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Drugs Seizure: Saudi Presses Lebanon on Arrested Prince

Al-Manar | October 27, 2015

The Saudi embassy in Lebanon is exerting direct pressure on the Lebanese authorities over the involvement of one of its princes in a major drugs smuggling attempt.

Early on Monday, a gendarmerie inspection unit at Beirut’s Rafiq al-Hariri International Airport foiled an attempt to smuggle two tons of Captagon pills to Riyadh in Saudi Arabia.

Security Sources told Al-Manar that Saudi Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Fawwaz Al-Shaalan met Lebanese Interior Minister Nuhad al-Machnouk later on Monday.

The sources said that Riyadh is trying hard to exclude the prince from the trial process.

Prince Abdel Mohsen Bin Walid Bin Abdulaziz was detained along with four of his companions: Mubarak Bin Ali Bin Ayed Al-Harthi, Zeyad Bin Sameer Bin Ahmad Al-Hakim, Bandar Bin Saleh Bin Marzouk Al-Sharari, Yahya Bin Shaem Bin Saad Al-Shammari.

The five were caught with two tons of Captagon that were found in the prince’s private jet inside 40 boxes and suitcases.

October 28, 2015 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , , , | Leave a comment

Examples of U.S. Foreign Policy Dysfunction

By Rick Sterling | Dissident Voice | October 27, 2015

If the U.S. is to ever change its foreign policy based on dominance and aggression to a foreign policy based on diplomacy and respect for international law, there needs to be a foundation of realistic assessments. Foreign policy decisions need to be based on reality not fantasy and propaganda.

Unfortunately, dysfunction, deception and propaganda extend across the spectrum from Congressional Republicans to Hillary Clinton to the White House to Bernie Sanders. The following are recent examples:

Benghazi Hearings in Congress ignore important issues to focus on superficial

Congress recently held hearings on what happened in Benghazi Libya leading up to the death of Ambassador Stevens. The hearings focussed on what former Secy of State Clinton knew, when she knew it and whether she should have ordered more security. Before that, millions were spent exploring the email home server issue.

Meanwhile the root cause of Stevens’ death and consequences of the US/NATO overthrow of the Gaddafi government have been ignored. The hearings were silent on the deaths of tens of thousands of Libyans, the eruption and expansion of terrorism within Libya and beyond and the massive numbers of refugees fleeing across the Meditarranean. Instead of evaluating the consequences of “regime change” in Libya, Congressional members focused on cheap political advantage.  Mainstream media said nothing about the shallowness of the hearings; they were happy to report on political maneuvering and whether or not Clinton would lose her temper or be able to get “above the fray”.

Points which would have been informative to explore include:

  • Were the claims of imminent ‘massacre’ in Benghazi exaggerated and largely false? These claims paved the way to the UN Security Council resolution and NATO imposed No Fly Zone. Was it a fake emergency?
  • Who authorized the transition from “protecting civilians” to a campaign of attack and Libyan government overthrow? UN Security Council members China and Russia both say there were deceived and that the US and NATO violated the UN Security Council resolution.

Politicians and much of the media have portrayed Gaddafi as “crazy” for many years. For readers interested in a reality check, see the short video of Gaddafi’s speech to the Arab League in 2008 as he points out the contradictions of acknowledging Israel on the 1967 boundary, as he warns the Arab League leaders of plots and coups, and as he says “we might be next” (for assassination).  For a concise contrast of Libya before and after the NATO backed invasion see this article aptly titled “From Africa’s wealthiest democracy under Gaddafi to Terrorist Haven after US Intervention”.

Clinton advocates No Fly Zone for Syria despite U.S. military opposition and Turkey turning against it.

U.S. military leadership has generally opposed the “no fly zone” idea.  They have made clear that a “no fly zone” begins with military attacks on anti-aircraft positions and is an act of war. They have underscored that imposing such a zone in Syria would be vastly more difficult than in Libya where there were no sophisticated anti-aircraft installations. Even then it took seven months of intense bombing to overthrow the Tripoli government. The risks in Syria would be huge with a significant chance of international war. The idea is reckless and irresponsible for the following reasons:

  • The areas are controlled by armed opposition groups, predominately Jabhat al Nusra (Al Qaeda). Very few civilians remain in the areas proposed for NFZ in Syria. Most have fled to areas under Syrian government control, especially around Latakia and Tartous. Other have gone to Turkey. The proposal is basically to make US and NATO the air force for Al Qaeda. Amazing.
  • If it was imposed, the No Fly Zone would more likely become an “intense conflict zone” rather than a “safe zone” as promoted by interventionists.  It would bring USA and NATO directly into the conflict which is what the proponents want.
  • There already exists a “safe zone”. It’s called the Turkish border.

