Pakistani man sues US over false arrest
Press TV – December 6, 2013
A Pakistani immigrant has filed a lawsuit against the US government in a federal court in Miami, saying he was kept for over ten months in solitary confinement after being falsely arrested on ‘terrorism’ charges.
Forty-year-old Irfan Khan, who immigrated to the United States from Pakistan in 1994, filed the complaint on December 3 at US District Court of Miami, Reuters reported on Thursday.
According to the lawsuit, Khan was arrested in California in 2011 on charges that included providing material support for the Pakistani Taliban.
The 40-year-old was then taken to a prison in Florida as he was also accused of supporting a plot for the abduction and murder of individuals overseas.
The lawsuit says that all charges against Khan were dropped in June 2012. However, until then he had been held for around 320 days in solitary confinement.
“I was shocked at the time. I’m still shocked. I don’t know why it happened, how it happened, and that’s why we are doing this. To get some answers,” Khan told Reuters on Thursday.
“The conduct the government subjected Irfan to, as a result of his religion, national origin, and its overzealousness in its war on terror was and still is, by all standards, horrendous,” the complaint says.
The lawsuit also accuses Washington of false arrest, incarceration and malicious prosecution.
The US government accused Khan of giving money to a commander of the Pakistani Taliban known as Akbar Hussain in 2008. However, Khan says he sent money to his wife, who was visiting Pakistan, through her uncle who is also named Akbar Hussain, a retired college professor.
The complaint also says that an impartial translator would have rejected the government’s interpretation of Khan’s telephone conversations with his father in Urdu and Pashto, which were cited by prosecutors.
The lawsuit says he criticized the Pakistani government during the two conversations but did not advocate violence, as was claimed by government prosecutors.
Khan said he lost his job and his car after his arrest. His wife and two children had to move over safety concerns.
Inequality grows as CEOs blackmail the rest of us
By Yves Engler · December 4, 2013
Last week in Switzerland big money staved off an important challenge to big paychecks. But the sentiment that spurred a Swiss effort to tie executive compensation to common workers’ wages will not be defeated so easily.
A Sunday ago Swiss voters said no to a referendum question that would have capped executive compensation at 12 times the lowest paid worker in the firm. After gaining over 130,000 signatures to put the question to voters, proponents of the initiative were overwhelmed by a flood of money claiming a ‘yes’ vote would drive companies away. Early polls found 46% of the Swiss public opposed to the 12:1 pay measure but with opponents spending up to 50 times more than the ‘yes’ campaign, 65% ultimately voted ‘no’.
According to supporters of the measure, the average Swiss CEO made 43 times the average wage in 2011, up from six times in 1984. A number of top Swiss CEOs make more than 200 times their employees’ wage.
But Switzerland’s CEO-to-worker pay differential appears socialistic compared to North America’s. After the US, Canada has the second highest CEO-to-worker pay ratio. Last year, for instance, the CEO of BCE, George Cope, received $11.1-million in compensation. This staggering sum is nearly 200 times more than what a Bell Canada technician in Toronto makes and 2,000 times the pay of an Indian call-centre worker who responds to Bell customers.
Despite making 200 times the average industrial wage, Cope was not the best-paid executive in Canada. According to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ summary of Canada’s 100 highest paid CEOs in 2011, the $11.1 million Cope made in 2012 would have placed him just off the top 15. Incredibly, the CEO of Canadian Pacific, Hunter Harrison, took home four and a half times Cope’s pay.
In recent years the difference between regular employees’ pay and CEO compensation has grown rapidly. A recent Globe and Mail survey found that ratio has reached 122-1 at Canada’s biggest firms, up from an average of 84-1 a decade ago. Using a different set of data, the CCPA and AFL-CIO put the Canadian CEO-to-worker pay ratio significantly higher.
As a flagrant symbol of growing inequality, executive pay is increasingly facing political challenge. While the 12:1 initiative was defeated, in March more than two-thirds of Swiss voters supported a referendum question requiring companies to give shareholders a binding annual vote on executives’ pay, while outlawing bonuses to executives joining or leaving a business or as part of a takeover. Similarly, some EU officials have suggested that shareholders should be given the right to vote on the ratio between a company’s best and worst paid workers.
The French government took office last year saying it would limit executive salaries at state-controlled companies to a maximum of 20 times that of the lowest-paid employees and on Wednesday Ontario New Democrat leader Andrea Horwath called for the salaries of CEO’s at the province’s hospitals, electrical utilities and other public sector agencies to be capped at $418,000, twice the premier’s annual salary.
Politicians should legislate a maximum pay differential between the best and worst paid workers in all companies. How about a ratio of 20 times that’s steadily reduced over time?
