Police: blast kills 7 at Iraqi political office…

Police and hospital officials say a bomb has exploded in a building used by a Sunni-backed political group north of Baghdad, killing at least seven people and wounding 10.

The officials say the bomb was hidden inside a building used by the Reform and Development Movement, a Sunni-backed political group that was founded last year and that won four seats in the last provincial council elections.

A police official says the blast killed at least seven, wounded 10 and damaged the building. A medic at the hospital in Baqouba, where the victims were taken, confirmed the numbers. Baqouba is the provincial capital of the Diyala province.
Read full article »»


GMO Scandal: The Long Term Effects of Genetically Modified Food on Humans…

by F. William Engdahl
Source: GlobalResearch

One of the great mysteries surrounding the spread of GMO plants around the world since the first commercial crops were released in the early 1990’s in the USA and Argentina has been the absence of independent scientific studies of possible long-term effects of a diet of GMO plants on humans or even rats. Now it has come to light the real reason. The GMO agribusiness companies like Monsanto, BASF, Pioneer, Syngenta and others prohibit independent research. 

An editorial in the respected American scientific monthly magazine, Scientific American, August 2009 reveals the shocking and alarming reality behind the proliferation of GMO products throughout the food chain of the planet since 1994. There are no independent scientific studies published in any reputed scientific journal in the world for one simple reason. It is impossible to independently verify that GMO crops such as Monsanto Roundup Ready Soybeans or MON8110 GMO maize perform as the company claims, or that, as the company also claims, that they have no harmful side effects because the GMO companies forbid such tests!

That’s right. As a precondition to buy seeds, either to plant for crops or to use in research study, Monsanto and the gene giant companies must first sign an End User Agreement with the company. For the past decade, the period when the greatest proliferation of GMO seeds in agriculture has taken place, Monsanto, Pioneer (DuPont) and Syngenta require anyone buying their GMO seeds to sign an agreement that explicitly forbids that the seeds be used for any independent research. Scientists are prohibited from testing a seed to explore under what conditions it flourishes or even fails. They cannot compare any characteristics of the GMO seed with any other GMO or non-GMO seeds from another company. Most alarming, they are prohibited from examining whether the genetically modified crops lead to unintended side-effects either in the environment or in animals or humans.

The only research which is permitted to be published in reputable scientific peer-reviewed journals are studies which have been pre-approved by Monsanto and the other industry GMO firms.

The entire process by which GMO seeds have been approved in the United States, beginning with the proclamation by then President George H.W. Bush in 1992, on request of Monsanto, that no special Government tests of safety for GMO seeds would be conducted because they were deemed by the President to be “substantially equivalent” to non-GMO seeds, has been riddled with special interest corruption. Former attorneys for Monsanto were appointed responsible in EPA and FDA for rules governing GMO seeds as but one example and no Government tests of GMO seed safety to date have been carried out. All tests are provided to the US Government on GMO safety or performance by the companies themselves such as Monsanto. Little wonder that GMO sounds to positive and that Monsanto and others can falsely claim GMO is the “solution to world hunger.”

In the United States a group of twenty four leading university corn insect scientists have written to the US Government Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) demanding the EPA  force a change to the company censorship practice. It is as if Chevrolet or Tata Motors or Fiat tried to censor comparative crash tests of their cars in Consumer Reports or a comparable consumer publication because they did not like the test results. Only this deals with the human and animal food chain. The scientists rightly argue to EPA that food safety and environment protection “depend on making plant products available to regular scientific scrutiny.” We should think twice before we eat that next box of American breakfast cereal if the corn used is GMO .

F. William Engdahl

is author of Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order. He may be contacted via his website at www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.

 

Related Articles:
The Codex Alimentarius and the WTO

GMO Scandal: The Long Term Effects of Genetically Modified Food on Humans

Codex Threatens Health of Billions

The Multiple Ways Monsanto is Putting Normal Seeds Out of Reach

The Documentation About “Codex Alimentarius”

Codex Alimentarius – How The Global Elite Will Control Your Food Supply

India: Harvest of Suicides

 


Citigroup’s $100 million banker…

The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that a top Citigroup trader is demanding that the bank follow through on a 2009 pay package estimated at $100 million. Andrew J. Hall, who runs Citigroup’s energy trading division, has threatened to quit should the bank fail to honor his pay deal in full.

