Lee Harvey Oswald, the JFK assassination and Dr. Mary’s Monkey

... As a precaution, Dr. Bernice Eddy, a researcher who worked for the National Institute of Health (NIH) in New Orleans, was ordered at the last minute to safe-test the Salk vaccine. Her finding was shocking: the vaccine itself could cause paralysis.

It heralded the biggest fiasco, to date, in the history of American medicine: unbelievably, the top dogs in the medical community decided to go ahead, anyway. [It is possible that this decision was based on a trade-off: some children would be paralyzed and some of them would die but many more would be protected from the disease.]

In a display of unimaginable arrogance, Ochsner, who had holdings in one of the five laboratories, inoculated his own grandchildren to demonstrate that the vaccine was safe. Both contracted polio. His granddaughter recovered from her paralysis but tragically his grandson died.

Estimates vary, but a significant number of other children also died or had permanent paralysis. Later on, in 1960, Dr. Albert Sabin was believed to have saved the day because his oral vaccine used a weakened virus rather than the dead virus used by Salk. Moreover, it had already been tested extensively in other countries. It began to be distributed here almost five years to the day that Americans had begun receiving the Salk inoculations.

About this time, another unsung heroine of American medicine, Dr. Sarah Stewart proved that a virus caused cancer. NIH officials, in an attempt to muzzle their whistleblower, had shifted Eddy, a close friend of Stewart's, from working on polio vaccine to doing research on influenza. Nevertheless, Eddy began to quietly perform more tests on polio vaccines.

At an October 1961 meeting in Manhattan of the New York Cancer Society, Eddy made a career-ending move. Without the consent of her superiors, she revealed an even more alarming discovery than her first: both polio vaccines were contaminated with a cancer-causing virus!

Another fiasco even bigger than the first! And one with far-reaching consequences. Between 1955 and 1963, millions of Americans had been injected with, or had swallowed, a substance that caused cancer. ...

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Common - 'A Letter To The Law'

Governmental abuse of power. (Def Poetry Jam)

Now Swiss Institutions Ask: Where’s the Gold?

Ron Holland writing at Lew Rockwell that Swiss institutions are joining the chorus of people wondering: Is Washington really  #1 In gold reserves?

As Chris Weber recently pointed out in an article, there's only ever been one audit of the gold in Fort Knox. And that was over 50 years ago! Since then, everyone has simply been taking the word of a few people that the gold is all there, and in good condition.

Even elected officials, including the U.S. President, are asked to blindly trust the word of a small group of people that the gold is still there. However, as the economy continues to falter, people are wondering if we could possibly go back to the gold standard.

And who trusts the government anymore. Even politicians know better, for friggin' sakes.

Americans are not the only ones wondering. (Recently, Ron Paul began calling for an audit of the gold in Fort Knox.) Ron Holland writes that people around the world are wondering where the gold is. If not in Fort Knox, where is it? It had to have gone somewhere.

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Nuclear waste piles up with no disposal plan

Tens of thousands of tons of potentially lethal radioactive waste have been piling up across the nation for more than a generation, but the federal government has yet to decide how to get rid of it permanently.

After axing a multibillion-dollar plan to bury the waste beneath Yucca Mountain, Nev., President Barack Obama has asked an expert panel to recommend alternatives.

But the panel's report isn't due until January 2012. And the group's recommendations aren't binding on the White House or Congress.

In short, the country's political leaders are no closer to a safe, permanent disposal plan for nuclear waste than they were a generation ago, when nuclear power became widespread and the Cold War was in full swing.

The nation's accumulated 70,000 tons of extremely radioactive, "high level" waste — uranium and plutonium — has sat in "temporary" storage in 35 states since at least the 1950s.

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How Prudential Cut a Deal With the VA

 The agency secretly amended the insurer's contract, allowing it to withhold payments to survivors of fallen soldiers.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs failed to inform 6 million soldiers and their families of an agreement enabling Prudential Financial Inc. to withhold lump-sum payments of life insurance benefits for survivors of fallen service members, according to records made public through a Freedom of Information request.

The amendment to Prudential's contract is the first document to show how VA officials sanctioned a payment practice that has spurred investigations by lawmakers and regulators. Since 1999, Prudential has used so-called retained-asset accounts which allow the company to withhold lump sum payments due to survivors and earn investment income on the money for itself.

The Sept. 1, 2009, amendment to Prudential's contact with the VA ratified another unpublicized deal that had been struck between the insurer and the government 10 years earlier -- one that was never put into writing, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its November issue. This verbal agreement in 1999 provoked concern among top insurance officials of the agency, the documents released in the FOIA request show.

