Julia Duin

China's hidden policy of executing prisoners of the forbidden quasi-Buddhist group Falun Gong and harvesting their organs for worldwide sale has been expanded to include Tibetans, "house church" Christians and Muslim Uighurs, human rights activists said Monday.

In a news conference on Capitol Hill, several speakers, including attorney David Matas of B'nai Brith Canada and Ethan Gutmann of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, said their investigations have unearthed a grisly trade in which an estimated 9,000 members of Falun Gong have been executed for their corneas, lungs, livers, kidneys and skins.

They likened the practice to the Nazi treatment of Jewish prisoners in World War II concentration camps, which included using them for sadistic medical experiments and taking the gold fillings from the teeth of corpses.

The newest wrinkle, they said, is that organs from other religious prisoners — specifically dissidents from China's Christian, Muslim and Tibetan Buddhist communities — are also being harvested to satisfy an insatiable global demand.

"These groups are useless to the state," said Mr. Gutmann, author of a forthcoming book on Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa. "They are toxic, so you can't release them. But they're worth a great deal of money in terms of their organs."

Organs from just one person can fetch a total of $100,000 on the worldwide market, he added.

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Philip Stott
Clamour Of The Times

“You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.” ~ Charles Dickens

[Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ’Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail. MARLEY’S GHOST]

My silence since mid-February has not meant that I have taken my eye off the climate-change scene. Far from it, although I have to confess that I have become increasingly wearied and bored by the fatuous lack of reality exhibited on this topic by many UK politicians. It is so glaringly obvious that, since the debacle in Copenhagen, ‘global warming’ is dying as a major political trope that I find it less and less exercising as an issue. Indeed, I do not want to waste too much energy in flogging a fundamentally dead corpse.

This last week, however, the nails in the global warming coffin have been driven in so thick and so fast that I thought it might be worth bringing attention once again to what is happening around the world - “You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Global Warming is as dead as a door-nail,” although I suspect that the Global Warming Ghost will hang around moaning and wailing for quite a while yet.

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Ellen Brown

Goldman Sachs building in New Jersey

While the SEC is busy investigating Goldman Sachs, it might want to look into another Goldman-dominated fraud: computerized front running using high-frequency trading programs.

Market commentators are fond of talking about “free market capitalism,” but according to Wall Street commentator Max Keiser, it is no more. It has morphed into what his TV co-host Stacy Herbert calls “rigged market capitalism”: all markets today are subject to manipulation for private gain.

Keiser isn’t just speculating about this.  He claims to have invented one of the most widely used programs for doing the rigging. Not that that’s what he meant to invent.  His patented program was designed to take the manipulation out of markets. It would do this by matching buyers with sellers automatically, eliminating “front running” – brokers buying or selling ahead of large orders coming in from their clients. The computer program was intended to remove the conflict of interest that exists when brokers who match buyers with sellers are also selling from their own accounts. But the program fell into the wrong hands and became the prototype for automated trading programs that actually facilitate front running.

Also called High Frequency Trading (HFT) or “black box trading,” automated program trading uses high-speed computers governed by complex algorithms (instructions to the computer) to analyze data and transact orders in massive quantities at very high speeds. Like the poker player peeking in a mirror to see his opponent’s cards, HFT allows the program trader to peek at major incoming orders and jump in front of them to skim profits off the top. And these large institutional orders are our money -- our pension funds, mutual funds, and 401Ks.

When “market making” (matching buyers with sellers) was done strictly by human brokers on the floor of the stock exchange, manipulations and front running were possible but were against the rules, which were strictly enforced.  Front running by computer, using complex trading programs, is an entirely different species of fraud. A minor potential for cheating has morphed into a monster. Keiser maintains that computerized front running with HFT has become the principal business of Wall Street and the primary force driving most of the volume on exchanges, contributing not only to a large portion of trading profits but to the manipulation of markets for economic and political ends.

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Stephen Lendman

Seven years under occupation, Iraqis still cope with what Refugees International calls "a dire humanitarian crisis that sees huge numbers of displaced (and other Iraqis) struggl(ing) to survive," a situation "for which the US bears special responsibility" but does nothing to correct.

Recent UNHCR figures estimate around 4.5 million refugees, nearly 2.8 million internal ones (IDPs), a third of these in squatter slums in Baghdad, Diyala and Salah al-Din. Many fear returning home. Most are impoverished. Settlements lack basic services, including water, sanitation, electricity, and health care. Education is difficult where available.

Camps are built in precarious places - under bridges, alongside railroad tracks, and near garbage dumps. In 2009, they were ordered to vacate. They remain. The directive was postponed, but they fear eviction with nowhere else to go, and little help for their needs and welfare.