According to the Journal, Hall, an energy speculator and top money-maker for the bank, received more than $100 million last year. Such nine-digit salaries exemplify the plundering of social resources that has become a hallmark of American capitalism and the American financial elite.

The crash of 2008 and Great Recession of 2009 have had no impact on the obscene levels of wealth that flow to a parasitic elite at the top of the economic ladder. On the contrary, the power of the aristocracy has, if anything, been enhanced as a result of the policies of the Obama administration, which has made the bailout of Wall Street at public expense its number one priority.

It would take a minimum wage worker, working full-time without vacations, 6,269 years to earn $100 million. Hall’s yearly pay is roughly equivalent to the annual wage of 2,000 workers in the US. He makes in an hour about the same amount most American workers earn in a year.
Read full article »»


Codex Threatens Health of Billions…

by Barbara Minton
Source: NaturalNews

Your right to eat healthy food and use supplements of your choice is rapidly vanishing, but every effort has been made to keep you in the dark about the coming nutricide. Codex Alimentarius is scheduled for full global implementation on December 31, 2009, and not a word has been spoken in main stream media about this threat to humanity. Yet, according to the projections based on figures from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), a minimum of 3 billion people will die from the Codex mandated vitamin and mineral guideline alone.

Former Nazi is father of contemporary Codex

Codex is the enemy of everyone except those who will profit from it. Codex has an association with those who committed crimes during the Nazi regime. At the end of World War II, the Nuremberg tribunal judged Nazis who had committed horrendous crimes against humanity and sentenced them to prison terms. One of those found guilty was the president of the megalithic corporation I.G. Farben, Hermann Schmitz. His company was the largest chemical manufacturing enterprise in the world, and had extraordinary political and economic power and influence with the Hitlerian Nazi state. Farben produced the gas used in the Nazi gas chambers, and the steel for the railroads built to transport people to their deaths.

While serving his prison term, Schmitz looked for an alternative to brute force for controlling people and realized that people could be controlled through their food supply. When he got out of prison, he went to his friends at the United Nations (UN) and laid out a plan to take over the control of food worldwide. A trade commission called Codex Alimentarius (Latin for food code) was re-created under the guise of it being a consumer protection commission. But Codex was never in the business of protecting people. It has always been about money and profits at the expense of people.

In 1962, the timetable was set for Codex to be fully implemented on a global level by December 31, 2009. Under Codex, committees were established to create guidelines on such topics as fish and fisheries, fats and oils, fruits and vegetables, ground nuts, nutrition, food for specialized uses, and vitamins and minerals. There were 27 committees in all, creating a huge bureaucracy. Under Codex there are over 4,000 guidelines and regulations on everything that can be put into your mouth with the exception of pharmaceuticals which are not regulated by Codex.

Codex is a weapon being used to reduce the level of nutrition worldwide

Codex is an industry dominated regulation setting organization, and as such has no legal standing. Participation in Codex is said to be voluntary. But Codex has risen to the level of de facto legal standing because Codex is administered by the WHO and FAO. They fund it and run it at the request of the UN. Since the WHO and FAO are supposed to be about health, there is conflict of interest. The committees of Codex work up guidelines, rules and regulations, and present them to a Codex commission for ratification. Once they are ratified and approved by consensus, they become mandatory standards for any country that is a member of the WHO.

Codex was accepted when the WTO was formed in 1994 as a means of harmonizing food standards globally for easy trade between countries. As a result, countries must harmonize with Codex if they want to have any standing in a trade dispute. When disputes arise and countries are pulled in to WTO, the one that is Codex compliant automatically wins, regardless of the merits of its case.

