05/11/15 ~ The Raw Story

Monday, 11 May 2015

The Bin Laden raid was a work of fiction, and Barack Obama should immediately resign

Where's wally?

Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has uncovered one of the biggest lies in modern American history. It turns out that much of what the American public was told about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden was a blatant lie. According to Hersh, Osama bin Laden had been captured by Pakistan all the way back in 2006, and he was being held by the ISI as a prisoner at the Abbottabad compound that the Seals ultimately raided in 2011. In addition, Hersh says that the ISI and Pakistan's military knew about the Seal raid in advance. Arrangements were made so that the Black Hawk helicopters could travel through Pakistani airspace safely, and the ISI guards at Osama bin Laden's compound were pulled away before the Seals got there. And by that time, Osama bin Laden was reportedly in such bad health that he was essentially a cripple. There was no "firefight" at all - only a turkey shoot. Afterwards, Osama bin Laden's body never made it to the USS Carl Vinson for a "burial at sea". That was all just part of the cover story according to Hersh. Of course the White House and Obama's lackeys at CNN are strongly denying all of this, and they will continue to deny the truth for as long as they possibly can. But there are individuals in the U.S. military and in the U.S. intelligence community that can come forward and tell us what really happened. Let us hope that at least some of those individuals still care enough about this country to do that.

According to Hersh, one of the biggest lies that Obama told was that Pakistani leadership had no idea that the Seals were coming in. Actually, the truth is that the head of the army, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and the director general of the ISI, General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, were both heavily involved in the planning of the operation. The following is an excerpt from Hersh's article for the London Review of Books...

Pasha and Kayani were responsible for ensuring that Pakistan's army and air defence command would not track or engage with the US helicopters used on the mission. The American cell at Tarbela Ghazi was charged with co-ordinating communications between the ISI, the senior US officers at their command post in Afghanistan, and the two Black Hawk helicopters; the goal was to ensure that no stray Pakistani fighter plane on border patrol spotted the intruders and took action to stop them. The initial plan said that news of the raid shouldn't be announced straightaway.

All units in the Joint Special Operations Command operate under stringent secrecy and the JSOC leadership believed, as did Kayani and Pasha, that the killing of bin Laden would not be made public for as long as seven days, maybe longer. Then a carefully constructed cover story would be issued: Obama would announce that DNA analysis confirmed that bin Laden had been killed in a drone raid in the Hindu Kush, on Afghanistan's side of the border. The Americans who planned the mission assured Kayani and Pasha that their co-operation would never be made public. It was understood by all that if the Pakistani role became known, there would be violent protests - bin Laden was considered a hero by many Pakistanis - and Pasha and Kayani and their families would be in danger, and the Pakistani army publicly disgraced.

When the Seals got to the compound in Abbottabad, bin Laden and his family were completely unguarded. That is because the ISI guards had already been pulled back.

Here is more from Hersh...

At the Abbottabad compound ISI guards were posted around the clock to keep watch over bin Laden and his wives and children. They were under orders to leave as soon as they heard the rotors of the US helicopters. The town was dark: the electricity supply had been cut off on the orders of the ISI hours before the raid began. One of the Black Hawks crashed inside the walls of the compound, injuring many on board. 'The guys knew the TOT [time on target] had to be tight because they would wake up the whole town going in,' the retired official said. The cockpit of the crashed Black Hawk, with its communication and navigational gear, had to be destroyed by concussion grenades, and this would create a series of explosions and a fire visible for miles. Two Chinook helicopters had flown from Afghanistan to a nearby Pakistani intelligence base to provide logistical support, and one of them was immediately dispatched to Abbottabad. But because the helicopter had been equipped with a bladder loaded with extra fuel for the two Black Hawks, it first had to be reconfigured as a troop carrier.

The crash of the Black Hawk and the need to fly in a replacement were nerve-wracking and time-consuming setbacks, but the Seals continued with their mission. There was no firefight as they moved into the compound; the ISI guards had gone. 'Everyone in Pakistan has a gun and high-profile, wealthy folks like those who live in Abbottabad have armed bodyguards, and yet there were no weapons in the compound,' the retired official pointed out. Had there been any opposition, the team would have been highly vulnerable. Instead, the retired official said, an ISI liaison officer flying with the Seals guided them into the darkened house and up a staircase to bin Laden's quarters. The Seals had been warned by the Pakistanis that heavy steel doors blocked the stairwell on the first and second-floor landings; bin Laden's rooms were on the third floor. The Seal squad used explosives to blow the doors open, without injuring anyone. One of bin Laden's wives was screaming hysterically and a bullet - perhaps a stray round - struck her knee. Aside from those that hit bin Laden, no other shots were fired. (The Obama administration's account would hold otherwise.)

After the raid, Obama was never supposed to go public with what had happened. Instead, about a week later a cover story about how bin Laden had been killed in a drone strike was supposed to be released to the public. Obama betrayed the Pakistanis for his own political gain. And the highly touted "burial at sea" of bin Laden never took place either...

Within weeks of the raid, I had been told by two longtime consultants to Special Operations Command, who have access to current intelligence, that the funeral aboard the didn't take place. One consultant told me that bin Laden's remains were photographed and identified after being flown back to Afghanistan. The consultant added: 'At that point, the CIA took control of the body. The cover story was that it had been flown to the .' The second consultant agreed that there had been 'no burial at sea'. He added that 'the killing of bin Laden was political theatre designed to burnish Obama's military credentials ... The Seals should have expected the political grandstanding. It's irresistible to a politician. Bin Laden became a working asset.' Early this year, speaking again to the second consultant, I returned to the burial at sea. The consultant laughed and said: 'You mean, he didn't make it to the water?'

The retired official said there had been another complication: some members of the Seal team had bragged to colleagues and others that they had torn bin Laden's body to pieces with rifle fire. The remains, including his head, which had only a few bullet holes in it, were thrown into a body bag and, during the helicopter flight back to Jalalabad, some body parts were tossed out over the Hindu Kush mountains - or so the Seals claimed. At the time, the retired official said, the Seals did not think their mission would be made public by Obama within a few hours: 'If the president had gone ahead with the cover story, there would have been no need to have a funeral within hours of the killing. Once the cover story was blown, and the death was made public, the White House had a serious "Where's the body?" problem.

Obviously the Seals could blow up the whole story by coming back and talking to the media. That is why the Obama administration has gone to extraordinary lengths to silence them...

The White House's solution was to silence the Seals. On 5 May, every member of the Seal hit team - they had returned to their base in southern Virginia - and some members of the Joint Special Operations Command leadership were presented with a nondisclosure form drafted by the White House's legal office; it promised civil penalties and a lawsuit for anyone who discussed the mission, in public or private. 'The Seals were not happy,' the retired official said. But most of them kept quiet, as did Admiral William McRaven, who was then in charge of JSOC. 'McRaven was apoplectic. He knew he was ****** by the White House, but he's a dyed-in-the-wool Seal, and not then a political operator, and he knew there's no glory in blowing the whistle on the president. When Obama went public with bin Laden's death, everyone had to scramble around for a new story that made sense, and the planners were stuck holding the bag.'

There is so much more in Hersh's article, and you can read the rest of it right here. The following is how Business Insider summarized some of the main points...

