February 3, 2012

Source: Deseret News

Outside the United Nations headquarters, hundreds of people were shouting and waving banners Tuesday that read “China and Russia – No Veto.” These people wanted support from the Security Council of the U.N. to oust the President of Syria, Bashar al-Assad.

Inside the U.N., another group of civil society leaders demanded a basic level of social security as they promoted a “social protection floor” at a preparatory forum for the Commission on Social Development, which began Feb. 1.

The focus of the forum was “universal access to basic social protection and social services.”

“No one should live below a certain income level,” stated Milos Koterec, President of the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. “Everyone should be able to access at least basic health services, primary education, housing, water, sanitation and other essential services.”

Read More…

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January 22, 2012

Source: Boston Herald

When Charles G. Taylor tied bed sheets together to escape from a second-floor window at the Plymouth House of Correction on Sept. 15, 1985, he was more than a fugitive trying to avoid extradition. He was a sought-after source for American intelligence.

After a quarter-century of silence, the US government has confirmed what has long been rumored: Taylor, who would become president of Liberia and the first African leader tried for war crimes, worked with US spy agencies during his rise as one of the world’s most notorious dictators.

The disclosure on the former president comes in response to a request filed by the Globe six years ago under the Freedom of Information Act. The Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s spy arm, confirmed its agents and CIA agents worked with Taylor beginning in the early 1980s.

Read More…

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January 16, 2012

Source: Ria Novosti

Iran has arrested several people in the killing of a nuclear scientist last week that Tehran blames on Israel and the United States, parliamentary speaker Ali Larijani told state Al-Alam TV, Tehran Times daily said on Monday.

“We have discovered some clues and some arrests have been made,” Larijani told the Arabic-language broadcaster.

Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, a deputy director of Iran’s largest uranium enrichment plant, died in a car bomb explosion in Tehran last week. Local police sources said a passing motorcyclist attached a magnetic mine to the car Roshan was riding in.

Larijani did not give any further details on the arrests but vowed his country would avenge the death using “non-terrorist” tactics.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has accused the U.S. and Israeli intelligence services of killing of the scientist.

Read More….

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January 15, 2012

Source: Big News Network

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January 11, 2012

By Anthony Gucciardi
Activist Post

This is no conspiracy theory — North Carolina officials are proposing that victims of forced sterilization programs be given $50,000 each in compensation, with the Associated Press admitting that the sterilization campaign was part of a “once-common public health practice called eugenics.”

Victims include thousands of individuals, such as criminals, mentally disabled, and women who were sterilized after giving birth to children as a product of rape.

The forced sterilizations occurred from 1929 to 1974 under admitted eugenics programs that officials claimed were ‘creating a better society’ by removing the reproductive abilities of criminals and those suffering from mental disorders. During this time periods, more than 7,600 individuals in North Carolina were sterilized. On a national scale, around 60,000 were forcibly sterilized under the same eugenics program.

Eugenics Program Linked to Nazi Germany, Targeted Mostly Black Women

What makes North Carolina’s rampant sterilizations so concerning, however, is that the program kept going on right through World War II despite the direct association between eugenics and Nazi Germany.

In fact, about 70% of all North Carolina’s sterilizations were performed after the war, with numbers peaking in the 1950s. Again, this is not something being made up; this is all reported by the Associated Press and other mainstream media outlets. According to the Associated Press report:

North Carolina’s program stood out because it ramped up sterilizations after World War II despite associations between eugenics and Nazi Germany.

The report also states within the first sentence that the practicing of eugenics was quite common during this time period:

People sterilized against their will under a discredited North Carolina state program should each be paid $50,000, a task force voted Tuesday, marking the first time a state has moved to compensate victims of a once-common public health practice called eugenics.

Perhaps the most criminal part of the forced sterilizations is the blatant racism involved. Most victims were poor, black women who were ‘deemed unfit to be parents’. Individuals as young as 10 were sterilized simply for not getting along with schoolmates or being promiscuous, and many parents were misled into sterilizing their children.

