Dannemora, New York - Once a psycho, always a psycho. Even before Peter Braunstein walked into a visiting room in this drum-tight maximum-security prison and opened his mouth to speak, it was obvious that nothing had changed.

Inmate number 07A3578, aka The Fiend, had dark brown scorch marks on his thumb from smoking cigarettes right down to the nub.



Whether it was a symptom of his mental condition or the drugs used to treat it, he didn't feel the pain because of the lack of sensation in his fingers.

Of course, Braunstein lacks sensation in every atom of his being.

The man who posed as a firefighter on Halloween night 2005, terrorizing a Manhattan woman for 13 hours in her apartment, appears incapable of empathy, logic, perspective or remorse.

The leaders of Libya and Venezuela have called on Africa and South America to create a new alliance to counter Western dominance.

They were speaking at the second South America-Africa (ASA) summit held in the Venezuelan island of Margarita, attended by nearly 30 leaders.

Venezuela's Hugo Chavez called on the two continents to unite to secure prosperity for future generations.

Libya's Muammar Gaddafi said he was in favour of a military-style pact.

A landmark ruling in a recent Kansas Supreme Court case may have given millions of distressed homeowners the legal wedge they need to avoid foreclosure. In Landmark National Bank v. Kesler, 2009 Kan. LEXIS 834, the Kansas Supreme Court held that a nominee company called MERS has no right or standing to bring an action for foreclosure. MERS is an acronym for Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, a private company that registers mortgages electronically and tracks changes in ownership. The significance of the holding is that if MERS has no standing to foreclose, then nobody has standing to foreclose - on 60 million mortgages. That is the number of American mortgages currently reported to be held by MERS. Over half of all new U.S. residential mortgage loans are registered with MERS and recorded in its name. Holdings of the Kansas Supreme Court are not binding on the rest of the country, but they are dicta of which other courts take note; and the reasoning behind the decision is sound.

At the time of the 'serendipitous' encounter on Sunset Boulevard, Stills was living at the home of Barry Friedman, a former circus clown, fire-eater, TV producer, and freelance publicist. To say that his home was a bit odd would probably be an understatement. According to folkie Nurit Wilde, "It had a bathtub in the middle of the living room and a secret room behind the bathroom where people carried on liaisons." The massive bathtub sat right in front of the equally massive fireplace. As Friedman himself would later acknowledge, "This was a very strange house."

Not strange by canyon standards, perhaps, but strange nonetheless. Stranger homes can certainly be found, such as in the Holly Mont neighborhood near the base of nearby Beachwood Canyon. One such home, pictured above, is described in the book Haunted Hollywood. The house isn't actually haunted, of course, but it does contain some rather unusual features, as a past owner discovered: "the house's most startling feature - a secret passageway behind a built-in bookshelf he'd discovered during remodeling. It connected to a series of subterranean tunnels linking several houses on the hillside...While exploring the tunnel beneath his house, Grey found a makeshift grave. The headstone read 'Regina 1922.'"

Nothing weird about that, I suppose. Nor about the fact that the house pictured below, which sits right next-door, is also linked through the underground tunnel complex.

Lonnie Wolfe wrote a report in 1981 entitled The Haig-Kissinger Depopulation Policy, in which he states that:

Investigations by EIR [Executive Intelligence Review] have uncovered a planning apparatus operating outside the control of the White House whose sole purpose is to reduce the world's population by 2 billion people through war, famine, disease and any other means necessary. This apparatus, which includes various levels of the government is determining U.S. foreign policy. In every political hotspot - El Salvador, the so-called arc of crisis in the Persian Gulf, Latin America, Southeast Asia and in Africa - the goal of U.S. foreign policy is population reduction. The targeting agency for the operation is the National Security Council's Ad Hoc Group on Population Policy. Its policy-planning group is in the U.S. State Department's Office of Population Affairs, established in 1975 by Henry Kissinger. This group drafted the Carter administration's Global 2000 document, which calls for global population reduction, and the same apparatus is conducting the civil war in El Salvador as a conscious depopulation project.

