Melody Townsel was stationed in Kyrgyzstan on a US AID project. During her stay there, she became embroiled in a controversy in which John Bolton was a key player. She described the incident in a letter to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee members who are reviewing the Bolton nomination.

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article8577.htm

This briefing examines the continuing use of incendiary weapons by the US military in Iraq. US officials have been forced to admit using the MK-77 incendiary, a modern form of napalm, at least during the initial fighting stage of the war.

http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/966/1/32/


From Information Clearing House

Iraqi female detainees say that they have been illegally detained, raped and sexually humiliated by U.S. occupation forces.

http://www.aljazeera.com/cgi-bin/news_service/middle_east_full_story.asp?service_id=7681

This is the story of what Mr. Blair did not tell us before sending British troops into battle.

On the second anniversary of the Iraq war, Panorama reveals how several of the claims he made in public during the build up to the war - and afterwards - conflict with what we now know was going on behind the scenes, as evidenced for instance by government officials and documents.

Real Video Click here to view:
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article8579.htm

18.04.05

Mit einer Änderung des Strafgesetzbuches möchte die Bundesregierung bestimmte häufige "Stalking-Handlungen" wie Auflauern vor der Wohnung, Telefonterror und Bedrohung unter Strafe stellen. Dazu solle ein neuer Tatbestand Nachstellung in das Strafgesetzbuch eingefügt werden, sagte Bundesjustizministerin Brigitte Zypries am Freitag in Berlin bei der Vorstellung eines entsprechenden Gesetzentwurfs. Gegen Täter könnten Freiheitsstrafen bis zu drei Jahren oder Geldstrafen verhängt werden. Fälle, die durch den neuen Paragrafen nicht abgedeckt werden, könnten über das bestehende Gewaltschutzgesetz aufgefangen werden.

Die ganze Nachricht im Internet:

http://www.ngo-online.de/ganze_nachricht.php?Nr=10894

With the first phase of Canada's annual seal hunt in the Gulf of St. Lawrence now over, more than 105,000 seals have been killed. Spectacular ice floes transformed into giant white nurseries just weeks ago are now stained red with the blood of seal carcasses as far as the eye can see. Last week they began killing another 200,000 seals in Newfoundland.

The Canadian government maintains that the hunt is humane. But our observers returning from the ice have witnessed numerous acts of cruelty and suffering, from clubbed baby seals left in agony while hunters move quickly onto the next seal, to seals shot and left to die a slow death under the ice. As IFAW's video footage shows, the seal hunt continues to inflict unnecessary suffering and cruelty to baby seals as young as 12 days old.

Thanks to your earlier efforts, we have made great strides in building the international outrage needed to end the slaughter.

But we need your help to intensify the pressure on Canada's government to end the hunt!

Please cut and paste this message into an email to your friends to maintain the momentum:


Dear Friends,

I have just read and signed the petition:
"Stop Canada's Cruel and Senseless Seal Hunt" from The International Fund for Animal Welfare:
http://www.care2.com/go/z/23181

Many people are unaware that hundreds of thousands of baby seals are still being cruelly killed each year mainly for their fur -- frivolous luxury items that no one really needs! Please help by speaking out against the largestgovernment sanctioned slaughter of marine mammalsin the world by signing this petition.

Every voice raised against such a cruel and unnecessary hunt is critical to raising the public pressure needed toconvince the Canadian government to change.

Sign here: http://www.care2.com/go/z/23181

Thank you!



Thank you for taking action today!

- Dawn S
Care2 and ThePetitionSite team

Pass It On: Welcome To The Hammer's House

Tom DeLay's got a network of power players and money. We've got a video about it.
http://houseofscandal.org/videoa.html

Source: http://www.tompaine.com/index.php#passiton

http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=630141

by Rowan Williams, The Independent

The archbishop of Canterbury warns that the price of our continued failure to protect the earth will be violence and social collapse.

http://www.tompaine.com/

"Ängste ernst nehmen"

15. April 2005

Mobilfunk-Petition für den Pongau geplant

ST. Johann (SN-S.P.). Bischofshofen machte den Anfang, St. Johann zog nach und nun will der ganze Pongau deren Vorbild folgen. Die Rede ist von einer Mobilfunk-Petition. In der Sitzung des Regionalverbandes Pongau am 19. April wird der Punkt behandelt. "Ich kann ich mir gut vorstellen, dass die Petition beschlossen wird", sagt Regionalverbands-Obmann und Bgm. Peter Brandauer aus Werfenweng.

Ähnlich wie in Bischofshofen und St. Johann soll die Pongau weite Resolution folgende Forderungen beinhalten: Einbeziehung der lokalen Bevölkerung, Überprüfung mehrerer Standort-Alternativen und die Einhaltung des Salzburger Vorsorgewerts in der Höhe von einem Milliwatt pro Quadratmeter.

