What is the best way to change public perception on any topic? Through entertainment. The battle to control us through changing (or creating) our opinions is as old as history. Carefully disseminated disinformation was first documented in ancient Greece, when playwrights and poets created dramas for the sole purpose of indoctrinating their audience to a certain set of morals, standards, and beliefs. When creating his empire, Macedonian king Alexander the Great inundated the places he conquered with his image, on the coins, adorning building, and in the form of statues. Grand stories were written and shared about his generosity and the legends that were created on his behalf to this day make him larger than life.

In 324 B.C.E., Alexander requested that he be deified so that he could carryout a scheme of repatriating 20,000 Greek exiles, which was contrary to the established laws of the League of Corinth. He became the son of Zeus, and his face soon appeared on coins, replacing that of Heracles, the real mythological son of Zeus. He commissioned, or allowed to be built, many statues and monuments in his honor, and representations of his portrait were to be found everywhere in his empire, adorning pottery, coins, buildings, and formal art (P. M. Taylor, 1990, p. 31). Alexander was the first to recognize that to maintain cohesion and control over his vast empire, such propaganda symbols could serve as a constant reminder of the various subjugated populations just where the center of power resided. (source)

So through works of fiction, the unacceptable became acceptable, the alien became familiar, and the minds of the masses were changed and manipulated.

A man walking his dog has reportedly found a royal python on the banks of a canal in Doncaster.

The RSPCA said the three-feet-long female snake was probably abandoned by its owner.

The animal welfare charity did not give any more details as to where it was found or when at this stage.

Kim Greaves, a reptile expert, said the RSPCA would prosecute the person who dumped the reptile if they were found.

Ms Greaves added that the snake would probably not live long in the wild and the problem of abandoned animals in the area was "getting absolutely out of hand."

She said: "This is a happy ending for this particular snake."

"But more and more of my colleagues are faced with abandoned animals, not just snakes and reptiles, but rabbits, guinea pigs, ferrets and cats and dogs.

"It is a sign of the times, I'm afraid,"

The non-venomous royal python is found in Africa and survives on a diet of rodents.

A large black snake which popped up out of a drain in a back garden in Cleethorpes - in front of a shocked Cleethorpes family - may not be the only one!

The Peck family were shocked to see the Mexican King Snake slither out of the grate covering a drain at their home in Mill Place.

Reptile experts say the constrictor snake - which can grow up to 4ft long - may have hatched from a nest of eggs, which could have been laid in the sewers of Grimsby and Cleethorpes.

Petrified Linda Peck said: "My husband Geoff and I walked past our back door, which is made of glass, and saw what looked like a very large slug on the drain.

A crowd gathered outside an Oxhey home yesterday, taking photographs of an escaped metre-long snake.

The red, black and yellow striped reptile was spotted outside a house in Grover Road.

Peter Trescak, a witness and Grover Road resident, said: "We found out that the snake is most probably a milk snake but it can also be a deadly coral snake, which resemble each other."

Police were contacted and a Rural Operational Support Team with special equipment arrived at the scene to remove the snake.

Mr Trescak added: "It was definitely a very exciting day for a normally quiet street."

Russia has orbited an Israeli communications satellite, the Federal Space Agency reported Sunday.

The comsat was launched with the help of a Zenit-2SB carrier rocket at 00:05 Moscow Time Sunday (20:05 GMT Saturday) from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan.

With the U.S. poised to lead yet another bombing campaign, this time against Syria, a sense of deja-vu is hanging in the air. President Obama tells us it will be a quick two-day airstrike to knock out Syrian defenses and end the country's 'reign of terror led by the brutal dictator Bashar al-Assad'. The bad guys will be defeated and the good guys can award themselves peace prizes for making the world a safer place.

This grand narrative is, of course, all complete and utter horse-hockey. This week on SOTT Talk Radio we'll be taking a closer look at the alleged chemical weapons attack that precipitated the major recent upswing in bellicose war rhetoric. WMDs, evil dictators killing their own people, UN inspectors, quick little 'humanitarian' wars... we've heard it all before, we know what it led to and what was really behind it.

