David Randall
The Independent

The United States has confirmed publicly for the first time that a Pakistani doctor long suspected of collecting vital evidence before the assassination of Osama bin Laden was indeed working for them.

Defence Secretary Leon Panetta told 60 Minutes on CBS, in a profile to be broadcast today, that Shakil Afridi helped provide proof that the compound in Abbottabad to which they had tracked a Bin Laden courier, was indeed sheltering the al-Qa’ida leader. Armed with this information, President Barack Obama swiftly authorised last May’s assault by a US Navy Seals team. Bin Laden was killed, and a much-embarrassed Pakistan arrested Dr Afridi for acting for a foreign intelligence service. He has been in jail since, on suspicion of treason. Mr Panetta said he is “very concerned” for the doctor.

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Roxana Tiron
Washington Post

Defense contractors Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and Raytheon spent a combined $33.4 million on lobbying in Washington last year, a 10 percent increase from 2010, as Congress and the Obama administration weighed cuts in the Pentagon budget.

A review of lobbying disclosures filed with the Senate by a Jan. 20 deadline showed that Bethesda-based Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defense company, led such spending last year with $15 million for lobbying, a 19 percent increase.

Pentagon contractors face an era of limited government spending after an impasse on how to cut the federal budget left open the prospect of $1 trillion in defense cuts over a decade. Even with future cuts looming, defense companies focused their lobbying last year on protecting contracts and programs from immediate cuts, according to Michael Herson, president of American Defense International, a defense lobbying and business-development firm in Washington.

“The contractors were focused on their programs in fiscal year 2012 — that was the more certain problem at hand,’’ Herson said in an interview.

Read full story here

Mike Barrett
Natural Society

Who needs alternative or natural treatments when there is already a fantastic medical system put in place aiming to ‘better’ the world? At least that’s what more than 400 doctors, medical researchers, and scientists who want to shut down all alternative medicine degrees seem to believe.

Alternative Medicine Attacked by Mainstream Medical Establishment

The mainstream medical practitioners in Australia seem to think that alternative medicine has no place, and chose to form a powerful lobby group to pressure universities to get rid of any alternative medicine degrees. The group, comically calling themselves ‘Friends of Science in Medicine’, have even openly denounced alternative medicine as ‘quackery’. They specifically stated that universities offering these alternative degrees are ruining their reputation by giving “undeserved credibility to what in many cases would be better described as quackery” and by “failing to champion evidence-based science and medicine.”

Nearly one in three Australian universities offer some kind of alternative therapy or complementary medicine, whether it be chiropractics, homeopathy, naturopathy, aromatherapy, or Chinese herbal medicine. But a co-founder of Friends of Science in Medicine, who is also a government adviser on consumer health fraud, says that universities like these are offering “degrees in pseudo science”.

“It’s deplorable, but we didn’t realise how much concern there was out there for universities’ reputations until we tapped into it,” Professor Dwyer said. “We’re saying enough is enough. Taxpayers’ money should not be wasted on funding [these courses] … nor should government health insurance rebates be wasted on this nonsense.”

This kind of attack on alternative medicine is not only occurring in Australia. European Union regulations have come into place banning hundreds of traditional herbal remedies. Under the guise of “protecting” consumers from these “dangerous” supplements, the European Union has opened the flood gates to an onslaught of new legislation designed to cut off access to alternative health supplements worldwide, setting the precedent for the government to tell us what we can and cannot put in our own bodies.

Similarly, the Food and Drug Administration in the United States is seeking to outlaw the majority of supplements created after 1994 until they have been heavily proven to be 100% effective and free of any slight side effects. Meanwhile the organization allows for harmful genetically modified ingredients to fill the world’s food supply. While the FDA’s NDI (New Dietary Ingredient) regulations seek to remove your right to freely purchase powerful superfoods, they are simply not concerned over the fact that GMO food consumption has been linked with severe organ disruption and other health concerns.

It is concerning to see such opposition to alternative medicine while the mainstream medical establishment has failed so miserably. Over the past 27 years — the complete time frame that the data has been available —  there have been 0 deaths as a result of vitamins and over 3 million deaths related to prescription drug use. While profit-driven drug companies push their products to ‘treat’ diseases like cancer, cancer rates are higher than ever, with the drugs making cancer worse and killing patients more quickly.

Government agencies are so eager to completely transform the population into drug-ingesting, non-questioning individuals that they have even deemed health-promoting foods like walnuts to be illegal drugs.

Is it possible to thrive without antipsychotics, high-powered painkillers, and statin drugs? More importantly, are natural alternatives really as ‘dangerous’ as mainstream health officials claim? While pharmaceuticals lead to more deaths than traffic fatalities in the U.S., natural and inexpensive supplements like vitamin D slash your risk of cancer, obesity, and the flu. Similarly, turmeric is known to positively affect over 573 diseases. Possessing anti-cancer properties and blocking cancer growth are just one of the many benefits of turmeric.

