Former head of CDC lands lucrative job as president of Merck vaccine division

(NaturalNews) You've heard it before, how the pharmaceutical industry has a giant "revolving door" through which corporations and government agencies frequently exchange key employees. That reality was driven home in a huge way today when news broke that Dr. Julie Gerberding, who headed the CDC from 2002 through 2009, landed a top job with Merck, one of the largest drug companies in the world. Her job there? She's the new president of the vaccine division.

How convenient. That means the former head of the CDC was very likely cultivating a relationship with Merck all these years, and now comes the big payoff: Heading up a $5 billion division that sells cervical cancer vaccines (like Gardasil), chickenpox vaccines and of course H1N1 swine flu vaccines, too.

So what's the problem with all this? The problem is that private industry and government health offices such as the CDC or FDA should never be so cozy. When they are, it creates an environment of collusion between Big Government and Big Pharma. We've already seen this with the government-led push for swine flu vaccines that are manufactured (and sold) by drug companies like Merck.

You might even say that the CDC already functions as the marketing division of the pharmaceutical industry. It was the CDC that pushed so hard for swine flu vaccines, even amid the obvious realization that swine flu was no more dangerous than seasonal flu. To this day, the CDC still hasn't bothered to recommend vitamin D for the prevention of either seasonal flu or swine flu. It remains heavily invested in the lucrative vaccine approach -- an approach that just happens to financially benefit the very corporations that are hiring ex-CDC employees like Dr. Gerberding.

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U.S. Military Commander Stands By Policy Punishing Pregnant Soldiers In Iraq

Maj. Gen. Anthony Cucolo is standing by a policy of punishing soldiers who become pregnant or impregnate other soldiers under his command in Iraq, despite pressure from female senators to rescind the order, ABC News reports (Netter/Martinez, ABC News, 12/22).

On Tuesday, Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) sent a letter to Cucolo saying that the policy making pregnancy a punishable offense "defies comprehension." The senators said that they understand that Cucolo has pledged not to imprison violators but that the policy nonetheless creates a "threat of criminal sanctions" that go "far beyond what is needed to maintain good order and discipline." They also wrote, "This policy could encourage female soldiers to delay seeking critical medical care with potentially serious consequences for mother and child," adding, "We can think of no greater deterrent to women contemplating a military career than the image of a pregnant woman being severely punished simply for conceiving a child."

The independent military newspaper Stars and Stripes first reported the story last week (Gisick et al., Stars and Stripes, 12/23). The policy was put in place in November after Cucolo took command of northern Iraq, which includes some of the most dangerous areas of the country (Ryan, Reuters, 12/23).

Cucolo said Tuesday that soldiers involved in a pregnancy will receive administrative discipline. He added, "I have never considered court martial for this.

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Financial Markets and Economic Forecasts 2010

The Business Times assembled a panel of eminent and seasoned experts to review economic and investment prospects.

Anthony Rowley: Welcome to this year-end Investment Round Table as we gather for the last time in 2009 and look ahead to what lies in store in 2010 - the Year of the Tiger in the Chinese zodiac. Some say it is a good year for taking risks, and there seems to be no shortage of those. Prof Sakakibara, would you begin the crystal-ball gazing and tell us what lies in store.

Eisuke Sakakibara: 2010 will be a very difficult year. Among developed countries, including the United States, the economy will be very weak and there is even a possibility of a double-dip recession. In the case of Japan, the likelihood of a double-dip recession is around 50-60 per cent. The situation (in Japan) is very bad at this moment. In the US case, fiscal stimulus will probably continue until the summer of next year but around the end of the year there is a possibility of a double-dip recession. Europe too has a very serious situation. Being a collection of countries, the situation is even more difficult than in the US. European countries have separate policies and economic conditions are different, yet monetary policy is unified.

Deflation is going to continue, not only in Japan but also in the US and Europe, and it may deepen. The so-called 'Japanese disease' is going to be a major malaise among developed countries. The problem is that it's not a monetary phenomenon - it's a structural phenomenon arising mainly from globalisation. So it's very difficult for central banks to control and it will take a long time to work its way through the system.

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US ground attacks reported in Pakistan

By Bill Van Auken
24 December 2009

Amid a deepening political crisis in Pakistan and growing popular unrest over US missile strikes and mercenaries, it has been revealed that over the past five years US special operations troops have conducted a number of clandestine cross-border raids into the country’s tribal areas.

These raids involved “helicopter-borne elite soldiers stealing across the border at night, and were never declared to the Pakistani government,” according to a “former NATO officer” cited in an article published Monday by the British daily Guardian.

