Hundreds of New testament text burned in Israel

Remember when the Nazis did it too?



Hundreds of New testament text burned in Israel

(CNN) -- Police in Israel are investigating the burning of hundreds of New Testaments in a city near Tel Aviv, an incident that has alarmed advocates of religious freedom.

Investigators plan to review photographs and footage showing "a fairly large" number of New Testaments being torched this month in the city of Or-Yehuda, a police spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld, said Wednesday.

News accounts in Israel have quoted Uzi Aharon, the deputy mayor of Or-Yehuda, as saying he organized students who burned several hundred copies of the New Testament. The deputy mayor gave interviews to Israeli radio and television stations after word of the incident surfaced about two weeks ago.

Soon he was talking with Russian, Italian and French television stations, "explaining to their highly offended audiences back home how he had not meant for the Bibles to be burned, and trying to undo the damage caused by the news (and photographs) of Jews burning New Testaments," The Jerusalem Post reported.

Aharon told CNN on Wednesday that he collected New Testaments and other "Messianic propaganda" that had been handed out in the city but that he did not plan or organize a burning. Instead, he said, three teenagers set fire to a pile of New Testaments while he was not present. Once he learned what was going on, he said, he stopped the burning.

The episode has worried defenders of Israel's minority population of Messianic Jews, who consider themselves Jewish but believe in the divinity of Jesus, as do Christians. It also has concerned evangelical Christians in North America, Europe and Asia, who visit Israel by the hundreds of thousands.

Calev Myers, an attorney for Messianic Jews in Israel, told CNN he plans to file a formal complaint Thursday with the national police at the request of the United Christian Council in Israel, an umbrella organization for a few dozen Christian organizations outside Israel.

"I hope the people who are responsible for breaking the law will be indicted and prosecuted," he said.

About 200 New Testaments were burned, Aharon said, but he saved another 200.

His goal was to stop attempts to distribute Christian literature in the city, he said.

Myers, however, said he doubts that Messianic Jewish missionaries distributed the New Testaments. He said it's not clear how the volumes found their way into homes in Or-Yehuda.

The deputy mayor told CNN he respects the New Testament and would not do what has been done to the Jews in the past -- a reference to Nazi burning of Jewish and other books in the 1930s, and other occasions when Jewish texts, including sacred ones, were burned.

Myers said his complaint will ask the authorities to investigate possible violations of two Israeli laws. One forbids the destruction or desecration of any religious icon or item that a group holds sacred. Another bans people from speaking publicly in a way that offends or humiliates a certain religion.

Both laws are meant to prevent people from inciting religious violence, he said.

The burning controversy has unfolded against the backdrop of other instances that Myers cited as examples of discrimination against Messianic Jews in Israel.

About two months ago, the teenage son of a Messianic pastor was severely injured when a package delivered to his home exploded, Myers said. In addition, several rabbis urged students to boycott further participation in a Bible competition after they learned that one winner -- a high-school student in Israel -- was a Messianic Jew, he said.

Groups such as the Anti-Defamation League have sharply criticized the burning of New Testaments.

"We condemn this heinous act as a violation of the basic Jewish principles and values," said Rabbi Eric J. Greenburg, director of interfaith policy for the Anti-Defamation League. "It is essential that we respect the sacred texts of other faiths. The Jewish people can never forget the tragic burning of sacred Jewish volumes at many points in history."

"While there may be legitimate concerns of proselytizing, these matters must be addressed through the proper legal channels," Greenburg said in a statement. "It is unacceptable and not legitimate to burn someone else's sacred texts."

Israel wipes out Palestinian food bowl, kills farmer

Israel wipes out Palestinian food bowl, kills farmer

May 21, 2008

GAZA, (PIC)-- The agriculture ministry in the PA legitimate government in Gaza Strip asserted on Wednesday that the IOF troops had bulldozed vast agricultural areas in the eastern sector of the Gaza Strip which is considered the food basket of the 1.5 million Palestinians living there.

According to a report issued by the ministry and a copy of which was obtained by the PIC, the Israeli occupation army uprooted fruitful trees and destroyed greenhouses and artisan wells in Shokeh and Sofa villages, east of Khan Younis city over the past week in addition to ruining poultry farms estimated at 1.5 million dollars.

The report, furthermore, added that Palestinian farmers in Qarara and Al-Buraij areas, east of Deir Al-Balah city, weren’t able to reach and cultivate their farms for fear that the IOF troops stationed opposite to their farms could shoot and kill them "in cold blood" any time.

Palestinian farmer Ali Al-Dahdouh, 32, was killed with IOF bullets while cultivating his farm in Juhr Al-Deik area, east of the tiny Strip, a couple of days ago.

Raising the alarm, the ministry warned that the brutal IOF practices against the Palestinian people and land were badly affecting the food basket of the Gaza Strip in addition to jeopardizing all aspects of life there.

For its part, the Authority of Environment Quality (AEQ) in the Gaza Strip seconded the warning of the PA agriculture ministry, warning further that cutting of trees and using them for cocking due to the severe shortage in the cocking gas as a result of the Israeli embargo would badly affect the Gaza Strip's ecology, and would contribute to increasing the temperature there.

The Israeli occupation government had been imposing a wing-clipping comprehensive economic blockade on the populated Strip that had, so far, reaped the lives of more than 160 Palestinian patients suffering of chronic diseases but were banned by the IOA from receiving medical treatment outside the beleaguered Gaza hospitals.

In this concern, the AEQ urged the international community and all concerned organizations to immediately intervene and pressure the occupation to stop its aggression against the Gaza Strip and its people.

Anti-semitism; a Jewish fraud?

Anti-Semitism; a Jewish fraud?

When you have built a house of cards, it is important that none of the cards is removed or of course the house will fall. Lets say for example you represent that the ace of spades in your deck is that the Jews of Modern Israel are somehow genetically related to the Judeans of the Bible. For this reason you assert a claim to Palestine. The king of clubs that Palestine was a land without a people and that modern Jews were a people without a land(pay no attention to those refugee camps). The queen of hearts that your people are long suffering, even more than the run of the mill person burned at the stake for not embracing Jesus in the Middle Ages. The jack of diamonds that Israel sitting on it's nuclear stockpile and modern weaponry provided by its American benefactor is somehow threatened by it's neighbors. And well you get the idea. If anyone challenges any of these assertions you have a problem. You need a term that will strike terror in the hearts of any of those who would actually challenge your fraudulent assertions. A term that would come to represent something far worse than racism, murder, rape or child molesting. That term....anti-Semitism. Only with control of the printing presses(publishing houses), air waves(all television networks) and the big screen(Hollywood of course) however can you conceal the fraud of all frauds. You have stolen another's religion, identity, land and other property and hell now you even now claim the falafel as your own. If you are now squirming in your chair after reading this post, congratulations your Zionist socialization is complete. Oh and one more thing. You cannot be a patriotic American if you don't love Israel.

The term anti-Semitism is just one more fraudulent card in Israel's house of cards. The term Semite is a reference to those who speak Semitic languages( Arabic dialects e.g. Hebrew Aramaic, etc.) Most of the original inhabitants of modern Israel spoke Yiddish, their native Eastern European tongue(where they ended up after their diaspora from Khazaria). The original Semites of Palestine (the real ancestors of Jesus) are now being brutalized, oppressed and ethnically cleansed from their homeland by a group of White Eastern European Pretenders (white people just like many of the rest of us but with a different set of religious delusions). But if you notice you are an "anti-Semite". Do you see how it works now?