"Es geht uns um optimale Nutzung der Anlagen, die bereits da sind. Es kann nicht sein, dass jeder Anbieter eine Anlage hat."

Robert Gassner, Initiator der Petition in Bischofshofen, will eine bessere Zusammenarbeit zwischen Mobilfunkanbietern und der Bevölkerung erreichen. "Die Mobilfunk-Betreiber müssen unsere Ängste ernst nehmen."

Thomas Barmüller vom Forum Mobilkommunikation ist von den Pongauer Plänen wenig begeistert: "Zum einen ist der Inhalt der Petition oft widersprüchlich, zum anderen ist der Vorsorgewert bei UMTS nicht einhaltbar." Für Betreiber werde es unmöglich, neue Standorte für Sendeanlagen zu finden. "Auf Gemeinde-Gebäuden geht nichts mehr. Auf Privathäusern auch nicht, weil Besitzer den sozialen Druck nicht aushalten." Auch Bischofshofen werde seine Haltung zu spüren bekommen: "Bei der Vierschanzentournee wird mobile Kommunikation und Datenübertragung im gewünschten Maß kaum noch möglich sein.

http://www.salzburg.com/sn/05/04/15/artikel/1500843.html


Nachricht von der BI Bad Dürkheim

http://www.breakfornews.com/articles/PhotoFakingTheWTCFall.htm


Informant: ranger116

They put huge deficits on plastic for our grandkids to pay. They sell us out to predatory lenders. They're the Credit Card Congress.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7528519/site/newsweek/


From Information Clearing House

AMERICA leads the world in many fields, but perhaps most commandingly in bankruptcy. Last year, in Britain, which enjoys Europe’s most debtor-friendly bankruptcy laws, 35,898 people filed for bankruptcy protection. In the United States that figure was 1.6m—around nine times higher per capita...

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8567.htm

- WARNING -

Pictures should only be viewed by a mature audience
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3943.htm

Victims in the Iraq war are daily "dampened down" and categorised as collateral damage. Give them personality, shape, name and a reference point in society and in conscience you couldn't bomb them. Killing somebody's daughter, mother, girlfriend or baby cuts too near the bone.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8566.htm


From Information Clearing House

Two new reports on economics (“Arab World Competitiveness Report 2005”) and politics (“Towards Freedom in the Arab World,” launched in Amman, Jordan on April 5, 2005) in the Arab states dramatized what all astute observers already knew: the Arab region is a mess and US policies have exacerbated the situation.

http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=7649&sectionID=22


From Information Clearing House

The myth of US invincibility
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8558.htm

New Labour is churning out misinformation about Iraq as the election nears.

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/comment/0,12956,1461888,00.html


From Information Clearing House

The Chancellor of the Exchequer and pretender to the throne, has, according to his biographer Richard Peston, told Blair that, "There is nothing you could say to me now that I could ever believe."

http://www.counterpunch.com/waraich04162005.html


From Information Clearing House

It is beginning to become apparent that the greatest threat to world peace may not really be individual terrorists but the United States Administration itself.

http://www.tonybenn.com/time.html


From Information Clearing House

Secret Agent: Rumsfeld Sneaks Off to Baku

Unreported in U.S. press, he stalks oil and Iran in Azerbaijan

So, all you families out there, get ready to send your kids to Iran to fight for "democracy"—and to keep China from getting all that oil so that our oil companies can continue to prosper.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8564.htm

US study finds H-bomb tests still causing cancer in Marshalls 50 years on

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20050417/hl_afp/marshallsusnuclear_050417204948


Informant: Raulmax

http://amconmag.com/2005_04_25/article1.html


Informant: Lew Rockwell

04/15/05

Memo to Congress: Whenever Attorney General Alberto Gonzales starts talking like a, you know, sort of likably dodgy teenager confronted with dings on the family car, it's time to pay close attention. In the first round of Congressional hearings into the Patriot Act, the normally precise Gonzales took on the oily grammar of evasion whenever he was pressed on a core civil liberties issue: 'Let me, kind of, reassure the committee and the American people' (on snooping into library and medical records). 'That's a difficult question that requires, sort of, a case-by-case analysis' (on rendition of prisoners to regimes with a record of torture). ... The sunset review of the Patriot Act marks a singular opportunity for Congress to catalogue abuses and rethink the Administration's rights-shredding approach to security. The Administration's obsession with secrecy makes a proper evaluation difficult, but the limited evidence so far available is alarming...

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050502&s=editors

from The Nation, by staff


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

04/14/05

It's the greed season. Republicans in the House just voted, by a lopsided margin, to permanently repeal the estate tax. ... But no effort is such an affront to our bedrock principle of equal opportunity as trashing the estate tax. ... The estate tax was a pillar of the Progressive movement 100 years ago, and the Republicans want to turn the clocks back, way back, beyond the New Deal, back past the Progressive Era, to the halcyon days of social Darwinism, the only kind of Darwinism they believe in." [editor's note: Bemoaning the end of the "death tax" -- specifically designed as it was to divert wealth AWAY from the families of those who made it, and into the public trough -- is another bad habit of "progressives" that we libertarians want to exorcise. Being more concerned that some of the "rich" might keep their money, than that some "middle class" ones could ... is pure socialist thinking! - SAT]

http://www.progressive.org/webex05/wx0413a05.php

from The Progressive, by Matthew Rothschild


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

04/16/05

The 'beat and greet' reception included kicking, punching, and, according to the indictment brought by the New Jersey prosecutor's office, 'plucking detainees' body hairs with pliers, forcing detainees to place their heads in toilet bowls, encouraging and ordering detainees to perform sexual acts upon one another, forcing detainees to assume unusual and degrading positions while naked, and cursing at and verbally insulting the detainees.' ... The pliers, it would turn out, were pincers used to cut plastic flex cuffs. Officers were also alleged to forced have their prisoners to chant 'America is number one!

http://counterpunch.com/dow04162005.html

from CounterPunch, by Mark Dow


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

The Lure of Christian Nationalism Part 1
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/040605B.shtml

America's religious right: Hang ten and fight Part 2

04/15/05

In their wisdom, the Founding Fathers foresaw the conflicts that government involvement in such questions would bring. Which is why, despite their personal religious convictions, they set out to keep God and government out of each other's way. Over succeeding generations, religious believers like Judge Moore have slowly broken through the wall of separation, as during the Cold War hysteria of the 1950s, when Congress put the words 'under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance and made 'In God We Trust' the national motto. Each succeeding generation of militants then uses the earlier breakthroughs to justify far more, all in pursuit of what Judge Moore call 'a Christian nation.'" [Editor's note: This is Part 2 in Weisman's 5 part series "America's Religious Right - Saints or Subversives?" -MLS]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/041505B.shtml

from TruthOut, by Steve Weissman


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

04/18/05

We, as people of this country, have a right to do as we please and we do not need permission, as long as we do not harm or put anyone in harms way or jeopardy. When it comes to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, it is all about property. When it comes to rights, it is all about property. Property is the one answer to any question when it comes to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and any amendments to that Constitution. George Bernard Shaw said, 'Liberty means responsibility, that is why men fear it...

http://www.libertyforall.net/2005/may1/awareness.html


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

04/15/05

The next major terrorist attack on the U.S. could plunge our economy into deep recession from which it may take years to recover. That's the disturbing, but all too believable conclusion of Robert D. Hormats, Managing Director of Goldman, Sachs. Hormats argues that in 2005, the U.S. economy is much more vulnerable to disruption from a terrorist attack than it was before 9/11. In 2001, the federal budget was running a large surplus. Today it is running a huge deficit. In addition, the U.S. is spending large amounts of money on war in Afghanistan and Iraq, homeland defense, and other security-related activities...

http://www.isil.org/towards-liberty/attack-could-sink.html

from International Society for Individual Liberty, by Jarret Wollstein


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

04/18/05

Here, just drink this stuff -- don't worry, it's only Kool-Aid. That's just what the Americans have been telling their would-be revolutionary vanguards all over Eastern and Central Europe, and throughout the former Soviet Union. No wonder post-'revolutionary' Kyrgyzstan is 'volatile.' So is Iraq, and so is Lebanon. The symptoms are universal. The patient begins to tremble and convulse: that's the new ruling elite purging their authoritarian opponents, and shedding the last remnants of national sovereignty before entering the American version of the old Warsaw Pact...

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=5586

from AntiWar.Com, by Justin Raimondo


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

04/17/05

The greatest reverence the founding fathers showed was their profound love of this world, and of man's place in it. At this late date, the religionists who seek to obliterate history and the actual founding principles of this country ought to give up their dishonest and ignorant battle to weld state and religion together once again. It is long past time for them to join the twenty-first century -- or, at the very least, the eighteenth. The sole and immensely destructive distinction that these religionists can claim is that they seek to reverse history, with their wretched embrace of the Dark and Middle Ages. And that is precisely where they would take all the rest of us, if they have their way...

http://coldfury.com/reason/?p=387

from The Light of Reason, by Arthur Silber


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

04/18/05

[L]ike a slowly dying large animal, the state will continue to be an annoyance and even deadly under certain conditions, but it will not be an effective player in our daily lives. The reason is this. The state cannot deal with change, and ours is a time of constant and relentless change. It does not navigate the world with attention to outcomes, and ours is a world in which all human endeavors are expected to achieve. Its bureaucratic structures are fine for dealing with repetitive tasks but it cannot face new challenges. It can consume resources but it is incapable of producing them. It is uninventive, unresponsive, unintelligent, uninformed, and unmotivated to succeed...