The White House's "most blatant" lie was that Pakistan's two most senior military officials were never informed of the mission, Hersh says.
While US officials say they found bin Laden by tracking his trusted courier, Hersh says they discovered his whereabouts from a former Pakistani intelligence officer who wanted the $25 million reward the US was offering.
The government claimed bin Laden was hiding out, but Hersh says the Pakistani intelligence agency had actually been holding him captive since 2006 to use him as leverage against Taliban and Al Qaeda activities in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
While the White House has said it would have taken bin Laden alive if it could have and that he was killed in a firefight, Hersh says that wasn't the case. "There was no firefight as they moved into the compound; the ISI guards had gone," Hersh wrote.
The article also takes issue with the White House's claim that bin Laden was buried at sea in a service that followed Islamic practices. "The remains, including his head, which had only a few bullet holes in it, were thrown into a body bag and, during the helicopter flight back to Jalalabad, some body parts were tossed out over the Hindu Kush mountains — or so the Seals claimed," Hersh reported, citing his senior US intelligence official.

If these things are true, Barack Obama and much of his inner circle should immediately resign. They purposely and maliciously lied to the American people over and over for their own political gain. But of course so far they are choosing to deny everything...

"There are too many inaccuracies and baseless assertions in this piece to fact check each one," White House National Security Council spokesman Ned Price said in a statement shared with The Hill.

"Every sentence I was reading was wrong," former acting CIA Director Michael Morell added Monday on "CBS This Morning."

"The source that Hersh talked to has no idea what he's talking about. The person obviously was not close to what happened," he added. "The Pakistanis did not know. The president made a decision not to tell the Pakistanis. The Pakistanis were furious with us. The president sent me to Pakistan after the raids to start smoothing things over."

So what we need are people that know what really happened to step forward and tell the American people the truth.

Without a doubt, there are individuals in the U.S. military and in the U.S. intelligence community that can expose the lies of the Obama administration if they have the courage to act.

If you are one of those individuals and you choose to remain silent, you are betraying this country just like the Obama administration has. The time has come to tell the truth, and it is your duty as an American to do so.

The reports that a colossal one mile wide asteroid will brush past the Earth this Thursday, with a closest approach of 3 million kilometres - far too close for comfort, with a rock that big.

According to The ;

The gigantic missile thought to measure almost a mile across will brush closer than previous monsters which have sparked a global panic.

Worried astronomers warned 1999 FN53, which is an eighth of the size of Mount Everest, will skim the Earth in THREE DAYS.

A collision would be nothing short of catastrophic triggering mass destruction, earthquakes and global extinction.

The monster is more than TEN TIMES bigger than other meteorites currently visible on NASA's Near Earth Object radar.

It is also double the size of the gargantuan 2014-YB35 which had astronomers around the world watching the skies in March.

Experts warn a collision would trigger an explosion similar to millions of megatons of TNT and would be capable of killing 1.5 billion people.

On this occasion a collision seems unlikely - but it doesn't take much of an orbital perturbation to put an Earth grazer onto a collision course.

A collision of 1999 FN53 with Earth, especially an ocean strike, would be nothing short of catastrophic. The fire and blast alone would likely kill millions. It would cause massive earthquakes across the world. An ocean strike would raise mountain size tsunamis which would smash coastal cities thousands of miles from the strike. The climate impact would also be significant - the Younger Dryas, a brutal collapse in global temperatures which lasted 1200 years, may have been caused by an asteroid impact.

What could we do if a large Asteroid on a collision course was detected? The answer is quite a lot, given a few years warning. The Manhattan Project scientists, in the 1950s, developed a simple design for a space drive whose capabilities were straight out of science fiction - capable of lifting gigantic payloads in a single stage to orbit. The most powerful designs could have powered starships - up to around 10% of the speed of light. Such a ship could be built in a year or two, if it was a priority, and would be more than capable of pushing a dangerous asteroid into a different orbit.

© Wikimedia Commons
Above is the mummified head of Egyptian pharaoh King Ahmose I, whose parents and grandparents were probably both sets of siblings.

The height of the pharaohs who ruled ancient Egypt supports historical records that they might have married their sisters and cousins, says new research into 259 mummies.

It's known from historical sources that incestuous marriages were common among the ancient Egyptian royalty. The pharaohs believed they descended from the gods so inbreeding was seen as a way to retain the sacred bloodline.

But it is hard to prove incest in royal marriages through genetic testings because of ethical consideration when destroying mummies' tissues.

Frank Rühli, director of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich, and colleagues used a highly hereditable character, body height, to look for evidence of incest in 259 mummies of both commoners and royals.

"It is actually one of the largest collections of body height of ancient Egyptians and spans all major periods of their history," Rühli told Discovery News.

The researchers tested the hypothesis of royal incest by studying variation (difference between individuals) of body heights of royals and comparing it with variations among commoners.

"Pharaohs varied less in height than men of the common population. This is one indicator of inbreeding," Rühli said.

Detailing their results in the Rühli and colleagues noted that the pharaohs were taller than non-royal males from the same time period, while there was little difference between the stature of queens and common Egyptian women.

The average height of the male population varied between 161 cm (5.28 feet) in the New Kingdom (about 1550 - 1070 BC) and 169.6 cm (5.56 feet) in the Early Dynastic period (about 2925 - 2575 BC), making an average of 165.7 cm (5.43 feet) for all time periods.

Females ranged between 155.6 cm (5.10 feet) in the Late Period (712-332 B.C) to 159.5 cm (5.23 feet) in the Early Dynastic period - an average stature of 157.8 cm (5.17 feet)

Overall, the average height of kings was a steady 166 cm (5.44 feet), featuring much less variations compared to the general population. Queens and princesses averaged 156.7 cm (5.14 feet).

The tallest pharaoh among those under investigation appears to be Ramses II (about 1303 - 1212 B.C.), who stood at least 173 cm (5.67 feet) and was married to Queen Nefertari-merj-em-Mut. She too was an outstandingly tall woman for her time, at 165 cm (5.41 feet) -- taller than the average man in the New Kingdom.

The study also confirmed the highly incestuous levels in the rulers of the 17th and 18th Dynasty, with the 165 cm-tall King Amenhotep I scoring the highest on the incest scale.

He probably was the product of three generations of sibling marriages. In comparison, King Tutankhamun earned a half ranking point.

In the lower range of the scoring system, which researchers admit is rather rough, were pharaohs such as Thutmosis III, whose grandparents were siblings, but not his parents.

Pharaohs who were married to their sisters, but whose parents were not siblings, were not considered since the incest effect would only affect their offspring.

"The study shows some evidence for consanguineous (incestuous) marriages in a reliable, non-invasive way," Barry Bogin, professor of biological anthropology at Loughborough University, U.K., told Discovery News.

He achieved similar results in a study carried out in Guatemala on living boys and girls between five and 14 years old.

"The height variation was reduced in the children from very wealthy families and very, very poor families compared with more middle-to-low income families," Bogin said.

The pattern of height variation indicated that both the wealthy and the poor lived in homogeneous environments -- very good for the wealthy and very bad for the poor. Those in the middle economic group lived in more variable environments.

"Average height and height variation reflect very nicely the quality of the environment. So, the very good environment of the royal men might be another reason why their height variation is reduced compared with commoners," Bogin said.

A California woman has sued her former employer, which fired her shortly after she disabled a GPS tracking feature on her company iPhone. The app was used to monitor employees even on their personal time, the lawsuit alleged.

Myrna Arias has claimed that her boss, John Stubits, at money transfer service Intermex in Bakersfield boasted about monitoring employees' locations while they were not on the job, according to the lawsuit filed in Kern County Superior Court.

Arias, a sales executive for the company, said she was "scolded" and subsequently fired -- even though she "met all quotas during her time with Intermex -- after she uninstalled Xora, a mandatory job-management app that was applied to company phones.

"After researching the app and speaking with a trainer from Xora, Plaintiff and her co-workers asked whether Intermex would be monitoring their movements while off duty," the suit says.

