference next week featuring several speakers who will voice support for the theory. Peter Rhys Evans is one of the organisers of Human Evolution: Past, Present and Future. He told the Observer that humans are very different from other apes, as we lack fur, walk upright, have big brains and subcutaneous fat and have a descended larynx - which is common among aquatic animals. According to evolutionary theories, these features appeared at separate times, for different reasons. But the aquatic ape theory says they appeared because our ancestors decided to live in or near water for millions of years. British biologist Sir Alister Hardy first theorised that we were descended from aquatic apes. He wrote that apes came down from the trees to live in the food rich creeks, river and seas. | |
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Sarah Everts
SmithsonianMag 2013-04-25 14:02:00
In 2001, a lonely computer technician living in the countryside in Northern Germany advertised online for a well-built man willing to participate in a mutually satisfying sexual act. Armin Meiwes' notice was similar to many others on the Internet except for a rather important detail: The requested man must be willing to be killed and eaten. Meiwes didn't have to look far. Two hundred and thirty miles away in Berlin, an engineer called Bernd Brandes agreed to travel to Meiwes' farmhouse. There, a gory video later found by police documented Brandes' consensual participation in the deadly dinner. The cannibalism was both a shock to the German public and a conundrum to German prosecutors wanting to charge Meiwes with a crime. Cannibalism might be humanity's most sacred taboo, but consent of a victim typically eliminates a crime, explains Emilia Musumeci, a criminologist at the University of Catania, in Italy, who studies cannibalism and serial killers. More technically, cannibalism is not designated as illegal in Germany's extensive criminal code: Until that point, laws against murder had sufficed to cover cannibalism. If Brandes had volunteered his own life, how could Meiwes be accused of murder? Because of his victim's consent, Meiwes was initially found guilty of something akin to assisted suicide, and sentenced to eight years in jail. Had there not been widespread uproar about the seemingly lenient penalty, Meiwes would be out of jail by now. Instead, the uproar led to a subsequent retrial, where Meiwes was found guilty of killing for sexual pleasure. He will likely spend the rest of his life in jail. | |
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| Science & Technology |
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Adam Mann
Scientists have gotten their first close-up view of the enormous hurricane that has been churning for years at the North Pole of our solar system's ringed beauty Saturn.Associated Press 2013-04-29 16:02:00 The whirlwind sits at the center of a large and mysterious structure known as Saturn's hexagon, a polygon-shaped stream whose each side is larger than the entire Earth. Astronomers used NASA's Cassini spacecraft to fly right over the hexagon and captured the gigantic hurricane within. The eye of the system alone is 2,000 kilometers across, about half the length of Australia or - as Wolfram Alpha kindly points out - a bit bigger than the distance the Proclaimers would walk, just to be the man that walks a thousand miles to fall down at your door. Though 20 times larger than an average Terran twister, the hurricane is very similar to the ones we see on Earth. Both have central eyes with low-hanging clouds surrounded by a wall of higher clouds spiraling around. Saturn's hurricane winds are four times stronger than those on Earth, whipping by at 530 kmph (330 mph). Cyclones on our planet also tend to move around but Saturn's polar storm has nowhere to go, remaining stuck in place for years. Scientists were unable to see much of the storm until now because Cassini arrived at Saturn in 2004, when the planet's Northern Hemisphere was in its winter darkness. Spring arrived in 2009 and Cassini's planners had to choreograph the gravitational swings needed to get the spacecraft to fly by the maelstrom and get a good close-up view years in advance. A couple of mind-blowing false color images of the storm are below.
Scientists have color coded the clouds in Saturn's North Pole hurricane. Red clouds are lower while green clouds are higher in the atmosphere.
