"Richard Silverstein" - Why I Published US Intelligence Secrets About Israel's Anti-Iran Campaign

Friday 14 October 2011

by: Richard Silverstein, Truthout | News Analysis

http://www.truth-out.org/why-i-published-us-intelligence-secrets-about-israels-anti-iran-campaign/1316550301

In 2009, Shamai Leibowitz was working secretly for the FBI, translating wiretapped conversations among Israeli diplomats in this country. He passed some transcripts of these conversations to me, which described an Israeli diplomatic campaign in this country to create a hostile environment for relations with Iran. I published excerpts from them in my blog, Tikun Olam.

Leibowitz comes from a family of distinguished Israeli Orthodox public intellectuals.

He first came to prominence inside Israel when he signed a statement refusing to serve in the Occupied Territories. He went on to earn a law degree and was one of the Israeli attorneys who represented Palestinian Marwan Barghouti in his terror trial. In a statement certain to enrage Israelis and the Shin Bet officials responsible for apprehending Barghouti, Leibowitz likened his client's leadership of his people to that of Moses. Though he was referring to the fact that Moses killed an Egyptian who was beating an Israelite slave - which caused him to flee his homeland, accused of being the ancient equivalent of a terrorist - the subtlety of the historical comparison was undoubtedly lost on many Israelis.

Leibowitz came to this country as a New Israel Fund (NIF) fellow to earn a US law degree in international human rights at Georgetown University. Though he completed his degree, NIF ended his affiliation with its program when the Israeli spoke at a Cambridge public event endorsing a boycott of Israel. The story made its way into the Israel press thanks to pro-Israel activists monitoring his activities here. When a mini-furor broke out both in Israel and here, NIF, showing its support for free speech, dropped Leibowitz from the program, even though he never stated that his remarks at the Massachusetts event represented NIF in any way. The NGO simply couldn't risk the wrath of the Israeli government since all its programming in Israel might be placed in jeopardy if it irritated the authorities.

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"Suzanne Goldenberg" - Rick Perry officials spark revolt after doctoring environment report

Scientists ask for names to be removed after mentions of climate change and sea-level rise taken out by Texas officials

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/oct/14/rick-perry-texas-censorship-environment-report/print

• Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 14 October 2011 08.05 EDT

Officials in Rick Perry's home state of Texas have set off a scientists' revolt after purging mentions of climate change and sea-level rise from what was supposed to be a landmark environmental report. The scientists said they were disowning the report on the state of Galveston Bay because of political interference and censorship from Perry appointees at the state's environmental agency.

By academic standards, the protest amounts to the beginnings of a rebellion: every single scientist associated with the 200-page report has demanded their names be struck from the document. "None of us can be party to scientific censorship so we would all have our names removed," said Jim Lester, a co-author of the report and vice-president of the Houston Advanced Research Centre.

"To me it is simply a question of maintaining scientific credibility. This is simply antithetical to what a scientist does," Lester said. "We can't be censored." Scientists see Texas as at high risk because of climate change, from the increased exposure to hurricanes and extreme weather on its long coastline to this summer's season of wildfires and drought.

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"Science Daily" - How to Punish Corporate Wrongdoers to Deter Bad Behavior

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111014095629.htm

ScienceDaily (Oct. 14, 2011)— If courts were able to award appropriate punitive damages that punish wrongdoers at a level tied to a company's financial worth, then businesses big and small would be at risk of being put out of business by punitive damages unconscionable offenses and would be deterred from bad behavior in the first place, according to Judy Feuer Zimet of the Phoenix School of Law in Phoenix, Arizona.

Writing in the International Journal of Private Law, Zimet points out that in many legal cases over the last two decades, companies have repeatedly been fined for breaking environmental and other laws, but have not suffered losses to their profit line that were adequate to deter them from repeating offences. She cites the case of Wright County Farm Eggs and owner Jack Decoster's long list of repeated violations that culminated in 2010 with a national salmonella outbreak. She also cites the oil company BP, which since 2005 has been held to account for a staggering 760 safety violations that resulted in a mere $373 million in fines.

