Nuclear Catastrophe in Japan "Not Equal to Chernobyl, But Way Worse"
April 12, 2011
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/4/12/nuclear_catastrophe_in_japan_not_equal


Japan has raised the severity rating of its nuclear crisis from 5 to 7, the
highest level, matching the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. We go to Tokyo for
an update from Thomas Breuer, head of the Climate and Energy Unit for Greenpeace
Germany and part of a field team of radiation monitors in Japan. He notes that
unlike Chernobyl, the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is in a
densely populated area. "We warned the government that there are a lot of cities
and villages outside the 20-kilometers evacuation zone where the radiation
levels are so high that people need urgently to be evacuated, especially
children and pregnant women, because they are the most vulnerable part of the
population to radiation," says Breuer. [includes rush transcript]


Guest:
Thomas Breuer, head of the Climate and Energy Unit for Greenpeace Germany. He is
part of a field team of radiation monitors in Japan.
Related stories


AMY GOODMAN: Japan has raised the severity rating of its nuclear crisis to the
highest level, matching the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The level 7 rating
signifies a major nuclear accident. At a news conference today, an official from
the Tokyo Electric Power Company said, quote, "The radiation leak has not
stopped completely, and our concern is that it could eventually exceed
Chernobyl."

For an update on the situation, we go to Tokyo. Thomas Breuer, head of the
Climate and Energy Unit for Greenpeace Germany, joins us byDemocracy Now! video
stream. He's part of a field team of radiation monitors in Japan.

Thomas Breuer, Greenpeace has been talking about the situation being more severe
for a number of weeks now. Explain what it means for Japan to lift the crisis
level from 5 to the very highest, to 7.

THOMAS BREUER: Yeah, Amy, maybe first of all, the idea from the INES scale,
which was introduced after the Chernobyl accident, is exactly to inform the
public in a timely manner. And Greenpeace has done calculations with scientists
already three weeks ago, where we figured out that this accident is in a scale 7
accident. And we are wondering why the government of Japan needs three weeks to
come to the same conclusion, especially because they must have way better data
than we have. So, what it means now, they wasted three weeks of not informing
the public about the real, real risks of this accident.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, though, talk about what 7 means. I mean, we're talking about
the continuing nuclear catastrophe that's unfolding in Japan being equal to the
worst nuclear disaster in history: Chernobyl.

THOMAS BREUER: So, from my point of view, it is not equal to Chernobyl, it is
way worse, because we are, like, facing three reactors totally, or partly,
destroyed. A fourth reactor has a problem with the spent fuel, which had a huge
explosion. And when we did the calculations like three weeks ago, we figured out
that, depending of course about the spread between the three reactors, each of
these reactors could be rated as a INES scale 7 accident, because the INES scale
does not even consider a multiple accident, what we are seeing here in
Fukushima. So, that is way worse than what we've seen in Chernobyl. Another
point there, which is very important, so in Chernobyl was more or less rural
area around the reactor. But Fukushima is in a densely populated area, so
millions of people are living around it. So, even that makes it worse and more
difficult to manage.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think Japan needs to do right now?

THOMAS BREUER: So, there are urgency measures. So, it is now clear that, since
we did our field research, we warned the government that there are a lot of
cities and villages outside the 20-kilometers evacuation zone where the
radiation levels are so high that people need urgently to be evacuated,
especially children and pregnant women, because they are the most vulnerable
part of the population to radiation. And so, they have to do that now. They have
to screen the whole Fukushima area, where there are other hot spots which need
to be evacuated.

And then they have to—what they haven't done so far—really, really explain to
people who are still living there what to do, how to behave. So, we were
approached from a lot of farmers during our field work, asking us whether we can
come to their fields and do food testing, because they have no idea whether they
still can eat the food or sell it or whatsoever. So, that's a very difficult
situation. We have been in Fukushima City. That's a city with 340,000
inhabitants, and we found very high levels of radiation in the city all over
again. But life seems to be like, on the surface, like normal life, and it has
to do with the fact that the government did not put out information, how to
behave, what to do. So people are really left alone with this accident, which
wasn't caused by them.

AMY GOODMAN: Thomas Breuer, you're in Tokyo right now, but you head the Climate
and Energy Unit for Greenpeace Germany. You're speaking to me in the United
States, where our president, President Obama, is really pushing a nuclear
renaissance for the first time in decades, pushing for the building of nuclear
power plants. Talk about the response around the world to what's happened in
Japan.

THOMAS BREUER: So, it's not understandable how one can push for nuclear
renaissance, especially if you dig into the whole industry. It's, first of all,
not compatible with democracy, because the open society, as we are living in,
they cannot deal with nuclear, because they are so vulnerable to terrorism and
to accidents that there will be always a clash with democracy at the end of the
day. And so, Obama should look what is happening in Germany. So, Angela Merkel,
even though she used to be quite pro-nuclear, as well, after the accident, she
understood the real risks of nuclear power plant, and she closed down
immediately eight of the 17 reactors in Germany. And I think that's a
responsible way to deal with nuclear: it has to be closed down.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you, Thomas Breuer, for joining us, head of the
Climate and Energy Unit for Greenpeace Germany, part of the field team of
radiation monitors in Tokyo, Japan.

*********************************************************************

WORLD VIEW NEWS SERVICE

To subscribe to this group, send an email to:
wvns-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

To leave this list, send an email to:
wvns-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

NEWS ARCHIVE IS OPEN TO PUBLIC VIEW
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/

Please consider contributing to WVNS today.
Email ummyakoub@... !

Young mothers hauled out, brutalized and arrested for peaceful sit-in to save
Catherine Ferguson Academy April 15


YOUNG MOTHER DESCRIBES OCCUPATION OF CATHERINE FERGUSON ACADEMY
April 19, 2011
by Diane Bukowski
http://voiceofdetroit.net/?p=6582

[Many photos at above website. -WVNS]


Cops slam Ashley Matthews against police car; she has two-year-old daughter


DETROIT – In an interview with VOD, Ashley Matthews, 17, described the heroic
student-led occupation of her school, Catherine Ferguson Academy on April 15.
She spoke of the wholehearted support the young mothers received from the
community, as well as the vicious physical and verbal brutality police visited
on them during their arrests.

She said two toddlers, there with their mothers, watched the events.

Inside Catherine Ferguson Academy in happier times

"When I came home, my mom and step-dad watched us on the news," Matthews said.
"My mom broke out in tears when she saw how the police treated me. She told me,
`I'm so proud of you.' This was the most joyful moment of my life. I was so
flabbergasted by all the support and I felt so much pride because I actually
stood up for something I believe in."

Catherine Ferguson is a Detroit Public School for teens with children, or who
are expecting. It provides special support services to help them complete their
education and go on to college. It received broad publicity last year for the
urban farm the students themselves created in the surrounding area.

Catherine Ferguson student working on well-publicized urban farm

It is the only school of its kind in the country, but it is on the list of
almost 60 schools that DPS czar Robert Bobb, board chair Anthony Adams, and
their state cronies, have slated for the chopping block this June, either
through closure, merger or charterization.  (See VOD article at)

Matthews said she has a two-year-old daughter, Breanna.

Teacher and young male supporter arrested

"The girls bring their kids to school because we don't have anyone else to watch
them," said Matthews. "What else are we going to do? Ninety percent of our
students graduate, and most of them go on to two and four year colleges. Our
principal tells us `smart mothers make smart children.'"

Cops brought out canine unit: who let the dogs (and cops) out?

She said she is four classes away from graduation, but does not know if the
students who sat in will be allowed back. She said she decided they needed to
fight to save their school, and approached the organization By Any Means
Necessary (BAMN) for support.

"The day before, I packed up all my stuff, my clothes and food, because I
thought we were going to stay for a week," Matthews said. "I left my daughter
with my mom and dad. We were inside making signs and calls, going on Facebook,
and putting stuff up in the windows. We hooked up speakers in the windows so we
could voice our demands."

Supporters chanted "NO NO, LET THEM GO!"

She said she was "surprised" when she saw how many people demonstrated outside
in their support. She said the supporters passed lasagna through the windows,
but that they didn't even get a chance to eat it because the police got there
first.

Cop arrests picketer

"When we heard the police were coming, we ran to the library as fast as we could
and barricaded ourselves in there. The police knocked on the window, and before
we knew it, they busted open the library door. We all got in a line and held
hands. We took a vote because we wanted to be democratic and we decided not to
leave. We chose to stick together, we came together and we were staying
together. We were chanting, `Whose schools? Our schools!' The whole time I was
recording everything on my phone."

She said the cop who arrested her, a Detroit police officer named R. Brown, saw
that she was recording the events and snatched the phone away. She said Detroit
Public Schools officers also took part in the attacks.

Huge cops push 100-lb. Ashley toward car

"I had sat down, and he yanked me up and slammed me down on my stomach on the
floor," Matthews said. "All the girls went berserk, telling him to get off me,
but he was just wiping up the floor with me. He pressed his thumbs in my neck,
and he tightened the handcuffs so hard that I have bruises there. I cried at
first but then I made myself stop."

Matthews said she weighs only 100 lbs. and is often mistaken for being much
younger because she is so small.

Supporter is horrified at brutality

"The officer pushed me up against the police car, with my face against it, and
put me in it," Matthews said. "They police didn't read us our rights even though
they told us we were under arrest. Then they were playing `good cop, bad cop,'
asking, `does your mom know you're going to jail?' I told them `She knows, I'm
fighting for my education, and I want a lawyer.' I wouldn't talk to them any
more after that."

But Matthews said the police "verbally assaulted" them the whole way to the
Eighth Precinct at Schaefer and Grand River.

Police rousted demonstrators too

"All the officers were so rude to us you would have thought we had killed
somebody," she said.  "They asked us, `do you have money, because you're going
to be in jail all weekend.' They told me it was good I'm 17, because I would
have to go on the `big block' and I'd better not be talking that `education
stuff' there. They were so mad because it was females standing up. But we have
the right to fight for our school, and we were non-violent."

She said the students felt absolutely "degraded" by the treatment they received
from the police.

Eighth Precinct police station

The students, represented by attorney Joyce Schon, were released that evening
from the garage in the precinct, where they were forced to sit during their
detention.  During their arrests, their cell phones were taken, and many left
without their shoes or jackets because the police would not allow them to get
them. Matthews said she received a ticket for "trespassing and being in the
school after hours."

Catherine Ferguson Academy before the police raid

She said they plan to go back to get their possessions at the school this week.

"We ran out the jail to so many people hugging us, and telling us how proud they
were of us," Matthews said.

"It's all over You Tube and Facebook now, and I hope everyone sees how the
police treated females in my school," Matthews said. "All my friends were
contacting me on Facebook when I got home and asking what I got arrested for.
It's time for all of us to stand up, it's our future. We can't find another
school that does what Catherine Ferguson does. I am thankful to BAMN and our
supporters because they truly showed us we do have a sense of hope, that there
is something you can do about what happens."

GROWN (AND JAILED) IN DETROIT

She said her mother was a single mom too, and taught her to be strong, to do the
best she could.

"Robert Bobb doesn't understand how we have to work hard to get an education to
get to where we want to go, because he never had to do it," Matthews said.

"The fight's not over, not as long as any school is on that list," she said. "We
are going to fight in a respectable, peaceful way for my school and for every
school. I owe it to myself, to my classmates, to my daughter, to my mom and dad.
I still love my school, and the Detroit Public Schools, and I am a proud citizen
of Detroit."


BAMN ORGANIZERS TELL STORY

Monica Smith (at left during earlier protest) went inside Catherine Ferguson
with its students to occupy the school while other BAMN organizers rallied
support outside. She was among those arrested.

"We are encouraging students everywhere to take up the fight to save their
schools," Smith said.

"The students are in great spirits and they all say they would do it again. We
are completely against these policies getting rid of public education and
closing schools like Catherine Ferguson, Moses Field, Carlton, Rutherford. 
Rutherford is for autistic children, and Carlton has over 500 students. Where
are they going to put them? The other schools are filled. Evidently they want
pregnant girls and mothers and disabled students to stay home.

Donna Stern organizing support outside Catherine Ferguson

Smith said a documentary filmmaker was also inside and arrested. She said the
woman's camera was seized during her arrest, then returned, but a sergeant at
the police station seized it again and kept it. She said students were also
filming events on their cell phones, many of which the police smashed on the
ground, and that they are concerned about the preservation of the documentary
film.

If police do erase the film, or have destroyed any other evidence, it is a
violation of the law, according to various attorneys.

Smith said the sit-in was very well-organized, and that people from the
community, including those from the Trumbullplex commune nearby, came to their
assistance almost at once.

"There were two small kids in there, two years and four years old," she said.
"They gave the kids to the principal. But the police were totally brutal. They
choked me twice, they choked a 100-lb. student, and they lifted up a teacher who
took part in the sit-in by the pants. At the police station, they handcuffed us
together on the floor of the garage. Everyone who was handcuffed has bruises on
their wrists and arms. When I was dragged out, they pulled my handcuffs up so
high I was on my toes."

BAMN organizer and teacher Donna Stern said the police took everyone's cell
phones and smashed them on the floor, making the students really angry because
their phones are their only way to stay in touch with their families and
children.

"They don't have that much money, and getting a new phone is a big deal," Stern
said.

She confirmed the accounts of Matthews and Smith regarding the brutal way in
which the police treated the young women. She said the number of supporters
outside kept growing, and that they followed the arrested students to the police
station, where they kept protesting until their release.

VIDEO FROM WHICH ARREST PHOTOS WERE TAKEN IS ON YOU TUBE AT

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmrpcHIYVMM

SIGN PETITION TO SAVE CATHERINE FERGUSON AT
http://www.grownindetroitmovie.com/school.php

*********************************************************************

WORLD VIEW NEWS SERVICE

To subscribe to this group, send an email to:
wvns-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

To leave this list, send an email to:
wvns-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

NEWS ARCHIVE IS OPEN TO PUBLIC VIEW
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/

Please consider contributing to WVNS today.
Email ummyakoub@... !

SC orders recovery of missing lawyers
April 13, 2011
http://www.dawn.com/2011/04/13/sc-orders-recovery-of-missing-lawyers.html


ISLAMABAD, April 12: The Supreme Court directed the Balochistan chief secretary
on Tuesday to ensure recovery of three missing lawyers and seek instructions
from the chief minister to address the concerns of petitioners over the issue of
security in the province.

A three-judge bench comprising Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, Justice
Muhammad Sair and Justice Ghulam Rabbani is hearing a constitutional petition
filed by the Balochistan High Court Bar Association president.

Balochistan`s Advocate General Amanullah Kanrani said there were certain things
which could not be discussed in an open court. He said that a commission was
working on the issue of missing persons and a task force comprising officials of
security and intelligence agencies had also been formed for the purpose.

"There have been certain incidents, but we cannot say that there is complete
collapse," he said, adding that tribal and religious organisations were also
involved in kidnapping people.

The chief justice told the advocate general that the court had issued a
comprehensive order at its last hearing, but it appeared that nothing had been
done. "We will be compelled to observe that you are not protecting the lives of
people."

The chief justice observed that a number of people sitting outside the National
Press Club were agitating for the recovery of missing persons, but nobody was
taking responsibility. The only solution to problems was to establish the writ
of the government, he added.

The additional advocate general said the chief secretary had requested for some
time because he could not turn up for Tuesday`s hearing.

Senior counsel Abdul Hafeez Pirzada, who is assisting the court in the missing
persons` issue, said that before issuing an order the chief secretary might be
asked to seek instructions from the provincial chief executive under
constitutional provisions.

He said the issue should be seen in its totality, cautioning that passing an
order at this stage would lead to dissolution of the provincial government.
BOGUS VOTERS:

The same bench issued notices to the attorney general and others for April 20 on
a petition alleging the inclusion of fake and bogus voters in electoral rolls
and another over the delay in composition of the Election Commission as
envisaged under the 18th Amendment.

The petitions were filed by Tehrik-i-Insaaf chief Imran Khan and television
anchor Mubashir Luqman.—APP

*********************************************************************

WORLD VIEW NEWS SERVICE

To subscribe to this group, send an email to:
wvns-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

To leave this list, send an email to:
wvns-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

NEWS ARCHIVE IS OPEN TO PUBLIC VIEW
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/

Please consider contributing to WVNS today.
Email ummyakoub@... !

A Warning to the Muslim World by David Duke
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWL3Gt_0qYM

*********************************************************************

WORLD VIEW NEWS SERVICE

To subscribe to this group, send an email to:
wvns-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

To leave this list, send an email to:
wvns-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

NEWS ARCHIVE IS OPEN TO PUBLIC VIEW
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/

Please consider contributing to WVNS today.
Email ummyakoub@... !

The Myth of Debt-Free Living
by Gary North
April 20, 2011
http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north969.html


I have set up a free website for people who are deep in consumer debt.
I am a great believer in getting out from under the burden of consumer debt. But
I am not a believer in getting out of debt. There is a reason for this. The only
way to get out of debt is to die.
Here are two great myths of the American dream: (1) financial independence; (2)
debt-free living.

Why are they myths? Because life involves both.

Finances require money. Money involves the division of labor. We are all
interdependent. Even a hermit is dependent on others: the owners of the land he
secretly lives on and secretly poaches on.

People say "financial independence" when they really mean "no dependence on a
salary." They can achieve this if they own lots of income-generating assets.
They do not have to show up at a job. But they are not financially independent.
They are dependent on all those people whose productivity enables companies or
governments to keep paying on the assets that the job-free people have invested
in. This is not financial independence. It is independence from a salaried job.
Let's keep our terminology clear.