A false-color wide view of the North Pole hurricane and surrounding hexagon. | ||
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Douglas Main
LiveScience 2013-04-29 09:49:00
Two types of fish have been shown to use gestures, or sign language, to help one another hunt. This is the first time these types of gestures have been found to occur in animals other than primates and ravens. Both types of fish, grouper and coral trout, are known for hunting cooperatively with other kinds of animals. Whereas the grouper hunts with giant moray eels and a fish called the Napoleon wrasse, coral trout partner up with octopuses to snag prey. A study published last week in the journal Nature Communications found that the fish are able to "point" their heads toward prey, to help out their hunting buddies. After observing the fish in the wild for many hours, the researchers found that when a prey fish escaped its hunting party, a grouper occasionally moved over the place where the fugitive prey was hiding. The grouper would then rotate its body so that its head faced downward, and it would shake its head back and forth in the direction of the potential meal, in what researchers call a "headstand" signal. Coral trout make a similar sign, the researchers found. | |
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Miriam Kramer
An incoming comet that may well turn out to be the "comet of the century" could create an unusual kind of meteor shower, scientists say. When Comet ISON passes by the Earth this year, it is possible that the dust sloughed off by the comet's tail will create an odd meteor shower when the planet passes through the stream of tiny particles that once were a part of the comet's tail.SPACE.com 2013-04-29 09:04:00 "Instead of burning up in a flash of light, they [the particles] will drift gently down to the Earth below," University of Western Ontario meteor scientist Paul Wiegert said in a statement. [See Photos of Comet ISON]
The specks of dust will be travelling at a speed of 125,000 mph (201,168 km/h), but once they hit the Earth's atmosphere, they will slow to a halt, according to Wiegert's computermodels. | |
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Kate Connolly and Guy Grandjean
The Guardian 2013-04-26 15:51:00
Nadim Chebli remembers well the first of his customers who decided to pay for the records they bought with virtual currency rather than cash or credit cards. "I'd only just agreed to accept Bitcoins," said the 36-year-old owner of the Long Player record shop, "and the first sales I made in it came pretty quickly, from a guy about my age who bought Tom Waits's The Big Time and a young woman who bought a Beatles compilation from 1967." In the few months since Chebli signed up to the peer-to-peer electronic cash system, he finds it hard to come up with definitive characteristics for the "typical" Bitcoin user who walks off the street into what he describes as his "vinyl living room". "There's no typical age group, or sex, just, well, regular folk," he said. Florentina Martens has had the same experience since opening her Parisian-style cafe Floor's two months ago just a couple of streets away. "There is not a prototype Bitcoin payer," she said. "It's random people. Not only nerds, let me put it that way." Like Chebli, Martens, whose Kersenvlaai (cherry cake) from her native Maastricht is rated as one of the best culinary offerings of the area, says she decided to accept Bitcoins because of the ease, cheapness and transparency of its payment system. | |
Comment: Listen to the latest SOTT Talk Radio show on Bitcoin, Gold and the Cashless Society
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RT
2013-04-28 11:20:00
UK and US scientists are seeking to alter the genes of dairy cows in order to make them hornless. The modification is meant to make the livestock safer to deal with, and spare them the painful de-horning practice currently used by farmers. Scientists have managed to single out DNA that suppresses horn growth in other breeds of cattle, which they now intend to implant into the genome of the Holstein cows - the world's highest-production dairy breed. "This would be a major advance in animal welfare," Geoff Simm, a scholar and chair of the UK government's Farm Animal Genetic Resources Committee said, according to the Sunday Times. The idea - the brainchild of scientists at Edinburgh's Roslin Institute - will now be brought to life by their partners from the University of Minnesota, who were already conducting similar research. Scott Fahrenkrug, a professor of genetics at the University of Minnesota, has extracted a short strip of DNA from the genome of Red Angus cattle. The strip, which is known to halt horn growth, was then inserted into the cells from a Holstein bull called Randy. | |
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Ashleigh Walters
WPTV 2013-04-27 16:48:00
Montevideo, Uruguay - Scientists in Uruguay have announced the world's first genetically-modified phosphorescent sheep. Nine sheep were born in October of 2012 at Uruguay's Institute of Animal Reproduction, an experiment conducted in conjunction with the Institute Pasteur. The scientists used a gene from a jellyfish, allowing them to produce a green fluorescent protein. The scientists say the sheep developed normally. They claim there are no differences to their non-modified peers. | |
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The Telegraph
2013-04-26 16:26:00
Astronomy students at Wakefield's Horbury Academy were in Hawaii and Australia for two nights to stargaze through the remote Faulkes telescope as part of a GCSE project. They focused their study on a space object that had been observed before as a possible asteroid but its classification had not been formally noted. After studying the data, the group were able to rule out the space matter as an asteroid but also anything that had previously been discovered. The Year 11 pupils sent off their analysis to the Minor Planet Centre in Massachusetts and were amazed to be told they had discovered a new comet. The comet was officially registered with the centre and given the name C/2013G9 (TENAGRA). | |