"Stubits admitted that employees would be monitored while off duty and bragged that he knew how fast she was driving at specific moments ever since she installed the app on her phone. Plaintiff expressed that she had no problem with the app's GPS function during work hours, but she objected to the monitoring of her location during non-work hours and complained to Stubits that this was an invasion of her privacy. She likened the app to a prisoner's ankle bracelet and informed Stubits that his actions were illegal. Stubits replied that she should tolerate the illegal intrusion...."

The suit alleged invasion of privacy, retaliation, and unfair business practices, among other accusations.

"This intrusion would be highly offensive to a reasonable person," the lawsuit claimed.

Arias' attorney told Ars Technica that the mandatory app was intrusive in its constant monitoring.

"The app had a 'clock in/out' feature which did not stop GPS monitoring, that function remained on," Gail Glick said.

"This is the problem about which Ms. Arias complained. Management never made mention of mileage. They would tell her co-workers and her of their driving speed, roads taken, and time spent at customer locations. Her manager made it clear that he was using the program to continuously monitor her, during company as well as personal time."

Arias is seeking damages in excess of $500,000. Intermex did not immediately respond to Ars Technica for comment.

© NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA/Montage by Tom Ruen
Where there were two, now there are 10! Ceres photographed on May 3 and 4 by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft show multiple white spots inside the 57-mile-wide crater located in the asteroid’s northern hemisphere.

We don't know exactly what those mysterious white spots on Ceres are yet, but we're getting closer to an explanation. Literally. The latest images from the Dawn spacecraft taken a mere 8,400 miles from the dwarf planet Ceres reveal that the of spots are comprised of even more spots.

"Dawn scientists can now conclude that the intense brightness of these spots is due to the reflection of sunlight by highly reflective material on the surface, possibly ice," said Christopher Russell, principal investigator for the Dawn mission from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Dawn recently concluded its first science orbit, making a 15-day full circle around Ceres while gathering data with its suite of science instruments. This past Saturday, May 9, its ion engine fired once again to lower the spacecraft to its second science orbit which it will enter on June 6. On that date, the probe will hover just 2,700 miles (4,400 km) above the dwarf planet and begin a comprehensive mapping of the surface. Scientists also hope the bird's eye view will reveal clues of ongoing geological activity.

There's no doubt a lot's been happening on Ceres. One look at all those cracks hint at either impact-related stresses some kind of crustal expansion. Geological processes may still make this little world rock and roll.

© NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA
In this uncropped single frame, not only are multiple white spots visible but also long, roughly parallel cracks or troughs in Ceres’ surface. Are they impact-related or caused by some other stress?

Fortunately, we won't have to wait till next month for more photos. NASA plans to pause the probe twice on the way down to shoot and send fresh images.

Paul Craig Roberts, Keynote Address to the Annual Conference of the Financial West Group, New Orleans, May 7, 2015

The defining events of our time are the collapse of the Soviet Union, 9/11, jobs offshoring, and financial deregulation. In these events we find the basis of our foreign policy problems and our economic problems.

The United States has always had a good opinion of itself, but with the Soviet collapse self-satisfaction reached new heights. We became the exceptional people, the indispensable people, the country chosen by history to exercise hegemony over the world. This neoconservative doctrine releases the US government from constraints of international law and allows Washington to use coercion against sovereign states in order to remake the world in its own image.

To protect Washington's unique Uni-power status that resulted from the Soviet collapse, Paul Wolfowitz in 1992 penned what is known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine. This doctrine is the basis for Washington's foreign policy. The doctrine states:

"Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power."

In March of this year the Council on Foreign Relations extended this doctrine to China.

Washington is now committed to blocking the rise of two large nuclear-armed countries. This commitment is the reason for the crisis that Washington has created in Ukraine and for its use as anti-Russian propaganda. China is now confronted with the Pivot to Asia and the construction of new US naval and air bases to ensure Washington's control of the South China Sea, now defined as an area of American National Interests.

9/11 served to launch the neoconservatives' war for hegemony in the Middle East. 9/11 also served to launch the domestic police state. While civil liberties have shriveled at home, the US has been at war for almost the entirety of the 21st century, wars that have cost us, according to Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, at least $6 trillion dollars. These wars have gone very badly. They have destabilized governments in an important energy producing area. And the wars have vastly multiplied the "terrorists," the quelling of which was the official reason for the wars.

Just as the Soviet collapse unleashed US hegemony, it gave rise to jobs offshoring. The Soviet collapse convinced China and India to open their massive underutilized labor markets to US capital. US corporations, with any reluctant ones pushed by large retailers and Wall Street's threat of financing takeovers, moved manufacturing, industrial, and tradable professional service jobs, such as software engineering, abroad.

This decimated the American middle class and removed ladders of upward mobility. US GDP and tax base moved with the jobs to China and India. US real median family incomes ceased to grow and declined. Without income growth to drive the economy, Alan Greenspan resorted to an expansion of consumer debt, which has run its course. Currently there is nothing to drive the economy.

When the goods and services produced by offshored jobs are brought to the US to be sold, they enter as imports, thus worsening the trade balance. Foreigners use their trade surpluses to acquire US bonds, equities, companies, and real estate. Consequently, interests, dividends, capital gains, and rents are redirected from Americans to foreigners. This worsens the current account deficit.

In order to protect the dollar's exchange value in the face of large current account deficits and money creation in support of the balance sheets of "banks too big to fail," Washington has the Japanese and European central banks printing money hand over fist. The printing of yen and euros offsets the printing of dollars and thus protects the dollar's exchange value.

The Glass-Steagall Act that separated commercial and investment banking had been somewhat eroded prior to the total repeal during the second term of the Clinton regime. This repeal, together with the failure to regulate over the counter derivatives, the removal of position limits on speculators, and the enormous financial concentration that resulted from the dead letter status of anti-trust laws, produced not free market utopia but a serious and ongoing financial crisis. The liquidity issued in behalf of this crisis has resulted in stock and bond market bubbles.

Implications, consequences, solutions:

When Russia blocked the Obama regime's planned invasion of Syria and intended bombing of Iran, the neoconservatives realized that while they had been preoccupied with their wars in the Middle East and Africa for a decade, Putin had restored the Russian economy and military.

The first objective of the Wolfowitz doctrine - to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival - had been breached. Here was Russia telling the US "No." The British Parliament joined in by vetoing UK participation in a US invasion of Syria. The Uni-Power status was shaken.

This redirected the attention of the neoconservatives from the Middle East to Russia. Over the previous decade Washington had invested $5 billion in financing up-and-coming politicians in Ukraine and non-governmental organizations that could be sent into the streets in protests.

When the president of Ukraine did a cost-benefit analysis of the proposed association of Ukraine with the EU, he saw that it didn't pay and rejected it. At that point Washington called the NGOs into the streets. The neo-nazis added the violence and the government unprepared for violence collapsed.

Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt chose the new Ukrainian government and established a vassal regime in Ukraine.

Washington hoped to use the coup to evict Russia from its Black Sea naval base, Russia's only warm water port. However, Crimea, for centuries a part of Russia, elected to return to Russia. Washington was frustrated, but recovered from disappointment and described Crimean self-determination as Russian invasion and annexation. Washington used this propaganda to break up Europe's economic and political relationships with Russia by pressuring Europe into sanctions against Russia.

The sanctions have had adverse impacts on Europe. Additionally, Europeans are concerned with Washington's growing belligerence. Europe has nothing to gain from conflict with Russia and fears being pushed into war. There are indications that some European governments are considering a foreign policy independent of Washington's.

The virulent anti-Russian propaganda and demonization of Putin has destroyed Russian confidence in the West. With the NATO commander Breedlove demanding more money, more troops, more bases on Russia's borders, the situation is dangerous. In a direct military challenge to Moscow, Washington is seeking to incorporate both Ukraine and Georgia, two former Russian provinces, into NATO.