It's easy enough to see through the propaganda the American, British, French and Israeli governments 'catapult' out there to justify and reinforce the Big Lie that is the 'clash of civilizations'. We wonder though, with signs of major global climatological and environmental upheaval now manifesting daily, if there's a primary underlying reason for launching another major, and extremely risky, war that might easily become a regional or global war.

Do the Powers That Be know that 'something wicked this way comes'? And are they trying to deliberately embroil humanity in the chaos of war in an effort to distract us from the very real and present danger posed by incoming space rocks?

Running Time: 02:21:00

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Iran's Majlis has approved the provisions of a bill that obliges the Iranian administration to assess and follow up ways of suing the US for its involvement in the 1953 coup d'état in the country.

In their Sunday open session, the Iranian parliamentarians approved the first and second articles of the bill.

Under the first article, the Iranian administration will be bound to form a committee to assess the material and non-material damages arising from the 1953 coup d'état against the democratically-elected then-Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq and provide the Majlis with ways to claim the redress.

The committee, which will report to Majlis on a quarterly basis, is comprised of the foreign minister (as the head of the body), prosecutor general, intelligence minister, representative of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps, economy minister as well as heads of Majlis committees on national security and foreign policy, legal and judiciary affairs, and planning and budget.

The second article of the bill obliges the administration to follow up the claims through relevant national and international bodies after the claims are calculated.

Ugandan inflation accelerated at the fastest pace in 12 months in August as food prices jumped, the Uganda Bureau of Statistics said.

The inflation rate climbed to 7.3 percent from 5.1 percent in July, as food costs surged 13 percent on an annual basis, compared with a 0.3 percent decline the month before, Chris Mukiza, director of macroeconomic statistics, told reporters today in the capital, Kampala. Prices rose 2.6 percent in the month, after a 0.6 percent increase in July, he said.

Higher food prices were the result of lower supplies "to the market due to the effects of a long dry spell that affected most parts of the country," Mukiza said. Food prices make up 27 percent of the consumer-price basket.

Controversial godman Asaram Bapu, accused of sexually assaulting a minor, was arrested by Jodhpur police from his ashram here late tonight.

Armed with a medical report that the godman was fit to be interrogated, a team of Jodhpur police arrested 72-year-old Asaram and whisked him in a white jeep about half an hour after the stroke of midnight, after waiting for nearly eight hours at the ashram.

"Asaram Bapu has been arrested and taken away by Jodhpur police", said Superintendent of Police (Indore West) Anil Singh Kushwah told reporters here.

Asked where Asaram was taken to, Kushwah said, "I have no information on that", amidst reports that he was headed to Indore Airport to be flown to Jodhpur where an FIR was filed by a 16-year-old girl alleging she was sexually assaulted by the godman at his ashram in the Rajasthan city.

Meanwhile, SSP Indore Rakesh Gupta told PTI that Asaram has been lodged inside Indore airport and would be taken to Delhi by a morning flight on Sunday, and then to Jodhpur. Security around Indore airport has been beefed up.

As the vehicle carrying Asaram and Jodhpur police made its way out of the ashram in Indore, hundreds of his supporters, watched by posse of policemen, shouted slogans against the police and supporting the self-styled godman.

The 50th anniversary of the March on Washington---in which Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. made his famed "I Have a Dream" speech---has recently won renewed attention from various print and electronic media in the United States. But the more attention given to King's extraordinary speech, the less we seem to know about King himself, the less aware we are about the serious challenges he was presenting, challenges that remain urgent and ignored to this very day.

The March on Washington took place on 28 August 1963. Despite repeated fear mongering by certain commentators and public officials who predicted there would be violence in the streets---over 250,000 people descended upon Washington D.C. in a massive show of unity and peaceful determination.

I was there. About two-thirds of the demonstrators were African-American, and about one-third were white. After all these years I still recall how gripped I was by the vast sweep of the crowd moving like democracy's infantry across the nation's capital, determined to awaken "our leaders" in Congress and the White House.

The high moment of the day was Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. It was a call to freedom and enfranchisement for a people who had endured centuries of slavery followed by segregation and lynch-mob rule. In his speech King reminded us that "the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land."

He went on: "The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to distrust all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny and their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom."

King continued to stoke the new militancy: "We can never be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. . . . Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice."