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4/10/2004



Iraqi Battalion Refuses to 'Fight Iraqis' :.

This is not a mutiny, mind you, but rather "a command failure."

A battalion of the new Iraqi army refused to go to Fallujah earlier this week to support U.S. Marines battling for control of the city, senior U.S. Army officers here said, disclosing an incident that is casting new doubt on U.S. plans to transfer security matters to Iraqi forces.

It was the first time U.S. commanders had sought to involve the postwar Iraqi army in major combat operations, and the battalion's refusal came as large parts of Iraqi security forces have stopped carrying out their duties.

The 620-man 2nd Battalion of the Iraqi Armed Forces refused to fight Monday after members of the unit were shot at in a Shiite Muslim neighborhood in Baghdad while en route to Fallujah, a Sunni Muslim stronghold, said U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, the official overseeing the development of Iraqi security forces. The convoy then turned around and returned to the battalion's home on a former Republican Guard base in Taji, a town north of the capital.

Eaton said members of the battalion insisted during the ensuing discussions: "We did not sign up to fight Iraqis."

He declined to characterize the incident as a mutiny, but rather called it "a command failure."





Job Outsourced? The National Security Agency is Hiring :.

The highly secretive National Security Agency is looking to hire 7,500 workers over the next five years in the spy agency's largest recruiting campaign since the 1980s.





All of Militant Islam Holds Meeting.... In Central London :.

The "war on terror" is a complete scam:

A secret meeting of senior Islamic activists held in London last month took the decision to ?stir the the Iraqi Shiite resistance? against the US-British led occupation of Iraq which led to the major escalation of hostilities over the last week to coincide with the first anniversary of the fall of Baghdad.

Delegates with affiliations to militant Islamic groups from across the Middle East, including many that are banned as terrorist organisations, travelled from all over Europe for the confidential closed-door sessions at various Islamic centres in central London.

Representative from both Sunni and Shiite groups and from countries such as Syria, the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia attended the conference.

According to an Arab source in Paris, among them were representatives of active terrorist organisations, like Lebanese Hezbollah, and some figures close to firebrand young Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr who is behind the current uprising in Iraq and now hunted by the US authorities in Iraq as an "outlaw and fugitive from justice".





Interesting Recent Hits

U.S. Military
wcs2-belvoir.nipr.mil NIPR Proxy - Fort Belvoir, Virginia
bu-wcs2-kelly.nipr.mil Defense Logistics Agency Automation Center
godzilla.hood.army.mil U.S. Army (nice machine name)
arifjan-netcache.kuwait.army.mil U.S. Army
px6o.wpafb.af.mil U.S. Air Force
ws000206.ramstein.af.mil U.S. Air Force
sch068068.pac.army.mil U.S. Army
gateway-alameda.uscg.mil U.S. Coast Guard
gate5-hawaii.nmci.navy.mil U.S. Navy
gate17-quantico.nmci.usmc.mil U.S. Marine Corps
sigcache1.sicily.navy.mil U.S. Navy
wcs2-pent.nipr.mil NIPR Proxy - Pentagon
phoenix.nro.mil U.S. National Reconnaissance Office
gateway.uscg.mil U.S. Coast Guard
usma-cce.usma.army.mil U.S. Army
1031c.cecer.army.mil U.S. Army
gate12-quantico.nmci.usmc.mil U.S. Marine Corps
belvoir-sun2.iern.disa.mil U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency
cacheflow.randolph.af.mil U.S. Air Force
wcs1-cbus.nipr.mil NIPR Proxy - Unknown origin, last knowable hop is Tampa, Florida
gate2-hawaii.nmci.navy.mil U.S. Navy
failover.orha.centcom.mil U.S. Military Central Command
wcs1-pent.nipr.mil NIPR Proxy - Pentagon