For a decade, until the contract was formally changed, Prudential wasn't fulfilling its obligations to survivors of fallen service members, says Brendan Bridgeland, an insurance lawyer who runs the non-profit Center for Insurance Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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The Coca-Cola Case

The red and white logo of Coca-Cola is one of a few international brands recognized so instantly and globally. If there is life outside of Earth, Coca-Cola would be one of the brands that would be recognized universally, too, because even Martians would have seen the Coke Santa, which debuted in The Saturday Evening Post before World War II. It's a ubiquitous product that has made itself a lifestyle choice of billions of people.

The Coca-Cola Company didn't achieve this by creating a product so essential to human life; instead it managed to win people's hearts and minds by having an extremely positive and successful marketing campaign. People all over the world associate Coke products with the pursuit of happiness and an improved quality of life. From its 1963 slogan, “Things Go Better with Coke,” to the 1979 “Have a Coke and a Smile,” to the 2001 “Life Tastes Good;” its jovial Santas making an appearance each year and even the World Cup mascot every four years on the collectible cans, Coca-Cola has worked hard to make us happy while quenching our thirst with the magically fizzy combination of water and sugar (or high fructose corn) syrup. (Full disclosure: This reviewer began drinking Coca-Cola at the age of 4 and for the next quarter century or so was one such content customer, turning to Coke products for refreshment and pleasure with a daily consumption of multiple glass bottles at first, then cans and then the 20-ounce plastic bottles before finally kicking the habit in 2004.)

For those current happy-go-lucky Coca-Cola fans out there, directors German Gutierrez and Carmen Garcia have some grim news to deliver in their new documentary, The Coca-Cola Case. Their film takes that pleasant image of Santa Claus decked out in red and white and replaces it with the blood of international bottling plant workers and the pale white faces of corpses.

Gutierrez and Garcia tell the story of a little publicized lawsuit filed in the U.S. by two human and labor rights attorneys Dan Kovalik and Terry Collingsworth. The two lawyers take on the case of a small trade union, Sinaltrainal, based in Bogotá, Colombia. These unionists claim that since 1986, more than 4,000 of their members have been assassinated in Colombia. They assert that the Coca-Cola Company aided and abetted the paramilitary groups who gunned down their fellow unionists.

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Blackwater/Xe Terrorist Cells Conducting False Flag Terrorist Attacks in Pakistan

Rock Creek Free Press/WMR has learned from a deep background source that Xe Services, the company formerly known as Blackwater, has been conducting false flag terrorist attacks in Pakistan that are later blamed on the entity called "Pakistani Taliban."
Only recently did the US State Department designate the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), also known as the Pakistani Taliban, a terrorist group. The group is said by the State Department to be an off-shoot of the Afghan Taliban, which had links to "Al Qaeda" before the 9/11 attacks on the United States. TTP's leader is Hakimullah Mehsud, said to be 30-years old and operating from Pakistan's remote tribal region with an accomplice named Wali Ur Rehman. In essence, this new team of Mehsud and Rehman appears to be the designated replacement for Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri as the new leaders of the so-called "Global Jihad" against the West.
However, it is Blackwater/Xe cells operating in Karachi, Peshawar, Islamabad and other cities and towns that have, according to our source who witnessed the U.S.-led false flag terrorist operations in Pakistan. Bombings of civilians is the favored false flag event for the Blackwater/Xe team and are being carried out under the orders of the CIA.

However, the source is now under threat from the FBI and CIA for revealing the nature of the false flag operations in Pakistan. If the source does not agree to cooperate with the CIA and FBI, with an offer of a salary, the threat of false criminal charges being brought for aiding and abetting terrorism looms over the source.

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FBI misled Justice about spying on peace group

There was a time in the 1960s when the FBI's illegal surveillance of left-wing groups seemed, and maybe even was, sinister if not broadly menacing. Parts of today's Justice Department report on its more recent activities, however, evoke that old saw about history repeating itself as farce.

The Inspector General's report covered a number of FBI targets following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks: an antiwar rally in Pittsburgh; a Catholic peace magazine; a Quaker activist; and members of the environmental group Greenpeace as well as of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA.

My favorite story was about the rookie FBI agent who was dispatched to an antiwar rally in Pittsburgh with a camera and told to look for terrorism suspects.

It was “a slow work day,” the IG report said -- the Friday after Thanksgiving 2002.

The “possibility that any useful information would result from this make-work assignment was remote,” the report said. The sponsor of the rally was the Thomas Merton Center, named for the Catholic priest who advocated pacifism and interfaith dialogue.

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Deadly Copyright Repression Threatens EU. Act Now!

A resolution of the European Parliament calling for more repression of file sharing will be voted upon on Wednesday. European conservatives, led by a pro-sarkozy rapporteur and helped by a diversion from the liberal group, are pushing for the adoption of the Gallo report. If they succeed, blind repression and private copyright police of the Net will become the official position of the European Parliament. Our fundamental freedoms are at stake. In just 5 minutes, you can help rejecting it.

