Archive for November, 2009
Celebrities Lead Charge Against Scientology
Peter Beaumont in London, Toni O’Loughlin in Sydney, and Paul Harris in New York report for the Guardian:
The security at the red-brick and glass-walled horseshoe of the John Joseph Moakley courthouse on Boston’s waterfront was unusually tight. Anybody who was not a member of the city’s bar association was swept with a search wand. Photo IDs were checked. Mobile phones were taken from guests, who included the Hollywood star Tom Cruise.
The occasion was a memorial service for Scientology’s top legal adviser for a quarter of a century, Earle Cooley. The controversial head of Scientology worldwide, David Miscavige, delivered the eulogy, thanking his late friend for his contribution to the neo-religion during his career, much of which was spent pursuing journalists and former members who spoke out against it.
Miscavige may since have wondered privately what Cooley would have made of the events of last week. Scientology, founded in 1953 by the late science fiction pulp novelist, serial fantasist and inveterate self-publicist L Ron Hubbard, is under fire again across the globe, following years of struggle to be recognised – with some success – as a legitimate church.
The church has just been denounced in the strongest possible terms in the Australian parliament. Prime minister Kevin Rudd has expressed his concern over allegations of “a worldwide pattern of abuse and criminality” and is contemplating a parliamentary inquiry. The organisation is under police investigation…
Religious Sacrifice of 250,000 Animals Begins
Olivia Lang in Bariyapur, Nepal, reports for the Guardian:
The world’s biggest animal sacrifice began in Nepal today with the killing of the first of more than 250,000 animals as part of a Hindu festival in the village of Bariyapur, near the border with India.
The event, which happens every five years, began with the decapitation of thousands of buffalo, killed in honour of Gadhimai, a Hindu goddess of power.
With up to a million worshippers on the roads near the festival grounds, this year’s fair seems more popular than ever, despite vocal protests from animals rights groups who have called for it to be banned. “It is the traditional way, ” explained 45-year old Manoj Shah, a Nepali driver who has been attending the event since he was six, “If we want anything, and we come here with an offering to the goddess, within five years all our dreams will be fulfilled.”…
Contact Lens Displays with Transparent Circuitry?
A contact lens with transparent circuitry is being developed at the University of Washington, and “Those components will eventually include hundreds of LEDs, which will form images in front of the eye, such as words, charts, and photographs!”
They’ve already developed a lens-with-LED prototype that’s powered by 330 microwatts of wireless radio-frequency power, and believe the lenses could also be used as biosensors to deliver body chemistry readings (including blood sugar levels). “What we’ve done so far barely hints at what will soon be possible with this technology,” says Dr. Babak Parviz.
“We already see a future in which the humble contact lens becomes a real platform, like the iPhone is today, with lots of developers contributing their ideas and
inventions.”
The British Policeman Who Wants to Bring Down Barack Obama
Ed Pilkington writes in the Guardian:
Neil Sankey has spent his life investigating organised crimes. As a former British police officer with almost 20 years experience, he was seconded to elite units of Scotland Yard through most of the 1970s and now runs his own private detective agency in California.
Over the years he has been involved in some big investigations. As part of the Special Branch and Bomb Squad he monitored British leftwing groups and the IRA, and in America his clients have included several big car companies.
But never has he handled anything quite as monumental as the investigation that is absorbing his energies today.
Sankey is pursuing what he believes to be fraud on a gigantic scale — a conspiracy, no less, to infiltrate and destroy the free world by putting a foreign imposter into the White House.
More on the Guardian
Asperger’s Syndrome Runaway Spends 11 Days Hiding in NYC Subways
With all the survelliance technology, the authorities couldn’t find this kid? KIRK SEMPLE writes in the NY Times:
Day after day, night after night, Francisco Hernandez Jr. rode the subway. He had a MetroCard, $10 in his pocket and a book bag on his lap. As the human tide flowed and ebbed around him, he sat impassively, a gangly 13-year-old boy in glasses and a red hoodie, speaking to no one.
Francisco Hernandez’s mother, Marisela García, displaying a poster seeking help.
After getting in trouble in class in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and fearing another scolding at home, he had sought refuge in the subway system. He removed the battery from his cellphone. “I didn’t want anyone to scream at me,” he said.
All told, Francisco disappeared for 11 days last month — a stretch he spent entirely in subway stations and on trains, he says, hurtling through four boroughs. And somehow he went undetected, despite…
Obama to Unveil Plan to Add Troops in Afghanistan
ANNE GEARAN writes on the AP via Yahoo News:
War-weary Americans will support more fighting in Afghanistan once they understand the perils of losing, President Barack Obama declared Tuesday, announcing he was ready to spell out war plans virtually sure to include tens of thousands more U.S. troops.
