Link: http://uruknet.info/?p=m50993&hd=&size=1&l=e

Cairo: Doctors operating the only brain-scanning machine at an Egyptian hospital near Gaza have been almost overwhelmed by the number of Palestinian children arriving with bullet wounds to the head. On just one day last week, staff at the Al Arish hospital in Sinai were called to perform CAT scans on a nine year old, two 10 year olds and a 14 year old, each of whom had a bullet lodged in their brain after coming under fire during the Israeli ground assault on Gaza. Israeli officials continued to deny on Saturday that their soldiers had deliberately targeted civilians, blaming Hamas fighters for sheltering in the houses of ordinary Gaza residents and using them as human shields. But there is no disputing the scale of the suffering in Gaza or its heavy impact on the young. Hundreds of victims of Israel's three-week campaign in Gaza have been transferred across the Egyptian border at Rafah for urgent treatment. They are seen first at Al Arish, nearly 40 miles from the border. Among them last week was nine-year-old Anas Haref, who arrived with a bullet in her brain. Dr Ahmad Yahia, head of the trauma team, broke the news to her grandmother that the girl was not expected to live.

Link: http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/article5484682.ece

Fears that the world is sliding into the worst global recession since the Great Depression multiplied yesterday as figures showed the steepest jump in American unemployment since the Second World War and a slump in manufacturing across Europe. Economists on both sides of the Atlantic were startled by the severity of the latest indications of global economic slump, which further stoked pressure for radical action to stave off economic calamity. A further surge in US joblessness led the litany of bleak developments yesterday. Official figures confirmed that more Americans lost their jobs last year than in any year since 1945, and that unemployment is soaring at the fastest pace seen since then. A total of 524,000 Americans were made redundant by US employers last month alone, the latest official payroll figures showed. The mounting toll of job losses drove the unemployment rate in the world's largest economy up to a 15-year peak of 7.2 per cent, sharply higher than November's 6.8 per cent, amid predictions that it will leap to 9.5 per cent or more by the second half of next year.

Link: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2009/928/fr1.htm

On Wednesday morning the family of Palestinian officer Ghassan Abu Ayyad, 25, was still trying to find a place to bury the body of their son in the Maghazi refugee camp in the heart of Gaza. The cemetery in Maghazi had already received dozens of burned and mangled corpses alongside the body parts of unidentified Palestinians killed on Saturday when the Israeli air force shelled a graduation ceremony at the police academy. There was no space for more bodies. By the fifth day of Israel's airborne assault on Gaza the tiny Strip's hospitals are in the same position as its cemeteries, unable to receive any more corpses and turning away all but the most critically injured victims of Israel's F16 fighter jets and Apache helicopters.

Link: http://aangirfan.blogspot.com/2009/01/remember-that-britains-sas-trained.html

At a time when the USA is supporting Israel's actions in Palestine, we should remember that the USA and UK supported Pol Pot and his murderous Khmer Rouge. The Kmer Rouge killed off around one quarter of Cambodia's population. Vietnam was pro-Russia. Pol Pot was not pro-Russia. The USA and UK supported Pol Pot. In 1970, Cambodia's head of state Prince Sihanouk was toppled by pro-American forces. In the early 1970s, the USA was bombing sections of Cambodia as part of its Vietnam War. This helped win recruits for Pol Pot. Pol Pot ran the government of Cambodia from 1975 until 1979, although he was influential before 1975. In 1972, the Vietnamese intervened in Cambodia against Pol pot's group. "Washington took immediate steps to preserve the Khmer Rouge as a guerrilla movement," according to Jack Colhoun in Covert Action Quarterly magazine, Summer 1990. (US supports Pol Pot)

Link: http://aangirfan.blogspot.com/2009/01/opus-dei-tony-blair-fascists-and.html

What might be the connections between CIA-Mossad mind control and politicians like Tony Blair? Professor Denys Turner, a theology professor at Yale, is a former member of Opus Dei which is said to be about sadomasochism and fascist mind control. In 2006, his daughter Ruth Turner was arrested and quizzed by UK police in the UK's cash-for-honours row. This row involved Tony Blair's Jewish friend Lord Levy. Ruth Turner now runs Tony Blair's Faith Foundation, which is active at Yale. "Blair’s foundation is the culmination of his life as a double agent." Blair, his 'sexy' Catholic aide... and new HQ near her Opus Dei father's office.

