Puppet MastersS


Light Sabers

SAS soldiers are training Syrian rebels in Iraq

Marco Giannangeli
Daily Express, UK
Sun, 22 Jul 2012 17:30 UTC
Image
MI6 HQ, London: keeping you distracted and under control since 1909
President Putin was last night warned that he is taking a "big gamble" with the lives of 20,000 Russians in Syria.

In the bloodiest week since troubles began last year, Russian sources confirmed that despite deploying an assault ship and more than 250 marines near the port of Tartus, Moscow would not pick up its citizens trapped in the fighting.

"Russia is taking a big gamble, and the stakes are high," warned Dr Jonathan Eyal, director of International Security Studies at the Royal United Services Institute.

"Moscow has contingency plans, and it has also raised the possibility of Russian military intervention to rescue its citizens, but from my conversations with senior Russian figures, there is no plan to implement it.

Comment: They try to make their activities sound so innocuous and benign when in actuality what they do is so evil:

London Bombings - The Facts Speak For Themselves

Read More...
Bell

City Officials Are Waging A War On Gardens

Sarah Laskow
Grist
Thu, 19 Jul 2012 16:58 UTC
Image
Across the country and even in Canada, cities' thinking about front lawns is more than a little bit antiquated. It comes down to this simple formulation: Grass good! Vegetables bad. We've heard one too many stories in which people decide to use their yards to grow some fresh vegetables, only to have city officials come down hard on them, forcing them to tear out their food or bulldozing the gardens themselves. If building a few bike lanes counts as a war on cars, this is definitely a war on gardens.

The latest skirmish took place in Drummondville, Quebec, where Josée Landry and Michel Beauchamp built what supporters describe as "a gorgeous and meticulously-maintained edible landscape full of healthy fruits and vegetables." (You can judge for yourself: It's the garden in the picture above.) Under the town's new code, a garden like that would be illegal. It covers too much of the yard. Under the new rules, only 30 percent of a yard's area can go towards growing vegetables, and the town's given the couple only two weeks to pull out their carefully planted veggies.
Read More...
Coffee

Best of the Web: Induced Mass Hypocrisy: The Nauseating Selective Grief of Diseased America

Arthur Silber
Once Upon a Time Blog
Tue, 24 Jul 2012 16:27 UTC
Civilian Casualities In Afghanistan
Many Americans hurl themselves with fundamentally false, deeply disturbed enthusiasm into public demonstrations of grief over the needless deaths of some human beings -- those human beings they see as being much like themselves, when the deaths happen in what could be their own neighborhood. As for all the murders committed by their government with a systematic dedication as insane as that of any serial killer: silence.
Read More...
Footprints

Ghana President Mills dead: presidential statement

Kwassi Kpodo and David Lewis
Reuters
Tue, 24 Jul 2012 16:19 UTC
Image
© Reuters/Joshua RobertsGhana's President John Evans Atta Mills speaks during a meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington March 8, 2012.
Ghana's President John Atta Mills has died unexpectedly, a presidential statement said, and an aide said his death occurred on Tuesday after he took ill on Monday night.

The death of the president of the world's No. 2 cocoa grower comes months before Mills was due to stand for re-election at the helm of the West African country that posted double-digit growth in 2011 and has been praised for its strong democracy in a turbulent region.

"It is with a heavy heart...that we announce the sudden and untimely death of the president of the Republic of Ghana," a statement sent to Reuters by the president's office said.
Read More...
Eye 1

Whistle blowers: 'NSA gathering information on every person in the United States'

Eric W. Dolan
Raw Story
Mon, 23 Jul 2012 15:51 UTC
Thomas Drake
Three National Security Agency whistle blowers told Viewpoint host Eliot Spitzer on Monday that the agency was gathering information on every person in the United States.

The FISA Amendments Act (FAA) of 2008 gave the NSA broad powers to monitor international phone calls and emails, and granted legal immunity to telecommunication companies that had participated in the Bush administration's wiretapping program prior to 2008. But former senior official Thomas Drake, former senior analyst Kirk Wiebe, and former technical director William Binney said the NSA was not only monitoring international communications - the agency had been spying on "the entire country."
Read More...
Heart - Black

London Olympics security firm G4S helps Israel abuse Palestinian children in solitary confinement

Adri Nieuwhof
Uruknet
Tue, 24 Jul 2012 15:41 UTC
G4S, the firm at the center of the debacle over security for the London 2012 Olympics, is helping Israel secure facilities where Palestinian children are imprisoned and severly abused.

Defence for Children-Palestine (DCI-Palestine) has released an urgent appeal to end the practice of holding Palestinian children from the West Bank in solitary confinement in facilities in Israel. The organization has documented 53 such cases since 2008.

The children have been held in solitary confinement mainly in Al Jalame and Petah Tikva interrogation centers. The security systems for Al Jalame detention facilities were provided by G4S Israel, according to a March 2011 report on the firm by Who Profits.

G4S Israel is a subsidiary of British-Danish security firm G4S and it is deeply involved in Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories, as well as in Israeli prisons and detention centers.

Meanwhile, G4S has lost its credibility because its incapacity to deliver on the contract to secure the London Olympics. The UK government stepped in and mobilized 3,500 military personnel to fill in the gap. Nick Buckles, G4S's CEO, was interrogated by members of parliament about the failure of his company. Buckles admitted that G4S's reputation is in tatters.