He is expected to make his case to the nation in a speech next Tuesday night, even as the military completes plans to begin sending in reinforcements in the spring.
Eight years after the Sept. 11 attacks led the U.S. into Afghanistan, Obama said it is still in America’s vital national interest to “dismantle and destroy” al-Qaida terrorists and extremist allies. “I intend to finish the job,” he said.
Obama said he would announce after Thanksgiving his decision on additional troops, and military, congressional and other sources said the occasion would be a Tuesday night televised speech laying out his plans for expanding the Afghan conflict…
Jeremy Scahill Reveals Blackwater’s Secret War in Pakistan
Posted on Democracy Now!:
In an explosive new article in The Nation magazine, investigative journalist and Democracy Now! correspondent Jeremy Scahill reveals the private military firm Blackwater is part of a covert program in Pakistan that includes planning the assassination and kidnapping of Taliban and Al-Qaeda suspects. Blackwater is also said to be involved in a previously undisclosed U.S. military drone campaign that has killed scores of people inside Pakistan. The article says the program has become so secretive that top Obama administration and military officials have likely been unaware of its existence. In a Democracy Now! exclusive, Scahill joins us for his first interview since the story broke.
Scientist Repeats Swine Flu Lab-Escape Claim in Published Study
By Simeon Bennett of Bloomberg:
Adrian Gibbs, the virologist who said in May that swine flu may have escaped from a laboratory, published his findings today, renewing discussion about the origins of the pandemic virus.
The new H1N1 strain, which was discovered in Mexico and the U.S. in April, may be the product of three strains from three continents that swapped genes in a lab or a vaccine-making plant, Gibbs, and fellow Australian scientists wrote in Virology Journal. The authors analyzed the genetic makeup of the virus and found its origin could be more simply explained by human involvement than a coincidence of nature.
Their study, published in a free, online journal reviewed by other scientists, follows debate among researchers six months ago, when Gibbs asked the World Health Organization to consider the hypothesis. After reviewing Gibbs’ initial three-page paper, WHO and other organizations concluded the pandemic strain was a naturally occurring virus…
U.S. Won’t Join Landmine Ban
Charley Keyes writes on CNN:
The United States won’t join its NATO allies and many other countries in formally banning landmines, State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said during his midday briefing Tuesday.
“This administration undertook a policy review and we decided our landmine policy remains in effect,” Kelly said in response to a question. “We made our policy review and we determined that we would not be able to meet our national defense needs nor our security commitments to our friends and allies if we sign this convention.”
Opponents of the U.S. landmine policy said they were surprised. “It is a disturbing development,” said Steve Goose of Human Rights Watch. “The administration never said a policy review was under way.”
Goose said the decision to leave the policy in place is at odds with the administration’s professed commitments to international agreements and humanitarian issues. “The international treaty against landmines has made a a huge…
The Card Game: Banks, Credit and the American Consumer
The Card Game is the follow-up documentary to the Secret History of the Credit Card, one of the best documentaries I have ever seen on television. The trailer is below.
Hidden fees, skyrocketing interest rates, bankrupt consumers. FRONTLINE correspondent Lowell Bergman investigates the future of the consumer loan industry amidst an ongoing battle over increased government regulation. The Card Game airs Tuesday, Nov. 24 at 9 PM on PBS (check local listings or watch online).
Lessons From the Japanese: Time to Stop Borrowing Money and Start Printing It
From Truthout:
Miners used to keep canaries in coal mines as an early warning device. If the air was so bad that it killed the canary, the miners would soon be next. Japan may be the canary for the out-of-control deficit spending policies now being pursued in the United States and the United Kingdom. In a November 1 article in the Daily Telegraph called “It Is Japan We Should Be Worrying About, Not America,” international business editor Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote:
“Japan is drifting helplessly towards a dramatic fiscal crisis. For 20 years the world’s second-largest economy has been … feeding its addiction to Keynesian deficit spending – and allowing it to push public debt beyond the point of no return. The rocketing cost of insuring against the bankruptcy of the Japanese state is telling us that the model has smashed into the buffers.
“. . . Tokyo’s price index fell 2.4 percent in…
Economic Crisis Is Getting Bloody: Violent Deaths Are Now Following Evictions, Foreclosures and Job Losses
From Alternet:
Despite ever rosier economic predictions and a surging stock market, the body count from the economic crisis is destined only to grow in the weeks and months ahead.
