Puppet MastersS


Bad Guys

Unmanned aerial vehicle incident over Israel

On October 6, Haaretz headlined "IDF shoots down drone that penetrated Israeli airspace," saying:

An "unidentified aerial vehicle" entered Israeli airspace Saturday. Israel shot it down over the Negev, south of Mount Hebron.

"The IDF said Saturday that the drone arrived in Israel from the west after flying over the Mediterranean and the Gaza Strip. It said the incident is under investigation.

IDF spokesman Yoav Mordechair said Israel tracked it "throughout the course of its flight." Fighter jets were dispatched. After getting approval, they downed it over Yatir forest. It's in Negev's northeast. Wreckage was recovered for further examination.

Hezbollah operates drones. Is it responsible or should fingers point elsewhere? It's hard imagining why Hezbollah, Iran or Syria would be provocative any time. Now seems extremely unlikely. Doing so would achieve nothing. It would also beg for retaliation.

Nonetheless, Israel's YNet News said Lebanon-based "Hezbollah-affiliated" Al-Mayadeen television reported that the drone was its UAV. A senior Hezbollah official denied involvement.

No information suggests Hamas had anything to do with it. It doesn't likely have access to drones or ability to operate them. Israeli officials claim it originated from Lebanon.

On October 6, Haaretz headlined, "The immediate suspect behind the drone that penetrated Israel: Hezbollah," saying:

The UAV "that was shot down by the IDF on Saturday came from the direction of Gaza - but it does not appear that Palestinian groups are behind it."

Israel revealed few details. All that's known is the drone "penetrated Israeli airspace from the direction of the Mediterranean, around the Gaza Strip."

During the 2006 Lebanon war, it's believed Hezbollah launched several Ababil drones capable of carrying explosives. Reportedly they were intercepted and downed.

In 2004, another drone penetrated Israeli airspace. Hezbollah was named responsible. Whether or not it's true, who knows. In 2010, Israel claimed it downed an unmanned balloon near Dimona.

All that's known is what Israel said each time. Best to take its reports with a grain of salt. They rarely have credibility.

Beaker

Health risks persist from Cold War toxic spraying of St. Louis neighborhood by U.S. Army

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St. Louis, Missouri - Doris Spates was a baby when her father died inexplicably in 1955. She has watched four siblings die of cancer, and she survived cervical cancer.

After learning that the Army conducted secret chemical testing in her impoverished St. Louis neighborhood at the height of the Cold War, she wonders if her own government is to blame.

In the mid-1950s, and again a decade later, the Army used motorized blowers atop a low-income housing high-rise, at schools and from the backs of station wagons to send a potentially dangerous compound into the already-hazy air in predominantly black areas of St. Louis.

Local officials were told at the time that the government was testing a smoke screen that could shield St. Louis from aerial observation in case the Russians attacked.

But in 1994, the government said the tests were part of a biological weapons program and St. Louis was chosen because it bore some resemblance to Russian cities that the U.S. might attack. The material being sprayed was zinc cadmium sulfide, a fine fluorescent powder.

Comment: Let this one sink in. The United States government, which makes all kinds of noise when it wants to attack another country such as Iraq about "using chemical weapons on its own people," did just that as an experiment. To see what would happen.


Che Guevara

You say you want a revolution... it's staring you right in the face

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1848 Revolution in Berlin
The continued slide in median earning power, rather than public obfuscation or even lack of jobs, is America's real problem. It is the wood as distinct from the trees. It tends to loom larger when the television is off. Edward Luce - Financial Times

What we are witnessing in Europe - and what may loom for the United States - is the exhaustion of the modern social order. Since the early 1800s, industrial societies rested on a marriage of economic growth and political stability. Economic progress improved people's lives and anchored their loyalty to the state. Wars, depressions, revolutions and class conflicts interrupted the cycle. But over time, prosperity fostered stable democracies in the United States, Europe and parts of Asia. The present economic crisis might reverse this virtuous process. Slower economic expansion would feed political instability and vice versa. This would be a historic and ominous break from the past. Robert J. Samuelson - Washington Post