Trust fund kids are not financially independent. They are dependent on the
decisions of their trust funds' managers, who are in turn dependent on the
productivity of the companies whose shares and bonds they have purchased.

In a division of labor economy, there is no independence.
Second, what about debt-free living? Why is it a myth? Let me offer an example.

FEAR OF DEBT

One of my subscribers has a problem. He must overcome his young wife's fear of
debt. He wants to invest in real estate. But he faces a problem: "My wife is
very risk-averse. She doesn't like debt."
She is 27. He is 32. It is clear that his wife does not understand debt. She is
in debt up to her ears.

She is five years younger than he is. On average, American wives outlive their
husbands by 4 years. So, in terms of statistical probability, she will have no
financial support from him in her last nine years of life. If he retires early,
they will live off of their savings. Then he will die, leaving her with reduced
capital for her final years. She may have no capital remaining by age 80.

In those not-so-golden years, she will be physically weaker than she is today.
She will probably be unable to earn money in the labor market. She will be
dependent on others.

She has lifetime obligations that are inescapable: she will consume resources.
That is what life requires. If she ceases to be able to work to pay those
obligations, she will become dependent on others to pay. For her to think that
she can safely live debt-free is to think that others are in some way in debt to
her: the government, the pension fund asset managers, or her children. Maybe all
of them.

She is saying that she is offering credit today – FICA taxes, pension
investments, care for her children – and that these investments will pay off. If
they don't, she will die in a hovel, unless she and her husband invest wisely.

Debt is inescapable for as long as we live. We will owe others whatever our
support in old age will require.

We can begin to prepare now to deal with this in mind, or else we can roll the
statistical dice and say, "I'll pass this debt onto someone else. I hope they
pay off." In short, the person tries to get his future debt paid by others.

GETTING STIFFED

Politicians around the West have made promises to their entire populations
regarding retirement living. They have promised voters that, in their old age,
the government will take over their medical expenses. In most Western European
nations, the government already pays for most medical costs.

This expense will bankrupt all nations without exception. The governments'
statisticians have known this for at least two decades, but the politicians keep
this hidden from public view as much as possible.

Voters are like rich, ugly heiresses: they want to be lied to. If they didn't,
they would not re-elect politicians who do not publicly announce the inevitable
bankruptcy of socialized medicine and old-age retirement programs. They reject
any candidate who tells the truth about Medicare. In short, "Don't tell me I'm a
rich, ugly woman. Tell me I'm beautiful, and you just can't live without me."
Her wish is their command.

Voters do not want to save enough money for their retirement. They want to eat,
drink, and be merry, and then go onto a tax-funded life-support system. They do
not want to hear about "tomorrow we die." They reply: "That's old-fashioned
thinking. That's mere accounting. That's ideology." They do not want to count
the cost. They want their cake, and they want to eat it, well into their
nineties. And they want someone else to fund it.

This desire is universal in the West. Voters look at the costs of old age, which
are very high for most people, and they want to pass on the Old Maid's expenses
to younger voters.

So, politicians make a promise: "Pay taxes today that fund the expenses of
oldsters, and we promise to pass on the costs of supporting you to younger
voters when you're old." In short, "You're beautiful, and I just can't live
without you."

The voters forget the obvious: younger voters giveth, and younger voters taketh
away. When the existing arrangement seems to be front-loaded with costs and
back-loaded with benefits, younger voters are going to pull the plug. They are
going to say, "We won't pay." In short, "You've spent your inheritance, you ugly
old hag. I'm outta here."

All the talk about burdening out children and grandchildren with enormous debt
is naive. Talk changes nothing. There are no revisions in the programs. When
older voters hear the words, "burdening our children with debt," the vast
majority conclude: "Yea! Stick it to them good and hard! We deserve everything
we can squeeze out of them."

This reliance on politicians' promises will backfire on the oldsters who vote
for them today and expect to be paid. The kids – all grown up – will have the
votes to elect a new generation of Congressmen and Senators, who will announce
revisions in the programs. The revisions will come at the expense of new
entrants onto the rolls of the old-age welfare programs.

The modern welfare state began in Prussia in the 1880s, when conservative
Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck got the legislature to provide government-funded
old age programs. The modern welfare state will abandon those programs. The
state giveth, and the state will take away.

RUNNING UP THE TAB

Oldsters think they are in the catbird's seat politically. They can get
politicians to keep the Ponzi scheme rolling. They do not save as much as they
should. They borrow from the future politically. They buy the good life today on
the assumption that the state will take care of them in their old age.

They are running up the tab. They think that younger voters will pay off their
tab.

As they get closer to the day of reckoning, they refuse to change their habits.
They do not look at a retirement calculator. They do not estimate how much
income they will need, and for how long, and at what rate of price inflation, to
live in comfort in the last 15 years of their lives (men) or 29 years (women).
Here is one. Are you willing to do the homework? Your peers aren't.

They think they are not going in debt, but they are. They think others will pick
up their tab. They think they have the votes to coerce others to pay their tabs.
They do have this power today; they will not have it a decade from now, let
alone two decades from now.
They do not think of themselves as accumulating debts. They think they will get
through old age by passing on the debts of old age to others. Because they do
not understand that future voters will renounce their obligations, either openly
(national default) or by hyperinflation, or by raising the age for access to
collect these benefits.

They are adding to their debts, yet they do not perceive this. Why not? Because
they really believe the mantra: "We're passing these debts to our grandkids."
They are not incensed by its implications. They rejoice in its implications.

It started with our parents and grandparents in 1935: Social Security. The
mindset of the New Deal was to get something at the expense of someone else. It
escalated in 1965: Medicare. This has become the outlook of the West. It has
accelerated.

China is taking advantage of this. China has no developed welfare programs for
oldsters. So, their people save for the future. Their supply of capital
increases. Their output increases. They are not burdened with FICA taxes. They
are not expecting anyone to care for them in their old age, other than their one
son. Half of them have no son.

Westerners stick it politically to everyone's children and grandchildren. The
Chinese assume that they will be responsible for aged parents and themselves, so
they save close to half of their income, if we are to believe the statistics
provided by the Chinese government. This generation of Chinese does not expect
the state to care for them in their old age. They are working hard to accumulate
capital, so that they will not fall into poverty in old age. They do not expect
everyone else's children to pick up their tab in old age.

REAL ESTATE AS A SOLUTION

When people ask me what the best way to retire is, I say "With a new career."

Most of them reply: "That's not what I mean. I do not want to work after age
65."

I ask them to go through the following mental exercise. First, estimate how much
monthly income it would take today for them to be comfortable if they lost their
job and could not get a new one.
They come up with a figure. Let's say that it's $5,000 a month before taxes.

Second, I tell them that they need about six 3-bedroom, 2-bath houses that
generate $1,000 a month net income before income taxes.
It is possible to get this in some regions from a house that costs under
$150,000.

Their goal should be to own six debt-free houses at age 65.
If they buy one house per year for six years, using owner-financed financing,
they can then sit back and let renters pay off the mortgages.

They could buy one a year for a decade. They may want to own ten. Or maybe they
can sell two or three of them and pay off the others.
This is the strategy recommended by John Schaub.

My view is that it's better to take on real estate investment debt today, when
you are young, and let renters pay it off. Then, at age 65, you have a portfolio
of ten debt-free houses or more. Your renters will pay you until you die.

You now have motivated people to pay your expenses. They don't pay you because
they have a contract with you. They pay because they want a roof over their
heads. They are highly motivated to pay your debts.

You have spread your risk. You will not be heavily dependent on government. Your
children will not regard you as a burden. You will not be dependent on a pension
fund, which may or may not fulfill its obligations.

We cannot escape debt. Debt is basic to life. It is therefore a question of how
we secure income to pay off our debt.

Taking on real estate debt at low rates to buy a bargain-priced home is a way to
build up a portfolio of houses that will provide income when you are old and
infirm.

CONCLUSION

There is no escape from debt. Anyone who tells you that you can ever live
debt-free has not thought through the implications of what he is saying.

It is possible to live debt-free on a net basis. You can have monthly income
that more than pays for your monthly debt. But there is always the possibility
that your income will disappear.

I contend that it is more likely to disappear if it comes from the government
than from renters.

Gary North is the author of Mises on Money. Visit http://www.garynorth.com. He
is also the author of a free 20-volume series, An Economic Commentary on the
Bible.

*********************************************************************

WORLD VIEW NEWS SERVICE

To subscribe to this group, send an email to:
wvns-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

To leave this list, send an email to:
wvns-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

NEWS ARCHIVE IS OPEN TO PUBLIC VIEW
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/

Please consider contributing to WVNS today.
Email ummyakoub@... !

Brand Ahmadinejad rights abuser: US senators
Fri Apr 15,2011
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110415/pl_afp/usiranrightspoliticssenate


WASHINGTON (AFP) – US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton should formally brand
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and 25 other current and former Iranian
officials as human rights abusers, senators urged Friday.

"We urge you to designate President Ahmadinejad as an Iranian human rights
abuser," Republican Senators Mark Kirk and Jon Kyl, Democratic Senator Kirsten
Gillibrand, and Independent Senator Joe Lieberman pressed Clinton in a letter.

The lawmakers pointed to Clinton's comments, in a March 2 Senate Appropriations
subcommittee hearing, that there was "certainly evidence" that Iran's
leadership, including Ahmadinejad, abused human rights.

The senators also noted that the European Union had designated 32 current or
former Iranian officials as rights abusers, and that the United States has only
done the same for seven of the people on that list.

"Therefore, we urge you to immediately investigate for possible designation as
human rights abusers the following 25 individuals listed by the European Union
as Iranian human rights abusers," they said in the letter, which was obtained by
AFP.

*********************************************************************

WORLD VIEW NEWS SERVICE

To subscribe to this group, send an email to:
wvns-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

To leave this list, send an email to:
wvns-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

NEWS ARCHIVE IS OPEN TO PUBLIC VIEW
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/

Please consider contributing to WVNS today.
Email ummyakoub@... !

Headscarves slam brakes on women's careers
By F. Brinley Bruton
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42226074/ns/world_news-europe


ISTANBUL, Turkey — Funda Altintas picks at her lamb kofte and salad and
tentatively describes her dream.

"I really want to be a professor," the 23-year-old psychology graduate says. "My
father says that maybe in 10 years I'll be able to be a professor."

On a night out on the town, Altintas' friends also share their ambitions: Melike
Akkus, 25, and Fatma Betul Yumuk, 22, are getting their MBAs. Esma Bendez, 23,
would like to focus on intercultural studies.

Despite earning degrees from one of Turkey's best universities, none can be sure
of reaching their career goals. What stands between them and their ambitions has
little to do with dedication, loans or standardized tests. Instead, it is the
traditional Muslim head covering they all wear.

Parliamentarians, judges, teachers and professors are forbidden from wearing the
headscarf in public buildings, even though Turkey is predominately Muslim and
governed by the Islam-oriented Justice and Development Party (AKP). Held in
place by an old guard of secular bureaucrats, judges and the army, the ban has
been eased at universities but remains unofficially applied in large parts of
the private sector.

For many Muslims, the right of women to dress in accordance with their beliefs
is on the front line in a battle with the traditional ruling class. For many
secular Turks, the head covering is a symbol of everything they fear Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan government is working toward — political Islam and
the oppression of women.

Istanbul seems to comfortably meld the old with the new, the secular with the
religious. A sleek tram car rumbles through the Old City. The Blue Mosque's
soaring minarets and a hulking Aya Sofia — first a basilica, then a mosque and
now a museum — crown a skyline that is both ancient and modern.

Women with and without headscarves walk through the city, arms sometimes linked.
Despite appearances, what is known here as the "turban" remains one of the most
polarizing issues in Turkey.

'Shock, awe and sadness'

Merve Kavakci-Islam's experience illustrates how explosive one piece of clothing
can be. At the age of 30, she was elected as a lawmaker for the Virtue Party
(Fazilet Partisi) in 1999.

Jeers greeted the engineer when she arrived for her swearing-in wearing a
headscarf. For 45 minutes, dozens of rival parliamentarians chanted: "Out, Merve
Kavakci! Out!"

"The prime minister (Bulent Ecevit, who served in the role until 2002) got up
and pointed at me with his finger and said, 'Put this woman in her place,'" she
told msnbc.com.

Story: US ally Turkey flirts with Mideast's 'bad boys' Kavakci-Islam never took
her seat. She was stripped of her Turkish citizenship within weeks and two years
later her party was closed down.

Now a lecturer at George Washington University and Howard University,
Kavakci-Islam says she felt "shock, awe and sadness" at her treatment in
parliament.

"I was Western-educated — (with) all the qualities that the republic wanted,"
she says. "But one-quarter of the parliament were protesting against me."

The governing party is in a tight spot. In 2008, the AKP's failed attempt to
lift a ban on Islamic dress at universities was used in a legal bid to shut it
down. It was alleged the party had violated the country's secular constitution.
And while the party says it will support university students expelled for
wearing the "turban," it has refused to back around a dozen headscarved women
who filed candidate applications ahead of June's parliamentary elections.

"There should be candidates wearing headscarves, but not now," AKP deputy leader
Bulent Arinc said last month.

Demonstrations

Even after the secular republic was established in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal
Ataturk, many women continued to cover their heads. The ban has been enforced
with varying severity over the years, but the vast majority of women of the
traditional elite did not and do not cover their heads.

Akkus, Bendez, Betel Yamuk and Altintas pressed their point while at college.
The four friends led five months of demonstrations at Bosphorus University when
a new rector decided to enforce the ban on headscarves.

They say they are tired of fighting for the right to get ahead while

"You have to convince other people that you are a thinking person with ideas and
thoughts," Yamuk says.

Bendez told msnbc.com it is difficult to debate the subject with fierce
secularists.

"Everybody talks to me, but they don't try to understand me," she said.

Secularists say easing the ban not only would betray the country's tenets but
fundamentally hurt women's rights.

"The headscarf is a religious symbol but today it is a political symbol," said
Nihal Kizil, the vice president of educational charity Association to Support
Contemporary Life. "Can you imagine a headscarf-wearing judge presiding over a
woman without a headscarf?"

Disadvantaged?

The four friends say they constantly feel disadvantaged because of the way they
dress.

Leaning over a cup of sugary tea served in a traditional tulip-shaped glass,
Akkus says the fact that she covers her head has had a big impact on who will
hire her and the size of her salary.

"I graduated from the best management programs in Turkey, and yet I earn half of
what my classmates do," she said.

Akkus recounts a conversation with an executive with one of the world's biggest
car companies. She asked him why his firm didn't hire headscarf-wearing women in
management positions in Turkey but did in other parts of the world.

"He told me, 'We have to follow the rules of the country,'" Akkus said.

But Akkus, Bendez, Betel Yamuk and Altıntas agree that society is changing.

"Ten years ago, you couldn't imagine the president's wife in a headscarf," Betel
Yamuk says optimistically.

The fact that President Abdullah Gul's wife, Hayrunnisa, covers her head has
also been noticed by the country's army chiefs, who in October boycotted the
Republic Day reception hosted by first lady.
Akkus is less upbeat than Betel Yamuk. She recounts the anger and humiliation
she felt at the age of 14 when female students at her school were forced to
uncover their heads.

"Soldiers came to our school," she says. "It was the hardest thing I have
experienced."

Akkus and her mother wept that day and she vowed never to return to school. She
did eventually return without her headscarf, but also forged a new long-term
goal: "We decided the best thing for me to do would be to become a very
important person."

*********************************************************************

WORLD VIEW NEWS SERVICE

To subscribe to this group, send an email to:
wvns-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

To leave this list, send an email to:
wvns-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

NEWS ARCHIVE IS OPEN TO PUBLIC VIEW
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/

Please consider contributing to WVNS today.
Email ummyakoub@... !

Detroit SWAT team assaults African American mom who refused to medicate her
daughter with antipsychotic drugs

http://www.naturalnews.com/032089_antipsychotic_drugs_health_freedom.html


(NaturalNews) The medical police state is alive and well in Detroit today, where
Child Protective Services (CPS) called in the police to aid in their kidnapping
of a 13-year-old daughter from an African American mother who refused to
medicate her with dangerous psychiatric drugs. As this case is clearly showing,
refusing to medicate your children with Big Pharma's mind-altering drugs is now
being treated as a felony crime.

Here are the facts of the case:

• Maryanne Godboldo is an African American mother of a teenager daughter. She
lives in Detroit. (http://www.prisonplanet.com/swat-at...)

• Child Protective Services (CPS) personnel attempted to kidnap Maryanne's
13-year-old daughter. They accused her of not giving her childpsychiatric
medicationprescribed by her doctor.

• Maryanne says the medication causedside effectsin her daughter and made her
condition worse, which is why she refused to give her daughter the medication.

• The medication wasRisperdal, a neuroleptic antipsychotic medication known for
causing serious side effects such as abdominal pain, vomiting, aggression,
anxiety, dizziness and lack of coordination
(http://www.risperdalsideeffects.com).

Watch the true video of the shocking side effects of Risperdal
here:http://www.naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=3...

See a complete list of side effects of psychiatric medications from CCHR:
http://www.cchr.org/sites/default/f...

• When Maryanne refused to let CPS take her daughter away, CPS personnel then
called the police, who then smashed down her front door and attempted to raid
her home to kidnap her daughter by force.

• The police did NOT have a warrant or any court documents whatsoever granting
them any right to enter Maryanne's home, according to Godboldo's attorneys.

• Police say that after they smashed in the front door, Maryanne opened fire on
them. (Who wouldn't open fire on a group of armed assailants trying to kidnap
their daughter, by the way?)