On the economic scene the dollar as reserve currency is a problem for the entire world. Sanctions and other forms of American financial imperialism are causing countries, including very large ones, to leave the dollar payments system. As foreign trade is increasingly conducted without recourse to the US dollar, the demand for dollars drops, but the supply has been greatly expanded as a result of Quantitative Easing. Because of offshored production and US dependence on imports, a drop in the dollar's exchange value would result in domestic inflation, further lowering US living standards and threatening the rigged, stock, bond, and precious metal markets.

The real reason for Quantitative Easing is to support the banks' balance sheets. However, the official reason is to stimulate the economy and sustain economic recovery. The only sign of recovery is real GDP which shows up as positive only because the deflator is understated.

The evidence is clear that there has been no economic recovery. With the first quarter GDP negative and the second quarter likely to be negative as well, the second-leg of the long downturn could begin this summer.

Moreover, the current high unemployment (23 percent) is different from previous unemployment. In the postwar 20th century, the Federal Reserve dealt with inflation by cooling down the economy. Sales would decline, inventories would build up, and layoffs would occur. As unemployment rose, the Fed would reverse course and workers would be called back to their jobs. Today the jobs are no longer there. They have been moved offshore. The factories are gone. There are no jobs to which to call workers back.

To restore the economy requires that offshoring be reversed and the jobs brought back to the US. This could be done by changing the way corporations are taxed. The tax rate on corporate profit could be determined by the geographic location at which corporations add value to the products that they market in the US. If the goods and services are produced offshore, the tax rate would be high. If the goods and services are produced domestically, the tax rate could be low. The tax rates could be set to offset the lower costs of producing abroad.

Considering the lobbying power of transnational corporations and Wall Street, this is an unlikely reform. My conclusion is that the US economy will continue its decline.

On the foreign policy front, the hubris and arrogance of America's self-image as the "exceptional, indispensable" country with hegemonic rights over other countries means that the world is primed for war. Neither Russia nor China will accept the vassalage status accepted by the UK, Germany, France and the rest of Europe, Canada, Japan and Australia. The Wolfowitz Doctrine makes it clear that the price of world peace is the world's acceptance of Washington's hegemony.

Therefore, unless the dollar and with it US power collapses or Europe finds the courage to break with Washington and to pursue an independent foreign policy, saying good-bye to NATO, nuclear war is our likely future.

Washington's aggression and blatant propaganda have convinced Russia and China that Washington intends war, and this realization has drawn the two countries into a strategic alliance. Russia's May 9 Victory Day celebration of the defeat of Hitler is a historical turning point. Western governments boycotted the celebration, and the Chinese were there in their place. For the first time Chinese soldiers marched in the parade with Russian soldiers, and the president of China sat next to the president of Russia.

The Saker's report on the Moscow celebration is interesting. Especially note the chart of World War II casualties. Russian casualties compared to the combined casualties of the US, UK, and France make it completely clear that it was Russia that defeated Hitler. In the Orwellian West, the latest rewriting of history leaves out of the story the Red Army's destruction of the Wehrmacht. In line with the rewritten history, Obama's remarks on the 70th anniversary of Germany's surrender mentioned only US forces. In contrast Putin expressed gratitude to "the peoples of Great Britain, France and the United States of America for their contribution to the victory."

For many years now the President of Russia has made the point publicly that the West does not listen to Russia. Washington and its vassal states in Europe, Canada, Australia, and Japan do not hear when Russia says "don't push us this hard, we are not your enemy. We want to be your partners."

As the years have passed without Washington hearing, Russia and China have finally realized that their choice is vassalage or war. Had there been any intelligent, qualified people in the National Security Council, the State Department, or the Pentagon, Washington would have been warned away from the neocon policy of sowing distrust. But with only neocon hubris present in the government, Washington made the mistake that could be fateful for humanity.

© Eric Franzosa
Four microbial features inferred from metagenomic sequencing collectively distinguish the starred individual from the population (?1 features are not detected in each other individual).

A new study shows that the microbial communities we carry in and on our bodies -- known as the human microbiome -- have the potential to uniquely identify individuals, much like a fingerprint. Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health researchers and colleagues demonstrated that personal microbiomes contain enough distinguishing features to identify an individual over time from among a research study population of hundreds of people.

The study, the first to rigorously show that identifying people from microbiome data is feasible, suggests that we have surprisingly unique microbial inhabitants, but could raise potential privacy concerns for subjects enrolled in human microbiome research projects.

The study appears online May 11, 2015 in the journal .

"Linking a human DNA sample to a database of human DNA 'fingerprints' is the basis for forensic genetics, which is now a decades-old field. We've shown that the same sort of linking is possible using DNA sequences from microbes inhabiting the human body -- no human DNA required. This opens the door to connecting human microbiome samples between databases, which has the potential to expose sensitive subject information -- for example, a sexually-transmitted infection, detectable from the microbiome sample itself," said lead author Eric Franzosa, research fellow in the Department of Biostatistics at Harvard Chan.

Franzosa and colleagues used publicly available microbiome data produced through the Human Microbiome Project (HMP), which surveyed microbes in the stool, saliva, skin, and other body sites from up to 242 individuals over a months-long period. The authors adapted a classical computer science algorithm to combine stable and distinguishing sequence features from individuals' initial microbiome samples into individual-specific "codes." They then compared the codes to microbiome samples collected from the same individuals' at follow-up visits and to samples from independent groups of individuals.

The results showed that the codes were unique among hundreds of individuals, and that a large fraction of individuals' microbial "fingerprints" remained stable over a one-year sampling period. The codes constructed from gut samples were particularly stable, with more than 80% of individuals identifiable up to a year after the sampling period.

"Although the potential for any data privacy concerns from purely microbial DNA is very low, it's important for researchers to know that such issues are theoretically possible," said senior author Curtis Huttenhower, associate professor of computational biology and bioinformatics at Harvard Chan School. "Perhaps even more exciting are the implications of the study for microbial ecology, since it suggests our unique microbial residents are tuned to the environment of our body -- our genetics, diet, and developmental history -- in such a way that they stick with us and help to fend off less-friendly microbial invaders over time."

A gunman killed three relatives and a neighbor in a late-night rampage in a Swiss village before turning his weapon on himself, local police said on Sunday.

The presumed killer, a 36-year-old Swiss national who was separated from his wife and the couple's three children, shot dead his father-in-law, mother-in-law and brother-in-law, police told a news conference.

The killings took place late on Saturday in and around a residential building in Wuerenlingen, a community of some 4,500 people north-west of Zurich.

Police said the gunman lived in another part of Switzerland and was known to police for violent behavior. The murder weapon was unregistered, they said.

A neighbor, who was not identified, told Swiss newspaper Blick she heard four shots in succession fired very quickly, then two further shots after a pause. She had heard no screams, the tabloid reported.

"There is never a decay of organized religion. When one church falls, another is built. During the 20th century, the new church was Science—in particular, Medical Science. It was constructed to extract the maximum amount of compliance from the population. This is what all orthodox churches do. So in addition to the countless numbers of diagnoses and drugs, there was the element of mind control: 'Follow our orders. We know the truth and we are giving it you for your own good; we love you and care about you, unless you rebel; then we consign you to Hell."(, Jon Rappoport)

Globalism is the New World Order. There is no mystery about it.

The alliance between mega-corporations, banks, and governments is ever-growing, as they extend their power over populations.

In this article, I use the example of Australia to illustrate a hidden point that applies to nations all over the world:

The medical cartel is "a compliance arm" of the New World Order.

The principle is simple: expand the degree of citizen-obedience in one area, and you expand it in all areas.

You create the core habit of obedience. That habit extends down into the subconscious mind.

Globalism and the New World Order need that obedience, because its methods are often so outrageous only robots would fall into line.

