Thursday, April 28, 2011
Belarus closes 2 independent newspapers, sends opposition leader to jail for 2 years
Apr. 27, 2011
The Information Ministry said the daily newspapers Nasha Niva and Narodnaya Volya were closed after receiving two or more warnings in the past year over their political coverage.
Opposition leader Dmitry Bondarenko was found guilty in court of organizing an election-night rally in December to protest the results of the vote that extended the rule of President Alexander Lukashenko.
"This is no more than a reprisal against political opponents,” Bondarenko told the court in his final statement.
Police violently dispersed the rally, which drew tens of thousands of protesters. Some 700 people were arrested, including seven presidential candidates.
Seven opposition figures have already been sentenced to jail terms of two to four years for their part in the protest. Ten more, including presidential candidate Andrei Sannikov, are still on trial.
The two newspapers had received warnings over their coverage of the bombing of the Minsk subway and for reporting suspicions that the government was behind the April 11 blast, which killed 14 people. The suspicions were so widely circulated that Lukashenko felt compelled to deny them in a televised address.
Full Article Here -http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/opposition_leader_sentenced_to_2_years_in_jail_in_authoritarian_belarus_after_organizing_rally/2011/04/27/AF9z8bwE_story.html?wprss=rss_europe
Obama’s Approval Remains at All-Time Low for Second Week in Row, Says Gallup | CNSnews.com
(CNSNews.com) - President Barack Obama’s weekly approval rating remained at its all-time low for the second straight week, according to the Gallup poll.
In the week of April 11-17 and again in the week of April 18-24, 43 percent of the Americanspolled by Gallup said they approved of the job Obama was doing as president.
That matched the all-time low for Obama’s weekly approval in the Gallup poll. Previously, Obama had earned a 43 percent approval rating in the back-to-back weeks of Aug. 16-22, 2010 and Aug. 23-29, 2010.
Obama’s weekly approval rating peaked at 67 percent in the week of Jan. 19-25, 2009—the week he was inaugurated.
Convicted RFK assassin says girl manipulated him
LOS ANGELES – Convicted assassin Sirhan Sirhan was manipulated by a seductive girl in a mind control plot to shoot Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and his bullets did not kill the presidential candidate, lawyers for Sirhan said in new legal papers.
The documents filed this week in federal court and obtained by The Associated Press detail extensive interviews with Sirhan during the past three years, some done while he was under hypnosis.
The papers point to a mysterious girl in a polka-dot dress as the controller who led Sirhan to fire a gun in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel. But the documents suggest a second person shot and killed Kennedy while using Sirhan as a diversion.
For the first time, Sirhan said under hypnosis that on a cue from the girl he went into "range mode" believing he was at a firing range and seeing circles with targets in front of his eyes.
"I thought that I was at the range more than I was actually shooting at any person, let alone Bobby Kennedy," Sirhan was quoted as saying during interviews with Daniel Brown, a Harvard University professor and expert in trauma memory and hypnosis. He interviewed Sirhan for 60 hours with and without hypnosis, according to the legal brief.
Sandi Gibbons, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County district attorney, said prosecutors were unaware of the legal filing and could not comment.
The story of the girl has been a lingering theme in accounts of the events just after midnight on June 5, 1968, when Kennedy was gunned down in the hotel pantry after claiming victory in the California Democratic presidential primary.
Witnesses talked of seeing such a female running from the hotel shouting, "We shot Kennedy." But she was never identified, and amid the chaos of the scene, descriptions were conflicting.
Through the years, Sirhan has claimed no memory of shooting Kennedy and said in the recent interviews that his presence at the hotel was an accident, not a planned destination.
Under hypnosis, he remembered meeting the girl that night and becoming smitten with her. He said she led him to the pantry.
"I am trying to figure out how to hit on her.... That's all that I can think about," he says in one interview cited in the documents. "I was fascinated with her looks .... She never said much. It was very erotic. I was consumed by her. She was a seductress with an unspoken unavailability."
Brown was hired by Sirhan's lawyer William F. Pepper.
Pepper's associate, attorney Laurie Dusek, attended the interviews. and Brown said in the documents they both took verbatim notes because prison officials would not let them tape record nearly all the sessions.
Sirhan maintained in the hypnotic interviews that the mystery girl touched him or "pinched" him on the shoulder just before he fired then spun him around to see people coming through the pantry door.
"Then I was on the target range ... a flashback to the shooting range ... I didn't know that I had a gun," Sirhan said.
Under what Brown called the condition of hypnotic free recall, he said Sirhan remembered seeing the flash of a second gun at the time of the assassination. Without hypnosis, he said, Sirhan could not remember that shot.
