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POPSUrge World Leaders: Vote No to Biased Goldstone Report I'm here at the emergency session of the U.N. Human Rights Council, facing a draft resolution by the Arab and Islamic blocs that seeks to endorse the biased Goldstone Report"a 500-page document that falsely accuses Israel of “deliberate attacks” against civilians during its defensive war against Hamas rocket attacks last January. (For details, see www.unwatch.org/goldstone.) Adoption of this dangerous text will trigger proceedings toward the indictment and prosecution of Israeli leaders and officers in the International Criminal Court. What’s at stake is the very survival of democratic societies under the assault of terrorists"enemies of human rights who cynically invoke its protective cover. The debate began yesterday and reaches its climax today. UN Watch will be there to address the assembled delegates. Representing us will be none other than Col. Richard Kemp, former commander of the British forces in Afghanistan,
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POPSUK has 1% of world's population but 20% of its CCTV cameras
An old article but still pretty accurate. you cannot move in London without being seen by at least 3 cameras at any one point. It is the definition of a police state, the police also have sub-machine guns, (H&K MP5k's for anyone interested) while you can be arrested for carrying a penknife if its blade is more than an inch long, because of the laws now concerning blades and knives. as well as the other tricks like LRADs (not new) which are now common place around the world. All backed by by ignorant and dangerous attitudes of the police. Again as always don't take my word for it look it up. The report says: "It is not entirely absurd to imagine that supermarkets' loyalty card data might one day be used by the Government to identify people who ignored advice to eat healthily or who drank too much, so that they could be given a lower priority for NHS treatment". "We have supermarkets collecting data on our shopping habits and also offering life insurance services"
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POPSUncle Sam Eyes Vehicle Tracking Tax The last part of the clip is not part of the article but from the comments. Note that this is an added tax it doesn't replace any just like the carbon tax and other proposed taxes and fee's. America it seems is being taxed into third world country status, at a time when jobs are in short supply too. H.R. 3311 is available via PDF Here More at source
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POPSNobel prize winner covering up for Iran
Once again, the indispensable DebkaFile tells all. Although it's not as though we never suspected that UN officials were in the pockets of the world's dictators. The rest of the report is as follows: One official told DEBKAfile that passing the new information to the IAEA director had compromised its sources anyway so there was no point in holding it back any longer. The seven governments concerned will decide very soon which parts of this unpublished information to air. According to our sources, it will not be attributed directly to any government but to "Iranian exiles" who will present it as coming from inside Iran. This tactic was employed in 2004, when the opposition Mojaheddin al-Khalq leaders first broke the news of Iran's uranium enrichment plant in Natanz at press conferences in Washington and Paris. The Israeli foreign ministry denounced the ElBaradei report, released ahead of the nuclear watchdog's regular annual meeting in Vienna on Sept. 7, for omitting "to detail I
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POPSIsraeli President Calls Deal on Kidnapped Soldier 'Close' Asked about that decision, Peres told Fox News, “You’re right. It is a very difficult decision and it’s very painful. But, according to our set of values and to our way of life " the life of a single person is worth the whole world. We take care of every individual as though he would be the collective sum of many people.” Peres also said Sunday that Israel will "reply immediately" if attacked by Hamas " one day after after Israel Air Force planes bombed a tunnel in the northern Gaza Strip in response to a Qassam rocket fired by Palestinian militants into an Israeli town early Saturday. "They know immediately there will be retaliation," he said. "There is an unwritten game between us and them. They know if they won’t respect it, they will pay heavily.”
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POPSTom Ridge: I Was Pressured To Raise Terror Alert To Help Bush Win "The Bush administration was forced to admit in the days after the 2004 alert that it was based on intelligence three or four years old. Officials then claimed there was a previously unmentioned “separate stream of intelligence” that justified the warning — but offered little tangible information to support their new story.. ThinkProgress recalls, the AP reported that “even ’some senior Republicans’ privately questioned Ridge’s timing of a terror alert that came just three days after the Democratic National Convention.” Ridge’s book, “The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege…and How We Can Be Safe Again,” comes out September 1."