Of crucial importance, the second Turkish Parliamentary elections are this coming Sunday November 1. Polls indicate the ruling “Justice and Develpment Party” (AKP) will probably lose majority control of the parliament. It’s possible they will lose power altogether. Either way, this will put a stop to the schemes for an all powerful Turkish President (Erdogan) and continuation of the war on Syria. All three non-AKP parties in Turkey oppose the current policies supporting war and terrorism in Syria.

Clinton’s NFZ proposal is opportunistic and out of step with reality in Syria and Turkey.

White House continues anti-Assad lies as they are further exposed in Turkey

The White House must know very well that Assad government forces did NOT carry out a chemical weapons attack on the outskirts of Damascus in August 2013. They must be acutely aware of this because they could not get the U.S. Intelligence to agree with the statement that Assad was behind the atrocity back in Fall 2013.  Instead of the usual “U.S. Intelligence assesses with high confidence …..” they had to substitute the “US Government assesses …..” Although rarely remarked or noted in mainstream media, this was a significant deviation.

Despite this, and the investigations of the most acclaimed US investigative journalists (Seymour Hersh, Robert Parry, Gareth Porter, Russel Baker) which all point to the Assad government NOT being responsible, just a couple weeks ago the White House spokesman asserted the Assad government “used chemical weapons against his own people”.

Meanwhile last week in Turkey two deputies of the social democratic party CHP held a press conference to expose the evidence of Turkish involvement in shipping sarin to Syria and the refusal of the Erdogan government to pursue the investigation or charge the culprits.

This evidence, including wire taps, supports the conclusions of Hersh and others, that the chemical weapons used in Damascus on August 21, 2013 were supplied by Turkey to armed “rebels”. This further exposes the fact free propaganda that “Assad used chemical weapons on his own people”. Politicians and mainstream media outlets such as PBS Frontline just keep repeating it.

Bernie Sanders joins the absurd propaganda campaign against Venezuela and former leader Hugo Chavez

As recently reported at Venezuelanalysis, Bernie Sanders referred to former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez as a “dead communist dictator”.  It’s nonsense, just like the White House claim that Venezuela is a “threat to US national interests”. It’s sad that Sanders is following that path.  Chavez was a socialist not communist; he was a member and leader of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela.  Between 1998 and 2013 Chavez and the PUSV competed in elections seventeen times.  They won every time except once. Elections in Venezuela are vastly more free and fair than elections in the US. They have high turnout, they have very active and hard campaigning, there is a paper trail to verify the accuracy of the electronic voting, over 50% of the electronic votes are matched to the paper votes to confirm the accuracy of the vote counting.

National Lawyers Guild and Task Force on the Americas (and others) have sent many delegations to Venezuela. They have observed conditions including the voting process. National Lawyers Guild’s statement on the 2013 election concluded the Venezuelan elections were “well organized, fair and transparent”.  They added: “The U.S. would do well to incorporate some of the security checks and practices that are routine in Venezuela to improve both the level of participation and the credibility of our elections,” said NLG attorney Robin Alexander.

So why in the world is Bernie Sanders promoting false propaganda that Chavez was a “communist dictator”?

Task Force on the Americas, based in the SF Bay Area, has written a letter to the Sanders campaign asking him to review and correct his inaccurate statement.

Conclusion

There is profound need for dramatic changes in U.S. foreign policy. Given that over 55% of the discretionary budget of the U.S. goes to the military, it’s likely that positive changes in domestic policy will depend on changes in foreign policy. The starting point has to be realistic assessments of conditions in other countries, sincere examinations of the consequences of past actions and a genuine commitment to abiding by international law.  As we can see from the above examples, there is a long way to go.

Rick Sterling is a retired engineer and co-founder of Syria Solidarity Movement. He can be emailed at: rsterling1@gmail.com.

October 28, 2015 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Hypersonic deterrence: how to maintain strategic balance

By Vladimir KOZIN | Oriental Review | October 27, 2015

It is unlikely that nuclear weapons, which the US created in the mid-twentieth century and used only once – to bomb Japanese cities – will ever be activated in a global conflict. We can assume that the leaders of the official Western nuclear powers (the UK, US, and France) as well as the other states that actually possess such weapons (India, Israel, North Korea, and Pakistan) will continue to base the conceptual foundation of their military strategy on this incontestable truism: “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” Russia’s current military and political leaders agree with this self-evident observation. In his Oct. 22 speech in Sochi before the Valdai Club, an international discussion group, President Vladimir Putin echoed these sentiments: “The development of nuclear weapons has made it clear that there can be no winners in a global conflict.”

Unlike nuclear weapons, which are “tools of extreme impact,” Long-Range Hypersonic High-Precision Weapons (or Advanced Hypersonic Weapons – AHW in US terminology) are ready for use in any scenario, including as part of counter-terror operations. AHW do not cause unnecessary civilian casualties and do not inflict significant material damage to civil transportation systems, power plants, or other infrastructure beyond the small affected area.