For an example of outrageous lunacy, take the upcoming Globalist treaty, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). When ratified by 12 nations (Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam), it will establish the right of corporations to bypass national courts and demand that their products be sold, without tariffs, without concern for workers who are paid slave wages, without concern for poisoning the environment with toxic chemicals.

This is a secret treaty. In Australia, it will be signed by the cabinet before any supporting legislation is considered.

Here is a brief quote from tppaustralia.org:

It [the TPP] has over 20 chapters which include everything from labour and the environment, to intellectual property and telecommunications. The negotiations have been kept secret even from our own Parliamentarians and Senators, but from leaked drafts of the TPP text, we know that there is legitimate reason for concern.

Did you catch that last part? Australia's own elected legislators haven't read the treaty. They're not permitted to. In the US, legislators have only had access to limited sections.

A secret treaty deeply affecting the lives of all people in those 12 countries, and only a chosen few know exactly what's in it.

From the Globalist point of view, this means one thing: populations must be rendered into a state of unquestioning obedience. They must go along with the program on what amounts to a hypnotic basis.

Otherwise (if awake) they would rebel en masse. This is what any population would do if they were alert.

"You're going to ratify a secret treaty that will put us further under the gun of mega-corporations? Not on your life."

But there are no massive protests in Australia, or in any of the other 12 TPP countries.

Since 1988, when I wrote my first book, , I warned about medical covert ops. At that time, I also began speaking about the overall program of the global medical cartel, the overall goal:

To place every person on the planet into a cradle-to-grave system of diagnosing and drugging. To make every person, first and foremost, a medical patient. To thereby condition every person to obey orders.

Obey.

The doctor knows. Don't question him. Just do what he tells you to do. Comply. From now until they lower your body into the ground. Take the drugs, and become more debilitated and, therefore, more obedient at a much deeper level.

This is the foremost system of eliciting obedience in the world.

We've recently seen the Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, issue a dictum about vaccination. Former exemptions have been canceled. Families receiving government aid will be cut off from that money if they refuse to vaccinate their children. No more freedom.

Obey or else.

When you can get citizens to obey in one area, there is a spillover to other areas. They become accustomed to a life of surrender. They give in. They go along. They yield on one front, so they yield on another.

It's no accident that, historically, the one family most responsible for the emergence of modern medicine AND the Globalist agenda is: Rockefeller.

Whatever else it is (and I have covered the details in many articles), the system of modern medicine is a mind-control operation designed to create slavish attachment on the part of the patient.

Attachment to the authority of the doctor and whatever he commands. Attachment to the toxic drugs he prescribes. Attachment to the disease-labels he pronounces.

In these and other respects, modern medicine is a secular Church, and the doctors are the priests in white coats. They are everywhere in contemporary societies. They rule. They subject the parishioners (patients) to arbitrary fiats.

The result of this long-term conditioning: the patients develop a deep habit of loyalty to authority. This habit spreads like ink on a blotter. It begins to apply to all areas of life.

Eventually, the government can say:

"Look, we're going to sign a treaty, and you won't know what's in it. You'll be completely in the dark. But it's a good thing. It's for the benefit of all. Don't ask us to disclose the details. Would you ask your doctor to explain, in detail, the pictures he took of your brain? Of course not. It's beyond you. You're not equipped to understand. Well, in this treaty, which runs thousands of pages, you're not equipped to understand the complex economic details, either. But you can rest secure in your (hypnotic) faith that we're on your side. We want what's best for you..."

There are various terms for this: brain-entrainment, operant conditioning, brainwashing, programming, mind control.

They all refer to the establishing of habitual behavior, unthinking behavior.

The brilliant hypnotherapist, Jack True, with whom I did research for several years (and who gave up the practice of hypnosis), once wrote to me:

"Nine out of ten of my patients walk through the door already convinced that I'm doing some form of medicine. That's what they want. They want me to tell them what to do, while they're awake and while they're in a trance. They're looking for another doctor. Our whole civilization is under a white-coat trance. It took me several years to get over my astonishment at this fact. This is mass-hypnosis on a grand scale."

If you're on the side of freedom, you need to look at a whole society and figure out where the deepest form of conditioning is coming from. You need to find out where the most successful form of hypnosis is coming from. Because that's where overall mind-control is strongest. In modern society, it's doctors. This is why governments ally themselves with doctors. It's a perfect partnership. Someday, we could see a President in a white coat with a stethoscope around his neck and a syringe in his hand. He'll be able to tell people the sky is the ground and stars are traffic lights, and he'll be believed. The doctor is the trigger- man for the New World.

On a practical level, we could see secret treaties like the TPP give more global protection to the medical cartel: international exemption from lawsuits against pharmaceutical corporations; exemption from liability stemming from toxic drugs and vaccines; agreements to extend periods of court-ordered lockdowns in psych wards.

The medical cartel and the Globalists walk hand-in-hand into the future.

Maintaining the freedom to refuse medical care is imperative.

The Holy Church of Medicine and its allies and dupes are out in full force these days. They want compliant slaves.

They must not win.

The indigenous municipality of Simojovel, in the state of Chiapas, Mexico reported the death of two babies after the administration of vaccines against hepatitis B (HepB), tuberculosis (BCG), and rotavirus.

Within hours of receiving the vaccines, 37 babies out of a total of 52 vaccinated had adverse reactions; some began to convulse with the tragic result of two dead and 37 hospitalized, 13 of whom reported to be in critical condition.

According to the Catholic organization Pueblo Creyente, the dead included a 30-day-old girl and a 28-day-old boy.

The Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) ordered the preventive suspension of the BCG (Tuberculosis), Rotavirus and Hepatitis B vaccine, after what they suspect were allergic reactions to the vaccines administered to the minors in Chiapas.

Although this news has been widely disseminated in the Spanish-language press, it has been virtually ignored by the English-language press.

What is wrong with this picture?

A recent outbreak of measles originating in Disneyland with no fatalities received world-wide media coverage and calls for legislation resulting in a heated battle regarding public vaccination policies.

A vaccination incident in Mexico which negatively impacted nearly 80% of the recipients, resulting in two deaths, 37 hospitalizations and 13 babies fighting for their lives has not been reported to the community at large and is certainly not being reported in other countries, particularly the United States.

Is this lack of media coverage because vaccines are promoted as "safe and effective" and no one wants to tarnish that image?

Is the lack of media coverage because it would negatively impact efforts to make vaccines mandatory and affect the profits of vaccine manufacturers and various other stakeholders?

It is crucial that the international community be informed of these deaths and of the fact that these vaccines have as of now been suspended in Mexico. It is an essential part of the universal right to informed consent.

Mothers in Simojevel are now asking themselves how safe these vaccines can be if they can kill perfectly healthy children within hours, and also leave many more in a very precarious health condition.

The municipality if Simojevel has historically been besieged by drug traffickers with their religious leaders have received death threats. It seems the only state intervention so far has been to promote these vaccinations, with the reported catastrophic results.

When will human lives become more important than vaccine uptake?

Sweden hit international headlines in October last year when it launched the biggest military underwater operation in recent years after it spotted a foreign submarine in Swedish waters. The vessel was widely thought to be Russian, although the Swedish military was unable to confirm where it came from - or indeed locate it.

The country's ability to defend itself should Russia increase military activity in the Baltic remains a hot topic in the Swedish media, after the centre-left government announced a new 10.2 billion kronor ($111.9 million) defence deal designed to increase the country's capabilities. Just last week a British defence expert told The Local that a Russian attack on the Nordic nation "could come soon".

But the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society (SPAS) believes there are more efficient ways to fend off Russians than military force. In a video published on their website on Monday, they demonstrate their new 'Singing Sailor Underwater Defence System', which they lowered into the sea east of Stockholm on April 27th.