America Don't Worry...

America Don't Worry, Israel is behind you

Nadia Hassan















I remember a few years ago, walking through the wonderful narrow streets of the occupied Old city of Jerusalem, seeing a small shop managed by an old Palestinian man who was selling souvenirs to the tourists. I entered the shop, not because I wanted to buy something, I cannot be a tourist in my own land (despite the Zionist entity that is occupying our land, allowing me to enter there just as a tourist) but because I was captured by the smell of fresh coffee that beckoned me from inside the shop. As I know my people, I knew that as soon as I set foot inside the shop I would be welcomed with this hot and stimulating beverage. I was right, after just a minute I was enjoying my drink and having a nice talk with the man. I made the rounds of his shop, looking at the hundreds small plates, pictures, colorful fabrics of all kinds of imaginative maaterials and very original T-shirts hanging on one of the wall. T-shirts with pictures of Jerusalem, with Holy Land slogans, with IDF motifs (always wondering who would buy one of those!) and I saw one that scared me the most because of its realism. It was a simple T-shirt with the slogan: “America Don’t worry, Israel is behind you!”

When I left the shop I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I didn’t get it, I was thinking that the right way to say it is “Israel Don’t worry, America is behind you!” not the opposite way. Anyway, after a few minutes of confusing thoughts about which comes first, the egg or the chicken, I forget the whole thing and continued my walk in the Old city of Jerusalem.

This happened 3 years ago.

Today, watching the news and thinking of what is going on in the Arab Homeland, this slogan came to my mind out of the blues and I started to realize the real meaning of it.

The recent events in Lebanon and in recent months in the Occupied Palestinian Territory of Gaza Strip proves that certain international and regional powers are continuing efforts to implement their “master plan” of chaos for the region as the first step to the greater plan of making their domination permanent.

This is not a conspiracy theory as many are saying, it's just the result of decades of efforts from the imperialistic powers to gain control of certain strategic areas in the Arab Homeland and control Arab oil, monopolizing their market. For that reason, these incidents are not limited just to Lebanon. Sometimes we get so overwhelmed with the huge amount of propaganda that we are not able to see the whole picture, the clear chain of events with similar patterns from the Gaza Strip to Baghdad, Somalia, Darfur and to Beirut. Some elements can be different in each case, but they have one thing in common, the master colonialist project of the United States and the high security risks that these events cause to its main settlement in the region, Israel. These places are strategically interconnected and the success of the US plan in the region depends on being able to control them.

Today, US-led imperialism is threatening national sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries. All recent interventions of imperialistic powers in different regions have resulted in divisions of countries and separation of peoples by ongoing wars. Kosovo and Iraq are just examples of the implementation of “divide and rule” policy of the imperialists. And the new states that are the outcome of these policies are not more than controlled states which serve as bases for imperialistic activities.

The Arab region is not an exception and as long as the Arab ruling classes are either unable to protest or are participating in these externally designed and oriented plans, the only alternative will be popular resistance. Resistance movements of any kind are a just threat for this goal.

The pro-imperialistic Arab regimes understand that their position are extremely fragile since they don’t have the support of the masses, and they compromised their own people’s sovereignty and development for the sake of their own survival. Adel Samara, in his book “Epidemic of Globalization” describes this situation very well: “As long as each regime is guarding a set of foreign interests inside the Arab Homeland, that regime has no alternative but to oppress the popular classes whose interests are in contradiction with the ruling comprador and its western capitalist allies. These interests vary from the plunder of raw material and oil to an open market where the regime becomes the agent that saturates it with foreign products and permits the spread of multinational corporations with their branches in many Arab countries chasing cheap and oppressed labor“.

To protect these interests and to guarantee their share, the trickle-down reward, Arab regimes suppressed all forms of liberties and the current situation in Lebanon is just an example of that. Siniora’s government didn’t have another option than to back down the parliament decision of last week to make the communication system of Hezbollah illegal due to pressure from the supporters of the resistance, but immediately (as if on cue) the Arab League foreign ministers expressed support for Siniora, despite the fact that they were aware of the root causes of Lebanon’s crisis.

Israel is not standing on the sidelines in what is going on here, in fact it is very afraid that any resistance movement against its own expansionist and imperialist plans can bring about control of a portion of what it considers its own domains. Israel is the central Key in this puzzle due to its strategic location. For that reason, Israel is also doing its part of the deal calling the International Community to take a look at the situation in Lebanon and in the Gaza Strip and do whatever it can to stop this frightening crisis to the security of its own state. Indeed, it insists that the International Community consider only the security interests of Israel alone as they attempt once again to convince us that religion and sectarian fights are the main reason for the disputes in the area. In doing so, they cover the political motivations and especially the economic interests involved in the whole process.

How funny is that? Calling upon the International Community to take an action for a state which is ‘celebrating’ 60 years of occupation of others’ land, 60 years of dispossession of other people, 60 years of terror against civilians and 60 years of neglecting every single thing the international community has asked for.

If the US and all the western pro-imperialistic governments for that matters lose control over this area, the whole plan can come to an end, since they are not in a position to attack another country and take the control of all the natural resources without some kind of convincing explanation for doing so, or at least not without a propagandist campaign prior to the invasion to make it look like a “rescue plan” from the jaws of evil. What made the US hesitate in launching new occupation is Iraqi resistance, which has truly worn down the US army. This is another reason why the target of all formal regimes in the west is the Resistance.

Escalation of tensions and conflicts in Lebanon and Palestine is in the American regime’s best interests because they know that no matter what happens, Israel is there for doing what they have so far been doing better than anyone else: oppressing others, occupying, attacking and killing in “security’s name”, everything that is needed to make the master plan succeed. Anyway, they have more than 60 years’ experience doing just that.

Many Arabs like myself during those walks in the Old city of Jerusalem 3 years ago, developed a false thinking that the Jews control the US. This is a miserable way of thinking. Israel is the product of the interests and needs of the capitalist core, two centuries before the Zionist organization of Theodor Herzl was even founded. Israel is doing a job in the Arab Homeland; its role is functional. The last proof of that is the fact that, while Israel tried to end its aggression against Lebanon in 2006, given the unsuccessful campaign, the US ordered Israel to continue until its final defeat!

And yes, America Don´t worry, Israel is behind you!

Nadia Hasan is a Palestinian activist who was born in Chile and who lives between various nations of South America and the Middle East. Her site is Palestina Resiste! and she dreams of the day when all Palestinians can exercise their Right of Return.

U. S Soldiers are chemically modified

U. S Soldiers are chemically modified


Armed with potent drugs and new technology, a dangerous breed of soldiers are being trained to fight America's future wars.

Amphetamines and the military first met somewhere in the fog of WWII, when axis and allied forces alike were issued speed tablets to head off fatigue on the battlefield.

More than 60 years later, the U.S. Air Force still doles out dextro-amphetamine to pilots whose duties do not afford them the luxury of sleep.

Through it all, it seems, the human body and its fleshy weaknesses keep getting in the way of warfare. Just as in the health clinics of the nation, the first waypoint in the military effort to redress these foibles is a pharmaceutical one. The catch is, we're really not that great at it. In the case of speed, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency itself notes a few unwanted snags like addiction, anxiety, aggression, paranoia and hallucinations. For side-effects like insomnia, the Air Force issues "no-go" pills like temazepam alongside its "go" pills. Psychosis, though, is a wee bit trickier.