The only publicly acknowledged incursion by US forces took place on September 3, 2008, when US Navy Seals were flown by helicopter into a village in South Waziristan, where they raided three compounds and slaughtered some 20 people. While Washington claimed those killed were Al Qaeda fighters, the Pakistani government said that the victims were all villagers and included six women and two children.

The incident provoked widespread outrage in Pakistan, with the government denouncing the attack as a “grave provocation” and the country’s parliament demanding that the military use force to repel any further violations of the country’s sovereignty. Unnamed US officials told the media that the Pakistani regime had acquiesced to the raid, something Islamabad vehemently denied.

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GWOT Propaganda: Al-Qaeda used as excuse to impose sanctions on Eritrea

Editor's Note: Ethiopia, now seen as a US puppet, is landlocked and wants the Red Sea ports Massaw and Assab for itself. The real US objective is to safeguard access to the Red Sea for its oil tankers. It's all about MONEY, not terrorism.

The United Nations Security Council imposed an arms embargo and other sanctions on Eritrea today in a move that in effect brands the country a pariah state.

The UN voted to punish Eritrea for illegally supplying arms to al-Qaeda-linked Islamic insurgents in Somalia and for occupying disputed territory on its border with Djibouti.

The 13-1 vote, with Libya against and China abstaining, represents an escalation of condemnation of Eritrea, which has repeatedly been accused of destabilising the Horn of Africa since it gained independence from Ethiopia in 1993 after a 30-year guerrilla war.

Eritrea has gone to war against both Ethiopia and Djibouti and backed al-Shabaab Islamic rebels battling the internationally recognised government in Somalia, despite an arms embargo on that country.

Sir Mark Lyall Grant, Britain's UN envoy, said he hoped Eritrea would heed the warning sent by the Security Council in adopting today's resolution.

"The United Kingdom urges Eritrea to stop its illegal actions ... and to engage constructively with international partners to help increase stability in the Horn of Africa," he said. "The nature of the international community's engagement with Eritrea in future will depend on that response."

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DARPA Seeks Means to Manipulate Lightning

China and Russia try to control rain clouds and the Dutch use technology to keep low-lying inland areas from flooding, so why shouldn’t the United States be able to manipulate lightning? In an attempt to better understand one of nature’s most powerful processes, DARPA issued a broad agency announcement yesterday asking for ideas on how to best protect American personnel and resources from dangers and costs associated with lightning strikes. To wit:

Lightning causes more than $1B/year in direct damages to property in addition to the loss of lives, disruption of activities (for example, postponement of satellite launches) and their corresponding costs. A better understanding of the physics underlying lightning discharge, associated emissions, and related processes (for example, tribocharging in the clouds) may lead to revolutionary advances in the state of the art of lightning protection.

Specifically, DARPA seeks validated models on the natural lightning process, a means of triggering lightning within a storm intentionally, and strategies for protecting a given area from lightning strikes during a storm by somehow reducing the probability that lightning will strike there.

The call for proposals also asks various questions about manipulating lightning’s natural unpredictability: “Given an area (size: 1 square kilometer) in the presence of a thunderstorm, is it possible to reduce the probability of a cloud to ground lightning strike in that area? How might lightning initiation be inhibited, or lightning propagation be diverted or blocked to achieve this goal? Is it possible to induce lightning in one region within the storm system, in order to suppress lightning in the region in need of protection?”

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Bended Knees: Zionist Power in American Politics

by James Petras

The discussion of Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC) in the US political system revolves around several essential issues, including:

1) The claims by the ZPC that it represents Jewish opinion and values as well as its authority to speak for the interests of the American people.

2) Measuring the power of the ZPC and determining its influence over policy, appointments and political institutions.

3) The question of whether the ZPC is a legitimate part of the US political system, another lobby, or something very different, an unregistered agent of a foreign power (Israel).

4) The scope and depth of the ZPC influence in US politics beyond the focus on its “lobbying” in Washington on a “single issue”.

5) The organizational weapons and techniques utilized by the ZPC to maximize influence and deny voice and influence to critics of Israel and itself.

6) The similarities of the organizational linkages of the Israel-Zionist relationship to the Russian – Stalinist Communist Parties of the 1930’s.

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Lithuania 'hosted' at least two secret CIA prisons

A Lithuanian inquiry has found that the US Central Intelligence Agency set up and used secret prisons on its soil following the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in the US.

