Former Vice President Dick Cheney received a heart transplant Saturday afternoon at a Virginia hospital, according to the Associated Press.

Cheney, who suffered his fifth heart attack in 2010, did not know the identity of the heart donor after waiting 20 months for the operation, as told to the AP by his aide Kara Ahern.

Facing direct opposition from the public, biotechnology giants like Monsanto and Dow are now making a disturbing attempt to brainwash developing minds into accepting their genetically modified foods using blatant lies and propaganda.

In a last ditch effort to potentially sway public opinion, the Council for Biotechnology Information (CBI) has launched the Biotechnology Basics Activity Book for kids.

With the intent to be used by 'agriculture and science teachers', the activity book spreads absurd lies about GMO crops - even going as far as to say that they 'improve our health' and 'help the environment'.

The book can be seen on the organization's website, and makes it extremely apparent that it is full of misinformation and propaganda that completely ignores scientific research surrounding genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

In fact, let's examine some claims made by this book that serves as an 'educational' tool to be used by teachers.

A teacher at a school in France asked her class to observe a moment's silence for Mohamed Merah.

The 56 year old female teacher described Merah as a 'victim,' and said his links to al-Qaeda had been faked by Sarkozy and the media.

Fifteen of the twenty pupils in the class reportedly walked out of the class as a protest against the teacher.

The pupils then wrote to the head of the school to complain about their teacher.

French Education Minister Luc Chatel has had the teacher suspended.

Sarkrazy is so predictable.

First, the totalitarian fascist State kills kids and innocents, and then it uses their deaths to kill free speech and democracy.

Below are two reports from Russia Today and Infowars.com about Sarkrazy's attack on free speech and free thought. Remember: the bodies of the victims of the latest state terror incident in France have not even been buried yet. This is sick and disturbing. This is political exploitation of murder and tragedy at its most vile.

RT: "Sarkozy: Visiting hate and terror websites will be punished," March 22, 2012:

The Toulouse murders and the operation of the alleged killer might bring additional political scores to Nicolas Sarkozy ahead of the future presidential elections, writer Diana Johnstone told RT.

"He [Sarkozy] has completely dominated the television screens for a couple of days as a result of this and shoved the other candidates into the shadows at the time when it was supposed to be the beginning of the campaign," she said. "So as a matter of fact, Sarkozy just by being present everywhere has already profited from this."

Kurt Nimmo: "Sarkozy: Prosecute and Imprison Readers of "Extremist" Websites," March 23, 2012:

French president Nicolas Sarkozy didn't wait long to exploit the terror rampage of Mohammed Merah. Soon after Merah's death in a stand-off with police, Sarkozy said French citizens who visit "extremist" websites should be treated the same way as those who look at child pornography.
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"Trying to criminalize a visit - a simple visit - to a website, that's something that seems disproportionate," Lucie Morillon of Reporters Without Borders told the Associated Press.

Morillon noted that in order for Sarkozy's law to be enforced, the internet would require new surveillance technology. "What's especially worrying for us is how you are going to know who's looking at what site. Does this announcement mean the installation of a global Internet surveillance system in France?" Morillon said.

The Internet is rapidly being transformed into a Big Brother control grid where privacy rights are being systematically strangled to death. The control freaks that run things have become absolutely obsessed with watching, tracking, monitoring and recording virtually everything that you do on the Internet. One thing that you can count on is that nothing you do on the Internet will ever be private again. In fact, if you are obsessed with privacy then the last place you want to be is on the Internet.

Most Americans have absolutely no idea how far Internet surveillance has advanced in the past few years. At this point, it would be hard to imagine any place less private than the Internet. Do not ever put anything on the Internet that you would not want the authorities or your employer to hold you accountable for.

Basically, the Internet is creating a permanent dossier on each one of us, and we contribute to this process by freely posting gigantic volumes of information about ourselves on social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter. The Internet is the greatest tool for mass communication that the world has perhaps ever seen, and it gives average citizens the ability to communicate with each other like never before, but there is also a downside to using the Internet. Everything that we do on the Internet is being watched, monitored and recorded and there is no longer any such thing as Internet privacy. If you think that you still have any privacy on the Internet, then you are either ignorant of what is going on or you are being delusional. The following are 10 reasons why nothing you do on the Internet will ever be private again....