For almost two centuries, today's high-income countries enjoyed waves of innovation that made them both far more prosperous than before and far more powerful than everybody else. This was the world of the American dream and American exceptionalism. Now innovation is slow and economic catch-up fast. The elites of the high-income countries quite like this new world. The rest of their population like it vastly less. Get used to this. It will not change. Martin Wolf - Financial Times

Bizarro Earth

Worst Flare-up in Months: Israeli forces and Palestinian militants exchange fire

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© Eyad Baba/Associated PressIsrael's military says it has fired on two Gaza members of an al-Qaeda-inspired group. Palestinians say one man was killed.
Israeli forces and Palestinian militants exchanged fire on Monday in the most serious flare-up in months along the border with the Gaza Strip, officials said.

The latest exchange came after Israel targeted two men in an airstrike into southern Gaza on Sunday night, killing one and wounding the other. Israel said they were militant jihadists responsible for attacks.

Then, militants of the Islamic group Hamas that rules Gaza and a smaller hardline offshoot, Islamic Jihad, fired some 30 rockets toward Israel's southern border on Monday morning, causing some property damage but no casualties, said an Israeli military spokeswoman. She spoke on condition of anonymity, citing military rules.

Gaza's interior ministry said Israel's military launched around 20 tank shells and an airstrike, mostly toward targets around the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis.

Palestinian health official Ashraf al-Kidra said five people were injured after a strike near a mosque. Another mosque was targeted nearby and a factory was targeted in east of Gaza City, according to the interior ministry.

Footprints

Vandana Shiva: Corporate monopoly of seeds must end

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© Gustau Nacarino / ReutersVandana Shiva is leading a two week campaign to muster citizens' response to seed slavery.
Sustainability pioneer Vandana Shiva speaks to Jo Confino about campaigning against seed slavery, corporations and patents

Vandana Shiva, one of the Guardian's Top 100 most inspiring women, is currently leading a campaign to create a global citizens' response on the issue of seed freedom.

In 1991, Shiva founded Navadanya, a movement which aims to protect nature and people's rights to knowledge, biodiversity, water and food. It does this by setting up community seed banks that generate livelihoods for local people and provide for basic needs.

Shiva, a scientist, philosopher, feminist, author, environmentalist and activist, explains why the two week campaign on seed freedom against major corporations, which culminates on World Food Day later this month, is so important and the consequences of failure.

Shiva calls for civil disobedience, quoting Gandhi who said that "as long as the superstition that unjust laws must be obeyed exists, so will slavery exist".

Comment: Bill Moyers interviews Vandana Shiva on the Problem with Genetically Modified Seeds.

Read the following articles by Vandana Shiva about the corporate monopoly of seeds and the lies biotech corporations peddle to ultimately patent and control life:

Great Seed Robbery
The seed, the source of life, the embodiment of our biological and cultural diversity, the link between the past and the future of evolution, the common property of past, present and future generations of farming communities who have been seed breeders, is today being stolen from the farmers and being sold back to us as "propriety seed" owned by corporations like the US-headquartered Monsanto.
Vandana Shiva: Understanding the Corporate Takeover
GMOs: Myths, Falsehoods, Superstitions
Monsanto and the Big Fat Lie of Food Safety


Attention

Best of the Web: Obama 'Care': Iran sanctions now causing food insecurity, mass suffering for millions

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© Abedin Taherkenareh/EPAAn Iranian man counts his banknotes after Iran's currency, the rial, crashed to a record low
Yet again, the US and its allies spread mass human misery though a policy that is as morally indefensible as it is counter-productive


The Economist this week describes the intensifying suffering of 75 million Iranian citizens as a result of the sanctions regime being imposed on them by the US and its allies [my emphasis]:
"Six years ago, when America and Europe were putting in place the first raft of measures to press Iran to come clean over its nuclear ambitions, the talk was of "smart" sanctions. The West, it was stressed, had no quarrel with the Iranian people - only with a regime that seemed bent on getting a nuclear bomb, or at least the capacity for making one. Yet, as sanctions have become increasingly punitive in the face of Iran's intransigence, it is ordinary Iranians who are paying the price.

