Confronting Today's Sepration Wall

The world that saw the collapse of the Berlin wall twenty years ago has been witnessing for years the construction of another separation wall being built by Israel on the occupied Palestinian territories. This wall continues to be built and nothing stands in front of it but weekly protests. The People's Committee For Resisting The Wall says that this wall will be brought down just like the one in Berlin...


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American Nationals Found Carrying Illegal Weapons In Pakistan, Again

[By Kashif Abbasi Kaswar Klasra, The Nation | Wednesday, 28 October, 2009.]
Once again, 4 American nationals were caught red-handed by Capital Police in the wee hours of Tuesday when they were carrying weapons publicly. However, they managed to secure release and continue their journey to a mysterious destination, sources informed.

According to details, police personnel deployed here at Nawaz Chowk, sector F-8, intercepted two suspicious vehicles in the wee hours of Tuesday. During the search, police recovered weapons from their custody. The riders of these vehicles were found, once again, to be American nationals.

To the surprise of many, the Americans were allowed to go along with their arms after an anonymous call that the officer in command at police picket received at the same time when preliminary investigation were being carried out from the foreigners.

Though it is not clear who asked the police to let the Americans go, sources revealed that U.S. Embassy officials came into action swiftly and got their nationals freed after contacting high-ups of Pakistan’s Interior Ministry.

When contacted, Foreign Office spokesman told The Nation that there existed no law in Pakistan that might allow any foreigner or diplomat, including Americans, to move on busy roads of capital with illegal arms.

Talking to TheNation, the Spokesperson of U.S. Embassy Richard Snelsire said he was unaware about the incident.

Following Tuesday’s incident, a wave of anger, fear and uncertainty has been felt across the federal capital. It was not the first incident of such kind in the Federal Capital wherein foreigners were nabbed by police for keeping illegal arms. It has been observed that in a number of incidents police intercepted foreigners including American diplomats cruising busy roads of Islamabad carrying sophisticated arms and let them free after interception of "hidden hands."

Some days ago, police officials deployed at a picket intercepted two Dutch diplomats and recovered sophisticated weapons including hand grenades from their possession. The police lodged a formal complaint, however, no such action was initiated in repeated cases of US diplomats and nationals who were allowed to go.

Following the incident, Federal Interior Minister Rehman Malik also stated that no foreigner would be allowed to carry illegal arms with him/her. “The violators would be dealt with an iron hand,” he added.

However, Americans were found violating the law of the land and to the surprise of the Minister himself, violators were given a safe passage every time. (Link.)

Carbon Ration Account For All Proposed By Environment Agency

[Ben Webster, London Times | Monday, 9 November, 2009.]
Everyone should be given an annual carbon ration and face financial penalties if they exceed it, under a proposal by the Environment Agency.

Lord Smith of Finsbury, the agency’s chairman, will say today that rationing is the fairest and most effective way of meeting Britain’s legally binding targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

People would be given a “carbon account” and a unique number that they would have to submit when making purchases of carbon-intensive items such as petrol, electricity or airline tickets. As with a bank account, people would receive statements showing the carbon weight of each purchase and how much of their ration remained.

If they used up their ration within a year, they would have to buy extra credits from those who had not used their full allowance.

Lord Smith, who was Culture Secretary in Tony Blair’s Government, believes that the system would encourage people to think about the carbon cost of their purchases as well as reward those who lived frugally and did little travelling, who could make a significant profit from selling their unused credits.

Speaking at the agency’s annual conference in London, Lord Smith will say that carbon rationing would help people to “judge how they want to develop their own quality of life in a sustainable way.”

Under the Climate Change Act, Britain is obliged to cut its emissions by 80 per cent on 1990 levels by 2050. This means annual CO2 emissions per person will have to fall from about 9 tonnes to only 2 tonnes. (Full story here.)

Hunger In America: Half Of Our Children On Food Stamps

[CBS News | Tuesday, 3 November, 2009.]
Nearly half of all U.S. children and 90 percent of black youngsters will be on food stamps at some point during childhood, and fallout from the current recession could push those numbers even higher, researchers say.