All of this happened in the United States, where government officials operated under a strict eugenics policy, seeing many people as ‘unfit’ to procreate. After this racist, Nazi-styled fertility purge, the victims may not receive a measly $50,000 decades after the fact.

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GlaxoSmithKline Fined Over Illegal Vaccine Experiments Killing 14 Babies

January 5, 2012

By Anthony Gucciardi

Vaccine and drug giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has been fined 400,000 pesos (around the equivalent of $93,000) by an Argentinian judge for killing 14 babies during illegal lab vaccine trials that were conducted between 2007 and 2008.

In addition to killing the children and experimenting with human beings, the judge asserted that the corporation actually falsified parental authorizations so that babies could participate without legitimate parental permission.

Judge Marcelo Aguinsky made the decision after a report was released on the subject by the National Administration of Medicine, Food and Technology (ANMAT in Spanish). Since 2007, 15,000 children below the age of one from Mendoza, San Juan, and Santiago del Estero have been participating in the illegal research. These babies were recruited by GSK from poor families that attended public hospitals. It was found that of the 14 baby deaths, 7 died in Santiago del Estero; 5 in Mendoza; and 2 in San Juan.

GSK Recruited Doctors, Pressured Illiterate Parents into Signing Over Children

Currently, it is unknown how many babies suffered serious side effects, adverse reactions, or if this is truly the total death count. As with many other vaccinations such as Gardasil, the official death count continues to rise as leaked reports from the FDA and elsewhere continue to surface.
One pediatrician working at the public hospital when GSK began recruiting babies for their illegal human trials said that not only did GSK force illiterate parents into handing over their children, but they also ‘recruited’ several doctors working at the hospital into their cause.

Ana Marchese, a pediatrician at the Eva Perón children’s public hospital in Santiago del Estero, stated:

GSK Argentina set an protocol at the hospital, and recruited several doctors working there. These doctors took advantage of many illiterate parents whom take their children for treatment by pressuring and forcing them into signing these 28-page consent forms and getting them involved in the trials.

It is quite clear that GSK has zero regard for human health, morals, and will go to any length to experiment with their latest jab regardless of the casualties. Of the 15,000 babies that were reported to be a part of the illegal trials, many may suffer from life-altering illness and serious side effects.

Amazingly, many parents had no idea they were signing over the lives of their children to GSK, as they were completely illiterate. Meanwhile, GSK sells their latest shots and pharmaceutical drugs to United States consumers, raking in record profits each year as the second-largest drugmaker.

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December 26, 2011

Source: Daily Caller

NEW YORK — In an historic hearing in the federal courthouse in Manhattan on Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge George Daniels said he planned to issue a ruling in the coming days declaring that Iran shares in the responsibility for the 9/11 terror attacks.

“The extensive record submitted to this court, including fact witnesses and expert testimony, is satisfactory to this court,” Judge Daniels said. The court “accepts as true” the various allegations of the plaintiffs and their experts, he declared, and “will issue an order” in the coming days that Iran bears legal responsibility for providing “material support” to the 9/11 plotters and hijackers.

Family members of 9/11 victims who attended the open-court hearing broke into tears. They had nervously sat through a four-hour presentation by attorneys Thomas E. Mellon, Jr., and Timothy B. Fleming, consisting of evidence backing up their claims that Iran had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks and actively assisted the hijackers in planning, preparing, and executing their plan.

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Healthy

Read the rest here: http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2011/12/16/debunking-conspiracy-theorists-paranoid-#more19751

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December 11th, 2011

Via: New York Times:

Now, along with scores of others selected for state sterilization — among them uneducated young girls who had been raped by older men, poor teenagers from large families, people with epilepsy and those deemed to be too “feeble-minded” to raise children — Mr. Holt is waiting to see what a state that had one of the country’s most aggressive eugenics programs will decide his fertility was worth.

Although North Carolina officially apologized in 2002 and legislators have pressed to compensate victims before, a task force appointed by Gov. Bev Perdue is again wrestling with the state’s obligation to the estimated 7,600 victims of its eugenics program.