Any submarines lurking in the capital's waters will come across an animated neon sign of a dancing sailor in boxer shorts along with the message "Sweden - gay since 1944" (referring to when Sweden legalized homosexuality). The sign also sends out the Morse code: "This way if you are gay".

[embedded content]

The tongue-in-cheek move is designed to scare off military vessels from Russia, which does not share Sweden's tolerant attitude to homosexuality.

Russia recently sparked an outcry in the Nordic nation when it approved controversial legislation outlawing "propaganda" directed at minors about "non-traditional sexual relations".

"If there is a submarine down there beneath the Baltic waves and the crew should happen to see or hear the Singing Sailor they are welcome to join us in the Stockholm Pride Parade on August 1st," Daniel Holking, SPAS communications and fundraising manager, said in a statement.

"In times of unrest, love and peace across boundaries is more important than ever. We want to break up with the violence. Our invitation is also extended to Swedish subs and military personnel and all others that want to join us," he added.

On a more serious note, the organization - which believes that military rearmament is a contributing cause of conflict - added in Monday's press release that 'The Singing Sailor' is also a call for Sweden to shift its military resources into "development and rethinking security".

"If military actions and weapons had functioned as conflict resolution methods there would be peace in the world a long time ago," Anna Ek, SPAS president said.

In March, Sweden's Security Service Säpo said that the biggest intelligence threat against Sweden came from Russia in 2014. Its annual report described Russian espionage against Sweden as "extensive", noting that it had increased in connection with the Ukraine crisis.

A dead blue whale has washed up on the southwest part of Hunt's Island.

Too often, scenes of dead whales are seen around shores. This whale, believed by locals to be a giant blue whale, has died and will soon begin to decay on the southwest part of Hunt's Island.

The temperature in Burgeo is still fairly cold and it is not composing fast, there is a lot of meat and blubber to decompose there.

It is more than a mile from town so the smell hasn't had any effect. After the gulls have picked holes in it, it is speculated it will sink because the holes will release the air.

Times have changed since the days of Farley Mowat and Moby Joe, people look at a dead whale now sadly, they love to see those huge beautiful mammals swimming and spraying their mists into the air.

Once Washington's steadfast allies, some European countries are now "at risk" of drifting into the Kremlin's fold, Dalibor Rohac, a Research Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC, emphasized.

"At the time, these [Eastern and Central European] countries were counted amongst the most staunchly pro-American members of NATO—and also among the boldest economic reformers on the continent, cutting their taxes and privatizing social security systems. Today, the situation could not be more different," the analyst stressed.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, Prime Minister of Slovakia Robert Fico, President of the Czech Republic Milos Zeman and Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary have been recently boosting their ties with Moscow, Dalibor Rohac noted deprecatingly.

For instance, last year, Viktor Orban closed a €12-billion nuclear energy deal with Russia, ("later overturned by the EU's nuclear energy agency"). This year Robert Fico and Milos Zeman turned a deaf ear to Washington's warnings and went to Moscow to commemorate the end of the Second World War, the expert pointed out.

It seems that Dalibor Rohac is all at sea trying to find out why the post-communist states are seeking to establish close ties with Russia.

The expert suggested that a "lack of American leadership" and Brussels' negligence have weakened the influence of the United States in Eastern and Central Europe.

"Brussels deserves some of the blame. Billions of euros of "structural funds" from the EU often ended in pockets of local oligarchs, encouraging corrupt practices," Mr. Rohac highlighted, adding that "a lack of American leadership in the region played an even more significant role."

According to the expert, America's non-governmental and civil society organizations have been seriously underfunded in Europe in the past few years and therefore become unable to counterbalance "the Kremlin's propaganda."

'The Obama administration's decision to "scrap the plan to build a missile defense shield in Central Europe" has dealt a severe blow to NATO's positions in the region, Dalibor Rohac emphasized.

The expert is warning that Washington may soon lose its control over several states of Central and Eastern Europe and urging the West "to recognize quickly that something has gone terribly wrong in this part of the world."

Remarkably, the United States is still in denial and refuses to admit that its own irresponsible foreign policy in Eastern Europe, particularly in Ukraine, could have triggered controversy among its steadfast allies.

Homes are being evacuated in small lakeside communities near Prince George as firefighters battle a wildfire.

The evacuation order covers about 80 people living on Norman Lake, Little Bobtail Lake and Naltesby Lake, while residents to the north and west are under an evacuation alert.

The wildfire is burning 50 km southwest of Prince George and was last estimated to cover 2,500 hectares. As of Sunday night, 26 firefighters were trying to bring it under control with the help of two helicopters, and five pieces of heavy equipment, but more than 100 additional staff have been called in to assist.

Smoke from the fire can be seen from Highway 16 and nearby communities.

The cause of the blaze is under investigation.

Jillian Kelsh of the B.C. Wildfire Management Branch said the evacuations are from a number of permanent and seasonal homes. She added that the fire was about 20 hectares in size when it was first spotted Saturday but quickly spread.

The forecast for the Prince George area this week calls for sunny skies and temperatures as high as 24 degrees through to Sunday. Winds are expected to gust at up to 20 km/h on Monday and Tuesday.

Kelsh said a top priority for firefighters on Monday will be to evaluate how the warm, dry, windy weather will impact the spread of the blaze.

Up-to-date information on evacuations can be found on the Regional District of Bulkley-Nechako's website and website for the Regional District of Fraser-Fort George.

B.C.'s Wildfire Management Branch is currently dealing with two active fires larger than 10 hectares in size. The second blaze is burning 32 km south of Lillooet off the Duffey Lake Road and spans 60 hectares, but it is contained by natural barriers and no structures are at risk.

Volcanoes are considered chaotic systems. They are difficult to model because the geophysical and chemical parameters in volcanic eruptions exhibit high levels of uncertainty. Now, Dmitri V. Alexandrov and colleagues from the Ural Federal University in Ekaterinburg, in the Russian Federation, have further extended an eruption model—previously developed by other scientists—to the friction force at work between the volcanic plug and volcanic conduit surface. The results, published in , provide evidence that volcanic activity can be induced by external noises that would not otherwise have been predicted by the model.

Predicting when, where and how volcanic eruptions will happen is likely to remain empirical. That is, until it is possible to improve the modelling of their dynamics. The challenge of such models is that the volcanic eruption dynamics are very complex, involving simultaneous unrelated processes and offering a variety of possible scenarios.

The authors built on a previous study demonstrating the influence of noise in triggering eruptions. Namely, they assumed that, under complex friction forces, the volcano plug and conduit exhibit a previously identified mechanism, called stick-slip behaviour, which causes the volcanic plug to rise and fall in an attenuated manner. They then studied the influence of random disturbances on these dynamics. They also tested the resulting model with experimental data from the Mount St. Helen's eruption, dating back to 2004 and 2005.

Alexandrov and colleagues show that the external noise is also linked to the appearance of large-amplitude oscillations in the volcanic plug and high seismicity. An increase in noise intensity leads to drumbeat-type plug movement, exhibiting irregular periodicity dependent on noise. Such beat-type behaviour is a building block for understanding the physical mechanisms of volcanic drumbeat seismicity.

In Convicting Jeff Sterling, CIA Revealed More Than It Accused Him of Revealing

Some Americans have heard of New York Times reporter and book author James Risen and his refusal to expose a source. But, because most reports on that matter scrupulously avoided the subject of what it was Risen had reported, relatively few people can tell you. In fact, Risen reported (in a book, as the New York Times obeyed a government request to keep it quiet) that back in the year 2000 the CIA gave nuclear weapons plans to Iran. Flaws had been introduced into the plans, with the stated intention of slowing down an Iranian nuclear weapons program if one existed. Risen’s reporting that the flaws were glaringly obvious, including to the former-Russian asset assigned to deliver the plans to Iran, made the scheme look even worse than it at first sounds.