• A SWAT team was then called in, carrying semiautomatic rifles and sniper gear.
A 12-hour standoff ensued.

• Maryanne eventually surrendered to the SWAT team, and the state took her
daughter to a psychiatric hospital where she is now being molested by the staff
there, her mother says.

• Maryanne Godboldo now faces multiple felony charges: firing a weapon in a
dwelling, felonious assault, resisting and obstructing an officer, and use of a
firearm in the commission of a felony.

• CPS lied about the child's father's ability to take care of her as a tactic to
kidnap her from her mother.

• Community groups in Detroit are now rallying on behalf of the family there,
shouting "Free Arianna" (the daughter).

Why Health Freedom is more important now than ever
What you are witnessing here with Maryanne Godboldo is the tyranny of the
medical police state and the wicked criminality of Child Protective Services
workers who are now front-line enforcers of Big Pharma's deadly agenda to drug
our children.

Make no mistake: What's happening today is that the state is now breaking down
the doors, assaulting, arresting and imprisoning parents who refuse to medicate
their children. This is being accomplished with the use of armed force against
innocent victims.

This unholy alliance between Big Pharma, CPS and the police has gone too far. It
has become the weapon of medication compliance.

When medicine has become so dangerous, so forceful and so utterly harmful to the
People that the state must use bullets and guns to force people to take it ,you
know it's all gone way too far.

It makes you wonder: What kind of system of medicine is so bad that
prescriptions have to been forced at gunpoint?

That this is happening is not just an assault on Maryann Godboldo, but an
assault on our rights and freedoms as sovereign human beings. Do we not have the
right to say NO to a medication we don't want our children to take? Do we not
have the right to protect our children from kidnappers? Do we not have the right
to use firearms in the defense and protection of our homes from armed invaders
who are conspiring to kidnap our children?

The real criminals in this case are the CPS workers. They should be brought up
on attempting kidnapping charges as well as a criminal conspiracy to commit
kidnapping. The gun-toting cops who broke into Maryanne's home and attempted to
kidnap her daughter should be arrested and brought up on charges of armed
robbery, breaking and entering and conspiracy to commit the felony crime of
kidnapping.

And yet, instead, Maryanne is now facing multiple felony charges while the CPS
criminals and cops who raided her home are charged with nothing.

Where is the justice in America today? How did medication become something to be
enforced with bullets and SWAT teams? And more importantly, how far will this go
before this tyranny ends?

Next, will they just line everybody up against a brick wall, and those who can't
produce a receipt for medication get a bullet in their heads?

Resistance is necessary to achieve freedom
I hope you see where this is headed. I've been warning you about this for years,
urging you to resist the rise of the medical police state... warning you about
what I called "gunpoint medicine" back in 2006
(http://www.naturalnews.com/019512.html).

Read about Daniel Hauser (http://www.naturalnews.com/026305.html), the gunpoint
vaccinations in Maryland (http://www.naturalnews.com/022267.html), the jailing
of Francisco Santos (http://www.naturalnews.com/021997.html) and the forced
poisoning of Abraham Cherrix (http://www.naturalnews.com/019617.html) with toxic
chemotherapy.

Learn the truth or you will surely be crushed by it. Big Pharma will stop at
nothing to force their drugs onto your children. They will use guns, SWAT teams,
kidnapping, the breaking down of your front door... anything it takes!

If you really want to learn the truth about the psychiatric industry and its war
on children, visit www.CCHR.org and www.CCHRint.org

You can also search the database of psychiatric drug side effects at
:http://www.cchrint.org/psychdrugdan...

And please, forward this article to everyone you know. Spread the word about
reading NaturalNews.com to stay informed about health freedom. We must protect
ourselves from these medication tyrants who use kidnapping, armed assaults and
the threat of violence to force us to drug our children.

*********************************************************************

WORLD VIEW NEWS SERVICE

To subscribe to this group, send an email to:
wvns-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

To leave this list, send an email to:
wvns-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

NEWS ARCHIVE IS OPEN TO PUBLIC VIEW
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/

Please consider contributing to WVNS today.
Email ummyakoub@... !
__._,

Re-Presenting Is The Pull Of Duality Into False Consciousness:
Unravelling Lies And Liars And The Remedy To The Lies
By Arthur & Fiona Cristian
19th April 2011
Love For Life
http://loveforlife.com.au/node/8129
Comments: http://loveforlife.com.au/comment/reply/8129#comment-form


This article is about what we feel is the kernel of the heartfelt-inspired
insights we have been unravelling from outside-the-square over the past six
years. We have spent thousands of hours sifting through the information we have
come across, keeping that which we find to be truth and discarding that which is
lies, until we have been able to simplify everything down to a remedy that does
not require hours of reading law dictionaries and memorising Laws, Acts and
Statutes. It does not require knowledge of how to prepare and file legal
documents.

What we share in this article can be used to unravel all the lies we have been
fed and to step out of "The System" to freedom. Once anyone can comprehend this
information and is inspired, they can apply it in whatever area they are working
with, whether religion, law or whatever, so long as they are unwavering in their
determination to see their objective through. They will be able to prove that
all men are equal and that no one has authority over another, and to make right
what has been made wrong, particularly if they have a large, strong force of
committed men and women beside them, to stand up to brute force tactics.

Applying this information successfully, we will be able to free innocent men and
women from jail and release others from the grip of harm-doers seeking to rape,
pillage and plunder their fruits of labour while exhausting their
LIFE-force-energy. This approach will only work for those who are prepared to
take full responsibility for LIFE and are not looking for something of "The
System", i.e. financial gain, which will only keep them in "The System". This
method will not work for those who have motives of greed and selfishness, power
and control, self-centered glory and righteousness. It only works with love.

This information can be used to discern whether new information is truth or
lies. The real purpose of this work is to enable men and women to pull out of
"The System" altogether and not be sucked into another one. To keep this article
as brief as possible we have provided links below to seven recent Facebook
discussions/debates and links to articles which collectively expand on the
themes we touch on in great detail. We also want to thank three friends, Tom,
Glen & Raymond, who shared some key insights with us over the past six years.
They provided missing pieces to a very large puzzle we finally completed late
last year.

Arthur and Fiona Cristian
Love For Life

===

Re-Presenting Is The Pull Of Duality
Into False Consciousness

Learning To Re-present

We are so accustomed to re-presenting, learning how to do it from an early age,
that we do it automatically, without awareness or comprehension of what we are
doing. From the stories we are read to the belief systems we are indoctrinated
into, we learn to place what is not real over what is real and to give up our
uniqueness for a fairytale character within "The System". Thus when little Mary
is looking at pictures of Alice in Wonderland while mum reads the story over &
over again, Mary is learning to re-present someone she is not. She starts
playing the game. When little Peter plays Superman, he is re-presenting someone
he is not. This may seem harmless enough - the children are using their
imaginations and having fun BUT, while they are in fantasy, they are not
experiencing the real world and, once we learn this behaviour, we continue our
fantasy life into adulthood although the fantasy characters we portray change as
our scenarios change as we grow. It is this behaviour that keeps us apart and in
conflict with each other because we are in conflict with who we really are and
the real world we are part of. When we learn to re-present a Christian, a
Muslim, a Frenchman, an Icelandic woman, a New Ager, a politician, a democrat, a
lawyer, etc, we are being someone we are not and re-presenting a fictitious
character in "The System".

The Baggage

So strongly do we identify with the characters that we are re-presenting, that
we will hurt our brothers and sisters of LIFE before we we will give them up. So
the Jews fight the Arabs, the Americans fight the Iraqis, citizens fight the Bar
and government, politicians of one party fight with the politicians of another
party and fans of opposing football teams fight with each other. See how we are
kept apart by this baggage? And baggage it is, baggage that we can let go of if
we choose and baggage that we have to let go of if we are ever to get together
and co-create a world of peace, joy, freedom, truth, abundance and do no harm
for ALL. This baggage makes us greedy, selfish, suspicious, uncooperative,
ignorant, arrogant, righteous and harmful. It blinkers us from ever seeing
clearly what needs to be done to create the world of love we all dream of. Even
amongst those of the freedom-truth movement who are supposed to be fighting for
a just, free world, there is bickering, back-stabbing and enmity with feuds
amongst different factions.

We Won't Let Go Of The Baggage

Let's have a look at what happens when we ask Mary and Peter to stop playing and
get ready for bed; first they ignore us - they don't want to slip out of fantasy
back to reality. Then, when we persist, they resist; "I don't want to stop
playing!" "I don't want to go to bed!". They may get really upset, throwing a
tantrum and hurling abuse, "I hate you, Mummy!", and even physically lashing
out, so much do they want to continue in their fantasy world, being the fantasy
figure of their choice in the fantasy story of their choice. The same thing
happens when, as adults, we are asked to question our belief systems; "Give up
my religion? No way!" "Let go of years of research into the legal system? No
way!" "Give up booze and meat pies? No way!" "Give up slavery? No way!" "I want
my Common Law!" "I want my Law Degree!" "I want my trial by jury!" "I want my
constitution!" " I want my democracy!", etc, etc.

We cling on to what we have been taught to re-present even if there is clear
evidence that the way we are living is causing destruction to LIFE that is who
we are. We would literally rather die and cause the death of all LIFE forms of
LIFE than give up our belief systems. Our addictions to baggage are so strong
that we will resist truth and get angry, attacking those who show us truth and
even maiming and killing our brothers and sisters of LIFE to defend our
addictions. It is the baggage doing the attacking because their baggage is all
they have to offer and the baggage is who they have become. Are we any different
from Mary and Peter clinging to their fantasy characters? The baggage we have
become includes our "self", whose needs and desires we are enslaved to and our
system "person/strawman" whose responsibilities in "The System" we have to
fulfil.

From early childhood, from Alice and Superman, we move onto pre-school and then
school and perhaps university where we are given more and more stories to
re-present, more fantasy to become addicted to and more and more information
that is not of LIFE to place over LIFE in the name of politics, science,
evolution, religion, spirituality, consciousness, the cosmos, etc, until we have
forgotten how to connect with the reality of LIFE any more. Everything of the
real world has been labelled in many different ways by the information of "The
System" and our heads are so busy re-presenting this man-made out-of-thin-air
information that we are unable to feel, hear, see, touch, taste or smell the
natural, pure and sincere information of LIFE that each LIFE form is offering us
unconditionally for free. Most of our waking life, most of the thoughts in our
head are not thoughts of LIFE but are thoughts of "The System" and we form
crowds, flocks and groups with others who like re-presenting the same "system"
thoughts as we do and resist mixing with those who re-present other "system"
thoughts. Thus we are divided and ruled, burdened by the growth of baggage that
becomes us. "The System" is the baggage that has become all of us.

With every re-presentation that we enact, there is both the scenery and the
character we are acting in that imagining that occurs only between our ears -
nowhere else is this occurring, be it a story about relativity, darkness, time,
money, the universe, other worlds or quantum physics. We are superimposing this
fiction over LIFE just as Mary turns the family dining table into the setting
for the Mad Hatters Tea Party.  When we focus on 1, 2 or 3 or a, b, or c or that
Mars is a planet, for example, we can't bring forward 1, 2 or 3 or a, b or c or
Mars or compass, square, universe, law or magnetic north to back our claims that
they exist. We are just re-presenting fiction that is the thoughts of other men
& women that we echo as re-presenters. Our brains are like film projectors and
the re-presentation information is what we are re-creating through the
projection of these thoughts that we superimpose over LIFE just as little Mary
re-presents wonderland over the real world.

Getting to grips with the way we re-present everything of "The System" of
baggage is the key to our escape from the enslavement of "The System".
Recognising that "The System" is a copy of LIFE, a shadow, that has been placed
over LIFE and needs our LIFE-energy to appear to exist is how we discern what is
truth and what is not. Is what we are feeling or experiencing of LIFE? Can we
feel it, see it, smell it, touch it, hear it and taste it? Does it have purity
and sincerity? Does it still have the presence of LIFE present? Is it LIFE
sustainable, meaning, is it free, not needing our LIFE-energy, the fruits of our
labour, to live? Or does it need us to interact with it, to start it, stop it,
manufacture it, mine it, process it, explain it, manage it, enforce it, build
it, repair it and believe it. Everything that is not of LIFE and is not LIFE
sustainable is fraud and it is this fraud, this re-presenting, that creates the
duality that is the basis of all belief systems of "The System".

How We Accept The Lies Of Duality

Re-presenting the thought of God is lying. The God of the thought of God does
not exist and therefore is not God. Living creator exists because its presence
of LIFE is present amongst us, here and now. Mary re-presenting Alice in
Wonderland does not make Alice or Wonderland real either. Only Mary is present
with the presence of LIFE and she has to re-present Alice and Wonderland because
they are not present to LIFE and are both without the presence of LIFE. This is
duality. This is baggage. Mary has become a slave to Alice and Wonderland and
has to re-present these thoughts to give them her LIFE so they can temporarily
have the illusion of being real. But they will never have the presence of LIFE
to be present amongst the living, amongst what is real. They are not
LIFE-sustainable.

All forms of duality are satanic; Mary is real but Alice isn't. This is duality.
Satanism is the practise of creating fairytales, the baggage, and then hijacking
men, women and children to fall into those fairytales so that they give their
power away to them so they can be ruled by the rulers in the fairytale. Satanism
is getting men, women and children to shoulder burdens of baggage so that they
limp through LIFE weighed down, enslaved and under the standing of the inventors
and rulers of the baggage.

Satanism is the practise of duality, i.e. heaven and hell or we are tiny aspects
of a universe at the effect of greater forces than us or we are all on a journey
heading from somewhere to somewhere. These ideas are lies. They do not have the
presence of LIFE present. Because the believers in heaven and hell have been
brainwashed to accept and believe in the hierarchies of archangels down to
cherubs in heaven and the authority of the devil in hell, they accept the
hierarchies of "The System". They agree to be ruled over by the
re-present-atives of hell. They accept judges, priests, Police Officers and
other "authority figures" as having authority and standing over them here and
now. Those who are "good", law abiding, compliant and peaceful citizens of their
faith go to heaven while those who are "bad" and break the rules of their faith
go to hell. In "The System", those who are  "good", law abiding, compliant and
peaceful citizens of "The System" are "allowed" to earn their money, buy their
houses and live unmolested by the enforcers of "The System" while those who are
"bad" feel the full force of the enforcers of "The System". They have been so
familiarised with their chosen fairytale that they view their lives through
their beliefs, just as little Mary turns her home, garden and family into
scenery and props for her performance of the Alice in Wonderland fairytale.

As Above So Below Is The Duality Of Baggage

All Satanic thoughts are without the pure and sincere substance of LIFE. All
substance is SENSE because it has LIFE, is LIFE-sustainable, and its presence of
LIFE is always present amongst us. Alice and Wonderland are NON-SENSE while Mary
isn't. Yes, she is presently lost in a fairytale but Mary has pure and sincere
senses of LIFE; sight, sound, touch, taste, feel and smell - it is just that she
is forgetting to use them all here and now. Mary is caught up in a world of
thought without sense embodied. This satanic practise is often referred to as
the "worship of the intellect" which is at the core of all Freemasonic
teachings. Mary believes that Alice and Wonderland exist, even though she cannot
experience them here and now with all her senses of LIFE. As Alice and
Wonderland are without sense, Mary has to act on their behalf, use her sense, to
re-present them. Mary's performance of Alice and Wonderland is based in
non-sense. Mary will never be able to bring forward Alice or Wonderland to back
her claim that Alice or Wonderland exists. All satanic thoughts are without the
presence of LIFE to be present amongst us, the living.

Bible believers claim the bible is the living word of God but they are unable to
bring forward their God to back their claims here and now. Just as little Mary's
Alice always remains invisible so does the God of the bible believers. We say:
"Hello God, can you please come forward to back John and Rachael's claims. We
want to touch, taste, see, smell and feel you while we hear your tongue confirm
John and Rachael's claims." Because John and Rachael are unable to bring forward
their God to back their beliefs, their claims default back to them as
fraudsters. They are both impersonating a God so they can, acting as impostors
of a God, place their claims and their lives on to a higher standing than other
men, women & children. This means they are both re-presenting a God of
NON-SENSE. This non-sense is causing conflict and chaos between other men and
women, of equal standing, caught in the crossfire of John and Rachael spreading
their righteousness all-around. John and Rachael have been dumbed down by the
baggage of a God that has become them. Due to non-sense, they are incapable of
seeing the harm they are causing and spreading all around and they are unable to
take full-responsibility for stopping the harm.

The same thing occurs in "The System" where the clergy, judges, politicians and
law enforcement officers, etc, all believe that they have authority over those
who do not have those titles. They are re-presenting NON-SENSE, especially when
there is a maxim of law that states, "All men are equal before the law"! And
those who go to the courts or accept Police, lawyers and barristers telling them
what to do also believe in this imagined authority. It works both ways. We
support the Wonderland structures that enslave us and even fight to keep them or
strengthen them. But where is democracy? Where is Court? Where is Common Law?
Who can bring them forward for us all to experience with our senses and hear
from them, first party to first party, the proof that they have authority over
us? All they can bring forward is a man, woman or child to back their claim.
Again, this is re-presenting non-sense for the purpose of power and control.
This is all duality. This is a continuation of the baggage. All
fairytales/non-sense is baggage.

The challenge is to become detached from duality so that we can see it for what
it really is. The duality of non-sense only exists as part of belief systems and
our belief in duality keeps us locked in our belief systems - without belief
systems, there is no duality, there is no baggage, there is no re-presenting
non-sense.