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Elizabeth Howell
Universe Today 2013-04-27 16:14:00
The site of Stonehenge - that mysterious collection of British rocks that could have served as a calendar using the stars - was also a graveyard for the elite, according to new research. A British group led by the University College London looked at 63 bodies surrounding the historical site. They determined these people were part of a group of elite families that brought their relatives to Stonehenge for burial over more than 200 years, starting from 2,900 BC. The bodies were buried long before the rocks visible today were erected, though. "The first Stonehenge began its life as a huge graveyard," stated UCL's Parker Pearson, who led the study. "The original monument was a large circular enclosure built 500 years before the Stonehenge we know today, with the remains of many of the cremated bodies originally marked by the bluestones of Stonehenge. We have also discovered that the second Stonehenge was built 200 years earlier than thought, around 2500 BC." | |
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Current Biology
2013-04-27 08:22:00
(Phys.org) - Every year millions of birds make heroic migratory journeys across oceans and continents guided by the Earth's magnetic field. How they detect those magnetic fields has puzzled scientists for decades. But now a collaboration between the Keays lab at the Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna and researchers at The University of Western Australia's Centre for Microscopy, Characterisation and Analysis (CMCA) has added some important pieces to the puzzle. Their work, published today in the online version of Current Biology, reports the discovery of iron balls in sensory neurons. These neural cells, called hair cells, are found in the ear and are responsible for detecting sound and gravity. Remarkably, each cell has a single iron ball, and it's in the same place in every cell. "It's very exciting. We find these iron balls in every bird, whether it's a pigeon or an ostrich, but not in humans," said Mattias Lauwers, the IMP researcher who discovered the balls. CMCA research associate Dr Jeremy Shaw, who has studied iron in a range of animals from molluscs to humans, said it was an astonishing finding. | |
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RT
2013-04-27 05:51:00
United States Vice President Joe Biden says the 2014 Boston Marathon will be "bigger, more spectacular" than ever before, and the city's police commissioner could see that through with some serious changes starting at next year's race. Notwithstanding last week's terrorist attack that killed three and wounded hundreds, Boston, Massachusetts is expected to continue its tradition of hosting the annual 26-mile run next spring. Speaking to the city's Herald newspaper though, Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis says he's looking to add at least one new element in 2014: unmanned aerial vehicles. Weighing in with regards to how his city will ensure another attack won't ruin next year's marathon, Davis says he's looking towards obtaining a drone aircraft to conduct surveillance from the Boston sky. | |
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RT
2013-04-27 05:42:00
Anti-war groups will protest at the UK airbase from which the country has begun controlling its fleet of assassination drones in Afghanistan. Previously, the remote pilots were deployed only in the US. Four anti-war groups - including CND, the Drone Campaign Network, Stop the War and War on Want - are staging a nonviolent protest on Saturday over drone use by the Waddington base in Lincolnshire. The British Royal Air Force (RAF) has opened drone control stations at the base located south of Lincoln this week to work in tandem with those already in place at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. In 2010, the Ministry of Defence decided it needs the capability to remotely operate its armed drones from its own soil following a strategic security review. | |
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| Earth Changes |
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P Gosselin
No Tricks Zone 2013-04-26 16:45:00
I'm late this time around with meteorologist Joe Bastardi's Saturday Summary (4/20). If you haven't seen it, then do take the few minutes to do so. He has a short outlook for the coming years. He starts by showing the global temperature for the last 4 years: "...you can see the fall that is occurring; it's very plain to see". Image left: Snapshot of Joe Bastardi's Saturday Summary (4/20). Of course four years do not make a trend. But they do come after 11 years of stagnation. After 11 years of no warming, one would think the warming would finally resume. Instead just the opposite has occurred - and it has been cooling amazingly fast (almost 0.4°C) - thus completely defying the models. Boy, the oceans must have one big appetite! | |
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BBC
2013-04-29 10:27:00
Spain has been struck by unseasonal weather which has seen snow falling across the country. Extreme weather warnings are in place in 18 provinces, with small roads blocked as temperatures continue to hover around freezing. Simon McCoy reports. | |
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Jessica Montoya Coggins
The Daily Mail 2013-04-28 16:24:00
A number of severe thunderstorms have moved across much of the South, prompting warnings across several states. The onslaught of storms have dumped more than seven inches in some areas and flood warnings were still in effect around Houston, Texas until Sunday morning. According to local affiliates quarter-size hail and winds up to 60 mph were reported in South Texas. The stretch of bad weather extended all the way to Tennessee, where a number of stray animals were 'on the loose.' The Fayette Country Animal Rescue was damaged by the storm sending an unknown number of animals into the area near Interstate 40.