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POPSTerror Alerts used in 2004 to help Bush win reelection More: Dave Weigel, writing for the Washington Independent, notes that in the past, Ridge has denied manipulating security information for political reasons. In 2004, for example, he said, "We don't do politics in the Department of Homeland Security." The Bush administration was forced to admit in the days after the 2004 alert that it was based on intelligence three or four years old. Officials then claimed there was a previously unmentioned "separate stream of intelligence" that justified the warning -- but offered little tangible information to support their new story.. Ridge's book, "The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege...and How We Can Be Safe Again," comes out September 1. Ridge reveals that he considered resigning because he was urged to issue a politically-motivated security alert on the eve of Bush’s re-election:
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POPSRobert Novak, Giant of Journalism RIP Kenneth Tomlinson at Human Events, which ran the Evans-Novak Report until it was ended last year, confirms that the conservative reporter Robert Novak has died after a year-long battle with cancer. Tim Carney, Novak’s last collaborator on the report, has a remembrance up. Novak would often tell aspiring journalists to pick a different field if their goal was to change the world. But, by simply aiming to inform and to do his job as well he could, Novak changed the lives of his readers and those of us blessed to work with him. Update: Lynn Sweet confirms it: “He was someone who loved being a journalist, love journalism and loved his country and loved his family,” Novak’s wife, Geraldine, told the Sun-Times on Tuesday.
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POPSParanoid, suspicion, obsessive surveillance - and a land of liberty destroyed by stealth AKA. life in the UK. It literally brings tears to my eyes to see a once proud nation subdued to such an extent. US and the world take heed! "Voltaire called England 'the land of liberty'. Until New Labour materialised, with its intrusive and 'character improving' agenda, that description rang true. The English preferred freedom and tolerance to ideological and religious fanaticism. The currency of our society was common sense No longer. Common sense has been replaced by officially sanctioned mistrust, mistrust that allows anyone invested with the tiniest bit of authority - often in the form of a high-visibility jacket - to throw their weight around Britain is now a place where terror laws have been used by councils to spy on people breaching smoking bans, making a fraudulent application for a Police routinely stop anyone who photographs a public building, in one instance deleting the pictures taken by a 69-year-old Austrian tourist who admired the architecture of a bus s
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POPSRecommended Reading: Much Of Afghan Drug Money Going To 'Our Friends' "The cost of this may well go beyond the effect on the heroin shipments. When we sat down this week with Amin Tarzi, director of Middle East Studies at the Marine Corps University and a native Afghan, he said that the United States has lost credibility with the Afghan populace by allying itself with warlords who have been known across Afghanistan for many years as criminals. We have, he says, handed a golden issue to the Taliban. They first took power in the 1990's by charging that the existing government was corrupt. Now they can say it again. (Steve Inskeep co-hosts Morning Edition. This is the first in a series of "recommended reading" posts we plan that highlight stories NPR hosts have heard, read or seen that they think are worth noting.)" When you realise that the CIA are indirectly (plausible deniability) responsible for Al Qaeda's actions,and that Bin Laden was and still is a CIA asset, who was sent in by them during the cold war to destabilise Russia, then it makes a
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POPSOpponents of U.S. healthcare reform take on... the U.K.'s National Health Service This is a good example of what happens when a political culture develops in which true facts no longer matter. In order to discredit the current plans for health-care reform, opponents are trying to tar it with the National Health Service's failures. Only problem is, most of the failures they describe are made up. I kind of like the super-glue story, though. I mean, hell, I pay for a group dental plan through my job, and my wife needs an implant, and I'm seriously considering a second mortgage to pay for it. And I have insurance. Somehow, these supposed British horror stories haven't convinced yet me that our current system is so wonderful that we shouldn't change it. Remember: the U.K. has the 18th-ranked healthcare system in the world; the U.S. has the 37th; and we spend plenty more than they do.