The board operated from 1933 to 1977 as an experiment in genetic engineering once considered a legitimate way to keep welfare rolls small, stop poverty and improve the gene pool.

Thirty-one other states had eugenics programs. Virginia and California each sterilized more people than North Carolina. But no program was more aggressive.

Only North Carolina gave social workers the power to designate people for sterilization. They often relied on I.Q. tests like those done on Mr. Holt, whose scores reached 73. But for some victims who often spent more time picking cotton than in school, the I.Q. tests at the time were not necessarily accurate predictors of capability. For example, as an adult Mr. Holt held down three jobs at once, delivering newspapers, working at a grocery store and doing maintenance for a small city.

Wealthy businessmen, among them James Hanes, the hosiery magnate, and Dr. Clarence Gamble, heir to the Procter & Gamble fortune, drove the eugenics movement. They helped form the Human Betterment League of North Carolina in 1947, and found a sympathetic bureaucrat in Wallace Kuralt, the father of the television journalist Charles Kuralt.

A proponent of birth control in all forms, Mr. Kuralt used the program extensively when he was director of the Mecklenburg County welfare department from 1945 to 1972. That county had more sterilizations than any other in the state.

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December 2, 2011

By Madison Ruppert
EndTheLie.com

In a shocking article published in Reuters, Felix Salmon confirmed what the so-called conspiracy theorists have said all along: former Secretary of the U.S. Treasury Hank Paulson was giving insider tips to his cronies at Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street titans which directly benefited them.

The article is entitled, “Hank Paulson’s inside jobs,” emphasizing the fact that this wasn’t some one-off lapse of ethics on Paulson’s part, but instead a disturbingly regular practice.

For those who are unaware, Paulson was the CEO and chairman at Goldman Sachs from 1999-2006 and he clearly provided them with actionable information that epitomizes the plague upon our economy, and the greater global economic system, that is crony capitalism.

However, this isn’t quite a brand new revelation given the fact that in October of 2009 Andrew Ross Sorkin exposed that Paulson met with the entire Goldman Sachs board in a hotel suite in Moscow at the end of June 2008.

Salmon covered this at the time, after Sorkin’s book was released, which detailed the meeting held after the Goldman Sachs boys had dinner with Mikhail Gorbachev.

At the time the Treasury chief of staff Jim Wilkinson told Goldman Sachs chief of staff John Rogers, “Let’s keep this quiet,” indicating that despite the fact that the Treasury’s general counsel Bob Hoyt claimed “it wouldn’t run afoul of the ethics guidelines,” they were well aware that wasn’t the case.

Hoyt said that it was acceptable so long as it was solely a “social event”, but unsurprisingly, Paulson didn’t record the so-called “social event” in his official calendar.

It is undeniable that these individuals knew very well what they were doing, and clearly they had no misgivings whatsoever.

During the Moscow meeting Paulson spoke of “the need for the government to have the power to wind down troubled firms, offering a preview of his upcoming speech,” according to Sorkin.

This wasn’t just a friend going over a speech with some old pals, as everyone knows the words of the Treasury Secretary heavily affect global markets almost instantly, just like speeches by the likes of Ben Shalom Bernanke, the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the private Federal Reserve.

Getting this kind of information ahead of time is critical, and through Sorkin’s writing it is clear that Paulson enlightened them as to the situation with Lehman Brothers, giving Goldman Sachs an unfair advantage over those who didn’t happen to have someone on the inside.

Paulson spoke of the possibility that Lehman Brothers very well might collapse, along with giving the Goldman Sachs board other insights into how he was viewing the economic climate and what was to come.

As Salmon points out, “Maybe it’s not so surprising that Goldman Sachs turned out to be so well positioned when Lehman did indeed [blow up] a few months later.”

This egregious breach of ethics is a perfect example of the corporatism that pervades Wall Street and has brought us to the brink of collapse where we are precariously perched today.

Paulson’s Moscow meeting with Goldman Sachs wasn’t an isolated incident as just a few weeks later on July 28^th, 2008, Paulson met with what Salmon characterizes as “a who’s who of the hedge-fund world” in the Eton Park Capital Management headquarters.