Lithuania's intelligence agency assisted the CIA-run secret prisons, which were used to hold at least eight al-Qaeda suspects, the parliamentary panel in charge of the probe said in a report on Tuesday.

The National Security Committee report records instances in 2005 and 2006 when chartered planes were allowed to land in Lithuania, adding that all the Lithuanian officials, including President Dalia Grybauskaite, were kept in the dark about the aircraft's passengers.

The report, which is based on testimony of top politicians and intelligence officials, also sought to close the door on any charges of human rights violations on the grounds that no official was ever aware of exactly what was happening in the US-run prisons.

It said Lithuania's State Security Department provided two facilities to the CIA.

A single detention cell was set up to house one suspect in 2002 and a former riding school on the outskirts of the capital Vilnius was turned into a larger facility in 2004, big enough to hold eight suspects.

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Wall Street’s fingerprints evident on financial reform bill

Since the near meltdown of Wall Street in late 2008, Congress has pledged to tighten regulations on the finance industry. That exercise is now half over, with the House approving a reform package Dec. 11.

With the Senate poised to take up the issue early in 2010, the next questions are: How much more money and influence will the industry expend to try to shape the reform legislation to its liking, and will it succeed?

Industry spending to sway Congress is hardly news, but the scale of such activity surrounding this season’s finance overhaul legislation is extraordinary, even for Washington.

“What’s astonishing to me is that the special interests opposing us contributed to the failure of the financial system. They’re trying to preserve the system that failed, and Congress is listening to them in some respects,” says Ed Mierzwinski, consumer advocate for US PIRG. a public-interest research group.

With the American public still reeling over the loss of trillions in savings and pensions from 2008’s financial fiasco, Wall Street is playing defense – and there’s evidence that its outsized investment in inside politics is paying returns.

The industry, with the help of centrist Democrats, won key concessions – including limits on the power of a new consumer protection agency, preemption of state consumer protection laws, and loopholes in new rules for the $600 trillion derivatives market that helped trigger the crisis and subsequent recession.

Consumer groups say the industry’s campaign contributions to sitting congressmen influenced these outcomes.

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Climate change alliance crumbling

FT.COM

Cracks emerged on Tuesday in the alliance on climate change formed at the Copenhagen conference last week, with leading developing countries criticising the resulting accord.

The so-called BASIC countries – Brazil, South Africa, India and China – backed the accord in a meeting with the US on Friday night, and it was also supported by nearly all other nations at the talks, including all of the biggest emitters.

But on Tuesday the Brazilian government labelled the accord “disappointing” and complained that the financial assistance it contained from rich to poor countries was insufficient.

South Africa also raised objections: Buyelwa Sonjica, the environment minister, called the failure to produce a legally binding agreement “unacceptable”. She said her government had considered leaving the meeting.

“We are not defending this, as I have indicated, for us it is not acceptable, it is definitely not acceptable,” she said.

There was even harsher criticism from Andreas Carlgren, environment minister of Sweden, current holder of the rotating European Union presidency, who proclaimed the Copenhagen accord “a disaster” and “a great failure”.

These responses contrasted with praise of the accord from India and China, and may presage problems for the United Nations in keeping the fragile alliances formed in Copenhagen together. The UN wants to sign a legally binding treaty by the end of 2010, but will struggle if countries repudiate the accord.

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There'll be nowhere to run from the new world government!

There is scope for debate – and innumerable newspaper quizzes – about who was the most influential public figure of the year, or which the most significant event. But there can be little doubt which word won the prize for most important adjective. 2009 was the year in which "global" swept the rest of the political lexicon into obscurity. There were "global crises" and "global challenges", the only possible resolution to which lay in "global solutions" necessitating "global agreements". Gordon Brown actually suggested something called a "global alliance" in response to climate change. (Would this be an alliance against the Axis of Extra-Terrestrials?)

Some of this was sheer hokum: when uttered by Gordon Brown, the word "global", as in "global economic crisis", meant: "It's not my fault". To the extent that the word had intelligible meaning, it also had political ramifications that were scarcely examined by those who bandied it about with such ponderous self-importance. The mere utterance of it was assumed to sweep away any consideration of what was once assumed to be the most basic principle of modern democracy: that elected national governments are responsible to their own people – that the right to govern derives from the consent of the electorate.

The dangerous idea that the democratic accountability of national governments should simply be dispensed with in favour of "global agreements" reached after closed negotiations between world leaders never, so far as I recall, entered into the arena of public discussion.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/janetdaley/6845967/Therell-be-nowhere-to-run-from-the-new-world-government.html

Fed's approach to regulation left banks exposed to crisis

WASHINGTON POST

Foreclosures already pocked Chicago's poorer neighborhoods but the downtown still was booming as the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago convened its annual conference in May 2007.