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POPSCongress Objects to CIA Lies But Not Torture and Murder? So what do you call a country if not a "tyranny" when its top officials dispatch their henchmen around the world to murder their enemies? That’s how the Soviet Union’s Joe Stalin worked. "No man, no problem." Stalin was no believer in respecting the sovereignty of other countries or bothering with their courts. Just go in and kill the guy. Apparently, Cheney worked the same way. And like Stalin, he authorized torture. This totalitarian streak runs deep both in the White House and CIA. The U.S. had been involved in the assassination or attempted assassination of 37 world leaders and more than 50 U.S. foreign interventions, mostly by the CIA, ranging from blackmail to armed overthrow. Blum also cites evidence of CIA meddling in 30 foreign elections. The crimes of our presidents and the CIA today represent everything America’s Founders despised.
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POPSThe planet's future: Climate change 'will cause civilisation to collapse' But the authors suggest the threats could also provide the potential for a positive future for all. "The good news is that the global financial crisis and climate change planning may be helping humanity to move from its often selfish, self-centred adolescence to a more globally responsible adulthood... Many perceive the current economic disaster as an opportunity to invest in the next generation of greener technologies, to rethink economic and development assumptions, and to put the world on course for a better future." More at source.
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POPSHave you found your soul place? Richard Ford, Pulitzer Prize winning author, was born and raised in Jackson, MS. His wife’s job as a city planner took them to many cities but when they moved to New Orleans, Ford said he had “an instantaneous recognition.”Even now, living in Maine, he considers New Orleans home. Often we are inspired to build monuments on these sacred grounds: pyramids, cities, stone circles, churches, mosques. Whatever caused our ancestors to pilgrimage to these spots, it is still drawing us as well. Perhaps the earthy taste of freshly squeezed olive oil, never before experienced, causes you to feel as one with the rocky landscape of a Greek island. No matter the reason, we are inexplicably attracted to locations and feel a connection that we cannot readily explain. In their special issue on Sacred Places, U.S. News and World Report states that that these spots are “as varied as the human sense of the sacred and as various as the world’s spiritual traditions.”
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POPSThe Era of Cheap Oil Is Officially Over Very simply, it indicates that the usually optimistic analysts at the Department of Energy now believe global fuel supplies will simply not be able to keep pace with rising world energy demands.
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POPSChina blocks internet sites, services ahead of Tiananmen anniversary
This is not unexpected. The Tiananmen demonstration anniversary is June 4 and Twitter messages were encouraging people to wear white, the color of mourning, until they were suddenly blocked. For the Chinese authorities to go through this much trouble to suppress the exchange of all other non-related ideas and thoughts just to prevent anything concerning the Tiananmen Square ordeal from getting through illustrates the Chinese authorities distrust of the Chinese people. This action reminds the rest of the world just how repressive China is and for the US government to encourage its citizens to support China through trade with them while demanding, pleading for, suggesting, whimpering about, giving up on human rights reform is irresponsible. It is so futile to hang on to old ways of thought and mind control. The internet has already been let out of the box and to suppress it in this manner just illustrates how old school these people are.
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POPS Anyone Care If KSM Was Water-Boarded?
the Bali nightclub bombings, the failed bombing of American Airlines Flight 63, the Millennium Plot, and the murder of Daniel Pearl. There is no ‘near drowning’ as the liberal media has been hyperventilating. We know from the Obama administration’s disclosure of classified material the man was waterboarded many, many times. He was sleep deprived and possibly slapped on the face. As some folks said it was tragic he did not get a taste of various college initiation rights as well. Our fighting men and women go through waterboarding to train them how to face up to what is really just a simple reflex action. There is no ‘near drowning’ as the liberal media has been hyperventilating. A cloth is placed over the face and water is poured over it, causing the reflexive panic that kicks in when one IS drowning. But it is nearly impossible to drown, the amount of water being used is just not that much. It is trick of the senses, it is not real drowning (water in lungs, etc).