Unsurprisingly, Eton Park Capital Management was created by Eric Mindich, formerly of Goldman Sachs as well.

In a Bloomberg article published yesterday, Richard Teitelbaum details the meeting between roughly a dozen hedge-fund managers and Wall Street executives, including no less than five former colleagues of Paulson’s from Goldman Sachs.

Others in attendance were Stephen Mandel of Pine Capital LLC, Dinakar Singh of TPG-Axon Capital Management LP and Daniel Och of Och-Ziff Capital Management Group LLC.

During the meeting Paulson, “went on to describe a possible scenario for placing Fannie and Freddie into ‘conservatorship’ — a government seizure designed to allow the firms to continue operations despite heavy losses in the mortgage markets.”

Teitelbaum writes, “The fund manager says he was shocked that Paulson would furnish such specific information — to his mind, leaving little doubt that the Treasury Department would carry out the plan. The managers attending the meeting were thus given a choice opportunity to trade on that information.”

While he points out that “law professors say that Paulson himself broke no law by disclosing what amounted to inside information,” it is hardly arguable that it is ethically acceptable for the Secretary of the Treasury to furnish information to certain people which would give them an advantage over everyone else.

As Salmon points out, “Given that it’s taken two years since the release of Sorkin’s book for the Eton Park meeting to be made public, it’s fair to assume that there were other meetings, too — possibly many others.”

Indeed it is impossible to know how much trading of insider information occurs amongst the financial elite, as we only get a glimpse when sources choose to disclose this information toreporters like Teitelbaum and Sorkin.

It is quite unfortunate that this is such a rare occurrence, especially when we look at how the ultra-rich continue to profit at record rates while the rest of us struggle to pay the bills.

Surely these meetings did not occur only a couple of times, given the tight connection that Goldman Sachs – or more accurately, as is now painfully clear – Government Sachs enjoys with Washington.
Salmon sums up this issue in pointing out that the so-called conspiracy theorists have been right all along.

Salmon writes, “Paulson was giving inside tips to Wall Street in general, and to Goldman types in particular: exactly the kind of behavior that ‘Government Sachs’ conspiracy theorists have been speculating about for years. Turns out, they were right.”

Now if only the derisive label of “conspiracy theorist” would be lifted from these issues when it is far from a conspiracy theory and is indeed a conspiracy fact.

I won’t be holding my breath, because so long as governments criminally conspire with multinational corporations and others, the label of conspiracy will be denigrated in order to keep people from discussing and investigating these facts and issues.

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December 2, 2011

By Mike Barrett
Activist Post

“The information contained in our shared [genome] is so fundamental, and requires so much further research to understand its utility, that patenting it at the earliest stage is like putting up a whole lot of unnecessary toll booths on the road to discovery”, said National Institutes of Health Director and former head of the Human Genome Project Francis Collins in his 2010 book The Language of Life: DNA and the Revolution in Personalized Medicine.

Unfortunately such toll booths were just given the go-ahead by a Federal appeals court. In a 2-1 decision issued on July 29, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit overruled a lower court’s decision in Association for Molecular Pathology et al. v. U.S. Patent and Trademark Office et al. holding that private companies and researchers could in fact patent genes and DNA sequences. If not overturned by the Supreme Court, this decision could have harmful impacts on patient health and could limit future genomic and scientific discoveries.

To get a better sense of what this case means and where it is going, we must take a step back and look at the history of gene patenting and the case against it. These patents harm patients and researchers, and they go against years of legal precedent holding that one cannot patent a “fact of nature.”

A Brief History of Gene Patents

Most people are shocked to learn that more than 20 percent of the human genome is patented.¹ Corporations and researchers own patents on genes that correlate diseases such as breast cancer, Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s disease, among others. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office started granting patents on human genes in the 1980s and has since granted more than 4,300 of them.

In May 2009, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against Myriad Genetics, which owned genes (BRCA1 and BRCA2) that correlate with increased risk for breast cancer and ovarian cancer. The ACLU named the Patent Office as a defendant, too, since it had granted these patents. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of researchers, genetic counselors, women patients, cancer survivors, breast cancer and women’s health groups, and scientific associations representing 150,000 geneticists, pathologists and laboratory professionals.