It may be difficult, but I’m sure CEOs like Bell’s George Cope could learn to cope on a million bucks a year.
Girl smuggled into Britain to have her ‘organs harvested’
Body parts black market booming in UK
Press TV – October 20, 2013
The number of human smuggling victims in the UK has topped record levels with a girl specifically trafficked to have her organs harvested, it has emerged.
A government report exposed the case of a Somali girl trafficked into Britain, where human smugglers intended to remove her organs and sell them on the black market, the Daily Telegraph reported.
The report claims that the case is a first, but child protection charities say it is unlikely to be an isolated incident since human traffickers were likely to have smuggled a group of children into the country.
The number of victims trafficked into Britain last year spiked by more than 50 percent compared to the previous year, of whom 371 children were either used as slaves or sexually abused, said the report.
The countries from where children were trafficked included Vietnam, Nigeria, China, Bangladesh and Romania, the report said.
Child protection charities have warned that the demand for organ transplants in Britain is being exploited by criminal gangs, who snatch children from target countries and smuggle them into the UK to have their organs harvested.
“Traffickers are exploiting the demand for organs and the vulnerability of children. It’s unlikely that a trafficker is going to take this risk and bring just one child into the UK. It is likely there was a group”, said Bharti Patel, the chief executive of Ecpat UK, a child protection charity.
This comes as the World Health Organization estimates that as many as 7,000 kidneys are illegally obtained by traffickers each year around the world.
Among other organs being sold on the black market, kidneys are the most sought-after because one can be removed from a patient without any ill effects.
Millions of Americans on food stamps face cuts from November
Press TV – October 20, 2013
Millions of food stamp recipients in the United States will see their benefits cut from the beginning of next month as the program is fully paid through October.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) will be cut because a temporary measure to increase food stamps expires Oct. 31.
The country’s weak economy and the high rate of unemployment have caused a growing number of people to rely on the SNAP program. Some 48 million Americans are using food stamps each month, half of them children and teenagers.
According to the US Department of Agriculture, the average benefit is currently about $275 per household per month and a family of four with no changes in circumstance will receive $36 less per month.
The change means that the average benefit will go from about $1.50 per person, per meal each month to about $1.40.
“For those of us who spend $1.70 a day on a latte this doesn’t seem like a big change, but it does kind of really highlight the millions of families living on an extremely modest food budget,” Stacy Dean, vice president for food assistance policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said.
“Every week is a struggle as it is,” said Heidi Leno, who lives in Concord with her husband, 9-year-old daughter and twin 5-year-olds. “We hate living paycheck to paycheck and you have to decide what gets paid.”
Jennifer Donald, a mother of three in Philadelphia, said she counts on the family’s $460 monthly benefit to put food on the table.
“I was mad and devastated and a little bit confused because we need our benefits,” Donald said. “This is the way we eat right now. Live a day in our life before you can cut our benefits.”
This is while lawmakers are considering slashing billions of dollars to the overall program.
Last month, the House of Representatives voted to cut food stamps funding by $39 billion over the next decade. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that such a level of cuts would cause up to 3.8 million people to lose food stamp benefits in 2014.
The US Senate had previously voted to cut $4 billion from the program.
Four arrested for organ trafficking in Costa Rica
Press TV – October 11, 2013
Costa Rican police have arrested four alleged members of a gang that trafficked organs to foreigners, the country’s attorney general says.
Carlos Jimenez said those detained on Thursday include three doctors, who are employed at the public Calderon Guardia Hospital in the capital, San Jose, as well as one Greek citizen, suspected of recruiting donors to sell their kidneys.
The arrested doctors have conducted the transplant surgeries “with full knowledge that the donors were receiving money in exchange for their organs,” said Jimenez.
The patients received a payment between USD 80,000 to 100,000 a transplant, according to officials.
This is the second arrest in the case since June when the leader of the trafficking gang, Francisco Mora Palma was detained together with a government official.
According to officials, Palma, who was also the chief of nephrology at the Calderon Guardia Hospital, was the main contact for foreigners seeking to buy kidneys, while the government official recruited possible donors.
At the time of June arrest Attorney General Jorge Chavarria said, “The patients who required the transplants were in Israeli territory, and some of the (trafficking) victims [had their kidney removed] here and others were transported to Israel. We have information that at least one person died after being operated on in Israel.”
The deceased donor was a woman who passed away while returning home to Costa Rica from transplanting an illegal organ in Israel.
In addition, two Israeli citizens paid in 2012 a Costa Rican and Nicaraguan man USD 6,000 for two illegally obtained kidneys, according to the International Organization for Migration of Costa Rica.