Most get no government, US, UN or NGO aid given security's top priority. "The zero-risk mentality of the burgeoning security industry has hijacked more rational and creative thinking" to provide vitally needed humanitarian assistance.

As a result, the occupation grinds on while conditions deteriorate, "3,000 new individuals registering for refugee status each month," adding to a growing crisis. They lack proper shelter, food, health care and other essentials, living day to day fearing greater misery, disease or death.

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Matthew Nasuti

American military creating an environmental disaster in Afghan countryside (Part 2 of 3)
American military creating an environmental disaster in Afghan countryside (Part 3 of 3)

America plans to withdraw its troops but leave behind a toxic mess.

The American military presence in Afghanistan consists of fleets of aircraft, helicopters, armored vehicles, weapons, equipment, troops and facilities. Since 2001, they have generated millions of kilograms of hazardous, toxic and radioactive wastes. The Kabul Press asks the simple question:

“What have the Americans done with all that waste?”

The answer is chilling in that virtually all of it appears to have been buried, burned or secretly disposed of into the air, soil, groundwater and surface waters of Afghanistan. While the Americans may begin to withdraw next year, the toxic chemicals they leave behind will continue to pollute for centuries. Any abandoned radioactive waste may stain the Afghan countryside for thousands of years. Afghanistan has been described in the past as the graveyard of foreign armies. Today, Afghanistan has a different title: “Afghanistan is the toxic dumping ground for foreign armies.”

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Justin Raimondo

A new documentary series created by Stephen Hawking posits the mathematical certainty of extraterrestrial life – but the brilliant theoretical scientist recommends against trying to establish contact. “To my mathematical brain, the numbers [of planets] alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational,” Hawking says. “The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.” That’s where the sense of caution sets in, because if they’re anything like us – rapacious warlike predators – then perhaps keeping a certain amount of distance is the better part of valor. As Hawking puts it:

“We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach.”

Hey, wait a minute: is he talking about the aliens – or us? Untethered from solid ground – and from reality – rampaging across the known universe, plundering everything in their path. That sounds like our ruling class, all right, and it’s certainly no surprise they’re extending their hubris into outer space, as the Times of London reports:

“The mysterious X37B, launched successfully by the US Air Force from Cape Canaveral on Thursday … is officially described as an orbital test vehicle. However, one of its potential uses appears to be to launch a surge of small satellites during periods of high international tension. This would enable America to have eyes and ears orbiting above any potential troublespot in the world.”

Oh, those troublesome “troublespots” – like Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Texas.

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Thomas Fuller

The world of renewable energy, as with so many new initiatives in the past, is currently characterized by a lot of government money being eagerly sought by many sources--some of them not very clean.

When the University of East Anglia decided to investigate itself, they could have chosen from a wide variety of scientific or legal figures. They decided on Lord Oxburgh, despite questions about his independence. As chairman of a windfarm manufacturer, could he really impartially decide on fundamental questions of the probity of climate science?

Would Lord Oxburgh have been appointed to his position as head of the panel investigating Climategate if it had been known that his employer was a subsidiary controlled by an Italian company enmeshed in scandals involving Sicilian waste? Let me hasten to add that I am not making any accusations of either Lord Oxburgh or Falck Renewables, the company he chairs. But was he really the best choice for this inquiry?

Lord Oxburgh is chairman of Falck Renewables, a builder of windfarms with six projects in operation or under construction in the UK alone. Falck Renewables is a subsidiary of Falck Group, a Milan based company that has built windfarms in Calabria and Sicily that have been part of an anti-Mafia investigation. Some of the windfarms, including one near Corleone, were completed quite some time ago, but haven't been connected to the grid. However, generous EU subsidies were forthcoming nonetheless. One project in Minervino Murge was the subject of an anti Mafia investigation (link in Italian, but Google will translate) that led to several arrests.

Italian and EU subsidies for the building of wind farms and the world’s highest guaranteed rates, €180 ($240, £160) per kwh, for the electricity they produce have turned southern Italy into a highly attractive market exploited by organised crime.

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Stephen Lendman

One of the fences that form a “no-man’s land” on the border
near Tijuana. (Photograph: David McNew/Getty Images)

On April 20, Reuters headlined, "Arizona passes tough illegal immigration law," saying:

State lawmakers "passed a controversial immigration bill on Monday (April 19) requiring police in the state (to) determine if people are in the United States illegally, a measure critics say is open to racial profiling."

Called "Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhood Act," the Arizona House and Senate passed it, sending it to Governor Jan Brewer who signed it on April 23 to make it Arizona law.

The National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (NNIRR) works for "a just immigration and refugee policy in the United States (for) all immigrants, regardless of immigration status....advocating for their full labor, environmental, civil and human rights."