The plaintiffs claimed that genes are “facts of nature” and are therefore not patentable. Additionally, they argued that Myriad’s patents limited patients’ access to potentially life-saving genetic diagnostic tests and prevented researchers from looking at those genes to help their patients or to develop more effective and affordable tests.

The defendants argued that patents are necessary to protect the time and money invested in identifying disease-gene correlations. Myriad Genetics also claimed that its patents are on “isolated” genes and DNA sequences, and this act of isolating a gene from the genome is an inventive step and worthy of a patent. These patents, the industry claims, are necessary to bring expensive tests and products to market and improve patient health.

In March 2010, a Federal judge agreed with the ACLU and decided that DNA sequences are “facts of nature” and are therefore no more patentable than “isolated” gold from a mine or isolating a natural element. Myriad Genetics quickly appealed the decision.

Do Gene Patents Harm Patients and Innovation?

Contrary to industry claims that gene patents are necessary to bring tests and products to market, such patents are actually detrimental to patient health and researcher access to genetic information. Gene patent holders often use their exclusive control to charge excessive fees for diagnostic testing and to prevent other researchers from utilizing specific genes for research.²

Myriad Genetics, for example, charges up to $4,000 for its breast cancer diagnostic test, a price too steep for many patients and health insurance providers. If allowed, labs could run the same genetic test for only a few hundred dollars.³ Myriad also sent cease-and-desist letters to researchers who were looking at the BRCA1/2 genes in their labs, providing diagnostic tests to patients and even providing patients second-opinion tests to confirm the test provided by Myriad.

Gene patents have a detrimental impact on health care and research.⁴ Gene patents can prevent more accurate, affordable and complex diagnostic tests from being developed.⁵ A survey of genetics labs found that 53 percent stopped doing research due to concerns about patented genes,⁶ and there has been a significant decline in published material on patented genetic information.⁷ The future of personalized medicine may be crushed by the weight of gene patent thickets if a company must ask permission from hundreds of patent holders to scan a single patient’s genome.

Gene patents also drive research towards gene-to-disease correlations and away from factors that actually cause disease, such as exposure to toxic chemicals. Most genetic tests offer only an estimate of the chances for developing a particular disease and fail to account for the influence of other genes and environmental factors that cause disease.⁸ The predictive power of the test for BRCA breast cancer mutations is high for persons from families with a history of particular kinds of breast or ovarian cancer, but very low for women without a family history of breast cancer; many women who test positive for a BRCA1 mutation do not get the disease.⁹ Gene patents lock-in our knowledge on these DNA sequences to only their potential correlation to a disease while preventing others from looking at how that gene may interact with other genes or the outside environment.

Are Genes Patentable?

This brings us to the recent verdict, in which the judges were not asked to rule on whether gene patents are harmful but whether they are patentable. In this respect, the appeals court largely agreed with Myriad Genetics when it determined that “isolated DNA” is patentable since it is not found in nature and is the result of a human process. The appellate court did agree with the lower court on one point when it said the act of comparing two DNA sequences (comparing a normal gene with a mutated gene sequence to identify said mutation) was not patentable since it was simply a mental process.

The majority opinion stated that, since isolated DNA is not found in nature, the act of isolating said DNA is an inventive step worthy of a patent. Since the bonds between the specific gene and the rest of the DNA had been broken, they argued, the isolated DNA is no longer a “fact of nature” but a man-made invention.

This view fails to take into account the unique nature of DNA. As Judge Sweet said in the lower court’s decision originally invalidating the BRCA1/2 genes, the “essential characteristic” of DNA is its nucleotide sequence, which is “defined by nature and central to both its biological function within the cell and its utility as a research tool in the lab.”¹⁰ In other words, DNA sequences have naturally evolved over millennia and are important not simply for their chemical construction but for the information they code for. If the genetic code and its information were different than that found in nature, Myriad’s and others’ genetic diagnostic tests would be worthless. That is why Judge Sweet called attempts to define patented genes as novel as merely a “lawyer’s trick.”