Russia has been developing its own promising prototypes of AHW in the numbers deemed necessary to bolster its own security, in response to both America’s functional rollout of Prompt Global Strike, an ambitious program to deploy a global, layered missile-defense system, as well as the Pentagon’s modernization of its strategic and tactical nuclear weapons.

There have already been calls for an international moratorium on R&D and testing of AHW. Despite the fact that this idea appears somewhat utopian, it is quite feasible that at some future date quantitative limits could be introduced on types of AHW and the regions where they could be positioned, but only if the following six key preconditions are met:

1) Any future AHW agreement must be grounded in the principle of equality and equivalent security for all signatory states and must ensure the creation of a system of multilateral, strategic-deterrence treaties.

2) Signatories to such an agreement must agree to respect the mutual commitment not to use AHW against each other under any circumstances.

3) Before such a treaty goes into effect, all nuclear powers must agree to respect the reciprocal obligation to either refrain from inflicting a nuclear first strike against each other or not to use such weapons at all, and also to renounce the use of weapons of any kind against manned or unmanned spacecraft, and these promises would be formalized through legally binding, international covenants.

4) All states possessing nuclear weapons, whether officially or factually, must commit themselves to move toward the use of defensive strategies and unconditional nuclear deterrence that threatens no one.

5) States deploying missile-defense systems and tactical nuclear weapons within the borders of other states, must dismantle the installations of this type currently being designed or constructed, before reaching an agreement on limiting AHW, and America must also pull all of its tactical nuclear weapons out of Europe and the Asia Pacific region, deploying them only within the borders of the continental US.

6) This agreement must be formalized through a legally binding international treaty that is both versatile and inclusive – in the sense that it includes provisions allowing any other state to join it – and its validity should be of indefinite duration.

Unfortunately, any type of Agreement on Quantitative and Territorial Constraints on the Deployment of AHW would hardly be reached shortly, given the context of America’s updated National Security Strategy (February 2015), which six times refers to Russia an “aggressor,” as well as the identification of Russia and China (here, here, and here) as her first and second, respectively, biggest potential adversaries in the American playbook for the use of strategic nuclear weapons. The Pentagon still adheres to a doctrine that calls for inflicting initial “preemptive and preventative” nuclear strikes against an enemy, and it keeps a longer list of potential targets for an initial nuclear strike than any other state. Another important point to consider is the multifold increase in NATO’s military activity near Russia’s borders during last two years.

In other words, without a radical change by Washington and its NATO allies in their negative and even hostile stance toward Russia and China, the idea that any sort of mutually acceptable agreement could be reached to limit or control AHWs is simply unrealistic and should be put off until a “better time.”

Vladimir Kozin is Head of Advisers’ Group at the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, Member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and Professor of the Academy of Military Sciences of the Russian Federation.

October 28, 2015 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

‘The worst calories’: Sugar even more harmful than it seems, study finds

RT | October 28, 2015

If you have a sweet tooth, you may want to think twice before you pick up your next doughnut. A new study says that sugar is “toxic,” leading to metabolic diseases such as high blood pressure and heart disease – even if no weight is gained.

The research – conducted by pediatric endocrinologist Robert Lustig at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in San Francisco, and Jean-Marc Schwarz of the College of Osteopathic Medicine at Touro University California – examined 43 obese children who had high blood pressure, unhealthy cholesterol levels, or signs of too much fat in their livers. The children were between the ages of nine and 18.

The children were put on a restricted diet which eliminated added sugar from sodas, sweet, and other foods.

Sugar intake was reduced from about 28 percent of total calories to about 10 percent. Fructose – a form of sugar believed to be particularly bad for health – was reduced from 12 percent to four percent of total calories.

Sugary foods were then replaced with starchier alternatives, such as hot dogs, potato chips, and pizza.

“This ‘child-friendly’ study diet included various no- or low-sugar added processed foods including turkey hot dogs, pizza, bean burritos, baked potato chips, and popcorn that were purchased at local supermarkets,” the study authors wrote.

Each child’s caloric intake closely resembled the amount they ate before the study began. However, the children reported feeling less hungry with the new diet.

“They told us it felt like so much more food, even though they were consuming the same number of calories as before, just with significantly less sugar. Some said we were overwhelming them with food,” Schwarz said.

After weighing themselves daily as part of the study’s requirements, one-third of the children said they could not eat enough food to stop losing weight. The children lost an average of nearly two pounds in just nine days.

“I have never seen results as striking or significant in our human studies; after only nine days of fructose restriction, the results are dramatic and consistent from subject to subject,” Schwarz added.

Blood pressure went down by an average of five points. The triglyceride measurement of cholesterol fell by 33 points, and low-density lipoprotein (LDL, also known as “bad” cholesterol) fell by 10 points. Blood sugar and insulin levels also fell. Glucose tolerance and the amount of excess insulin circulating in the blood improved.

“Every aspect of their metabolic health got better, with no change in calories,” Lustig said, adding that sugar isn’t harmful because of its calories or its effect on weight, but rather “because it’s sugar.”