The estimate comes from an analysis of 30 years of national data, and it bolsters other recent evidence on the pervasiveness of youngsters at economic risk. It suggests that almost everyone knows a family who has received food stamps, or will in the future, said lead author Mark Rank, a sociologist at Washington University in St. Louis.

"Your neighbor may be using some of these programs but it's not the kind of thing people want to talk about," Rank said.

The analysis was released Monday in the November issue of Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. The authors say it's a medical issue pediatricians need to be aware of because children on food stamps are at risk for malnutrition and other ills linked with poverty.

"This is a real danger sign that we as a society need to do a lot more to protect children," Rank said.

Rank and Cornell University sociologist Thomas Hirschl studied data from a nationally representative survey of 4,800 American households interviewed annually from 1968 through 1997 by the University of Michigan. About 18,000 adults and children were involved.

Overall, about 49 percent of all children were on food stamps at some point by the age of 20, the analysis found. That includes 90 percent of black children and 37 percent of whites. The analysis didn't include other ethnic groups. (Full story here.)

Planned Parenthood Leader Resigns After Watching Ultrasound Of Abortion

Court Slaps Gag Order On Abby Johnson


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Aborted Fetus Cells Used In Beauty Creams

[By Valerie Richardson, Washington Times | Tuesday, 3 November, 2009.]
A San Francisco cosmetics company has ignited an outcry among pro-lifers for including an unexpected ingredient in its anti-aging creams: skin-cell proteins from an aborted fetus.

Children of God for Life, a watchdog group that monitors the use of fetal material in medical products, called last week for a boycott of all treatments manufactured by Neocutis Inc., which acknowledges that the key ingredient in its product line was developed from an aborted boy.

"There's just no excuse for using aborted babies in skin-care products," said Debi Vinnedge, executive director of Children of God for Life, a 10-year-old organization based in Murfreesboro, Tenn. "The reaction, the shock and anger I've seen is incredible."

In a statement released Friday, in response to a wave of condemnation from pro-life and religious blogs, Neocutis defended the use of its trademarked ingredient, Processed Skin Cell Proteins, or PSP, arguing that the fetal cell line was harvested in a responsible, ethical manner for use in treating severe dermatological injuries.

The ingredient was developed at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland from proteins in the skin tissue of a 14-week-old male baby electively aborted at the university's hospital and donated to the Swiss university. The abortion was deemed medically necessary because the baby could not survive to term, according to Neocutis.

The fetal skin cell line was taken from a piece of skin the size of a postage stamp and donated voluntarily by the parents for medical research. The donation was approved by the hospital's medical ethics committee and in accordance with Swiss laws, said the Neocutis statement. (Full story here.)

French Activists File Charges Of "Attempted Poisoning" Against H1N1 Vaccine Campaign

[By Michael Cosgrove, Flesh & Stone | Saturday, 24 October, 2009.]
In what is being seen as the first of many such actions to come, nine individuals have filed formal charges claiming that the H1N1 campaign is a deliberate attempt to poison the French population.

These charges, which were filed yesterday, could not come at a more inopportune moment for the government and health specialists. The vaccination campaign got underway last Tuesday in a climate of national skepticism as to the vaccine’s safety and efficiency, and this news will surely boost the morale of the increasing number of anti-vaccine lobbyists who are beginning to organize their resistance to any attempt to vaccinate the population against H1N1.

Nine inhabitants of the Isére region of France are cited as joint plaintiffs in the case, including a health sector worker, a teacher and a radio talk show host. They met each other at various public meetings held to denounce the vaccine’s alleged health risks.

The charges take the form of a ‘plainte contre X’ which means that the perpetrator of an alleged crime or felony is not known, or is not named, in the charge sheet. This is a commonly used manner of filing complaints in France, particularly where the charges relate to supposed government implication in alleged breaches of the law. In cases where those trials proceed after prior examination of the facts, the specific persons or organizations concerned are designated and charged as the trial proceeds.