Government
wdcsun16.usdoj.gov U.S. Department of Justice
e450.mst.gov.pl Polish Ministry of the Treasury
beluha.ssu.gov.ua The Security Service of Ukraine (Sluzhba Bespeky Ukrayiny - SBU)
agmrrfsc.agric.gov.ab.ca Agriculture Ddepartment, Alberta Canada
sahp4060.sandia.gov Sandia National Laboratory, (primarily a nuclear weapons lab)
ns1.ftb.ca.gov California Franchise Tax Board
bcccache6-3.tco.census.gov U.S. Census Department
esd-jardine2000.ornl.gov Oak Ridge National Laboratory
internet.eletrobras.gov.br Brazilian Electrical Power Production Agency
clayton.state.gov U.S. State Department
s00dab8.ssa.gov Social Security Administration
sherman.state.gov another State Department machine
cerf.grc.nasa.gov U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration
microdeck1.loc.gov U.S. Library of Congress
host118-161.government.bg Bulgarian Council of Ministers
rch4.gtwy.uscourts.gov U.S. Federal Judiciary
igate.tc.faa.gov U.S. Federal Aviation Administration
host33-161.moew.government.bg Bulgarian Ministry of Environment and Water
n021.dhs.gov U.S. Department of Homeland Security


4/9/2004



Do You Feel a Draft? :.

There is pending legislation in the House and Senate (twin bills: S 89 and HR 163) which will time the program's initiation so the draft can begin as early as Spring 2005 -- just after the 2004 presidential election. The administration is quietly trying to get these bills passed now, while the public's attention is on the elections, so our action on this is needed immediately. Details and links follow.





Fascist Pig Scalia At It Again :.

Several journalism groups are expressing outrage over the actions of a deputy marshal who forced the erasure of two journalists' audio recordings of a speech by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia at a Mississippi high school.

The U.S. Marshals Service stopped short of fully defending the deputy's actions.

"The deputy's actions were based on the justice's standing policy prohibiting such recordings of his remarks," said Marshals Service spokesman David Turner.





On a Lighter Note: G.I. Joe Public Service Announcements :.

Did you watch G.I. Joe cartoons when you were a kid? Get ready to laugh your ass off.

Research Credit: JF





Enron Ex-CEO Skilling 5150ed :.

It's not easy being a PHB. One day, you're carving up the universe, and then the next thing you know, cops are dragging you away to the nut house:

Former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling was taken to a hospital early Friday after several people called police saying he was pulling on their clothes and accusing them of being FBI agents, a police source told The Associated Press.





At Least 9 U.S. Dead in Single Convoy Attack :.

Pictures of the attack. I don't know why this isn't on CNNABCFOXMSNBCetc. yet:

Insurgents attacked a U.S. convoy carrying fuel west of Baghdad Friday, killing at least nine people, witnesses said.

A Reuters photographer on the scene said he saw bodies burning inside the vehicles, which were still on fire near Abu Ghraib. He said the convoy included U.S. military vehicles and fuel tankers.

Huge clouds of black smoke hung over the area, visible from several kilometers away. There was heavy fighting between U.S. troops and guerrillas in Abu Ghraib Thursday.

Truckloads of people from the area have also tried to head further west to help other insurgents battling U.S. forces in Falluja and Ramadi.





Got Root? Vulnerability in Internet Explorer ITS Protocol Handler :.

Click the wrong link and set yourself up the bomb! Incredible. It's a good thing Firefox is so nice:

A cross-domain scripting vulnerability in Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user running IE. The attacker could also read and manipulate data on web sites in other domains or zones.


4/8/2004



While You Were Sleeping: Active Suppression of Images Out of Iraq by U.S. Media

WARNING: YOU GET NO WARNING. OPEN YOUR EYES!

The disconnect between what is happening in Iraq and what is being reported in the U.S. media is almost unbelievable. I watch media sources continuously and I don't see these images. I had to sift through hundreds of images on the photowire to find these. While the yammering of filthy liar Condoleezza Rice seems to be making news at the moment, I suggest that you pay attention to a few of the images from just the last two days in Iraq:

















Related: Photos from Falluja, Aljazeera News Crew Inside the Town





Bloody Chaos Engulfs Iraq: Fierce Fighting Rages, Foreigners Kidnapped :.

It is increasingly difficult to get any details of what is happening in Iraq. Most of the reporting is being done from hotels in Baghdad. Meanwhile, the rest of the country is in open rebellion and chaos is the order of the day. Victory! Liberation! Democracy! The boneheads (such as U.S. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez) are quite right when they say this is nothing like Vietnam. Actually, the implications of this U.S. caused catastrophe are much more strategic and dire in nature than Vietnam could have ever been. The war in Iraq threatens to draw the entire region into a conflict that could easily touch off a world war:

U.S.-led troops fought fierce battles with Sunni and Shi'ite rebels Thursday and a spate of kidnappings snared foreigners as Iraq descended into bloody chaos not seen since Saddam Hussein's fall a year ago.