Jeffery Sterling, a CIA handler of the former-Russian asset, was convicted earlier this year of being Risen’s source. He was convicted on the basis of the sort of circumstantial evidence known as “meta-data” that the NSA maintains we’re not supposed to worry about, but which an appeals court on Thursday ruled the bulk collection of unconstitutional. Sterling is expected to be sentenced Monday to a lengthy prison term.

During the course of Sterling’s trial, the CIA itself made public a bigger story than the one it pinned on Sterling. The CIA revealed, unintentionally no doubt, that just after the nuclear weapons plans had been dropped off for the Iranians, the CIA had proposed to the same asset that he next approach the Iraqi government for the same purpose. The CIA revealed this by entering into evidence this cable:

Mr. S., also known as Bob S., was and is a CIA officer. M is short for Merlin which is code for the former Russian and also the name of the operation (Operation Merlin). The cable refers to a more adventurous extension of the operation to somewhere other than Iran. The name for this other location begins with a vowel, because it follows the indefinite article “AN.”

Look closely at the text of the cable. The letters line up in vertical columns as well as the usual horizontal rows. It’s a grid. The missing word on the seventh line begins with a vowel and has five letters. It can be IRAQI or OMANI.

Keep reading. The missing word on the tenth line has four letters. It is either IRAQ or OMAN.

There follows a discussion of a meeting place, which is likely not in Iraq (or Oman).

Read to the last line. There the missing word has six letters. It can be IRAQIS or OMANIS.

The circumstantial evidence for choosing Iraq over Oman as the second target for Operation Merlin is far more weighty than what was used to convict Jeffrey Sterling of informing the public of the first target. Oman has never been alleged publicly by anyone of having or pursuing a nuclear weapons program. Oman has never been known to be a target of U.S. military action. Iraq in 2000 had been the target of multiple CIA-backed coup attempts. Iraq’s weaponry was a top focus of the CIA. Within two years, claims about Iraqi weaponry would be used by the CIA to support the U.S. attack on Iraq that would come in March 2003.

The 2002-2003 claims by then-President George W. Bush and then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice that a smoking gun could come from Iraq in the form of a mushroom cloud take on a different light when we learn that some short time earlier the CIA had proposed to give Iraq nuclear weapons plans as part of a program that Condoleezza Rice personally persuaded the New York Times not to reveal.

In 1995, Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law Hussein Kamel had informed U.S. and British intelligence officers that “all weapons—biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed.” Yet, on October 2, 2002, President Bush said, “The regime has the scientists and facilities to build nuclear weapons, and is seeking the materials needed to do so.” This was a claim he would also put in a letter to Congress and in his 2003 State of the Union Address.

Vice President Dick Cheney went so far as to claim, on March 16, 2003, on Meet The Press, “And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.”

There was no evidence for this, of course, and pretended evidence was carefully manufactured, including forged documents purporting to show that Iraq was trying to buy uranium, and an incorrect analysis of aluminum tubes that had to be carefully sought out after all the usual experts refused to provide the desired answer.

“We do know that there have been shipments going . . . into Iraq . . . of aluminum tubes that really are only suited to — high-quality aluminum tools [sic] that are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs,” said Condoleezza Rice on CNN’s Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer on September 8, 2002.

When the experts at the Departments of Energy, State, and Defense refused to say that aluminum tubes in Iraq were for nuclear facilities, because they knew they could not possibly be and were almost certainly for rockets, a couple of guys at the Army’s National Ground Intelligence Center near Charlottesville, Va., were happy to oblige. Their names were George Norris and Robert Campus, and they received “performance awards” (cash) for the service. Then Secretary of State Colin Powell used Norris’ and Campus’ claims in his U.N. speech despite the warning of his own staff that they weren’t true.

The U.S. government has never engaged in any such efforts to falsely portray Oman as pursuing nuclear weapons.

Did the CIA follow through with Merlin and actually give anything to the Iraqi government? Did it provide nuclear weapons plans as with Iran? Did it provide nuclear weapons parts, as originally conceived for Iran but not followed through on?

We don’t know. But we know that the CIA continued paying “Merlin” and his wife for some service. As Marcy Wheeler pointed out, “altogether, the CIA paid the Merlins roughly $413,223.67 over the 7 years after James Risen supposedly ruined Merlin’s usefulness as an asset.” For all we know, we taxpayers are still funding the Merlin household.

BREAKING: Attorney: George Zimmerman not seriously injured after bullet hit his vehicle in Florida.

— The Associated Press (@AP) May 11, 2015

George Zimmerman, who was acquitted in the 2013 shooting death of Trayvon Martin, has, according to WESH Orlando, been shot in Orlando, Florida.

The shooting involved two men and happened on Lake Mary Boulevard, police said. Officers at the scene said it appeared Zimmerman suffered a minor gunshot wound, Bracknell said. “He walked normally into the ambulance, so he wasn’t being helped or nothing,” said witness Ricardo Berrare.

Live Feed (via WOFL)

FOX 35 News Orlando

As WESH reports,

Chopper 2 video showed a bullet hole in the passenger window the vehicle Zimmerman was in.

In January, Zimmerman was accused of assault by his girlfriend, but no charges were filed after she recanted her allegation.

He was also arrested in November 2013 on domestic violence allegations after his girlfriend called police. His girlfriend later recanted her story and charges were never filed.

Zimmerman was acquitted in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in 2013.

* * *

#Breaking: George Zimmerman reportedly involved in shooting about an hour ago in Lake Mary FL. Details breaking. http://pic.twitter.com/IqxyRCk2la

— FOX 29 (@FOX29philly) May 11, 2015

#BREAKING: KARMA - George Zimmerman Shot In Possible Road Rage Incident - http://bit.ly/1dXUSrq @Breaking911 http://pic.twitter.com/QWOweecFE4

— BREAKING NEWS (@JohnMir12) May 11, 2015

White House Denies It Fabricated bin Laden Killing, Says Hersh Report "Riddled With Inaccuracies And Falsehoods"

If anyone expected the Obama administration to admit that, as Seymour Hersch alleged last night, it had openly lied and fabricated the entire account of Osama bin Laden killing - perhaps the most defining narrative of Obama's entire first term, we have some bad news: it won't.

Instead, as AP reports, the White House has decided to continue its reality challenged ways and has dismissed as "untrue" Hersh's entire 10K plus word report on what really happened in Abbattobad.

It gets better: according to that paragon of honesty, White House spokesman, Josh Earnest, Hersh's piece in the London Review of Books is "riddled with inaccuracies and outright falsehoods."

It was not immediately clear if Earnest referred the press corp to some fabricated YouTube clip as evidence it wasn't lying about lying.

Earnest noted former CIA deputy director Michael Morell's reaction to the article — that he stopped reading because every sentence was wrong.

As previously reported, Hersh attributed his information to a retired general of the Pakistani intelligence service and several unidentified sources in the U.S. and Pakistan. He says bin Laden was secretly kept as a prisoner by the Pakistanis and that they helped the U.S. stage the raid on his compound.

Among the many allegations of Hersh's report are that:

bin Laden had been a prisoner of the Pakistan intelligence at the Abbottabad compound since 2006 (something revealed previously in "Osama bin Laden 'protected by Pakistan in return for Saudi cash")
that the two most senior Pakistani military leaders knew of the raid in advance and had made sure that the two helicopters delivering the Seals to Abbottabad could cross Pakistani airspace without triggering any alarms;
that the CIA did not learn of bin Laden’s whereabouts by tracking his couriers, as the White House has claimed since May 2011, but from a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret in return for much of the $25 million reward offered by the US,
and that, while Obama did order the raid and the Seal team did carry it out, many other aspects of the administration’s account were false.