Pepper, a New York lawyer with an international practice, previously tried to prove that James Earl Ray was not the assassin of Martin Luther King Jr.
The lawyer said he is convinced that Sirhan was a victim of a mind control project such as those used by the CIA in the 1960s. He is seeking an evidentiary hearing to exonerate Sirhan in Kennedy's killing.
Dusek said in an interview that Sirhan was hypnotized for perhaps 30 percent of the interviews, most of which had to be done through a glass partition with Brown talking to him on a phone.
Only when Sirhan was moved from the state prison at Corcoran to his current location at Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga were they allowed face-to-face visits, she said, and a few of those were recorded.
Other portions of the motion allege suppression of ballistics evidence and the autopsy report, and claim ineffective assistance of counsel. It contends previous lawyers for Sirhan accepted from the start that he was the lone shooter, settled on a defense of diminished capacity and did not seek other avenues of defense.
During the trial, Sirhan tried to confess to killing Kennedy "with 20 years of malice aforethought," but the judge rejected the blurted statement.
A large portion of the new documents seek to prove the bullets that hit Kennedy came from a different direction than the spot where Sirhan was standing. The papers do not name any other possible shooter.
Sirhan was denied parole in March by a panel that said he had not shown sufficient remorse for the killing.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/04/28/convicted-rfk-assassin-says-girl-manipulated/#ixzz1Krv7Q9lq
» Charlie Veitch Arrested In Pre-Crime Raid Prior to Royal Wedding
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
April 28, 2011
We received the following email from Charlie Veitch’s girlfriend. Veitch, who many of you will know as the leader of the Love Police activist group, has been arrested by British police in a pre-crime raid on charges of “conspiracy to cause a public nuisance” at tomorrow’s Royal Wedding. Veitch was in contact with police before the arrest, reassuring them that his plans were completely peaceful and merely centered around voicing his free speech, which evidently no longer exists as a human right in the United Kingdom.
Please call the number listed in the email below and politely demand that Veitch be released. Veitch is being held at Cambridge Parkside Station.
In a You Tube video posted earlier this week, Veitch warned that he was under surveillance and that he was being followed around London.
RELATED: MI5 Intelligence Front Threatens Royal Wedding To Justify Banning Protest
- A D V E R T I S E M E N T
RELATED: Modern British Royalty: Eugenicists, Nazis and Neo-Feudalists
RELATED: Secrets of the Royal Wedding Exposed!
—
Hi guys,
My apologies for sending this to multiple emails – this news is important and needs to get out quick, and these are the only Infowars addresses I have.
My boyfriend, Charlie Veitch of the Love Police (UK) was arrested today from our own home on suspicion of a ‘conspiracy to cause a public nuisance’ tomorrow at the Royal Wedding. By nuisance, they mean speaking freely in a public space, which is what Charlie does. He went to the police recently, on his own accord, to discuss how he is entirely non-aggressive and not a threat to them but a friend to them.
If you were wondering if the UK is still a democracy – the answer is evidently no. I have never known so many democratic activists be arrested, not only on suspicion of thought-crime, speech-crime, or political assembly crimes – but now actually these ‘offenses’ as PRE-crime?!
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My name is Silkie – I am Charlie’s partner and a student of politics and psychology at The University of Cambridge. I would very much like to get the word out to your listeners/readers.
I’d particularly ask anyone who is similarly outraged by this to call (+44) 845 456 456 4 and ask for the custody block, who will be quite aggresive and rude (as they have been to me), in order to maintain the pressure and demand his release.
Royal wedding protest: three anti-capitalist activists arrested
Three anti-capitalist activists who were planning a mock execution of Prince Andrew with a guillotine to mark the royal wedding have been arrested and detained at Lewisham police station.
Officers arrested Professor Chris Knight, a leading member of the G20 Meltdown group, outside his home in Brockley, south east London at around 6.15pm, according to an eyewitness.
Also arrested were Knight's partner Camilla Power and Patrick Macroidan, who was dressed as an executioner, said fellow activist Mike Raddie, of north London, who was with them.
The three activists were preparing to drive their theatrical props, including a home-made guillotine and effigies, into central London when three police cars and two police vans drew up near Knight's home in Brockley, said Raddie.
Charlie Veitch Arrested Prior To Royal Wedding
"BREAKING NEWS Charlie Veitch has been arrested for conspiracy to cause a public nuisance and for aggravated trespass of Fortnam and Masons at the last protest,this is a political arrest,and most people in "Great Britain" think they are free!?"
This appeared in the David Icke Forum
http://forum.davidicke.com/showthread.php?t=167382&page=2
Silkie told Nathan, who posted it on FB. He's being held at Cambridge Parkside Station.If anyone else is in Cambridge there's a bunch of people gathering outside the police station at 9.30 as a protest / solidarity thing.
