Should the Pope Face Charges for Harbouring Pedophiles?
September 13th, 2010Via: Maclean’s:
God in the Dock, meaning God on trial, is a familiar concept in Britain, both from the title of a famous collection of essays by C.S. Lewis and as a general term for skepticism about religious belief and doctrine. But Pope in the Dock? Literally? Perhaps not in our lifetimes, as British lawyer Geoffrey Robertson concedes in The Case of the Pope: Vatican Accountability for Human Rights Abuse, a book set to appear just one week before Benedict XVI makes the first-ever papal state visit to Britain. But, Robertson argues, the once unthinkable idea that Benedict or a successor could be charged with obstructing justice or for “harbouring pedophile priests” is now very thinkable, and—given evolving trends in international human rights law—may soon be practical.
The plain facts of the case to be answered are horrific and undeniable. Since the dam crumbled around the turn of the decade, a cascade of child sexual abuse by Roman Catholic clergy has come tumbling into the open. So many cases emerged that the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference commissioned an expert study, which concluded in 2004 that, since 1950, 10,667 individuals had made plausible allegations against 4,392 priests, 4.3 per cent of the entire body of clergy in that period. The total bill in settlements with victims is spiralling toward $2 billion and won’t stop, Forbes predicts, this side of $5 billion. Depressingly similar stories from other First World countries, including Canada, soon emerged; the situation in Latin America and Africa, where no investigations have ever been made, can only be imagined.
Family to Receive Millions of Dollars in Damages Because Child with Mitochondrial Disease Developed Autism After Receiving Multiple Vaccinations
September 13th, 2010Via: CBS News:
The first court award in a vaccine-autism claim is a big one. CBS News has learned the family of Hannah Poling will receive more than $1.5 million dollars for her life care; lost earnings; and pain and suffering for the first year alone.
In addition to the first year, the family will receive more than $500,000 per year to pay for Hannah’s care. Those familiar with the case believe the compensation could easily amount to $20 million over the child’s lifetime.
Hannah was described as normal, happy and precocious in her first 18 months.
Then, in July 2000, she was vaccinated against nine diseases in one doctor’s visit: measles, mumps, rubella, polio, varicella, diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, and Haemophilus influenzae.
Afterward, her health declined rapidly. She developed high fevers, stopped eating, didn’t respond when spoken to, began showing signs of autism, and began having screaming fits. In 2002, Hannah’s parents filed an autism claim in federal vaccine court. Five years later, the government settled the case before trial and had it sealed. It’s taken more than two years for both sides to agree on how much Hannah will be compensated for her injuries.
In acknowledging Hannah’s injuries, the government said vaccines aggravated an unknown mitochondrial disorder Hannah had which didn’t “cause” her autism, but “resulted” in it. It’s unknown how many other children have similar undiagnosed mitochondrial disorder. All other autism “test cases” have been defeated at trial. Approximately 4,800 are awaiting disposition in federal vaccine court.
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Zynga’s Secret Dealer for High Value Farmville Addicts
September 13th, 2010Via: Valleywag:
The company behind Mafia Wars and Farmville doesn’t like to talk about the sad addicts who fuel its profits. But it does quietly run a special store for them, where imaginary credits are bought with very real bank transfers.
The minimum purchase in Zynga’s underground “Platinum Purchase Program” is $500, payable by wire transfer (see email below). The reward over buying online with your credit card: Extra points with which to buy virtual goods for the company’s Facebook games. If you refer a friend to the program, you get even more points.
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Related: Woman Neglected Children, Let Dogs Die of Starvation As She Played Video Game
Via: Telegraph:
A mother who became so obsessed with a computer game that she left her children to eat cold baked beans from the tin has been given a suspended jail sentence and banned from using computers.
The woman also allowed her German Shepherd and lurcher dogs to starve to death and left them rotting in the dining room for two months as she played Small World on the internet almost non-stop.
After a neighbour peered through the letterbox and saw the appalling conditions, the NSPCC were told and police officers entered the home and saw the decay and filth.
The children had been given no hot food and were forced to eat cold baked beans from the tin without any spoons.
The 33-year-old widow, who cannot be identified, admitted three charges of child cruelty and two of animal neglect.
Maidstone Crown Court was told the children, aged nine, 10 and 13, were badly neglected for six months.
Deepak Kapur, prosecuting, said when officers arrived at the house in Swanley, Kent, in February the woman told them it was in a bit of a mess.
They then saw rubbish strewn all over the floor in all rooms, mouldy food and a swarm of flies. The toilet was in a disgusting state.
The woman tried to block officers from entering the dining room and when asked why she replied: “All right, my dogs are in there. They are dead. I killed them.