The keynote speaker, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, assured the bankers and businessmen gathered at the Westin Hotel on Michigan Avenue that their prosperity was not threatened by the plight of borrowers struggling to repay high-cost subprime loans.

Bernanke, who was in charge of regulating the nation's largest banks, told the audience that these firms were not at risk. He said most were not even involved in subprime lending. And the broader economy, he concluded, would be fine.

"Importantly, we see no serious broad spillover to banks or thrift institutions from the problems in the subprime market," Bernanke said. "The troubled lenders, for the most part, have not been institutions with federally insured deposits."

He was wrong. Five of the 10 largest subprime lenders during the previous year were banks regulated by the Fed. Even as Bernanke spoke, the spillover from subprime lending was driving the banking industry into a historic crisis that some firms would not survive. And the upheaval would shove the economy into recession.

Just as the Fed had failed to protect borrowers from the consequences of subprime lending, so too had it failed to protect banks.

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US forces mounted secret Pakistan raids in hunt for al-Qaida

American special forces have conducted multiple clandestine raids into Pakistan's tribal areas as part of a secret war in the border region where Washington is pressing to expand its drone assassination programme.

A former Nato officer said the incursions, only one of which has been previously reported, occurred between 2003 and 2008, involved helicopter-borne elite soldiers stealing across the border at night, and were never declared to the Pakistani government.

"The Pakistanis were kept entirely in the dark about it. It was one of those things we wouldn't confirm officially with them," said the source, who had detailed knowledge of the operations.

Such operations are a matter of sensitivity in Pakistan. While public opinion has grudgingly tolerated CIA-led drone strikes in the tribal areas, any hint of American "boots on the ground" is greeted with virulent condemnation.

After the only publicly acknowledged special forces raid in September 2008, Pakistan's foreign office condemned it as "a grave provocation" while the military threatened retaliatory action.

The military source said that was the fourth raid of previous years. Two of the others targeted Taliban and al-Qaida "high-value targets" near the border, while the third was to rescue a crashed Predator drone. He said that one of the capture raids succeeded, the other failed and the US sent elite soldiers to the downed Predator because they did not trust Pakistani forces. "People were afraid they would take the parts and reverse- engineer its components," he said.

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September 11, 2001: America and NATO Declare War on Afghanistan

Why are American and NATO troops in Afghanistan?

What is the justification for waging war on a country of 28 million people?

What justifies Obama's military surge?

Both the media and the US government, in chorus, continue to point to the 9/11 attacks and the role of Al Qaeda led by "terrorist mastermind" Osama bin Laden.

The bombing and invasion of Afghanistan is described as a "campaign" against Islamic terrorists, rather than a war.

To this date, however, there is no proof that Al Qaeda was behind the 9/11 attacks.

Neither is there evidence that Afghanistan as a Nation State was behind or any way complicit in the 9/11 attacks.

The Afghan government in the weeks following 9/11, offered on two occasions to deliver Osama bin Laden to US justice, if there were preliminary evidence of his involvement in the attacks. These offers were refused by Washington.

 http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16573

Israel harvested organs from bodies, including Palestinians, in 1990s without permission

STAR TRIBUNE

JERUSALEM - Israel has admitted that in the 1990s, its forensic pathologists harvested organs from dead bodies, including Palestinians, without permission of their families.

The issue emerged with publication of an interview with the then-head of Israel's Abu Kabir forensic institute, Dr. Jehuda Hiss. The interview was conducted in 2000 by an American academic, who released it because of a huge controversy last summer over an allegation by a Swedish newspaper that Israel was killing Palestinians in order to harvest their organs. Israel hotly denied the charge.

Parts of the interview were broadcast on Israel's Channel 2 TV over the weekend. In it, Hiss said, "We started to harvest corneas ... Whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family."

The Channel 2 report said that in the 1990s, forensic specialists at Abu Kabir harvested skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers, often without permission from relatives.

In a response to the TV report, the Israeli military confirmed that the practice took place. "This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer," the military said in a statement quoted by Channel 2.

http://www.startribune.com/world/79758112.html?elr=KArksLckD8EQDUoaEyqyP4O:DW3ckUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aUUsZ

Climate summit ends in chaos

London Telegraph

After intense overnight wrangling, delegates from 192 countries on Saturday passed a motion simply "noting" a loose deal aimed at limiting temperature rises to less than 2C, which was agreed by the US and four other large-scale polluting nations.

