Archived documents have revealed that Mussolini, who ruled his country with fear and forged a disastrous alliance with Nazi Germany, got his start in politics in 1917 with the help of a £100 weekly wage from MI5.
Mussolini, then a 34-year-old journalist, worked to ensure that Italy continued to fight alongside the allies in the First World War by publishing propaganda in his paper, the Guardian reports. He was also willing to send Italian army veterans to beat up peace protesters in Milan.
Mussolini's payments were authorised by Sir Samuel Hoare, an MP and MI5's man in Rome, who ran a staff of 100 British intelligence officers in Italy at the time.
Cambridge historian Peter Martland, who discovered details of the deal struck with the future dictator, told the Guardian: "Britain's least reliable ally in the war at the time was Italy after revolutionary Russia's pull out from the conflict. Mussolini was paid £100 a week from the autumn of 1917 for at least a year to keep up the pro-war campaigning – equivalent to about £6,000 a week today."
Mr Hoare, later to become Lord Templewood, mentioned the recruitment in memoirs in 1954, but Mr Martland stumbled on details of the payments for the first time while scouring Mr Hoare's papers.
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Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Italian dictator Benito Mussolini 'was recruited by MI5'
Oil tycoon: Our troops died ... we're "entitled" to sweet contracts in Iraq!
...Another consortium headed by Exxon is still in the running for one project, but that doesn't mollify hedge-fund gazillionaire -- and natural gas honcho -- T-Boone Pickens. He's none-too-happy:
Oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens told Congress on Wednesday that U.S. energy companies are "entitled" to some of Iraq's crude because of the large number of American troops that lost their lives fighting in the country and the U.S. taxpayer money spent in Iraq.
[...]
"They're opening them (oil fields) up to other companies all over the world ... We're entitled to it," Pickens said of Iraq's oil. "Heck, we even lost 5,000 of our people, 65,000 injured and a trillion, five hundred billion dollars."
[...]
"We leave there with the Chinese getting the oil," Pickens said.
Nothing new -- In August T-Boone called on the administration to "demand" oil contracts from Iraq before considering a withdrawal ($$). But it is an unusually brazen admission that many energy bigs did in fact consider "blood-for-oil" to be a straightforward deal...
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Spotter cards: What they look like and how they work
This kind of highly confidential document – pictured above – is rarely seen by the public.
These so-called "spotter cards" are issued by police to identify individuals they consider to be potential troublemakers because they have appeared at a number of demonstrations.
The photographs are drawn from police intelligence files. This card was apparently dropped at a demonstration against Britain's largest arms fair in 2005.
H is Mark Thomas, the comedian and political activist. Asked why it was justifiable to put Thomas, who has no criminal record, on this card, the Metropolitan police replied: "We do not discuss intelligence we may hold in relation to individuals."
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U.S. official resigns over Afghan war
When Matthew Hoh joined the Foreign Service early this year, he was exactly the kind of smart civil-military hybrid the administration was looking for to help expand its development efforts in Afghanistan.
A former Marine Corps captain with combat experience in Iraq, Hoh had also served in uniform at the Pentagon, and as a civilian in Iraq and at the State Department. By July, he was the senior U.S. civilian in Zabul province, a Taliban hotbed.
But last month, in a move that has sent ripples all the way to the White House, Hoh, 36, became the first U.S. official known to resign in protest over the Afghan war, which he had come to believe simply fueled the insurgency.
"I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan," he wrote Sept. 10 in a four-page letter to the department's head of personnel. "I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end."
The reaction to Hoh's letter was immediate. Senior U.S. officials, concerned that they would lose an outstanding officer and perhaps gain a prominent critic, appealed to him to stay.
U.S. Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry brought him to Kabul and offered him a job on his senior embassy staff. Hoh declined. From there, he was flown home for a face-to-face meeting with Richard C. Holbrooke, the administration's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.
"We took his letter very seriously, because he was a good officer," Holbrooke said in an interview. "We all thought that given how serious his letter was, how much commitment there was, and his prior track record, we should pay close attention to him."
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Brother of Afghan leader is said to be on C.I.A. payroll
Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country's booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.
The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.'s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai's home.