"There is a single theme behind all our work-we must reduce population levels," said Thomas Ferguson, the Latin American case officer for the State Department's Office of Population Affairs (OPA). "Either they [governments] do it our way, through nice clean methods or they will get the kind of mess that we have in El Salvador, or in Iran, or in Beirut. Population is a political problem. Once population is out of control it requires authoritarian government, even fascism, to reduce it. "The professionals," said Ferguson, "aren't interested in lowering population for humanitarian reasons. That sounds nice. We look at resources and environmental constraints. We look at our strategic needs, and we say that this country must lower its population - or else we will have trouble".

With little in the way of visible evidence in the world around them, it's understandable that someone reading this report in 1981 would mentally file it away as a Crazy Conspiracy Theory. For all we know, in 1981 we might have done the same thing. In August of 2009 however, denial of what is happening around us is no longer an option except for the most deluded. Depopulation policy is active and underway, it is the culmination of an actual plan long in the making by the world's psychopathic elite. SOTT's editors and readers have been seeing the signs for years, and this month's events bring the dread reality a step closer to fruition as the war against people opens on all fronts. All and everything that can destroy us physically, mentally, psychologically and spiritually has been unleashed. Through the blunt force of military warfare, eugenics programs disguised as medical practices, bio-engineered food, wholesale plundering and destruction of resources, the spreading of toxins and psychological warfare comes the clear and present danger of brutal and universal oppression.

And yet there is hope, which begins in awareness. And so we proceed...

Leader of Lebanon's most powerful Druze clan Walid Jumblatt says Lebanon can turn to Iran to acquire the weapons it needs for protection against its enemies.

Speaking to Press TV in Beirut on Saturday, Jumblatt warned about a possible Israeli aggression against Lebanon, saying: "They (Israelis) are not hiding that, they are saying we will attack or we will one day come to Lebanon again."

He added that Washington refuses to provide Lebanon with its essential armament, fearing that the weapons could be used against its ally, Israel.

"Until now all the weapons delivered to the Lebanese army were American weapons or weapons from the Arab world," Jumblatt said.

An inscription praising Joseph Stalin at a refurbished metro station in Moscow has sparked a new controversy over the Soviet political and architectural heritage.

Passengers at the Kurskaya metro station, unveiled after the repairs, have been surprised recently to see it decorated with a powerful symbol of the past. A restored inscription contains a line from an old version of the Soviet national anthem.

The line reads: "Stalin brought us up to be loyal to people, inspired us to labor and feats." Unveiling the decoration coincided with the death of Sergey Mikhalkov, the author of the Soviet Union's and Russia's national anthems. In 1977, Mikhalkov had to renew the anthem, removing the name of Stalin from it.

The Nevada cop who rescued a woman raped by sicko Phillip Garrido 33 years ago lambasted authorities on Saturday for allowing the sex fiend to go free.

Long before Garrido abducted Jaycee Lee Dugard, Reno Police Officer Clifford Conrad caught the psycho raping a 25-year-old casino worker he also had kidnapped.

"Someone dropped the ball," the retired Conrad, 66, told the Daily News.

"I thought he got sentenced to 50 years to life, so how he got out after 10 years, I'll never know. I guess a lot of people dropped the ball his whole life."

"I don't care if it's a white cat or a black cat. It's a good cat so long as it catches mice." -- Deng Xiaoping, who opened China to foreign investment after 1978

China is being called a "miracle economy." It seems to have decoupled from the rest of the world, preserving an 8% growth rate while the rest of the world sinks into the worst recession since the 1930s. How is that phenomenal growth rate possible, when other countries relying heavily on exports have suffered major downturns and remain in the doldrums? Economist Richard Wolff skeptically observes:

We now have a situation in the world where we have a global capitalist crisis. Everywhere, consumption is down. Everywhere, people are buying fewer goods, including goods from China. How is it possible that in that society, so dependent on the world economy, they could now have an explosive growth? Their stock market is now 100 percent higher than at its low -- nothing remotely like that hardly anywhere in the world, certainly not in the United States or Europe. How is that possible? In order to believe what the Chinese are saying, you would have to agree that in a matter of months, at most a year, no more, they have been able to transform their economy from an export-based powerhouse to a domestically focused industrial engine. Nowhere in the world has that ever taken less than decades.

Philadelphia - A seldom-employed psychopath was sentenced to 120 years in prison Wednesday for making a huge cache of child pornography that shows him sexually assaulting a dozen children, including infants at a girlfriend's in-home day care.

The FBI found John Jackey Worman with more than 1 million images of child pornography when they arrested him in suburban Philadelphia in 2007.