The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that facts of nature are not patentable. In the 1980 landmark case of Diamond v. Chakrabarty, the Court explained how patents can be granted to:

Anything under the sun that is made by man . . . . [T]he laws of nature, physical phenomena, and abstract ideas have been held not patentable . . . a new mineral discovered in the earth or a new plant found in the wild is not patentable subject matter. Likewise, Einstein could not patent his celebrated law that E=mc²; nor could Newton have patented the law of gravity. Such discoveries are manifestations of nature, free to all men and reserved exclusively to none.¹¹ [emphasis added]

The dissenting judge in the appeals court agreed that genes are not patentable and that “extracting a gene is akin to snapping a leaf from a tree.” Since the genetic information in isolated genes is identical to that in genes found in nature, and in our bodies, it should be beyond the scope of patentability.

This case points out an interesting problem: We are asking our judges, who are experts in legal jurisprudence, no doubt, to make decisions about basic facts of biology and genetics. The two judges who supported gene patents, Judge Lourie and Judge Moore, studied chemistry and electrical engineering, respectively, before their legal careers.¹² While they must have consulted experts on the issue, we should not delegate the future of genetic research and access to our common genetic heritage to engineers and chemists. Congress, which has constitutional authority over what is patentable, should pass legislation making it clear that genes are “facts of nature” and are therefore unpatentable. Such a law would tear down the thicket of gene patent “toll booths” that are harming patient health and scientific research.

The Next Battleground

This legal battle is far from over, since the case is expected to be decided by the Supreme Court, and no matter which way the court rules, Congress will likely step in.

As Joseph Stiglitz and John Sulston explained in the Wall Street Journal, “the patenting of human genes is wrong as a matter of science and as a matter of economics.” Lets hope Congress keeps with good science, good economics and good public health policy by declaring, once and for all, that genes and DNA sequences are facts of nature, part of our common genetic heritage, and therefore unpatentable.

¹Kyle Jensen and Fiona Murray, “Intellectual Property Landscape of the Human Genome”, Science, October 14, 2005. See also Human International Genome Sequencing Consortium, “Initial Sequencing and Analysis of the Human Genome”, Nature, February 15, 2001; J. Craig Venter et al., “The Sequence of the Human Genome”, Science, February 16, 2001.

²Mildred K. Cho, Preparing for the Millennium: Laboratory Medicine in the 21st Century (American Association for Clinical Chemistry Press, 2d ed., 1998), pp. 47–58.

³Joseph Stiglitz and John Sulston, “The Case Against Gene Patents”, Wall Street Journal, October 7, 2010.

⁴See Jon F. Merz, Antigone G. Kriss, Debra G. B. Leonard and Mildred K. Cho, “Diagnostic Testing Fails the Test”, Nature, February 7, 2002; David Blumenthal et al., “University-Industry Research Relationships in Biotechnology”, Science, June 13, 1986; David Blumenthal et al., “Withholding Research Results in Academic Life Sciences”, Journal of the American Medical Association, April 16, 1997; David Blumenthal et al., “Data Withholding in Academic Genetics”, Journal of the American Medical Association, January 23/30, 2002.

⁵Gene Patents and Licensing Practices and their Impact on Patient Access to Genetic Tests, report of the Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Genetics, Health and Society.

⁶Mildred K. Cho, Samantha Illangasekare, Meredith A. Weaver, Deborah G. Leonard and Jon F. Merz. “Effects of Patents and Licenses on the Provision of Clinical Genetic Testing Services”, Journal of Molecular Diagnostics (February 2003).

⁷Fiona Murray, Scott Stern, “Do Formal Intellectual Property Rights Hinder the Free Flow of Scientific Knowledge? An Empirical Test of the Anti-Commons Hypothesis,” prepared for the NBER Academic Science and Entrepreneurship Conference (June 2005).