As someone wrote to us recently through Facebook after reading our articles and
Facebook discussions/debates, "I am aware how duality comes in all its many
forms only to keep us going back and forth almost like a dog chasing its own
tail. Around and around we go and every time we go around the bend, we don't
recognise that we've been down that road before. The same old thing, just a
different dressing to make it new and improved, only to be had once more. But
good news is I, like others, have caught on."

The Belief Systems Of Duality (baggage)

These belief systems of duality are the spells woven by the "We Will Lead Every
Revolution Against Us" men and women of "The System". In order to keep us
enslaved to "The System", they have to convince us that "The System" is changing
and that we are responsible for making some of those changes. Those behind "The
System" provide us with the chaos of "The System" and then offer us the remedy
to the chaos. They have all bases covered and we fall for their spells,
attaching our fiction "selves" to the remedies they offer, not realising that no
remedy with or of "The System" will give us freedom. Hence the effect of the dog
chasing its tail; the remedy we pour our energy into only continues our
enslavement. We are the ones with the power of co-creation so the world we see
around us is what we are responsible for creating. When those behind "The
System" trick us into thinking the thoughts they want us to think, we oblige by
creating the world in the image of those thoughts. Those behind "The System"
even provide physical/material "evidence" to support those thoughts. They are
black-magic masters of deception, remote projection, remote viewing and remote
control and we, unwittingly, fall for their thoughts. Not conscious of our gift
for co-creation, our true power, our brains, is being used against us.

It is hard to comprehend that the baggage of "The System" is in nearly every
area of our lives. The moment we stop doing what is natural to LIFE and start
re-presenting what we have been taught by "The System", we are weighing our
lives down with more baggage. When we process/cook food and liquids, this is
baggage. When we kill and eat flesh and blood creatures, this is baggage, When
we worship false idols, this is baggage. When we cause pain and trauma in
others, this is baggage that they then start re-presenting and carry as baggage.
It is no wonder that there are so many unhappy, lonely, frightened, distrustful
people around, carrying both the baggage they have been taught by "The System"
and the baggage of others that has been pushed onto them. Even the read and
write alphabet languages that we read and speak, all the mathematics, geometry
and all university courses and careers add to the baggage. It is all stuff that
we have to re-present, meaning that we don't have much LIFE any more. We are
totally bogged down being slaves, almost totally disconnected from LIFE.

The Baggage Continues

So immersed are we by the baggage that some of us even work against our brothers
and sisters of LIFE to maintain the baggage. Throughout the freedom, truth,
consciousness, health, education, science, New Age, spiritual & all alternative
movements are intelligence agents whose job is to make sure that we are not
putting down our burdens of baggage. Some we think are friends and on our side.
Some we've known for years and have worked together with. "We Will Lead Every
Revolution Against Us" - they get to know our thoughts, who we are talking too,
the groups that we are part of or the new groups/grass-root-movements we are
creating with others and the true intentions behind them. They get to know what
our plans and dreams are, what we eat and drink, when we sleep, where we
socialise, what we like and dislike, how we feel and how we think. They get to
know almost everything about us because we let them into our private lives and
accept them when they set themselves up as trusted leaders/shepherds/influential
guides of their flocks.

The tactics they use to get us to trust them are brilliant but very predictable
once you become conscious of them. They may be thrown in jail and roughed up,
picked on by Police, done over in court, etc. Things are not what they seem. "If
they can get you to think what they want you to think and get you to put your
LIFE-energy into these thoughts & feelings, you will create that world (their
world). Slaves willingly create a world in their masters image without
realising." The deception is far deeper than most realise.

Not only are these agents both the "good guys" and the "bad guys", they often
also create scenes between them, getting their followers to "take sides" and
thus be still more divided. See this link for an example:
http://web.mac.com/len15/Newsletter_&_Blog/Knighting_Controversy.html

These intelligence agents then report all information back to their central
intelligence networks which filter the information back to the Levite priests
who control all sides of everything in "The System", their "system of systems",
their enclosure of many enclosures, their mazes within many mazes, their matrix,
their fairytales. As we said "We Will Lead Every Revolution Against Us". Whose
thoughts are we thinking and most importantly, who benefits long-term through
our compliance to these thoughts? By knowing our thoughts, they control the
outcomes to suit their agenda.

Change Agents Of Baggage

Not only are the intelligence agents the leaders of their fields, they are also
men and women who work across the internet in forums and social networks to
discredit and bring down those who are pure and sincere in the inspiration to
co-create freedom for ALL. These agents send abusive attacks and character
assassinations. They try to emotionally manipulate their targets and those they
are in contact with to break down bonds that are forming between them. Many of
these agents are themselves controlled remotely by the Levite Priests and their
lackeys through Black Magic. In "The System", this manipulation occurs in every
area of life; there is nowhere the presence of this satanic agenda is not
present. It is all pervasive. And those managing the network of the Satanic
agenda are the higher Freemasonic orders, the henchmen of the Levite Priests
that are above the "benevolent", lower levels of Freemasonry. This is all more
baggage.

Having a man-made "system" with currentcy, laws, governments, etc, requires
slavery. It is impossible to have a man-made "system" without having slavery.
Currentcy, insurance, commerce, laws, governments, rulers, law enforcement, etc,
do not exist and are of duality. There is the presence of MAN whose flesh lives
and blood flows present amongst us and then there is currentcy, insurance,
commerce, laws, governments, rulers, law enforcement, etc, which do not exist,
requiring MAN to re-present them. There are billions of slaves presently amongst
us.

A copy of LIFE is the shadow world that is the man-made darkness. The
Freemasonic world rules over the shadow world. Re-presenting forms the shadows
that disconnect us from who we really are and what we are really part of, from
each other, all other LIFE forms of LIFE and our true purpose. Just as the
Obelisk in Washington DC is erected over water so that it has a reflection, "The
System" is just a poor reflection of LIFE. Why do you think the obelisk was
placed there? They always show us the truth but they do not teach us how to
recognise it. We are being ruled by the shadows of our own projections. Mary's
Alice is a shadow.

How They Keep Us Apart

The freedom truth information is already showing up as not working. We are
hearing of more and more cases of men and women using this information still
being evicted from their homes and of many other cases where those of "The
System" are ignoring their own laws just to ensure that we remain enslaved and
that no precedents are set that could free us all. This situation is true to one
of the tactics of the change agents of "The System" whereby they raise our hopes
by seeming to have remedies, only to dash down those hopes when the remedies
don't work. The mantra is always, "We can't beat "The System"".

All the supposed roads to freedom are whitewashed/white-anted. Men and women
waking up become aware of their enslavement, look for the way out and are
overjoyed when the "good guy" of "The System" comes along, seeming to have all
the answers. Like a shepherd to his flock, he leads them along to what they
think is freedom but is actually only another enclosure of "The System". The
methods that should work don't work and, slowly, the men and women realise that
they have not found freedom after all. They try again but each new enclosure is
still in "The System" and they are still enslaved.

Those behind "The System" do have a remedy planned for the problems we are all
experiencing and it will be one that most will jump at because it will sound
wonderful, erasing all debt and other enticements of that nature. However, it
will not be freedom but just a new version of the current system, a New World
Order (NWO) system wrapped in shiny paper with sparkling ribbons but still
backed by the same force only, this time, the force will be stronger and more
pervasive and our "rights" will be fewer and we will be even more under control
than we are now. We will jump at it because nothing seems to be working; all the
remedies are failing, life in "The System" is getting harder and harder, we are
working longer and longer hours and seeing our families less and less.  Earth is
becoming more and more polluted and we are becoming sicker and sicker. Why
wouldn't we jump at a remedy that seems to offer relief from all this suffering?
We will be on our knees and delighted when the Chosen One of "The System" comes
along to wipe out all our worries.

The NWO is not the present chaos led by the "bad guys" with their police state,
forced vaccinations, global warming, wars, terrorism, injustice, loss of rights
and freedoms, etc, the NWO is the remedy to this chaos led out front by the
"good guys". Both the "bad guys" and the "good guys" all come from one of the
thirteen Ancient Egyptian Freemasonic "orders" (13 lost tribes of IS RA EL)
spread out across Earth.

As we have written many, many times, the only remedy to our situation is to form
do no harm communities where we take care of each other and nature. Those behind
"The System" also know that this is the only way we will cause a mass exodus
from "The System" and away from their clutches, so do you think they are going
to let us set up communities without trying to have some sort of influence? Of
course not. We have noticed that some of the leaders in the freedom truth
movement are starting to talk about community as a remedy. If they are pure and
sincere in their intent, this is great. However, some of them are there to set
these communities up for failure down-the-line, to show us that we cannot get
together and overcome our baggage. The baggage everyone brings to community
destroys it and the change agents know this which is why they don't teach
everyone how to let go of all the baggage. If necessary, they will also
infiltrate communities to bring about their downfall by stirring up problems and
creating divisions. This is easily dealt with if we are forming our communities
with pure and sincere information driven by the intent for purity and sincerity
in everything we think, feel and do but they will no doubt have some success
with communities that are not prepared for this tactic of destruction. We do not
want to be sucked into re-presenting the "as above, so below" duality that will
have us be enslaved in the next version of "The System", the NWO.

Why Re-Presenting?

So why all the effort to teach us to re-present?

Those behind "The System" need our energy and our belief to keep "The System"
intact and active. Without us, there is nothing. Without Mary there is no Alice
or Wonderland to re-present. They need us to be slaves to "The System",
re-presenting/performing the constructs of "The System" and giving our power
away to the black-magic masters of "The System". We are already of LIFE which is
a natural "system", a way of co-creating with LIFE through SENSE that is natural
to us. In order for us to forget our connections to LIFE and to abandon and
destroy LIFE so that it no longer has the presence of LIFE present, we have to
be taught from early childhood to put our energy into something other than LIFE,
into the fake, contrived, man-made system of civilisation which we are taught to
place over LIFE. As none of the constructs of "The system" have LIFE, if we do
not put our LIFE energy into them, they are nothing. For those behind "The
System" to keep the status quo of everything for them and crumbs for the rest of
us, we need to be persuaded to maintain that situation for them.

We have been conned into living in a world of man-made constructs and there is
not ONE construct (CON-struct) of "The System" that can be backed up by those
who worship it because ALL constructs of "The System" exist nowhere but as
fantasy, illusion and delusion between the ears. They are fraudulent ideas
without LIFE that we must support and maintain, enslaving our lives in the
process. If we are to escape "The System", we must be vigilant in routing out
all the fraud. It is vital that we all scrutinise thoroughly ALL the information
we come across rather than just accepting that which fits our belief system, and
that we all learn to go where truth takes us if we are pure and sincere in our
intent to co-create a world of peace, freedom, abundance, joy and Do No Harm for
all.

LIFE is love and love is LIFE and we are the ones with LIFE/love. "The System"
has no love/LIFE and so is nothing without the LIFE/love we put into it. In a
community, it is the LIFE/love that we put into that community that sustains it.

Thought Without LIFE Are Not Real

The thought of God is not God just as the thought of Jesus, consciousness, love,
peace, freedom, joy, abundance and do no harm for all are not Jesus,
consciousness, love, peace, freedom, joy, abundance and do no harm for all. All
dreams have a creator. Imagine the dream of LIFE is a bubble (a metaphor);
Living-creator thought out the dream of LIFE in great detail, held all the
thoughts that make up the whole of LIFE in focus and then put its LIFE into
those thoughts to give LIFE to the dream of LIFE. The presence of Living creator
is always present to everything Living-Creator created. If Living-Creator
removed its LIFE from the dream of LIFE, the bubble, the dream of LIFE would
fade away and die. TRUTH always has the presence of LIFE present (here & now).
Truth is LIFE-sustainable and does not require MAN to be a slave for its
existence. TRUTH always has SENSE (sight, sound, touch, taste, feel, smell)
while lies are always based on NON-SENSE.

LIFE is the LIFE of Living-Creator and is the living body of Living-Creator. All
thoughts without the LIFE of Living-Creator present, are Satanic, and are fraud
and lies. This is why we say the thought of God is not God, instead it is a dead
God. It's when we give LIFE to thoughts that are LIFE-sustainable that they are
real and LIFE-sustainable. LIFE is the Gift of LIFE. In paradise, every breath
is a gift of LIFE, every drink of water is a gift of LIFE, every bite of
raw-living food is a gift of LIFE, every step we make is a Gift of LIFE and is
an act of co-creation with LIFE. Every thought given LIFE is sacred. We were all
meant to be taking full-responsibility for everything we think, feel & do;
unfortunately most don't because they have fallen into fairytales that have them
lost and re-presenting lies. Mary, as Alice, does not want to take
responsibility for the things she has to do as Mary in the real world. Mary has
left it to others to take care of her responsibilities in the real world. This
is what we are all doing in "The System"; we have forsaken our responsibility
for LIFE and allowed others to make the decisions for us, which means that we
now have rulers who take care of things provided we DO WHAT THEY SAY, i.e. be
their slaves. "The System" is Wonderland for adults. It is impossible to have
any man-made system without rulers and slaves. Re-presenting a system, cashless
or not, requires slaves and rulers.

Re-presenting is the basis of "The System" and learning not to re-present is the
basis of freedom from "The System". Re-presenting is at the heart of all
religions, all occults and esoterics, all university courses and careers, all
science, mathematics and read and write alphabet languages. It is the basis of
all false prophets.

Waiting For Salvation

All dreams come with full responsibility and it is our role to take full
responsibility for LIFE. However, we have leant to pass on that responsibility
to false gods, prophets and laws and, in doing so, we have forsaken the dream of
LIFE to the point where it is dying and we, as LIFE, are dying. Rather than face
up to the mess we have created, we place all our hopes on someone, something,
somehow, somewhere to solve everything for us. And there are plenty of false
prophets willing to tell us that, if we just sit tight and hold on, everything
will come out all right. See this example:

Isa 25  (Stones - Hebrew text & NKV)
Yahweh will eliminate death forever,   And YAHWEH will wipe away tears from all
faces;
       He will remove the shame of His people and the shame of His nation Israel
for ever;
       For YAHWEH has spoken.

Then he said to me: "Son of man, these bones are the people of Israel. They say,
`Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone; we are cut off.' And many of those
who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake,  Some to everlasting life, Some
to shame and everlasting contempt.  Those who are wise shall shine  Like the
brightness of the firmament,  And those who turn many to righteousness  Like the
stars forever and ever. )  And it will be said on that day: "Behold, this is our
God; We have waited for Him, and He will save us. This IS YAHWEH; We have waited
for Him; We will be glad and rejoice in His salvation."

This is Re-Presenting The Pull Of Duality Into False Consciousness

If 6 billion children were brought up in forests not exposed to "The System" or
to anyone exposed to "The System", would they all know about Alice and
Wonderland? Would they know about Yahweh? Would they all be re-presenting
NON-SENSE or would they all be present to the presence of LIFE of Living-Creator
and all equal team-players of LIFE, all taking full-responsibility for LIFE?

How many people are waiting for God, Jesus, Yahweh, the Prophet, the Galactic
Federation, the White Brotherhood, the Asian Triad, Nesara, Maitreya, someone,
anyone, to come along and make it all better with one whoosh of their magic
wand? How many are waiting to be proven right; that their way was the right way
and that they are among the chosen? This is all re-presenting NON-SENSE. Where
is Yahweh? Why is Yahweh limited to time? Why is he invisible? If he is our
father or whatever, why is he removed from us? Would parents erect barriers
between them and their children? Can Yahweh appear before all of us so that we
can all experience him with all our senses of LIFE? Can he move a mountain range
100 kilometres with us all watching? How will he stop us all thinking and
feeling satanic thoughts and feelings? Are we puppets on a string? If we don't
each have full-responsibility for LIFE then who and what are we? Where are his
ancestors buried? Where do his children play? What is his address so we can
visit to have a chat while having a bite to eat and a drink between us? Would we
all suffer, if not fade away and die, if he did not exist? For more on this, see
the Facebook discussions/debates referred to below.

Don't those waiting for their chosen prophet realise that freedom for one means
freedom for all? That abundance for one is only possible when there is abundance
for all? That do no harm for one is only possible when there is do no harm for
all?

Even many of those who do not believe in a saviour still think of the "Universe"
as something separate, greater and more powerful than them and that the "forces"
of the Universe will sort things out and "right the balance" between light and
dark, good and evil. This is still duality - light balanced by dark, good
balanced by evil. Can they bring forward the universe to back their claim? Can
they bring forward darkness? Is not what they call "universe" just part of the
body of LIFE that we are? Is darkness not just the absence of light
(LIFE/reality/sense)? LIFE is information, darkness is information and words
like spirit and soul and light are information but does darkness have the
presence of LIFE present amongst us? Or is darkness just another pretend shadow
we made up just as Alice is a shadow of Mary's projection? SENSE is
consciousness, is LIFE - NON-SENSE is unconsciousness, is death to LIFE - sense
is information - non-sense is information and we become in the image of the
information we put our LIFE-energy into and project.

All men are equal - this means that no one has authority over another and that
all of us are equally responsible for LIFE. This also means that there is no
almighty father figure with more power than any of us. Until we learn how not to
be slaves or rulers or deceivers we will always have the problems we are
experiencing now.