The financial ties and close working relationship between the intelligence agency and Mr. Karzai raise significant questions about America's war strategy, which is currently under review at the White House.
The ties to Mr. Karzai have created deep divisions within the Obama administration. The critics say the ties complicate America's increasingly tense relationship with President Hamid Karzai, who has struggled to build sustained popularity among Afghans and has long been portrayed by the Taliban as an American puppet. The C.I.A.'s practices also suggest that the United States is not doing everything in its power to stamp out the lucrative Afghan drug trade, a major source of revenue for the Taliban.
More broadly, some American officials argue that the reliance on Ahmed Wali Karzai, the most powerful figure in a large area of southern Afghanistan where the Taliban insurgency is strongest, undermines the American push to develop an effective central government that can maintain law and order and eventually allow the United States to withdraw.
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'A science experiment being sabotaged by its own future self?'
From Large Hadron Collider goes Back to the Future by Peter Evans, CBCNews.ca
...Two scientists have hypothesized in a series of papers that the LHC's stated aim of finding the Higgs boson might be so abhorrent to nature that mysterious forces are traveling back through time and sabotaging the experiment before it can succeed.
"The potential production of a large number of Higgs particles at a certain future time would cause a pre-arrangement such that Higgs particle production can be avoided," theoretical physicists Holger Bech Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya rather clumsily wrote in a recent research paper.
Unlike the experiment itself, reaction to the paper has been predictable. Blogger mouths were agape. The New York Times chimed in.
Despite the attention, the two aren't proposing a possible solution to the problem. Indeed, if the powers that be are bound and determined to see the LHC fail, there isn't much humanity can do about it, they concede. Their proposal was merely to implement a sort of random-number generator via card drawing into the overall LHC experiment.
If an impossibly rare sequence of numbers came up, it could be construed as proof of high-level meddling, they posited. "When the Higgs particles are to be produced, we must carry out a retest to elucidate whether there could be an influence from the future," the physicists wrote.
A science experiment being sabotaged by its own future self?
That two respected scientists would put forward a theory reminiscent of Marty McFly's journey through time to ensure his parents fall in love speaks to the collider's intrigue in the scientific community and the world at large. ...
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Top 25 censored stories for 2010
Top Censored Stories of 2009/2010
- 1. US Congress Sells Out to Wall Street
- 2. US Schools are More Segregated Today than in the 1950s
- 3. Toxic Waste Behind Somali Pirates
- 4. Nuclear Waste Pools in North Carolina
- 5. Europe Blocks US Toxic Products
- 6. Lobbyists Buy Congress
- 7. Obama's Military Appointments Have Corrupt Past
- 8. Bailed out Banks and America's Wealthiest Cheat IRS Out of Billions
- 9. US Arms Used for War Crimes in Gaza
- 10. Ecuador Declares Foreign Debt Illegitimate
- 11. Private Corporations Profit from the Occupation of Palestine
- 12. Mysterious Death of Mike Connell—Karl Rove's Election Thief
- 13. Katrina's Hidden Race War
- 14. Congress Invested in Defense Contracts
- 15. World Bank's Carbon Trade Fiasco
- 16. US Repression of Haiti Continues
- 17. The ICC Facilitates US Covert War in Sudan
- 18. Ecuador's Constitutional Rights of Nature
- 19. Bank Bailout Recipients Spent to Defeat Labor
- 20. Secret Control of the Presidential Debates
- 21. Recession Causes States to Cut Welfare
- 22. Obama's Trilateral Commission Team
- 23. Activists Slam World Water Forum as a Corporate-Driven Fraud
- 24. Dollar Glut Finances US Military Expansion
- 25. Fast Track Oil Exploitation in Western Amazon
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Obama’s H1N1 swine flu national emergency evidences vaccine "market-building" for mass murder
By Dr Leonard Horowitz and Sherri Kane, 27 October 2009
Los Angeles–President Obama's declared H1N1 emergency cannot be reconciled by either vaccine shortages or flu cases; only by medical “market-building,” vaccination intoxications, and mass murder for population reduction says common sense and mounting evidence.
