Saturday, April 2, 2011
Gustavus and alienation
Full meltdown in full swing? Japan maximum nuclear alert
Japan pays 'suicide squads' fortunes to work in stricken nuclear plant as 'battle is lost for reactor two'
By Richard Hartley-Parkinson, Daily Mail
- Four reactors at stricken plant to be decommissioned
- Subcontractors offered £760 a day - 20 times going rate - to brave radiation levels but some refuse
- One expert who designed reactor says race to save reactor two is 'lost'
- Radiation levels in sea water 3,335 times higher than normal
- Readings are almost three times worse than last week
- Unmanned drone photographs plant from the air amid health fear for pilots
- American robots dispatched to help containment efforts
Workers at the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant are being paid vast sums of money to brave high radiation levels - as experts warn that the race to save the facility has been lost.
Subcontractors are reportedly being offered up to 100,000 yen a day (£760) - 20 times the going rate - but some are still refusing the dangerous work.
Radiation levels are still extremely high at the plant, with water around the reactors emitting a highly dangerous 1,000 millisieverts per hour.
There are also fears that the plant is leaking more radiation as sea water around the plant was found to contain levels 3,335 higher than normal - almost three times higher than last week.
In a further development, an expert who helped design the plant said today that the race to prevent reactor number two melting down had been lost.
The plant's operators also said today that the four reactors that suffered explosions will be shut down for good once they are under control - and could be sealed in special material to keep radiation in.
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Junkies in jackboots: Nazi soldiers given highly addictive crystal meth to help them fight harder and longer
By Allan Hall, Daily Mail
- 200 million pills were given to soldiers during the War
Hitler's propaganda stressed the importance of keeping fit and abstaining from drink and tobacco to keep the Aryan race strong and pure.
But in reality his soldiers were taking addictive and damaging chemicals to make them fight longer and more fiercely.
A study of medicines used by the Third Reich exposes how Nazi doctors and officers issued recruits with pills to help them fight longer and without rest.
The German army's drug of choice as it overran Poland, Holland, Belgium and France was Pervitin - pills made from methamphetamine, commonly known today as crystal meth.
By the time the invasion of the Soviet Union was launched in 1941, hundreds of thousands of soldiers were doped up on it. Records of the Wehrmacht, the German army, show that some 200 million Pervitin pills were doled out to the troops between 1939 and 1945.
Research by the German Doctors' Association also showed the Nazis developed a cocaine-based stimulant for its front-line fighters that was tested on concentration camp inmates.
'It was Hitler's last secret weapon to win a war he had already lost long ago,' said criminologist Wolf Kemper, author of a German language book on the Third Reich's use of drugs called Nazis On Speed.
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Libyan rebels massacre black Africans
By Wolfgang Weber, World Socialist Web Site
The opposition forces in Libya attempting to march on Tripoli with the assistance of American, French and British bombs are far removed from the image of innocent civilians fighting for freedom and democracy promoted by the media and political circles.
This is made clear in a March 22 article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung by Gunnar Heinsohn, the author of Encyclopaedia of Genocide (Rowohlt, 1998).
Heinsohn cites a report by the well-known Zimbabwean journalist and documentary filmmaker Farai Sevenzo dealing with barbaric, pogrom-like massacres perpetrated by the so-called “rebels” against black African workers in Libya. The article states:
“Because mercenaries from Chad and Mali are presumed to be fighting for him [Gaddafi], the lives of a million African refugees and thousands of African migrants are at risk. A Turkish construction worker told the British radio station BBC: ‘We had seventy to eighty people from Chad working for our company. They were massacred with pruning shears and axes, accused by the attackers of being Gaddafi’s troops. The Sudanese people were massacred. We saw it for ourselves.’ ”
The genocide authority Heinsohn explains: “It is standard knowledge in genocide research that minorities come under attack in civil wars because at least one party to the conflict accuses them of collaborating with the enemy….
“Whoever wants to prevent crimes against humanity with the use of force...is always in danger of helping one side in the neutralisation or even extermination of the other side…. UN Security Council Resolution 1973 of March 17 against the Libyan government provides a perfect example.
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Going into the light
A new study of deathbed experiences has found a surprising number of similarities, writes Fionola Meredith, Irish Times:
Given that many of us shy away from talking about death and dying, it is not surprising that we know so little about what happens in the last hours of a person’s life. But an unusual new study, funded by the Irish Hospice Foundation, aims to break through the taboo of the deathbed.
The study – Capturing the invisible: exploring Deathbed Experiences in Irish Palliative Care, by researchers Una MacConville and Regina McQuillan – examines the strange visions that often accompany the dying process, asking members of the Irish Association of Palliative Care to report their experiences. The results are startling.
In one frequently reported scenario, the dying person spoke of seeing deceased relatives or religious figures, or of experiencing a radiant white light in the room. Perhaps because they defy explanation, these deathbed phenomena are rarely discussed by healthcare professionals, despite being a familiar occurrence.
Yet rather than avoiding the topic, MacConville says education about such experiences could raise awareness of the phenomena and help palliative care professionals to normalise them for patients and families as a common and even comforting part of dying.
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Drugging America: The drug industry exposed
By Adam Helfer, The Washington TimesPharmaceuticals are a $650 plus billion dollar a year industry. For years the most profitable business in the U.S. has been the pharmaceutical corporations, which routinely top the annual fortune 500 list. Doctor prescribed drugs support an industry which out-earns the GNP of many nations.
A core attribute to big Pharma’s overwhelming ‘success’ lays in the liaison between the corporations and the ‘symptoms management’ health care industry: The pharmaceutical representative. The men and women we see meeting with physicians, walking into offices with gifts of lunch for the staff, meeting with the doctor while you wait for our appointment.
Gwen Olsen was a top level pharmaceutical rep for some of the biggest in the industry: Johnson & Johnson, Syntex Labs, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Abbott Laboratories and Forest Laboratories.
Through some chilling wake up calls in her tenure, and the tragic drug-related death of her niece, Gwen has dedicated her life to making people aware of the dangers of prescription drugs and how the drug industry manipulates doctors into prescribing, and over prescribing, their drugs.
She is exposing the dark, deep-rooted deception and corruption that is prevalent in this industry.
Gwen Olsens words are powerful. Her message absolutely frightening.
[ ... ]
In fact many times we would be called into a meeting when a new sales piece was being introduced. Managers would ask us questions on what aspects of the piece we received the most objections on. What were the parts that raised the most concern? After we gave the marketing department that feedback, the next period they would come up with a different layout that had manipulated and minimized the objectionable data. So, it was a constant set of circumstances where I began to see that I wasn’t allowed to give good information and I wasn’t given good information to share.
The industry knows that many of their drugs aren’t safe and that they don’t heal people. In fact, some drugs are designed to make symptoms worse later on.
When I started becoming pro-active and began to ask too many critically intelligent questions, management objected and discouraged me. I was frequently met with answers such as “We do it that way because we can", or "We sell more pills that way.”
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