Apple has vowed to route out children from its vast workforce after an audit in China revealed one of the company's component makers employed over 70 underage workers. The tech giant increased its audits by 72 percent in 2012 following numerous scandals emerging over working conditions in its Chinese factories, including a spate of suicides in manufacturer Foxconn factories in 2010.

In an effort to create the "Super Soldier," the U.S. military spends hundreds of millions of dollars on psychiatric research programs that can only be described as science fiction-esque experimentation. The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), a mental health watchdog group, is dedicated to exposing these mental health abuses.

It's no secret that the nation's military forces long have been used as guinea pigs for psychological and pharmaceutical experiments. Recent history is littered with examples of the botched experiments brought to light in the form of lawsuits and congressional investigations. As for the troops, well, it appears they truly are expendable.

The military is spending billions of dollars on psychiatric drugs; a Nextgov investigation published on May 17, 2012 uncovered the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs having spent nearly $2 billion on antipsychotics and anti-anxiety drugs over the past decade, and the Dec. 29. 2012 Austin American-Statesman article, "Soaring cost of military drugs could hurt budget," quoted Department of Defense spending of $2.7 billion on antidepressants, totaling more than $4.5 billion in the last decade, despite more than 170 warnings issued by international drug regulatory agencies warning of drug induced suicide, violence, mania, psychosis, aggression, hallucinations, death and much more. The U.S. Military's Central Command policy even allows a 90-180 day supply of highly addictive psychiatric drugs before deployment.

There is also Seroquel, or "Serokill," as it now is referred to, which is not permitted for treatment of deploying troops with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, but, rather, is prescribed off-label to treat insomnia. The fact that "Serokill" is still in the military's formulary becomes more bizarre when one considers that the antipsychotic has been suspected of being linked to hundreds of "sudden cardiac deaths" among returning soldiers.

Yet, in desperation, top brass are continuing to turn to psychiatrists and psychologists who apparently have seen way too many sci-fi movies and seem ready "to go where no man has gone before," when it comes to altering the human mind. But when one becomes fully aware of the planned and on-going experiments, the famous line from The Fly comes to mind: "Heeeeelp meeeee!"

Liars, Gun Control and Money in a Culture of Violence¹


Gun control is a hot topic right now. As usual, COINTELPRO is in full force trying to control and define the debate within the narrowest possible field, limiting the questions people ask and presenting loud and obnoxious pundits who are supposed to represent "the people." We doubt the people are this mentally backwards.

Gun and weapon control has a long and illustrious³ history. It has never led to any tangible results. Murders are just as prevalent, if not more, than at any other time in history (rates of murder and violence tend to rise and fall throughout history⁴). If history is taken as a lesson, reliance on gun control in the forms of registration of ownership and limiting of the types of arms and ammunitions, has caused more deaths than it has ever prevented.

People are focused on the now. The collective memory of a civilization is very short. I have heard the number 3 years suggested as the average duration of recall for the ordinary person; sometimes it is more, sometimes less. I really don't know. I only know that it is shorter than it should be.

Each successive generation appears to feel as if they have moved beyond the influence of the problems of their forebears in a poorly defined and mentally retarded concept called 'progress'⁵. There is no such thing as progress. Man is a bit like a hamster in a cage; eventually he always comes full circle.⁶ No matter how hard he runs, he's never going to get anywhere until he learns to step off the damned wheel.

It's the same dance, just a different tune.

In this interview with Aaron Swartz from three years ago, we get a glimpse of the talent, energy and commitment to Truth that drove this pioneer of Internet freedom and civil liberties.

At least once a day, Robert Mackey and Paul Trucchio would pray to "the alligator god" that a human head, the only evidence of the brutal murder they committed, would be devoured by a reptile in the Everglades, two witnesses told jurors Thursday.

The witnesses, former roommates of the suspects during their 2007 stay in Volusia County, said Mackey and Trucchio each confessed to murdering Lorraine Hatzakorzian, 41, dismembering her, and tossing her head into an Everglades canal, where it was discovered near a boat ramp in western Broward County on April 28, 2007.