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POPSUS 'War on Terror' Eroded Rights Worldwide - Experts
"There has been severe damage and it needs to be addressed," she told a news conference in Geneva. "We are not more secure. We are more divided, and people are more cynical about the operation of laws." Arthur Chaskalson, former chief justice of South Africa, said that the United States should launch an inquiry into its counter-terrorism practices, including acts of torture by individual security and intelligence agents. Although counter-terrorism issues have faded from the front pages since the change of government in Washington, Chaskalson said such practices have shifted around the world and could keep restricting liberties if they are not confronted head-on. "We all have less rights today than we had five or 10 years ago, and if nothing happens, we will have even less," he told a Geneva briefing to launch an International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) report on counter-terrorism and human rights. ABUSE MONITORING The report found that many undemocratic states have refe
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POPSGlobal Television for Our Future Global Leader “the media voices we think of as international” coming from London (the BBC), Qatar (Al-Jazeera) or Atlanta (CNN). BBC is known for its anti-American programming, Al-Jazeera for its pro-terrorist slant, and CNN for its left-wing and pro-Democratic bias. It will take “innovative public-private funding” to bring this new network into being, apparently meaning that the taxpayers in the U.S. will have to be soaked in order to help bring this about. Elsewhere in the report (page 31) the idea of “international taxation” is proposed for “global action” of various kinds. Perhaps this is a vehicle for raising revenue for the new “global voice.” “In a world where there are calls for global governance as a response to a global financial crisis, where scientific research, capital flows and production chains are globalized, the media and the communities in which we imagine ourselves remain fiercely localized.”
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POPS100K & 5 Presidents at World Social Forum
One new amazing U.S. media brain-dead news report was about the burning question of the midweek's second news cycle: "Is President Obama Giving Too Many Interviews?" But as I was rushing to the computer to login and cast my vote I began to wonder about the question itself. "Are Republican obstructionist getting too much air time on brain dead TV?" I though would be a better question. Or: "Can the nation stomach hearing former VP, hated Dick Cheney, offer advice from the Dark Side?" -- since advice from Cheney to Obama was another alleged "news," topic. That's why when I read of this year's gathering of the World Social Forum it was a breath of fresh air: Non-self-obsessed news of something other than the sour soup de jour of defeated Republicans and haunted ghosts of the Bush Administration. One idea that sunk in from this clip (and others) was that we're hearing more from the people who screwed America over, gave away billions to the SuperRich and now pretend to have solut
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POPS Al-Qaida's Threat Is Still With Us Europe's population. An airborne version, pneumonic plague, is equally deadly. The details are horrific. The Algerian victims were said to be afflicted with horrible boils in different parts of their bodies, dying in excruciating pain after just a few hours. It's an awful way to die. Since AQLIM boasts of 1,000 members in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Nigeria, the loss of 40 terrorists will barely scratch the surface of their membership. What worries us is that if the "accident" was part of a wider program to create a deadly bioweapon to be used against civilians — possibly in the U.S. or Europe — then we are in serious danger. A bioweapon loosed on a major population center is a terrifying prospect. The last plague outbreak in London in 1665 killed more than 30,000 people in a city much smaller than the one today. Al-Qaida doesn't lack the will to do this, just the means. The U.S. faces a terrorist threat that will take advantage of our inattention or our weakness.
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POPSUN: Nearly 1 Billion Live with Hunger The lion's share of the problem is food prices. While prices have dropped recently, the report tells us "they still remain high compared to previous years." "FAO’s Food Price Index is still nearly 30 per cent higher as of October 2008 than it was two years before," according to the UN. "Meanwhile, the prices of seeds, fertilizers and other inputs have more than doubled since 2006, leaving poor farmers unable to produce food." Over two-thirds of the world's hungry live in just seven nations: India, China, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Ethiopia.
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