Tuesday, Jul 15th
Last update06:52:25 AM GMT
The Close Alliance Between Gates Foundation and Monsanto
As I discussed last month, Wikileaks has revealed just how deeply entrenched the US government has become with Monsanto. It's long been known that the government was being unduly influenced, but the leaked cables revealed the reality is far worse than expected; the US Department of State is actively promoting the private interests of Monsanto across the world.
To mark International Women's Day, an IoS survey shows progress is being made. Women are capturing an increasing number of seats in parliaments around the world, an Independent on Sunday survey to mark International Women's Day has found. In places such as South Africa and Iceland, they are approaching parity with men, and in one country, Rwanda, they are actually in the majority.
While much remains to be done, not least in the UK where barely one in four MPs are women, governance experts this weekend hailed the advances that many countries have made, including some of the world's least developed nations.
Israel and the United States created the Stuxnet worm to sabotage Iran's nuclear programme, a leading security expert has claimed.
Ralph Langner told a conference in California that the malicious software was designed to cripple systems that could help build an Iranian bomb.
Mr Langner was one of the first researchers to show how Stuxnet could take control of industrial equipment. It is widely believed that its target was machinery used to enrich uranium.
Public sector workers are employed by the government, but they are private citizens. Once a private citizen earns a dollar from the sweat of his or her brow, it no longer belongs to his or her employer.
NPR, PBS and local public broadcast stations around the country are hiring more journalists and pumping millions of dollars into investigative news to make up for what they see as a lack of deep-digging coverage by their for-profit counterparts.
Public radio and TV stations have seen the need for reporting that holds government and business accountable increase as newspapers and TV networks cut their staffs and cable television stations have filled their schedules with more opinion journalism.
For some three decades, local residents near a top secret terrorist training base have reported on hearing explosions, seeing sudden flashes of light and night time flares, and noticing small planes and "black helicopters" arriving at and departing from a small airfield on the base. The airspace over the base is off-limits to unauthorized aircraft.
The base is not in Pakistan's restive Waziristan region or in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley but in northeastern North Carolina on Albemarle Sound, near the town of Hertford. Officially known as the Harvey Point Defense Testing Activity the base, which was once a Navy Supply Center, it actually serves as a paramilitary training course for the CIA and allied intelligence and paramilitary services, including Israel's Mossad and Britain's Special Air Services (SAS). On March 20, 1998, The New York Times reported that during its existence, Harvey Point trained 18,000 foreign intelligence operatives from 50 different countries.
Who can we blame for $4.00 a gallon? Answer: every last one of us cotton pickin' American gas guzzling 8-cylinder SUV drivers, trucks, trains, boats and planes! We burn 20 million barrels a day in the United States. The world's humans burn 84 million barrels daily. That's 29.9 billion barrels of oil annually worldwide! Whopping carbon footprint! Hey! Did you think a finite resource like 'endless oil' could go on forever? That's like sucking on an 'endless milkshake' straw at the local diner! It eventually runs dry and you suck on air.
In fact, the $3bn Israel aid package is the new third rail of American politics: touch it and die. It is also the one program that liberals, conservatives, Democrats, Republicans and tea partiers all agree should not sustain even a dollar in cuts.
Actually, that is something of a mis-statement. These various parties and factions do not agree that the $3bn Israel aid package is sacred. They just say that they do because a powerful lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), makes clear to them that touching the aid package will mean big trouble for them in the next election.
Last night, The Nation Institute hosted a debate between former congressman Brian Baird and Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) and moderated by The New York Times’s Roger Cohen about the UN-commissioned Goldstone Report, which documented alleged war crimes committed by both the Israeli military and Hamas forces during the 22-day long “Operation Cast Lead” conflict in Gaza in 2008.
At one point during the debate, Weiner began to say that the West Bank was more relatively prosperous than Gaza in part because there is no Israeli occupation there (although there is an enormous blockade).
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