Jean-Pierre Joseph, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, describes the vaccination campaign as “A veritable attempt to poison.” He confirmed that the charges were filed at the High Court in Grenoble before the court’s senior examining magistrate. He said other court cases involving other plaintiffs would begin soon

The various charges filed included one of “Attempting to administer substances… of a nature which could result in death.”

“The aim is to put a stop to what we consider to be an act of poisoning,” according to Joseph. “The interest of this action is that people in France now have a means by which to express their concern as citizens by saying publicly “We are aware that the vaccination campaign is a swindle.”

Similar court actions are planned in other areas of the Isére, as well as in Paris, Pau and Nantes, and several hundred vaccine opponents are beginning to organize themselves on the internet with a view to filing class action charges.

The government and health authorities are currently battling to persuade people to get vaccinated against increasingly difficult odds. Opposition to the campaign has been increasing steadily, and various polls taken over the last few days put the figure for those who do not intend to get vaccinated as high as 70 percent. (Full story here.)

No Men OR Women Needed: Scientists Create Sperm And Eggs From Stem Cells

[By Fiona MacRae, Daily Mail | Thursday, 29 October, 2009.]
Human eggs and sperm have been grown in the laboratory in research which could change the face of parenthood. It paves the way for a cure for infertility and could help those left sterile by cancer treatment to have children who are biologically their own.

But it raises a number of moral and ethical concerns. These include the possibility of children being born through entirely artificial means, and men and women being sidelined from the process of making babies. Opponents argue that it is wrong to meddle with the building blocks of life and warn that the advances taking place to tackle infertility risk distorting and damaging relations between family members.

The U.S. government-funded research also offers the prospect of a "miracle pill" which staves off the menopause, allowing women to wait longer to have a child. It centres on stem cells, widely seen as a repair kit for the body. Scientists at Stanford University in California found the right cocktail of chemicals and vitamins to coax the cells into becoming eggs and sperm.

The sperm had heads and short tails and are thought to have been mature enough to fertilise an egg. The eggs were at a much earlier stage but were still much more developed than any created so far by other scientists.

The double success, published in the journal Nature, raises the prospect of men and women one day "growing" their own sperm and eggs for use in I.V.F. treatments. The American team used stem cells taken from embryos in the first days of life but hope to repeat the process with slivers of skin. The skin cells would first be exposed to a mixture which wound back their biological clocks to embryonic stem cell state, before being transformed into sperm or eggs.

Starting with a person's own skin would also mean the lab-grown sperm or eggs would not be rejected by the body. The science also raises the possibility of "male eggs" made from men's skin and "female sperm" from women's skin. This would allow gay couples to have children genetically their own, although many scientists are sceptical about whether it is possible to create sperm from female cells, which lack the male Y chromosome. (Full story here.)

Why Boys Are Turning Into Girls

[By Geoffrey Lean, London Telegraph | Friday, 23 October, 2009.]
Here's something rather rotten from the State of Denmark. Its government yesterday unveiled official research showing that two-year-old children are at risk from a bewildering array of gender-bending chemicals in such everyday items as waterproof clothes, rubber boots, bed linen, food, nappies, sunscreen lotion and moisturising cream.

The 326-page report, published by the environment protection agency, is the latest piece in an increasingly alarming jigsaw. A picture is emerging of ubiquitous chemical contamination driving down sperm counts and feminising male children all over the developed world. And anti-pollution measures and regulations are falling far short of getting to grips with it.

Sperm counts are falling so fast that young men are less fertile than their fathers and produce only a third as much, proportionately, as hamsters. And gender-bending chemicals are increasingly being blamed for the mystery of the "lost boys": babies who should normally be male who have been born as girls instead.

The Danish government set out to find out how much contamination from gender-bending chemicals a two-year-old child was exposed to every day. It concluded that a child could be "at critical risk" from just a few exposures to high levels of the substances, such as from rubber clogs, and imperilled by the amount it absorbed from sources ranging from food to sunscreens.