However, critics warned the "Copenhagen Accord", the result of two weeks of negotiations in the Danish capital, was full of holes and lacked a timetable – and environment agencies branded it toothless and a failure. One African delegation likened the deal to the Holocaust.

An exhausted Gordon Brown, who arrived back in Britain at 3am on Saturday, admitted that much more had to be done to achieve a legally binding, properly funded agreement.

A new United Nations-backed conference could be held in Mexico in the first half of 2010, several months earlier than planned, sources suggested.

As Britain and the US both tried to claim credit for reaching any form of agreement at Copenhagen, the blame game for the overall failure began. Ed Miliband, the Climate Change Secretary, said that "developing countries didn't want to sign up to legally binding targets".

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Alternative Medicine Pioneer Kidnapped by US Government in Ecuador

In 1984 my husband founded Consumer Express, which later became Nutrition for Life International (briefly traded on the NASDAQ stock exchange as “NFLI”). In 1995 he created Alpha Omega Labs (herbhealers.com / altcancer.com), which became a provider of over 300 alternative health products with 14 distributors around the world, before its closure by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration in September, 2003.
It successfully reopened in Ecuador in June, 2008.

Alpha Omega Labs is best known for Cansema® — an effective cure for skin cancer, based on suppressed formulary information dating back to the 1850’s. Over a 13 year period, Alpha Omega Labs was responsible for curing thousands of cancer cases.

In 2007, Greg and his wife received residential Visas to live in Ecuador. The Ecuadorian government had granted us all the proper permits to manufacture and sell our herbal products from within Ecuador at that time. And so, we legally reopened Alpha Omega Labs in the summer of 2008 in Ecuador.

As of 2007, Greg had 1.5 years left to serve on his probation. He had already been granted permission to fly back and forth from the US to Ecuador and was hoping to have his probation commuted. However, because of the involvement of an extremely corrupt FDA agent by the name of John Armand, who had Greg arrested in 2003, we made a joint decision to stay here in Ecuador and not travel until his probation period had been completed.

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Copenhagen climate summit: Al Gore condemned over Arctic ice melting prediction

LONDON TELEGRAPH

Speaking at the Copenhagen climate change summit, Mr Gore said new computer modelling suggests there is a 75 per cent chance of the entire polar ice cap melting during the summertime by 2014.

However, he faced embarrassment last night after Dr Wieslav Maslowski, the climatologist whose work the prediction was based on, refuted his claims.

Dr Maslowski, of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, told The Times: “It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at.

“I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”

The blunder follows the controversy over hacked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, which sceptics claim suggest scientists manipulated data to strengthen their argument that global warming is man-made.

Mr Gore, who narrated the Oscar-winning climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth, told the conference that record melting of Polar and Himalayan ice could deprive more than a billion people of access to clean water.

Alluding to Dr Maslowski’s work, he said: “These figures are fresh, I just got them yesterday.

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Strange Phenomenon in Norwegian Sky... Again

– Pilarer, eller Halo, kaller vi det. Det er iskrystaller som ikke går i alle retninger, men som peker samme vei og dermed sender lysrefleksjonene samme vei, sier statsmeteorolog John Smits ved Meteorologisk institutt til rb.no.

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Predator drone download by Iraqi insurgents wasn't 'hacking'

CS MONITOR

The Wall Street Journal story on Thursday morning that revealed insurgents in Iraq had been intercepting video transmissions from US Predator drones had a very catchy headline: "Insurgents Hack US Drones: $26 software is used to breach key weapons in Iraq; Iranian backing suspected."

Those words "hack," "breach" and "Iranian" were enough to set off frightening flights of fancy: Iraqi fighters had found a way to commandeer the $4 million Predators and their Hellfire missiles. If they'd managed to wrest control away from their US pilots (who are often sitting in air-conditioned offices in Arizona while gathering intelligence over Mosul or planning strikes on insurgent leaders in Baquba), could turning them on our own forces be far behind?

But the full story revealed that there really wasn't any hacking going on, and certainly no prospect of seizing control of the drones. Instead, what was happening was the passive downloading of US video transmissions, which were later discovered on captured insurgents laptops.

Since the video streams that the Predators send back to bases across the world aren't encrypted, no security effort was being "breached." And while a number of Shiite insurgent groups in Iraq like the Mahdi Army have received explosives and financial support from the Iranians over the years, no evidence has even been presented that they've received advanced weaponry.

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