Robert Fisk - The Children of Fallujah - the hospital of horrors

The pictures flash up on a screen on an upper floor of the Fallujah General Hospital. And all at once, Nadhem Shokr al-Hadidi's administration office becomes a little chamber of horrors. A baby with a hugely deformed mouth. A child with a defect of the spinal cord, material from the spine outside the body. A baby with a terrible, vast Cyclopean eye. Another baby with only half a head, stillborn like the rest, date of birth 17 June, 2009. Yet another picture flicks onto the screen: date of birth 6 July 2009, it shows a tiny child with half a right arm, no left leg, no genitalia.

"We see this all the time now," Al-Hadidi says, and a female doctor walks into the room and glances at the screen. She has delivered some of these still-born children. "I've never seen anything as bad as this in all my service," she says quietly. Al-Hadidi takes phone calls, greets visitors to his office, offers tea and biscuits to us while this ghastly picture show unfolds on the screen. I asked to see these photographs, to ensure that the stillborn children, the deformities, were real. There's always a reader or a viewer who will mutter the word "propaganda" under their breath.

But the photographs are a damning, ghastly reward for such doubts. January 7, 2010: a baby with faded, yellow skin and misshapen arms. April 26, 2010: a grey mass on the side of the baby's head. A doctor beside me speaks of "Tetralogy of Fallot", a transposition of the great blood vessels. May 3, 2010: a frog-like creature in which – the Fallujah doctor who came into the room says this – "all the abdominal organs are trying to get outside the body."

Read More:

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-the-children-of-fallujah--the-hospital-of-horrors-7679168.html#

European, US Austerity Drive is Suicidal: Nobel Economist Stiglitz

Europe is headed down the same path that most Republicans -- and many Democrats -- are suggesting for the US: reductions in the public sector, cuts in benefits, slashing investments in infrastructure and education.

Nobel Prize-winning U.S. economist Joseph Stiglitz speaking in Vienna, Austria Thursday night said that it's a suicidal path for Europe -- and that such a policy has never worked in any large country.

Youth unemployment in Spain has been at 50 percent since the crisis in 2008 with “no hope of things getting better anytime soon,” said Stiglitz, who is a professor for economics at Columbia University. “What you are doing is destroying the human capital, you are creating alienated young people.”

In an interview earlier this week in The European, Stiglitz said, "When you look at America, you have to concede that we have failed. Most Americans today are worse off than they were fifteen years ago. A full-time worker in the US is worse off today than he or she was 44 years ago. That is astounding – half a century of stagnation. The economic system is not delivering. It does not matter whether a few people at the top benefitted tremendously – when the majority of citizens are not better off, the economic system is not working."

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/04/27-1

Study finds warming speeding up rainfall cycle

An Australian study of ocean salinity over the past 50 years has revealed a "fingerprint" showing that climate change has accelerated the rainfall cycle, according to a researcher.

The study published in the journal Science and conducted by Australian and US scientists looked at ocean data from 1950 to 2000 and found that salinity levels had changed in oceans around the world over that time.

Co-author Susan Wijffels said the figures were revealing because ocean salinity was indicative of changes in the water cycle of rainfall and evaporation.

"What the results are saying is we have an ocean fingerprint, a very clear fingerprint, that the earth's water cycle has already spun up," she told AFP.

"What we see in the observations of how the salinity field has changed already over the last 50 years, (is) our hydrological cycle has already intensified significantly."

Wijffels said the pattern was amplifying over time and it could be inferred that the same dynamics were also happening over land.

"What it really means is that the atmosphere can actually shuttle more water from the areas that are drying out to the areas that have lots of rain faster," she said.

"And essentially it means that the wet areas are going to get wetter and the dry areas are going to get drier."

Read More:

http://news.yahoo.com/study-finds-warming-speeding-rainfall-cycle-060240114.html

Why Did Russia Ban The Use Of Microwave Ovens?

Consumers are dying today in part because they continue to eat dead foods that are killed in the microwave. They take a perfectly healthy piece of raw food, loaded with vitamins and natural medicines, then nuke it in the microwave and destroy most of its nutrition. Humans are the only animals on the planet who destroy the nutritional value of their food before eating it. All other animals consume food in its natural, unprocessed state, but humans actually go out of their way to render food nutritionally worthless before eating it. No wonder humans are the least healthy mammals on the planet.

In Russia, microwave ovens were banned in 1976 because of their negative health consequences as many studies were conducted on their use. The ban was lifted after Perestroika in the early 90’s.Numerous documents can be found online relating to this topic.

The invention of the microwave and its mass adoption by the population coincides with the onset of obesity in developed nations around the world. Not only did the microwave make it convenient to eat more obesity-promoting foods, it also destroyed much of the nutritional content of those foods, leaving consumers in an ongoing state of malnourished overfeeding. In other words, people eat too many calories but not enough real nutrition. The result is, of course, what we see today: Epidemic rates of diabetes, cancer, heart disease, depression, kidney failure, liver disorders and much more. 

Read More:

http://zen-haven.dk/why-did-russia-ban-the-use-of-microwave-ovens/

Katherine Gustafson - Farmers Markets Move Online

It isn’t always easy finding fresh, high-quality food in this country. Supermarkets with their long, complex supply chains usually offer unripe or subpar produce that leaves a lot to be desired. But the usual alternative methods of provision have distinct limitations. Luckily, technology provides one great answer to this dilemma, opening up an important new avenue for small-scale producers to connect to customers.

Only local farms can deliver the very freshest produce. But while the common methods of providing this bounty to consumers—community supported agriculture (CSA) plans and farmers’ markets—are essential components of a revitalizing fresh-food sector, they don’t always provide a sufficiently flexible or robust shopping experience.

CSAs require a large up-front cash layout and lock you into eating whatever happens to be delivered. Farmers’ markets vary vastly in size and quality, from those that enforce requirements on farm-size and distance to those that don’t seem to hold vendors to any standards at all. It’s dismaying to discover resellers at “farmers’” markets; for all you know, they bought their wares at Safeway that morning.

For quality-minded consumers who would like to support local agriculture, it can be a struggle to obtain the freshest food on a consistent basis. And small farmers may struggle to find enough convenient markets for their goods.

Read More:

http://www.nationofchange.org/farmers-markets-move-online-1335593740

Michel Chossudovsky - The 9/11 Attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC): Unspoken Financial Bonanza

On October 17, 2000, eleven months before 9/11, 

Blackstone Real Estate Advisors, of The Blackstone Group, L.P, purchased, from Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association, the participating mortgage secured by World Trade Center, Building Seven.1

April 26, 2001 

The Port Authority leased the WTC for 99 years to Silverstein Properties and Westfield America Inc,

The transaction was authorised by Port Authority Chairman Lewis M. Eisenberg.

This transfer from the New York and New Jersey Port Authority was tantamount to the privatisation of the WTC Complex. The official press release described it as "the richest real estate prize in New York City history". The retail space underneath the complex was leased to Westfield America Inc.2

On 24 July 2001, 6 weeks prior to 9/11 

Silverstein took control of the lease of the WTC following the Port Authority decision on April 26.

Silverstein and Frank Lowy, CEO of Westefield Inc. took control of the 10.6 million-square-foot WTC complex. "Lowy leased the shopping concourse called the Mall at the WTC, which comprised about 427,000 square feet of retail space."3

Explicitly included in the agreement was that Silverstein and Westfield "were given the right to rebuild the structures if they were destroyed". 4

Read More:

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=30554

Kristina Chew - CISPA Passes the House: Why We Should Be Wary, If Not Worried

Last night, after nearly seven hours of debate, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) passed the House of Representatives by  a vote of 248-168. CISPA is intended to protect websites and the government from hackers by giving internet companies the authority  to reveal users’ confidential records without facing legal action.  The bill also allows the government to share classified information with companies to help protect computer networks to improve the government’s and private companies’ ability to share information about possible security threats from China and other countries. But opponents have critiqued the bill as being too broad and vague about what it would regulate as a cybersecurity threat and for infringing too much on privacy.