Meanwhile, BP's annual profits are in the double figure billions of dollars. The serious oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 forced the company to create a $20 billion victims' compensation fund. Zimet suggests that had fines for the 759 prior violations been sufficiently punishing, BP might have been more effective in addressing the problems that led to the 2010 spill.

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"Mike Adams" - Media hoax exposed: Recent attack on vitamins a fabricated scare campaign

Mike Adams, NaturalNews.com October 14, 2011

http://www.naturalnews.com/033883_vitamins_mortality_risk.html

(NaturalNews) TIME, USA Today, MSNBC, NPR, CTV, the LA Times and numerous other mainstream media outlets have all been running a juvenile hoax over the last week. Through various misleading headlines, they're all claiming that vitamins might kill you. Here are some of the headlines:

Study links vitamins to higher death rates in women - CTV

Study: Vitamins may increase death risk in older women - USA Today

We've Been Wasting a Ton of Money on Vitamins and Dietary Supplements - TIME

Some common vitamin supplements could increase death risk - MSNBC

Dietary supplements risky for older women, study finds - LA Times

Supplements Look Risky In Study Of Older Women - NPR

Vitamins do more harm than good, new suggest says - News.com.au

Women Who Take Vitamin Supplements May Have Increased Death Risk - Huffington Post

There are literally hundreds of headlines from mainstream news sources that essentially say the same thing.

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[Video] Gary Null at Knocking on the Devil's Door Screening, Huntington, NY

Gary Null Q&A and audience reactions at the premiere of his documentary Knocking on the Devil's Door at the Huntington Arts Cinema in Huntington, NY.

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"Progressive Radio Network Dr. Peter Breggin, Mondays @ 5pm(EDT") - Prozac Turned Teen into Murderer

Dear friends and colleagues, if you haven't heard already, for the first time in North America a Canadian judge has himself endorsed a Prozac defense in regard to a murder.  A sixteen year old knifed his friend to death without provocation.  The judge point by point contrasted my opinion to that of the Canadian psychiatrist's opinion (for the prosecution), and endorsed my opinion.  
 
Here is a direct link to my summary and analysis of the case with a link to the judge's opinion:  http://breggin.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=295
 
In addition, for your personal use, here is a direct link I set up to the judge's opinion: http://breggin.com/CourtOfManitoba_HerMajestyTheQueen&CJP.pdf
 
Of course, we have had other confirmations of the scientific legitimacy of antidepressant-induced murder in criminal and civil cases; but this appears to be the first time a judge has come forward and taken the position in North America in a criminal murder case.

I think back to the first cases I did in the very early 1990s.  What a change we've been witnessing, especially since the warning changes in mid 2000.

"S.L. Baker" - Doctors speak out: healthcare has been reduced to a making money factory

S. L. Baker, NaturalNews.com  October 15, 2011 

http://www.naturalnews.com/033881_health_care_profits.html

(NaturalNews) Two doctors from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard's teaching hospital, have taken an unusual step for the medical profession. These courageous physicians are speaking out about today's healthcare system which emphasizes money over individualized patient care.

In an article just published in The New England Journal of Medicine, Pamela Hartzband, MD, and Jerome Groopman,MD, are blunt about their frustration with a system that has "reduced medicine to economics." In fact, they go so far as to say hospitals have been turned into "factories" that reduce clinical encounters between a patient and doctor into simply "economic transactions."

"Patients are no longer patients, but rather customers or consumers. Doctors and nurses have transmuted into providers," Pamela Hartzband, MD, and Jerome Groopman MD, wrote. "We are in the midst of an economic crisis and efforts to reform the health care system have centered on controlling spiraling costs. To that end, many economists and policy makers have proposed that patient care should be industrialized and standardized. Hospitals and clinics should be run like modern factories and archaic terms like doctor, nurse and patient must therefore be replaced with terminology that fits this new order."