He stressed the study proves “a calorie is not a calorie.”

“Where those calories come from determines where in the body they go. Sugar calories are the worst, because they turn to fat in the liver, driving insulin resistance, and driving risk for diabetes, heart and liver disease,” he said.

The study was published in the journal Obesity on Monday. The researchers noted that further examination is needed to determine whether the short-term gains in health with low-sugar diets remain present in the longer term.

October 28, 2015 Posted by | Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | 2 Comments

Suppressed Memo: Eli Lilly Hid Increase in Suicidal Thoughts and Aggression with Prozac for Years

By Aaron and Melissa Dykes | Truthstream Media | October 27, 2015

It would seem that every time there is a mass shooting in this country, the shooter has either been taking psychotropic medications, usually in the form of antidepressants, or the shooter has recently quit taking antidepressants.

It is well known that these medications can cause suicidal thoughts, especially in young people up to around age 24. If a medicine can cause suicidal thoughts, it would only follow that it can possibly cause violent or homicidal thoughts as well.

A multitude of studies have linked antidepressants to everything from birth defects (including a very serious birth defect called persistent pulmonary hypertension of the newborn, causing the Food and Drug Administration to place a black box warning on them) to increased suicidal tendencies (causing the FDA to update the initial black box warning to include an additional suicidal tendencies warning).

Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical giant that brought us Prozac, knew this from its own trials as far back as 1984, but the company kept it from the public and the FDA for years, long after the drug was approved in 1988. This information only came to light through a highly controversial litigation.

What do these documents, which the company reportedly worked to keep hidden, reveal about the potential dangers of Prozac (fluoxetine)?

The “confidential” report opens by stating that:

“Fluoxetine [Prozac] may produce both activation (nervousness, anxiety, agitation, insomnia) and sedation (somnolence, asthenia). Approximately 19% of patients might be expected to report activation during acute therapy with fluoxetine which was not present prior to therapy and which could be attributed to fluoxetine (in trials, 38% fluoxetine-treated patients reported new activation but 19% of placebo-treated patients also reported new activation yielding a difference of 19% attributable to fluoxetine).”

It is worth noting, however, that the control used in trials was apparently also a psychotropic drug, trazodone, a serotonin antagonist reuptake inhibitor (SARI) that carries “activation” risks of its own, including suicidal and violent behavior. Therefore, the true effects may have been downplayed through semantics and parameters set by the study.

At any rate, Lilly’s own internal report on clinical trials matches up incidence reports for fluoxetine against trazodone (an SARI), amitriptyline and desipramine (both tricyclic antidepressants), as well as maprotiline (a tetracyclic antidepressant). It shows a dramatically higher rate of suicide attempts, psychotic depression, hostility and intentional injury for fluoxetine-based Prozac than any of the other antidepressants used in the company’s own trials.

While suicide attempts represented 3.7% of total reports for fluoxetine in trials, it accounted for only 0.2% of the incidents in trazodone, 0.8% in amitryptyline, 0.3% in desipramine and 0.0% for maprotiline. While Lilly attempted to explain away six of the 12 suicide attempts which occurred during its trials of Prozac, but even if you buy their maneuvering, that’s still a 6:1 ratio of suicides potentially induced by Prozac verses controls.

Similarly, psychotic depression reports spiked in fluoxtine at 2.3% while they represented <1% in the other drugs; fluoxetine was two-and-a-half to four times more likely to cause hostility than other drugs tested, and at least eight times more likely to trigger episodes of intentional injury.

Those results show enough risk and red flags it should give any doctor pause before prescribing them to anyone. The 1984 memo even describes ways to explain these findings away to doctors, stating, “Several suggestions may be helpful in presenting this information to physicians” including emphasis on positives like lower discontinuation rates and encouraging physicians to understand “the meaningfulness of subtracting the placebo rate from the drug associated rate” to “point out these values are relatively low”. (Does history show that, just by the way? Obviously not.)

However, with these studies suppressed, Prozac became the “star drug” for depression and Eli Lilly’s blockbuster.

But at what cost, not only to patients, but to legal protections and a right-to-know for the general public, many of whom may be taking, or could be prescribed Prozac?

According to his report on the documents, Dr. Peter R. Breggin, M.D. was responsible for uncovering several concealed internal Lilly memos during the discovery process as a scientific expert in litigation in the early 1990s – and Lilly certainly did not want them to come to light.

Dr. Breggin explains the bizarre and utterly concerning case this way:

I am familiar with these documents because I initially found them in the early 1990s while searching through mountains of paper produced by the drug company in the discovery process. At the time I was the scientific expert for the combined Prozac suits and one of my tasks was to evaluate Eli Lilly’s discovery materials for all the initial cases…

[…]

Paul Smith, the attorney for the plaintiffs, secretly settled the case during the trial and then denied the fact to presiding Judge John W. Potter. The plaintiffs agreed to water down their presentation of the case to the jury in return for a large secret settlement. After Eli Lilly seemed to win the trial by a 9-3 vote, Judge Potter found out that the trial was a sham aimed at exonerating the drug company.

The Supreme Court of Kentucky declared that Eli Lilly may have committed “fraud” and that the drug company had “manipulated” the judicial system. The judge voided the jury verdict and changed it to “settled with prejudice” by Eli Lilly. Although the initial “victory” by Eli Lilly was widely covered in the press, the change in the verdict was largely ignored.

Consumer protection and medical malpractice hangs in the balance of a very determined legal and marketing team in the modern day world of Big Pharma corporate dominance.

The Indianapolis Star, based in the hometown of Eli Lilly, reported on the legal cunning of the Prozac makers in deflecting liability through “secret deals” and “hardball tactics”:

Critics charge Lilly became adept at lawsuit-quashing through aggressive and sometimes unethical legal tactics. They earned the rebuke of three courts, spurred at least three separate lawsuits and gave rise to charges of trial-fixing, conspiracy and document-hiding.

[…]

The deal was “arguably unprecedented in a Western court,” wrote Cornwell.

Zitrin views the deal as an attempt by Lilly to “create a situation where the trial was fixed.” The deal required Smith to withhold key negative evidence about Lilly from the jury in the end stage of the trial. [Editor’s Note: And also required no appeals or punitive damages.]

The evidence concerned Lilly’s 1985 guilty plea to 25 criminal counts for failing to tell the U.S. Food and Drug Administration about deaths and illnesses of patients taking a Lilly arthritis drug called Oraflex, plus related charges. [Editor’s Note: Analysts say Lilly barely obtained a victory]

[…]

“Lilly made the verdict the centerpiece of a national publicity campaign, touting the safety of Prozac,” said a 1997 ruling by the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Wow. That is spin at work.

If the reports are true, then a liability in the way of secret deals, suppressed evidence and proof of harm was cleverly turned around into a promotional “victory” for Eli Lilly that dispelled the notions that the drug was harmful or unsafe.

Lilly knew from its own drug trials that nearly 1-in-5 patients would, statistically, undergo “activation”… and could be at risk for a significant increase in suicidal tendencies, as well as aggression and hostilities that were not otherwise expressed.

Reports show that 12 people attempted suicide during Lilly’s own trials, way more than with the other drugs tested, and even with half of these somehow explained away by other factors in the study, the warning would have been apparent if the information had been made available to the FDA and the public.

Read the PDF for yourself.

Instead, profits were put ahead of public health concerns, and many consequences – including shattered lives and even mass shooting incidents – have arguably been connected to this ethical failure to put patients and drug safety first.

Today, the US is a Prozac Nation, where more than one in ten people are taking antidepressants. A new study just came out which found that over 2/3rds of people taking drugs like Prozac aren’t even clinically depressed.

Guess it makes for a much more manageable public.

On an interesting side note, kind of makes you wonder why exactly George H. W. Bush became director of the CIA the year after its MK Ultra mind control scandal broke, only to join the board of directors of, you guessed it, Eli Lilly (also involved in MK Ultra) for two years while Prozac was being developed…

October 28, 2015 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | 3 Comments

Tokyo orders work to start on Okinawa US base, despite governor’s opposition

RT | October 28, 2015

Japan’s Defense Ministry says it will restart work on a land reclamation project, which is vital for a proposed US military base on the site. This is likely to infuriate the local Okinawa prefectural government, who are deeply against the move.

Work is planned to start on Thursday and will create storage space needed to start the landfill work. The Okinawa Defense Bureau will also continue a seabed drilling survey off the coast of Henoko, where an alternative US base could be built.

“An administrative decision to start the landfill work has already been made,” said Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga on Wednesday, as cited by the Japan Times.

The Okinawa government says it refuses to accept the notice and has asked the bureau to consult with them before starting the landfill work. Tokyo says these talks have already finished.

On October 13, Okinawa Governor Takeshi Onaga revoked permission granted for the construction of a new US military base to host the US Marine Corps, following their relocation from the Futenma Air Station from the heavily populated city of Ginowan.

“I will continue to do everything in my power to fulfill my campaign pledge of not allowing the construction of a new base at Henoko,” Onaga said, according to the Asahi Shimbun.

However Onaga appears to have been outflanked. Land Minister Keiichi Ishii suspended the landfill approval cancelation on Tuesday, while Tokyo said it would now be giving itself permission to carry out the work and sideline the governor.

The Land Ministry asked Onaga to withdraw his cancelation of the landfill approval by November 6, the Japan Times reports.

“This is like an ultimatum from the government,” Onaga told a news conference on Tuesday. “It’s not just unfair but also insulting to many people in the prefecture. It’s absolutely unacceptable.”

The previous Okinawa governor, Hirokazu Nakaima, gave the green light for the relocation of the base in 2013. However, after Onaga won the elections in 2014, he promised to oppose the plan – to the delight of the majority of locals.

There has been tension for years between the local population and US servicemen. This dates back to a notorious crime committed in 1995 when three US marines kidnapped and raped a 12-year-old schoolgirl.

There have also been less-publicized sex crime cases involving underage victims reported in 2001 and 2005, the fatal running over of a female high school student by a drunken US marine in 1998, and other incidents.

Okinawa, home to about one percent of Japan’s population, hosts nearly half of the 47,000 US troops based in Japan.

October 28, 2015 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Militarism | , , , | 1 Comment

Geophysical Research Letters Shock Finding: In 2014 More Multiyear Ice Than Previous Nine Years… Arctic Winter 0.5 – 1.5°C Colder!

By P Gosselin | NoTricksZone | October 27, 2015

Has anyone been wondering why we’ve been hearing so little about the Arctic lately?

New study says Arctic to remain frozen for many more years. MODIS image of the Arctic, Jeff Schmaltz – NASA Earth Observatory

Reader Dennis A. sent me the following abstract of a new paper by Haas et al: Ice thickness in the Northwest Passage – Haas – 2015 – Geophysical Research Letters – Wiley Online Library. It turns out that the Arctic is far less ice free than many thought or expected just some years ago. So wrong can the models be!

More Arctic ice and up to 1.5°C colder!
Navigable NWP postponed 40 years!

The study finds that in 2014 “more ice survived the summer as MYI than in the nine most recent years” and it was only “slightly less than during 1968–2015 on average (Figure S5).”

Also “between November 2014 and April 2015, winter air temperatures were between −0.5°C and −1.5°C colder than during 1980–2010.”

Moreover the study also has climate experts profoundly postponing yet another prediction: The Northwest passage will not be navigable for another 40 years… let alone the Arctic becoming ice free!

The entire GRL abstract (emphasis added):

We present results of the first ever airborne electromagnetic ice thickness surveys over the NWP carried out in April and May 2011 and 2015 over first-year and multiyear ice. These show modal thicknesses between 1.8 and 2.0 m in all regions. Mean thicknesses over 3 m and thick, deformed ice were observed over some multiyear ice regimes shown to originate from the Arctic Ocean. Thick ice features more than 100 m wide and thicker than 4 m occurred frequently.

Results indicate that even in today’s climate, ice conditions must still be considered severe. These results have important implications for the prediction of ice breakup and summer ice conditions, and the assessment of sea ice hazards during the summer shipping season.

For further evaluation, it is also important to consider that in Parry Channel, including VMS, i.e., in the waters of the northern NWP, in 2014 more ice survived the summer as MYI than in the nine most recent years but slightly less than during 1968–2015 on average (Figure S5).

Between November 2014 and April 2015, winter air temperatures were between −0.5°C and −1.5°C colder than during 1980–2010 which could have led to slightly thicker level ice than average, notwithstanding snow effects

However, by all means the observed thicknesses and amount of deformed ice still indicate serious ice conditions which can persist throughout the summers and provide ample potential for encounters with hazardous ice. Even in recent years, the CAA remains a source for locally grown MYI and a sink for Arctic Ocean MYI [Howell et al., 2015]; and therefore, shipping through the NWP should not be taken lightly.

These conclusions also support results of Smith and Stephenson [2013] who suggested that the NWP will not become easily navigable for another 40 years or so.

In addition, we have observed two ice islands in and south of Byam-Martin Channel in 2011 which were not included in the present analysis. These ice islands originated from the ice shelves along the Arctic Ocean coast of Ellesmere Island, and were between 30 and 40 m thick, adding to the variability of hazardous ice features in the NWP.”

October 28, 2015 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

New York Times Sliming Their Readers Again

Real Science | October 27, 2015

2015-10-27-09-48-25

The full melting of Greenland’s ice sheet could increase sea levels by about 20 feet.

TimesMachine – NYTimes.com

Even the most ridiculous estimates of ice loss in Greenland are less than 200 km³ per year. The volume of the ice sheet is 3,000,000 km³. Using the most aggressive claims, it would take 15,000 years for the ice sheet to melt. That accounts for a sea level rise of about one hundredth of an inch per year. Does Coral Davenport think that one inch of sea level rise over the next century is going to drown her?

But the reality is that the surface of Greenland gains about 300 billion tons of ice every year. Greenland is not melting.

2015-10-27-09-57-09Greenland Ice Sheet Surface Mass Budget: DMI

Ninety percent of the ice sheet gained mass from September 1, 2014 to August 30, 2015.

2015-10-27-10-04-12

Greenland Ice Sheet Surface Mass Budget: DMI

Claims that the ice sheet is losing 200 km³ / year are based on unreliable gravity calculations made by people with an agenda. Glacial flow to the ocean is controlled by the amount of excess ice building up in the interior. If for some reason the amount of ice building up in the interior decreased, flow would also decrease.