Currently there are no reports of any deaths or injuries from the storms. | ||
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Dr. Mercola
Zen Gardner 2013-04-27 14:47:00
Genetic engineering (GE) of our food supply amounts to a massive science experiment being performed on mankind, without consent or full disclosure. Although the biotech industry continues to claim GE products are safe, the truth is that no one knows what the long-term effects will be, because no one has done the necessary studies. The loudest proponents of GE are the ones who stand to profit the most, and they don't seem terribly concerned about the human or environmental costs. What do we know for certain? We know genetic engineering is riddled with unpredictable effects... so we should expect the unexpected. You may not realize that this reckless genetic experimentation is not limited to your food supply. Besides being used to create drugs and "Frankenfish," they've also created vaccine-containing bananas, goats that produce spider silk in their milk, venomous cabbage, chemotherapy chicken eggs, and even glow-in-the-dark cats.1 As creepy as some of these things are, the application that may have the greatest potential for global disaster are GE trees created to serve the desires of the paper industry. Deforestation is already an enormous problem, and the last thing we need is to further stress our precious native forests and the flora and fauna that depend on them. The documentary featured above discusses how GE trees may adversely impact ecologicalsystems on a grand scale, with potentially catastrophic effects. A Silent Forest: The Growing Threat, Genetically Engineered Trees is hosted by Dr. David Suzuki,2 an award-winning geneticist and author of 52 books. (article continues below video) | |
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phys.org
2013-04-27 05:29:00
Poaching on an "industrial" scale has slashed the elephant population in the countries of central Africa by nearly two-thirds, a group of international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) said on Friday. "A recent study shows that the population of forest elephants has dropped by almost two-thirds or 62 percent in the past 10 years, victims of large-scale ivory poaching," the group of eight NGOs said in a statement. "The situation is dramatic and worrying. It's very dangerous," Jerome Mokoko, assistant director of the Wildlife Conservation Society, told reporters at a news conference in Brazzaville. "Nearly 5,000 elephants have been lost in the northern zone of Congo between 2009 and 2011," said Mokoko. He added there were 80,000 elephants in the Central African Republic just 30 years ago but their number has been reduced to just a few thousand. "The Democratic Republic of Congo alone is home to 70 percent of the elephant population of central Africa. But now there are only between 7,000 and 10,000 elephants in the DRC," Mokoko said. | |
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| Fire in the Sky |
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| Health & Wellness |
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RT.com
2013-04-29 15:56:00
An influential group of worldwide cancer experts has warned that the astronomical prices charged by drug companies are in effect condemning some patients to death. More than 100 leading cancer specialists have accused the world's drug industry of"profiteering" from cancer patients in the same way that unscrupulous food vendors raise the price of basic food stuffs after a natural disaster. The authors of the article, which appeared in the journal Blood, are all specialists in blood cancer. Blood cancers, such as Leukemia, have been proven to be very responsive to cancer drugs. The specialists are keen to get the message across that they understand that drug companies must make a profit on what they do, but the profit should be in relation to the money invested and should not take advantage of people with life threatening medical conditions. "What determines a morally justifiable 'just price' for a cancer drug? A reasonable drug price should maintain healthy pharmaceutical industry profits without being viewed as 'profiteering'. This term [profiteering] may apply to the trend of high drug prices where a life threatening medical condition is the disaster," the specialists wrote in the report. | |
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JG Vibes
Intellihub.com 2013-03-28 09:21:00
Joanne Webster, professor of parasite epidemiology at Imperial College London, explains that many parasites favor the brain, "because it shelters them from the full fury of the immune system". But, she says, "it also gives them direct access to the machinery to alter the host's behavior". The Telegraph reported that, There is a single-celled parasite called Toxoplasma gondii, which is found in domestic cats, and is estimated to infect 350,000 people a year in Britain. Its effect on humans became the obsession of Jaroslav Flegr, professor of evolutionary biology at Charles University in Prague, who linked it with disturbed behaviours such as reckless driving and a greater risk of suicide. Rats infected with Toxo, as scientists at Imperial College discovered, actually like the smell of cat urine, instead of being terrified by it. And studies at Stanford University in California have revealed the neural changes that lay behind this transformation. | |
Comment: For more information on how to protect your brain see Ketogenic Diet - Path To Transformation?