Far from getting discouraged, the working consensus appears to be that we just haven't gotten the drugs right yet. In recent years, the U.S., the UK and France -- among others -- have reportedly been funding investigations into a new line-up of military performance enhancers. The bulk of these drugs are already familiar to us from the lists of substances banned by international sporting bodies, including the stimulant ephedrine, non-stimulant "wakefulness promoting agents" like modafinil (aka Provigil) and erythropoietin, used to improve endurance by boosting the production of red blood cells.

As the chemical interventions grow bolder and more sophisticated, we should not be surprised that some are beginning to cast their eyes beyond droopy eyelids and sore muscles. Chief among the new horizons is the alluring notion of psychological prophylactics: drugs used to pre-empt the often nasty effects of combat stress on soldiers, particularly that perennial veteran's bugaboo known as post-traumatic stress disorder syndrome. In the U.S., where roughly two-fifths of troops returning from combat deployments are presenting serious mental health problems, PTSD has gone political in form of the Psychological Kevlar Act, which would direct the Secretary of Defense to implement "preventive and early-intervention measures" to protect troops against "stress-related psychopathologies."

Proponents of the "Psychological Kevlar" approach to PTSD may have found a silver bullet in the form of propranolol, a 50-year-old beta-blocker used on-label to treat high blood pressure, and off-label as a stress-buster for performers and exam-takers. Ongoing psychiatric research has intriguingly suggested that a dose of propranolol, taken soon after a harrowing event, can suppress the victim's stress response and effectively block the physiological process that makes certain memories intense and intrusive. That the drug is cheap and well tolerated is icing on the cake.

Propranolol has already been dubbed the "mourning after pill," largely by those who argue that its military use amounts to medicating away pangs of conscience. For the time being, though, we can set aside our dystopian visions of zombies with guns, since the tranquilizing effects of beta-blockers are unlikely to permit their widespread use on the battlefield. But pharmacology moves more swiftly with each passing year -- especially when helped along by defense-research dollars -- and we may need to revive those visions sooner than we think.

The Mediated Soldier

In the new model army, brute force and viscera are out. Cutting edge gadgetry, omniscient surveillance and precision long-distance termination is in. What motivates it all is the type of war we fear we'll be fighting.

On this, the strategists have spoken: with Iraq and Afghanistan as the testing grounds, the conflicts of the future will be guerrilla wars, open-ended, with no battle lines, no rules of engagement and ambivalent or openly hostile civilian populations in which any man, woman or child can turn combatant.

In breeding a future soldier for these future wars, we will inevitably leave behind the mere rectification of human weakness and enter into the realm of the superhuman. Glimpses of this realm have already become commonplace in the form of ceramic-Kevlar body armor and night-vision goggles -- wizardry that transforms squishy pink men into bullet-proof creatures of the night.

Such magic will continue apace under the auspices of dozens of military development initiatives across the globe, creating a species known variously as the Future Force Warrior by the U.S., FIST by the British Army, Félin by the French. All are merely the human components of broader visionary projects for what has been called "the army after next," the most noteworthy of which being the U.S. Army's Future Combat Systems. With a budget clocking in at $160 billion or so, FCS is not just one of history's most costly weapons programs; it is an all-encompassing modernization program, one that will usher in a total re-imagining of the armed forces. What FCS and its kin have imagined for soldiers is a battlefield experience increasingly mediated by technology, insulated in a cocoon of "force multipliers" -- military parlance for anything that allows you to accomplish more with fewer personnel. In concrete terms, that translates into an array of tools designed to enhance lethality and survivability: next-generation sidearms; headsets that provide live command and control, detailed geographic data and the ability to fire around corners; smart suits equipped with ultralight nanotech armor, micro-climate conditioning, real-time health monitoring and even automated medical care like CPR and drug delivery. Also on the docket are robotic exoskeletons that allow the soldiers wearing them to carry hundreds of pounds -- even while running -- without breaking a sweat, as well as handheld imaging equipment that grants the ability to see targets through walls.

This is serious... whatever for? Israel, Oil and water?

U.S tortures prisoners-Jimmy Carter

U.S. tortures prisoners-Jimmy Carter, Former U.S president

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The United States tortures prisoners in violation of international law, former President Carter said Wednesday.

Former President Carter says the U.S. "has abandoned the basic principle of human rights."

"I don't think it. I know it," Carter told CNN's Wolf Blitzer.

"Our country for the first time in my life time has abandoned the basic principle of human rights," Carter said. "We've said that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to those people in Abu Ghraib prison and Guantanamo, and we've said we can torture prisoners and deprive them of an accusation of a crime to which they are accused."

Carter also said President Bush creates his own definition of human rights.

Carter's comments come on the heels of an October 4 article in The New York Times disclosing the existence of secret Justice Department memorandums supporting the use of "harsh interrogation techniques." These include "head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures," according to the Times.

The White House last week confirmed the existence of the documents but would not make them public.

Responding to the newspaper report Friday, Bush defended the techniques used, saying, "This government does not torture people."

Asked about Bush's comments, Carter said, "That's not an accurate statement if you use the international norms of torture as has always been honored -- certainly in the last 60 years since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was promulgated.

"But you can make your own definition of human rights and say we don't violate them, and you can make your own definition of torture and say we don't violate them."

After reading a transcript of Carter's remarks, a senior White House official said, "Our position is clear. We don't torture."

The official said, "It's just sad to hear a former president speak like that."

Carter also criticized some of the 2008 Republican presidential candidates, calling former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani "foolish" for his contention the United States should be open to use force on Iran.

"I hope that he doesn't become president and try to impose his conviction that we need to go to war with Iran," Carter said.

The Giuliani campaign declined to comment on Carter's criticism.

The former president didn't spare the rest of the GOP field either.

"They all seem to be outdoing each other in who wants to go to war first with Iran, who wants to keep Guantanamo open longer and expand its capacity -- things of that kind," Carter said.

"They're competing with each other to appeal to the ultra-right-wing, war-mongering element in our country, which I think is the minority of our total population."

Carter declined to say which Republican candidate he feared the most.

"If I condemn one of them, it might escalate him to the top position in the Republican ranks," he said.

Democratic Sens. Hillary Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois also drew Carter's criticism for refusing recently to pledge to withdraw all troops from Iraq by the end of their first terms if they win the presidency in 2008.

"I disagree with their basic premise that we'll still be there; I think the American people want out," Carter said. "If there is an unforeseen development where Iraqi people request American presence over a period of time I think that would possibly be acceptable, but that's not my personal preference."

My very own jewel on the Nile... thank you for speaking out, and may history reward you accordingly.

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3 years of Arab/Foreign Intel ruined-Zeevi

3 years of Arab/Foreign intel ruined-Zeevi
Aaron Zeevi Farkash

10/05/2008: The former head of Israel's intelligence Aaron Zeevi Farkash said that he had warned Washington against relying on its allies in Lebanon. "We advised the CIA not to rely on Walid Jumblatt or Saad Hariri because we tested them in 2006 and they proved helpless in the face of Hezbollah."
In an interview with Filkka-Israel site on the internet, Zeevi stressed "Israel has given Lebanese Forces (of Samir Geagea) men the best training and they will appear in any future confrontation. Lebanese Forces fighters will hold on much longer in Hezbollah's faces, but eventually they will be defeated."
The former intelligence chief said Tel Aviv and Washington are in a dilemma because "no force in Lebanon can strike Hezbollah and we are not ready yet to take this step. All the Americans can do is send some guards to the dwellings of Saniora, Jumblatt and Hariri."