The results build on earlier studies showing that British children have higher levels of gender-bending chemicals in their blood than their parents or grandparents. Indeed WWF (formerly the World Wildlife Fund), which commissioned the older research, warned that the chemicals were so widespread that "there is very little, if anything, individuals can do to prevent contamination of themselves and their families." Prominent among them are dioxins, PVC, flame retardants, phthalates (extensively used to soften plastics) and the now largely banned PCBs, one and a half million tons of which were used in countless products from paints to electrical equipment.

Young boys, like those in the Danish study, could end up producing less sperm and developing feminised behaviour. Research at Rotterdam's Erasmus University found that boys whose mothers were exposed to PCBs and dioxins were more likely to play with dolls and tea sets and dress up in female clothes.

And it is in the womb that babies are most vulnerable; a study of umbilical cords from British mothers found that every one contained hazardous chemicals. Scientists at the University of Rochester in New York discovered that boys born to women exposed to phthalates had smaller penises and other feminisation of the genitals.

The contamination may also offer a clue to a mysterious shift in the sex of babies. Normally 106 boys are born for every 100 girls: it is thought to be nature's way of making up for the fact that men were more likely to be killed hunting or in conflict. But the proportion of females is rising, so much so that some 250,000 babies who statistically should have been boys have ended up as girls in Japan and the United States alone. In Britain, the discrepancy amounts to thousands of babies a year. (Full story here.)

Lack Of Choice, Loss Of Freedom

[Holistic Moms Network | Sunday, 25 October, 2009.]
President Obama has paved the road for the end of freedom and choice for parents (and others) in this country. Declaring the swine flu pandemic to be a national emergency, President Obama has given broad powers enabling the government to act as they deem appropriate to prevent and treat this illness.

Despite the C.D.C.'s own reporting that the swine flu pandemic may well have peaked out already, the President has initiated a crisis state inciting both fear and panic. But his actions are not going without criticism. Mike Adams of the Natural News ponders the motivation behind declaring a state of emergency, even more concerning coming on the heels of the rescission of NY H1N1 mandate for health care workers and growing media reports of public distrust of the vaccine and the severity of the swine flu. The more resistance to the vaccine that arises, the harder the push to enforce it.

This second of two actions to broaden government powers during a "pandemic" also "allows drug companies, health officials and anyone who gives experimental vaccines to Americans during a declared public health emergency, to be protected from liability if people get hurt." There will be no recourse despite reports of adverse flu vaccine reactions, including the tragic story of Desiree Jennings. The insert to the H1N1 vaccination itself clearly states the the potential side effects including increased risk of hospitalization and wheezing in young children, immune system disorders, Guillain-Barre syndrome (G.B.S.), and gastrointestinal disorders. And there is no regard for reports of deaths from the swine flu vaccine along with hundreds of cases of G.B.S. And what about the swelling number of credible, informed professionals who warn of the danger of the swine flu vaccination? Do any of these factor into the equation?

Parents across the country are scared. Not by swine flu, but by the lack of choice and loss of freedom that they are facing. Most physicians are not helping matters. Anecdotal reports from Holistic Moms across the nation indicate that anyone appearing in a health care facility with flu-like symptoms are being told they have H1N1, without testing, simply because "no other flu viruses" are circulating this early in the season, inflating reports without any clinical evidence.

Will parents lose all choice in this emergency? Can we no longer decide what medical practices are or are not appropriate for our children? We have seen "mishaps" already of children given the vaccine "by mistake."

As parents, we have a right to make informed, educated decisions about the health and well-being of our children. We should be guided by the principles of informed consent. As the National Vaccine Information Center explains:

"Informed consent has been the central ethical principle of the practice of modern medicine since the Nuremberg Code was issued by the Nuremberg Tribunal after World War II. Although the Nuremberg Code specifically addressed the human right for human beings to give their voluntary informed consent to participate in scientific experiments, the First Principle of the Nuremberg Code has become an ethical standard for allowing patients to give their voluntary consent to engage in medical interventions that carry a risk of harm."

Without such a guiding principle, we and our children are not only at risk but also have no legal means for justice. A national emergency indeed. (Link.)