See also: Brain parasite hosted by cats linked to increased suicidal behaviour threat: study Toxoplasmosis Parasite May Trigger Schizophrenia And Bipolar Disorders Toxo: A Conversation with Robert Sapolsky about Toxoplasmosis | |
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Melanie Johnson
Prevent Disease 2013-04-29 00:53:00
For nine months, the umbilical cord is a lifeline between mother and baby, sending oxygenated blood to the growing fetus. Once the baby is born, usually within the first minute of birth, that connection is often quickly severed. Mounting evidence suggests that clamping the cord within seconds of the baby's arrival deprives it of vital blood from the placenta -- which can lead to iron deficiency and anemia in later life. Medical bodies, senior doctors and the National Childbirth Trust (NCT) want maternity staff to instead leave the umbilical cord untouched for anything from 30 seconds to whenever it stops pulsating naturally - usually within two to five minutes. "The later the better," said Midwife Naomi Karns. "Between four to five minutes is the ideal delay period in cutting the cord to maximize therapeutic potential." The umbilical cord carries nutrients and oxygen from mom-to-be's placenta to the developing infant's abdomen. (It leaves a life-long impression in the form of the belly button.) When the practice of immediate cord clamping first began about a half century ago, the value of cord blood, especially its stem cells, which can develop into a suite of other cells, was not known. But now we know that stem cells have many therapeutic properties. A review, which appears in an issue of the Cochrane Collaboration, found that delaying the clamping of the umbilical cord for up to 120 seconds in premature infants can lead to an increased number of red blood cells, the need for fewer transfusions due to anemia or low blood pressure, and a decreased risk of bleeding in the brain. Anemia - a disorder which means you have a less than the normal quantity of hemoglobin in the blood - can later be associated with brain development and can affect cognitive ability. | |
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Paul Fassa
Natural Society 2013-04-25 15:20:00
It's important for parents to at least consider the potential dangers and lack of necessity of vaccinations. Now some pediatricians are withholding treatment for children whose parents' have rejected all or some vaccinations - this simply isn't right. But it's important not to cave in to those pressures, and continue researching vaccines from multiple sources. Vaccine Advocate Says Children Can Receive 10,000 Vaccines at Once An example of, let's call it lunacy, from high places in the vaccine industry, Dr. Paul Offitonce publicly remarked that children can safely receive 100,000 vaccines at once. He later changed that to 10,000. Unfortunately, this leading pediatrician who holds influential University and Clinical positions has media clout and has been interviewed often. He has written publications refuting vaccination dangers and condemning those who refuse vaccinations for their children, even to the point of encouraging pediatricians to not provide care for children not vaccinated. | |
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share.banoosh.com
2013-04-25 14:58:00
Energy-intensive industrial farming practices that rely on toxic chemicals and genetically engineered crops are not just undermining public health - they're destroying the planet. Here's how: Generating Massive Greenhouse Gas Pollution (CO2, Methane, Nitrous Oxide) and Global Warming; While Promoting False Solutions Such as Industrial Biofuels, So-Called Drought-Resistant Crops, and Genetically Engineered Trees Evaluations of corn grown for ethanol show that whatever reduction in emissions you get from burning corn instead of oil in the gas tank is more than offset by the fact that producing biofuel from corn requires as much fuel as it could replace. Corn production, like the production of all of the crops (corn, cotton, canola, soy, and now, sugar beets and alfalfa) that Monsanto has so successfully industrialized through its business model of selling patented GMO seeds to increase the use of its pesticides, is very fossil fuel intensive. But that's just the beginning of Monsanto's contribution to agriculture's green house gas emissions. With ever-increasing acreage, where are all those GMO crops going? They're being fed to animals, and when you look at emissions from factory farms, you'll wish we burned them in the gas tank instead! | |
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Elizabeth Renter
Natural Society 2013-04-16 14:39:00
An estimated 12.5 million people had some form of cancer in 2009, according to the American Cancer Society. Another 25.8 million have diabetes. These two preventable diseases are responsible for millions of deaths worldwide each year. In the constant battle to stay healthy, many of us know that too much sugar in the blood can lead to diabetes and that by controlling our diets we can both prevent and even reverse the disease. But, could the same be said for cancer? According to researchers, sugar and cancer are indeed connected. The Sugar-Cancer Connection Obesity and high blood sugar are risk factors for diabetes. And diabetics have an estimated double risk of suffering a colon or pancreatic cancer diagnosis. Scientists say that the two facts are connected and that blood sugar could play a role in the development of cancer. In one study published in the journal Molecular Cell, a team of researchers under Dr. Custodia Garcia-Jimenez, have identified how sugar could directly increase the cancer risk. | |
Comment: Does Sugar Feed Cancer? Yes! Read more to learn about the health effects of sugar and the cancer connection:
Addicted to Sugar? The Health Detriments of Sugar Revealed Study reveals why cancer cells like sugar Remember the Dangers of Refined Sugar Sugar, Sugar - A Poison By Any Other Name Would Be As Toxic Cancer Cells Feed on Sugar and Sugar Free Products Alike Cancer Feeds on Fructose, America's Number One Source of Calories Cancer & Sugar - Strategy for selective starvation of cancer Avoid Refined Sugar, Prevent Breast Cancer Recurrence Sugar High: The Dark History and Nasty Methods Used to Feed Our Sweet Tooth | |
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Dr. Mercola
Huffington Post 2013-01-28 14:21:00
A recently-published Harvard University meta-analysis funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has concluded that children who live in areas with highly fluoridated waterhave "significantly lower" IQ scores than those who live in low fluoride areas. In a 32-page report that can be downloaded free of charge from Environmental Health Perspectives, the researchers said: A recent report from the U.S. National Research Council (NRC 2006) concluded that adverse effects of high fluoride concentrations in drinking water may be of concern and that additional research is warranted. Fluoride may cause neurotoxicity in laboratory animals, including effects on learning and memory ... | |
