Archive for January, 2009
Black Death Plague Hits Al Qaeda — Biological Warfare?
Anti-terror bosses last night hailed their latest ally in the war on terror — the BLACK DEATH.
At least 40 al-Qaeda fanatics died horribly after being struck down with the disease that devastated Europe in the Middle Ages. The killer bug, also known as the plague, swept through insurgents training at a forest camp in Algeria, North Africa. It came to light when security forces found a body by a roadside.
The victim was a terrorist in AQLIM (al-Qaeda in the Land of the Islamic Maghreb), the largest and most powerful al-Qaeda group outside the Middle East. It trains Muslim fighters to kill British and US troops.
Now al-Qaeda chiefs fear the plague has been passed to other terror cells — or Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.
North Korea Claims to Have Weaponized Plutonium
BEIJING, China (CNN): Senior North Korean officials say the communist regime has “weaponized” its stockpile of plutonium, according to a U.S. scholar, in a move suggesting that North Korea may have significantly hardened its stance on nuclear negotiations.
Selig Harrison, one of the few U.S. scholars granted access to senior North Korean officials, said at a news conference in Beijing that the officials told him they had weaponized 30.8 kilograms of plutonium, enough for four or five warheads.
The director of the Asia Program at the Center for International Policy, who just returned from a five-day visit to Pyongyang, said senior North Korean officials told him the warheads will not be open for inspection.
If it is true, the news portends a gloomy outlook for the future of the six-party talks that began in 2003 with the goal of getting North Korea to end its nuclear program.
“It does change the game,” Harrison said.
South…
Obama’s Mass Movement Gets a New Mission
“People don’t remember what fascism was, I am afraid. A lot of people think, especially here in the U.S. where people are ignorant, people believe that fascism is a purely top down phenomenon,” author Webster Griffin Tarpley told the Dutch journalist Daan de Wit during an interview on May 11, 2008. “Fascism is the march on Rome; fascism is the storm troopers fighting in the streets. It is a gutter and street level movement; it is a grass roots movement that has anti-authoritarian cover, anti-parliamentary, anti-congress cover. It has left cover. Mussolini of course was a revolutionary socialist and a lot of people in his movement were left wingers, you now, extreme trade union activists, syndicalists and stuff like this.”
The Proposed Aggregator Bank is A Trojan Horse for the New ‘United States’
Five Months after US Treasury Sec. Paulson asked for TARP Funds (and at this writing not having used not a dime to buy toxic assets), he now proposes yet another solution — A new US Government Owned “Aggregator Bank.” [1] While this idea comes not from the RTC but from the Swedish Banking Crisis of 1990–1993, it has the potential to go far afield of its stated purpose.
Sweden’s bank crisis began with Swedish bank deregulation in the late 1980s. Deregulation rapidly eased credit. Easy credit allowed intensive investment in Swedish real estate. Like our (US) recent housing bubble, Swedish real estate prices soared in the late 1980s. As easy credit pushed prices higher Swedish banks loaned more krona against quickly appreciating hard Swedish real estate assets. When the Swedish real estate market collapsed the asset “values” deflated quickly. Swedish borrowers and their creditors, the Swedish banks, found themselves suddenly illiquid.…
Government Regulators Aided IndyMac Cover-Up, Maybe Others
A brewing fraud scandal at the Treasury Department may be worse than officials originally thought.
Investigators probing how Treasury regulators allowed a bank to falsify financial records hiding its ill health have found at least three other instances of similar apparent fraud, sources tell ABC News.
In at least one instance, investigators say, banking regulators actually approached the bank with the suggestion of falsifying deposit dates to satisfy banking rules — even if it disguised the bank’s health to the public.
Treasury Department Inspector General Eric Thorson announced in November his office would probe how a Savings and Loan overseer allowed the IndyMac bank to essentially cook its books, making it appear in government filings that the bank had more deposits than it really did. But Thorson’s aides now say IndyMac wasn’t the only institution to get such cozy assistance from the official who should have been the cop on the beat.
The federal…
Eastern Europe braced for a violent ’spring of discontent’
Eastern Europe is heading for a violent “spring of discontent”, according to experts in the region who fear that the global economic downturn is generating a dangerous popular backlash on the streets.
Hit increasingly hard by the financial crisis, countries such as Bulgaria, Romania and the Baltic states face deep political destabilisation and social strife, as well as an increase in racial tension.