So should we really trust and listen to the mainstream medical establishment, or is it time to throw the bums out? You are not meant to feel sick, broken down, and rely upon invasive surgeries and damaging pharmaceuticals to sustain your health. It’s time to shift to a new health paradigm, where natural living is paramount.

RT

As Nigeria spirals into instability, historian and economic researcher Frederick William Engdahl argues a recent government decision to lift subsidies on imported fuel in the oil-rich nation bears the mark of Washington Consensus shock therapy.

In the article below, Engdahl explains his view.

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation and its largest oil producer, is from all evidence being systematically thrown into chaos and a state of civil war. The recent surprise decision by the government of Goodluck Jonathan to abruptly lift subsidies on imported gasoline and other fuel has a far more sinister background than mere corruption, and the Washington-based International Monetary Fund (IMF) is playing a key role. China appears to be the likely loser along with Nigeria’s population.

The recent strikes protesting the government’s abrupt elimination of gasoline and other fuel subsidies, that brought Nigeria briefly to a standstill, came as a surprise to most in the country. Months earlier, President Jonathan had promised the major trade union organizations that he would conduct a gradual four-stage lifting of the subsidy to ease the economic burden. Instead, without warning he announced an immediate full removal of subsidies effective January 1, 2012. It was “shock therapy” to put it mildly.

Nigeria today is one of the world’s most important producers of light, sweet crude oil—the same high-quality crude oil that Libya and the British North Sea produce. The country is showing every indication of spiraling downward into deep disorder. Nigeria is the fifth largest supplier of oil to the United States and twelfth largest oil producer in the world on a par with Kuwait and just behind Venezuela with production exceeding two million barrels a day.

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Ellen Nakashima and Lisa Rein
Washington Post

The Food and Drug Administration secretly monitored the personal e-mail of a group of its own scientists and doctors after they warned Congress that the agency was approving medical devices that they believed posed unacceptable risks to patients, government documents show.

The surveillance - detailed in e-mails and memos unearthed by six of the scientists and doctors, who filed a lawsuit against the FDA in U.S. District Court in Washington last week — took place over two years as the plaintiffs accessed their personal Gmail accounts from government computers.

Information garnered this way eventually contributed to the harassment or dismissal of all six of the FDA employees, the suit alleges. All had worked in an office responsible for reviewing devices for cancer screening and other purposes.

Copies of the e-mails show that, starting in January 2009, the FDA intercepted communications with congressional staffers and draft versions of whistleblower complaints complete with editing notes in the margins. The agency also took electronic snapshots of the computer desktops of the FDA employees and reviewed documents they saved on the hard drives of their government computers.

Read full report here

- NASA experts warn, ‘expect the Thames to freeze over in the winter’

- Met Office releases new figures which show ‘no warming in 15 years’

David Rose
Mail Online

The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.

The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.

Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997. Meanwhile, leading climate scientists yesterday told The Mail on Sunday that, after emitting unusually high levels of energy throughout the 20th Century, the sun is now heading towards a ‘grand minimum’ in its output, threatening cold summers, bitter winters and a shortening of the season available for growing food.

… We are now at what should be the peak of what scientists call ‘Cycle 24’ – which is why last week’s solar storm resulted in sightings of the aurora borealis further south than usual. But sunspot numbers are running at less than half those seen during cycle peaks in the 20th Century.

Read full report here

ScienceDaily

Could preventing colon cancer be as simple as developing a taste for yerba mate tea? In a recent University of Illinois study, scientists showed that human colon cancer cells die when they are exposed to the approximate number of bioactive compounds present in one cup of this brew, which has long been consumed in South America for its medicinal properties.

“The caffeine derivatives in mate tea not only induced death in human colon cancer cells, they also reduced important markers of inflammation,” said Elvira de Mejia, a U of I associate professor of food chemistry and food toxicology.

That’s important because inflammation can trigger the steps of cancer progression, she said. In the in vitro study, de Mejia and former graduate student Sirima Puangpraphant isolated, purified, and then treated human colon cancer cells with caffeoylquinic acid (CQA) derivatives from mate tea. As the scientists increased the CQA concentration, cancer cells died as a result of apoptosis.

“Put simply, the cancer cell self-destructs because its DNA has been damaged,” she said.

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Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com

In politically correct San Francisco, a six year old boy was charged with sexual assault after playing a game of tag on the playground.

The child was accused of brushing his best friend’s leg or groin while the two were playing on the playground at Lupine Hills Elementary in Hercules two months ago, according to CBS in San Francisco.

The parent of the child said his son was held in the principal’s office and interrogated. The school coerced a confession from the child. He was suspended and a sexual battery charge was placed on his permanent school record, even though there is no such thing as sexual assault for a six year-old in California.

Only after the boy’s parents hired a lawyer and threatened to sue did the school back down.