Codex has become a weapon to make every nation scurry to become compliant to its mandated decline in nutritional standards. Compliance in the U.S. will mark the end of its consumer protection laws. Codex will not serve consumers. Codex will serve the interests of the medical, pharmaceutical, biotechnology, chemical, and big agricultural industries.

Under Codex, nutrients are classified as poisons

The Dietary Substances Health and Education Act (DSHEA), was signed into law in 1994 for the purpose of ensuring that safe and appropriately labeled products would remain available to those who wanted to use them. In the findings associated with this law, Congress stated that there may be a positive relationship between sound dietary practice and good health, and a connection between dietary supplement use, reduced health-care expenses, and disease prevention. Under DSHEA, nutrients and herbs are classified as food. There is no upper limit set, and access is freely given. Americans are allowed to have any nutrients they want, because under English common law, anything that is not expressly forbidden is permitted.

Codex, on the other hand, is based on Napoleonic law and is much more restrictive. In 1994, the same year DSHEA was signed, Codex had nutrients declared to be toxic and poisonous. And as poisons, they claimed people must be protected from them through the use of toxicology and risk assessment, under which scientists test small doses on animals until they are able to discern an impact. They then take the first sign of the most minimal impact and divide this amount by 100 to establish a safety margin required from these poisons. This means that the largest dose of any nutrient allowed under Codex is 1/100th of the amount shown to produce the first discernable impact.

Nutrients allowed under Codex are limited to those on the positive list, expected to contain only 18 nutrients, one of them being fluoride. Although fluoride has no biological benefit whatsoever, it does make people complacent.

The Codex proponents now have several bills before Congress designed to overturn and get rid of DSHEA. Once this is accomplished, the U.S. will have been harmonized with the vitamin and mineral guidelines of codex. High potency, therapeutically effective, significant nutrients will then be illegal in the way that heroin is illegal. They will not even be available by prescription.

Codex supports toxic food additives, pesticides and GM foods

Codex poses a significant threat to the food supply, according to Dr. Robert Verkerk, founder and director of the Alliance for Natural Health. About 300 dangerous food additives that are mainly synthetic will be allowed under Codex, including aspartame, BHA, BHT, potassium bromate, tartrazine, and more. Dr. Verkerk is particularly concerned that no consideration has been given to potential risks associated with long-term exposure to mixtures of additives.

Codex sets limits for the dangerous industrial chemicals that can be used in food, but they are incredibly high, and the list of chemicals that can be used is long. In 2001, 176 countries including the U.S. got together and decided that 12 highly toxic organic chemicals, known as persistent organic pollutants (POPS), were so bad that they had to be banned. There are many more than 12 toxic chemicals used on food, but these 12 were unanimously declared to be the worst. Of these, 9 are pesticides.

Under Codex, 7 of the 9 forbidden POPS will again be allowed in the production of food. All together, Codex allows over 3,275 different pesticides, including those that are suspected carcinogens or endocrine disrupters. There is no consideration of the long-term effects of exposure to mixtures of pesticide residues in food.

Organic food governance will be dumbed down to suit the interests of large food producers. Various synthetic chemical additives and processing aids will be allowed, and food labeled as organic may be irradiated. Labeling will permit the use of hidden, non-organic ingredients.

Monsanto, a member of Codex, will benefit greatly as production of genetically modified (GM) foods are stepped up and more GM plants are given the green light. Terminator seeds will be approved for international trade. GM food animals will also be on the way.

Under Codex, every dairy animal can be treated with growth hormone, and all animals in the food chain will be treated with sub-clinical levels of antibiotics. Codex will lead to the required irradiation of all foods with the exception of those grown locally and sold raw.

Codex is food regulations that are in fact the legalization of mandated toxicity and under-nutrition. Of the 3 billion people initially expected to die as the result of the Codex vitamin and mineral guidelines, 2 billion of them will die from the preventable diseases that result from under-nutrition, such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and many others. Those who will live will be the wealthy elites who are able to somehow provide themselves with sources of clean food and other nutrients.