Over the weekend, initial reports from Reuters News Service and Fox News stated that the President's declaration was intended to prepare the country in case of “a rapid increase in illness that may overburden health care resources.” The media quoted an unidentified administration official saying, “It's important to note that this is a proactive measure — not a response to a new development.” This action was “similar to disaster declarations issued before hurricanes hit coastal areas,” Reuters reported.
Why would the Obama administration anticipate an H1N1 “hurricane” to hit when Purdue researchers concluded last week the epidemic was expected to peak this week? In fact, too soon for vaccines to be helpful.
Thus, most people getting vaccinated now risk side effects for NOTHING–no benefit what-so-ever!
Furthermore, CBS News determined last week the CDC's reported H1N1 cases had been overblown up to 97 percent. Only about 1,000 people have died of H1N1 since April's Mexican outbreak. That is merely 1/18th, or less than 6%, of expected deaths from a normal seasonal flu during the same time period.
It is highly suspicious that David A. Paterson, New York State's Governor, suddenly suspended “mandatory” H1N1 shots for health professionals citing vaccine shortages, not litigation exposures, as cause for the policy change.
Neglecting notice that more than 60 percent of nurses in New York State refused to take the H1N1 vaccines according to polls, and unions had filed lawsuits against New York and Washington State to gain injunctions against mandated injections, Paterson's yellow press blamed “limited vaccine supplies” as reason to inject pregnant women and children exclusively. Only two weeks earlier, New York State officials posted their first priority, “as established by the CDC,” to vaccinate health care workers and emergency medical services personnel.
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Herbal drug crackdown: Millions face having to buy remedies on black market as Europe tightens the rules
Patients could lose access to safe herbal medicines under EU rules, it was claimed yesterday.
Instead they could end up buying potentially dangerous supplies from the black market, say herbalists.
Sales of all herbal remedies, except for a small number of products for 'mild' illness, will be banned to the public under the new law to come in in 2011.
Almost 2,500 UK qualified herbalists and Chinese medicine practitioners will also lose the right to supply a wide range of herbal medicines, because they are not signed up to a statutory regulation scheme.
Unlike healthcare professionals, there is no regulation of herbalists.
The Government has launched a consultation on whether to bring in statutory regulation - which herbalists support. However, many fear the consultation process is too complicated, which could affect the chances of its success.
At least six million Britons have consulted a herbal practitioner in the past two years, according to research.
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UK: Then they came for the gypsies
By Grattan Puxon
The appearance of neo-facist leader Nick Griffin on a popular BBC panel programme last week has caused outraged protest by those who fear extreme-right wing policies are becoming acceptable in today's would-be police-state Britain.
But if the British National Party with its million votes is moving into the mainstream, its just as frightening that once middle-ground politicians are willing to court favour with the neo-fascists by assuming a brownshirt colouring.
Romanies and Travellers may have been in Britain half a millennium or more, yet are still not accepted by a middle -England majority. Those who continue to follow a nomadic life -style get it in the neck everyday due to institutional racism locked into our bureaucracy and police forces.
We're seeing it happen in Italy and Hungary, now we'll see it happening here. Twenty miles from the Mother of Parliaments, by the lorry-full and
Landrover, with bulldozer and crane - stop them if you dare! - they're coming for the Gypsies.
On UN Human Rights Day 10 December, Basildon's Tory chief will formally lead his cabinet in voting to give a two million pound contract to a bunch of hard-hat bullyboys to oust hundreds of Travellers from his district. It will be the ugliest yet act of ethnic-cleansing by a British local authority against an outpost of Europe's nascent Roma nation.
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Piano stairs - TheFunTheory.com - Rolighetsteorin.se
We believe that the easiest way to change people's behaviour for the better is by making it fun to do. We call it The fun theory.
http://www.thefuntheory.com
Curry spice 'kills cancer cells'
An extract found in the bright yellow curry spice turmeric can kill off cancer cells, scientists have shown.
The chemical - curcumin - has long been thought to have healing powers and is already being tested as a treatment for arthritis and even dementia.
Now tests by a team at the Cork Cancer Research Centre show it can destroy gullet cancer cells in the lab.
Cancer experts said the findings in the British Journal of Cancer could help doctors find new treatments.