The Matrix

The Matrix
Written by Andy Wachowski & Larry Wachowski


Morpheus: I imagine that right now you're feeling a bit like Alice. Tumbling
down the rabbit hole?
Neo: You could say that.
Morpheus: I can see it in your eyes. You have the look of a man who accepts what
he sees because he's expecting to wake up. Ironically, this is not far from the
truth. Do you believe in fate, Neo?
Neo: No.
Morpheus: Why not?
Neo: 'Cause I don't like the idea that I'm not in control of my life.
Morpheus: I know exactly what you mean. Let me tell you why you're here. You're
here because you know something. What you know, you can't explain. But you feel
it. You felt it your entire life. That there's something wrong with the world.
You don't know what it is, but it's there. Like a splinter in your mind --
driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what
I'm talking about?
Neo: The Matrix?
Morpheus: Do you want to know what it is?
(Neo nods his head.)
Morpheus: The Matrix is everywhere, it is all around us. Even now, in this very
room. You can see it when you look out your window, or when you turn on your
television. You can feel it when you go to work, or when you go to church or
when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to
blind you from the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else, you were born into
bondage, born inside a prison that you cannot smell, taste, or touch. A prison
for your mind. (long pause, sighs)
Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for
yourself. This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. (In
his left hand, Morpheus shows a blue pill.)
Morpheus: You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and
believe whatever you want to believe. (a red pill is shown in his other hand)
You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the
rabbit-hole goes. (Long pause; Neo begins to reach for the red pill) Remember --
all I am offering is the truth, nothing more.
(Neo takes the red pill and swallows it with a glass of water)

Why was this film made? Why were we "allowed" to see so much of the "truth"?
Because, while they show us the rabbit-hole, they don't show us the full extent
of the rabbit-hole and how deep it really goes. They don't show us about
re-presenting and how the only way out of the rabbit-hole is through our love,
our gifts for LIFE and our willingness to come together with our brothers and
sisters of LIFE for the benefit of LIFE. "The Matrix" is the feel-good, quick
fix, the confirmation that all is not right with the world, without a way out or
any responsibility required.

Have We Got What It Takes?

When we wake up to the fact that everything of "The System" is Wonderland and,
however much fear and pressure is forced upon you by the actors in Wonderland,
it is still Wonderland, you realise that nothing of benefit to LIFE can be found
in Wonderland. Just as Mary has to pack up her game and join her family in the
real world, so we have to have the courage to let go of Wonderland. We need to
pack up all the costumes, throw away all the titles and everything else we are
re-presenting and return to the real world. Wonderland is not a remedy to
Wonderland; behind all the trickery and treachery there is only force and force
cannot co-create a world of peace, freedom, truth, joy, abundance and do no harm
for all.

We need to stop using their books and their laws and just show them the fraud.
They can never prove that any of the constructs of "The System" exist; all they
can bring forward is another man and they will never admit that all men are not
equal. Exposing the fraud is the remedy to dealing with the law and is the way
to solving all our issues. But ONLY if we are brave enough to give up our
baggage and stop re-presenting the lies that keep us enslaved. If we go into the
courts, we go in as living co-creators of LIFE. We do not go in to use their
laws, their books or to partake in their rituals. We go in to expose the fraud
and show that they have no authority or jurisdiction because they cannot bring
forward any proof to back their claims that they do, just as we, who have
created our own Alice and Superman to act in "The System", cannot bring forward
Alice or Superwoman, only the living man or woman whose flesh lives and blood
flows, the living-creator/living-co-creator.

When we have peeled away all the re-presenting baggage all that remains is LOVE
FOR LIFE and, from being selfish, self-centred, greedy, fearful individuals
(in-divide-u-all-s), clinging on to our beliefs and our possessions, we become
like the rays of the sun, shining our love for life outwards for the benefit of
LIFE, secure in the information that, as we pour all our LIFE into taking care
of LIFE, so LIFE will take care of us. The thoughts of Living Creator given LIFE
of Living Creator are the gift that we have. We can be present to those
thoughts, to the pure and sincere information of LIFE, anywhere, throughout all
our waking LIFE, if we chose to and if we are prepared to let go of the baggage
that keeps us from being present to those thoughts. When we stop re-presenting
the fear, trauma, distrust and indifference of "The System", we connect with the
real dream of LIFE and experience (remember) the true working of the dream of
LIFE and our natural inheritance as co-creators of LIFE.

When we take full responsibility for our baggage, we start to forgive instead of
blaming, harming and dumping. We can forgive the men and women we are and
forgive all the baggage and devastation we have caused to us, each other and
nature. We realise that it is not about first or last, rich or poor, have or
have not, but about taking care of the dream of LIFE so that it doesn't fade
away and we don't fade away with it.

Even the masterminds of "The System" and their henchmen need to be forgiven
because they too have been brainwashed, they were all once innocent babies. All
the impure and insincere thoughts they send out are curses that cannot escape
LIFE because LIFE is all there is. This is also true of all the impure and
insincere thoughts we send out; they cannot escape LIFE and, in the end, they
return to the maker but not before causing harm to LIFE. We can learn to stop
thinking impure and insincere thoughts and stop sending out curses but we cannot
stop others doing so. What we can do is not accept the curses of others,
instead, sending them back to their maker. Forgiving those behind and of "The
System" does not mean that we do not stand up to them or accept their curses,
only that we forgive them even as we stand our ground. We need to break the
Freemasonic/Satanic spell over those bound by the oath of death and thus break
the perpetuation of this NON-SENSE. Most, if not all, are in fear of each others
reprisals and missing out on sitting by the side of their Lord in their
after-LIFE.

Communities Without Baggage

We are currently re-writing the Ten Steps Of Kindom (Freedom) in which we set
out the steps to take in order to co-create Do No Harm Communities, Communities
Without Baggage and, when we have found a venue and the support necessary, we
will start running workshops based on the Ten Steps Of Freedom where we can all
learn how to start letting go of our baggage and taking responsibility for our
thoughts, feelings and actions.

Nothing can escape our making. We are responsible for everything we are
experiencing around us and for everything being experienced by our brothers and
sisters of LIFE. It is our thoughts and the energy we give them that is the
world we are all experiencing here and now. Our thoughts cannot escape LIFE and
are what is used to create the world we all experience here and now. All the
natural disasters are created by us as well. All we learn from "The System" is
how to do harm and all this harm is curses that we send out in the image of our
thoughts.

Do No Harm communities are for those who want to stop creating and supporting
the curses that are destroying LIFE, as well as providing a sanctuary for those
fleeing "The System".

We already are LIFE, we already are unique and we already have everything we
need for lives of freedom, truth, joy, abundance and do no harm for all. All we
have to do is help each other remember how to create those lives. Individualised
and alone, we will achieve nothing. Together, strong in our commitment and
through love, we can do anything we aspire to.

*********************************************************************

WORLD VIEW NEWS SERVICE

To subscribe to this group, send an email to:
wvns-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

To leave this list, send an email to:
wvns-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

NEWS ARCHIVE IS OPEN TO PUBLIC VIEW
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/

Please consider contributing to WVNS today.
Email ummyakoub@... !

I Do Not Believe That A Palestinian Killed Vittorio Arrigoni

http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/i-do-not-believe-that-a-palestinian-killed-vitto\
rio-arrigoni.html


DateSunday, April 17, 2011 at 7:45AM AuthorGilad Atzmon
We should bear in mind that Israel is horrified by the tidal wave of Palestinian
solidarity. It is aware of the 40 countries strong 'breaking the siege Flotilla'
that is planned to embark soon.
Israel is desperate to intimidate us all.
But we are determined. We will keep fighting. We will expose Israeli crimes and
'tricks'.  We will bring this murderous racist state down.


Watch video of Vittorio Arrigoni


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZg0WGKRg2A&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SblB2O7AfP4&feature=related

===

Vittorio Arrigoni: The man I knew
By Nicole Johnston
April 15th, 2011
http://blogs.aljazeera.net/middle-east/2011/04/15/vittorio-arrigoni-man-i-knew


There is a packet of pipe tobacco sitting in my Gaza City apartment.
It's Victor's. He left it behind the last time I saw him, about one month ago.

Anyone who knew Italian activist Vittorio Arrigoni knew that he was usually
puffing away on a pipe. Like a wise sea captain.

I had hoped to give his tobacco back to him this weekend, to catch up before he
left Gaza and returned to Italy.

He was heading home to see his father, who has been very ill. Also to have a
break from Gaza and return refreshed on a new flotilla aiming to set sail to
Gaza at the end of May and break the siege.

I last heard from him on Wednesday. It was a short text message asking me if I'd
just heard the loud booms. These were sonic booms from low flying Israeli war
planes. No, I replied, I hadn't.

The following day he was kidnapped and shortly afterwards killed. Members of a
Salafi group say they are responsible.

I first met Vik on a story inside Gaza's buffer zone. A team from the
International Solidarity Movement (ISM) was accompanying a farmer and a dozen
Palestinian women onto their land while they harvested their crop.

This area has been declared a no-go area by Israel. Inside the buffer zone
Israeli soldiers shoot and sometimes kill Palestinians. ISM hopes the
international presence will deter the Israelis.

It didn't seem much of a deterrent when we were there. Even with a film crew
present Israeli troops fired shots. We crouched down low into the wheat.

Vik and his colleagues stood their ground. When they decided it was too
dangerous to stay any longer, we followed them out. We went into the buffer zone
once.
Gaza's ISM volunteers were doing it every week. Some say it was foolhardy
bravery. But there was no doubting their commitment to the cause.

So after bonding in the buffer zone, I met Vik and his colleague, Adie
Nistelrooy, many times. Sometimes it was over pasta, a seafood meal, or a shisha
pipe and a World Cup football game.

The last time we all gathered, I thought I was farewelling them both from Gaza.
A group of us ate, danced and watched the night slip away from my ninth floor
apartment.

Adie did leave Gaza a day or two later. Vik ended up staying one month longer. A
month that has changed everything.

The news of his death has shaken Gaza's small community of internationals and
the Palestinians he counted as his dear friends. Italy has evacuated its
nationals.

I often walk by myself through Gaza's dark streets at night, heading home from a
café or after visiting a friend's apartment. Usually I carry a torch in the
stretches of road where the electricity has been cut. With Hamas police manning
checkpoints and street corners across Gaza City, it felt safe.

Now I hope it still is. Because that's what Victor would have wanted.

*********************************************************************

WORLD VIEW NEWS SERVICE

To subscribe to this group, send an email to:
wvns-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

To leave this list, send an email to:
wvns-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

NEWS ARCHIVE IS OPEN TO PUBLIC VIEW
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/

Please consider contributing to WVNS today.
Email ummyakoub@... !

'I wanted to be free - please let me come home'


Muslim model upsets family by posing nude for Playboy cover
By Deborah Arthurs
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1378455/I-wanted-free-Muslim-model-ups\
ets-family-posing-nude-Playboy-cover.html#ixzz1Jyar8pgI

[Photos at website -WVNS]


Strict: Turkish German actress Sila Sahin says her childhood was 'restricting'


Sila Sahin, a 25-year-old Turkish German living in Berlin, had until now been
regarded as a glowing example of how a modern Muslim girl should behave in a
multicultural society.

A successful actress starring in German television soap opera Good Times, Bad
Times, she pleased her many fans and made her Turkish family proud.

But her latest move has shocked some of those fans, and enraged those closest to
her.

Posing provocatively on the cover of German Playboy magazine with one breast
exposed, Sila Sahin is apparently sending a clear and deliberate message to her
conservative Turkish family.

'I did it because I wanted to be free at last,' she said. 'These photographs are
a liberation from the restrictions of my childhood.'
Her family have, unsurprisingly, reacted with horror, and her mother has cut off
all contact with the actress.

'My mother is still angry. It will be even more difficult with my grandparents,
my aunts and my uncles,' she said on the website devoted to her television soap.

She has, however, managed to talk to her actor father, who expressed concern
over the pressure she will inevitably face from those not only within the
Turkish community in Germany, but from the wider Muslim community as a whole.

Ms Sahin's declared intention was to used the controversial Playboy photoshoot
as a call to action for other Muslim girls who suffer the effects of their
strict backgrounds, where women's choices are often limited, husbands are chosen
for the girls and chastity closely controlled.

Liberating?: I did it because I wanted to be free,' said Sila Sahin of the nude
Playboy photographs that offended her Turkish family

Liberating?: I did it because I wanted to be free,' said Sila Sahin of the nude
Playboy photographs that offended her Turkish family
Her message to these girls? 'For too long I tried to do everything right,' she
says. 'I want these photos to show young Turkish women it's okay for you to live
however you choose.'

Popular: Sila Sahin on the red carpet with actor Joern Schloenvoigt
In what is undeniably a groundbreaking move, Ms Sahin is the first Turkish woman
ever to strip for the cover of Playboy.

Indeed, in the 12-page article that accompanies the revealing photographs, Ms
Sahin says she feels 'like Che Guevara', adding that the semi-naked photoshoot
was a bid to express her freedom.

And according to Ms Sahin, her friends have been impressed by the magazine
spread. 'They admire my courage,' she says.

But while her friends and some fans may be impressed, Ms Sahin's family have
expressed their disappointment.

And despite her outward conviction, Ms Sahin was devastated her actions should
be met with such a harsh response.

Their daughter informed them of her Playboy spread via an interview on German
television channel RTL, just one day before the nude photographs were to be
published.

In an impassioned interview, as she displayed the revealing photographs, she
pleaded with her family to understand the reasons behind her decision to pose
naked.

The emotional actress begged for clemency from her family.

'I hope you can forgive me, she said.

'Please let me come home.'

*********************************************************************

WORLD VIEW NEWS SERVICE

To subscribe to this group, send an email to:
wvns-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

To leave this list, send an email to:
wvns-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

NEWS ARCHIVE IS OPEN TO PUBLIC VIEW
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/

Please consider contributing to WVNS today.
Email ummyakoub@... !

India's refusal to seriously address the issue of enforced disappearances leaves
Kashmiris searching for closure.


Breaking the resolve of the Kashmiri people
Azad Essa
17 Apr 2011
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/04/2011414223221522698.html


Relatives of disappeared persons protest in a park in Srinagar, the summer
capital of Indian-administered Kashmir [Showkat Shafi]


Two decades of conflict have left Indian-administered Kashmir economically,
socially and psychologically decimated. The systematic use of enforced
disappearance - there have been a reported 8,000 to 10,000 in
Indian-administered Kashmir - has been recognised as a crime against humanity.
And while the number may have fallen dramatically since the height of the
insurgency in the 1990s, India's refusal to seriously address the issue has left
Kashmiris searching for closure.

Al Jazeera's Azad Essa speaks to Athar Parvaiz Bha, a Kashmiri journalist, about
the conflict, disappearances and trauma in the valley.

As a journalist working in Indian-administered Kashmir what is your assessment
of the situation regarding enforced disappearances in the valley? How can we
account for the different figures suggested for the number of disappeared?

The lack of any authentic figures about the disappeared people in Kashmir is
presently one of the major concerns.

While the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) asserts that the
number of disappeared people since 1989 is more than 10,000, latest official
figures presented by the National Conference government in the legislative
assembly put this number at just 1,105.

No attempt has so far been made by any social or human rights organisation
(local or foreign) to come up with the exact figures and [to] contest the
figures given by the government or the APDP.

We have seen different governments coming up with different figures about the
disappeared people over the last seven years. In 2003, the then coalition
government led by the Peoples Democratic Party said in the assembly that 3,931
people had gone missing since 1989, but in 2007, the Congress-led coalition
government put this number at 1,017 quoting a survey conducted by government
agencies.

How have enforced disappearances influenced the movement for self-determination?

Enforced disappearance is one of the many repressive measures (like killings,
illegal detentions etc.) aimed at breaking the resolve of [the] people. It was
especially practised in the initial years of armed rebellion against India. And,
therefore, it is definitely one of the reasons for dissatisfaction with India
and actually motivates most of the people to root for the freedom struggle.

In your experience, how does the trauma of enforced disappearance affect
Kashmiri society and what has been done to address this?

Kashmiri society in general is a traumatised society, but those who don't have
any clue about their loved ones are even more traumatised. A person who is sure
about having lost a loved one somehow manages to come to terms with the loss,
but the one who is living on a false hope while seeking the whereabouts of the
dear one finds it too hard to carry on with the uncertainty.

The women whose husbands have disappeared are referred to as half widows. I
personally know a woman whose husband disappeared in custody 19 years back. She
didn't remarry for the sake of her children. But despite sacrificing [the] rest
of her life for her children, she couldn't [afford to] educate them and her
family is in dire straits.

As regards [to] addressing the trauma of these families, the response is as
pathetic as it is regarding addressing the concerns of [the] rest of the
conflict's victims.

The scale of [the] damage the conflict [has inflicted upon] Kashmir is indeed
beyond description. The two-decade-long conflict and years of mis-governence has
wrought havoc in Kashmir. You have the basic sectors of civic amenities in
tatters. As regards the social fabric of the society, insecurity about [the]
future reflects in their social behaviour as well.

How would you describe the use of enforced disappearance as part of India's
fight against insurgency? Is it a type of silent war, a type of terrorism? It
was at its peak in the mid-1990s, but does it still continue today?

As someone who has been observing events [in Kashmir] since 1989, I don't think
this is still used as a weapon in the changing dynamics of [the] Kashmir
conflict.

One might argue that it was a silent weapon in early 1990s and mid-1990s given
the frequency with which it would occur during those days, but presently the
Indian government has a far more potential challenge to handle - the challenge
which I call 'soft resistance', wherein people resort to peaceful means of
struggle like peaceful protest demonstrations, effective use of social media
etc.

So in [the] earlier days of [the] struggle when, say, some five per cent of
people in Kashmir were gunmen, it was understandable to see this tactic being
used, but not now when you have almost all the people up against you and your
policies.

Since 2008, Kashmiris have managed to redefine their freedom struggle in tandem
with the acceptability benchmarks of the international community, especially of
the West. Since then we have witnessed peaceful mass uprising twice. This has
helped in removing the tag of 'armed freedom struggle' which invites hostility
from the Western powers, especially after 9/11.