A previously unknown Iraqi group said it was holding three Japanese hostages and threatened to "burn them alive" unless Tokyo withdrew its troops from Iraq within three days.

Rebels seized two Arabs with Israeli identity cards, shown on a video tape aired by an Iranian television station, and accused them of spying. A Briton was missing after being kidnapped in the southern town of Nassiriya.





Comprehensive Nutrient Review :.

Gary Null and his team of researchers provide irrefutable evidence of the benefits of nutritional supplementation. I listened to an audio presentation of some of this information and it is incredible. Try to keep this information in mind as the AMA and FDA try to ban commonly available supplements. This is priceless, top notch work and it's available to everyone for free. Highly recommended:

We performed a comprehensive review of scientific studies on the efficacy of 50 selected nutrients in preventing, retarding, and treating disease. These studies were culled from a much larger online database of 484,000 studies contained in peer reviewed health, nutritional, and scientific journals. Based on this research, we conclude that there is a significant body of evidence demonstrating that the 50 selected nutrients are effective at preventing, retarding and even improving disease. The studies, as a whole, show that the nutrients are effective at both preventative and higher therapeutic dosage levels. Further, these studies demonstrate that the effective therapeutic dosages are significantly higher than had been generally argued by even alternative health groups.

We believe that this is the first time there has been a scholarly effort to assemble and summarize such a massive number of peer reviewed studies on such a wide assortment of nutritional supplements. Previously arguments made by both traditionalist and alternative health groups have relied on specific studies, or at most, a group of studies on a single nutrient. Many of these studies were sponsored by parties with a vested interest in the conclusion. Such data, we suggest, was insufficient to make broad pronouncements on the efficacy of supplements as a whole. Here, however, we have utilized a significantly larger number of studies covering a much broader range of nutrients. Accordingly, we can have much greater assurance that we have reached correct conclusions about the efficacy of nutrients as a whole, particularly at therapeutic dosages.





Another Refinery Explodes! 4 Injured As Blasts Rock N.M. Refinery :.

WTF?

Two explosions followed by fire rocked a gasoline refinery Thursday, seriously injuring four people, officials said.

Smoke billowed from one side of the Giant Industries refinery about 15 miles east of Gallup in western New Mexico as rescue crews converged on the scene.

State police Lt. Jimmy Glascock said a piece of equipment used to make high-octane fuel exploded, and that blast caused the second one.





Photos from Falluja, Aljazeera News Crew Inside the Town :.

Liberation:

The Aljazeera crew, including cameramen Layf Muftaq and Hasan Walid, sound engineer Sayf al-Din and correspondent Hamid Hadid, are the only media personnel inside the town.

Hospital sources said at least 52 Iraqis were killed and 90 injured in attacks on the besieged town of Falluja on Wednesday, said Aljazeera correspondent in Falluja, Ahmad Mansur.

"Iraqi medic Rafi al-Isawai said the number of casualities is expected to double," he added.

Another 53 Iraqis died in attacks overnight in the besieged town which American forces sealed off on Sunday. "More than 200 Iraqis, including women children, were injured in the past 24 hours," said Mansur.


WARNING: PICTURES OF DEAD CHILDREN.





Hospital Patients Forced to Watch TV They Can't Turn Off :.

When thousands of NHS hospital patients were offered television sets beside their beds as part of a deal with a private company, it was billed as a triumph for the government's drive towards "patient power".

The only problem, as the Department of Health acknowledged yesterday, was that the patients lacked the power to turn the sets off. The TVs were not equipped with an off switch, and cast their flickering light for a fixed 15 hours a day.


4/7/2004



ECHELON Intercepts Lead to Arrests :.

They say this is a first. Well, I'd take that with several grains of salt. Technically, these are the first publicly announced arrests, but you can be sure that the ECHELON system provides actionable intelligence on a routine basis. Personally, I recommend the handy ECHELON Bullshit Generator for all of your ECHELON spoofing needs.

Let's all get those stupid Gmail accounts and send output from the EBG back and forth. Maybe some unwell programmer can create a perl script that does this 24 hours per day, 7 days per week... with about a thousand Gmail accounts. Maybe n number of script kitties would find this activity kEwL and run the script on their Linux-on-Xbox systems.