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cornucopia.org
2013-04-23 14:11:00
Abbott Laboratories Shareholders Set To Vote on Non-GMO Policy Shareholders of Abbott Laboratories will vote on whether the manufacturer of Similac, a leading brand of infant formula, should adopt a policy of sourcing ingredients that have not been genetically engineered. The vast majority of corn and soy-based ingredients in processed foods in the United States, including infant formula, come from genetically engineered crops developed by Monsanto and other biotechnology companies. Dairy ingredients may come from dairy cows that were treated with genetically engineered bovine growth hormones. The annual meeting, open to all owners of Abbott stock, takes place at Abbott Laboratories' headquarters in Abbott Park, IL on April 26. | |
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Chris Armstrong
Every once in a while a documentary comes along that really does a great job of reaching out and changing the mind of people who are skeptics. One such documentary is Statin Nation by director, Justin Smith. It's full of information that we've all heard over and over again, but it does it in such a way that nearly anybody will understand.Primal Docs 2013-04-26 09:18:00 If you have friends or relatives that are skeptical of your way of life, send them this video, it's a fantastic introduction into what we know as the truth. It will at least open people eyes to the possibility that everything that we thought we knew about food was false and how data was manipulated in the name of profit. Some might call this a conspiracy theory, but it's pretty hard to disagree when you see the facts.
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Pete Papaherakles
Nearly every expression of normal emotion can now be classified as a syndrome in need of medicationAmerican Free Press 2013-04-18 08:43:00
In May 2013, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) is scheduled to release its fifth Diagnostic Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) superseding the DSM-IV published in 1994 and revised in 2000. The new "psychiatry bible" has been criticized by many as a testament to the insanity of the industry itself. Virtually every emotion experienced by a human being - sadness, grief, anxiety, frustration, impatience, excitement - is now being classified as a "mental disorder" demanding chemical treatment with - you guessed it - pharmaceutical drugs. Ironically, one of its harshest critics is Allen Frances M.D., professor emeritus from the Department of Psychiatry at Duke University who was chair of the DSM-IV Task Force. "DSM-5 opens up the possibility that millions and millions of people currently considered normal will be diagnosed as having a mental disorder and will receive medication and stigma that they don't need," said Frances. "This is the saddest moment in my 45-year career of studying, practicing, and teaching psychiatry. [The] approval makes it likely that DSM-5 will start a . . . dozen or more new fads which will be detrimental to the misdiagnosed individuals and costly to our society." The DSM is now larger than ever, and it includes Orwellian disorders such as "obedience defiance disorder" (ODD), defined as refusing to follow authority. Rapists who feel sexual arousal during their raping activities are given the excuse that they have "paraphilic coercive disorder" (PCD) and therefore are not responsible for their actions. You can also get diagnosed with "hoarding disorder" if you happen to stockpile food, water and ammunition, among other things. Being prepared for possible natural disasters now makes you a mental patient in the eyes of modern psychiatry. The entire industry of psychiatry has become such a laughing stock that even many supporters of the industry are turning their backs in disgust. To many scientists today, psychiatry is no more "scientific" than astrology or palm reading, yet its practitioners call themselves "doctors" of psychiatry in order to sound credible. | |
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Kelly Patricia O'Meara
Citizens Commission on Human Rights International 2013-03-25 08:34:00
It is difficult to absorb the recent data released by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, AHRQ, on the skyrocketing numbers of children diagnosed with "bipolar disorder" and not come to the conclusion that this startling information represents the never-ending harm initiated by the idiotic psychiatric theories of Harvard child psychiatrist, Dr. Joseph Biederman. In order to fully grasp just how outrageous the data are, one first must remember that the now disgraced and marginalized Biederman is credited with being the ring leader for diagnosing the alleged bipolar disorder in very young children. To add insult to injury, not only was Biederman the chief advocate of the now controversial diagnosis, but he is also credited with prescribing the most powerful antipsychotic drugs as treatment. It was only due to a Congressional inquiry by Senator Charles E. Grassley that the apparent motive behind Biederman's childhood bipolar diagnosis was uncovered...money. $1.6 million dollars was Biederman's take from the pharmaceutical companies for his "research." Most revealing, however, were court documents released in March of 2009, which disclose that Biederman reportedly had promised drug maker Johnson & Johnson in advance that his studies on the antipsychotic drug Risperdone (Risperdal) would prove the drug to be effective when used on preschool age children. Biederman could never be accused of discrimination. The Harvard psychiatrist, who literally placed himself just one rung below God, was so drug money-friendly that his list of paymasters reads like a who's who of pharmaceutical giants, including Abbott Laboratories, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Janssen, Novartis, Pfizer and Shire to name a few. | |
Comment: For more information, check out SOTT Talk Radio: Good Science, Bad Science - Psychology and Psychiatry
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John Briffa
drbriffa 2013-04-25 08:23:00
