Welcome to Sott.net
Tue, 26 Oct 2021
The World for People who Think

Puppet Masters
Map

Eye 1

China formally abolishes re-education labor camps


The Washington Post
Sat, 28 Dec 2013 04:43 UTC
china labor camps
© lifeanditsbeauty
There are 350 “reeducation through labor” camps in China.
In a step toward rule of law, China's national legislature on Saturday voted to abolish a much-criticized penal system that allowed police to lock up people for up to four years without due process.

The standing committee of the National People's Congress adopted a resolution to abolish the re-education labor system, formalizing a November decision by the ruling Chinese Communist Party, according to the official Xinhua News Agency and the state-run China Central Television.

State media said all those serving time in the labor camps would be set free starting Saturday, but that the penalties handed out before the abolition would still be considered legitimate, a provision aimed at preventing the victims from suing the state and seeking redress.

Established to punish early critics of the Communist Party, the penal system was retooled to focus on petty criminals. In recent years, however, it had been used by local officials to deal with people challenging their authority on issues including land rights and corruption.

Comment: See: Big Hang and Tiger Bench: Women expose brutality of Chinese labor camp

Prisoners are subjected to 'the big hang' and 'the death bed' at China's notorious re-education labor camps

      Read More...
Popcorn

Chinese smarter than Americans: reject shipments of genetically modified corn

Ricardo Lopez
LA Times
Fri, 27 Dec 2013 07:50 UTC
Corn Bin
© Daniel Acker / Bloomberg
The U.S. is the world's largest corn exporter, and China is its No. 3 customer.
China rejected two shipments -- almost 546,000 tons -- of U.S. dried distillers' grain, a corn byproduct, because it contained genetically modified material, state media reported Friday.

China's top food-quality watchdog rejected the two shipments because they contained MIR162, a special insect-resistant variety of maize developed by Syngenta, a Swiss maker of seeds and pesticides.

The first shipment, 545,000 tons, was rejected last week in Shanghai, state media said. The second shipment, 758 tons, was rejected Monday.

MIR162 is not on the Chinese government's short list of approved grains considered genetically modified organisms, or GMO.

Still, Chinese consumers remain wary of GMO crops and some nationalist-leaning pundits have suggested the Western-dominated technology leaves China's food supply vulnerable.

The U.S. is the world's largest corn exporter and China is its No. 3 customer. The Asian nation is expected to buy a record 7 million tons of corn in the 2013-14 marketing year.

Chinese authorities said the shipments have been returned and are urging American officials to improve their "inspection procedures to ensure they comply with Chinese quality standards."
      Read More...
Bomb

Powerful explosion rocks downtown Beirut; former ambassador to U.S.and 4 others killed

Abigail Hauslohner
The Washington Post
Fri, 27 Dec 2013 13:58 UTC
Image
© Reuters
A powerful car bomb flung glass and heavy strips of metal across a wide intersection in downtown Beirut on Friday, killing a former cabinet minister and underscoring Lebanon's growing instability as it absorbs the impact of neighboring Syria's increasingly bloody civil war.

Mohamad Chatah, a senior aide to former prime minister Saad Hariri and a member of Lebanon's Future Movement party, was killed in the blast. Chatah, a Sunni Muslim, served as Hariri's finance minister and was Lebanon's ambassador to the United States from 1997 to 2000.

Chatah's assassination fueled fears that Lebanon may soon be forced to revisit its own civil war. The country has been unable to free itself from the sway of the Syrian conflict that is fast engulfing this turbulent region.

"You now have a Lebanon that will be engaged in a tit-for-tat to the extreme," said Salman Shaikh, director of the Brookings Doha Center. "Whether that takes it into civil war, God only knows." But Chatah's killing marks "a dangerous forebear for how 2014 can unfold," he said.

At least four other people were killed in the explosion and 75 were injured, Lebanon's Health Ministry said. The blast, which shook the center of the capital around 9:40 a.m., ignited nearby cars and shattered the facades of high-end apartment and office buildings.