We might as well laugh at the absurdity of this system before is comes crashing down:

Citing anonymous sources in the British intelligence community, The Sunday Times reported that an e-mail message intercepted by NSA spies precipitated a massive investigation by intelligence officials in several countries that culminated in the arrest of nine men in Britain and one in suburban Orleans, Ont. -- 24-year-old software developer Mohammed Momin Khawaja, who has since been charged with facilitating a terrorist act and being part of a terrorist group.

The Orleans arrest is considered an operational milestone for this vast electronic eavesdropping network and its operators. But Dave Farber, an Internet pioneer and computer-science professor at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, said the circumstances are also notable because it will be the first time that routine U.S. monitoring of e-mail traffic has led to an arrest.

"That's the first admission I've actually seen that they actually monitor Internet traffic. I assumed they did, but no one ever admitted it," Mr. Farber said.





Fallujah: U.S. Military Blows Up Mosque :.

At least 40 people were killed on Wednesday when three missiles slammed into a mosque in a besieged city in central Iraq.

The missiles were fired by a U.S. helicopter as marines battled insurgents in Fallujah.

Worshippers were gathering at the Abdul-Aziz al-Samarrai for afternoon prayers at the time of the attack.





Hamburg Court Frees 9/11 Suspect :.

Wow:

A Hamburg court has ordered the release of the only suspect convicted in the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.

In a statement, the court said El Motassadeq "is no longer an urgent suspect in the charge of accomplice to murder, but only as a member of a terrorist organization."


This guy was probably a paid informant for German or U.S. Intelligence, or both. Perhaps the Germans want him out so he can "escape" and become an intelligence asset again.





Insurgency 'Has Grown Deeper Roots' :.

While al Qaeda is primarily a myth that is maintained for political purposes by the United States, the risk that real anti-American insurgencies and hostility would be created, by using the myth as a justification to kill people and steal resources, has now become real. As usual, several of us have been saying this for years now. It's just time to roll out the professors on CNN to make it official:

BLITZER: What exactly did you suspect would happen based on your knowledge of the region?

GERGES: Well, I think the official version in Washington is that most of the attacks were launched by foreign fighters, al Qaeda terrorists and a few small remaining pockets of the former Baathists.

I think what appears to have happened is that the insurgency, the armed insurgency in Iraq, has grown deeper roots in particular within the Sunni Arab community. And now unfortunately it appears to be spreading into many Shiite areas.

And I think what has happened in the last few months is that the insurgency is being led by religious and nationalist sentiment. That is, it's a real insurgency, deeply rooted in nationalist and religious sentiment.


Get it? It's not fake, it's not al Qaeda. Now, the U.S. has pissed off enough people to the point that it's real. So it goes...





Ginger and Probiotics

I listen to Gary Null every week on KPFK (90.7fm out of Los Angeles). Gary interviewed Paul Schulick on the benefits of ginger in the diet, and its relationship to healthy bacteria.

There are several "no brainers" in terms of daily nutritional supplementation. Examples of some of these include, Vitamins C and E (mixed tocopherols), flax seed oil, cayenne, garlic, etc.

After listening to Paul Schulick's presentation, I'm adding ginger to my "no brainer" list. (And I don't even like the taste of ginger.) This is an absolutely incredible food, in terms of its prophylactic and theraputic qualities. Please take some time to investigate the benefits of ginger and marvel at the fraud of establishment medicine in the West.

References:

Radio show: Gary Null show #3443 12/29/2003 Paul Schulick - Ginger: Common Spice & Wonder Drug. + Pro Biotics (Show will be available for download at some point. It makes more sense to buy the book, see below. Or, just read about ginger online.)

Book: Ginger: Common Spice and Wonder Drug: Common Spice & Wonder Drug by Paul Schulick





Carlyle Group Subsidiary Pushing a Swastika-Shaped Tracker Chip :.

The Carlyle Group, run by Frank Carlucci, was strategically placed before Sept 11th to maximize profits by controlling almost every sector of the police state's architecture in America.

Upon looking at Matric's structure , Alex found the following Carlyle Group members on the Board of Directors at Matrics:

Brooke Coburn: Managing Director of The Carlyle Group





California Voters Say 'No' to Wal-Mart :.

I was shocked that this didn't pass:

Voters in this Los Angeles suburb rejected a ballot measure Tuesday that would have allowed Wal-Mart to build a warehouse-sized store while skirting zoning, traffic and environmental reviews.

With 25 of 29 precincts reporting, Inglewood voters opposed the initiative, with 65.7 percent voting "no" and 34.2 percent voting "yes," said Gabby Contreras of the city clerk's office.