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/empire-shrinks.html

from LewRockwell.Com, by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

04/15/05

A data broker that sold personal information to identity thieves, an elementary school that tried to track students with radio-frequency ID tags and a consulting firm that helped orchestrate an invasive traveler-monitoring system all received honors this week from privacy rights advocates. The honorees were named as winners of this year's U.S. Big Brother Awards, a dubious prize intended to shame government agencies and companies that have done the most to invade personal privacy. Award recipients received a statue of a golden boot stomping on a human head...

http://wired-vig.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,67240,00.html

from Wired News


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

04/17/05

Top Democrats assailed House Majority Leader Tom DeLay on Sunday over ethical questions that have put him at the center of a political firestorm, while Republicans came to his defense. In appearances on political TV talk shows, congressional Democrats accused DeLay and fellow Republicans of an 'abuse of power' in handling questions over DeLay's fund raising and overseas trips...

http://tinyurl.com/95xvj

from CNN


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

04/17/05

All imports of United States corn have been stopped at British ports following the discovery that the US has been illegally exporting a banned GM maize to Europe for the past four years. The unprecedented move, which has angered the Bush administration, follows efforts to hush up and play down the scandal on both sides of the Atlantic. ... The scandal -- the worst yet involving GM imports -- centres around maize named Bt 11, modified to repel a pest called the corn borer. It also contains a gene conferring resistance to antibiotics. All such crops are banned in Europe because of fears that the resistance could spread to consumers via the food chain...

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/environment/story.jsp?story=630186

from Independent [UK]


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

04/15/05

The State Department decided to stop publishing an annual report on international terrorism after the government's top terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, the first year the publication covered. Several U.S. officials defended the abrupt decision, saying the methodology the National Counterterrorism Center used to generate statistics for the report may have been faulty, such as the inclusion of incidents that may not have been terrorism. Last year, the number of incidents in 2003 was undercounted, forcing a revision of the report, 'Patterns of Global Terrorism.' But other current and former officials charged that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's office ordered 'Patterns of Global Terrorism' eliminated several weeks ago because the 2004 statistics raised disturbing questions about the Bush's administration's frequent claims of progress in the war against terrorism...

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/11407689.htm

from Knight Ridder


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

(excerpt)

We have several new articles that are important. The great news is that the mainstream media is beginning to awaken to the threat of Dominionists attempt to take over the U.S.A. Here are several articles that came out in the last few weeks and are reprinted on our web site:

First: More on the Dominionists' "Reclaiming America For Christ"
by Bob Moser
Rolling Stone

In the conference's opening ceremony, the Dominionists recite an oath they dream of hearing in every classroom: "I pledge allegiance to the Christian flag, and to the Savior for whose kingdom it stands. One Savior, crucified, risen and coming again, with life and liberty for all who believe."

http://www.yuricareport.com/Dominionism/ChristiansPlotToRemakeAmerica.html

Secondly, writing about the same conference as Bob Mosser, Jane Lampman tells the story a little differently:

A Mission To 'Reclaim America'

by Jane Lampman, writing in the Christian Science Monitor and on CBS news-web site

In material given to conference attendees, the Rev. D. James Kennedy, Coral Ridge pastor wrote: "As the vice-regents of God, we are to bring His truth and His will to bear on every sphere of our world and our society. We are to exercise godly dominion and influence over our neighborhoods, our schools, our government ... our entertainment media, our news media, our scientific endeavors - in short, over every aspect and institution of human society."

http://www.yuricareport.com/Dominionism/MissionToReclaimAmerica.html

Here's a short piece by Katherine, but it is chilling to the core. Michael Ledeen has been linked to the forgery of the Niger Uranium documents that convinced America to preemptively strike Iraq. Ledeen is the international adviser to Karl Rove and the White House. Here are a few chilling excerpts from his book Machiavelli on Modern Leadership--if you haven't read this do so now. It raises questions of why an adviser to the President is discussing the necessity of a "temporary dictatorship."


Everything You Need to Know About Michael Ledeen

By Katherine Yurica

He wrote, "Paradoxically, preserving liberty may require the rule of a single leader, a dictator, willing to use those dreaded extraordinary measures, which few know how, or are willing, to employ." To find out a little about Michael Ledeen, the man who may have forged the documents, click here.

http://www.yuricareport.com/Dominionism/MichaelLedeen.html


Katherine Yurica