Link: http://www.russiatoday.com/news/news/35342

Saturday marks one year since the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan. The former prime minister was killed in a suicide bomb attack after an election rally near the capital, Islamabad. To her supporters, Bhutto's presence and guidance came to symbolise the quest for freedom and equality. Benazir Bhutto’s last speech was so spirited and full of hope that, a year later, her death has still leaves many feeling empty. The small Pakistani community in Moscow is marking the first anniversary of Bhutto's assassination with prayers and speeches. At a ceremony they praised her courage and vision, two qualities that, according to Pakistani Ambassador Mohammad Khalid Khattak, cost Bhutto her life. "Terrorists hate everyone, you don't have to do anything to be hated by them, if you disagree with them they hate you," said Khattak. A year after Bhutto's death, security still remains one of the most pressing issues in Pakistan. Metal detectors are a permanent fixture in the family mausoleum, as are the rose petals on Benazir’s tomb.

Link: http://english.pravda.ru/world/americas/23-12-2008/106864-usa_change-0

Is the United States going to put dictatorship into effect under the guise of the anti-terrorist struggle? What may trigger another major transformation in 2009? The answer is obvious: another 9/11 in the USA. Terrible and bloody events are in store for the world in the beginning of 2009. Most likely, the world will witness a reality show with a nuclear blast, which will be used as a reason for the US administration to change the world order again and leave the new Great Depression behind. There is every reason to believe that the Russian Federation may suffer as a result of this possible initiative too. Joe Biden made a sensational statement on October 19, 2008. He said that Barack Obama would have to undergo an ordeal during the first six months of his stay in the White House. It will be the time of a very serious international crisis, when Obama would have to make tough and possibly unpopular decisions both in home and foreign politics.

Link: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21539.htm

Rumsfeld, Ashcroft and other top Bush officials could soon face legal jeopardy. The United States, like many countries, has a bad habit of committing wartime excesses and an even worse record of accounting for them afterward. But a remarkable string of recent events suggests that may finally be changing—and that top Bush administration officials could soon face legal jeopardy for prisoner abuse committed under their watch in the war on terror. In early December, in a highly unusual move, a federal court in New York agreed to rehear a lawsuit against former Attorney General John Ashcroft brought by a Canadian citizen, Maher Arar. (Arar was a victim of the administration's extraordinary rendition program: he was seized by U.S. officials in 2002 while in transit through Kennedy Airport and deported to Syria, where he was tortured.) Then, on Dec. 15, the Supreme Court revived a lawsuit against Donald Rumsfeld by four Guantánamo detainees alleging abuse there—a reminder that the court, unlike the White House, will extend Constitutional protections to foreigners at Gitmo. Finally, in the same week the Senate Armed Service Committee, led by Carl Levin and John McCain, released a blistering report specifically blaming key administration figures for prisoner mistreatment and interrogation techniques that broke the law. The bipartisan report reads like a brief for the prosecution—calling, for example, Rumsfeld's behavior a "direct cause" of abuse.

Link: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Whered-the-bailout-money-go-apf-13889514.html?ref=patrick.net

Where'd the bailout money go? $350 billion later, banks won't say how they're spending it. It's something any bank would demand to know before handing out a loan: Where's the money going? But after receiving billions in aid from U.S. taxpayers, the nation's largest banks say they can't track exactly how they're spending the money or they simply refuse to discuss it. "We've lent some of it. We've not lent some of it. We've not given any accounting of, 'Here's how we're doing it,'" said Thomas Kelly, a spokesman for JPMorgan Chase, which received $25 billion in emergency bailout money. "We have not disclosed that to the public. We're declining to." The Associated Press contacted 21 banks that received at least $1 billion in government money and asked four questions: How much has been spent? What was it spent on? How much is being held in savings, and what's the plan for the rest? None of the banks provided specific answers.

Link: http://www.truthout.org/122408R

The US economy shrank in the third quarter, official data confirmed Tuesday, as the IMF's top economist warned of a second Great Depression offering no respite from relentless gloom ahead of Christmas. The abrupt 0.5 percent contraction of gross domestic product (GDP) in the world's largest economy was seen as marking the start of a steep downturn for the United States after GDP growth of 2.8 percent in the second quarter. Stocks on Wall Street rose in early trading, however, as the contraction had been expected and was unrevised from a previous estimate. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 0.54 percent and the Nasdaq rose 0.60 percent.

Link: http://sovereignsentience.blogspot.com/2008/12/general-george-s-patton-was.html

George S. Patton, America's greatest combat general of the Second World War, was assassinated after the conflict with the connivance of US leaders, according to a new book. The newly unearthed diaries of a colourful assassin for the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, reveal that American spy chiefs wanted Patton dead because he was threatening to expose allied collusion with the Russians that cost American lives. The death of General Patton in December 1945, is one of the enduring mysteries of the war era. Although he had suffered serious injuries in a car crash in Manheim, he was thought to be recovering and was on the verge of flying home. But after a decade-long investigation, military historian Robert Wilcox claims that OSS head General "Wild Bill" Donovan ordered a highly decorated marksman called Douglas Bazata to silence Patton, who gloried in the nickname "Old Blood and Guts".