The case is another example of control freak public school administrators treating students like prison inmates. So-called “zero tolerance” for “sexual abuse” – from students who are too young to even know what sex or sexual abuse are – provides an excuse to lord over impressionable children and acclimate them behaviorally for years spent in the education-prison system that is public school.

School are Constitution-free zones writ large. Students around the country are subjected to searches of lockers, cars and personal possessions in violation of the Fourth Amendment.

In numerous cases, school officials around the country have subjected children to traumatic experiences that will harm them for life – from arresting them for playing with Nerf “guns” toallowing police to conduct armed training exercises in schools.

Police are now gunning down students in school hallways, something that was unheard of a generation ago.

And while school officials claim students are engaged in sexual abuse and perversion, more often than not it is teachers and administrators who are the perverts. In California, state bureaucrats are in the business of the protecting pedophiles who come in contact with children.

The Jerry Sandusky case at Penn State underscores the fact that pedophiles gravitate toward schools and government jobs where sexual abuse is often tolerated and covered-up. Add to that the documented fact child protective services around the country are involved inkidnapping and molestation and we have more than enough reason to never trust government with the education and management of our children.

Government mistreatment and exploitation of children is epidemic and no more so than at the de facto world government headquarters, the United Nations. In 2007, it was reported that the U.N. was investigating itself for involvement in a child sex slavery ring.

In 2005, Rep. Cynthia McKinney had the chance to grill then Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld about Pentagon contractor Dyncorp’s buying and selling of young women and children. Dyncorp and Halliburton subsidiary KBR have been implicated in human trafficking.

McKinney was ultimately run out of Congress and nothing became of the human trafficking accusations, thus again demonstrating that the pedophile and human sexual slave trade instinct of government is largely above reproach.

For the ordinary parent, the only sane option is to remove his or her children from government indoctrination mills and the prison complex and homeschool them.

Gordon G. Chang
Forbes

This month, the Hong Kong Census and Statistics Department reported that China imported 102,779 kilograms of gold from Hong Kong in November, an increase from October’s 86,299 kilograms.  Beijing does not release gold trade figures, so for this and other reasons the Hong Kong numbers are considered the best indication of China’s gold imports.

Analysts believe China bought as much as 490 tons of gold in 2011, double the estimated 245 tons in 2010.  “The thing that’s caught people’s minds is the massive increase in Chinese buying,” remarked Ross Norman of Sharps Pixley, a London gold brokerage, this month.

So who in China is buying all this gold?

The People’s Bank of China, the central bank, has been hinting that it is purchasing.  “No asset is safe now,” said the PBOC’s Zhang Jianhua at the end of last month.  “The only choice to hedge risks is to hold hard currency—gold.”  He also said it was smart strategy to buy on market dips.  Analysts naturally jumped on his comment as proof that China, the world’s fifth-largest holder of the metal, is in the market for more.

There are a few problems with this conclusion.  First, the Chinese government rarely benefits others—and hurts itself—by telegraphing its short-term investment strategies.

Second, the central bank has less purchasing power these days.  China’s foreign reserves declined in Q4 2011, falling $20.6 billion from Q3.  The first quarterly outflow since 1998 was not large, but the trend was troubling.  The reserves declined a stunning $92.7 billion in November and December.

Third, the purchase of gold would be especially risky for the central bank, which is already insolvent from a balance sheet point of view.  The PBOC needs income-producing assets in order to meet its obligations on the debt incurred to buy foreign exchange, so the holding of gold only complicates its funding operations.  This is not to say the bank never buys gold—it obviously does—but there are real constraints on its ability to purchase assets that do not provide current income.

Read full story here at Forbes

Silvia Ribeiro
pravda.ru

A report by Jeremy Scahill in The Nation (Blackwater’s Black Ops, 9/15/2010) revealed that the largest mercenary army in the world, Blackwater (now called Xe Services) clandestine intelligence services was sold to the multinational Monsanto. Blackwater was renamed in 2009 after becoming famous in the world with numerous reports of abuses in Iraq, including massacres of civilians. It remains the largest private contractor of the U.S. Department of State “security services,” that practices state terrorism by giving the government the opportunity to deny it.

Many military and former CIA officers work for Blackwater or related companies created to divert attention from their bad reputation and make more profit selling their nefarious services-ranging from information and intelligence to infiltration, political lobbying and paramilitary training – for other governments, banks and multinational corporations. According to Scahill, business with multinationals, like Monsanto, Chevron, and financial giants such as Barclays and Deutsche Bank, are channeled through two companies owned by Erik Prince, owner of Blackwater: Total Intelligence Solutions and Terrorism Research Center. These officers and directors share Blackwater.

One of them, Cofer Black, known for his brutality as one of the directors of the CIA, was the one who made contact with Monsanto in 2008 as director of Total Intelligence, entering into the contract with the company to spy on and infiltrate organizations of animal rights activists, anti-GM and other dirty activities of the biotech giant.

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