When asked if the Americans are going to embark in Lebanon, Zeevi said that "this is what Condi told Saniora. He collapsed and accused Jumblatt of cowardice and fleeing from the battle. So she promised Saniora to get a presidential decree to send the Marines to central Beirut only to protect his headquarters."

The reporter asked Zeevi about the reason behind the failure of the assassination plot against Hezbollah's chief Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah on the 25th of April. "I don't know why, but killing Nasrallah was not impossible with the presence of thousands of Lebanese informers working with the Americans. Everything is lost now. Three years of intelligence efforts by international and Arab sides have gone overnight. Most intelligence agents have left Beirut and the Lebanese are no longer able to move under the cover of their daily mission, each according to his rank in some security services. The west has lost a lot after Nasrallah surprised their allies," Zeevi said.

On the assassination of top resistance commander martyr Imad Moghniyeh, Zeevi revealed that a "Lebanese side had provided Israel with the picture of Moghniyeh showing his real face. Only one person knew who (Hajj Radwan) was. He is a Lebanese leader whose security bodyguards were trained by Moghniyeh."
When the reporter asked: Is he Jumblatt?
Zeevi said: No comment.

AIDS: The 'perfect' disease

AIDS: The 'perfect' disease

The AIDS epidemic, caused by a mysterious monkey immunosuppressive virus that suddenly crossed into humans and caused an epidemic of cancer, did not catch the entire medical community off guard. Quite the contrary. For decades prior to the AIDS outbreak, cancer virus researchers had been creating, manipulating, studying and testing immunosuppressive viruses with selective immune system damaging and cancer-causing properties remarkably similar to AIDS. Moreover, several of these immunosuppressive viruses (including those from monkeys and humans) were being grown in human cell cultures shortly before the AIDS epidemic broke out in humans.

These unique viruses were created as part of the U.S. government’s war on cancer in a crash program to develop vaccines. These experimental immunosuppressive viruses, which were isolated from mice, cats, cows and monkeys in the 1960s and 1970s, were successfully used to destructively manipulate the immune systems of a variety of lab animals as a means of controllably increasing susceptibility to cancer. This research was conducted so that scientists could learn more about precisely how immune system dysfunction contributed to cancer growth. The innovative research with these novel immunosuppressive viruses provided valuable information on the role that various components of the immune system played in cancer prevention and aided the development of various means of manipulating the immune system to prevent cancer in animals.

Interestingly, the selective immune system damage caused by the AIDS epidemic in humans is supplying cancer researchers with invaluable data eerily similar to that which they obtained in the 1970s by deliberately injecting the immunosuppressive viruses they created in animal test subjects. This is so because the cancer epidemic initiated by AIDS is providing observant researchers a wealth of invaluable data about how cancer grows, from its earliest to its latest phases, in human subjects with selectively impaired immune systems. By constructing huge databases on how cancer grows in AIDS patients as their immune systems systematically degrade, researchers are quietly finding such powerful clues as to the mechanisms behind the increased susceptibility to cancer in human AIDS patients, especially those cancers thought to be caused by viruses...that many are now confidently predicting the imminent development of human cancer vaccines. Such a phenomenal development would mirror similar progress made earlier in animal cancer research with immunosuppressive and cancer viruses.

It is at this point that a terrible question must be asked: Could HIV, and the epidemic of human cancers and death resulting from it, be the result of a sinister cross-species experiment with a monkey cancer virus designed as a means of intentionally inducing cancer in human subjects as a research and diagnostic tool in the development of human cancer vaccines? If so, was such an experiment modeled after decades of similar animal experiments in which well-characterized immunosuppressive viruses similar to HIV were injected in test subjects so that cancer researchers could monitor the progress of induced cancer growth as the animals’ immune systems deteriorated? And was this why researchers were growing monkey and human immunosuppressive viruses in human cell cultures, determining the pathogenic effects on T-cells, shortly before HIV began to destroy T-cells in the immune systems of human populations?

Unfortunately, there are numerous disturbing precedents indicating that cancer researchers would do this very thing. These precedents supply deeply disquieting evidence consistent with the terrifying hypothesis that the AIDS epidemic, caused by a simian virus that has resulted in an unprecedented international human cancer epidemic, is the result of the wider application of shockingly unethical and dangerous human cancer experiments with simian cancer viruses conducted throughout the 1950s and 60s.

As will be discussed in greater detail in a later section, in one set of these cross-species cancer vaccine experiments, immunosuppressed rats and humans were given the same set of cancer-inducing virus injections so that the tumors that developed in each species could be systematically compared. In a similar set of such immunosuppressive experiments, tumors were deliberately induced in human subjects as a result of injections with monkey tumor and cancer viruses, so that researchers could compare the resultant human tumors with those that grew in the monkeys. As an extension of this type of work, in the 1970s, shortly before AIDS began in human populations, researchers began combining primate cancer viruses that had been injected in human subjects with primate immunodeficiency viruses in human cell cultures.

For example, while the public is completely ignorant of this fact, simian immunosuppressive viruses (SIVs) such as the Mason Pfizer Monkey Virus, one of 3 types of SIV, were available to researchers as early as 1970, when the virus was grown in cell cultures. Well before AIDS, the Mason Pfizer Monkey Virus (MPMV) was shown to induce immunodeficiency states in monkeys in the early 1970s, as well as the 1980s. Even more provocative is the fact that cancer researchers were coaxing this immunosuppressive monkey virus to grow in human cells in the late 1970s, just before HIV broke out in human populations and caused an epidemic of sarcoma. In these experiments, MPMV was mixed with SV40, a monkey cancer virus (which had already been injected in humans to cause cancer) and the Rous sarcoma virus in human cell cultures. Since HIV is thought to be caused by an SIV, it is amazing that these intriguing pre-AIDS experiments have not been publicized.

The national security establishment, which worked closely with the viral cancer research community, is likewise not a disinterested party in the AIDS epidemic. While cancer researchers are benefiting from the selective depopulation of certain cells in the immune systems of HIV victims, it could be argued that the national security planners in fact are benefiting from the resultant selective destruction of human populations. This depopulation effect is fulfilling national security goals for the Third World, where 90% of AIDS deaths occur and where 95% of world population growth occurs, that were outlined in classified national security planning documents shortly before AIDS broke out.

The latter section of this study will examine the hypothesized linkage between cancer research and the interests of the national security community. Specifically, evidence will be presented to support the thesis that the AIDS epidemic was deliberately started as an exercise in biowarfare conducted under the cover of a human cancer experiment. This would explain why the HIV epidemic is selectively depopulating regions of the globe that the national security establishment had targeted for depopulation in the 1970s as a means of maintaining access to resources in the developing world. Additionally, the "cancer vaccine experiment" theory of the origin of AIDS could also explain not only why the AIDS virus selectively depopulates the exact components of the immune system that cancer researchers had been targeting for decades prior to AIDS but why homosexual populations are disproportionately infected by HIV and rare cancers. And finally, there is credible evidence that AIDS vaccine research vehicles have a linkage to the Gulf War Syndrome.