That amounts to 4,419 votes against the initiative and 2,305 in favor.

"This is very, very positive for those folks who want to stand up and ... hold this corporate giant responsible," said Daniel Tabor, a former City Council member who had campaigned against the initiative.





American Fascism: Military Jets Over Capitol :.

We are now in the "ugly" phase of the collapse:

The sight of military jets flying low over the U.S. Capitol and the National Mall rattled some nerves Tuesday.

Local radio and television stations reported getting worried calls from residents asking about the jets, which were part of a military publicity and recruitment campaign.

Capt. Sheldon Smith, a spokesman for the D.C. Air National Guard, apologized and promised such flights would be publicized better in the future.

The flights involved two F-16 warplanes and military versions of the 737 jetliner and Gulfstream corporate-style jet, all based at Andrews Air Force Base.

"We are the protectors of the U.S. Capitol, and we want to tell the community we are here," a spokesman for the 113th Air Wing of the D.C. Air National Guard, which staged the flyovers, said before the event.


4/6/2004



Watchdogs Slam Google's New E-Mail Service :.

Privacy activists worry that Gmail will comb through e-mail more intensively than the filters widely used to weed out potential viruses and spam.

Gmail opponents also want Google to revise a policy that entitles the company to retain copies of people's incoming and outgoing e-mail even after they close their accounts.

The e-mail scanning, which Google says will be handled exclusively by computers, has raised the most alarms, partly because it seeks to capitalize on messages sent by people without Gmail accounts.

Google intends to deliver ads by analyzing what's being discussed. For instance, an e-mail from one friend to another talking about an upcoming trip might include links to hotels or airlines.

Gmail has a "definite creepiness factor," said Ari Schwartz, associate director of the Center for Democracy and Technology.





Fringe/Freak/Weird: April 19, 2004, What Do You Think? :.

I just found that message on the Rumor Mill News list. I read it, scratched my chin a bit, laughed and said, "This has to be bullshit. There can't be anything to this." I closed the window down and moved on. After a few minutes, it started nagging at me a bit. What if? It's so far out, it's funny. Or, it's not funny.

By posting this, I'm not indicating that I buy this completely. In fact, I think the movie tie-in is silly. But what do you guys think about the numbers? Is this enough to get you to, say, maybe not be in a large city on April 19, 2004? I'm sure someone with a background in statistics can explain this away as total folly. Right?

Oh, But Wait, It Gets So Much Better

Guess who's directing The Day After Tomorrow? Yes, friends, that's right: Our man, Roland Emmerich. This might seem like just another big budget film... until you read this. I think it's safe to say that there's a fair amount of weirdness here. More weirdness than usual.

P.S. I was going to make one of my usual wise cracks about Cheney and his transdimensional portal, and Rumsfeld summoning things... but then I found out Emmerich also directed Stargate. Thanks. I'm finished now.





60% of U.S. Corporations Paid No Federal Taxes :.

No commentary necessary. You'll know what to do when the time comes:

More than 60% of U.S. corporations didn't pay any federal taxes for 1996 through 2000, years when the economy boomed and corporate profits soared, Tuesday's Wall Street Journal reported, citing the investigative arm of Congress.

The disclosures from the General Accounting Office are certain to fuel the debate over corporate tax payments in the presidential campaign. Corporate tax receipts have shrunk markedly as a share of overall federal revenue in recent years, and were particularly depressed when the economy soured. By 2003, they had fallen to just 7.4% of overall federal receipts, the lowest rate since 1983, and the second-lowest rate since 1934, federal budget officials say.





Blackwater Recruits Pinochet Death Squad Members for Iraq Merc Duty :.

Man, this just gets better by the minute. You know what this sounds like?! It's VERY similar to the way the CIA used to run its covert training operations. Private planes, shooting ranges in remote areas, hiring unsavory maniacs from all corners of the globe, operations that nobody hears about unless someone fucks up. Sound familiar? But now it's like they don't need to cover it up. They have a website! They sell t-shirts and bumper stickers. The spook contractors have come out of the closet, they're proud, they're kickin' ass and they're busier than ever. Shit, it might be time to form a mercenary labor union! Where's Hasenfus!?

If Fletcher Prouty was still alive, he'd probably die laughing! The Secret Team isn't so secret anymore.