The Indian state's response has been ambiguous. Is this a purposeful attempt not
to address the issue?

Whether you mean response to enforced disappearances or response to resolving
the Kashmir dispute, my answer is 'yes' to either of the two.

It is a classic case of 'if you can't convince them, confuse them'.

The fact is that India has so far managed to manage the Kashmir conflict rather
than resolving it thanks to a divided leadership in Kashmir and the involvement
of too many international players in the Kashmir dispute.

*********************************************************************

WORLD VIEW NEWS SERVICE

To subscribe to this group, send an email to:
wvns-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

To leave this list, send an email to:
wvns-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

NEWS ARCHIVE IS OPEN TO PUBLIC VIEW
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/

Please consider contributing to WVNS today.
Email ummyakoub@... !

Billboards that highlight black abortion disparity spark debate
By Dawn Turner Trice, Tribune reporter
April 19, 2011
www.chicagotribune.com/health/ct-met-abortion-trice-0420-20110419,0,1552075.stor\
y


When a Texas minister came to Chicago last month to launch a controversial
anti-abortion billboard campaign, he highlighted a statistic that some people
found shocking.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, black women account
for about 36 percent of the country's reported abortions, even though blacks are
less than 13 percent of the population.

So why is the black abortion rate, which is three times that of white women, so
disproportionately high?

Experts say it's because black women have higher rates of unintended
pregnancies, and often that's a result of not having access to quality health
care as well as the most effective contraception and sex education.

Gaylon Alcaraz, the executive director of the Chicago Abortion Fund, said the
statistics tell only part of the story.

"The abortion rate doesn't talk about the high rate of sexual violence, such as
rape and molestation, in poor black communities," Alcaraz said. "It doesn't tell
you about the woman whose birth control failed or the college student who wants
to finish school.

"Then there's the woman who sneaks out to get an abortion so she doesn't have to
bring another baby into a house where the husband is beating her."

Cherisse Scott, health educator for the Chicago-based Black Women for
Reproductive Justice, said the rate also doesn't address the overall racial
disparities in health care and health outcomes.

"We know that black women are more likely to suffer or die from diabetes, heart
disease, breast cancer and HIV/AIDS," Scott said. "Life Always (the Texas-based
group responsible for the ads) would like you to believe that the high abortion
rate is not complicated and merely the result of aggressive marketing from
abortion providers. But that's just untrue.

"They believe black women have been bamboozled by Planned Parenthood, as if (the
organization is) standing on every street corner in every black neighborhood
promoting abortion."

On March 29, Life Always unveiled three of its anti-abortion billboards in a
vacant lot in the Englewood neighborhood. Since then, at least four other
billboards have been placed on the South Side.

All are identical, showing the likeness of President Barack Obama and the words:
"Every 21 minutes, our next possible leader is aborted."

The Rev. Stephen Broden, of Life Always, said the group uses the statistics to
show the impact that abortion providers, particularly Planned Parenthood, have
on the black community.

"They've convinced our women that the answer to social injustice is to kill
their babies and the answer to unintended pregnancies is to kill their babies,"
said Broden, who is black. "There are alternatives throughout the entire
scenario."

According to the Guttmacher Institute, a private, nonprofit reproductive-health
research organization in New York, the abortion rate among all women has been
declining over the last decade, even though abortion rates remain higher among
black women.

Rebecca Wind, spokeswoman for Guttmacher, said that one persistent reason for
unintended pregnancies is that many women of color, who are also
disproportionately low-income, are less likely to use the most effective methods
of contraception. Such methods include the birth control pill, the patch, the
vaginal ring and intrauterine devices.

"What's left out of the discussion is that black women are more likely to
experience unintended pregnancies and therefore more likely to seek and obtain
abortions than any other group," Wind said.

She said that because black women also are underinsured, they may be more
vulnerable, since the most effective methods are often the most expensive.

But Scott said the problem goes even deeper. Many of the women and girls she
encounters don't have a good understanding of their basic reproductive and
sexual health. She said many don't even know how to chart their menstrual
cycles.

"It doesn't matter if there's yet another form of a contraceptive method if a
woman doesn't know how to use it properly," Scott said.

Another problem, said Scott, is that some contraception and safe-sex devices —
such as the female condom and dental dams (used during oral sex) — are harder to
find in many of the city's poorer neighborhoods. However, some public health
clinics offer both for free.

Dorothy Roberts is the author of "Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction,
and the Meaning of Liberty" and a Northwestern University professor who has
examined attempts throughout history to regulate black women's reproduction.

She said she wonders if the black-white disparity in the abortion rate is
exaggerated because the numbers for white women having the procedure have been
undercounted. (Some states, including California, don't report abortion
statistics to the CDC.)

"It doesn't mean that black women aren't having abortions at higher rates,"
Roberts said. "But if you are wealthy and middle-class, you can be more private
about reproductive decisions because you can have a procedure done by a private
doctor.

"And if you pay cash, you don't even have to engage your insurance. But poor
women often go to public hospitals and clinics, and their reproductive behavior
is under surveillance and can be more easily detected."

She said a billboard that Life Always put up in New York — it had the message,
"The most dangerous place for African-Americans is in the womb" — was
reminiscent of the eugenics movement and population-control policies, which
deemed black women as sexually irresponsible and incapable of making good
reproductive decisions.

"The thinking was they shouldn't be allowed to control their own bodies,"
Roberts said. "And it makes it difficult to talk about preventing unintended
pregnancies in the black community or even design a public health response if
the public believes stereotypes painting black women as inherently promiscuous."

The New York billboard was taken down. Earlier this month, two of the ones in
Chicago's Englewood neighborhood were covered up with white fabric.

Alcaraz is organizing an event on Saturday in Englewood to clean debris from the
vacant lot adjacent to the building with the billboards. She's expecting
representatives from more than 30 organizations that advocate on behalf of women
and women's rights to join in the cleanup, as well as pass out information and
answer questions.

"Most women — rich, poor, black, white, Hispanic — don't arrive at the decision
to have an abortion lightly," Alcaraz said.

"You can't just come into a community, hang a billboard and believe shaming a
woman into not having an abortion is going to get to the heart of the problem.
That won't even touch the surface."

dtrice@...

*********************************************************************

WORLD VIEW NEWS SERVICE

To subscribe to this group, send an email to:
wvns-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

To leave this list, send an email to:
wvns-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

NEWS ARCHIVE IS OPEN TO PUBLIC VIEW
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/

Please consider contributing to WVNS today.
Email ummyakoub@... !

Banning the burqa: an assault on freedom
Monday 11 April 2011
Brendan O'Neill
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/10418/


Unfortunately, both France and some of its critics seem driven by a desire to
police people's thoughts.

On the day that France's ban on the burqa comes into force, spiked republishes a
speech given by editor Brendan O'Neill at the House of Literature in Oslo in
October last year.

There is no question, in my mind, that tolerance is under threat today. This
Enlightenment ideal - one of the most important, radical Enlightenment ideals -
is being assaulted and undermined around Europe.

However, it is being undermined not only by governments and thinkers who want to
ban the burqa, but also by some of those who defend women's right to wear the
burqa. Tolerance is being denigrated first by those who refuse to tolerate the
burqa - and second by those who defend `burqa rights' in a very shallow,
relativistic fashion and who clearly don't have the first clue what tolerance
really means.

So tolerance is suffering a double-whammy attack. It is being explicitly
attacked by the authoritarians who want to ban certain religious symbols, and it
is being implicitly attacked by some of the liberal critics of those bans, who
foolishly and dangerously think that tolerance is the same thing as recognition.

Let's take the first lobby first: the burqa-banners. The great irony of the
French government's restrictions on the burqa in public places, and to a certain
extent the Belgian government's restrictions, is that they have been presented
as being in the tradition of the Enlightenment. This is about liberating women
from oppression, they say, and therefore it is a good, Enlightened, Voltairish
thing to do.

In fact, banning a religious garment is counter to the spirit of the
Enlightenment. What these authoritarians forget is that the Enlightenment sprang
from a defence of religious liberty. The Enlightenment has its origins, not in
any attempt to censor certain minority religious symbols, but in a belief that
minority religions, even ones we consider `heretical', should be protected from
state intervention, censorship and oppression.

So in calling for the state to restrict a certain form of religious expression,
these pseudo-Enlightened censors are doing something that the original men of
the Enlightenment would have considered pretty outrageous.

One of the most important early texts of the Enlightenment was A Letter
Concerning Toleration by the English liberal philosopher John Locke, published
in 1689. It is easy to forget how radical this letter was when it first
appeared, following the Inquisition and much religious conflict. Locke had to go
into hiding and then exile simply for calling for the following: `the toleration
of those that differ from others in matters of religion'.

Locke argued that the civil authorities should not `prejudice another person in
his civil enjoyments simply because he is of another church or religion'. He
wasn't defending these faiths because he liked them - in fact he considered many
of them erroneous. Rather he was defending their right to believe what they
wanted to believe and to practise their faith because he felt that the
authorities had no right to interfere in our internal lives, in matters of
faith, belief and conscience.

The liberal tradition was built on this foundation stone laid by Locke and
others, on this determination to expel the civil authorities from the realm of
belief. Now, in the twenty-first century, 300 years later, some of the
self-styled heirs of Lockean liberalism are explicitly inviting the state back
into the realm of belief. They are turning the clock back three centuries by
fundamentally blurring the Enlightenment distinction between those areas where
the civil authorities have jurisdiction – our `outward lives' relating to
property, security and law – and those areas where the civil authorities should
have no jurisdiction – our `inward lives' of freedom of belief and expression.

And they are mad if they believe that banning the burqa or the niqab will
liberate Muslim women. In fact, it will make life even harder for the tiny
minority of women in Europe who wear these garments. A woman who truly believes
that it is wrong to go outside without being covered up – and as Locke pointed
out, you can't magically change people's beliefs through brute bans since `no
man can, if he would, conform his faith to the dictates of another' – will now
potentially be imprisoned in her home. She will be less free.

The burqa and niqab are symbols of oppression rather than the causes of it. You
cannot tackle oppression, you cannot challenge the undoubtedly inferior position
of some poor Muslim women, simply by attacking its outward symbols. From a
principled point of view, banning religious symbols is illiberal and
un-Enlightened – and from a pragmatic point of view, it is shallow and
counterproductive.
However, there are some big problems on the other side of this debate, too,
amongst those who defend the right of women to wear the niqab or burqa.

Too many of these people are also denigrating tolerance, by confusing it with
the therapeutic category of recognition. For them, it is not enough to tolerate
something – apparently we must also respect it, recognise its validity, even
celebrate its contribution to making Europe a varied, multi-faceted, properly
multicultural place. Some even say that Muslim veils are now as much `part of
the European fabric' as clogs or Italian coffee or Belgian beer.

This point is made very starkly by Tariq Ramadan, professor of contemporary
Islamic studies at Oxford University. In his new book, Quest for Meaning, he
says that tolerance is too passive a virtue – we have to replace it with the
more active virtue of respect. He says that tolerance `reduces the Other to a
mere presence', whereas respect `opens us up to the Other's complexities'.

This, too, is a worrying development – because the Enlightenment ideal of
tolerance does not mean having to respect something. You can tolerate something
and hate it; you can tolerate something and also ruthlessly criticise it.
Tolerance is not about suspending judgement or putting one's critical faculties
to one side in order to avoid offending `Others'. As Locke said, it is wrong to
try to force or censure people into changing their beliefs, but `in teaching,
instructing and redressing the erroneous by reason, [we] do what becomes any
good man to do'.

Tolerance involves judgement and criticism and the free flow of ideas and
debate. For the early Enlightenment thinkers, the real, true, explosive virtue
of tolerance lay in the toleration of the things we hate. And I hate the burqa.
It is deeply objectionable. It restricts women's vision, freedom of movement and
ability to engage with their fellow citizens. I have no respect for it
whatsoever, far less any desire to celebrate it as `equally valid'. But I
tolerate it, as Europe must, because we should recognise that people's freedom
of conscience is so important that it overrides our personal objections to what
they believe and how they express their beliefs.

Today, we have the emergence of a deeply relativistic tolerance industry. In the
political sphere, and in education in particular, tolerance is promoted as a
form of non-criticism, non-judgement. As Robert Weissberg argues in his book
Pernicious Tolerance, `an incredibly worthy idea – tolerance as enduring the
odious – is being replaced with a fantasy: tolerance as a blank-cheque
appreciation of diversity'. This so-called tolerance is actually about policing
hate, policing our emotions and attitudes towards religion. Britain and other
Western European countries have passed laws outlawing `religious hatred' in the
name of promoting tolerance.

So in a very powerful irony, the promoters of tolerance also invite the state
into the realm of belief, the realm of thought. Like the burqa-banners, they too
want the civil authorities to poke their noses into our inward lives. Both the
banners and defenders of the burqa believe the state has the right to tell us
what we can believe and how we should express those beliefs: the banners attack
freedom of religion and the defenders attack our freedom to hate religion.
This is the crisis of tolerance today – it is being undermined both by religious
censors disguised as men of the Enlightenment, and by the intolerant policers of
hate disguised as the promoters of tolerance. This has got to stop. Tolerance
means allowing people to believe what they want to believe, and allowing
everyone else to criticise and even mock them for it. It might not be pretty,
but who said freedom would always be pretty?


Brendan O'Neill is editor of spiked. Visit his website here. The above is an
edited version of a speech he gave at a Battle of Ideas/British Council
satellite debate at the House of Literature in Oslo on 14 October 2010.

*********************************************************************

WORLD VIEW NEWS SERVICE

To subscribe to this group, send an email to:
wvns-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

To leave this list, send an email to:
wvns-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

NEWS ARCHIVE IS OPEN TO PUBLIC VIEW
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/

Please consider contributing to WVNS today.
Email ummyakoub@... !

Portland legislator pushes bill to legalize, tax marijuana in Maine
By Randy Billings
Apr 19, 2011
http://www.theforecaster.net/content/p-maine-rep-introduces-bill-legalize-tax-ma\
rijuana-042011


PORTLAND — Imagine walking into a neighborhood store to buy beer, wine, liquor
and cigarettes. But on your way home you make one more stop – to buy marijuana,
legally.

That's the vision Rep. Diane Russell, D-Portland, will outline at a press
conference on Wednesday at Portland City Hall, when she introduces LD 1453: An
Act to Legalize and Tax Marijuana.

The bill would legalize and regulate marijuana much the same way the state
regulates the alcohol and tobacco industries. It would allow adults over 21 to
cultivate, possess, purchase and use marijuana within certain limits.

The bill would also institute a 7 percent sales tax on recreational and
medicinal marijuana transactions.

"It's an issue whose time has come," Russell said in an interview Monday morning
at the Hilltop Coffee Shop on Munjoy Hill.

Russell said the legislation is supported by the Maine Civil Liberties Union and
by a group of caregivers who grow and supply patients with medical marijuana.

Since the bill would legalize pot, it would affect Maine's medical marijuana
law, making it unnecessary to get a doctor's permission to buy and use the the
drug.

MCLU Public Policy Counsel Alysia N. Melnick called the proposal "smart policy."
Investing scarce resources into criminalizing people who use marijuana is
costly, inhumane and diverts funding from more important programs, she said.

"The 'war on drugs' is quite costly in both financial and human terms, and the
prohibition of marijuana has not measurably reduced its use," Melnick said.
"This is a clear call for us to reconsider our laws and policies on marijuana."

Russell said current marijuana law "ensnares" good people, making it difficult
for them to get jobs, apply for loans and the like.

She said her bill also has bi-partisan support in the Legislature, where it's
co-sponsored by Rep. Richard Cebra, R-Naples; Rep. Aaron Libby, R-Waterboro;
Rep. Wayne Mitchell, who represents Penobscot Nation; Rep. Andrew O'Brien,
D-Lincolnville, and Rep. Frederick Wintle, R-Garland.

The bill has been referred to the Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee,
but as of Tuesday there were no public hearings or work sessions scheduled.

Russell said she expects opponents will argue that legalizing marijuana will
open the door to more dangerous and addictive drug use.
But Russell doesn't buy that. She believes the black market is that gateway, not
the marijuana itself.

"The market already exists," Russell said. "It's not the drug that's the
gateway, it's the drug dealer."

Russell said addiction to marijuana, like other legal drugs, including alcohol
and tobacco, should be treated as a mental health issue, rather than a criminal
issue.

South Portland Police Chief Edward Googins, who is also president of the Maine
Chiefs of Police Association, could not be reached for comment.

Russell said the 20-page bill addresses concerns that have plagued other
legalization efforts. She said it outlaws use by minors and marketing efforts
geared towards children.

The bill would allow people over 21 to possess up to a pound of marijuana and
paraphernalia. An adult could produce and store marijuana for personal use
within a 75-square-foot area of their home, and allow them to purchase up to 2.5
ounces or seedlings from a licensed dealer.

The production and storage limits would be greater for commercial producers.
They could produce and store marijuana in a 2,000-square-foot area.

The bill would require the state commissioner of public safety to develop
administrative rules by Dec. 11, and the tax structure would take effect on Jan.
1, 2012.

Russell said she hopes the bill will become a model for other legalization
efforts across the country. For that to happen, however, she said "mainstream"
residents are going to have to step forward, shed the fear of being associated
with the "stoner" community, and speak their minds.

"Why are we enforcing a policy we don't agree with and not collecting taxes?"
she said.

Russell pointed to a 2006 report published in The Bulletin of Cannabis Reform,
indicating that marijuana was the state's No. 1 cash crop and in the top three
of 30 states.