* * * * *

Hitler is winning

Although the cruelty and utter disregard for human life displayed by the Nazis during the World War II era are widely recognized, the true origin of the infamous Nazi ideology of racial supremacy (which provided the rationale for the Nazis’ unprecedented crimes) has been one of the better-kept secrets of the postwar years.

As will be shown in this book, the deadly philosophy of racial purity which was used to justify the Nazi mass murder of millions of people was far from being the isolated viewpoint of a few Teutonic madmen. Far from it. Contrary to this carefully created and widely held perception, the Nazi philosophy of Aryan supremacy was the natural outgrowth of what was, at the time, considered to be a “respectable” international intellectual movement known as the eugenics movement. This movement was created and nurtured by a powerful economic elite through its financial power long before Adolph Hitler arrived on the scene to implement its theories in practice.

The international elite who subsidized the eugenics movement not only assisted Hitler with the development of his eugenics philosophy and its implementation in Nazi Germany, but assisted him in his attempts to implement it on a global scale. This criminal assistance, which took the form of direct and prolonged financial and technical aid to Hitler’s war machine (which is only now making international headlines as a result of a flood of Holocaust-related lawsuits), was to have an unprecedented and devastating impact on the world. Without this crucial and treasonous aid and trade on the part of America’s most powerful economic and political elites and their allies, Hitler would never have been able to conduct his murderous military (and eugenic) campaigns across Europe.

Unfortunately, despite the magnitude of their crimes, the global financiers and industrialists who subsidized the eugenics movement at large and its specific manifestation in Hitler’s Germany went largely unpunished after the war (as did their German counterparts). This was due to their ability (through control of the press and government policy making) to hide their role in creating the international eugenics movement as well as their ability to obscure the links between this eugenics movement and Nazi Germany.

In addition to allowing those truly responsible for the Holocaust to go unpunished, the hidden role played by the eugenic elite in creating the international eugenics movement and Nazi Germany has provided another result – the uninterrupted continuation of the eugenics movement to the present day, despite its horrific consequences in Nazi Germany.

This book will unmask this incredibly dangerous eugenics movement – still existing under various guises. In order to expose this ongoing eugenics movement, a brief history of the movement and its basic tenets will first be presented. In subsequent chapters the present state and trends of the eugenics movement will be discussed along with what I believe to be the future of the eugenics movement – based on these trends. As horrible as it sounds, it is possible that a component of this alleged modern-day, applied eugenics program included the deliberate creation and unleashing of the AIDS virus. The fantastic benefits that the AIDS catastrophe is quietly providing the eugenics movement will be discussed in Appendix A of this study, as will be the relationship between the research that made the epidemic possible and research conducted in Nazi concentration camps. Appendix B reveals that, thanks to the U.S. government, German and Japanese war criminals from the Second World War were placed in positions to help implement such a crime, which would essentially be an extension of the acts they carried out during the war.

Culled from books by Jerry Leonard

About the author:
Jerry Leonard is a physicist who has been actively involved in microelectronics research and production for over 15 years. He has been studying the documented history of cancer research, the development of immunosuppressive viruses and unethical government experimentation on human subjects...including the use of monkey cancer viruses... Mr. Leonard also studied the documented history of Nazi Germany, the eugenics movement... and mind control research on human subjects for over ten years.

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The Iraq/Iran fusion

The Iraq/Iran fusion



It is 1939 all over again. The world waits helplessly for the next act of naked aggression by rogue states. Only this time the rogue states are not the Third Reich and Fascist Italy. They are the United States and Israel.

The targeted victims are not Poland and France, but Iran, Syria, the remains of the Palestinian West Bank and southern Lebanon.

The American mass media is overjoyed. War coverage attracts viewers and sells advertising.

The neoconservatives are ecstatic. Hegemony uber alles is back on track.

The US Air Force can’t wait “to show what it can do.”

Defense contractors see no end of the profits.

Under cover of the mayhem and propaganda, Israel can grab the remains of the West Bank and have another go at grabbing the water resources of southern Lebanon.

Unlike the US and Israel, Iran is neither occupying any other country’s territory nor threatening to invade another country. Nevertheless, propaganda against Iran is spouting from US and Israeli mouths at an increasing rate. Lie after lie rolls off the tongues of leaders of the “two great democracies.”

On April 27 Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, blamed Iran for “increasingly lethal and malign influence” in Iraq. Has Admiral Mullen forgot that it is the US, not Iran, that is responsible for as many as one million dead Iraqis and four million displaced Iraqis, the “collateral damage” of a “cakewalk war” now into its sixth year?

On April 26 the Washington Post reported that “the Pentagon is planning for potential military courses of action” against Iran.
The Bush Regime’s national security advisor says Iran is a threat in Iraq, an accusation echoed endlessly by secretary of defense Robert Gates, secretary of state Rice, vice president Cheney, and president Bush. The US, which has 150,000 troops in Iraq, is not a threat. The US troops are protecting Iraq from Iran, al Qaeda, and the Taliban. Just ask Fox “News.”

Doing its part to egg on war with Iran, the US TV news program, “60 MInutes,” gave air time to the commander of the Israeli Air Force, General Eliezer Shkedi, who declared in a special interview that Iranian president Ahmadinejad was the new Hitler and that we must not again make the mistake of disbelieving a Hitler.

There are better candidates for the role than Ahmadinejad.
Gen. Shkedi himself sounds like Hitler blaming Poland for the outbreak of the second world war. Ahmadinejad has attacked no country, whereas Israel repeatedly invades its neighbors and continues 40-year occupations of Syrian and Palestinian territory.

As Noam Chomsky has written, the US government thinks that it owns the world (Chomsky could have added that Israel thinks it owns the Middle East and America). Americans can wallow in indignation over China’s occupation of Tibet, but be perfectly content with America’s occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Israel can wax eloquently about “Palestinian terrorism” while its military and Zionist settlers terrorize Palestinians.

Americans see no hypocrisy in “their” government’s damning of Russia for opposing the incorporation of former Russian satellites and constituent parts in a US military alliance.

Americans see manifest destiny, not US aggression, when “their” government drops bombs on Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, and Pakistan. Americans do not think it is aggression for them to develop war plans to attack Iran or China or N. Korea or whomever, or to maintain hundreds of military bases all over the globe. The same Americans work themselves into hysterical frenzies over “Iranian influence in Iraq” and “al Qaeda plans to bring the war to America.”

As Chomsky says, we own the world. No one else counts.

Except Israel.

Israel counts so much that every presidential candidate has declared his and her willingness to expend whatever American blood and treasure are necessary “to protect Israel.” There are no limits on the promise “to defend Israel,” no matter what Israel does, no matter if Israel initiates (yet again) war with its neighbors, no matter if it continues to force Palestinians out of their homes and villages in order to “create living room” for Israelis.

With this sort of promise, why should Israel ever settle for anything less than “greater Israel”?

Just as the US government launched its illegal invasion of Iraq on the back of lies about weapons of mass destruction and mushroom clouds, the US government claims it must attack Iran or Iran will build a nuclear weapon. The Bush Regime has learned never to discard a lie as long as it works.

The lie works for the US Congress, the US media and much of the US public, but it is breaking down abroad. On April 27 the British newspaper, the Independent, responded to the recent US government claim that the Syrian facility attacked last September by Israel in an act of naked aggression was a nuclear reactor built by N. Korea:

“There is no independent way to verify any of this, especially since the installation has now been destroyed. We must rely on the integrity of the Israeli and US intelligence. That is where we hit a problem. The former US Secretary of State Colin Powell presented similar evidence to the United Nations Security Council in February 2003 showing what we were told was strong evidence of Iraqi storage of weapons of mass destruction. As we all know, that intelligence turned out to be bogus.”