“I probably starved them, probably because I have been playing the computer game all the time.”
Mr Kapur said: “Police discovered the bodies of the dogs. Flies were around them. The smell was so overpowering, making the officers wretch.”
The mother had become hooked on the computer game featuring dwarves and giants and in which players vie for conquest and control of a world that is simply too small to accommodate them all, after an invitation from a friend on Facebook.
She started playing initially for an hour a day in late 2009 but since August of that year it had become an obsession to the point where she was only getting two hours sleep a night, said Mr Kapur.
She then began to feed her children only on foods that did not need cooking such as pot noodles, sandwiches, chips and pies.
Allan Compton, defending, said the woman had been a devoted and competent mother until tragedy struck some years ago with the death of her husband from a heart attack.
“She retreated into this virtual world provided by her laptop computer,” he said.
“She shut herself off from the outside world and operated in the real world on a very basic level.”
British Troops Allegedly Transporting Heroin on Military Aircraft
September 13th, 2010My guess is that this particular story is due to upstarts, but keep in mind: Planned British Covert Operation Included Training in “Farming and Irrigation Techniques” for Taliban Fighters.
For the real, state sponsored narcotics trafficking program—tons, not a kilo here, a kilo there—look at things like the U.S. built heroin bridge and Blackwater/Xe’s “aviation support” activities in Africa.
Flashback: Vietnam: Heroin Smuggled in Body Bags of Dead GIs
Via: Guardian:
Military police are investigating claims that British soldiers have been involved in heroin trafficking in Afghanistan. The Ministry of Defence said it was aware of “unsubstantiated” claims that troops were buying the drug from dealers and shipping it out of the country in military aircraft. An inquiry is focusing on British and Canadian personnel at airports in Camp Bastion and Kandahar. Security has been tightened, with additional sniffer dogs being used. Afghanistan is the source of 90% of the world’s opium. Some drug bosses in the country have implicated soldiers in the trade.
Last year the Sunday Times spoke to one dealer who said members of the military were the second largest buyers of heroin after foreign drug lords. The newspaper was told: “The soldiers whose term of duty is about to finish, they give an order to our boss.” A team of detectives from the Ministry of Defence’s special investigations branch is believed to be heading the investigation into the claims.
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More: Canada’s Military Won’t Probe Heroin Allegations
Via: CBC News:
Canada’s military won’t investigate British media reports that Canadian soldiers are alleged to have smuggled heroin out of Afghanistan, sources told CBC News.
The military was reacting to reports Sunday in the Sunday Times and the BBC that Canadian and British troops have been sending large quantities of heroin out of Afghanistan on military aircraft taking troops back to Britain.
The heroin was then allegedly sold to drug traffickers for sale on the streets.
However, the military sources said Monday that following a thorough check with officials on the ground at Kandahar Air Field and through the chain of command, there are no allegations of Canadian heroin smuggling and there will be no investigation of any smuggling.
The military sources called the reports a case of media speculation.
Research Credit: jb
Secret Christian Reconstructionist Group Wants to Use Alien Threat to Justify Creation of Dictatorship Based on Old Testament?
September 12th, 2010The reason I’m posting this is because, in the vast milieu of UFO bullshit and non-bullshit that I’ve studied over the past couple of decades or so, I’ve never come across this one before.
Also, it’s the weekend, when I like to relax with the serious foil topics…
FINAL EVENTS and the Secret Government Group on Demonic UFOs and the Afterlife by Nick Redfern
Via: Secret Sun:
Author and journalist Nick Redfern has a new book out called Final Events that’s guaranteed to shake people up. It deals with a powerful secret society within the Intelligence community created with the intention of establishing a Christian Reconstructionist surveillance state. For what purpose?
Well… in order to protect America from demonic UFO pilots.
We’re seeing a lot of this kind of thinking floating around out there. It may in fact become the dominant view of UFOs, given that Hollywood is preparing a huge slate of UFO invasion films. Is someone trying to tell us something or is this a reaction to the Recession and fears about illegal immigration? Or is there a plan to fake some kind of devastating alien invasion in order to unite the world around a common enemy?
I interviewed Nick to get the scoop…
Tell us about your book. What’s the basic premise?
Basically speaking, Final Events is a study of a think-tank group comprised of personnel from within the U.S. Government, military and intelligence community that has existed in stealth for a surprisingly long time. The group believes that while the UFO issue is a very real one, they do not believe it has anything to do with literal extraterrestrials.
Rather, the group – which calls itself the Collins Elite – concludes that the “aliens” are, in reality, literal demonic entities that are trying to seduce us with a false lure of supposed alien technology, and to – quite literally – steal and farm our souls. The group claim to have discovered evidence that these demonic entities – that seem to utilize a weird combination of advanced technology and archaic rite and ritual – derive a form of “energy sustenance” from the human soul or life force.