According to the report, Maine produced about$122.8 million worth of pot a year
from 2003-2005. A 7 percent tax would have resulted in $8.6 million in annual
revenue for the state.

Russell said she knows it will be challenging to get the bill through the
typically conservative Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee. But, if she
only gets one vote recommending passage, Russell said she would push for a floor
vote.

Even if the bill becomes state law, it will be in direct opposition to federal
drug law. But Russell said Maine is already out of compliance with federal law,
since medical marijuana is already legal in the state.

"We need one state to do it and think other states will follow," Russell said.
"Then the federal government (will have) no choice."


Randy Billings can be reached at rbillings@....

*********************************************************************

WORLD VIEW NEWS SERVICE

To subscribe to this group, send an email to:
wvns-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

To leave this list, send an email to:
wvns-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

NEWS ARCHIVE IS OPEN TO PUBLIC VIEW
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/

Please consider contributing to WVNS today.
Email ummyakoub@... !

A chance to be immersed in Islam, particularly Sufi traditions and the mystic
Rumi - without having to convert


Be Muslim for a month in Istanbul: pray five times a day and fast
Riazat Butt
Thursday 21 April 2011
www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2011/apr/21/muslim-for-month-istanbul-turkey


       Blue Mosque in Istanbul

       A reflection extends the minarets on the Blue Mosque, one of Istanbul's
Muslim sights. Photograph: Richard Hamilton Smith/Corbis


       It has the ingredients of a conventional holiday – experiencing the
culture and hospitality of one of the most exciting cities in the world. But few
getaways encourage its participants to pray five times a day or try their hand
at fasting, especially when those people are not Muslim.

       A social enterprise is offering individuals the opportunity to immerse
themselves in Islam, without having to convert, through a trip to Istanbul that
takes in the regular sights and sounds but also includes prayers at dawn and
midnight and lessons on Islam and its basic practices.

       It draws heavily on the country's Sufi traditions – with a particular
emphasis on the poet and mystic Rumi. Ben Bowler, from the Blood Foundation,
which runs the project, said: "We wanted to focus on Rumi because he is a
unifying figure. Turkey has a relatively open brand of Islam and Istanbul is an
existing tourist destination.

       "There is a willingness to engage with the west. We might not have found
it in the Middle East or parts of south Asia. If we were in Saudi Arabia it
would have been harder."

       The foundation has called the initiative Muslim for a Month, despite it
lasting nine days, and wants to offer a 21-day programme in the future. Bowler
said most people would find it difficult to take a month off and admitted even
the nine-day programme, which offers bed, board, instruction and sightseeing for
£600, could have limited appeal.

       "We currently offer Monk for a Month, where people spend time in a
Buddhist monastery in Tibet. That is successful. The difference is that there's
a curiosity about Buddhism in the west. People are attracted to it, people who
do meditation for example."

       In addition to praying and fasting, participants will forsake alcohol and
pork. Smoking is, however, permitted. They will also be expected to carry out
pre-prayer ablutions, mastering the art of hoiking their feet into a washbasin
as part of the process.

       Bowler described the clash between "Muslims and the rest of the world" as
one of the most "contentious issues around" and said Muslim for a Month will
appeal to "open-minded" individuals who want something educational and cultural.

       "Our hosts don't want to make the prayers obligatory but I think if you're
going to do something you should dive in. They might work up to five prayers a
day – including the early morning one". In mid-May, when the programme is due to
start, the dawn prayer in Istanbul is around 3.30am.

       An inaugural programme in February involving participants connected to
Monk for a Month attracted Catholics, an agnostic, some Jews and a Hindu from
around the world. Although nobody converted – and there is no obligation to do
so – Bowler said there were changed attitudes and a deeper understanding of
Islam.

       "If we attract people who are predisposed to like Islam, that's fine. I
would like to think people aren't so duplicitous that they will see Muslims for
a Month as a cheap holiday to Istanbul.

       "There is no illusion that bowing down to Mecca five times a day makes you
a Muslim. It's what the rituals and practices represent – a constant
consciousness of the divine."

       Outreach programmes about Islam are nothing new. The Living Library, which
operates in 12 countries and "loans" people out to challenge prejudice and
stereotypes, features Muslims in its lending scheme. Deepening ties with Muslim
communities is also a central plank of Barack Obama's presidency. Last year he
hosted an entrepreneurship summit.

       Television has also tried to play a part in improving people's
understanding of Islam. Make Me a Muslim, shown on Channel 4 in 2007, featured a
gay hairdresser, an atheist taxi driver with a porn habit and a glamour model.
Their Muslim mentors guided them in the dos and don'ts of the religion. The
BBC's offering – The Retreat – was shown that same year.

*********************************************************************

WORLD VIEW NEWS SERVICE

To subscribe to this group, send an email to:
wvns-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

To leave this list, send an email to:
wvns-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

NEWS ARCHIVE IS OPEN TO PUBLIC VIEW
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/

Please consider contributing to WVNS today.
Email ummyakoub@... !

UNICEF says 26 children killed in Yemen protests:
  By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Apr 19, 2011
http://arabnews.com/middleeast/article366059.ece


GENEVA: The UN children's fund says 26 children have been killed during violent
protests in Yemen over the last two months.

UNICEF spokeswoman Marixie Mercado said Tuesday that most of the children killed
in clashes between security forces and anti-government demonstrators died of
wounds from live ammunition.

Opposition groups in Yemen have staged a series of protests demanding the ouster
of longtime President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

===

One killed as Yemeni police open fire on protesters:
http://www.dawn.com/2011/04/19/yemeni-police-open-fire-on-protesters-one-killed.\
html


Anti-government protestors gesture while chanting slogans during a demonstration
demanding the resignation of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh in Sanaa. -AP
Photo


SANAA: Yemeni security forces opened fire on anti-government protesters in the
second largest city on Tuesday, killing at least one, activists and medics said
amid rising international concern over the strategically located nation.

The United Nations Security Council was scheduled to meet later Tuesday to
discuss the deteriorating situation in Yemen, where rights groups say two months
of protests calling for the president to step down have claimed 120 lives.

A government delegation also headed to nearby Abu Dhabi for talks with the
six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council over a proposal for President Ali Abdullah
Saleh to transfer power to his deputy to end the crisis. The opposition held
similar talks Sunday.

Thousands of protesters were marching in the southern city of Taiz, a hotbed of
anti-government activism, demanding the president's resignation when security
forces opened fire.

The director of a city field hospital, Dr. Sadeq al-Shuja, said at least one was
killed in the crackdown. Activist Nouh al-Wafi said earlier that four protesters
were wounded including one who was in a very critical condition.

Earlier this month, another four protesters were killed in the southern city.

Tens of thousands took to the streets in the capital Sanaa later in the day and
thousands demonstrated in Aden, Ibb, al-Hudaydah and other cites where most of
the shops were closed in support of the protesters.

The UN children's fund said Tuesday that at least 26 children have been killed
during the protests over the last two months.

Most died of wounds from live ammunition during clashes between security forces
and anti-government demonstrators, said UNICEF spokeswoman Marixie Mercado.

The country's opposition, inspired by the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, says
nothing short of Saleh's immediate departure would end the unrest.

Yemen is the poorest country in the Arab world, and protesters are calling for
steps to improve livelihoods and open up the country's restricted political
life.

The protests are the biggest direct challenge to Saleh's three-decades in power.
His weak government has little control beyond the capital and has struggled to
confront an armed rebellion in the north and a secessionist movement in the
south.

*********************************************************************

WORLD VIEW NEWS SERVICE

To subscribe to this group, send an email to:
wvns-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

To leave this list, send an email to:
wvns-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

NEWS ARCHIVE IS OPEN TO PUBLIC VIEW
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/

Please consider contributing to WVNS today.
Email ummyakoub@... !

Imam Yassin Aref Transferred from CMU
By Karin Friedemann
The Muslim Observer
April 21, 2011
http://muslimmedianetwork.com/mmn/?p=8312


In a surprise move by the Bureau of Prisons (BOP), Albany, New York's Imam
Yassin Aref, who was serving a ten year sentence inside the Communications
Management Unit (CMU) in Marion, Illionois, has been moved to the general prison
population. Aref stated in an email to his friends dated April 13, 2011:

"Finally and thankfully they accepted my request and agreed for me to come out
of CMU. Now I am just a regular human – I mean regular prisoner! I am no longer
in CMU, so if any of you come and visit me I promise I am going to hug him!
Hopefully after six months they will transfer me to somewhere close to my family
so I can see my children but as for why and how? Believe me I don't know
anything more than you! They just told me to pack up. 25 days before that I had
a team review. I asked for transfer as usual and they told me they would do the
recommendation for me but the decision its not theirs. When I called my son
Salah, he told me, "Daddy how is it they let you out?

What has changed?" I told him I am still Yassin and they did not tell me
anything. However, I am very thankful they allowed me to be in the regular
general population."

Aref was inside the CMU in Terre Haute, Indiana from May 2007 until March 2009,
when he was transferred to the Marion CMU. As of April 10, 2011, Aref is in the
same prison building but in a different unit. Now he has more space to walk and
more recreational activities. He has more lenient social, visitor and phone call
rights. There are some African American Muslim brothers in his new unit and they
pray the Friday prayer together. Whenever he leaves his unit to dine, go to the
yard or library, and to visit the chaplain, he walks by the door of the CMU.
Imam Yassin describes his past experience:

"After spending about 20 Months in total solitary confinement at a county jail,
I arrived at CMU Terra Haute, Indiana to find a small Middle Eastern community
where inmates from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt and Yemen
among others were already there. In CMU, most inmates are Arab or Arabic
speakers.

"We are separated because of our nationality and religion. Of course they deny
that, but the reality in the CMU proves this segregation is the whole point of a
CMU. Otherwise what did I do? Why am I classified as a high risk inmate? How can
it be dangerous if they allow me to hug my children? Why do they need to limit
my communication? Who I am going to call besides my family?

"All my life in Iraq I was treated as a second degree citizen and half human
because I was Kurdish. I left my country to regain my humanity and live free,
not to be targeted, imprisoned and placed in a CMU.

When I learned CMU prisoners don't have the same rights like other prisoners in
the BOP, and I found that 65 to 75 percent of the inmates in CMU are Muslim and
another 8 to 15 percent are Spanish speakers, I became sad and it seemed like
this country is going backward to the dark days of its history when Black people
were slaves or treated like slaves. Many inmates in CMU are not criminals. They
are political prisoners and victims who were in the wrong place at the wrong
time.

Some like me never committed any crime. Yet they treat us as the highest risk
inmates!

"My youngest daughter is still a child and she was born while I was in jail. I
never carried her or kissed her and I could never buy a candy for her. She
doesn't have any memory with me. Until she was four years old she used to think
`daddy' means the phone! That's because whenever I used to call home, her
brothers and sister would run to the phone saying "Daddy, daddy!" So, she
thought daddy means phone! Whenever anyone asks her, `Where is your daddy?' she
would point or run to the phone and say, `That is my daddy!' It's heart breaking
but I am laughing. In Arabic they say the worst trial is the one which makes you
laugh!

"Thank God with all of these unjustices still my heart is full of peace and
Love. My faith saved me from hate. I believe God allowed this to happen and that
is why it happened. I look for His reward for all my pain and all of what my
family going through."

Aref is involved with a civil rights lawsuit which questions why Muslim
prisoners who are considered a low security risk are being put under high
security communication restrictions without any legal recourse.

Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) Attorney Alexis Agathocleous told NPR,
"Our clients were designated to the CMUs without due process or oversight, even
though they have no significant history of disciplinary infractions."

However, Aref does not believe that his transfer has anything to do with the
lawsuit.

*********************************************************************

WORLD VIEW NEWS SERVICE

To subscribe to this group, send an email to:
wvns-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

To leave this list, send an email to:
wvns-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

NEWS ARCHIVE IS OPEN TO PUBLIC VIEW
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/

Please consider contributing to WVNS today.
Email ummyakoub@... !

Oscar Nominated Documentary Filmmaker And Photographer Killed In Libya
Glynnis MacNicol
Apr. 20, 2011
http://www.businessinsider.com/tim-hetherington-oscar-libya-restrepo-2011-4#ixzz\
1KGqDnJXS


Oscar nominated director Tim Hetherington and Pulitzer Prize nominated
photographer Chris Hondros were killed earlier today in Libya.  Two other
photographers were injured, one seriously.

The four photographers were reporting from the Libyan town of Misurata, which
has seen heavy fighting in recent weeks.  The Washington Post has further
details about what happened on the ground from one of their journalists who was
there.  Apparently the journalists had accompanied rebel fighters to Tripoli
Street in the city center.

The news of their deaths first surfaced on fellow photographer Andre Liohn's
Facebook page.  Liohn was with them at the hospital.

CJ Chivers at the NYT shortly thereafter confirmed the death of Hetherington and
tonight Hondros.

Hetherington's family released a statement this afternoon.  The White House
released a statement this evening.

Previously:

*This post has been updated numerous times today.  The updates below run from
most recent to least.

UPDATE [6:04 PM]:  The NYT is confirming that Chris Hondros has died.

"Chris Hondros of the Getty photo agency died within a few hours of devastating
brain trauma... Mr. Hondros suffered an extensive loss of brain tissue and was
revived twice before being triaged from care. He spent several hours in a coma
and died after 10 p.m., Mr. Liohn said."

Previously:

UPDATE: Multiple agencies have confirmed Tim Hetherington has been killed.  The
NYT reports that Chris Hondros has suffered sever brain injuries and is in grave
condition.  More from the NYT below.

UPDATE 2: Vanity Fair tweets Hondros "remains in grave condition."

UPDATE 3: The New York Times correspondent C.J. Chivers published the following:

"Tim Hetherington, the Oscar-nominated film director and conflict photographer
who produced the film Restrepo, was killed in the besieged city of Misurata on
Wednesday, and three photographers working beside him were wounded."

"The wounds to two of the photographers -- Chris Hondros and Guy Martin -- were
grave, according to a colleague at the triage center where they were being
treated Wednesday night. Their prospects for survival were not immediately
clear."

"Mr. Hondros, an American working for the Getty photo agency, suffered a severe
brain injury and was in extremely critical condition, according to Mr. Liohn. He
had been revived and was clinging to life in the evening. A later update from
Mr. Liohn said that Mr. Hondros was in a coma at the medical center, which is
located near the front lines."

Previously:

This is terrible news.

There are reports that photographers Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros have
been killed in Libya.

The news was first posted on fellow photographer Andre Liohn's Facebook page. 
Liohn is reportedly at the hospital and later updated his status in the comments
to say that Hondros has died.

Hetherington was nominated for a Oscar this year for the documentary Restrepo
which he co-directed with journalist Sebastian Junger.

Chris Hondros is a Pulitzer-Prize nominated war photographer whose work has
appeared in the NYT, Newsweek, and The Economist, to name a few.

The two were reportedly covering the fighting in Misrata.  Yesterday
Hetherington tweeted: "In besieged Libyan city of Misrata. Indiscriminate
shelling by Qaddafi forces. No sign of NATO."

Backyard chickens are becoming increasingly popular and are now allowed in urban
communities such as Madison Heights and Hazel Park. Anne, an Oakland County
resident who would not reveal her last name, and her young son check on the
family's chickens in their backyard Friday.


Ferndale residents want backyard chickens allowed
Michael P. McConnell
Daily Tribune
Friday, April 22, 2011
http://www.dailytribune.com/articles/2011/04/22/news/doc4db1c2c901571189005085.t\
xt?viewmode=fullstory


FERNDALE – A group of residents wants backyard chickens allowed in the city and
is working to convince officials to scratch out a new ordinance to allow the
birds.

Though Ferndale's ordinance allows chickens, it prohibits them unless they are
kept at least 150 feet from the nearest neighbors' property. That provision
effectively prohibits chickens in 90 percent of city neighborhoods.

Chicken enthusiasts say the birds are a natural low-cost way to have fresh eggs
and good fertilizer for their gardens. Keeping chickens in urban areas has
become a movement of sorts over the past several years and are permitted in many
cities from New York to San Francisco with some restrictions.

Locally, cities such as Madison Heights and Hazel Park have recently changed
their ordinances to accommodate chickens. Residents in Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor
are also permitted to keep chickens.

Resident Laura Mikulski, an avid organic gardener, wants chickens allowed
because their eggs provide a good source of locally grown protein without having
to engage with the darker side of the industrially raised eggs available at most
stores.

"I started gardening and then thought I would like to have my own sustainable
source of protein," she said. "That's when I checked the city ordinance and
found out you can't have chickens any closer than 150 feet from another
residence. Only about 10 percent of Ferndale is eligible to have chickens under
the current ordinance."

Mikulski and others are now on a mission to change the city ordinance and have
reached out to Councilwoman Melanie Piani.

"I expect this group is going to work with the city and the city's community
development director and bring a draft proposal to the City Council," Piani
said. "I think backyard chickens, if done properly with good oversight, can be a
good thing for the community. This is a trend that is going on in urban areas
all over and not just Ferndale. They are taking control of their food and what
they put into their bodies."

Madison Heights was the most recent city to change its ordinance to allow
chickens. City Council members in November voted 5-2 to allow backyard chickens.
There was some opposition to the chickens from residents. Councilman Brian
Hartwell said at the time that anti-chicken sentiment was based on an image
issue, adding that "some feel Madison Heights is too good for hens."

Anne, an Oakland County resident who keeps four chickens and didn't want to
reveal her last name, said she, her husband and their two small sons like
watching and feeding the birds.