The head was the only part of the victim's body that was ever found, and even though no one knows where the victim met her demise, the location of her head resulted in a murder trial in Broward.

Mackey, 44, faces life in prison if convicted of second-degree murder or 30 years if convicted of being an accessory after-the-fact. He cannot be convicted of both crimes. Trucchio was sentenced to 30 years in prison after pleading no contest to the murder charge a year ago.

Prosecutors say Mackey and Trucchio beat Hatzakorzian to death when she tried to get away from them, then used their tree-trimming tools to cut her head off. Witnesses Doug Stine and Louis Caroleo, who roomed with Mackey and Trucchio in Port Orange from May to July 2007, each said they heard the men confess to the crime and discuss how they could get away with it.

A drunk uncle chopped up his 18-month-old niece then roasted her body parts in an oven, police said today.

Andrey Gadzhiev's sister Elena Titova, 29, had left him caring for the toddler for 15 minutes while she visited a neighbour.

When she returned there was no sign of the child and her intoxicated brother could not explain what had happened to her.

A family in Brazil have expressed their joy at finding their pet tortoise, Manuela, more than thirty years after she went missing.

She disappeared from the Almeida family home in Rio de Janeiro in 1982 and was never found despite an extensive and thorough search.

The family assumed she must have escaped through the front door, after builders who were working on the house at the time had left it open.

It was only after their father Leonel died earlier this month that the family started tidying and sorting his locked store room and made the discovery.

Leandro, Leonel's son, was clearing out boxes from his father's locked second-floor store room, and was throwing out what he thought was just a box with an old record player, when a neighbour pointed out the tortoise.

A self-styled Buenos Aires superhero who fought crime armed only with a costume, mask and pepper spray is now on weapons charges.

Thanks to an alleged shootout with muggers, the superhero has been charged with carrying an unlicensed gun, police said.

The man who called himself Menganno - Spanish for Joe Blow - and became famous in Argentine media is actually Oscar Lefosse, 43, a former cop who served from 1986 to 1996. It turns out his gun licence expired a year ago.

On Tuesday, Lefosse told police that three petty criminals opened fire on his car as he drove with his wife. He returned fire with his Glock pistol.

On his Facebook page, "Menganno" - 33,000 followers - posted a photo of what he said was his bullet-ridden car.

Here in the United States, where there is a reported rape every 6.2 minutes, and one in five women will be raped in her lifetime, the rape and gruesome murder of a young woman on a bus in New Delhi on December 16th was treated as an exceptional incident. The story of the alleged rape of an unconscious teenager by members of the Steubenville High School football team was still unfolding, and gang rapes aren't that unusual here either. Take your pick: some of the 20 men who gang-raped an 11-year-old in Cleveland, Texas, were sentenced in November, while the instigator of the gang rape of a 16-year-old in Richmond, California, was sentenced in October, and four men who gang-raped a 15-year-old near New Orleans were sentenced in April, though the six men who gang-raped a 14-year-old in Chicago last fall are still at large. Not that I actually went out looking for incidents: they're everywhere in the news, though no one adds them up and indicates that there might actually be a pattern.

There is, however, a pattern of violence against women that's broad and deep and horrific and incessantly overlooked. Occasionally, a case involving a celebrity or lurid details in a particular case get a lot of attention in the media, but such cases are treated as anomalies, while the abundance of incidental news items about violence against women in this country, in other countries, on every continent including Antarctica, constitute a kind of background wallpaper for the news.

An elite military Guards battalion is growing boobs because of the way they drill, a shock military medical report had revealed in Germany.

Dozens of soldiers in the Wachbataillon unit - which performs close drill displays at official events - are said to be stricken with a condition which stimulates male mammary glands.

Experts say the repeated slapping of the soldiers' heavy rifles in the same spot on the left side of their chests during drills has stimulated the glands to produce hormones, causing boobs to sprout on one side only.