Meanwhile, another illegal organ trafficking ring was uncovered last year in Israel after several countries contacted authorities and provided them with the names of the suspects.
Furthermore, the Israeli regime admitted in 2009 that it had harvested organs from dead Palestinians without permission from their next of kin in the 1990s.
The confession came after Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet revealed in a report that the Israeli authorities returned bodies of deceased Palestinians with organs missing.
Expensive Energy Kills Poor People
More stunning pictures of Al Gore’s mansion at link
By Willis Eschenbach | Watts Up With That? | September 27, 2013
Lesotho (pronounced “Leh – soo – too”), is a mountain fortress of a country, totally surrounded by South Africa. The people there, the Basotho (pronounced “Bah – soo – too), are tough as nails, and you’d have to be. It’s high desert country, cold in the winter, not much water. The Basotho are fiercely independent.
Back in the early days, they fought off the Germans who tried to take their land. The Germans then drove them off of the fertile lowlands and into the arid mountains. So their King cut a deal with the English King for the country to be a British Protectorate … very clever, one of the few parts of Africa that was never a colony of anybody. These days, curiously, most of the time the country is populated by old folks, and women and kids—the only real employment for hundreds of miles around are the mines of South Africa … including the coal mines. So the men are all at work in South Africa, and the country runs on the money that the miners send home.
Of a wintry morning in Maseru, the capital, there’s a haze across the city from the thousands and thousands of coal fires. By and large, these fires are warming poor women’s shacks and shanties, and cooking what passes for their kids’ breakfasts. They burn coal because it’s what they have. There are no forests, so they can’t burn wood. There are no great herds of cattle, so they can’t burn dung.
And as a result, Maseru mornings have that curious acrid smell that only comes from coal, and the haze that comes from coal burnt in leaky stoves and open three-stone fires.
I bring up this image of dirt-poor people in a dirt-poor country to provide a clear context for the New York Times report of the latest lethal IPCC recommendation, which they describe as follows:
To stand the best chance of keeping the planetary warming below an internationally agreed target of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) above the level of preindustrial times, the panel found, no more than one trillion metric tons of carbon can be burned and the resulting gas released into the atmosphere.
Just over half that amount has already been emitted since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and at the rate energy consumption is growing, the trillionth ton will be released somewhere around 2040, according to calculations by Myles R. Allen, a scientist at the University of Oxford and one of the authors of the new report. More than three trillion tons of carbon are still left in the ground as fossil fuels. SOURCE
First, the “internationally agreed target” of 2°C? I don’t recall any international agreement on that, except perhaps among attendees at one of the IPCC’s annual moribund quackathons held in Rio or somewhere.
But lets look instead at the important issue, the numbers that they give for carbon. They say we’ve burnt a half-trillion tonnes, and that we should stop when we’ve burned another half trillion tonnes, and leave the other two-and-a-half trillion tons of fossil fuels in the ground. Leave it in the ground … the mind boggles. Never happen.
So in a scant few decades, the women of Maseru are supposed to just stop burning coal? And do what? Burn their furniture? They could pull up the floorboards and burn them … if they had floors …
Dont’cha love these guys? Don’t they understand that their policies KILL PEOPLE! I apologize for shouting, but they seem to be congenitally blind to the results of their actions, so perhaps their ears still work. Do they have a plan in hand for fueling Maseru, and a thousand other Maseru’s around the world? Wind won’t do it. Sun won’t do it. So in a couple decades … what?
Here’s what they avert their eyes from.
Artificially increasing energy prices for any reason harms, impoverishes, and kills the poor.
Yes, kills. People die from the cold. If the women of Maseru have to pay more for coal, they have less money to pay for food. So they will buy a bit less coal and a bit less food, and somewhere in there, in the hidden part that far too many people don’t want to think about, kids are dying. It’s already happening. The World Bank and the US are currently refusing to fund coal-fired power plants around the world … rich people refusing cheap energy to poor people, on my planet that is disgusting and criminal behavior.
Can’t say much more than that without excessively angrifying my blood, thinking about rich 1%ers like the IPCC conclave and Myles R. Allen trying to make all fossil fuels more expensive, and blithely ignoring the lethal consequences of their actions. So I’ll leave it there, but spread the word.
Expensive energy kills poor people.
Iran news agency slams CNN for ‘fabricating’ Rouhani’s Holocaust remarks
RT | September 26, 2013
Iran’s state-owned Fars News Agency (FNA) claims that CNN has ‘fabricated’ the remarks made by President Hassan Rouhani in response to the question about the Holocaust. The US news channel added to or changed parts of his remarks, the agency said.