Codex is legalized genocide

Dr. Gregory Damato, Ph.D., writing for Natural News, has characterized Codex as “population control for money”. He sees Codex as run by the U.S. and controlled by the big pharmaceutical corporations and the likes of Monsanto with the purpose of reducing the population of the world to a level considered sustainable by those promulgating the New World Order. This would mean a reduction of approximately 93 percent of the current world population.

Once Codex standards are adopted there will be no turning back. When Codex compliance is instigated in any area, as long as the country remains a member of the WTO, those standards cannot be repealed, or altered in any way.

The time for modifying Codex guidelines is rapidly disappearing

Some hope remains. Over the years, the WTO has accepted Codex standards as presumptive evidence of the rules of trade between countries. However, several times in history, the WTO has refused to make Codex the single and only standard to be used in trade disputes. Under Codex`s own statutes, their guidelines are claimed to be “advisory”, and nations are able to set up their own guidelines as long as they are more restrictive than those of Codex.

Since compliance with Codex standards is simply presumptive evidence, and not finally determinative, a nation can opt out of the guidelines in an effort to protect its traditional foods and remedies. The Codex two step process is a legal strategy developed to help nations wanting to do this. Under step one, the country develops its own food and health guidelines that may be at variance with Codex guidelines. For example, it may be much stricter on the issues of toxins in the food supply or on the issue of genetically modified foods. It may require, for example, that companies using GM ingredients be required to indicate them on food labels. In countries that refuse to use GM foods, this can be indicated on their label too, so that people can make informed choices. The second step is to adopt a national law that implements those guidelines on a sound scientific basis.

Normally, in a trade dispute before the WTO, the country that has adopted Codex guidelines will be the winner of that dispute based on those guidelines being presumptive evidence. However, when countries have gone through the two step process to create their own guidelines, there is no such presumption, and the WTO will look at the science behind the guidelines.

In the U.S. the door is open to Codex

In 1995, the FDA issued a policy statement saying that international standards such as Codex would supersede U.S. laws governing all food. Under the Central American Free Trade Agreement, which is illegal under current U.S. law, but is legal under international law, the U.S. is required to conform to Codex as it stands on December 31, 2009, unless it creates its own guidelines and gets them approved under the two step process. Given current government sentiment, this seems unlikely. Besides, as guidelines are one-by-one chiseled into standards, time is running out.

Related Articles:
The Codex Alimentarius and the WTO

GMO Scandal: The Long Term Effects of Genetically Modified Food on Humans

Codex Threatens Health of Billions

The Multiple Ways Monsanto is Putting Normal Seeds Out of Reach

The Documentation About “Codex Alimentarius”

Codex Alimentarius – How The Global Elite Will Control Your Food Supply

India: Harvest of Suicides


Obama’s Military Is Spying on U.S. Peace Groups…

Anti-war activists in Olympia, Wash., have exposed U.S. Army spying and infiltration of their groups, as well as intelligence gathering by the U.S. Air Force, the federal Capitol Police and the Coast Guard.

The infiltration appears to be in direct violation of the Posse Comitatus Act preventing U.S. military deployment for domestic law enforcement, and may strengthen congressional demands for a full-scale investigation of U.S. intelligence activities, like the Church Committee hearings of the 1970s.

Brendan Maslauskas Dunn asked the City of Olympia for documents or e-mails about communications between the Olympia police and the military relating to anarchists, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) or the Industrial Workers of the World (Dunn’s union). Dunn received hundreds of documents. One e-mail contained reference to a “John J. Towery II,” who activists discovered was the same person as their fellow activist “John Jacob.”
Read full article »»


Half of US to receive swine flu shots…

About half of the US population is assigned a priority to receive swine flu vaccine with children and pregnant women at the front of the line.

US officials said on Wednesday they were unlikely to have enough vaccine for all of the people in the nation and that makes them recommend that children and pregnant women be among the 160 million people to first receive the shots.

The number of doses will hopefully stretch to completely encompass the target group, even if two doses are needed.
Read full article »»


‘War on terror’ reaches US citizens…

Washington has called on Americans to aid in counterterrorism activities — a move seen as a stepping stone to encroach upon civil liberties.