The test of a democracy is how you treat people incarcerated, people in jail, and especially so with minors" - Mark Regev, spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu

A major new EU-funded study documents 'a systematic pattern of ill-treatment, and in some cases torture' of Palestinian children detained by Israel. Drawing on 311 sworn testimonies, collected over a period of four years, the report (PDF) by Defence for Children International (DCI) finds that most children passing through Israel's military detention system suffer multiple forms of ill-treatment and abuse, much of which amounts to 'cruel, inhuman or degrading' treatment as defined by the UN Convention against Torture. It's pretty long, but important, so I thought I'd post a condensed summary.

Most children are arrested in the middle of the night. Israeli civil law restricts the times when children can be interrogated, which in turn influence the times when they are arrested. But Palestinians are subject to military law, which contains no such provision. Most have their hands 'painfully tied behind their backs and are blindfolded', before being transported to an unknown location - usually neither children nor parents are informed where, or on what basis - for interrogation. This process is 'often' accompanied by 'verbal abuse and humiliation, threats as well as physical violence'. Palestinian children are not accompanied by a parent and are usually interrogated without legal advice or being informed of their right to silence. Nearly a third of the children who testified to DCI reported experiencing violence during their arrest, usually punching, slapping or kicking. A former Israeli military commander, describing this process to the BBC, confessed that after leaving the army, his dreams were haunted by children 'screaming':

Quietly, and with little fanfare, President Obama signed a "National Defense Resources Preparedness" Executive Order on Friday. As the name suggests, the order intends to shore up the country's national defense resources in advance of a national emergency.

To be fair, this is not the first time that such an order has been written. Presidents Bush (II), Clinton, Reagan, and even Eisenhower provided directives in the same spirit as President Obama's order - providing some level of government commandeering in times of national emergency.

In the past, these orders have related to things like production capacity for defense contractors, or giving FEMA authority to resolve disputes between other departments in federally designated emergency areas.

President Obama's order, however, takes things much, much further.

The French have transferred their resentments from Jews to Arabs

Barely had Mohammed Merah leapt from his bathroom widow in Toulouse yesterday, still blasting away with his gun, than politicians and experts were analysing just what it might mean for the President and the other candidates in the coming election.

It's unseemly. It's obscene. It has precious little to do with the facts of the case, the question of religion or the future of society in France. But it is what politics is now about, as much in France as the US.

And, of course, it does matter in electoral terms. Think back only two days when the gunman was thought to be a man of the extreme right, very probably a dismissed soldier, who was as eager to take his revenge on Muslims and blacks as Jews. Then it seemed as if the loser might be Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Front, and the question was whether Sarkozy could draw some of her support to him or whether the Socialists, under Francois Hollande, would reap the benefit.

Once the assassin was fingered as a Muslim with allegedly al-Qa'ida connections, however, the whole focus changed. Now it is Le Pen, despite the halt to campaigning during this time, who is on the offensive again with a rallying call to "fight this war against these politico-religious fundamentalists who are killing our Christian children, our young Christian men", and Sarkozy, already tacking hard to the right, who is caught trying to catch up.

French police had no grounds to detain Mohamed Merah, the self-proclaimed al-Qaeda extremist, before he went on a killing spree in Toulouse, according to Francois Fillon, the prime minister.

"There was no single element allowing to detain Mohamed Merah," Mr Fillon told French radio. "We don't have the right in a country like ours to permanently monitor without judicial authorisation someone who hasn't committed an offence ... We live in a state of law."

Questions are being asked over how Merah, known to the authorities, managed to murder seven people, including three children, in three separate attacks, before being killed in a firefight after a 32 hour siege.

Adding to pressure on security officials, one veteran police officer asked how the gunman was not taken alive during Thursday's siege and final assault in the southwestern city of Toulouse.

Officers from an elite unit moved in Thursday morning after a 32-hour siege, killing self-proclaimed al-Qaeda militant Mohamed Merah as he tried to shoot his way out of his apartment.

After the tragic Toulouse shooting, which Richard Cottrell recently covered in detail, French President Nicolas Sarkozy has already begun to leverage the horrific incident to push his draconian policies.

Today he announced that it would become a crime in France to visit websites which supposedly advocate terrorism or hate crimes.

He also announced that he would further crack down on individuals who travel abroad for alleged ideological indoctrination. How they will know if anyone is actually traveling for ideological indoctrination and not just for the sake of travel is anyone's guess.

"From now on, any person who habitually consults Web sites that advocate terrorism or that call for hatred and violence will be criminally punished," Sarkozy stated in an address on television.