The Obama administration says the Pakistanis didn't know about the raid in advance. It wasn't immediately clear if it had rejected all the other claims.

For those who missed it, the full Hersh report can be found here.

Six years ago, Dr Erica Mallery-Blythe moved to the country, stopped carrying a mobile phone and sacrificed a successful career in emergency medicine to focus on a new medical interest - radiation emitted by Wi-Fi, mobiles and other wireless devices.

She is now one of the country's few professional advisers on medical conditions related to radiofrequency (RF) radiation and other electromagnetic fields (EMFs).

"I was using wireless devices before most people I knew - I loved it," says Mallery-Blythe, who was ahead of the tech trend even in 1985 when she was handed her first mobile phone, aged 10.

"But as soon as I started digesting the literature on EMFs it was a no-brainer," she says of her decision to relinquish wireless gadgets.

"I wasn't willing to take that kind of risk for something that was purely convenient."

- Wi-Fi fears: three-year study into health risks of mobiles to children's brains

Her interest in EMFs started in 2009 after she began noticing increasing trends in certain symptoms - headaches, insomnia, fatigue and palpitations, but also more serious conditions including brain tumours in young people, fertility problems and accelerating neurological diseases such as early onset Alzheimer's and autism. As yet there is still no scientific proof that relates these diseases to radiation, but Mallery-Blythe is among a not insignificant number of scientists and practitioners concerned by those studies that do highlight cause for more precaution.

Over the past few years, as Wi-Fi, laptops and iPads have become increasingly prevalent in classrooms, Mallery-Blythe says "hundreds" of families have sought her help with what they believe to be EMF-related diseases and health issues.

One such case is that of nine-year-old Jessica Lewis's family. In the autumn term of 2011, Jessica started to complain that she was getting bad headaches at school. She was also feeling overly tired, developed rashes on her legs and her parents said she looked "completely washed out" after school, particularly on Mondays. A quick internet search threw up a forum where parents had written that their children complained of similar symptoms after installing Wi-Fi.

- Introducing the pepper grinder that will switch off your kids' phones

"I ignored it. We didn't know anything about Wi-Fi then," says Jessica's father, Paul Lewis. "We didn't think her school had it."

Later that term, at a parents' evening, he noticed a Wi-Fi router near Jessica's desk in her new form classroom. As it turned out, Monday was the day of the week the whole class worked on laptops.

When a local GP backed up Lewis's suspicions about Wi-Fi being the probable cause of Jessica's headaches, he went to some lengths to try to convince Spotbrough Copley Junior School in Doncaster to use wires instead of Wi-Fi, even offering to pay for the school building to be wired with cables.

- Mobile phones unlikely to harm human health, scientists find

The school pointed out that a government report advised that Wi-Fi exposures were well within internationally accepted standards. Guidelines were reviewed in 2011 and still stand today. "We do not think the balance of available scientific evidence on radiofrequency has shifted and, as such, our position remains that PHE [Public Health England] sees no reason why Wi-Fi should not continue to be used in schools and in other places," says Dr Simon Mann at PHE, the Department of Health's agency in charge of health protection.

"That just didn't add up," says Lewis. Now Jessica is home-schooled, much to her frustration, because symptoms resurface when she's exposed to Wi-Fi.

In February, insurance market Lloyd's of London informed schools that it was excluding liability coverage for injuries "resulting from or contributed to by electromagnetic fields, electromagnetic radiation, electromagnetism, radio waves or noise", which means that school officials could be personally liable for exposing children and staff to microwave radiation.

"The Government is expecting head teachers to decide whether risk versus benefit is worthwhile. This seems unfair to me," says Mallery-Blythe. "Most teachers don't even know that RF is currently classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) as a Group 2B carcinogen, which means it is a possible cause of cancer in humans. There is a vast amount of published literature documenting the harmful effects on every biological system. Most people understandably don't have time to read and digest it all."

- Ban mobile phones and wireless networks in schools, say European leaders

As well as founding the Physicians' Health Initiative for Radiation and Environment (PHIRE) to inform doctors of the issues and advise on best health practice, Mallery-Blythe gives talks to teachers around the country, in which she presents scientific studies that reveal both short and long-term effects of EMF exposure. One of the talks (below) has had more than 15,000 views on YouTube since last November. It's an engaging summary of the issues that concerned scientists are discussing. "I try to present the facts the authorities aren't highlighting," says Mallery-Blythe.

[embedded content]

I was surprised to find myself glued to it. Particularly eye-opening are the number of widely held misconceptions about radiation safety that Mallery-Blythe sets about busting. Standing a good distance away from a Wi-Fi router may reduce radiation intensity, for example, but low-intensity windows of radiation have been shown to be more harmful in some studies than higher-intensity exposures.

"At the moment people think their children are safe because the router is far away - or we don't have to worry about the phone because it's not near the brain. That's common sense but unfortunately we now know it's not quite true," she says, pointing out that the brain is better protected than some more vulnerable parts of the body.

Are the Department of Health and PHE doing too little? "My main issue with the PHE's stance is that it's contradictory," says Mallery-Blythe.

"They've issued a caution saying children under 16 shouldn't be using mobile phones except for essential calls, but they've been quite happy to support the one-to-one iPad scheme, though an iPad can have an equivalent or higher SAR (the rate at which energy is absorbed by the human body when exposed to a radio frequency) than a phone."

Associate Professor Olle Johansson, a neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, compares putting an iPhone near a baby's head to "putting it next to several electric train engines", pointing out that working with train engines is Sweden's highest occupational exposure allowance.

Johansson has been researching the biological effects of radiofrequency (RF) wireless radiation for more than 30 years, but says it has become "extremely hard to get funding" in this area. "Given the importance of the subject I'd say that's more than enigmatic."

He predicts a "paradigm shift" in attitudes towards EMF. We are currently living in an environment estimated to contain more than 10 billion times more RF radiation than it did in the Sixties. "If this environment is safe we're talking about in the order of 15,000 to 25,000 papers - in peer-reviewed scientific journals - all being wrong. That has never happened before."

"We just want to see some precautionary action put in place, and we're not seeing it."

Wi-Fi at home: Dr Erica Mallery-Blythe's advice

Try to keep your mobile switched off and don't use it unless you need to. Keep it in flight mode when it is on and never carry your mobile close to your body, even on standby.

Don't use Wi-Fi for internet. Instead use an Ethernet cable and buy a router with no wireless capacity or disable it. Disable Wi-Fi on your computer or tablet by disabling the wireless card via the control panel or putting it into flight mode.

Replace cordless landlines with corded ones. Most cordless telephones give off radiation whether they're in use or not.

Background

In February the French government banned Wi-Fi in nursery schools and restricted use in primary schools. The German government has recommended that the use of Wi-Fi in the workplace or home should be avoided where possible. LA has reduced student exposure to Wi-Fi radiation to 10,000 times below US government standard.

In 2000, a report commissioned by the Government concluded that no school should fall within 100 metres of a mobile phone mast; in 2007 a BBC Panorama programme found that the readings next to a classroom laptop showed radiation at double the level only 100 metres from a mobile phone mast.

A five-year-old absorbs up to 60 per cent more radiation than an adult due largely to their thinner skulls and the high water content of a young body. In Western countries brain tumours have overtaken leukaemia as the most common cause of cancer in children.

A 2008 study found a fivefold increase in the risk of glioma (a form of brain cancer now recognised by the World Health Organisation as being linked to mobile phone usage) for those starting mobile phone use under 20 years of age, indicating that the age group at first use is highly significant.

Schools and parents can find out more through ssita.org.uk

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