CDC Vaccine Scientist Who Downplayed Links to Autism Indicted by DOJ in Alleged Fraud Scheme
Poul Thorson is a scientist who formerly worked for the CDC, and over the last several years, he oversaw millions of dollars in grant money that was used to conduct research to “prove” that vaccines have no link to autism. Dr. Thorson’s research papers include the famous “Danish Study” entitled Thimerosal and the occurrence of autism: negative ecological evidence from Danish population-based data. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/…)
Iceland Declares Independence from International Banks
By Bill Wilson – Iceland is free. And it will remain so, so long as her people wish to remain autonomous of the foreign domination of her would-be masters — in this case, international bankers.
On April 9, the fiercely independent people of island-nation defeated a referendum that would have bailed out the UK and the Netherlands who had covered the deposits of British and Dutch investors who had lost funds in Icesave bank in 2008.
At the time of the bank’s failure, Iceland refused to cover the losses. But the UK and Netherlands nonetheless have demanded that Iceland repay them for the “loan” as a condition for admission into the European Union.
In response, the Icelandic people have told Europe to go pound sand. The final vote was 103,207 to 69,462, or 58.9 percent to 39.7 percent. “Taxpayers should not be responsible for paying the debts of a private institution,” said Sigriur Andersen, a spokeswoman for the Advice group that opposed the bailout.
A similar referendum in 2009 on the issue, although with harsher terms, found 93.2 percent of the Icelandic electorate rejecting a proposal to guarantee the deposits of foreign investors who had funds in the Icelandic bank. The referendum was invoked when President Olafur Ragnur Grimmson vetoed legislation the Althingi, Iceland’s parliament, had passed to pay back the British and Dutch.
Under the terms of the agreement, Iceland would have had to pay £2.35 billion to the UK, and €1.32 billion to the Netherlands by 2046 at a 3 percent interest rate. Its rejection for the second time by Iceland is a testament to its people, who feel they should bear no responsibility for the losses of foreigners endured in the financial crisis.
That opposition to bailouts led to Iceland’s decision to allow the bank to fail in 2008. Not that the taxpayers there could have afforded to. As noted by Bloomberg News, at the time the crisis hit in 2008, “the banks had debts equal to 10 times Iceland’s $12 billion GDP.”
“These were private banks and we didn’t pump money into them in order to keep them going; the state did not shoulder the responsibility of the failed private banks,” Iceland President Olafur Grimsson told Bloomberg Television.
Read more at NetRightDaily.com: http://netrightdaily.com/2011/04/iceland-declares-independence-from-international-banks/#ixzz1KqChEN3f
Guantanamo's Child Soldiers: Files Reveal Many Inmates Were Minors - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International
The file reads like a description of a fighting machine. Omar Ahmed Khader, who was given the prisoner number US9CA-000766DP, was a skilled fighter. While training in Afghanistan, he learned to detonate mines and blow up bombs, not to mention "configuring IEDs for remote detonation using hand held devices."
And the man had used his skills well, according to his risk assessment written by US interrogators in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp -- a document which SPIEGEL has seen and which has now been made public by the whistleblowing platform WikiLeaks, together with 778 other files."Detainee admits to having participated in several mining operations and harassing attacks against US Forces," the file reads. He is even alleged to have killed an American soldier with a grenade.
The detainee did not appear to regret his actions, however. "Detainee has never expressed any genuine remorse for the killing of that soldier," the file reads. On the contrary, while in Guantanamo he grew "increasingly hostile towards his interrogators and the guard force," despite being willing to cooperate. "He remains committed to extremist Islamic values."
Everything in the file makes the detainee sound like a hardcore jihadist. With one exception: the date of birth. Omar Ahmed Khader was born on Sept. 19, 1986. The detainee was only 17 years old at the time when his file was created.
'Understands the Gravity of His Actions'
Omar Ahmed Khader was a child soldier. According to his file, his own father was close to al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. He "encouraged" his teenage son to travel to Afghanistan to take part in the fight against the US.
Royal Wedding: Police Have Arrested 20 People Amid Fears Of A Plot To Disrupt The Royal Wedding
5:34pm UK, Thursday April 28, 2011
Police have arrested more than 20 people who are suspected of involvement in plans to disrupt tomorrow's Royal Wedding.
Sky's crime correspondent Martin Brunt said Scotland Yard had stressed there was no specific terror threat.
But sources say officers are concerned about activities by anarchist groups ahead of the big day and carried out pre-emptive raids on squats in London this morning.
Seven arrests were also made at squats in Hove earlier today.