CISPA still has to pass the Senate; as of yet, there is not a corresponding bill. The Senate is working on a bipartisan bill that instead calls for the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security to create regulations that would protect “critical infrastructure” such as the “electric power grid, water and sewer systems, transportation hubs and financial service networks,” says the New York Times. On Wednesday, the Office of Management and Budget had said that it recommended a presidential veto on CISPA.

Read More:

http://www.care2.com/causes/cispa-passes-the-house-why-we-should-be-wary.html#ixzz1tTZ9PTKp

Valerie Tarico - How I Left My Evangelical Christian Faith

I am what you might call a slow learner. I managed to make it all the way through high school, despite an eating disorder I couldn’t pray away, and all the way through college, despite a suicidal depression triggered by the same eating disorder, and almost all the way through grad school before I finally gave up on my religion and god. 

By contrast, my friend Geoff figured things out in the second grade. One day a nun at his Catholic school tried to pour holy water on the one Black kid in the school to exorcise the devil because he kept getting in fights. But Geoff thought to himself: It’s not Satan, it’s because all the other kids pick on him. Today Geoff is a psychologist working for Seattle Children’s Hospital –which is, ironically, the same place that did in the last shreds of my Evangelical beliefs.

I can’t recall the name of the small person who severed the final strands of my faith. There's just a vague image of soft brown hair and trusting brown eyes. I was 26, in the last stage of my PhD program, which required a year-long internship at the University of Washington. In one of my rotations, the one at Children’s Hospital, interns provided mental health consultation for families of patients on the medical wards. He was two, and in the first phase of treatment for a spinal cord tumor that would leave him paraplegic even if the nightmare course of chemotherapy were successful. I don’t know how long he survived.

Read More:

http://www.alternet.org/story/155155/how_i_left_my_evangelical_christian_faith

Lars Schall - Insider Trading 9/11: Allegations that informed circles made substantial profits in financial markets in connection to 9/11

Is there any truth in the allegations that informed circles made substantial profits in the financial markets in connection to the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, on the United States? 

Arguably, the best place to start is by examining put options, which occurred around Tuesday, September 11, 2001, to an abnormal extent, and at the beginning via software that played a key role: the Prosecutor's Management Information System, abbreviated as PROMIS. [i] 

PROMIS is a software program that seems to be fitted with almost "magical" abilities. Furthermore, it is the subject of a decades-long dispute between its inventor, Bill Hamilton, and various people/institutions associated with intelligence agencies, military and security consultancy firms. [1] 

One of the "magical" capabilities of PROMIS, one has to assume, is that it is equipped with artificial intelligence and was apparently from the outset “able to simultaneously read and integrate any number of different computer programs or databases, regardless of the language in which the original programs had been written or the operating systems and platforms on which that database was then currently installed." [2] 

Read More:

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=30556

Annie-Rose Strasser and Scott Keyes - What Everyone Who Uses The Internet Needs To Know About CISPA

Congress is on the cusp of passing a new bill that could threaten any internet user’s civil liberties. The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, a digital equivalent of allowing the government to fight perceived threats by monitoring which books citizens check out from the library, passed the House yesterday and will now be taken up by the Senate.

Online advocates, fresh off their victory against the Stop Online Piracy Act, are now gearing up to oppose CISPA because of the disastrous effect the bill could have for private information on the internet. The bill’s opponents argue that it goes too far in the name of cybersecurity, endangering citizens’ personal online information by giving the government access to anything from users’ private emails to their browsing history.

As the fight in the Senate begins, here is everything you need to know about CISPA:

Read More:

http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2012/04/27/472990/need-to-know-cispa/