"We are ALL Arizona," it said before the bill became law. "Stop the Criminalization of Immigrants, End Racial Profiling! Tell AZ Governor to Veto (this) Anti-Immigrant Bill," saying:

"The Arizona State Legislature just passed a law (SB 1070) that legalizes unchecked racial profiling by police of anyone they 'suspect' is undocumented. It would criminalize all undocumented immigrants as 'trespassers' and subject them to misdemeanor or, in some cases, felony charges for a new 'trespass' crime."

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Patrick Seale

Barely a week goes by without news of some act of violence by Jewish settlers against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. By any definition, what settlers and other religious activists do to Palestinians is terrorism. But it goes unpunished.

Time and again, Muslim graves and mosques are desecrated, harvests torched, sheep rustled, cars stoned and damaged, homes and shops forcibly occupied. Palestinians are chased off their own land by gunfire. Just last week, settlers cut down 300 olive trees.

The settlers have a new and brutal policy. They have declared that, for every attempt by the authorities to rein them in, they will exact a price in violence against the Palestinians -- a “price tag,” they call it.

In the Arab world, Islamic extremists such as al-Qaida are pursued, jailed or killed. Two of Al-Qaida’s top leaders were killed in Iraq this week. In Israel, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has no wish or will to confront his home grown terrorists. Indeed, representatives of the religious settlers sit in his government.

In the Arab world, militants who fight to create an Islamic state are generally considered the enemy. In Israel, the armed underground movement which aims to create a Torah state is treated with kid gloves. The government dares not confront it -- or is secretly complicit with it.

Unless Israel’s fanatical settlers -- both religious-nationalist and ultra-orthodox -- are confronted, and their messianic ambitions tamed, there will be no peace in the Middle East.

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Alice Embree

Went AWOL seeking help for PTSD: Eric Jasinski released from Texas jail

Eric Jasinski is being released from the Bell County Jail in Belton, Texas, tomorrow morning, April 24. He will have served 25 days of a 30-day sentence.

Jasinski, 23, who is a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, went AWOL in 2009 to seek help for his PTSD. His story was reported on by Dahr Jamail in The Rag Blog.

Eric Jasinski enlisted in the Army in 2005, and deployed to Iraq in October 2006 as an intelligence analyst. He collected intelligence used to direct air strikes. After his return to the U.S., Jasinski suffered from severe PTSD resulting from what he did and saw in Iraq. He felt remorse and guilt for the way he contributed to loss of life. He went through a divorce and had friends killed and maimed in combat.

He tried to get treatment for PTSD and finish out his military contract. “In late 2008,” Jasinski said, ”they stop-lossed me [an involuntary extension of contract], and that pushed me over the edge. They were going to send me back to Iraq.” Jasinski went AWOL until December 11, 2009, when he turned himself in to authorities at Fort Hood.

The Army scheduled a Summary Court Martial for March 31. Jasinski was sentenced to 30 days in the Bell County Jail. Laura Barrett, Jasinski’s mother, told the Temple Herald Telegram, “This has been a total outrage. I cannot believe my son who is diagnosed with PTSD from his deployment to Iraq would be sent to jail.”

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Ahmed Moor

"To the extent that Israel must exist exclusively for the Jewish
people, the enfranchising of the roughly four million Pale-
stinians living under Israeli occupation today does pose a
threat to its existence." (Yotam Ronen/ActiveStills)

Washington insiders are now touting a misguided Obama-dictated plan to solve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Most recently, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Stephen Solarz took to the pages of The Washington Post to float the idea of an imposed peace, which largely undermines non-negotiable historic Palestinian rights. The authors call for the annulment of the Palestinian right of return, and the creation of a "demilitarized Palestinian state."

The trial balloon avoids any talk of Israeli parliamentary dynamics and the incapacity of the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to cede anything without sowing the seeds of its own dissolution, something Netanyahu probably realized while negotiating the composition of his coalition government. But its most glaring failure is the presumption that Palestinians will meekly accept American dictates regarding the right of return. As a Palestinian, I believe that any plan that seeks to sacrifice our inalienable human rights to ensure race-based majorities in Israel will fail.

Brzezinski and Solarz begin their piece by paraphrasing a statement made by Israel's current defense minister, Ehud Barak. They write that the "absence of the two-state solution is the greatest threat to Israel's future." Presumably, Barak is indirectly referring to the one-state solution, or the growing call by Palestinians and anti-Zionist Jews to create a democratic state in all of historic Palestine. It is telling that the Israeli defense minister -- and Brzezinski and Solarz -- appears to view a growing movement in the Holy Land for equal rights and enfranchisement as "the greatest threat to Israel's future."