In general terms, the body likes to keep its physiological and biochemical parameters within a certain range - not too high and not too low. This applies to an endless stream of factors including blood sugar levels, temperature, blood pH, blood pressure and sodium levels. However, there are some doctors and researchers who believe that the normal rules do not apply to cholesterol, and specifically 'low density lipoprotein'-cholesterol (LDL-cholesterol). There is a general belief that LDL-cholesterol is 'bad' and is largely responsible for the narrowing of the vessels and heart disease and cerebrovascular disease (the precursors of heart attack and stroke respectively). Using this line of thinking, then the lower we get cholesterol levels, the better. Regular readers of this blog may know that cholesterol is an essential element in the body. It's in all cell membranes, and a major constituent of key components including several hormones and vitamin D (actually, vitamin D is a hormone, despite it being branded a 'vitamin'). I was recently reading that cholesterol may have a role in the body's ability to resist infection too. Some evidence for a protective role here comes from studies which link higher cholesterol levels with reduced risk of infection. In one study, for instance, over a 15-year period, those with higher initial levels of total cholesterol were found to be less likely to be admitted to a hospital with an infectious disease [1]. | |
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| Science of the Spirit |
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Peter Dizikes
MIT News 2013-04-29 17:03:00
Suppose you hear someone say, "The man gave the ice cream the child." Does that sentence seem plausible? Or do you assume it is missing a word? Such as: "The man gave the ice cream to the child." A new study by MIT researchers indicates that when we process language, we often make these kinds of mental edits. Moreover, it suggests that we seem to use specific strategies for making sense of confusing information - the "noise" interfering with the signal conveyed in language, as researchers think of it. "Even at the sentence level of language, there is a potential loss of information over a noisy channel," says Edward Gibson, a professor in MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS) and Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. Gibson and two co-authors detail the strategies at work in a new paper, "Rational integration of noisy evidence and prior semantic expectations in sentence interpretation," published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. | |
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University of California - Los Angeles
Body dysmorphic disorder is a disabling but often misunderstood psychiatric condition in which people perceive themselves to be disfigured and ugly, even though they look normal to others. New research at UCLA shows that these individuals have abnormalities in the underlying connections in their brains.2013-04-29 15:53:00 Dr. Jamie Feusner, the study's senior author and a UCLA associate professor of psychiatry, and his colleagues report that individuals with BDD have, in essence, global "bad wiring" in their brains - that is, there are abnormal network-wiring patterns across the brain as a whole. And in line with earlier UCLA research showing that people with BDD process visual information abnormally, the study discovered abnormal connections between regions of the brain involved in visual and emotional processing. The findings, published in the May edition of the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, suggest that these patterns in the brain may relate to impaired information processing. "We found a strong correlation between low efficiency of connections across the whole brain and the severity of BDD," Feusner said. "The less efficient patients' brain connections, the worse the symptoms, particularly for compulsive behaviors, such as checking mirrors." |
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Stuart Mason Dambrot
(Phys.org) - That Homo sapiens exhibits both cooperative and competitive behavior is a topic that continues to be the subject of ongoing discussion. In terms of cooperation, altruism (a selfless type of prosocial behavior in which an organism acts to benefit another at a cost to itself), has received significant attention from evolutionary biologists, neuroscientists, economists, psychologists, philosophers, social scientists, game theorists, and computer scientists. In particular, altruistic punishment - in which individuals who, at no apparent benefit (or even at a cost) to themselves, punish someone who has treated another unfairly - has been demonstrated in a range of studies. Recently, however, scientists at the University of Miami posited that the evidence for these results is possibly affected by experimental artifacts, and is therefore questionable. To address their hypothesis, the researchers designed and performed an experiment without such artifacts, finding that while victims punished offenders, witnesses did not - and moreover reacted with envy for ill-gotten gains rather than moralistic anger. In addition, a second experiment showed that previous evidence was due to what is known as affective forecasting error (inaccurate estimations of reactions to hypothetical situations). The scientists concluded that evidence supporting human altruistic punishment has been overstated.Proceedings of the Royal Society B 2013-04-27 06:13:00 |
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Jeremy Dean
PsyBlog 2013-04-25 00:00:00
How to fight a psychological scourge of the modern world. We worry about work, money, our health, our partners, children...the list goes on. And let's face it, there are plenty of things to worry about, and that's even before you've turned on the news. This means that when the mind is given an idle moment, often what it seems to fill it with is worrying. Worry can be useful if it's aimed at solving problems but less useful when it's just making us unhappy or interfering with our daily lives. The standard psychological methods for dealing with everyday worry are pretty simple. But just because they're simple and relatively well-known doesn't mean we don't need reminding to use them from time-to-time. So here is a five-step plan called "The Peaceful Mind" that was actually developed by psychologists specifically for people with dementia (Paukert et al., 2013). Because of this it has a strong focus on the behavioural aspects of relaxation and less on the cognitive. That suits our purposes here as the cognitive stuff (what you are worrying about) can be quite individual, whereas the behavioural things, everyone can do. | |
Comment: There are myriad relaxation techniques out there, but not many of them can attest to having not only immediate effects, but also having a highly practical application. Éiriú Eolas can assist with reducing stress, calming and focusing your mind and increasing a sense of connection with others in your community. It will also help you to have improved overall health, a stronger immune system and will also help you to heal emotional wounds; anything that may hinder or prevent you from leading a healthy and fulfilling life.