The New York Times has been reporting this same hysteria for almost 85 years.

2015-10-27-10-31-10

TimesMachine: May 15, 1932 – NYTimes.com

2015-10-27-10-09-222015-10-27-10-09-41

TimesMachine: June 24, 1930 – NYTimes.com

Thirty years later they were predicting a new ice age.

2015-10-26-19-25-48December 7, 1958 – NYTimes.com

Climate is cyclical. There is no rational reason to believe that the Greenland ice sheet is going to disappear. More than half of it never gets above freezing most years.

October 28, 2015 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

In The NY Times, Israeli Injuries Make Headlines, Palestinian Deaths Are Footnotes

By Barbara Erickson | TimesWarp | October 27, 2015

These are the last moments of 17-year-old Hebron schoolgirl Dania Irsheid, as described by witnesses: Raising her hands above her head, terrified by the shouts of Israeli police, Dania cried out, “I don’t have a knife.” Immediately, one shot hit the ground between her legs; then a hail of bullets followed, and she fell.

A video shows her lying motionless, her white headscarf stained with blood, as police mill about but make no attempt to assist her. The terrible scene took place at a checkpoint near Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque on Sunday.

Her death merited a brief and anonymous mention in The New York Times. Far into a story about the changing tactics of Palestinian Authority security forces, we find this single sentence: “Elsewhere in the West Bank, an Israeli police officer fatally shot a 17-year-old Palestinian girl who tried to stab him, The Associated Press reported.”

Witnesses at the scene said she had no knife and had already passed through two metal detectors and revolving doors before opening her book bag for inspection at the mosque site. Israeli police, however, released a statement saying she was a “female Arab terrorist” and had been “neutralized.”

The Times says nothing of these contradictions, and it has maintained a resounding silence over other Palestinian deaths, including the shooting of two Hebron schoolboys who were killed last week, also in disturbing and disputed circumstances. (See TimesWarp 10-21-15).

On the other hand, the newspaper has taken pains to draw readers’ attention to an alleged stabbing attack on an Israeli citizen, which left the victim “moderately wounded” and resulted in the death of one Palestinian and the arrest of another.

The story appeared online five days ago, on Oct. 22, and was still present on the Middle East page through most of today’s online edition (it disappeared only after this post came out) under the headline “Jewish Man Stabbed in Israel by Palestinians as Violence Continues.” The article, touted so tenaciously on the Times website, is a mere 270 words and sketchily reported, but it outlasted other breaking news from the region with unusual longevity.

The death of Dania Irsheid merited no headline in the Times while the “moderate wounding” of an Israeli man was repeatedly flagged for online viewers. It is clear from this (and many other choices they make) that the newspaper’s editors have an agenda of their own, one that is inconsistent with accepted journalistic standards.

Israel is to be the perennial victim. Palestinians are to be the aggressors. Any deviation from this narrative causes dissonance at the Times.

Thus we find no stories about the harried and fearful lives of Palestinians in Hebron, even though the situation cries out for a close look at their ordeal. (Some 16 Palestinians have been killed in the city since the beginning of this month, out of 44 in the West Bank overall and 17 in Gaza, according to the International Middle East Media Center). Nor do we find any serious examination of the brutal occupation and colonization of Palestine that fuels the resistance.

We do, however, find a Times story about youthful Palestinian attackers inspired by social media, and we find an article focused on Palestinian songs with a nationalistic and sometimes violent bent. Both these articles appeared in print on page 1, and both conveniently fit the portrait of Palestinians as aggressors.

When evidence to the contrary cannot be ignored (as in the arson deaths of three Palestinian family members this summer), the Times turns to damage control. Thus, we have the newspaper attempting to undermine video evidence that shows Israeli security forces making false accusations or killing Palestinians who pose no threat.

This was the purpose of a story with the disingenuous headline, “Conflicting Accounts of Jerusalem Strife Surround a Wounded Arab Boy.” The point of this article is not what it purports to be, an examination of two different narratives, but an effort to debunk videos and witness accounts challenging the statements of Israeli security forces.

The Times devotes 1,600 words to telling us that Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abba and others got it wrong when they said Ahmad Manasra, 13, caught on video as he lay bleeding in Jerusalem, had been killed. He had only been wounded, the Times notes, and he is now being cared for in hospital.

The Times (and Israeli officials) are using this error to claim that Palestinian testimonies cannot be trusted. Some video evidence of Israeli misconduct is irrefutable, however, and monitoring groups outside of Palestine have vouched for them, calling for an end to the use of excessive force and extrajudicial executions.

Moreover, the video of Ahmad is shocking in its revelations of Israeli settler brutality even though the boy eventually survived. And beyond this, the Times story itself makes a significant error in claiming that the boy is shown in hospital being “spoon-fed by a nurse.”

In fact, it was an attorney, Tareq Barghout, who held the spoon, as the man later testified. Barghout also said Ahmad was shackled to the bed and suffered constant verbal abuse from hospital staff. The Times story, however, included none of this information.