⁸Michael J. Malinowski and Robin J.R. Blatt, “Commercialization of Genetic Testing Services: The FDA, Market Forces, and Biological Tarot Cards”, Tulane Law Review, vol. 71, no. 4 (1997).

⁹Wylie Burke, “Genetic Testing”, New England Journal of Medicine, December 5, 2002.

¹⁰Association for Molecular Pathology et al. v. U.S. Patent and Trademark Office et al., 132, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, March 29, 2010.

¹¹Diamond v. Chakrabarty, U.S. Supreme Court, June 16, 1980.

¹²Andrew Cohen, “Like a Leaf From a Tree: The Gene Patent Ruling”, The Atlantic Online, August 1, 2011.

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December 1, 2011

Source: AP

WASHINGTON (AP) — Top national security lawyers in the Obama administration say U.S. citizens are legitimate military targetswhen they take up arms with al-Qaida.

The lawyers were asked at a national security conference Thursday about the CIA killing of Anwar al-Alwaki, a U.S. citizen and leading al-Qaida figure. He died in a Sept. 30 U.S. drone strike in the mountains of Yemen.

The government lawyers — CIA counsel Stephen Preston and Pentagon counsel Jeh Johnson — did not directly address the al-Alwaki case. But they said U.S. citizens don’t have immunity when they’re at war with the United States.

Johnson said only the executive branch, not the courts, are equipped to make decisions about who qualifies as an enemy.

Read More…

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November 30, 2011

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November 28th, 2011

Via: CNN:

Sirhan Sirhan, convicted of the 1968 assassination of presidential candidate Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, should be freed from prison or granted a new trial based on “formidable evidence” asserting his innocence and “horrendous violations” of his rights, defense attorneys said in federal court papers filed this week.

In a U.S. District Court brief, Sirhan’s lawyers also say that an expert analysis of recently uncovered evidence shows two guns were fired in the assassination and that Sirhan’s revolver was not the gun that shot Kennedy.

Attorneys William F. Pepper and Laurie D. Dusek also allege that fraud was committed in Sirhan’s 1969 trial when the court allowed a substitute bullet to be admitted as evidence for a real bullet removed from Kennedy’s neck.

The attorneys further assert that Sirhan was hypno-programmed to be a diversion for the real assassin and allege that Sirhan would be easily blamed for the assassination because he is an Arab. Sirhan, 67, is a Christian Palestinian born in Jerusalem whose parents brought him and his siblings to America in the 1950s.

Sirhan “was an involuntary participant in the crimes being committed because he was subjected to sophisticated hypno programming and memory implantation techniques which rendered him unable to consciously control his thoughts and actions at the time the crimes were being committed,” court papers said.

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Scientist Makes H5N1 Highly Contagious

November 26th, 2011

Via: NPR:

If the virus evolves to spread as easily between people as seasonal flu, however, it could cause a devastating global pandemic. So in an attempt to stay ahead of H5N1, scientists have been tweaking its genes in the lab to learn more about how this virus works, and what it is capable of.

In September, one scientist made a stunning announcement. At a flu conference held in Malta, he said he’d done a lab experiment that resulted in bird flu virus becoming highly contagious between ferrets — the animal model used to study human flu infection. It seemed that just five mutations did the trick.

News of the results raised red flags for Dr. Thomas Inglesby, a bioterrorism expert and director of the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

“It’s just a bad idea for scientists to turn a lethal virus into a lethal and highly contagious virus. And it’s a second bad idea for them to publish how they did it so others can copy it,” says Inglesby.

No science journal has published the information yet. And Inglesby hopes none of them do.

Biology research usually has a culture of openness. Scientists report their methods and results so others can repeat their work and learn from it.

Inglesby agrees that’s the way to go the vast majority of the time. But not this time. “There are some cases that I think are worth an exception to that otherwise very important scientific principle,” he says. “I can only imagine that the process of deliberating about the publication of these findings is quite serious.”

The researcher who presented these findings at the science meeting is virologist Ron Fouchier, of the Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands. NPR has learned that his work is now under scrutiny by a committee called the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity.

Related: Man-Made Super-Flu Could Kill Half of Humanity

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