The Gallo report, named after its French sarkozyst rapporteur, Marielle Gallo, is a non-legislative text dictated by the entertainment industry lobbies in their crusade against online file sharing. Based on bogus evidence1, it calls for disproportionate repression that could lead to severe consequences for fundamental freedoms.

If adopted, the Gallo report will open the door for the European Commission to come up with new repressive legislation imposing criminal sanctions. It will also open the door to private copyright police of the Net, also encouraged by the ACTA agreement2, whereby Internet service providers and entertainment industries would be allowed to circumvent the due process of law by deciding between themselves what an infringement is and how to sanction it. Hidden behind the benign name of "cooperation" between right holders and ISPs, what lies ahead in the Gallo report is de facto censorship, automatic sanctions, and a generalized surveillance of the Net. They would impact freedom of expression, harm privacy, bypass the judicial authority, and turn the presumption of innocence into a fiction. The diversionary ALDE resolution drafted by entertainment publishing lobby puppet3 Toine Manders serves no other purpose than to take votes away from the true alternative resolution drafted by the S&D, Green and MEPs of several other groups.

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European Raelian Movement sues Pope Benedict XVI

...“The Vatican has maintained an ongoing campaign against the ERM for years,” said Marcus Wenner, Raelian bishop of the U.K. Raelian Movement. “That campaign was obviously carried out in retaliation for the Movement's clear stance against pedophilia and the cover-ups rampant within the Catholic Church clergy. And there are several other tenets of Vatican policy the Raelian Movement directly opposes, such as its genocidal position against using condoms in Africa, which results in continued HIV infections, deaths of millions and subsequent orphaning of children.

Forewarning Benedict XVI of the impending suit, the ERM also claimed in its pre-litigation letter that his actions continue to violate international law along with treaties on genocide and those concerning organized sexual abuse and trafficking in children.

“We are indeed aware of the seriousness of the allegations and we will provide documents which we feel are ample proof,” Wenner said. Vatican actions or lack of actions have violated many international laws, such as The Convention on the Rights of the Child, The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (Articles X & XXII) and the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (Article IX).”

Under Pope John Paul II, then-Cardinal Ratzinger was in charge of dealing with the pedophilia scandal, to which Raelians were drawing attention in the 1990's.

While Richard Dawkins and others have voiced their desire to have Pope Benedict arrested for such crimes as the ERM is alleging, U.K. Raelians are contending in court that they have a greater right to sue because of the history of legal judgments against them. In one such case a few years ago, a Belgian court ruled against NOPEDO, a branch of the ERM, for publicizing the Vatican's pedophilia cover-ups. In a report released in Belgium last week by church investigator Peter Adriaenssens, more than 300 cases of abuse are listed, mostly involving minors. The report said they had been found in nearly every diocese, and 13 alleged victims had committed suicide. ...

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Glassdoor offers view inside firms like HP

If the workplace review site Glassdoor is to companies what Yelp is to restaurants, then Hewlett-Packard Co. employees gave former chief executive Mark Hurd only two stars, but remain hopeful of a four- or five-star successor.

In the past, those kinds of inside insights into employee morale at any corporation could be locked away behind closed doors. But in the open world of the Web, sites like Glassdoor have moved those sentiments into the open market, giving voice to rank-and-file workers in a way that no company suggestion box ever could.

"In a world with Glassdoor and Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn, there's a tsunami of transparency washing over the employment space," Glassdoor Inc. CEO Robert Hohman said. "The best companies aren't just dealing with it, they're embracing it."

The Sausalito company lets any employee post reviews about the overall workplace environment, both the pros and the cons of working there and "advice for senior management."

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Bio Weapons Spurned by Hitler Were Tested on Adventists

The U.S. got into the germ-warfare business in 1942 at the request of Britain, which feared that Adolf Hitler was cooking up world-class pestilence in his labs.

While FDR found the weapons ``inhumane,'' he went along with their development, the show says. He was certainly right about the nature of the weapon. As the show explains, ``a biological weapon is alive. What it wants to do is reproduce itself inside a human body.''

Eventually, the guest kills the host, who suffers hideously. Another victim is science itself, which has been used ``not strictly for the benefits it can bring'' but for purely destructive purposes, according to Jeanne Guillemin, senior adviser to MIT's Security Studies Program.

From the start the U.S. program was cloaked in secrecy: Leakers were promised 40 years in jail, with a $10,000 fine thrown in for good measure.

As it turns out, Hitler early on ordered that ``there was to be no offensive biological weapons research.'' His benevolence may have been the result of having been gassed in World War I, the show suggests.

Ghastly Experiments

Japan, however, more than made up for the German restraint. A lengthy segment of the hour-long program takes a close and horrifying look at the Japanese program and its mastermind, Shiro Ishii.

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