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Calls for Putin to Resign Flood Campaign Website

Gleb Bryanski and Maria Tsvetkova
Reuters
Thu, 12 Jan 2012 00:00 UTC
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© RIA Novosti/ReutersRussian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin speaks during a meeting of the Government Presidium
Calls for Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to resign and drop his presidential bid flooded his campaign website within minutes of its launch on Thursday, prompting administrators to limit public access.

Putin's spokesman and campaign official Dmitry Peskov said the website fell victim to a hacker attack in its early hours and some of the anti-Putin messages were spam. He denied that any messages were blacklisted for political reasons.

"All this fuss with calls for resignation is a kind of computer game that children are playing at. It has nothing to do with constructive dialogue," Peskov said.

Putin also unveiled his draft program for the March presidential poll, which acknowledged Russians' desire for faster change but barely touched on issues such as corruption and political reform, the subject of many voters' complaints.

Putin faced the biggest rallies of his 12-year rule last month when tens of thousands of people, many affluent and educated city dwellers, took to the streets to protest against alleged fraud in the December 4 parliamentary election.
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Attention

Best of the Web: Corruption of Science: Misconduct Pervades UK Research

Clive Cookson
Financial Times
Thu, 12 Jan 2012 13:16 UTC
Fraud
© ZippyCart.com
UK research is plagued with misconduct, according to a survey of 2,700 scientists by the British Medical Journal. It found that 13 per cent had first-hand knowledge of UK-based researchers deliberately altering or fabricating data, while 6 per cent were aware of misconduct that had not been properly investigated.

The BMJ released the results at a conference in London where experts pushed for stronger action to tackle what they said was a problem being ignored by many universities, hospitals and other scientific institutions.

Fiona Godlee, BMJ editor, said the survey showed "that there is a substantial number of cases and that UK institutions are failing to investigate adequately, if at all.

"The BMJ has been told of junior academics being advised to keep concerns to themselves to protect their careers, being bullied into not publishing their findings, or having their contracts terminated when they spoke out," she added.

Speaker after speaker at the meeting said Britain should not be complacent just because the most publicised cases of fraud in recent years had taken place in other countries. "The British public do not know what is going on," said Dr Godlee. "People need to realise that misconduct is affecting patients every day and it is a misappropriation of public funds."
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Pills

Best of the Web: The Big Pharma Corporatocracy and the Culture of Corruption

Karen De Coster
American Daily Herald
Mon, 09 Jan 2012 22:01 UTC
risperdal
© n/a
If you never watch People & Power on Al Jazeera, here is a very interesting edition of the show from 2010 on "Drug Money." This is a very good film that exposes the lies and fraud of Big Pharma and the medical establishment (one and the same), though the film leaves out investigation of the enabler of this powerful oligarchy, which is government.

Turn to the 7:00 mark and note the interview with the whistleblower from Pfizer who was trained to lie, and when he asked too many questions about Bextra and its off-label marketing he was put on administrative leave. When he and four other whistleblowers were awarded $7.4 million from Pfizer in a legal settlement, the company "accepted full responsibility for improper past promotional practices" for Bextra, yet it denied the allegations made by those five individuals. The Bextra case is one of the largest drug settlements ever.

Also, at 13:00 of the video is the story of Risperdal, a drug marketed for the psychiatric industry for treating schizophrenia and other psychiatric "disorders." It has also been used to treat bipolar disorder children. Many male children developed breasts from using the drug. A professor from Harvard Medical School, Joseph Biederman, is the guy who spearheaded the effort "to fuel a controversial 40-fold increase from 1994 to 2003 in the diagnosis of pediatric bipolar disorder." A quote from a brief piece in the New York Times:
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Radar

U.S. military moves carriers, denies Iran link

Phil Stewart & Reed Stevenson
Reuters
Wed, 11 Jan 2012 21:00 UTC
Washington - The U.S. military said on Wednesday that a new aircraft carrier strike group had arrived in the Arabian Sea and that another was on its way to the region, but denied any link to recent tensions with Iran and portrayed the movements as routine.
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© UnknownA new naval strike group arrives in the Arabian Sea.