Speaking on national security issues, including the notion of ‘radicalized Americans’ on Wednesday, the US Homeland Security Secretary, Janet Napolitano, told a gathering at the key international relations think tank, Council on Foreign Relations, about the US administration’s intentions to engage ‘ordinary’ people in ‘scouting’ activities against rising ‘homegrown terrorism.’

The head of the Homeland Security Department urged Americans to join the White House bid in the collective battle against ‘terrorism.’

The 52 year-old former Arizona governor, who joined President Obama’s team earlier this year, said, “The terror threat is even more decentralized, more networked, and more adaptive than on 9/11,” adding, “We face a networked enemy, and we must meet it with a networked response.”
Read full article »»


Israeli tanks, bulldozers roll into Gaza…

The Israeli army has launched another cross border attack on the Gaza Strip, opening fire on villagers’ homes south of the impoverished sliver.

Israeli tanks and bulldozers rolled hundreds of meters deep into the strip on Wednesday and flattened cultivated fields in Al Qararra town in southern Gaza.

According to witnesses several Palestinian homes were damaged in the attack but there were no reports of casualties. Four tanks and two bulldozers conducted the attack.

Palestinian sources say the invading Israeli troops were forced to retreat after they faced resistance from Palestinian fighters.

Source: press tv


Made in a Lab – The Swine Flu Swindle…

part 1/2

part 2/2

 

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Fear, Intimidation & Media Disinformation: U.K Government is Planning Mass Graves in Case of H1N1 Swine Flu Pandemic

What are Obama’s investments in biotech companies apparently developing the “bird” and “swine” flu vaccine?

Big Pharma: Baxter Files Swine Flu Vaccine Patent a Year Ahead of Outbreak

Charges For Conspiracy Against Mankind

Obama gets billions for ‘pandemic’ Swine Flu

Swine Flu Outbreak Or Bioterrorism And Intent To Commit Mass Murder?

Media sensationalism, corporate power and the swine flu outbreak

Swine Flu: Who Profits?

Swine Flu Created in Lab as Bio-Weapon?

As Swine Flu Spreads, Conspiracy Theories of Laboratory Origins Abound

Who Will Profit from the Deadly Flu This Time?

UK prepares mass graves for swine flu victims

Swine flu drug increases stroke risk

VIDEO – Swine Flu vaccine Baxter linked to Dyncorp´s mercs H1N1 patents

VIDEO –  Made in a Lab – The Swine Flu Swindle

VIDEO – ‘Swine flu virus began life in lab’

Mandatory Swine Flu Vaccine Alert

VIDEO – Flashback: 1976 Swine Flu Scam

VIDEO – The Swine Flu Fiasco (CBC, 1983)

VIDEO – Mexican Flu Outbreak 2009: SPECIAL REPORT by Dr Leonard Horowitz


International Movements Breaking the Siege on Gaza…

Since June 2007 the Israeli government has imposed almost complete closure over the Gaza Strip. The siege prevents nearly all movement of people or goods to and from the coastal region with only minimal amounts of humanitarian provisions inconsistently allowed in. With the exception of a small amount of carnations allowed out earlier this year, there has been a virtual ban on all exports from Gaza since 2007. A quick socio-economic glimpse of Gaza includes agricultural losses totaling US $30 million and more than 40,000 jobs for the 2007/2008 season, the suspension of 98% of industrial operations, and more than 80% of Gaza’s population is now dependent on humanitarian aid from international aid providing agencies.

Closure of Gaza and the West Bank has intermittently been imposed since 1991. While Israel prevents movement and access in the name of temporary security measures, the regularity and extent of these mechanisms, particularly since the Oslo process, represents an institutionalized policy of closure. Israel’s current siege on Gaza reflects an unprecedented and severe application of the closure policy. In the past year internationals have tried to break the siege on Gaza by bringing critical medical supplies and other humanitarian goods into Gaza.