On Tuesday, the newly elected Iranian president gave his first English-language TV message in an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. The interview made international headlines with hundreds of news agencies worldwide boasting titles like “Iran’s President Rouhani calls Holocaust ‘reprehensible’ crime against Jews” or “Rouhani recognizes the Holocaust as crime against Jews”.
Asking about Rouhani’s take on the Holocaust, Amanpour noted that his predecessor, President Ahmadinejad, infamously denied the Holocaust. “Do you accept what it was, and what was it?” the US journalist asked.
However, according to Iran’s FNA, the news channel made up parts of Rouhani’s answers, adding the word ‘Holocaust’ among other placatory remarks to its translation from the answers given in Farsi.
According to the exact English translation provided by FNA, the Iranian President said,
“I have said before that I am not a historian and historians should specify, state and explain the aspects of historical events, but generally we fully condemn any kind of crime committed against humanity throughout history, including the crime committed by the Nazis both against the Jews and non-Jews, the same way that if today any crime is committed against any nation or any religion or any people or any belief, we condemn that crime and genocide. Therefore, what the Nazis did is condemned, [but] the aspects that you talk about, clarification of these aspects is a duty of the historians and researchers, I am not a history scholar.”
Meanwhile, the CNN translation of Rouhani’s answer stated:
“I’ve said before that I am not a historian and then, when it comes to speaking of the dimensions of the Holocaust, it is the historians that should reflect on it. But in general I can tell you that any crime that happens in history against humanity, including the crime that Nazis committed towards the Jews as well as non-Jews is reprehensible and condemnable. Whatever criminality they committed against the Jews, we condemn, the taking of human life is contemptible, it makes no difference whether that life is Jewish life, Christian or Muslim, for us it is the same, but taking the human life is something our religion rejects but this doesn’t mean that on the other hand you can say Nazis committed crime against a group now therefore, they must usurp the land of another group and occupy it. This too is an act that should be condemned. There should be an even-handed discussion.”
According to FNA, the word ‘Holocaust’ as well as the statement “whatever criminality they committed against the Jews, we condemn” are “the worst parts of the fabrications which totally change what President Rouhani has said.”
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Book Summary
The Whole Soy Story: The Dark Side of America’s Favorite Health Food
Lies Are Unbekoming | January 20, 2026
Soybeans generate approximately $80 million annually in mandatory producer assessments alone, funding a marketing apparatus that has transformed an industrial commodity into one of America’s most trusted “health foods.” The campaign succeeded. Soy milk lines supermarket shelves beside dairy. Soy protein fortifies everything from infant formula to energy bars. Vegetarians rely on tofu and tempeh as dietary staples. Doctors recommend soy to menopausal women. School lunch programs serve soy-based meat substitutes to children. An estimated 60 percent of processed foods contain soy derivatives. The premise underlying this proliferation—that Asians have thrived on soy for millennia and that modern science validates its health benefits—has been repeated so often it functions as established fact.
Kaayla T. Daniel’s The Whole Soy Story dismantles this premise through systematic examination of the scientific literature. The book documents that traditional Asian soy consumption averaged roughly one tablespoon daily, consumed as fermented condiments after processing methods that neutralized inherent toxins—a pattern bearing no resemblance to American consumption of industrially processed soy protein isolate, soy flour, and soy oil. Daniel catalogs the antinutrients that survive modern processing (protease inhibitors, phytates, lectins, saponins), the toxic compounds created by industrial methods (nitrosamines, lysinoalanine, hexane residues), and the heavy metals concentrated in soy products (manganese, aluminum, fluoride, cadmium). She traces the mechanisms by which soy isoflavones—plant estrogens present at pharmacologically significant levels—disrupt thyroid function, impair fertility, and interact with hormone-sensitive cancers. The evidence emerges from peer-reviewed journals, FDA documents, and industry sources themselves.
The stakes extend beyond individual dietary choices. Infants fed soy formula receive isoflavone doses equivalent to several birth control pills daily, with blood concentrations 13,000 to 22,000 times higher than their natural estrogen levels. Soy protein isolate—the ingredient in formula, protein bars, and thousands of products—has never received GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) status; its only pre-1960s use was as an industrial paper sealant. Two senior FDA scientists formally protested their own agency’s approval of soy health claims, citing evidence of thyroid damage and reproductive harm. The Honolulu Heart Program found that men consuming tofu twice weekly showed accelerated brain aging and increased dementia. These findings have not penetrated public awareness because the institutions responsible for consumer protection have been compromised by the industry they regulate. The Whole Soy Story presents the evidence that has been systematically excluded from mainstream health messaging, enabling readers to evaluate for themselves what the soy industry prefers they never learn. … continue
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