Link: http://www.democracynow.org/2008/12/19/us_auto_giants_workers_face_uncertain

GREGG SHOTWELL: Well, you know, I think that we need to advocate for a national industrial policy that supports and sustains the expansion, rather than the destruction, of the middle class. And I would advocate for a policy that strengthens our economy, our national security, and makes the dream of a higher standard of living attainable for a wider number of citizens. You know, the working class is the backbone of this nation. And I think that we need to strengthen the American worker. I would like to see, first and foremost, that we have national healthcare, because this is the one solution that would help everyone. It would help the employers. It would help the employees. It would help the consumers. And that is the biggest factor that takes away our competitiveness. That’s the one factor that would level the playing field, because all of our competitors have national healthcare and stronger pension systems in their country—and by “pension,” I mean government pension—so that when Toyota, you know, imports all these cars, they’re not paying for healthcare, they’re not paying for the pensions on those employees that are working overseas.

Link: http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Police_assault_12yearold_girl_after_mistaking_1219.html

It was a little before 8 at night when the breaker went out at Emily Milburn's home in Galveston. She was busy preparing her children for school the next day, so she asked her 12-year-old daughter, Dymond, to pop outside and turn the switch back on. As Dymond headed toward the breaker, a blue van drove up and three men jumped out rushing toward her. One of them grabbed her saying, "You're a prostitute. You're coming with me." Dymond grabbed onto a tree and started screaming, "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy." One of the men covered her mouth. Two of the men beat her about the face and throat. As it turned out, the three men were plain-clothed Galveston police officers who had been called to the area regarding three white prostitutes soliciting a white man and a black drug dealer. police went to the wrong house, two blocks away from the area of the reported illegal activity, Milburn's attorney, Anthony Griffin, said. After the incident, Dymond was hospitalized and suffered black eyes as well as throat and ear drum injuries. Three weeks later, police went to Dymond's school, where she was an honor student, and arrested her for assaulting a public servant. Griffin says the allegations stem from when Dymond fought back against the three men who were trying to take her from her home. Update: This is from the officers' lawyer, William Helfand: "The city has investigated the matter and found that the conduct of the police officers was appropriate under the circumstances," Helfand also said the little girl will face consequences for her actions... The police are always right in a police state.

Link: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=1088437

In yet another sign of mounting troubles for Detroit's three automakers, Chrysler LLC announced yesterday it would idle all 30 of its North American manufacturing plants for at least four weeks after its last shift tomorrow. The move will put thousands of auto workers across the country out of work until at least mid-January. North America's third-largest automaker said the drastic measure was needed to bring its production levels in line with inventories, after a lack of consumer credit for car buyers in the United States has left new vehicles gathering dust on dealership lots. The plant shutdowns will remain in effect until at least Jan. 19, Chrysler said. The move follows similar announcements at General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co. in recent weeks. GM said last Friday it would halt operations at 30% of its plants, including those in Oshawa, for the first three months of 2009, which would result in 250,000 fewer vehicles.

Link: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/dec2008/brel-d15.shtml

Jacques Brel was one of the great representatives of French chanson in the post-World War II period. Born into a bourgeois family, Brel rejected the future awaiting him in his father’s cardboard factory and turned to singing. At the height of his success, in 1967, he chose to stop singing to devote himself to theater and cinema. Brel’s boundless enthusiasm toward life, his inexhaustible energy and his respect for ordinary people remain unforgettable. Born on the eve of the Great Depression, he experienced the Second World War and the German invasion of Belgium, the Algerian independence struggle in the late 1950s and the mass radicalization of the 1960s. Those events profoundly marked Brel’s life and art, as well as that of other contemporary singers and artists. Brel was born in Brussels, the Belgian capital, in April 1929. His father, Romain Brel, had worked some 20 years for the import-export corporation Cominex, during which time he spent several years in the Congo, then a Belgian colony. In 1926, he returned to Brussels and, in 1929, held a post on the company’s board of directors. Shortly after, Armand Vanneste, his brother-in-law, offered to partner with him in founding Vanneste & Brel, a company making cardboard. It was into this well-to-do Brussels bourgeois family that Jacques Brel was born, and this would permit him to avoid, for the most part, the miseries brought on by the economic crisis that hit the world in 1929, when the Wall Street crash occurred.

Link: http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2008/12/03/the-wholesale-destruction-of-the-american-economy.aspx

There is only one organization in the world with the power to destroy the American economy. Throughout 2008, it has waged a terrible war that has severely damaged -- likely beyond quick repair -- the very foundations of that economy. If left unchecked, the pain we're feeling now will seem minor in comparison to the devastation yet to come.