Last week protesters were tear-gassed as they threw rocks at police outside parliament in Vilnius, capital of Lithuania, in a protest against an austerity package including tax rises and benefit cuts.
In Sofia, Bulgaria, 150 people were arrested and at least 30 injured in widespread violence. More than 100 were detained after street battles between security forces and demonstrators in the Latvian capital, Riga.
According to the most recent estimates, the economies of some eastern European countries, after posting double-digit growth for nearly a decade, will contract by up to 5%…
Mexican drug wars worry some Americans
Indiscriminate kidnappings. Nearly daily beheadings. Gangs that mock and kill government agents.
This isn’t Iraq or Pakistan. It’s Mexico, which the U.S. government and a growing number of experts say is becoming one of the world’s biggest security risks.
The prospect that America’s southern neighbor could melt into lawlessness provides an unexpected challenge to Barack Obama’s new government. In its latest report anticipating possible global security risks, the U.S. Joint Forces Command lumps Mexico and Pakistan together as being at risk of a “rapid and sudden collapse.”
“The Mexican possibility may seem less likely, but the government, its politicians, police and judicial infrastructure are all under sustained assault and pressure by criminal gangs and drug cartels,” the command said in the report published Nov. 25.
“How that internal conflict turns out over the next several years will have a major impact on the stability of the Mexican state.”
…
Al Qaeda Does not Exist!
This is the Prologue to the new documentary from The Corbett Report, Al Qaeda Doesn’t Exist. This documentary interrogates the notion that Osama Bin Laden single-handedly runs the pervasive Al Qaeda terrorist network by examining its inception, its links to Western intelligence, the double agents and fictitious characters that populate its ranks, and the fraudulent ways the Al Qaeda myth is propagated in the controlled corporate media. The documentary also offers ways that citizens can become involved in helping to spread understanding about the true government-sponsored terror paradigm.
Part One of the Al Qaeda Doesn’t Exist documentary from The Corbett Report, dealing with the founding and funding of what we know as Al Qaeda. This installment of the documentary goes into Zbigniew Brzezinski, Operation Cyclone, the ISI-CIA-MAK-US government funding circle and CIA connections to Osama Bin Laden. For more information about this documentary, including a bibliography of works cited, please visit…
Woman fined for eating crust
A Liverpool woman was to be charged with not being in control of her car after she was seen eating a crust of bread while she was driving.
Monetary union has left half of Europe trapped in depression
Events are moving fast in Europe. The worst riots since the fall of Communism have swept the Baltics and the south Balkans. An incipient crisis is taking shape in the Club Med bond markets. S&P has cut Greek debt to near junk. Spanish, Portuguese, and Irish bonds are on negative watch.
Dublin has nationalised Anglo Irish Bank with its half-built folly on North Wall Quay and €73bn (£65bn) of liabilities, moving a step nearer the line where markets probe the solvency of the Irish state.
A great ring of EU states stretching from Eastern Europe down across Mare Nostrum to the Celtic fringe are either in a 1930s depression already or soon will be. Greece’s social fabric is unravelling before the pain begins, which bodes ill.
Each is a victim of ill-judged economic policies foisted upon them by elites in thrall to Europe’s monetary project – either in EMU or preparing to join…
Under Obama, Feds May Still Snoop Library Files
President-elect Barack Obama’s nominee for attorney general has endorsed an extension of the law that allows federal agents to demand Americans’ library and bookstore records as part of terrorism probes, dismaying a national group of independent booksellers.
Eric Holder said at his confirmation hearing Thursday before the Senate Judiciary Committee that he supports renewing a section of the USA Patriot Act that allows FBI agents investigating international terrorism or espionage to seek records from businesses, libraries and bookstores. If not renewed by Congress, the provision will expire at the end of 2009.
The searches must be authorized by a court that meets secretly and has approved the government’s requests in nearly all cases, according to congressional reports. The target of the search does not have to be suspected of terrorism or any other crime. A permanent gag order that accompanies each search prohibits the business or library from telling anyone about it.
Holder…
New RFID Technology Allows You to be Tracked WITHOUT Your Knowledge
By invitation, I recently visited a remote facility in northern Virginia to see a demonstration of NOX — a new Intelligent Perimeter Defense system deployed by the FBI that uses covert Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) technology to track people and assets without their knowledge.