A needless war, a country destroyed, all for bogus intelligence.

Why must we repeat our crime in Iran?

Why do we persist in our crime in Iraq? On April 27 McClatchy Newspapers reported that 50 Iraqi political leaders representing numerous political groups including Sunnis went to Sadr City to protest the siege by the US military. Why is al Sadr under seige?

He called for a halt to bloodshed between Iraqis, for a “liberation of ourselves and our lands from the occupier,” for “a real government and real sovereignty.” However, for the Bush Regime, rhetoric about “freedom and democracy” is but a mask behind which to impose a US puppet government. Real Iraqi leaders like al Sadr are “terrorists” who must be eliminated.

Why do the American people and “their” representatives in Congress continue to tolerate a criminal Bush Regime that uses lies and propaganda to mask its acts of naked aggression, war crimes under the Nuremberg standard?

Why does the rest of the world continue to receive political representatives from a war criminal government?

What if the rest of the world told the US to close its bases, its embassies, its CIA operations and to go home?

Self-righteous Americans would regard such demands as effrontery! We own the world.

Doesn't it just make you wonder looking at that tiny map of Israel? We own the world, it's our promised land... Hmm.

Shameful days

Shameful days

The last ten days have been among the most shameful in the history of American journalism.

On April 20th, the New York Times published its expose of the Bush administration's use of Pentagon-approved, prepped, and financially-enriched "military analysts" to appear on TV to help sell the invasion of Iraq, and then put a positive spin on the occupation -- even as conditions on the ground deteriorated.

It was a powerful illustration of the Bush administration's commitment to propaganda and disinformation. But it was also a damning indictment of the mainstream media's complicity in the wholesale deception of the American public on the single most important decision a country can make -- the decision to go to war.

How big a story was it? John Stauber of the Center for Media and Democracy called it the Pentagon Papers of the Iraq war.

So it only stands to reason that a story this explosive would quickly become the subject of extensive follow-ups by TV and print journalists, and endless debate on the political talk shows, right?

Wrong.

Instead of opening their reportorial and analytical floodgates, the mainstream news media have all but ignored the story.

The Times did a brief followup to its original story and, six days later, published a single editorial. Howard Kurtz wrote about the story the next day in his WaPo column and discussed it on CNN. Keith Olbermann and Wolf Blitzer gave it brief mentions. And that's about it.

A Lexis/Nexis search turned up no other coverage of this should-be major story. Nothing from Brian Williams or Katie Couric or Charlie Gibson. Nothing from Anderson Cooper or Lou Dobbs or Larry King or Campbell Brown. Nothing from Chris Matthews or Dan Abrams. Nothing from Tim Russert or George Stephanopoulos or Bob Schieffer. Nothing from anyone on Fox News.

This near-complete blackout imposed by the culpable news organizations is a despicable abdication of their central role in our society -- and has raised the ire of many in the blogosphere.

Glenn Greenwald decries the media invoking "the Kremlin-like methods of Dick Cheney -- they refuse to comment, refuse to reveal even the most basic facts about what they did, and do everything possible to hide behind the wall of secrecy they maintain." And he's incredulous that "these news outlets misleadingly shoveled government propaganda down the throats of viewers on matters of war and terrorism and they don't feel the least bit obligated to answer for what they did or knew about any of it."

"Mum's been the word on [the Times'] bombshell throughout the megamedia," writes DailyKos poster Meteor Blades. "The talking point - or perhaps the memo from on high - seems to be: Don't talk.... A hundred years of scrubbing will not remove the blood from their hands."

We've been told again and again that when it comes to Washington scandals, the cover up is worse than the crime (see Watergate and Bill Clinton not having sex with that woman). In this case, the lack of follow up is at least as bad as the crime. It is indicative of the MSM's disdain for the public and their willingness to trade their commitment to the truth for access to the halls of power.

As I've been giving interviews and speeches about my new book, specifically the points it makes about the role the media have played in the allowing the Right to hijack our democracy, I've been struck by the public's frustration at the mainstream media's Attention Deficit Disorder -- the failure to pursue important stories that, once exposed, are quickly forgotten.

Whether it's the increasing use of mercenary soldiers like those from Blackwater, corporate profiteering in the wake of Katrina, the advice of military commanders in Afghanistan being rebuffed by the Bush administration, or the military analysts scandal --- the mainstream media repeatedly allow stories to, in essence, die on the front page.

Fitzgerald said there were no second acts in American life. And it seems as if the MSM are committed to there being no second acts in American political scandals. At the end of Act I, the curtain comes down and we are quickly asked to leave the theater, left to wonder about what happens next.

We should do more than wonder. We should demand that the media mavens who enabled the Pentagon's disinformation campaign -- and, indeed, the administration's across the board effort to sell us this war -- be held accountable.

Carl Levin and others are calling for investigations into the military analysts scandal. That's good, but the cozy relationship between the White House and ABC, NBC, Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, as well as the print outlets that gave space to the Pentagon's propagandists, should be investigated as well.

Mainstream news organizations have never be very good at self-scrutiny -- look how long it took the New York Times to offer its Judy Miller/Iraq war mea culpa. And some might suggest that expecting the MSM to publicly dissect their complicity in duping the American public would be like expecting OJ Simpson, Robert Blake, and Phil Spector to find the "real killers" of Nicole, Bonny Lee, and Lana.

But that deceitful trio doesn't claim to be in the business of uncovering the truth, or functioning as a constitutionally protected check on our government.

As Justice Potter Stewart wrote on the Pentagon Papers, "without an informed and free press there cannot be an enlightened people."

And, he might have added, a free press not in bed with the government it is supposed to keep an eye on.


Arianna Huffington@huffingtonpost.com

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Please click here to order Arianna's new book.

Why Israel at 60 is no cause for celebration

Why Israel at 60 is no cause for celebration

Mazin Qumsiyeh of the excellent Wheels of Justice peace initiative has drafted this list furnishing facts about why good people of conscience everywhere will not be celebrating Israel at its 60th anniversary this month, just as apartheid-era South Africa was not accepted or celebrated. There are many more reasons, and he invites people to add to it.

Israeli psychologist and exile Avigail Abarbanel notes, “If a day comes, and I hope it does, when Israelis decide to stop living in denial, they will have to realise that real peace will only come through justice. Justice in this context means one thing, that the ideal of an exclusively Jewish state at the cost of an entire people might have to be abandoned. Only a bi-national state and a right of return for the Palestinian refugees will come close enough to rectifying some of the injustices committed in 1948 and since. Having been ethnically cleansed, this is also what the Palestinians are entitled to under international law and common human decency.“

* Ethnic cleaning and ongoing genocide: Between December 1947 and December 1950, over 530 Palestinian villages and towns were destroyed. Half of the Palestinians were ethnically cleansed by underground Zionist forces even before Israel was unilaterally declared a state. Palestinians call these events of the late 1940s the Nakba (Catastrophe).

* The Palestinian refugees are the largest remaining refugee population in the world. Seven million of the ten million Palestinians are refugees or displaced people. They are prevented from returning to their homes and lands even though International law and UN resolutions demand it.