Most of the arrests are thought to relate to the stealing of electricity from properties, but it is thought police are keen to clamp down on anyone who may be suspected of planning trouble.
A group called Reclaim The Royal Wedding, which is encouraging followers to take part in some form of protest near Westminster Abbey on Friday, are also causing concern.
Police had been expected to carry out a number of arrests ahead of the big day, which will be watched by a global TV audience of two billion and is expected be the most expensive and high-profile security operation in a generation for Scotland Yard.
Primer: Why release this birth certificate now?
Was it really just to end the "silliness," as the president says -- or a canny move to make the GOP look "crazy"?
During his 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama battled a steady stream of falsehoods -- about his religion, about ACORN, about his wife's alleged use of the pejorative "whitey" -- which led to his campaign's launch of its Fight the Smears website in June, to combat some of themore virulent rumors. On the site, it posted an item about Obama's birth certificate -- which included the short-form document -- along with a brief message:
Smears claiming Barack Obama doesn't have a birth certificate aren't actually about that piece of paper -- they're about manipulating people into thinking Barack Obama is not an American citizen. The truth is, Barack Obama was born in the state of Hawaii in 1961, a native citizen of the United States. Next time someone talks about Barack's birth certificate, make sure they see this page.
This, obviously, failed to pacify conspiracy theorists, who noted with relish the long- versus short-form distinction. As mentioned in a much-cited defense of the short-form certificate, posted in August 2008 by FactCheck.org, the state of Hawaii normally dispenses only short-form certificates of live birth -- and that document is an accepted form of identification, including by the U.S. State Department. When skeptics first began making noise about the long-form certificate in the summer of 2008, Obama spokeswoman Shauna Daly said it represented "all the records we could get our hands on."
A more militarized CIA for a more militarized America - Glenn Greenwald
The first four Directors of the CIA (from 1947-1953) were military officers, but since then, there has been a tradition (generally though imperfectlyobserved) of keeping the agency under civilian rather than military leadership. That's why George Bush's 2006 nomination of Gen. Michael Hayden to the CIA provoked so many objections from Democrats (and even some Republicans).
The Hayden nomination triggered this comment from the current Democratic Chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein: "You can't have the military control most of the major aspects of intelligence. The CIA is a civilian agency and is meant to be a civilian agency." The then-top Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, Jane Harman, said "she hears concerns from civilian CIA professionals about whether the Defense Department is taking over intelligence operations" and "shares those concerns." On Meet the Press, Nancy Pelosi cited tensions between the DoD and the CIA and said: "I don't see how you have a four-star general heading up the CIA." Then-Sen. Joe Biden worried that the CIA, with a General in charge, will "just be gobbled up by the Defense Department." Even the current GOP Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Pete Hoekstra, voiced the same concern about Hayden: "We should not have a military person leading a civilian agency at this time."
Saudi Arabia nabs nearly 30 activists
The detainees, who included two internet activists, were arrested in the eastern city of Qatif for taking part in anti-government protests, AFP reported on Thursday.
"Arrests have been ongoing for sometime but in the past few days it focused on bloggers and writers," a Shia activist was quoted as saying on condition of anonymity as he feared facing arrest.
"The number of Shias arrested since the start of the protests and (those who) remain in jail is 140."
Earlier in the month, a Human Rights Watch report said the authorities have arrested over 160 activists since February.
The people were called to police stations or saw their homes being raided by police.
“Even ordinary people have been detained for taking part in demonstrations,” a human rights campaigner was quoted as saying.
More People Applied for Unemployment Benefits
Washington (AP) - More people sought unemployment benefits last week, the second rise in three weeks, a sign of the slow and uneven jobs recovery.
Applications for unemployment benefits jumped 25,000 to a seasonally adjusted 429,000 for the week ending April 23, the Labor Department said Thursday. That's the highest total since late January.
The four-week average of applications, a less volatile measure, rose to 408,500, its third straight rise and the first time it has topped 400,000 in two months. Applications near 375,000 are consistent with sustained job creation. Applications peaked during the recession at 659,000.
Several economists attributed the increase to difficulties in seasonally adjusting the data around the Easter holidays. Since the timing of Easter changes each year, the data around the holiday week can be volatile.
"Given these technical factors, we are inclined to dismiss the recent backup," said Carl Riccadonna, an economist at Deutsche Bank Securities. "We will be looking for claims to move back below 400,000 in early May."
Other analysts were more slightly more concerned. Ryan Wang, an economist at HSBC Securities, noted that the four-week average has increased by 20,000 in the past month.
"Minor seasonal distortions are not a good reason to dismiss the underlying increase in jobless claims," Wang wrote in a note to clients. "This is a big enough increase to merit some concern about the direction of employment growth going forward."