While the world’s most powerful and influential states stand back and watch the complete collapse of Gaza’s economy and livelihood of its population, citizens around the world are joining Palestinians in various forms to break the siege on Gaza.
Read full article »»


Obama ignores torture…

by Helen Thomas
Source: Timesunion.com

Secrecy is endemic in all governments. It goes with the turf, especially if their leaders hope to hide illegal or immoral behavior, such as torture of foreign prisoners.

Many Americans heaved a sigh of relief last January when President Barack Obama banned the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

It made the administration look more humane than the Bush-Cheney team. But that is not the whole story.

Obama left unaddressed the possibility of torture in secret foreign prisons under our control as in Abu Ghraib in Iraq or Bagram in Afghanistan, not to mention the ‘black sites” sponsored by our foreign clients in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel, Thailand and other countries.

“The United States will not torture,” Obama said in his directive. But he has been silent on the question of whether the U.S. would help others do the torturing.

Members of Congress knew a lot about U.S. torture practices. But Republicans loyal to the Bush administration and Democrats, too, played along and kept silent at the horror of it all.

Why did no bells ring for the U.S. lawmakers — particularly those privy to the brutality — when briefed on the abusive treatment of the captives. Did they owe more allegiance to the CIA than to the honor of our country?

There are hair-raising reports of methods that Americans — including private contractors — have used to coerce information from our prisoners.

They include slamming a prisoner against a wall; denying him sleep and food; waterboarding him under so-called enhanced interrogation; and keeping him in a crate filled with insects.

I remember when President Ronald Reagan, marveling at the courage of American soldiers, used to say: “Where do we get such men?” And I have to ask: “Where did we get such people who would inflict so much pain and ruthlessness on others?”

William Rivers Pitt, a best-selling author who wrote “The Greatest Sedition is Silence,” recently raised the emotional question of whether U.S. adoption of torture has debased the international standards for treatment of prisoners and that our enemies may now feel that they can torture Americans. Pitt specifically expressed concern about Army Pvt. Bowe Bergdahl, who was captured by the Taliban in Afghanistan last month.

American military leaders had warned President Bush over and over that U.S. torture of prisoners could boomerang against our troops. But he would not listen.

Obama has blocked publication of pictures of the harsh treatment of prisoners from our two ongoing wars — in Iraq and Afghanistan — but the word still gets around.

 

Helen Thomas’ e-mail address hthomas@hearstdc.com.


Bribery and fraud at heart of defense contracting work in Iraq and Afghanistan…

(WMR) — WMR has learned from a knowledgeable contractor who served in Iraq and Afghanistan that a number of large U.S. defense contractors have been involved in questionable deals to land major contracts in countries that made up the “Coalition of the Willing” that invaded and occupied Iraq.

The companies named by the contractor include Booz Allen of McLean, Virginia, where Donald Rumsfeld’s Comptroller Dov Zakheim took a job after resigning in 2004; Lockheed Martin; and VSE Corporation of Alexandria, Virginia. In December 2003, a Government Accountability Office (GAO) audit concluded that there was $1.6 billion in lost funds from the war in Iraq and on information technology contracts.

VSE provided “support services” to the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Read full article »»


Global warming is the new religion of First World urban elites…

Geologist Ian Plimer takes a contrary view, arguing that man-made climate change is a con trick perpetuated by environmentalists…
by Jonathan Manthorpe
Source: The Vancouver Sun

Ian Plimer has outraged the ayatollahs of purist environmentalism, the Torquemadas of the doctrine of global warming, and he seems to relish the damnation they heap on him.

Plimer is a geologist, professor of mining geology at Adelaide University, and he may well be Australia’s best-known and most notorious academic.

Plimer, you see, is an unremitting critic of “anthropogenic global warming” — man-made climate change to you and me — and the current environmental orthodoxy that if we change our polluting ways, global warming can be reversed.