* The Israeli “Knesset” adopted a set of laws that are contrary to International law that ensured no refugees are allowed to return (as customarily happens at the end of a war) and that their land is confiscated for use by Jews only (“absentee property” laws). The removal of 75-80% of non-Jews from what became Israel by 1950 was a necessary but not sufficient condition for creating and maintaining a Zionist-defined Jewish state. What the nascent state did subsequently was expand its borders and continue to appropriate native Palestinian lands, expel many of them and discriminate against those who remained at all odds.

* Israel has no constitution but promulgated a set of basic laws that govern it essentially “for the benefit of the Jewish people”. These laws recognize members of a particular religion (including converts) as nationals of the state regardless of where they live or their current citizenship. In Israeli law, all Jews are part of Am Yisrael (the people of Israel). To get papers of citizenship all they have to do is show up in the state and claim their automatic citizenship.

* Israel is unique among the nations in not being a country of its citizens but of “Jewish people everywhere”. No other country defines itself as a country for members of a particular religion (including converts) regardless of where they live. No other country has supranational entities that have authority superseding state authority and native rights. For example, the Jewish National Fund is not a state agency but it has on its own website the amazing statement that “The Jewish National Fund is the custodian of the land of Israel on behalf of its owners, Jewish people everywhere.” 91% of the land (most taken from the 530 Palestinian towns and villages depopulated between 1947-1949) is not privately owned but turned over from the custodian of “absentee property” to the JNF for lease by Jews.

* Israeli law considers one fourth of the remaining Palestinians (300,000 of the 1.3 million Palestinians with Israeli citizenship) as “present absentees”. This means that their land and/or homes were confiscated from them and turned to the Jewish Agency/JNF. By international law they are considered internally displaced people (refugees).

* Israel maintains an illegal occupation and colonization of the West Bank and Gaza for 40 years. This includes: 133 illegal Israeli settlements, 562 military checkpoints, 610 flying checkpoints, Israeli-only roads and settlements built on Palestinian lands, denial of residency rights, 11,500 Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli jails and, just in the past 7 years alone, 35,000 more Palestinians were made homeless by home demolitions and land confiscations. The Gaza Strip was turned into a large concentration camp where 1.5 million Palestinians (most refugees) are held in a desert strip with what the UN Human Rights commissioner declared as “catastrophic” conditions.

* Israel is funded to the tune of $5 billion (3 billion in direct aid, 2 billion other) from our (US) taxes and shielded from International law and basic human rights conventions by our government (e.g. 37 vetoes at the UN security Council). We thus hold special responsibility in this situation (and in the atrocities in Iraq that derive from it), which is not the same for example for Darfur, Sudan (where our government is not funding oppression but is actually at least verbally trying to stop it).

Average computer has more germs than a toilet seat

Average computer has more germs than a toilet seat

click for Video

Pray, which toilet seats were used for this comparative analysis? The ones at the White House, the Pentagon or Langley? They really ought to be telling this to the Marines, they're the ones who need cleaning up. Hello! Germs are every where plus in the air we breathe and 99% of them are harmless! Some help us convert food to energy and others strengthen our immune system by actually infecting us. The laptop and www are never going away, so just forget it and shut up!

BP and Shell make 3.3 million pounds every hour!

BP and Shell make 3.3 million pounds every hour!

MOTORISTS reacted with fury yesterday when oil companies BP and Shell announced profits of £3.3million an hour for the first three months of this year.

With drivers facing misery at the pumps, the firms thanked rising oil prices for combined profits of £7.2billion in the first quarter.

Share prices gained around six per cent because of the higher than expected profits.

But if shareholders and the City were delighted, those supporting hard-pressed motorists were dismayed.

In the last 10 days alone, unleaded has risen by an average 1.6p per litre and diesel has surged by 2p a litre.

AA president Edmund King said: “It’s the ordinary motorist that’s bearing the brunt of this while the oil companies and the Government are laughing all the way to the bank.”

He called on the oil companies to reinvest more of their profits into drilling and refining to boost oil supplies and bring down petrol prices.

Lib Dem environment spokesman Steve Webb called on the Government to step in, saying: “Although it can’t control global oil prices, it can protect people from being ripped off at the petrol pumps by the fuel companies.”

Both oil companies argued that while record oil prices inflated returns at their exploration and production divisions, they endured tougher conditions in their refining and marketing sectors.

Shell and BP insisted they already pay high levels of tax to the Treasury while also investing a similar sum to their annual profits in finding new sources of oil and gas.

Cold-blooded gluttonous pigs!!!

Bill gates uses 10,000 times the energy of average American

Bill Gates uses 10,000 times the energy of an average American

Cambridge (MA) – Time to start the finger-pointing again. A class at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has begun to track the carbon footprint of different lifestyle in different nations. And the picture painted for the U.S. isn’t pretty: Even the most power conscious people in this country use more than twice the energy of the average person around the world. If you are looking for people with the worst carbon footprint, look among the super-rich such as Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey, MIT says.


Mug-shots of young Bill Gates by New Mexico police

It is common knowledge that energy use in the U.S. has been at obscene levels for decades and that nations around the world aren’t happy with the fact that less than 5% of the world’s population is consuming almost one quarter of the energy available worldwide. A new study published by the MIT sheds additional light on this scenario and claims that no matter who you are, you are estimated to contribute at least twice and as much as five times as much greenhouse gas to the atmosphere as those living in the rest of the world.

Gates' outrageous aquarium and lightings; ratio-chairs Vs walls
The MIT class said that it compared the carbon emissions of Americans in a variety of lifestyles ranging from the homeless to multimillionaires, from Buddhist monks to soccer moms and compared them to those of other nations. What is interesting is that the group found that your carbon footprint impact rises with your income. The class estimated Bill Gates' impact at 10,000 times the national average.

So, what about the average Americans and the ultra-energy conscious? There does not seem to be much hope that Americans can consider themselves as energy-conserving as people living in other countries anytime soon: “Regardless of income, there is a certain floor below which the individual carbon footprint of a person in the U.S. will not drop,” says Timothy Gutowski, professor of mechanical engineering, who taught the class that calculated the rates of carbon emissions.

This “floor” below which nobody in the U.S. can drop, no matter what their energy choices are, turned out to be 8.5 tons of annual carbon dioxide emissions, the class found. That was the usage calculated for a homeless person who ate in soup kitchens and slept in homeless shelters. If you look at a self-sustaining level, the person with the lowest energy usage was a Buddhist monk who spent six months of every year living in the forest and had total annual spending of $12,500. His carbon footprint was 10.5 tons. The average annual carbon dioxide emission per person was found to be 20 metric tons, compared to a world average of four tons.

The carbon footprint calculation was based on someone’s impact on the environment, including the array of government services that are available to everyone in the United States. These basic services-including police, roads, libraries, the court system and the military-were allocated equally to everyone in the country in this study. Services that are more specific, such as education or Medicare, were allocated only to those who actually make use of them. The energy impact for the rich was estimated from published sources, while all the others were based on direct interviews, MIT said.

What appears to have a substantial impact on greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. is the economical effect of saved energy and its “rebound effect”. “When you save energy, you save money,” Gutowski explains. “The question is: How are you going to spend that money?” For example, buying a hybrid car may save you gas money, but people are likely to spend that extra cash something that may have an even larger carbon footprint, such as a long plane trip.