Very good article:

In February, Blackwater USA, a North Carolina-based Pentagon contractor, began recruiting "former commandos, other soldiers and seamen" from Chile, offering them up to $4,000 a month "to guard oil wells against attack by insurgents," the Guardian reported. The company "flew a first group of about 60 former commandos, many of who had trained under the military government of Augusto Pinochet, from Santiago to a... [large] training camp in North Carolina," wrote Jonathan Franklin, reporting from Santiago, Chile.

These recruits will eventually wind up in Iraq, where they will spend six months to a year: "We scour the ends of the earth to find professionals -- the Chilean commandos are very, very professional and they fit within the Blackwater system," Gary Jackson, the president of Blackwater USA, told the Guardian.


Research Credit: BW





Najaf: Blackwater Mercs in Fierce Gunbattle :.

This mercenary company is operating helicopters in Iraq! This is the first time I've heard of them using an aircraft for a combat re-supply operation. One has to wonder, how big is Blackwater's corporate airforce?

An attack by hundreds of Iraqi militia members on the U.S. government's headquarters in Najaf on Sunday was repulsed not by the U.S. military, but by eight commandos from a private security firm, according to sources familiar with the incident.

Before U.S. reinforcements could arrive, the firm, Blackwater Security Consulting, sent in its own helicopters amid an intense firefight to resupply its commandos with ammunition and to ferry out a wounded Marine, the sources said.

In Sunday's fighting, Shiite militia forces barraged the Blackwater commandos, four MPs and a Marine gunner with rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47 fire for hours before U.S. Special Forces troops arrived. A sniper on a nearby roof apparently wounded three men. U.S. troops faced heavy fighting in several Iraqi cities that day.

With their ammunition nearly gone, a wounded and badly bleeding Marine on the rooftop, and no reinforcement by the U.S. military in the immediate offing, the company sent in helicopters to drop ammunition and pick up the Marine.

During the defense of the authority headquarters, thousands of rounds were fired and hundreds of 40mm grenades shot.


4/5/2004



Google's Gmail: Possibly Illegal Under European Law :.

Privacy campaigners have objected to plans to send users adverts linked to the content of messages, and to the permanent storage of email.

Campaign group Privacy International has filed a complaint with the UK Information Commissioner, Reuters news agency reported.

The Information Commissioner's job is to make sure organisations comply with a web of laws safeguarding privacy and freedom of information.


Research Credit: PW





Iraq on the Brink of Anarchy :.

Going off the rails:

The Bush administration was last night facing a nightmare scenario in Iraq, fighting on two fronts against Sunni and Shia militants less than three months before it is due to hand over power to an Iraqi government.

Facing a critical moment in the effort to pacify the country, President George Bush vowed he would not budge from his June 30 deadline for the transition to self-rule, while US forces in Iraq opted for a high-risk strategy of attempting to crush both insurgent groups simultaneously.

American officials in Baghdad announced an arrest warrant for a radical Shia cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr, whose black-uniformed Mahdi militia revolted against coalition forces at the weekend, killing seven American soldiers in the Baghdad district known as Sadr City. Up to 30 Iraqis were also killed in the clashes, the worst the capital has seen since its fall to US troops a year ago.






UK Firm Experiments on Orphans :.

Orphans and babies as young as three months old have been used as guinea pigs in potentially dangerous medical experiments sponsored by pharmaceutical companies, an Observer investigation has revealed.

British drug giant GlaxoSmithKline is embroiled in the scandal. The firm sponsored experiments on the children from Incarnation Children's Centre, a New York care home that specialises in treating HIV sufferers and is run by Catholic charities.

The children had either been infected with HIV or born to HIV-positive mothers. Their parents were dead, untraceable or deemed unfit to look after them.

According to documents obtained by The Observer, Glaxo has sponsored at least four medical trials since 1995 using Hispanic and black children at Incarnation. The documents give details of all clinical trials in the US and reveal the experiments sponsored by Glaxo were designed to test the 'safety and tolerance' of Aids medications, some of which have potentially dangerous side effects. Glaxo manufactures a number of drugs designed to treat HIV, including AZT.

Normally trials on children would require parental consent but, as the infants are in care, New York's authorities hold that role.





It's Off to Jail for Chicken Rescuer :.

Bock, The End:

Williams man thought he was rescuing a neglected chicken, but the Josephine County Sheriff?s Department saw it as stealing and arrested him early Wednesday.