That’s right, using RFID to track people without their knowledge. This system is exactly what the privacy advocates have long feared: Big Brother tracking us with spy chips. As Orwellian as this sounds, the undisputed fact is that this system catches thieves and does so at a fraction of the cost of traditional security solutions.
NOX combines high-resolution video pictures and RFID for identification, tracking and tracing, overlaid in real time on a facility map to show the movement of people and assets. The system allows security officers to see theft as it happens, even if the stolen object is inside a briefcase, under a jacket, or stuffed inside…
Not Green: Obama Inauguration Will Generate More than Half-Billion Pounds of CO2
Jeff Poor: Study that includes planes, trains, automobiles and even horses shows it would take an average American house 57,598 years to produce same carbon footprint.
Here’s an environmental impact story you’re not likely to see in the mainstream media. Neither NBC’s chief environmental affair correspondent Anne Thompson, nor ABC correspondent Bill Blakemore nor CBS “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley — all of whom have been eager over the years to expose so-called crimes against the environment — have rushed to report on the massive carbon footprint of the Obama inauguration.
But a comprehensive new study by The Institute for Liberty (IFL) took an in-depth look at each component of the Jan. 20 inauguration in Washington, D.C., and estimated that 575 million pounds of carbon dioxide will be emitted in the atmosphere for the inauguration — which is roughly equal to what the average American household would produce in 57,598 years.
Barack Obama in 2002: The Anti-Iraq War Speech
I have no doubt a President Barack Obama is not the same politician as Illinois State Representative Obama. Here is the video of the speech, as voiced by Obama and his supporters, that catapulted our next president into the hearts and minds of the progressive movement:
Obama Leadership Rates As High as Bush’s After 9/11
Paul Steinhauser, CNN: A national poll suggests that three-quarters of the public thinks President-elect Barack Obama is a strong and decisive leader, the highest marks for a president-elect on that characteristic in nearly three decades. Seventy-six percent of Americans questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Wednesday said Obama is a strong and decisive leader.
“That’s the best number an incoming president has gotten on that dimension since Ronald Reagan took office in 1981,” CNN Polling Director Keating Holland said. “The public’s rating of his leadership skills is already as high as George W. Bush’s was after 9/11 and easily beats the numbers that both Bush and Bill Clinton got at the start of their first terms in office.”
Just six in 10 felt that Bush was a strong leader when he took office in 2001. After the attacks of September 11, that number rose to three in four. Sixty-seven percent…
50 Facts That Should Change The USA – Disinformation: The Podcast
Disinformation: The Podcast – 50 Facts That Should Change the U.S.A.
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This episode features a conversation with Stephen Fender, author of 50 Facts That Should Change The USA. With the recent elections still a hot topic, and the inauguration only a few days away, this was a good opportunity to talk to Stephen about his book and why change has become such a popular concept in recent months. Sit back and enjoy a fascinating dialogue about the pros and cons of contemporary America.
Disinformation Podcast T-shirts available here!
Pro-Abortion Doughnuts: Hot Fetusus Now?
The anti-abortion American Life League has issued a press release accusing venerable pastry manufacturer Krispy Kreme of supporting baby-murder by offering free donuts on inauguration day. Krispy Kreme, which is extending the offer in honor of “American’s sense of pride and freedom of choice … on this historic day,” apparently had no idea of the implications of their choice of words.
The American Life League takes issue with the term “freedom of choice”, claiming that “[a] misconstrued concept of ‘choice’ has killed over 50 million preborn children since Jan. 22, 1973. Does Krispy Kreme really want their free doughnuts to celebrate this ‘freedom.’”
U.S. Agency Warns Americans Not To Eat Peanut Butter
The Food and Drug Administration on Saturday advised consumers to avoid eating any products containing peanut butter or peanut paste until the agency can determine which ones may be contaminated by salmonella.
The FDA said its warning does not include peanut butter sold in jars, such as Jif or Peter Pan, which the agency said is safe to eat.
The warning includes only products made with peanut butter or peanut paste, including cookies, candy, crackers, ice cream and cereal.
“We are urging people not to eat products that have peanut butter until we have better information and they can make an informed choice,” said Stephen Sundlof, director of the FDA Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition.
Rahm Emanuel Interview on C-SPAN: Obama’s Plan for The Draft
Obama’s Plan for The Draft — MANDATORY SERVICE Everyone 18–25:
