cryptogon.com

What is the intention of such programs?

My colleague Leslie Manookian, writer and director of the movie The Greater Good, wrote in a recent article, the “CDC has openly stated that vaccine registries are a tool to identify areas of ‘undervaccination’ so that they can be ‘addressed’ and brought into ‘compliance.’”

I would also add to Leslie’s statement that since the government purchases a large bulk of the vaccines (for example, the Vaccines for Children program), it is in their financial interest to make sure vaccines are consumed regularly.

The piece of landing gear found in a narrow alleyway behind 51 Park Place and 50 Murray Street in Manhattan’s financial district includes a “clearly visible” Boeing identification number, New York City Police spokesman Paul Browne said.

Browne said the discovery was made on Wednesday by a construction crew inspecting the rear of the Park Place building. The location is the site of an Islamic prayer space and community center that opened amid controversy in the fall of 2011, two blocks from Ground Zero.

The piece of landing gear, wedged one story above ground, is about 5 feet high and 3 feet wide (0.9 meter).

Police have secured the area between the buildings and are treating it as a potential crime scene, said Browne.

It is the place where 34 nations representing more than half the world’s population have joined forces in the biggest scientific collaboration on the planet – only the International Space Station is bigger.

The international nuclear fusion project – known as Iter, meaning “the way” in Latin – is designed to demonstrate a new kind of nuclear reactor capable of producing unlimited supplies of cheap, clean, safe and sustainable electricity from atomic fusion.

If Iter demonstrates that it is possible to build commercially-viable fusion reactors then it could become the experiment that saved the world in a century threatened by climate change and an expected three-fold increase in global energy demand.

This week the project gained final approval for the design of the most technically challenging component – the fusion reactor’s “blanket” that will handle the super-heated nuclear fuel.

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As the components of the tokamak arrive in the coming years, Iter engineers will be holding their breaths to make sure the parts fit together perfectly. But even if “first plasma” happens within the next 10 years, it will still be another five years or more before they have the confidence to put radioactive tritium fuel into the vacuum vessel – and go nuclear.

But sadly it looks as if the man found living in the Vietnam jungle, who a new documentary claims is ‘long dead’ US army veteran Sgt John Hartley Robertson, is likely to be a fraud.

News of the “discovery” of Sgt Robertson swept the world yesterday, after details emerged of a soon-to-be-released documentary that claims an elderly man living in the remote Vietnam jungle is in fact a former Green Beret shot down and presumed dead 44 years ago.

Although DNA tests had not taken place, tearful “reunions” with a former colleague and the last surviving sister of Sgt Robertson appeared to confirm the man was who he claimed to be.

80-year-old Jean Robertson Holly even went as far as saying: “There’s no question. I was certain it was him in the video, but when I held his head in my hands and looked in his eyes, there was no question that was my brother”.

That emotional story was shattered today, however, when it was claimed that the found man was in fact a fraudster who the US government performed DNA tests on 20 years ago and whose story had been fully debunked as an attempt to exploit Vietnam’s Missing in Action and Prisoner of War groups and claim military back-pay.

According to a memo sent to a UK news organisation yesterday evening, the man claiming to be Sgt Robertson is in fact Dang Tan Ngoc – a 76-year-old Vietnamese citizen of French origin who has a history of pretending to be US army veterans.

The memo, taken from a Defense Prisoner of War Missing Personnel Office report in 2009, apparently says Ngoc first came to the attention of the US military in 2006 when he started telling people he was Sgt John Hartley Robertson.

He was apparently questioned about the claims but quickly admitted he had been lying and was in fact Vietnamese.

In 2008 Ngoc apparently began claiming to be Sgt Robertson once again, and he was taken to a US embassy in Cambodia to be fingerprinted. It was quickly established that the fingerprints did not match those of the missing army veteran.

Had Hollywood told the story of the discovery of a long-forgotten soldier, found miraculously still alive in Vietnam after surviving a horrific helicopter attack and crash, it would have involved a dramatic and dangerous jungle rescue followed by a homecoming parade.

Instead, in Emmy-winning Edmonton filmmaker Michael Jorgensen’s documentary Unclaimed, we meet a slightly stooped, wiry 76-year-old man living in a remote village in south-central Vietnam who trembles with frustration or pounds his forehead when he is unable to remember his birthday or his American children’s names. He is only able to speak Vietnamese.

Unclaimed has its world premiere at Toronto’s 20th Hot Docs festival on April 30.

Robertson says he was confined to a bamboo cage in the jungle by North Vietnamese captors and, accused of being a CIA spy, was tortured for a year. Confused and badly injured, he was released and married the Vietnamese nurse who helped care for him. He assumed the name of her dead husband. They had children.

Jorgensen believes audiences in America, where “they don’t hold anything higher than service to the country,” will “lose their minds” when Unclaimed screens at the G.I. Film Festival in Washington, D.C., in May. “They’ll come unglued.”

But Jorgensen wanted this Canadian production to screen in his home country first.

Israel Police Chief Yohanan Danino says he has dispatched officials to Boston, Massachusetts, where they will meet with Federal Bureau of Investigation agents and other authorities, the Times of Israel Reports.

Citing an earlier report published by the newspaper Maariv, Times of Israel writes that Danino has dispatched police officers to participate in discussions that “will center on the Boston Marathon bombings and deepening professional cooperation between the law enforcement agencies of both countries.”

You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that’s trillion, with a “t”) worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it “dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets.”

That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world’s largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world’s largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.

Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It’s about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.

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