Comment: The treatment that these children get from Israel amounts to torture. We are hard pressed to think of a crime worse than that. Yet the world is content with bread and circus...

Read More...
Rocket

Iran threatens to 'strike out' at any intervention in Syria


RT
Tue, 24 Jul 2012 15:22 UTC

President Bashar al-Assad's regime has friends in the region poised "to strike out" in the event of an intervention into Syria, says a commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guards. The warning was particularly sent to "hated" Arab countries.

­"None of Syria's friends or the great front of resistance has yet entered the scene, and in the event that this happens, decisive blows will be struck at the enemy, especially the hated Arab rulers," Gen. Masoud Jazayeri, a spokesman of the country's Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Fars news agency.

No country in particular was mentioned. Iran remains a key ally of official Damascus, while leaders of such Gulf countries as Saudi Arabia, Jordan or Qatar openly support Syrian rebels.

The hawkish rhetoric heard from Iran comes on top of the exchange over Syria's chemical and biological arsenal, which the Arab country pledged Monday not to use against its own population, but only to combat "foreign aggressors."

Comment: Looks like Israel will get the war it so much desires after all.

With all this warmongering taking place as the world experiences the effects of bizarre weather - including cosmic weather - we are reminded of Victor Clube's assertion that military activity is needed to mask celestial events. See:

Reign of Fire: Meteorites, Wildfires, Planetary Chaos and the Sixth Extinction

Read More...
Pirates

Best of the Web: Eurozone danger mounts as Spain spins out of control

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
The Telegraph
Tue, 24 Jul 2012 00:47 UTC
Spain is battling to avert a fully-fledged sovereign rescue after borrowing costs spiralled out of control, with dangerous knock-on effects in Italy and Eastern Europe.
Image
© ReutersA worker sweeps outside Madrid's bourse on Monday.

The yields on closely-watched two-year debt surged by 78 basis points to a modern-era high of 6.42pc, leaving it unclear how long the country can continue funding itself. Italy's two-year yields vaulted to 4.6pc.

"We can't keep going like this for another 15 days," said Prof Miguel Angel Bernal from Madrid's Institute of Market Studies. "The European Central Bank has to bring out its heavy artillery."

Andrew Roberts, credit chief at Royal Bank of Scotland, said the dramatic spike in short-term borrowing costs marked a key inflexion point in the crisis, replicating the pattern seen in Greece, Ireland and Portugal as they lost access to market finance. "We are fast approaching the endgame," he said.

Exchange clearer LCH Clearnet raised margin requirements on both Spanish and Italian bonds, a move that will automatically cause further selling by some funds.

Comment: There's the story of a country who got out from under the IMF, ECB and World Bank Rule:
Iceland forgives mortgage debt of its population
Iceland, who was: "Bullied" Over Bank Debt
Iceland where there was a: Peaceful Revolution Ignored by Mainstream Media

Read More...
Dollar

Rich hide at least $21 trillion in tax havens

F. Brinley Bruton
NBC Bottom Line
Mon, 23 Jul 2012 08:30 UTC
Image
© Ken PyneBarclays, Goldman Sachs, JPMorganChase, BOA..
Thanks to lax international tax rules the world's super rich have siphoned at least $21 trillion -- more than 50 percent larger than the entire U.S. economy -- into secretive tax-free havens, according to a study by UK campaign group Tax Justice Network.

The report by James Henry, a former chief economist at international consultancy McKinsey & Co., shows how with the help of private banks the money has flowed into countries such as Switzerland and the Cayman Islands.

"We're basically talking about a black hole in the world economy," Henry told NBCNews.com.

The figure of $21 trillion in off-shore funds is conservative and the true sum could be as high as $32 trillion, Henry said.

According to the study, the world's top 50 private banks managed more than $12.3 trillion in 2010 in off-shore financial assets, up from $7.5 trillion five years earlier.
Read More...
Telephone

UK Hacking Scandal Spreads, 100-Plus New Claims


The Marietta Times
Tue, 24 Jul 2012 00:00 UTC
Rupert Murdoch
© PANews of the world, Rupert Murdoch leaving News International
London - British police are investigating new tabloids in the country's growing phone hacking scandal, including the Trinity Mirror PLC newspaper group as well as the U.K.'s Express Newspapers, a senior Scotland Yard official said Monday.

More than 100 new allegations of "data intrusion" also are being probed.

Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers' comments to a judge-led inquiry into media ethics indicated that the scandal, which erupted last year at Rupert Murdoch's News of the World and has involved hundreds of victims, could end up burning the now-defunct tabloid's U.K. competitors as well.

Akers gave as an example payments of tens of thousands of pounds (dollars) allegedly made to the same prison officer by all three newspaper groups.

"Our assessment is that there are reasonable grounds to suspect offenses have been committed and that the majority of these stories reveal very limited material of genuine public interest," Akers told Lord Justice Brian Leveson, who is leading a government inquiry into media misbehavior set up in the wake of the scandal.

Separately, prosecutors said they would announce Tuesday whether to levy criminal charges against an unspecified number of people caught up in the investigation.

So far more than 40 journalists and public officials have been arrested as part of the sprawling inquiry. Only a handful, including former News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks, have been charged. Brooks has denied any wrongdoing
Read More...