It is, of course, not new to have a highly qualified scientist saying that global warming is an entirely natural phenomenon with many precedents in history. Many have made the argument, too, that it is rubbish to contend human behaviour is causing the current climate change. And it has often been well argued that it is totally ridiculous to suppose that changes in human behaviour — cleaning up our act through expensive slight-of-hand taxation tricks — can reverse the trend.

But most of these scientific and academic voices have fallen silent in the face of environmental Jacobinism. Purging humankind of its supposed sins of environmental degradation has become a religion with a fanatical and often intolerant priesthood, especially among the First World urban elites.

But Plimer shows no sign of giving way to this orthodoxy and has just published the latest of his six books and 60 academic papers on the subject of global warming. This book, Heaven and Earth — Global Warming: The Missing Science, draws together much of his previous work. It springs especially from A Short History of Plant Earth, which was based on a decade of radio broadcasts in Australia.

That book, published in 2001, was a best-seller and won several prizes. But Plimer found it hard to find anyone willing to publish this latest book, so intimidating has the environmental lobby become.

But he did eventually find a small publishing house willing to take the gamble and the book has already sold about 30,000 copies in Australia. It seems also to be doing well in Britain and the United States in the first days of publication.

Plimer presents the proposition that anthropogenic global warming is little more than a con trick on the public perpetrated by fundamentalist environmentalists and callously adopted by politicians and government officials who love nothing more than an issue that causes public anxiety.

While environmentalists for the most part draw their conclusions based on climate information gathered in the last few hundred years, geologists, Plimer says, have a time frame stretching back many thousands of millions of years.

The dynamic and changing character of the Earth’s climate has always been known by geologists. These changes are cyclical and random, he says. They are not caused or significantly affected by human behaviour.

Polar ice, for example, has been present on the Earth for less than 20 per cent of geological time, Plimer writes. Plus, animal extinctions are an entirely normal part of the Earth’s evolution.

(Plimer, by the way, is also a vehement anti-creationist and has been hauled into court for disrupting meetings by religious leaders and evangelists who claim the Bible is literal truth.)

Plimer gets especially upset about carbon dioxide, its role in Earth’s daily life and the supposed effects on climate of human manufacture of the gas. He says atmospheric carbon dioxide is now at the lowest levels it has been for 500 million years, and that atmospheric carbon dioxide is only 0.001 per cent of the total amount of the chemical held in the oceans, surface rocks, soils and various life forms. Indeed, Plimer says carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, but a plant food. Plants eat carbon dioxide and excrete oxygen. Human activity, he says, contributes only the tiniest fraction to even the atmospheric presence of carbon dioxide.

There is no problem with global warming, Plimer says repeatedly. He points out that for humans periods of global warming have been times of abundance when civilization made leaps forward. Ice ages, in contrast, have been times when human development slowed or even declined.

So global warming, says Plimer, is something humans should welcome and embrace as a harbinger of good times to come.

jmanthorpe@vancouversun.com


UK Government to be Sued For Involvement in CIA Rendition Program…

The British government is being sued for the first time over its complicity in the operation of the CIA rendition program.

A former detainee at Guantanamo Bay, now living back in Pakistan, claims the CIA plane that took him to be interrogated in Egypt stopped to refuel on the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, where the U.S. has an air base.

Mohamed Saad Iqbal Madni is filing a lawsuit in the High Court in London that alleges the stopover makes the British complicit in the torture he received at the hands of the Egyptians and Americans – and, moreover, the British government now has a duty to help him win justice.
Read full article »»


Israel’s Lieberman Calls for UN Sanctions on Iran…

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said he was in favor of tougher U.N. sanctions aimed at forcing Iran to halt its nuclear program, which he described as a “threat” to the world.

“We see that the situation with Iran is really a big threat not only for Israel but for (the) entire world,” Lieberman said during a visit to Peru, part of a 10-day swing through Latin America aimed in part at countering Tehran’s growing influence in the region.

“If this regime will achieve nuclear power it’s a real threat. We need to stop Iranians,” he said.

“We think the best solution is tough sanctions in the U.N. and we hope this meeting in U.N. in September can bring a real change in the Iranian problem.”