And no, this brazen cabal isn't based in radical shrines in the Middle East or the mountainous border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Its headquarters is a hundred square mile plot of swampland between Virginia and Maryland. Regardless of the intent of the U.S. government's economic interventions, the consequences of all that help are shaping up at minimum to rival the Great Depression in depth and scale. The ultimate cost may be far larger: the complete loss of our country.

You're being killed with kindness. The weapons of economic destruction have been forced marriages through bailouts, coerced investments in banks, and cash infusions into utter failures. Every time the government steps in, it crowds out private capital, distorts the signaling value of prices, and impedes the market's ability to cleanse itself by sweeping away its failures. Rather than helping the economy and markets recover, all this "help" is prolonging the agony.

Link: http://leftlooking.blogspot.com/2008/12/cias-mind-control-program-exposed-by.html

Louis Porter, of the Vermont Press Bureau, today reports that a Dr. Robert W. Hyde, a psychiatrist associated with the CIA, conducted drug and psychological experiments on unwitting subjects at a Boston Hospital in the 1950s, under the auspices of MK-ULTRA, the CIA's mind control program. Later, Hyde worked as the Director of Research in the Vermont State Hospital, where he secretly used abnormal and harmful treatment techniques, including LSD dosage, on unwitting patients. How does Porter know all this? Because one of Hyde's patients can't forget him and his abuse. Her name is Karen Wetmore, and, with the help of lawyers who obtained secret government documents under the Freedom of Information Act, she sued the hospital and won a private settlement. The full article can be found on the blog of "Steven Soldz: Psychoanalyst, Psychologist, Researcher and Activist." Where did the CIA get LSD? From the Nazi scientists who brought it with them to America after the war. One of the first to discover and develop the drug, Dr. Hubertus Strughold use it on death camp prisoners during the war. Dr. Strughold, not coincidentally, is one of the Nazis rescued from a hangman's noose at Nuremberg by Allen Dulles and the CIA.

Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7764852.stm

The discovery was made by members of a government-appointed commission during excavation at a military base outside the capital, Kabul. Daud Khan overthrew the last king of Afghanistan, Zahir Shah, in 1973. His death five years later ushered in a decade of Soviet occupation followed by the rise of the Taleban. The former president is to be given a special funeral ceremony by the government. A spokesman for the Ministry of Health told the Associated Press news agency that the former president's body was among dozens discovered at two mass graves in the Pul-e-Charkhi area, east of Kabul, six months ago. The spokesman said that Mr Khan and 17 family members and associates were executed inside the presidential palace in Kabul during a communist-inspired coup in 1978. He said that teeth moulds were used to identify the late president's body but the determining factor was a small golden Koran that was found with his remains. "This Koran was given to him as a gift by the king of Saudi Arabia when he went on a trip to the kingdom," the spokesman said.

Link: http://en.rian.ru/russia/20081205/118703869.html

YEKATERINBURG, December 5 (RIA Novosti) - A final round of DNA tests has confirmed that the human remains found in the Urals in 1991 belonged to Russia's last tsar, Nicholas II, an American scientist involved in the research said on Friday. An analysis of the bone remains and DNA extracted from blood on the emperor's shirt that is kept in the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg was ordered by the top prosecutor's office. One of the aims of the analysis was to prove the authenticity of bone fragments discovered near Yekaterinburg in 2007 and identified as the remains of Nicholas II's son and heir, Alexis, and daughter Maria. Michael Cobble said the research had been concluded and the results had confirmed the earlier findings. Earlier tests, conducted by a dozen institutions in Russia and abroad, proved the remains found in 1991 and 2007 belonged to members of the same family. The remains of Nicholas II and his family members were discovered near Yekaterinburg, where they were shot by the Bolsheviks in 1918. They were authenticated and buried in the St. Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg in 1998, but the forensic examination results have been repeatedly challenged since then. The Russian Orthodox Church, which has canonized the murdered Romanovs, but called their 1998 burial "a political show," responded cautiously to the latest test results on Friday. "I believe the results of those tests should be presented for discussion by a broad group of scientists, and explained to the public and Church leaders," Father Vsevold Chaplin, deputy head of the Moscow Patriarchy's foreign relations department, said.

Link: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1092165/Rush-hour-driver-asked-police-use-hardshoulder-wife-labour-hospital--got-issued-70-traffic-ticket.html

Jennifer Davis's contractions were just three minutes apart when she and her husband John got stuck in rush hour traffic as they tried to get to the hospital in Cambridge, Boston. Mr Davis said he drove in the breakdown lane and stopped to ask a state trooper if they could take the lane to the next exit. But the officer not only refused, he made them wait on the roadside while he finished writing someone else's ticket, then returned to their car and told them they would be getting a ticket in the post. The case, reported in local media today, outraged Bostonians so much that the couple have been flooded with calls and interview requests and even offers from people who wanted to pay their ticket - offers the couple have declined. A State Police spokesman said the trooper was not expected to be disciplined over the incident...