Dr Sharon McKenna and her team found that curcumin started to kill cancer cells within 24 hours.
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Cancers can vanish without treatment, but how?
Call it the arrow of cancer. Like the arrow of time, it was supposed to point in one direction. Cancers grew and worsened.
But as a paper in The Journal of the American Medical Association noted last week, data from more than two decades of screening for breast and prostate cancer call that view into question. Besides finding tumors that would be lethal if left untreated, screening appears to be finding many small tumors that would not be a problem if they were left alone, undiscovered by screening. They were destined to stop growing on their own or shrink, or even, at least in the case of some breast cancers, disappear.
“The old view is that cancer is a linear process,” said Dr. Barnett Kramer, associate director for disease prevention at the National Institutes of Health. “A cell acquired a mutation, and little by little it acquired more and more mutations. Mutations are not supposed to revert spontaneously.”
So, Dr. Kramer said, the image was “an arrow that moved in one direction.” But now, he added, it is becoming increasingly clear that cancers require more than mutations to progress. They need the cooperation of surrounding cells and even, he said, “the whole organism, the person,” whose immune system or hormone levels, for example, can squelch or fuel a tumor.
Cancer, Dr. Kramer said, is a dynamic process.
It was a view that was hard for some cancer doctors and researchers to accept. But some of the skeptics have changed their minds and decided that, contrary as it seems to everything they had thought, cancers can disappear on their own.
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Manhunt launched after gunmen injure Greek police in Athens
Athens - A nationwide manhunt was launched on Wednesday after gunmen opened fire on a police station in the suburbs of the Greek capital, injuring six.
Four hooded gunmen opened fire with automatic rifles on the Agios Pareskevis police station in northern Athens late Tuesday, injuring six police officers, two of whom were in serious condition.
Reports said the gunmen fired at least 40 rounds at the police station before fleeing on motorcycles. Three of the motorcycles were discovered outside a metro station a short distance from the scene of the attack, reports said.
The wounded were rushed to hospital, where two of the officers who suffered gunshots to the stomach and chest were undergoing emergency surgery.
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Rich Germans demand higher taxes
A group of rich Germans has launched a petition calling for the government to make wealthy people pay higher taxes.
The group say they have more money than they need, and the extra revenue could fund economic and social programmes to aid Germany's economic recovery.
Germany could raise 100bn euros (£91bn) if the richest people paid a 5% wealth tax for two years, they say.
The petition has 44 signatories so far, and will be presented to newly re-elected Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The group say the financial crisis is leading to an increase in unemployment, poverty and social inequality.
Simply donating money to deal with the problems is not enough, they want a change in the whole approach.
"The path out of the crisis must be paved with massive investment in ecology, education and social justice," they say in the petition.
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AP IMPACT: Troops already outnumber Taliban 12-1
There are already more than 100,000 international troops in Afghanistan working with 200,000 Afghan security forces and police. It adds up to a 12-1 numerical advantage over Taliban rebels, but it hasn't led to anything close to victory.
Now, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan is asking for tens of thousands more troops to stem the escalating insurgency, raising the question of how many more troops it would take to succeed.
The commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, says the extra forces are needed to implement a new strategy that focuses on protecting civilians and depriving the militants of popular support in a country where tribal militias may be Taliban today and farmers tomorrow.
The White House said Tuesday that President Barack Obama has nearly finished gathering information and advice on how to proceed in Afghanistan, where bombings killed eight more American troops. With October now the deadliest month for U.S. forces in the war, many experts question the need for more troops.
"The U.S. and its allies already have ample numbers and firepower to annihilate the Taliban, if only the Taliban would cooperate by standing still and allowing us to bomb them to smithereens," said Andrew Bacevich, a professor of international relations and history at Boston University, and one-time platoon leader in Vietnam.
"But the insurgents are conducting the war in ways that do not play to (allied) strengths."
The Taliban rebels are estimated to number no more than 25,000. Ljubomir Stojadinovic, a military analyst and guerrilla warfare expert from Serbia, said that although McChrystal's reinforcements would lift the ratio to 20-1 or more, they would prove counterproductive.