Iran is already subject to three sets of U.N. sanctions following its refusal to heed repeated ultimatums from the Security Council to halt sensitive nuclear work.
Read full article »»


US: Military planning for possible H1N1 outbreak…

WASHINGTON — The U.S. military wants to establish regional teams of military personel to assist civilian authorities in the event of a significant outbreak of the H1N1 virus — the swine flu — this fall, according to Defense Department officials.

The proposal is awaiting final approval from Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

The officials would not be identified because the proposal from the U.S. Northern Command’s Gen. Victor Renuart has not been approved by the secretary.

Source: CNN


Israeli leader calls Obama ‘slave’…

Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual leader of Israel’s Shas Party, has called US President Barack Obama “a slave” who seeks to rule the world and control Tel Aviv’s affairs.

“American insidiousness tells us to build here and not to build there as though we were slaves working for them,” he said. “We live in a time when slaves are governing us and are trying to control us.”

The racist remarks were made during Yosef’s weekly sermon on Saturday during which he protested the Obama administration’s policy to exert pressure on Tel Aviv over its settlement expansion.

“We are not employees of the Americans… and Israel does not work for the United States,” he shouted.
Read full article »»


Gordon Brown proclaims the army’s “success” in Afghanistan, but 52% of the British public knows what failure looks like…

22 British soldiers have been killed in the last four weeks, the highest number in any month since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, despite Britain deploying 9000 troops, with some of the most devastating weaponry on the planet, against less than 500 Taliban — many having fled or “melted back into the local population” — who were armed with the equivalent of muskets and crude but deadly homemade bombs.

It seems quite possible that in the last four weeks more British soldiers have been killed or injured than their Taliban opponents, hence the reluctance of the military commanders to give any figures for insurgent casualties.

Medics treating the injured at the British army’s field hospital say they have been stretched to breaking point and they are seeing injuries the like of which they have never experienced before.

Predictably, with a total of 20,000 US and British troops in Helmand – an area about the size of the Isle of Wight – the Taliban and other groups resisting occupation moved into areas of Afghanistan which had previously been relatively quiet, but in recent weeks have seen an upsurge in violence.

This is what Gordon Brown describes as “success”. And of course much of the mainstream media, acting as stenographer for the government and Britain’s armed forces, dutifully filled the newspapers and air waves with the same story.
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Bomb kills eight Afghan security guards…

At least eight Afghan security guards have been killed when their vehicles struck remote-controlled roadside bombs in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan.

According to Afghan interior Ministry, the “two cars, belonging to Humayon Security Company, were struck by remote control mine in Yakhchal area of Grishik district, leaving eight guards dead and four others injured, all Afghans.”

Afghan authorities have blamed the attack on Taliban militants.

The roadside bombing came a day after Gordon Brown announced the end of the five-week offensive, which, he claimed, managed to push back the Taliban and break the chain of terror.
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West Bank Settlers Top 300,000 as Growth Continues: 11 New Outposts Set Up in Past Two Days…

According to the Israeli military, the population of settlers in the West Bank passed 300,000 for the first time this year, and sits at 304,569 as of the end of June, an increase of 2.3% in the past six months. Usually growth rates are even higher in the second half of the year. The number does not include some 200,000 more settlers living in East Jerusalem.

The announcement comes less than a week after a study by an Israeli think tank showed the heavy subsidies of the settlements by the national government were causing disproportionate increases in the populations of the outposts, at a time when Israel is under increasing pressure to halt their growth.

The Netanyahu government has resisted the calls however, and insists growth will continue. The settlers have considerable sway in Israel’s right-wing government and today held a massive anti-US rally in Jerusalem condemning President Obama’s criticism of the settlements.

The government has tried to salve international criticism with the promise to dismantle the smaller, illegal outposts in the West Bank, but over the past two days it is reported that 11 new outposts were set up by the militant “Youth for Israel” movement, which seemed to consist of little more than a handful of huts set up by teenagers. The Israeli military, however, declined to stop the construction of the new outposts.

Source: Antiwar.com