Minutes after the blast, the twisted wreckage of two cars - one of which soldiers said carried the bomb - sat smoking in pools of black water littered with pieces of human flesh. Glass and debris lay scattered across a nearly quarter-mile radius just blocks from Lebanon's parliament and government buildings.
      Read More...
Wolf

Feeding on suffering: Hospice firms draining billions from Medicare

Peter Whoriskey and Dan Keating
The Washington Post
Thu, 26 Dec 2013 00:00 UTC
Image
© Bob Miller/For The Washington Post
Chocolate Blount, 91, was discharged from hospice care in Monroeville, Alabama after his health improved.
Hospice patients are expected to die: The treatment focuses on providing comfort to the terminally ill, not finding a cure. To enroll a patient, two doctors certify a life expectancy of six months or less.

But over the past decade, the number of "hospice survivors" in the United States has risen dramatically, in part because hospice companies earn more by recruiting patients who aren't actually dying, a Washington Post investigation has found. Healthier patients are more profitable because they require fewer visits and stay enrolled longer.

The proportion of patients who were discharged alive from hospice care rose about 50 percent between 2002 and 2012, according to a Post analysis of more than 1 million hospice patients' records over 11 years in California, a state that makes public detailed descriptions and that, by virtue of its size, offers a portrait of the industry.

The average length of a stay in hospice care also jumped substantially over that time, in California and nationally, according to the analysis. Profit per patient quintupled, to $1,975, California records show.

This vast growth took place as the hospice "movement," once led by religious and community organizations, was evolving into a $17 billion industry dominated by for-profit companies. Much of that is paid for by the U.S. government - roughly $15 billion of industry revenue came from Medicare last year.
      Read More...
USA

Noam Chomsky: We're no longer a functioning democracy, we're really a plutocracy

Travis Gettys
Raw Story
Fri, 27 Dec 2013 18:52 UTC
Image
The world faces two potentially existential threats, according to the linguist and political philosopher Noam Chomsky.

"There are two major dark shadows that hover over everything, and they're getting more and more serious," Chomsky said. "The one is the continuing threat of nuclear war that has not ended. It's very serious, and another is the crisis of ecological, environmental catastrophe, which is getting more and more serious."

Chomsky appeared Friday on the last episode of NPR's "Smiley and West" program to discuss his education, his views on current affairs and how he manages to spread his message without much help from the mainstream media.

He told the hosts that the world was racing toward an environmental disaster with potentially lethal consequence, which the world's most developed nations were doing nothing to prevent - and in fact were speeding up the process.

"If there ever is future historians, they're going to look back at this period of history with some astonishment," Chomsky said. "The danger, the threat, is evident to anyone who has eyes open and pays attention at all to the scientific literature, and there are attempts to retard it, there are also at the other end attempts to accelerate the disaster, and if you look who's involved it's pretty shocking."
      Read More...
Megaphone

Edward Snowden is wrong: His mission has not been accomplished.

Andrea Peterson
Washington Post
Thu, 26 Dec 2013 18:45 UTC
Image
© Barton Gellman for The Washington Post
Edward Snowden photographed in Moscow, Russia December, 2013.
"For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission's already accomplished," former NSA contractor Edward Snowden told my Washington Post colleague Barton Gellman in Moscow this month. Snowden went on to explain that he had "already won" because the journalists working from the documents he secreted away from the NSA are giving the public a chance to weigh in on surveillance policies.

But while it's not quite flight-suit level deception, calling the current state of affairs mission accomplished is a significant change in the scope of Snowden's ambitions compared to when he first stepped forward as the source of the NSA documents. In a video interview with the Guardian released shortly after he stepped out of the shadows, he espoused many of the same hopes about the public having input on the secret machinations of intelligence agencies. But he also gave a much more lofty goal: substantive policy change.
The greatest fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change. People will see in the media all of these disclosures. They'll know the lengths that the government is going to grant themselves powers unilaterally to create greater control over American society and global society. But they won't be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things to force their representatives to actually take a stand in their interests.

And the months ahead, the years ahead it's only going to get worse until eventually there will be a time where policies will change because the only thing that restricts the activities of the surveillance state are policy.
      Read More...
Eye 2

Man who oversaw Saddam Hussein's hanging: 'The room was full of death'


Raw Story
Fri, 27 Dec 2013 18:38 UTC
Image
© AFP Photo
Mowaffak al-Rubaie sits in his office with a statue of Saddam Hussein behind him, the rope used to hang the dictator around its neck, recalling his final minutes.