Nick Gombos was arrested at 1:08 a.m. and charged with third degree theft and interfering with an officer at Gombos? home on Powell Creek Road. He was handcuffed and placed in a patrol car wearing nothing but his underwear. He was released from jail Wednesday morning five days after he took home a lone chicken from outside Ray?s Food Place, 7200 Williams Highway, in Murphy a few miles south of Grants Pass.





Screenshots of Gmail Parsing Messages to Deliver Ads :.

Microsoft Longhorn will make Gmail look like a boyscout exercise. How about using Gmail to send and receive nothing but PGP encrypted messages? I wonder if you'll get recruitment ads for the NSA...





Children Who Watch TV Receive Nonsurgical Lobotomies :.

Make sure you plant your kids in front of the television and give them lots of dangerous psychiatric drugs, sugar and Wonder bread! It's all for the children. We love the children.

The way we raise our kids is probably the most serious crime against humanity:

Very young children who watch television face an increased risk of attention deficit problems by school age, a study has found, suggesting that TV might overstimulate and permanently "rewire" the developing brain.

For every hour of television watched daily, two groups of children -- aged 1 and 3 -- faced a 10 percent increased risk of having attention problems at age 7.

The findings bolster previous research showing that television can shorten attention spans and support American Academy of Pediatrics recommendations that youngsters under age 2 not watch television.

"The truth is there are lots of reasons for children not to watch television. Other studies have shown it to be associated with obesity and aggressiveness" too, said lead author Dr. Dimitri Christakis, a researcher at Children's Hospital and Regional Medical Center in Seattle.





New Tool Cracks Apple's FairPlay DRM :.

These coders are not maintaining appearances! Enemy combatant status for sure:

PlayFair is an integrated utility that removes the DRM from AAC music files protected by Apple's FairPlay encryption. Information is limited, but the source code is on SourceForge.net and it appears to actually remove the encryption itself and not simply hijack the QuickTime audio stream as earlier methods did.





Job Growth Strongest in Four Years: Bank of America to Cut 12,500 Jobs :.

Lies, damn lies, and government employment statistics. Stories like this are the reality check:

Bank of America Corp., newly merged with FleetBoston Financial Corp., said Monday it will cut 12,500 jobs - or nearly 7 percent of its work force - over the next two years.





Battlefield Chechnya: Chechen Rebel Videos Depict Asymmetric Warfare :.

This site contains several videos of Chechen rebels engaged in various types of combat against elements of the Russian military. The tactics are similar to what the U.S. is facing on a daily basis in Iraq.

Particularly prominent in both conflicts are the "roadside bombs." These videos contain dozens of examples of how roadside bombs are utilized by the less powerful combatants in an asymmetric warfare situation.

WARNING: GRAPHIC COMBAT VIDEO. EXTENSIVE, UP-CLOSE DEPICTIONS OF DEATH AND DESTRUCTION.





Jordanian Prince in WWIII Warning :.

Prince Hassan of Jordan has said he fears a third world war is erupting in the Middle East.

Speaking to BBC's Radio Four, he said it was an "extremely depressing" time.

Extremist voices in the region were rising, and not only individuals but states were taking the law into their own hands, the prince said.

He was speaking after a week in which Israel assassinated the spritual leader of Palestinian militant group Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.





Speculating About Gmail :.

For a few hours last week, I thought the Gmail announcement from Google was an April Fool's joke. I just couldn't get my brain around any company provisioning 1 gigabyte of free storage for every user. In the back of my head, I thought that the only way it could be real is if the motivation involved pure evil. Nevermind the possible intelligence tie-ins to this, how does not being able to delete your email grab ya?

Slashdot has pulled some of the speculation together in one place:

"The Register is running an article about Google's new email service that was mentioned earlier, here. The story details the new privacy concerns about Gmail's privacy policy and Google's tracking habits. The policy states that Google will not guarantee the deletion of emails that are archived even if you cancel your account. 'The contents of your Gmail account also are stored and maintained on Google servers in order to provide the service. Indeed, residual copies of email may remain on our systems, even after you have deleted them from your mailbox or after the termination of your account.'" Reader cpfeifer writes "Rich Skrenta (founder of ODP, and Topix) speculates in his blog that the real product Google is creating isn't web search or email, but a massively scalable, distributed computing platform. 'It's a distributed computing platform that can manage web-scale datasets on 100,000 node server clusters. It includes a petabyte, distributed, fault tolerant filesystem, distributed RPC code, probably network shared memory and process migration. And a datacenter management system which lets a handful of ops engineers effectively run 100,000 servers.' If he's right, the question isn't what product will Google announce next, but what product wil they not be able to announce?"