The shift in the powerful U.S. naval assets comes at a moment of heightened tensions with Iran, which has threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz - the world's most important oil shipping lane - if U.S. and EU sanctions over its nuclear program cut off its oil exports.

The U.S. military has said it will halt any blockade of the strategic strait and the top U.S. naval officer acknowledged on Tuesday that preparing for a potential conflict there was something that "keeps me awake at night."

Still, the Pentagon denied any direct link between recent tensions and the movement of aircraft carriers.

Comment: The article implies a preparation for war, while simultaneously downplaying the possibility - a classic propaganda tactic, usually resulting in cognitive dissonance in the reader.

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Stormtrooper

Be very afraid: Stephen Harper is inventing a new Canada

Gerald Caplan
The Globe and Mail
Fri, 16 Dec 2011 11:43 UTC
Stephen Harper Canada
© Jonathan Hayward / The Canadian PressPrime Minister Stephen Harper waves to the crowd following his election-night victory speech in Calgary on May 2, 2011.
Stephen Harper first became Prime Minister in 2006 and has already dramatically transformed the old Canada. But with no election due for four more years, we ain't seen nothing yet.

It's in the nature of true believers and ideologues to believe that any means to their sacred ends are justified. This makes them extremely dangerous people. It's also typical of such people that they're often motivated by unfathomable resentment and anger, a compulsion not just to better but to destroy their adversaries. These are good descriptions of Stephen Harper and those closest to him.

There was never a Trudeauland or Mulroneyland or Chrétienland, but as The Globe's Lawrence Martin has made us understand, there is already a Harperland whose nature is quite apparent. Like the American conservatives whom the Harperites so envy, our government has concocted a new reality of its own that it is systematically imposing on the Canadian people. The values and moral code of Mr. Harper's new Canada are clear.

A central tenet of the new reality is the repudiation of the need for anything as irrelevant as evidence, facts or rationality whenever they are inconvenient. As in cancelling the long-form census, without a shred of reason. As when Injustice Minister Nicholson defends his back-to-the-jungle crime bills by reminding us of a Harperland article of faith: "We don't govern on the basis of statistics." Or, as we now know, on the basis of the findings of serious experts both in and out of the government.
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Eye 2

US: Are Drones Watching You?

Jennifer Lynch
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Tue, 10 Jan 2012 21:21 UTC
drones
© n/a
Today, EFF filed suit against the Federal Aviation Administration seeking information on drone flights in the United States. The FAA is the sole entity within the federal government capable of authorizing domestic drone flights, and for too long now, it has failed to release specific and detailed information on who is authorized to fly drones within US borders.

Up until a few years ago, most Americans didn't know much about drones or unmanned aircraft. However, the U.S. military has been using drones in its various wars and conflicts around the world for more than 15 years, using the Predator drone for the first time in Bosnia in 1995, and the Global Hawk drone in Afghanistan in 2001. In the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the US military has used several different types of drones to conduct surveillance for every major mission in the war.

In Libya, President Obama authorized the use of armed Predator drones, even though we were not technically at war with the country. And most recently in Yemen, the CIA used drones carrying Hellfire missiles to kill an American citizen, the cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. In all, almost one in every three U.S. warplanes is a drone, according to the Congressional Research Service. In 2005, the number was only 5%.

Now drones are also being used domestically for non-military purposes, raising significant privacy concerns. For example, this past December, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) purchased its ninth drone. It uses these drones inside the United States to patrol the U.S. borders - which most would argue is within its agency mandate - but it also uses them to aid state and local police for routine law enforcement purposes. In fact, the Los Angeles Times reported in December that CBP used one of its Predators to roust out cattle rustlers in North Dakota.
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Eye 1

US: Homeland Security Watches Twitter, Social Media and Websites

Mark Hosenball
Reuters
Wed, 11 Jan 2012 21:02 UTC
A monitor displays an attacking team's progress
© Reuters/Jim UrquhartA monitor displays an attacking team's progress during a drill at a Department of Homeland Security cyber security defense lab at the Idaho National Laboratory in Idaho Falls, Idaho, September 30, 2011.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security's command center routinely monitors dozens of popular websites, including Facebook, Twitter, Hulu, WikiLeaks and news and gossip sites including the Huffington Post and Drudge Report, according to a government document.

A "privacy compliance review" issued by DHS last November says that since at least June 2010, its national operations center has been operating a "Social Networking/Media Capability" which involves regular monitoring of "publicly available online forums, blogs, public websites and message boards."

The purpose of the monitoring, says the government document, is to "collect information used in providing situational awareness and establishing a common operating picture."

The document adds, using more plain language, that such monitoring is designed to help DHS and its numerous agencies, which include the U.S. Secret Service and Federal Emergency Management Agency, to manage government responses to such events as the 2010 earthquake and aftermath in Haiti and security and border control related to the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia.
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Bad Guys

US - Revolving Door: From Top Futures Regulator to Top Futures Lobbyist

Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone
Wed, 11 Jan 2012 15:50 UTC
Walter Lukken
© Bill Clark/Roll Call/Getty ImagesWalter Lukken returns to the witness table before the start of the Senate Appropriations Committee Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee and Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee joint hearing.

While America focused on New Hampshire, a classic example of revolving-door politics took place in Washington, going almost completely unnoticed. It's a move that ranks up there with the hire of Louisiana congressman Billy Tauzin to head the pharmaceutical lobbying conglomerate PhRMA -- at a salary of over $2 million a year -- immediately after Tauzin helped ram through the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill, a huge handout to the pharmaceutical industry.

In this case, the hire involves Walter Lukken, who toward the end of the Bush years was the acting head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. As the chief regulator of the commodities markets, it was Lukken's job to spot and combat speculative abuses and manipulations that might have led to artificial price hikes and other disruptions.

In 2008, the last full year of his tenure, Lukken presided over some of the worst chaos in the commodities markets in recent history, with major disruptions in the markets for food products like wheat, cotton, soybeans, and rice, and energy commodities like oil.

Most notoriously, 2008 saw a historic spike in the price of oil futures, an enormously destructive speculative bubble that peaked in July of that year at the lunatic high price of $146 per barrel (Goldman, Sachs at the height of the mania was telling investors oil might go to $200 a barrel).
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Red Flag

Dear Americans, We Are Surrounded

Robert Wenzel
Economic Policy Journal
Tue, 10 Jan 2012 00:00 UTC
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© occupydallas.wordpress.com
Occasionally in the past, I have received emails from readers asking me if it was time to leave America because of some new infringement on our rights.

In the past, I always responded to these emails by saying that it really depended on who the reader was. Anyone, I usually replied, who was in the securities-brokerage industry or the medical profession should start looking, because of how regulated those industries are. If on the other hand, a surfer dude just living for the next wave, would have little reason to be concerned.

Things have changed so dramatically in the last 6 to 12 months that I now believe you are being irresponsible ,no matter who you are, if you do not have a bagged packed and are ready to move at a moments notice.

It is not as though there is some new country, or land where the breeze blows lightly 365 days a year, and where there is no government intrusion into your life, but things could get so bad in the United States that many places may start to look like happy alternatives.

The United States is a very rich country with only minor government harassment at this time. For the most part, we all have smart phones, internet connections, wear fashionable clothes and eat decent food. I now believe this situation could change at anytime. Please note: I am not saying it will change but that it could, very quickly.
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Whistle

Best of the Web: Monsanto's GMO Corn Approved Despite 45,000 Public Comments in Opposition

Mike Barrett
Activist Post
Tue, 10 Jan 2012 14:04 UTC
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© Activist Post
As previously reported, while people were de-stressing and enjoying their much needed time off during the holidays, the United States Department of Agriculture announced its approval of Monsanto's 'drought tolerant' genetically engineered corn.

The decision to give the green light to Monsanto regarding their GE corn didn't seem too difficult for the Obama Administration, despite receiving nearly 45,000 public comments voicing opposition and only 23 comments in favor since comments opened.

Prepare to see this new GE corn unleashed into the environment as well as the American food supply.
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