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Wall Street's naked swindle
On Tuesday, March 11th, 2008, somebody — nobody knows who — made one of the craziest bets Wall Street has ever seen. The mystery figure spent $1.7 million on a series of options, gambling that shares in the venerable investment bank Bear Stearns would lose more than half their value in nine days or less. It was madness — "like buying 1.7 million lottery tickets," according to one financial analyst.
But what's even crazier is that the bet paid.
At the close of business that afternoon, Bear Stearns was trading at $62.97. At that point, whoever made the gamble owned the right to sell huge bundles of Bear stock, at $30 and $25, on or before March 20th. In order for the bet to pay, Bear would have to fall harder and faster than any Wall Street brokerage in history.
The very next day, March 12th, Bear went into free fall. By the end of the week, the firm had lost virtually all of its cash and was clinging to promises of state aid; by the weekend, it was being knocked to its knees by the Fed and the Treasury, and forced at the barrel of a shotgun to sell itself to JPMorgan Chase (which had been given $29 billion in public money to marry its hunchbacked new bride) at the humiliating price of … $2 a share. Whoever bought those options on March 11th woke up on the morning of March 17th having made 159 times his money, or roughly $270 million. This trader was either the luckiest guy in the world, the smartest son of a bitch ever or…
Or what? That this was a brazen case of insider manipulation was so obvious that even Sen. Chris Dodd, chairman of the pillow-soft-touch Senate Banking Committee, couldn't help but remark on it a few weeks later, when questioning Christopher Cox, the then-chief of the Securities and Exchange Commission. "I would hope that you're looking at this," Dodd said. "This kind of spike must have triggered some sort of bells and whistles at the SEC. This goes beyond rumors."
Cox nodded sternly and promised, yes, he would look into it. What actually happened is another matter. Although the SEC issued more than 50 subpoenas to Wall Street firms, it has yet to identify the mysterious trader who somehow seemed to know in advance that one of the five largest investment banks in America was going to completely tank in a matter of days. "I've seen the SEC send agents overseas in a simple insider-trading case to investigate profits of maybe $2,000," says Brent Baker, a former senior counsel for the commission. "But they did nothing to stop this."
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Chinese ex-official details plan for world domination
... During the June 4, 1989, massacre of unarmed Tiananmen seekers of freedom, Chi Haotian was the chief of staff of the People's Liberation Army and supervised the massacre. Yet President Bill Clinton received him in Washington with a 19-gun salute in his honor.
Until 2003, Chi, 80, was the minister of Chinese national defense. In 2005 he was vice chairman of China's Military Commission.
On June 24, Chi's speech of December 2005 was posted on Yahoo! under the heading “Speech by Comrade Chi Haotian, Vice-Chairman of China's Military Commission.” The speech was delivered to the audience of top officers and generals of the People's Republic of China.
Chi said that he was “very excited today” because in answering, “in the large-scale survey,” the “question 'Will you shoot at women, children, and prisoners of war' [in the U.S. and other enemy countries], more than 80 percent of the respondents answered in the affirmative.”
Why was Chi “very excited” about it?
“If China's global development will necessitate massive deaths in enemy countries, will our people endorse that scenario? Will they be for or against it? The fact is, our 'development' refers to the great revitalization of the Chinese nation, which of course, is not limited to the land we have now, but also includes the whole world.”
Chi does not consider German Nazism evil. He considers the Germans insufficiently superior as a race and hence a failure. “Our Chinese people are wiser than the Germans because, fundamentally, our race is superior to theirs.”
Yet Chi advises to avoid the use of the German word Lebensraum “too openly” in order to “avoid the West's association of us with Nazi Germany, which could in turn reinforce the view that China is a threat.” Chi prefers to use Britain and the U.S. as negative examples (and not to praise Nazi Germany):
“. . . if we refer to the 19th century as the British Century and to the 20th century as the American Century, then the 21st Century will be the Chinese Century! (Wild applause fills the auditorium.)”
How to deal with America?
”America was first discovered by the ancestors of the yellow race, but Columbus gave credit to the white race. We the descendants of the Chinese nation are ENTITLED to the possession of that land!”
However: “Only by using special means to 'clean up' America will we be able to lead the Chinese people there.”
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image from http://www.spitting-image.net