Sherlock

Turkish newspaper says Erdogan's government handed over the mortars to armed groups in Syria which shelled Akcakale town

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© Reuters Oct. 3, 2012: Smoke rises over the streets after an mortar bomb landed from Syria in the border village of Akcakale, southeastern Sanliurfa province.
Turkish Yurt Newspaper said that the government of the Development and Justice Party has to take a neutral stance on the events in Syria instead of supporting the groups of the so-called the armed opposition.

"Turkey was inevitably affected by the events in Syria... so it was very necessary for it to adopt new polices and be aware that instigating others will bring nothing but more damages.. The Turkish government was wrong at seeing the whole region through a sectarian vision," Journalist Ali Sirmen wrote in an article published by the newspaper.

Airplane

What it means to be living with death by drone

drone
© Shah Khalid / Associated Press / August 25, 2012A Pakistani villager holds a wreckage of a suspected surveillance drone which crashed in a Pakistani border town along the Afghanistan border.
Last week, Stanford University and New York University released a major study about the use of drones in the ever-evolving but never-ending war on terror. Unfortunately, many commentators missed the report's key message: Drones are terrorizing an entire civilian population.

I was one of the researchers for the study, and spent weeks in Pakistan interviewing more than 60 people from North Waziristan. Many were survivors of strikes. Others had lost loved ones and family members. All of them live under the constant threat of annihilation.

What my colleagues and I learned from these unnamed and unknown victims of America's drone warfare gave the report its title: "Living Under Drones."

People in the United States imagine that drones fly to a target, launch their deadly missiles with surgical precision and return to a U.S. base hundreds or thousands of miles away. But drones are a constant presence in the skies above the North Waziristan tribal area in Pakistan, with as many as six hovering over villages at any one time. People hear them day and night. They are an inescapable presence, the looming specter of death from above.

And that presence is steadily destroying a community twice the size of Rhode Island. Parents are afraid to send their children to school. Women are afraid to meet in markets. Families are afraid to gather at funerals for people wrongly killed in earlier strikes. Drivers are afraid to deliver food from other parts of the country.

Comment: A veritable war of terror sponsored by the Obama administration. And people still think he is one of the 'good guys'.


Stormtrooper

Israeli forces caught on video smashing Palestinian child's head to ground near Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa


A video shows Israeli occupation forces in Jerusalem smashing the head of a Palestinian boy on the ground during a violent arrest, after Israeli troops stormed the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in eastern occupied Jerusalem this morning.

The brief clip shows a boy being dragged by black-clad occupation soldiers. As the boy screams "khalas" - "enough" or "stop" - the soldiers throw him to the ground. One soldier punches the boy in the side of the head, smashing his head into the stone floor.

The video was posted on the YouTube account of QNN, a Palestinian news group that operates on Facebook. QNN identified the child as Hasan al-Afifi of the Bab al-Hadid area of the Old City of Jerusalem. The videographer is identified as Amjad Arafa.

Comment: The article adds that Twitter user @BDS4Justice, who visits Al-Aqsa mosque regularly, witnessed, livetweeted and photographed what happened. Click here and scroll down for the feed.


Pirates

German state TV reports: Syrian rebels claim responsibility for attack on Turkey

On Oct. 4th, the German state TV channel ZDF reported on the attack on Turkey several times.

In its "Mittagsmagazin" at 1300 hours it reports as follows:

02:06 - 02:32
German:
"Raketen- und Granatfeuer. Die Türkei übt Vergeltung für einen Angriff von syrischer Seite. Gestern Nachmittag hatten syrische Rebellen einen türkischen Ort in Grenznähe beschossen. Seit Wochen schon warnt Ankara davor, die Türkei zu provozieren. Inzwischen haben sich die syrischen Rebellen ganz offiziell zu der Provokation bekannt."
Translation: (emphasis added)
"Rocket and mortar fire. Turkey takes revenge after an attack from the Syrian side. Yesterday afternoon Syrian rebels fired on a Turkish village close to the border. For weeks Ankara had warned against provoking Turkey. Meanwhile Syrian rebels officially claimed responsibility for the provocation."

Comment: Turkey is a member of NATO. Is this the false-flag attack intended to give NATO an excuse to intervene directly and officially in the Syrian conflict?