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Stuart Littlewood

Archbishop of Westminster And Patriarch's Delegation Visit Bethle-
hem. The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Reverend Dr Rowan
Williams first from the right. (LIFE)

Stuart Littlewood views the silence of the head of the Anglican Church, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, over Palestinian suffering, especially in Gaza, which he had promised to visit but had not been heard to mention since. He contrasts this with Mr Rowan’s fawning over Israel and the Holocaust.

My ears pricked up when I heard the Archbishop of Canterbury was planning a visit to Gaza last February, and Lambeth Palace (his headquarters in London) was "actively engaged in humanitarian relief and advocacy".

I asked for more information. Whom would he meet? Would he see the health minister? Would he sit down and talk with elected Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, man of God to man of God, Mr Haniyeh being an imam? I’d like to be a fly on the wall at such a meeting.

Would he "do Gaza proud by spending a generous amount of his time with senior members of the Islamic faith"?

And would he look up Fr Manuel Mussallam, the redoubtable old priest who was a mainstay of the Christian community throughout Gaza's darkest hours and tells it straight? His office didn't reply.

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Alan Caruba

Whether it’s on television or in the newspapers or the endless stream of news releases I receive, the message over and over again is that people believe such stupid stuff about the planet and their environment that I keep asking, where do they come from?

People who think they can save the planet by bringing a cloth bag to the supermarket instead of using a plastic one, even though plastic is part of just about everything they will use that day, from their car to their kitchen’s countertop,

People who insist that turning corn into fuel instead of building more refineries to process more oil makes no sense at all because wasting corn in this way forces up the cost of food,

People who think that Green jobs are anything other than temporary, low paying menial work, entirely dependent on government subsidies and handouts,

People who think that it’s wrong to eat meat even though they have a mouth full of teeth whose purpose down through the millennia of mankind is to chew meat,

People whose ancestors survived by hunting long before agriculture was developed, yet think it is cruel to hunt or to cull a population of animals that endanger people or property,

People who think solar or wind energy can even begin to compete with coal, natural gas, or nuclear energy when both require traditional plants to back up “alternative” energy sources. Why? Because the sun doesn’t shine 24 hours a day and the wind doesn’t blow all the time,

People who think that polar bears are going extinct when, in fact, the polar bear population has been growing for twenty years or more,

People who believe “global warming” is real even though the “theory” was based entirely on seriously flawed, often deliberately false computer models,

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Stephen Lendman

Launched in October 2003, Cageprisoners is a human rights organization dedicated to raising the "awareness of the plight of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay" and other War on Terror victims. As a "comprehensive resource," six words explain its mission: "education, campaign, support, motivation, co-operation (and) prevention" for its efforts to educate the public, campaign for Guantanamo and other detainee repatriations or their asylum, and have prisoner rights guaranteed under international law, including humane treatment not to be:

-- tortured;
-- indefinitely detained;
-- disappeared; or
-- denied proper legal representation, due process, judicial fairness, and access to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), medical personnel and families.

In April 2009, its report titled, "Fabricating Terrorism II: British Complicity in renditions and torture" followed its same-titled 2006 report. Part I covered 13 cases with evidence based on detainee testimonies, interviews with security service officials, and other research.

Part II updated it (including 16 other cases - 29 in all), focusing on Britain's claim to be a human rights leader. Stating it ratified the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (OPCAT) in 2003, its practices belie its commitment.

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Mike Whitney

Schadenfreude. The pleasure derived from watching someone else suffer. It’s human natur, and it’s what’s what’s driving the Goldman pile-on. SEC Enforcement director Robert Khuzami had barely uttered his statement on Friday before the the yelps of joy arose from every corner of the country. “Fraud!” What a happy noise. Revenge is sweet. Suddenly the prospect of subpoenas, indictments, and long prison sentences didn’t seem so remote. But don’t get your hopes up. Goldman was picked for a reason, and that reason has nothing to do with its shady business transactions. It’s politics.

Don’t get me wrong; Goldman is guilty as hell. They slapped together a Kamikaze CDO that was designed to blow up, and then they schluffed it off on their clients without filling them in on the details. It’s called “withholding material information”, and its no-no. It’s like wrapping smelly fish in yesterday’s paper and pawning it off as fresh-caught Blackmouth. You can’t do that. According to former regulator William Black, “Goldman did not just withhold information, they told people, ‘Hey, the investment decisions are being made by experts who would only choose good quality stuff’, when. in fact, the stuff that was put in was chosen because it was considered the most likely to suffer near-term downgrades.”

So Goldman was minting its own roadside bombs and getting input from notorious hedge fund short-seller, John Paulson, who planned to bet against the same CDO. But what’s most shocking, is that Goldman was caught schtuping its own clients just to make a buck. That’s going to haunt them for a very long time. Trust is important, even on Wall Street. Goldman’s reputation is shot.

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