Israeli officials made much of the error over Ahmad’s survival, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calling it “the new big lie,” and the Times obligingly followed suit. The overblown story is consistent with Times efforts to support the Israeli narrative and to discredit the testimony of Palestinians.

Meanwhile, three more died in Hebron on Monday, and the Times has once again failed to take notice. Palestinian deaths are—at best—footnotes in the newspaper of record while Israeli injuries are headlines. This is the unspoken but evident policy at The New York Times.

Follow @TimesWarp on Twitter

October 28, 2015 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , | 1 Comment

Turkish police raid opposition TV station ahead of election

RT | October 28, 2015

Police in Turkey have stormed the offices of an opposition television station days before the country goes to the polls. The media outlet is linked to an Islamic preacher opposed to President Tayyip Recep Erdogan.

The incident took place outside the offices of Kanalturk and Bugun TV in Istanbul, while footage was broadcast live on Bugun’s website.

There were large scuffles outside the offices, where there was also a heavy police presence. Police seemed to be using pepper spray against those trying to block their path through the gate and into the building.

After a struggle, dozens of police eventually made their way through the crowd and into the building. A water cannon on the street was also used to keep demonstrators away.

The media groups are owned by Koza Ipek Holding, which has links to the Islamic preacher Fethullah Gulen, who is a political foe of the current Turkish President Erdogan. Gulen lives in self-imposed exile in the United States.

On Tuesday, the authorities took over the management of 22 companies that were owned by Koza Ipek, Reuters reports.

Gulen was once an ally of Erdogan, but the two fell out after police and prosecutors seen as sympathetic to the preacher opened a corruption investigation against the inner circle of the Turkish president, then prime minister, in 2013. This is believed to have resulted in the crackdown against Gulen.

Gulen is facing charges of running a “parallel” structure within state institutions that was looking to topple Erdogan. Prosecutors are seeking a prison sentence of up to 34 years for Gulen.

October 28, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

RT Chief Outraged at ‘Shocking’ Proposal to Seize Channel’s US Assets

Sputnik – 27.10.2015

RT television channel Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan said Tuesday that she was outraged at the proposal by a former US assistant secretary of state that the United States must freeze RT assets.

David Kramer, a former US assistant secretary of state for democracy and human rights, said in an op-ed published last week by The Washington Post that RT channel assets in the country must be seized in compliance with two European court rulings against Russia stipulating shareholder debt repayment in the now defunct Yukos oil firm.

“We are outraged at this call of a former US official,” Simonyan said. She blamed the US hype over RT broadcasts on a long-time smear campaign against the channel to “gag RT, the only opposition voice in a choir of mainstream media.”

“The US Broadcasting Board of Governors has already compared us to Islamic State and called to label us a ‘foreign agent.’ But remarks of the former US assistant secretary of state in The Washington Post are nevertheless shocking,” Simonyan said.

The RT chief pointed out there was no legal ground to back Kramer’s assertion. The former US government appointee claimed that an RT asset seizure was an option to pay an estimated $52 billion to Yukos shareholders after observing that the Russian Embassy and consulate property in the US were protected by diplomatic immunity.

Last year, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague and the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg ruled that the Russian government owed tens of billions of dollars to Yukos shareholders. Yukos was declared bankrupt in 2006 and absorbed into the state-owned Rosneft company.

The Russian Justice Ministry refused to follow EU court rulings, saying this would put the ministry in breach of the Russian constitution. The ministry appealed the ruling, arguing that it was neither fair nor impartial.

October 27, 2015 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance | | 4 Comments

EFF Disappointed as CISA Passes Senate

By Mark Jaycox | EFF | October 27, 2015

CISA passed the Senate today in a 74-21 vote. The bill is fundamentally flawed due to its broad immunity clauses, vague definitions, and aggressive spying authorities. The bill now moves to a conference committee despite its inability to address problems that caused recent highly publicized computer data breaches, like unencrypted files, poor computer architecture, un-updated servers, and employees (or contractors) clicking malware links.

The conference committee between the House of Representatives and the Senate will determine the bill’s final language. But no amount of changes in conference could fix the fact that CISA doesn’t address the real cybersecurity problems that caused computer data breaches like Target and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

The passage of CISA reflects the misunderstanding many lawmakers have about technology and security. Computer security engineers were against it.  Academics were against it. Technology companies, including some of Silicon Valley’s biggest like Twitter and Salesforce, were against it. Civil society organizations were against it. And constituents sent over 1 million faxes opposing CISA to Senators.

With security breaches like T-mobile, Target, and OPM becoming the norm, Congress knows it needs to do something about cybersecurity. It chose to do the wrong thing. EFF will continue to fight against the bill by urging the conference committee to incorporate pro-privacy language. And we will never stop fighting for lawmakers to either understand technology or understand when they need to listen to the people who do.

October 27, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

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