In 2007, Jason Rodriguez was fired from his position at an Orlando, Florida engineering firm and ended up taking a job as a “sandwich artist” at a Subway restaurant. His salary was cut nearly in half and his debts mounted until, last May, he filed for bankruptcy, listing his assets at just over $4,600 and his liabilities at nearly $90,000. Although he lived only 30 minutes away, according to his former mother-in-law, America Holloway, Rodriguez barely saw his son. When the boy asked why his father didn’t visit, Holloway said Rodriguez told him: “‘Because I don’t have any money. I don’t have a job. I don’t have anything to eat. When things get better, I’ll come see you.’”
Things never got better. On…
Tea Party Patriots Attack Family Who Lost Daughter And Grandchild
From Huffington Post:
A group called the Chicago Tea Party Patriots publicly heckled a grieving family and suggested that the couple fabricated their tragic story.
At a town hall held by Rep. Dan Lipinski (D-Ill.) on Nov. 14,, Dan and Midge Hough spoke about how they believed the death of their daughter-in-law and her unborn child were caused, in part, by a lack of health insurance. Twenty-four-year old Jennifer was uninsured. According to her in-laws, she was not receiving regular prenatal care and was not properly treated when she got sick. She ended up in an emergency room with double pneumonia that developed into septic shock, had a heart attack, a brain bleed and a stroke. The baby died and Jennifer died a few weeks later.
Midge Hough was heckled by anti-reform crowd members. “You can laugh at me, that’s okay,” she said, crying. “But I lost two people, and I know you think that’s funny, that’s okay.”
[Read more at the Huffington Post]
Veiled Threat – The Guerrilla Graffiti of Princess Hijab
From Bitch Magazine:
Since 2006, the elusive guerrilla artist known as Princess Hijab has been subverting Parisian billboards, to a mixed reception. Her anonymity irritates her critics, many of whom denounce her as extremist and antifeminist; when she recently conceded, in the pages of a German newspaper, that she wasn’t a Muslim, it opened the floodgates to avid speculation in the blogosphere. If her claim of being a 21-year-old Muslim girl was only partially true, some wondered what the real message was behind her self-described “artistic jihad.” …
The Legend of the Sewer Gator
via Gothamist
In 1935, the NY Times published an article titled, “Alligator Found in Uptown Sewer,” tracing the actions of 16-year-old Salvatore Condoluci and his comrades, who trapped and killed an 8-foot-long alligator found under 123rd Street. Today, at 92, Condoluci still remembers some of the tale, and the Times looks back at the urban legend.
Along with the printed article, former superintendent of city sewers, Teddy May, also had a part in giving the legend legs. He once investigated reports of sightings, relaying his story to writer Robert Daley, who in 1959 published the account in his book, The World Beneath the City. It goes like this:
“Alligators serenely paddling around in his sewers. The beam of his own flashlight had spotlighted alligators whose length, on the average, was about two feet. Some may have been longer. Avoiding the swift current of the trunk lines under major avenues, the beasts had wormed up the smaller pipes under less important neighborhoods, and there Teddy had found them. The colony appeared to have settled contentedly under the very streets of the busiest city in the world.”
No one seems to be certain if the story is fact or fiction, but the belief is that many vacationing families were bringing back baby alligators as pets from Florida at the time, later discarding them. Adding more documentation to the legend, Times columnist Meyer Berger once wrote that in the mid-1930s, “sewer alligators seemed to thrive below the pavement in rather frightening numbers. They were destroyed systematically and the threat of an alligator invasion died away.”
Alex Jones: Americans Have A Gun To Their Heads
The Fall of the Republic, Obama’s unkept promises and lies, the economic crisis as part of a bigger new world order strategy, the swine flu hoax, the fraud behind the fed – Alex Jones talks about all this in an exclusive interview with RT’s Anastasia Churkina.
The War on Drugs: FAIL: An Interview With Clifford Thornton Jr.
Pinky interviews drug policy expert Clifford Thornton: “The War on Drugs has absolutely nothing to do with drugs – it’s about power, it’s about control, it’s about coercion, it’s about money.”
George Monbiot: The Conspiracy Which Proves That Manmade Global Warming is a Scam
By George Monbiot [on his personal blog], published in the Guardian, 23rd November 2009
It’s no use pretending that this isn’t a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging(1). I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them.
Yes, the messages were obtained illegally. Yes, all of us say things in emails that would be excruciating if made public. Yes, some of the comments have been taken out of context. But there are some messages that require no spin to make them look bad. There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released(2,3), and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request(4).
Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work…