4/4/2004



John Dean, Ex-Convict: Bush Is the 'Most Corrupt President' :.

John Dean, Richard Nixon's legal counsel who was jailed for his part in the Watergate scandal, has accused the Bush administration of trumping even the Nixon regime in secrecy, deception and political cynicism.

In the latest book to attack the conduct of the current United States administration, Mr Dean says that it has created potentially the most corrupt, unethical and undemocratic White House in history.

His Worse than Watergate, the Secret Presidency of George W. Bush is published this week by Little Brown.

"Bush and [Vice-President Richard] Cheney are a throwback to the Nixon time," Mr Dean, 65, told The Telegraph last night. "All government business is filtered through a political process at this White House, which is the most secretive ever to run the United States.

"This is not in the public's interest. It's in the White House's interest, and the interest of Bush's re-election. The White House is being run like a private business, with the difference that it is not accountable to the shareholders - in this case the voters."





Powell Admits Iraq Evidence Mistake :.

* Shaking Head *

US Secretary of State Colin Powell has admitted that evidence he submitted to the United Nations to justify war on Iraq may have been wrong.

In February last year he told the UN Security Council that Iraq had developed mobile laboratories for making biological weapons.

On Friday he conceded that information "appears not to be... that solid".





MI5 'Knew of Plot to Kill Finucane' :.

MI5, army intelligence and Special Branch all knew of loyalist plots to kill Pat Finucane, the Belfast lawyer, but failed either to warn him or prevent his murder, an independent report concluded yesterday.




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:. Reading

Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture by Andrew Kimbrell Readers will come to see that industrial food production is indeed a "fatal harvest" - fatal to consumers, as pesticide residues and new disease vectors such as E. coli and "mad cow disease" find their way into our food supply; fatal to our landscapes, as chemical runoff from factory farms poison our rivers and groundwater; fatal to genetic diversity, as farmers rely increasingly on high-yield monocultures and genetically engineered crops; and fatal to our farm communities, which are wiped out by huge corporate farms.

Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America by Bertram Myron Gross This is a relatively short but extremely cogent and well-argued treatise on the rise of a form of fascistic thought and social politics in late 20th century America. Author Bertram Gross' thesis is quite straightforward; the power elite that comprises the corporate, governmental and military superstructure of the country is increasingly inclined to employ every element in their formidable arsenal of 'friendly persuasion' to win the hearts and minds of ordinary Americans through what Gross refers to as friendly fascism.

The Good Life
by Scott and Helen Nearing
Helen and Scott Nearing are the great-grandparents of the back-to-the-land movement, having abandoned the city in 1932 for a rural life based on self-reliance, good health, and a minimum of cash...Fascinating, timely, and wholly useful, a mix of the Nearings' challenging philosophy and expert counsel on practical skills.

Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth by David Bollierd In Silent Theft, David Bollier argues that a great untold story of our time is the staggering privatization and abuse of our common wealth. Corporations are engaged in a relentless plunder of dozens of resources that we collectively own—publicly funded medical breakthroughs, software innovation, the airwaves, the public domain of creative works, and even the DNA of plants, animals and humans. Too often, however, our government turns a blind eye—or sometimes helps give away our assets. Amazingly, the silent theft of our shared wealth has gone largely unnoticed because we have lost our ability to see the commons.

The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It: The Complete Back-To-Basics Guide by John Seymour The Self Sufficient Life and How to Live It is the only book that teaches all the skills needed to live independently in harmony with the land harnessing natural forms of energy, raising crops and keeping livestock, preserving foodstuffs, making beer and wine, basketry, carpentry, weaving, and much more.

When Corporations Rule the World by David C. Korten When Corporations Rule the World explains how economic globalization has concentrated the power to govern in global corporations and financial markets and detached them from accountability to the human interest. It documents the devastating human and environmental consequences of the successful efforts of these corporations to reconstruct values and institutions everywhere on the planet to serve their own narrow ends.

The New Organic Grower: A Master's Manual of Tools and Techniques for the Home and Market Gardener This expansion of a now-classic guide originally published in 1989 is intended for the serious gardener or small-scale market farmer. It describes practical and sustainable ways of growing superb organic vegetables, with detailed coverage of scale and capital, marketing, livestock, the winter garden, soil fertility, weeds, and many other topics.