…
If I were a more cynical kind of guy, I might almost think that this was all just another psyops group assigned to create pretexts for overthrowing the Republic.
Untangling the Bizarre CIA Links to the Ground Zero Mosque
September 12th, 2010Full text below, just to make sure that this doesn’t go away somehow.
Via: The New York Observer:
Untangling the Bizarre CIA Links to the Ground Zero Mosque
By Mark Ames
September 10, 2010 | 2:36 p.m
So far, the debate over the proposed Islamic center near Ground Zero has unfolded along predictable lines, with the man at the center of the project, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, drawing attacks from the right painting him as a terrorist sympathizer with ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.
But meanwhile, links between the group behind the controversial mosque, the CIA and U.S. military establishment have gone unacknowledged.
For instance, one of the earliest backers of the nonprofit group, the Cordoba Initiative, that is spearheading the Ground Zero mosque, is a 52-year-old Scarsdale, New York, native named R. Leslie Deak. In addition to serving on the group’s board of advisors since its founding in 2004 by Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, Deak was its principal funder, donating $98,000 to the nonprofit between 2006 and 2008. This figure appears to represent organization’s total operating budget—though, oddly, the group reported receipts of just a third of that total during the same time period.
Deak describes himself as a “Practicing Muslim with background in Christianity and Judaism, [with] in-depth personal and business experiences in the Middle East, living and working six months per year in Egypt.” Born into a Christian home, Deak became an Orthodox Jew and married a Jewish woman before converting to Islam when he married his current wife, Moshira Soliman, with whom he now lives in Rye.
Leslie Deak’s resume also notes his role as “business consultant” for Patriot Defense Group, LLC, a private defense contractor with offices in Winter Park, Florida, and in Tucson. The only names listed on the firm’s website are those of its three “strategic advisers.” These include retired four-star General Bryan “Doug” Brown, commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command until 2007, where he headed “all special operations forces, both active duty and reserve, leading the Global War On Terrorism,” and James Pavitt, former deputy director for operations at the Central Intelligence Agency, where he “managed the CIA’s globally deployed personnel and nearly half of its multi-billion dollar budget” and “served as head of America’s Clandestine Service, the CIA’s operational response to the attacks of September 11, 2001.”
Besides Pavitt, Brown and a third advisor, banker Alexander Cappello, the Patriot Defense Group is so secretive it doesn’t even name its management team, instead describing its anonymous CEO as a former Special Forces and State Department veteran, the group’s managing director as a former CIA officer experienced in counter-terrorism in hostile environments and the group’s corporate intelligence head as a “23-year veteran of the U.S. Secret Service who worked on the personal security details of former Presidents Bush and Clinton.”
Leslie Deak and Moshira Soliman/ PanachePrive
Patriot Defense Group’s primary business involves leveraging its government connections and know-how. The firm is divided into two divisions: one that “focuses exclusively on the needs of the U.S. military and law enforcement communities as well as the requirements of friendly foreign governments,” and a corporate division, which “provides business intelligence and specialized security services to corporate clients and high net-worth family enterprises.”
So, to recap: From 2006 to 2008, R. Leslie Deak worked as a “business consultant” to this super-secretive security contractor with ties to the CIA and counterterrorism forces, and in those same three years he also donated nearly $100,000 in seed money to the foundation now advocating the construction of the so-called Ground Zero Mosque.
Interestingly, during the same three-year period during which the Deak Family Foundation was financing the Cordoba Initiative, Deak also donated a total of $101,247 to something called the National Defense University Foundation. The National Defense University is a network of war and strategy colleges and research centers (including the National War College) funded by the Pentagon, designed to train specialists in military strategy. The organization recently announced a November 5 dinner gala in honor of Defense Secretary and former CIA chief Robert Gates. Sponsors include Northrup Grumman, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and…the Patriot Defense Group.
Deak also sits on the NDUF’s board of directors, the chairman of which is Mark Treanor, the former general counsel for Wachovia bank from 1998 through its collapse in 2008 and a major bundler of campaign donations for the McCain-Palin ticket in 2008. Wachovia, now owned by Wells Fargo, was recently fined $160 million for laundering “at least $110 million” in Mexican drug money between 2003 and 2008, while Treanor was Wachovia’s general counsel, though the figure is likely higher since Wachovia admitted it didn’t put any controls on at least $420 billion—that’s billion—in cash moved through its network of Mexico currency exchanges.