Visit the Éiriú Eolas site or participate on the forum to learn more about the scientific background of this program and then try it out for yourselves, free of charge | |
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| High Strangeness |
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Ben McPartland
A spooked family from a village in northern France were reportedly hospitalized after being hit by 'flying chairs' at their home, which they claim is haunted. Housing authorities in the area have agreed to move them elsewhere.The Local, France 2013-04-24 15:18:00
When it comes to paranormal activities, a freaked out French family living in a supposed haunted house in the French village of Mentque-Nortbécourt, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, claim to have seen it all. They've witnessed oranges floating across the room, violent attacks by soap trays and earlier this month members of the spooked family were hospitalized after being hit by flying chairs, the regional Voix du Nord newspaper reported on Wednesday. According to the local newspaper the family have reported that the strange happenings have been going on since last July. To prove they were not going mad they have brought in others from the village, including the mayor, to witness the events. "It's becoming dangerous," the mother told France 3 television. "My friend had to go to hospital this week after getting hit in the head by stones. It's serious." | |
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| Don't Panic! Lighten Up! |
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Augureye Express
2013-04-25 16:40:00
So there I was having just sat down to dinner in time to catch the beginning of the movie I've been waiting to see. I turned off the phone and computer so as to not have any unwanted distractions while I watched the latest new terminator franchise movie. The opening credits are just ending, which makes me wonder why they haven't changedthat along with everything else, It just makes no sense to splash all that writing all over the screen obscuring the picture I'm trying to see. The same exact lists of names are at the end of the movie, but the ego freaks know nobody would ever see them so they splatter them all over the screen at the beginning too. Damned annoying, if I wanted to read, I would have grabbed a book instead of the remote. But it's all good now as the credits are finished and the action has begun, and looks so damn real on the Double Dolby Plasma HD big screen BluRay home theater. The screen takes up the whole wall; so with the right lighting it just looks like you're looking out a window at real life and the people are all life size. Unfortunately so is the hapless fly buzzing around like some drunk kamikaze pilot trying to fly thru the window to get outside. As soon as that sucker works his way near me, it's gonna be 'instant universe' pal, and good riddance, cause flying bugs strafing the screen are as annoying as opening credits and political campaign ads. Here he comes now, boy is he in for a surprise. Most folks would just black flag that housefly, except what's poison for him is also poison for me so I never use the crap. all you need is a plastic spray bottle full of high test Windex, the stuff with the ammonia in it. When the insect in question is in range I just blast him with a couple shots, when the spray hits his little spiracles it's like liquid-X on a date-rape and he drops to the floor where it's so much easier to step on him. | |
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James Brooks
The Telegraph 2013-04-26 16:39:00
A list of the most chilling things children say to their parents has become a hit on the online-forum Reddit, gaining more than 10,000 comments in less than 24 hours. Titled 'What is the creepiest thing your young child has ever said to you?', most of the posts from the forum users - dubbed Redditors - concerned comments about death. "I was tucking in my two-year-old," said user UnfortunateBirthMark. "He said 'Goodbye dad.' I said, 'No we say good night.' He said, 'I know. But this time it's goodbye." "Had to check on him a few times to make sure he was still there," added the shocked parent. User Like-I-was-sayin commented: "My three-year-old daughter stood next to her new born brother and looked at him for a while then turned and looked at me and said, 'Daddy, it's a monster we should bury it." "Congratulations on giving birth to the antichrist," another Redditor replied. |