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"Press Release" - Health Authorities Admit Gardasil™ Contains Residual Recombinant HPV DNA

October 14, 2011
by Norma Erickson, President

2 September 2011, SANE Vax Inc. posted a letter sent to Dr. Margaret Hamburg, FDA Commissioner, on their website to inform her that recombinant (genetically modified) HPV DNA firmly attached to the aluminum adjuvant had been discovered in Merck’s quadrivalent HPV vaccine, Gardasil™.

In what appears to be a worldwide coordinated response, SANE Vax Inc. and other advocacy groups have received the following replies:

• 22 September 2011, the European Medicines Agency, via Dr. Abadie said, “The presence of recombinant DNA fragments does not represent a case of contamination and is not considered to be a risk to vaccine recipients. All medicinal products manufactured using recombinant technology may contain small fragments of residual DNA.”
• 23 September 2011, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said, “We have determined that Gardasil is not contaminated with HPV DNA and remains safe and effective….Gardasil does contain recombinant HPV L1 specific DNA fragments. This is expected, since DNA encoding the HPV L1 gene is used in the vaccine manufacturing process to produce the virus-like particles. The presence of these expected DNA fragments, which are inevitable in vaccine production, is not a risk to vaccine recipients, is not harmful, and this DNA is not a contaminant.”
• 28 September 2011, MedSafe in New Zealand, via email to a local vaccine safety advocate said, “Gardasil is manufactured using recombinant DNA technology so any finding of residual DNA fragments in the vaccine is expected and does not represent contamination.”
• 7 October 2011, the Queensland Immunisation Program in Australia, via email to an Australian advocate, said, “Gardasil is manufactured using recombinant DNA technology so any finding of residual DNA fragments in the vaccine is expected and does not represent contamination.”

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"Renee Parsons" - Another Stain on the Constitution

http://trueblueprogressivereport.blogspot.com/2011/10/americas-rule-of-law.html

The following experience confirms the fear of a widening number of Americans who believe that a broad range of the country's Constitutionally protected rights are in serious jeopardy and that the Obama White House is a large part of the problem.

At the same time, we are reminded that there is nothing supreme about the United States Supreme Court which is little more than a bunch of post menopausal men, driven by ideological purity rather than legal principles or the Rule of Law.  

It is true that over the years I have been accused of practicing without a license.  As a legal beagle, I am not a lawyer but much of my adult life has focused on the law - as a lobbyist for Friends of the Earth in Washington, DC, employed in a State Public Defender’s office for more than a decade and then as an elected official and mayor of a small Rocky Mountain town.

Here’s the story I wanted to share – A man was stopped in NJ on a minor traffic violation.  His family was in the car.  The Officer checked the man's driver's license and discovered that there was an outstanding warrant for this individual because of an unpaid fine for an earlier traffic violation.  The point to keep in mind here is we are talking about two minor traffic violations.

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"David Fogarty" - Plants take in more CO2 than thought, study finds

Wed, Sep 28 2011

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/28/us-carbon-plants-idUSTRE78R43E20110928

By David Fogarty

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Scientists might be able to predict climate change with more accuracy after discovering that plants consume carbon dioxide 25 percent faster than previously thought.

The finding, by an international team of researchers, could help refine efforts to fight global warming just at a time when U.N. talks are struggling to agree on a broader climate pact that will be the focus of a major meeting in December in South Africa.

Scientists say climate change will cause more extreme droughts and floods and rising sea levels and that nations must curb carbon pollution blamed for heating up the globe. Better and more accurate climate science can help change energy policies.

Lisa Welp-Smith of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, California, and her team came up with a new method for measuring how much CO2 is absorbed and released by plants.

The team used oxygen isotope markers in CO2 and more than 30 years of data from a global network that analyses air samples to measure changes in greenhouse gases, pollution and other factors.

"What this (finding) means is that plants are working faster than we thought they did," said Colin Allison, an atmospheric chemist and one of the study's authors, told Reuters from Australia.

The study was published on Thursday in the journal Nature.

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