Which leads to another odd coincidence: Laundering money for drug lords is what brought down Deak & Co., the company run by Leslie Deak’s father, Nicholas Deak, years ago. The elder Deak, a former top intelligence commander during World War II for the OSS (the forerunner of the CIA), was the founder of Deak-Perera, which became for a time one of the world’s biggest foreign currency and gold dealers. But in 1984, a Presidential Commission on Organized Crime accused the firm of acting as a money laundering operation for Columbia drug cartels, who reportedly brought sacks of cash containing tens of millions of dollars into Deak’s Manhattan offices. By the end of 1984, Deak & Co. had declared bankruptcy, and a year later, Nicholas Deak was murdered in the company’s headquarters at 29 Broadway by a deranged homeless woman.
After the firm went bankrupt and Leslie Deak was left on his own, the corporation was broken up and sold off in pieces. One company that traces its beginnings to the defunct Deak empire is Goldline International, a business concern well known to fans of Glenn Beck as well as California investigators. Goldline is to Glenn Beck what General Electric was to Ronald Reagan: The company sponsors Beck’s TV and radio shows as well as his touring act, and Beck is its public face. The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office, along with the Santa Monica City Attorney’s office, are currently investigating Goldline for defrauding customers by railroading gullible customers into buying their most debased products.
Speaking of Glenn Beck, it has been reported that Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, the second-largest shareholder in News Corp., the parent company Fox News, which airs Beck’s program, is also a major funder of Imam Rauf’s projects, as Jon Stewart viewers heard all about last week.
Coincidences happen, of course. (For instance, Pamela Geller, the blogger who’s become the leading voice denouncing the mosque project was once, bizarrely enough, associate publisher of The New York Observer.)
But add to this array of unexpected connections the work of Imam Rauf on behalf of the U.S. government—which includes serving as an FBI “consultant” and being recruited as a spokesperson by longtime George W. Bush confidante Karen Hughes, who headed up the administration’s propaganda efforts in the Muslim world—and a compelling picture begins to emerge. Bush’s favorite Imam, with backing from a funder with connections to the CIA, the Pentagon and the currency trading company that now sponsors rightwing firebrand Glenn Beck, proposes to build a mosque around the corner from the site of the most devastating terrorist attack ever visited on America. In the name of “[cultivating] understanding among all religions and cultures,” he puts forth a project that offends a majority of Americans and deals a significant setback to the broader acceptance of Muslim-Americans. It’s a little like Billy “White Shoes” Johnson claiming the only reason he moonwalks after scoring a touchdown is to lower tensions on the football field and raise the other team’s spirits.
Whether the Cordoba Initiative ever gets its way with the Ground Zero Mosque, it may well have a lasting legacy at odds with its stated intention: By damaging the very moderates and progressives who actually view New York, and the nation as a whole, as a tolerant melting pot, and strengthening the position demagogues on both sides, it will almost certainly deal a setback to interfaith relations. It will also help to hobble the Democratic party. Which just might have been the point all along.
Either that, or it’s merely a coincidence that this controversy has erupted now, during crucial mid-term elections. In which case we can all go back to what we were doing before—either denouncing the Park51 Mosque as an affront to Americans, or championing it as a symbol of our fundamental rights-playing our accustomed roles in a drama that seems too perfect, somehow, to believe.
Abu Ghraib: “Most of the women in the prison were raped — some of them left prison pregnant.”
September 12th, 2010Via: Independent:
Yet nothing comes closer to Titus Andronicus than the insistent, terrible stories of gang rape by United States personnel in Abu Ghraib. You hear this repeatedly in Amman, and a very accurate source of mine in Washington – a man who deals with military personnel – tells me they are true. This, he says, is why Barack Obama changed his mind about releasing the photographs which George W Bush refused to make public. The pictures we saw – of the humiliation of men – were outrageous enough. But the ones we haven’t seen show Americans raping Iraqi women.
Lima Nabil, a journalist who now runs a home for on-the-run girls, sips coffee as the boiling Jordanian sun frowns through the window at us. “In Abu Ghraib,” she says, “women were tortured by the Americans much more than the men. One woman said she witnessed five girls being raped. Most of the women in the prison were raped – some of them left prison pregnant. Families killed some of these women – because of the shame.”
U.S. Poverty on Track to Post Record Gain in 2009
September 12th, 2010Via: AP:
The number of people in the U.S. who are in poverty is on track for a record increase on President Barack Obama’s watch, with the ranks of working-age poor approaching 1960s levels that led to the national war on poverty.
The Stark, Raving Madness of Phil Davison, GOP Candidate for Stark County Treasurer
September 11th, 2010I was thinking that a Monkey Boy routine was going to break out at any moment:
Research Credit: JH
