© unknown
SOTT
SIGNS
OF THE
TIMES
OF THE
TIMES
Welcome to Sott.net
The World for People who Think
Puppet MastersS
One of Marc Dutroux's houses in Charleroi, southern Belgium. Boarding over the dark reality his case exposed won't make the problems go away.
In a dank basement by the oily waters of the Brussels-Charleroi canal, police diggers in black jumpsuits uncovered the latest trove of horrors: a skull, a wisdom tooth, bones from fingers, three kneecaps, scraps of undergarments.
For Boutiri family members--Moroccan immigrants next door--the grisly find filled them with such terror that they have put their two-story stone home up for sale.
"We feel we are living in a cemetery," said Zora Boutiri, 23, a clothing saleswoman whose mother is now too afraid to get out of bed for middle-of-the-night Muslim prayers. "Where will the next body be found? On our roof? In the canal out front?"
As chilling fogs linger in the streets of Brussels, police investigators are assembling gruesome details of the latest installment in a nation's nightmare.
Italian police have discovered a massive international paedophile network selling violent child-pornography videos to clients in Italy, the US and Germany.
Eight Italians have been arrested and 490 warned that they are under investigation, in a scandal that has shocked and outraged the country. Police are reportedly trying to identify 5,000 people who are suspected of attempting to purchase the videos, some of which appear to contain images of children being tortured and murdered.
The tapes, which were made in Russia, have allegedly generated revenues of £410m for their makers.
The directors of two state-run television news programmes resigned yesterday after brief excerpts of the paedophile videos were broadcast on Wednesday to illustrate reports. The images were apparently taken from internet sites promoting the pornographic films, which cost anything from £270 to £4,000.
Eight Italians have been arrested and 490 warned that they are under investigation, in a scandal that has shocked and outraged the country. Police are reportedly trying to identify 5,000 people who are suspected of attempting to purchase the videos, some of which appear to contain images of children being tortured and murdered.
The tapes, which were made in Russia, have allegedly generated revenues of £410m for their makers.
The directors of two state-run television news programmes resigned yesterday after brief excerpts of the paedophile videos were broadcast on Wednesday to illustrate reports. The images were apparently taken from internet sites promoting the pornographic films, which cost anything from £270 to £4,000.
© n/a
On Tuesday, the French National Assembly passed a law for the creation of a national biometric database, ostensibly to fight identity fraud.
However, the EFF warns that biometric databases pose a mission-creep threat since the data can be used for reasons beyond identity fraud.
It points out that governments are increasingly demanding storage of citizens' biometric data on chips embedded into identity cards or passports and centrally held on government databases, with little regard to citizens' civil liberties.
The new laws compel the creation of an ID card that will contain information such as fingerprints, photograph, home address, height and eye colour. New passports will also contain the chip.
In early February 1987, an anonymous tipster in Tallahassee, Fla., made a phone call to police. Two "well-dressed men" seemed to be "supervising" six disheveled and hungry children in a local park, the caller said. The cops went after the case like bloodhounds--at least at first. The two men were identified as members of the Finders. They were charged with child abuse in Florida. In Washington, D.C., police and U.S. Customs Service agents raided a duplex apartment building and a warehouse connected to the group. Among the evidence seized: detailed instructions on obtaining children for unknown purposes and several photographs of nude children. According to a Customs Service memorandum obtained by U.S. News, one photo appeared "to accent the child's genitals."
The more the police learned about the Finders, the more bizarre they seemed: There were suggestions of child abuse, Satanism, dealing in pornography and ritualistic animal slaughter.
© Mark Wilson/Getty ImagesTrue All American Action Hero
The UN special rapporteur on torture has formally accused the US government of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment towards Bradley Manning, the US soldier who was held in solitary confinement for almost a year on suspicion of being the WikiLeaks source.
Juan Mendez has completed a 14-month investigation into the treatment of Manning since the soldier's arrest at a US military base in May 2010. He concludes that the US military was at least culpable of cruel and inhumane treatment in keeping Manning locked up alone for 23 hours a day over an 11-month period in conditions that he also found might have constituted torture.
"The special rapporteur concludes that imposing seriously punitive conditions of detention on someone who has not been found guilty of any crime is a violation of his right to physical and psychological integrity as well as of his presumption of innocence," Mendez writes.
© AP Photo/Harry HamburgRep. Dennis Kucinich
Establishment Democrats have long viewed Dennis Kucinich with a mixture of scorn, mockery and condescension. True to form, the establishment liberal journal American Prospect gave Kucinich a little kick on the way out, comparing his political views to the 1960s musical Hair (the Ohio loser talked about "Harmony and understanding"!), deriding him as "a favorite among lefty college kids and Birkenstock-wearers around the country," and pronouncing him "among the wackiest members of Congress." Yes, I said The American Prospect, not The Weekly Standard.
The Prospect article also praises as "great" a snide, derisive Washington Post piece which purports to "highlight some of the particularly bizarre facts about" Kucinich. Among those is the fact that "he introduced impeachment articles against former President George W. Bush and former Vice President Cheney for their roles in the Iraq war" and "proposed a Cabinet-level agency devoted to peace." What a weirdo and a loser. Even more predictably, a team of four interns at The New Republic - the magazine that spent years crusading for the attack on Iraq, smearing Israel critics as anti-Semites, and defining its editorial mission as re-making the Democratic Party in the image of Joe Lieberman - denounced the anti-war Kucinich as "ludicrous," citing most of the same accusations as the Prospect and the Post.
© n/a
Since 2005, Veterans for Peace and others have been calling for the impeachment of the sitting president for war crimes. After their demands to lawmakers to uphold the rule of law against Bush were largely ignored, they renewed their effort to impeach Obama once he continued to bomb sovereign nations without congressional approval. Now, lawmakers seem to have finally decided to take the rule of law and Separation of Powers seriously.
Obama will face impeachment over his failure to seek congressional authorization before launching offensive military action in Libya last year. Official impeachment proceedings have now been filed in both the House and Senate.
Last week, North Carolina Representative Walter Jones filed an Impeachment Resolution in the House H.CON.RES.107.IH stating:
"Expressing the sense of Congress that the use of offensive military force by a President without prior and clear authorization of an Act of Congress constitutes an impeachable high crime and misdemeanor under article II, section 4 of the Constitution."
"Whereas the cornerstone of the Republic is honoring Congress's exclusive power to declare war under article I, section 8, clause 11 of the Constitution:
Now, therefore, be it Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), That it is the sense of Congress that, except in response to an actual or imminent attack against the territory of the United States, the use of offensive military force by a President without prior and clear authorization of an Act of Congress violates Congress's exclusive power to declare war under article I, section 8, clause 11 of the Constitution and therefore constitutes an impeachable high crime and misdemeanor under article II, section 4 of the Constitution."
Speaking on condition of anonymity, three US senior intelligence officials have said Assad holds a strong position in Syria and his inner circle is also very determined to back the cause and remain "steadfast," AP reports.
Intelligence officers noted that the disorganized Syrian opposition is providing little challenge to the regime and that the political leaders of the Syrian National Council do not work as a team and often fight among themselves.
Meanwhile, government forces are very well equipped, US intelligence experts assert. They describe Syria as a formidable military power, with some 330,000 soldiers on active duty, surveillance drones and a dense network of air-defense installations that would make it difficult to establish a no-fly zone.
"That leadership is going to fight very hard," said one of them.
Comment: For a better idea of what is really going on in Syria please read the Sott Focus: Syria's Bloody CIA Revolution - A Distraction? by Joe Quinn.
For additional information read:
Mossad, Blackwater, CIA Led Operations in Homs
Wikileaks: US-led NATO Troops Operate Inside Syria