The former national security advisor, who oversaw Saddam's 2006 execution, said he remained strong until the end, and never expressed any regret.

"A criminal? True. A killer? True. A butcher? True. But he was strong until the end.

"I received him (Saddam) at the door. No one entered with us - no foreigners, and no Americans," Rubaie said in an interview with AFP at his office in the Kadhimiyah area of north Baghdad, near the prison where the execution took place seven years ago. "He was wearing a jacket and a white shirt, normal and relaxed, and I didn't see any signs of fear.

"Of course, some people want me to say that he collapsed or that he was drugged, but these facts are for history," Rubaie said. "I didn't hear any regret from him, I didn't hear any request for mercy from God from him, or request for pardon.

Comment: All of this may be true, and may have happened as described, but the chances are that the man that was hanged was not Saddam Hussein

The Capture, Trial and Conviction of Saddam Hussein - Another US Intelligence Farce

      Read More...
Sheeple

Psychopathic liar John Hagee to atheists: Gladly accept my Christmas tidings or 'leave the country'

David Edwards
The Raw Story
Thu, 26 Dec 2013 13:43 UTC

Video courtesy of GETV, recorded Dec. 22, 2013

Texas megachurch Pastor John Hagee this week advised atheists who didn't like Christmas to "leave the country" or "take your Walkman and stuff it into your ears."

In a sermon at his Cornerstone Church on Sunday, Hagee warned that "Christmas is under attack in America" because government offices were greeting people with "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas."

"Humanists are now making the claim that Christmas was originally a pagan holiday," he said. "Hey, dummy, look at the word: Christ-mas."

"To all humanists and atheists listening to this telecast: Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness will not be in danger in any way if someone says 'Merry Christmas' around you."
      Read More...
Bad Guys

Destabilizing Lebanon: Car bomb kills Mohamad Chatah, aide to ex-PM of Lebanon Saad Hariri

Martin Chulov
Guardian
Fri, 27 Dec 2013 17:23 UTC
Image
© Guardian
Chatah, outspoken critic of Hezbollah and Syrian regime, assassinated in attack near Hariri's compound in Beirut

A senior aide to the former Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri has been assassinated by a large car bomb in central Beirut. Fifteen other people were injured in the blast, which destroyed part of a neighbourhood near Hariri's compound.

Hariri-linked media reported that Mohamad Chatah, a senior adviser to the now exiled leader, died in the blast. He was believed to have been en route to a meeting at the nearby headquarters, where he kept an office. Chatah was an outspoken critic of the Syrian regime and of Hezbollah, which has held sway over the Lebanese government since Hariri was ousted as leader three years ago.

Chatah, 62, is the second senior opposition figure to have been killed in the past 14 months. The political killing of figures linked to the Hariris dates back nine years.

In October last year, Wissam al-Hassan, the head of the Internal Security Forces intelligence branch, was also killed by a car bomb. He was buried several hundred metres from the scene of Friday's blast in a shrine alongside former prime minister Rafiq Hariri, the patriarch of the western-leaning 14 March alliance whose assassination in February 2005 sparked a new era of instability in post-civil war Lebanon.

Friday's bombing comes several weeks before the start of the long-delayed trial of the alleged assassins of Hariri, five members of Hezbollah, who will be tried in The Hague in absentia. Hezbollah has vehemently denied being responsible for Hariri's death, which it labels as a US and Israeli plot.
      Read More...
War Whore

NSA collection of phone data is lawful, New York federal judge rules

Sari Horwitz
The Washington Post
Fri, 27 Dec 2013 12:34 UTC
Image
© PatDollard.com
A federal judge in New York ruled Friday that the massive collection of domestic telephone data brought to light by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden is lawful, rejecting a challenge to the program by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The decision conflicts with that of a U.S. District Court judge who ruled against the government early last week, finding that the NSA's program was almost certainly unconstitutional. The divergent decisions make it more likely that the Supreme Court will make it's own ruling.

In a 53-page opinion, U.S. District Judge William Pauley said Friday the legality of the program, which collects virtually all Americans' phone records, is "ultimately a question of reasonableness," under the Fourth Amendment and represents the U.S. government's "counter-punch" to eliminate the al-Qaeda terrorist network.
      Read More...
Amazon Smile
Revolt! T-shirts