What Mr Gates tools about town in
The biggest factors in most people's lives were the well-known obvious energy users: housing, transportation and food. “The simple way you get people's carbon use down is to tax it,” Gutowski says. “That's a hard pill to swallow-politicians don't like to step up” to support such measures. Absent such national actions, he says, it is important to study “what role consumer choices can play” in lowering the nation's carbon emissions.

If nothing else, the members of this class got a whole new perspective. “The students really got into it,” Gutowski says. “It raised everybody's awareness about the issues.”

The results of the study are scheduled to be presented on this May 19 at the IEEE International Symposium on Electronics and the Environment in San Francisco.

Thousands of US Dockworkers strike for Iraq

Thousands of US Dockworkers strike for Iraq

All 29 ports on the West Coast, including the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, have been effectively shut down this morning as thousands of dockworkers stayed home to protest the Iraq war. The walkout comes two months before the contract between dockworkers and and port operators expires. Louis Sahagun has the story:

"We are supporting the troops and telling politicians in Washington that it's time to end the war in Iraq," union president Bob McEllrath said.

McEllrath, whose comments came in a press release handed out by union officials in the Port of Los Angeles area, said rank-and-file members decided in early January to stand down on May 1.

The dockworkers' action also affected ports in Oakland, Seattle and San Diego, and was expected to last between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. The dockworkers do virtually all the work involved in loading and unloading freight between ships and the port, handling containers brimming with toys, clothing, computers and automobiles.

Big rigs headed for the ports are being turned away at the terminal gates. That's a guard at the TREPAC terminal in San Pedro, keeping traffic from entering.

Americans unload priced belongings...

Americans unload priced belongings to make ends meet

NEW YORK (AP) - The for-sale listings on the online hub Craigslist come with plaintive notices, like the one from the teenager in Georgia who said her mother lost her job and pleaded, "Please buy anything you can to help out."

Or the seller in Milwaukee who wrote in one post of needing to pay bills - and put a diamond engagement ring up for bids to do it.

Struggling with mounting debt and rising prices, faced with the toughest economic times since the early 1990s, Americans are selling prized possessions online and at flea markets at alarming rates.

To meet higher gas, food and prescription drug bills, they are selling off grandmother's dishes and their own belongings. Some of the household purging has been extremely painful - families forced to part with heirlooms.

"This is not about downsizing. It's about needing gas money," said Nancy Baughman, founder of eBizAuctions, an online auction service she runs out of her garage in Raleigh, N.C. One former affluent customer is now unemployed and had to unload Hermes leather jackets and Versace jeans and silk shirts.

At Craigslist, which has become a kind of online flea market for the world, the number of for-sale listings has soared 70 percent since last July. In March, the number of listings more than doubled to almost 15 million from the year-ago period.

Craigslist CEO Jeff Buckmaster acknowledged the increasing popularity of selling all sort of items on the Web, but said the rate of growth is "moving above the usual trend line." He said he was amazed at the desperate tone in some ads.

In Daleville, Ala., Ellona Bateman-Lee has turned to eBay and flea markets to empty her three-bedroom mobile home of DVDs, VCRs, stereos and televisions.

She said she needs the cash to help pay for soaring food and utility bills and mounting health care expenses since her husband, Bob, suffered an electric shock on the job as a dump truck driver in 2006 and is now disabled.

Among her most painful sales: her grandmother's tea kettle. She sold it for $6 on eBay.

"My grandmother raised me, so it hurt," she said. "We've had bouts here and there, but we always got by. This time it's different."

Economists say it is difficult to compare the selling trend with other tough times because the Internet, only in wide use since the mid-1990s, has made it much easier to unload goods than, say, at pawn shops.

But clearly, cash-strapped people are selling their belongings at bargain prices, with a flood of listings for secondhand cars, clothing and furniture hitting the market in recent months, particularly since January.

Earlier this decade, people tapped their inflated home equity and credit cards to fuel a buying binge. Now, slumping home values and a credit crisis have sapped sources of cash.

Meanwhile, soaring gas and food prices haven't kept pace with meager wage growth. Gas prices have already hit $4 per gallon in some places, and that could become more widespread this summer. The weakening job market is another big worry.

Christine Hadley, a 53-year-old registered nurse from Reading, Pa., says she used to be "a clotheshorse," splurging on pricey Dooney & Bourke handbags. But her live-in boyfriend left last year, and she has had trouble finding a job.

Piles of unpaid bills forced her to sell more than 80 items, including the handbags, which went for more than $1,000 on a site called AuctionPal.com. Now, except for some artwork and threadbare furniture, her house is looking sparse.

"I need the money for essentials - to pay my bills and to eat," Hadley said.

At AuctionPal.com, which helps novices sell things online, for-sale listings rose 66 percent from February to March, much faster than the 25 percent to 30 percent average monthly pace since the company was formed in September, CEO Maureen Ellenberger said. She said she was surprised to see that most of her clients desperately needed to sell items to raise cash.

For LiveDeal.com, a classifieds and business directory site, for-sale listings for January through March rose 10 percent from the previous year.

"We can definitely detect economic stress on the part of the consumer," said John Raven, the site's chief operating officer.

On Craigslist, Buckmaster said, three of the four fastest-growing for-sale categories are tied to gas  recreational vehicles like campers and trailers, cars and trucks, and boats.

Raven noted more and more listings for furniture, particularly in areas around Miami and Las Vegas and other regions hardest hit by the housing crisis.

Baughman, who runs eBizAuctions, said that over the past four months she's been working with mostly desperate sellers instead of mainly casual ones. Most are middle-class customers who can't pay their bills and now want to be paid up front for the items instead of waiting until they are sold, she said.

The trend may be hurting secondhand stores too. Donations to the Salvation Army were down 20 percent in the January-to-March period. George Hood, the charity's national community relations and development secretary, said that was probably partly because people were selling their belongings instead.

And secondhand buyers want better deals now as well, driving prices down. Secondhand merchandise online is going for 25 to 35 percent below what it commanded a year ago, estimated Brian Riley, senior analyst at research firm The TowerGroup.

"It won't hit the saturation point until the (economy) hits the bottom and right now, we don't know when that is," he said.

In Alabama, Bateman-Lee said that she only received $30 for her TV and $45 for her DVD player at a local flea market. She doesn't have too much left to sell, but she's going back to "sort through more things."

Her $30 water bill is due this week.

Mandela still on US terrorist list

Mandela still on US terrorist list

WASHINGTON, May 1 (UPI) -- Nelson Mandela, South Africa's Nobel Prize-winning symbol of hope for leading the fight against apartheid, is reported still on U.S. terrorist watch lists.

His inclusion means Mandela must have special permission to enter the United States, USA Today said Thursday.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice calls it "embarrassing" and some members of Congress vow to fix it, hopefully by Mandela's 90th birthday on July 18.

The same entry requirements apply to other members of South Africa's governing African National Congress, the once-banned anti-apartheid organization.

In the 1970s and '80s the ANC was officially branded a terrorist group by the ruling white minority government.

I had to search this out and read, to believe it! It goes to show how terrorist-branding works and for how long this concept has been operational. Today, as we are witnessing in America, that dog has gone mad and is all set to bite its very own master. "U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice calls it "embarrassing" and some members of Congress vow to fix it, hopefully by Mandela's 90th birthday on July 18." Incredible! To fix it, hopefully by Mandela's 90th birthday on July 18. It's nearly four decades and it's still being fixed! Need anyone speak about America's drug-driven incompetence! This is as doped up as clowns can possibly get!!!