"We really enjoy coming out here with our 3-year-old to collect the eggs," she
said, as she and her son checked in on the chickens in their backyard Friday.
The family also likes to grow the vegetables they eat and buying food locally.
She sees keeping chickens as an extension of that philosophy.

"You can't get much more local than your backyard," she said.

Mikulski is working with gardener and farmer Trevor Johnson to make a pitch for
chickens in Ferndale.

Johnson, a Detroit resident, previously lived in Ferndale for 17 years and is
now looking to buy a house here so he can move back.

"Allowing chickens in our backyards is a way to allow them to be chickens
without hormones and control they way they are treated and raised," he said. "It
gives you the ability to have control over what enters your mouth. Food is one
of the most effective leverage points to make any change in society because it
touches everybody."

Ferndale Mayor Dave Coulter admits he doesn't know much about chickens and has
yet to take a position on whether they should be allowed in every backyard.

"I'm no expert but I'm open to being educated," he said.

*********************************************************************

WORLD VIEW NEWS SERVICE

To subscribe to this group, send an email to:
wvns-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

To leave this list, send an email to:
wvns-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

NEWS ARCHIVE IS OPEN TO PUBLIC VIEW
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/

Please consider contributing to WVNS today.
Email ummyakoub@... !

Israeli car ad boasts run over of kids
Thu Apr 21, 2011
http://www.presstv.com/detail/176044.html


"We'll see who can stand against you," reads the Hebrew line to the right corner
of the picture.

A new photo advertisement of a Japanese car in Israel has drawn considerable
outrage for its implied promotion of running over Palestinian kids.

The commercial advertisement, published by a Subaru dealership in Israel,
features the scene photographed last year, when an Israeli settler struck two
Palestinian children with his car in the East al-Quds (Jerusalem) neighborhood
of Silwan before speeding away, Xinhua reported on Thursday.

"We'll see who can stand against you," reads the Hebrew line to the right corner
of the picture.

The October incident targeted two youngsters, aged 10 and 12, breaking the
younger victim's leg.

Following the attack, the victims initially resisted to be hustled into a car,
which apparently meant to take them to a hospital. Palestinian youngsters fear
getting into strangers' vehicles because they have seen their friends taken away
by Israeli troops posed as civilians on a regular basis.

The acting Palestinian Authority (PA) Chief Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party has said
the promotion of the act of aggression "is a dirty advertisement and propaganda
that reached to the status of calling for [the] killing Palestinian children by
running them over."

The attacker, named David Be'eri, is the director general of Elad, a hard-line
real estate development conglomerate.

The organization encourages Jews to move into dense neighborhoods in East
al-Quds.

East al-Quds forms part of the Palestinian territories, which Tel Aviv occupied
in 1967 and later annexed despite international refusal to recognize either
aggression. It has been promised as the capital of any future Palestinian state.

*********************************************************************

WORLD VIEW NEWS SERVICE

To subscribe to this group, send an email to:
wvns-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

To leave this list, send an email to:
wvns-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

NEWS ARCHIVE IS OPEN TO PUBLIC VIEW
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/

Please consider contributing to WVNS today.
Email ummyakoub@... !

Aaafia Siddiqui: The Truth About Justice
by Yvonne Ridley
The Wisdom Fund
http://www.twf.org/News/Y2010/0208-Aafia.html


Many of us are still in a state of shock over the guilty verdict returned on Dr
Aafia Siddiqui.

The response from the people of Pakistan was predictable and overwhelming and I
salute their spontaneous actions.

From Peshawar to Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore and beyond they marched in their
thousands demanding the return of Aafia.

Even some of the US media expressed discomfort over the verdict returned by the
jurors ... there was a general feeling that something was not right.

Everyone had something to say, everyone that is except the usually verbose US
Ambassador Anne Patterson who has spent the last two years briefing against Dr
Aafia and her supporters.

This is the same woman who claimed I was a fantasist when I gave a press
conference with Tehreek e Insaf leader Imran Khan back in July 2008 revealing
the plight of a female prisoner in Bagram called the Grey Lady.

She said I was talking nonsense and stated categorically that the prisoner I
referred to as "650" did not exist.

By the end of the month she changed her story and said there had been a female
prisoner but that she was most definitely not Dr Aafia Siddiqui.

By that time Aafia had been gunned down at virtually point blank range in an
Afghan prison cell jammed full of more than a dozen US soldiers, FBI agents and
Afghan police.

Her Excellency briefed the media that the prisoner had wrested an M4 gun from
one soldier and fired off two rounds and had to be subdued. The fact these
bullets failed to hit a single person in the cell and simply disappeared did not
resonate with the diplomat.

In a letter dripping in untruths on August 16 2008 she decried the"erroneous and
irresponsible media reports regarding the arrest of Ms. Aafia Siddiqui". She
went on to say: "Unfortunately, there are some who have an interest in simply
distorting the facts in an effort to manipulate and inflame public opinion. The
truth is never served by sensationalism ..."

When Jamaat Islami invited me on a national tour of Pakistan to address people
about the continued abuse of Dr Aafia and the truth about her incarceration in
Bagram, the US Ambassador continued to issue rebuttals.

She assured us all that Dr Aafia was being treated humanely had been given
consular access as set out in international law ... hmm. Well I have a challenge
for Ms Patterson today. I challenge her to repeat every single word she said
back then and swear it is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

As Dr Aafia Siddiqui's trial got underway, the US Ambassador and some of her
stooges from the intelligence world laid on a lavish party at the US Embassy in
Islamabad for some hand-picked journalists where I've no doubt in between the
dancing, drinks and music they were carefully briefed about the so-called facts
of the case.

Interesting that some of the potentially incriminating pictures taken at the
private party managed to find the Ambassador was probably hoping to minimize the
impact the trial would have on the streets of Pakistan proving that, for the
years she has been holed up and barricaded behind concrete bunkers and barbed
wire, she has learned nothing about this great country of Pakistan or its
people.

One astute Pakistani columnist wrote about her: "The respected lady seems to
have forgotten the words of her own country's 16th president Abraham Lincoln
(1809-1865): "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the
people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time".

And the people of Pakistan proved they are nobody's fool and responded to the
guilty verdict in New York in an appropriate way.
When injustice is the law it is the duty of everyone to rise up and challenge
that injustice in any way possible.

The response - so far - has been restrained and measured but it is just the
start. A sentence has yet to be delivered by Judge Richard Berman in May.

Of course there has been a great deal of finger pointing and blame towards the
jury in New York who found Dr Aafia guilty of attempted murder.

Observers asked how they could ignore the science and the irrefutable facts ...
there was absolutely no evidence linking Dr Aafia to the gun, no bullets, no
residue from firing it.

But I really don't think we can blame the jurors for the verdict - you see the
jury simply could not handle the truth.Had they taken the logical route and gone
for the science and the hard, cold, clinical facts it would have meant two
things.It would have meant around eight US soldiers took the oath and lied in
court to save their own skins and careers or it would have meant that Dr Aafia
Siddiqui was telling the truth.

And, as I said before, the jury couldn't handle the truth. Because that would
have meant that the defendant really had been kidnapped, abused, tortured and
held in dark, secret prisons by the US before being shot and put on a rendition
flight to New York. It would have meant that her three children - two of them US
citizens - would also have been kidnapped, abused and tortured by the US.

They say ignorance is bliss and this jury so desperately wanted not to believe
that the US could have had a hand in the kidnapping of a five-month -old baby
boy, a five-year-old girl and her seven-year-old brother.

They couldn't handle the truth ... it is as simple as that.

Well I, and many others across the world like me, can't handle any more lies.
America's reputation is lying in the lowest gutters in Pakistan at the moment
and it can't sink any lower.

The trust has gone, there is only a burning hatred and resentment towards a
superpower which sends unmanned drones into villages to slaughter innocents.

It is fair to say that America's goodwill and credibility is all but washed up
with most honest, decent citizens of Pakistan.

And I think even Her Excellency Anne Patterson recognizes that fact which is why
she is now keeping her mouth shut.

If she has any integrity and any self respect left she should stand before the
Pakistan people and ask for their forgiveness for the drone murders, the extra
judicial killings, the black operations, the kidnapping, torture and rendition
of its citizens, the water-boarding, the bribery, the corruption and, not least
of all, the injustice handed out to Dr Aafia Siddiqui and her family.

She should then pick up the phone to the US President and tell him to release
Aafia and return Pakistan's most loved, respected and famous daughter and
reunite her with the two children who are still missing.
Then she should re-read her letter of August 16, 2008 and write another ... one
of resignation.


---
Yvonne Ridley is a patron of Cageprisoners which first brought the plight of Dr
Aafia Siddiqui to the world's attention shortly after her kidnap in March 2003.
The award-winning, investigative journalist also co-produced the documentary In
Search of Prisoner 650 with film-maker Hassan al Banna Ghani which concluded
that the Grey Lady of Bagram was Dr Aafia Siddiqui.

David Usborne, "Pakistani Scientist in U.S. Court on Terror Charges,"
Independent, August 6, 2008
"Reflections on Independence Day: Justice in America," The Wisdom Fund, July 4,
2009
["Justice was not served," Tina Foster, executive director of the International
Justice Network--Chris Hedges, "The Terror-Industrial Complex," truthdig.com,
February 8, 2010]

[There is no more complete or compelling evidence of a police state than the
government announcing that it will murder its own citizens if it views them as a
"threat."--Paul Craig Roberts, "It Is Now Official: The US Is a Police State,"
antiwar.com, February 10, 2010]

[On September 23 in federal court, US District Court Judge Richard Berman
sentenced political prisoner Aafia Siddiqui to 86 years in prison. Outrage most
accurately expresses this gross miscarriage of justice, compounding what she's
already endured following her March 30, 2003 abduction, imprisonment, torture,
prosecution, and conviction on bogus charges. . . .

In the presence of two FBI agents, two Army interpreters, and three US Army
officers, this frail 110 pound woman allegedly assaulted three of them, seized
one of their rifles, opened fire at close range, hit no one, yet she alone was
severely wounded.

At trial, no credible evidence was presented.--Stephen Lendman, "Aafia Siddiqui
Sentenced: A Grievous Miscarriage of Justice," baltimorechronicle.com, September
23, 2010]

Paul Craig Roberts, "It Is Official: The US Is A Police State," antiwar.com,
September 25, 2010

[The tape reopens the whole question, not just of Dr Siddiqui, but of the
corroding effect of the US alliance with Pakistan's military and intelligence
elite in a war on terror which has had so many Pakistani victims. . . .

For the US too there are questions to answer about the extensive cover- up of
what happened to Dr Siddiqui and her three children - two of whom are US
citizens, and appear to have spent five traumatized years separated from their
mother and from each other, in various prisons.--Victoria Brittain, "A New Turn
as Lawyers Release Explosive, Secretly Recorded Tape ," counterpunch.org,
February 14, 2011]

[On February 3, 2010, a New York court convicted Aafia. The charge against her
was an ATTEMPT to kill Americans. For that she was sentenced to 86 years in
prison and is being kept in total isolation. The trial was framed by Judge
Richard Berman in a way that there would be no mention of her kidnapping from
Karachi in 2003 or any mention of Aafia and her three children being held and
tortured in secret prisons.

Almost exactly a year later, we are witnessing a drama in Pakistan involving an
American mercenary who killed two Pakistani youths in broad daylight and his
friends who proceeded to kill another Pakistani in an effort to help him escape
to the US consulate.
Those who proclaim the Rule of Law are now using every trick in the book to
avoid that same Rule of Law.--Fowzia Siddiqui, "A Tale of Two Prisoners: Aafia
and Raymond," justiceforaafia.org, February 24, 2011]

*********************************************************************

WORLD VIEW NEWS SERVICE

To subscribe to this group, send an email to:
wvns-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

To leave this list, send an email to:
wvns-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

NEWS ARCHIVE IS OPEN TO PUBLIC VIEW
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/

Please consider contributing to WVNS today.
Email ummyakoub@... !

ELITIST LIES AND THEIR FUZZY MATH


Capitol Hill's Brave New World
by Dr. Ellen K. Rudolph
April 21, 2011
http://drellenr.wordpress.com/2011/04/21/elitist-lies-and-their-fuzzy-math/#more\
-1683


I don't think I have ever witnessed such bold-faced lying to the American public
as I am seeing today from the so-called Ruling Elite…you know, the elites in
Congress and in the White House, in Presidential Commissions, at the Federal
Reserve, yes, even in our activist judiciary and in many university classrooms.

The liars are Progressives from both extremes of the political spectrum that are
aided by a mainstream media that blatantly encourages them.

They are everywhere, making pronouncements that we all know to be untrue –
bolstering their case for raising the debt ceiling, dropping bombs on Libya,
ganging up against Israel, ratcheting up federal spending to historic highs,
bankrupting America with entitlement programs, printing money – they even tell
little green lies to make environmentally friendly technologies look like manna
from heaven when they are nothing but greedy smoke screens. [This, by the way,
includes a new wave of political interest in climate engineering that postures
itself as the latest greatest answer to global climate woes.]
In support for their aspirations they trot out handpicked numbers from nowhere
with math that is fuzzy and woefully stacked against the American taxpayer.

Dragons Waiting to be Slain

Yup, that's us – the taxpayers, we're the dragons waiting to be slain – not the
47% of Americans who pay no taxes — but the rest of us who pay taxes – you and
me and every small business struggling to make it in this overly regulated
world.

They are robbing us blind and redistributing the wealth to make that other 47%
ever-more dependent on them.

So who's kidding whom here: are we all too dumbstruck to raise a ruckus? Is the
ruling elite in such abject control of us that our shouts of dismay have finally
been suffocated? Shouldn't we all be yelling FIRE! or something?

All those lofty promises of Nirvana have not materialized yet the pockets of
American taxpayers by now are as drained as their psyches. They are tired of the
rip-offs and the lies and all the charades yet we do nothing…collectively we sit
and wait…and wait.

For what? For more change that we can believe in?

Sunshine is the Best Disinfectant

Materially false and misleading statements from the ruling elite must finally
see the light of day. The lies must be exposed, and every citizen has a civic
responsibility to do just that. It means calling your representatives in
congress, your senator, your governor – whoever will listen – and tell them that
you are sick and tired of all the lies and you want them stopped.

     Taxpayers in revolt are a weighty adversary, something to be reckoned with.
We are in the majority and we have the numbers behind us. We also have all the
money even though the elites (seem) to have all the strings. At least that's
what they want us to think.

But the truth is, Americans are a bunch of dolts. We haven't been paying the
slightest bit of attention and look what's happened on our watch.

We need to turn off American Idol and turn our attention to the news of the day.
We also have to start reading books (remember those?) – public policy books,
political books, history books, economics books, books about our Republic form
of governance; anything of consequence that will turn our minds back on and
kick-start our imagination.

Forget the novels, find out about the real world staring you in the face.

One thing is for sure: our schools have put us to sleep. Since the early 50's
school boards all over this country have sanitized the history books and
homogenized the topics that populate our textbooks – they've done so quietly, in
the background, erasing words and substituting others more befitting of
Johnson's by now transparent Great Society ideals.

All this crap going on around us – yes, all of it – is the direct result of our
collective drowsiness. We have let the schools and the pundits and their cohorts
in the mainstream media lull us into thinking that all is well when it isn't;
that life is good and that America is undergoing CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN.

This is mind control. It is deception at its best. It is a conscious conspiracy
on the part of the Progressive ruling elite to lull us into an ever-deeper
mindlessness.

But listen up: the real change we can believe in rises up from deep inside of
us, not from without. Nothing of consequence comes from without. The SELF is
what is real. The SELF defines and determines what happens to us in life. It
reveals us to the world. Throughout the history of the world despots always have
risen up in the middle of the night when their subjects were asleep. Like
cattle, they robbed them of their self-determination and fenced them in.

The Moral to the Story is This

To change the world we have to change ourselves, not the other way around. We
have to pick ourselves up by the bootstraps and start acting like we are alive
and well. And awake!

     Followers are mindless no-selves. The elitist controllers are lying and
conniving pseudo-selves. They control others because they have nothing of
consequence inside of them – they are no-selves with high ambitions and zero
principles who only know to project their selfishness at others.

Beware liars in sheep's clothing for that's what the ruling elite are. They want
us to think that they are working tirelessly on our behalf, that they have only
our best interests at stake, but this is not the case. They are using us to
further their own aims and there is no more clear reflection of this than a
highly disrespected Congress that sincerely thinks it is there to win
re-election through the funding of earmarks for special interests.

Contrast that to Americans who get up and go to work every day to make a simple
living so that they can feed the mouths of babes and pay their taxes.

Look closely at Capitol Hill

What do you see, other than a righteous collective of know-it-alls? These are
the gutless gladiators of a Republic that they have long been dismantling one
precious brick at a time by their spineless approach to governing. They speak
with forked tongues because that is all they know how to do; that and getting
re-elected year after year. These career politicians lie when they need to and
they lie when they don't need to. They lie because that's the culture of
Washington through and through.

And for that they have us to thank!

Americans have, by and large, forfeited their control of this Republic by their
mindlessness. Americans would rather play games and drink beer and rant and rave
about the likes of Charlie Sheen; and most of us don't even bother to vote –
ever, even at Presidential elections like the one to come in 2012. If they do
vote, those with union armbands allow themselves to be bused like cattle to
election booths where, once inside, they only know to put the check before a
name they were (paid?) to mark.

     Most folks in this country wouldn't know a Republic from a Democratic
Monarchy, or a flat from a fair tax. Find someone who cares about waste and
fraud in Medicare, for there but for the grace of god go us, huh? Comedic
interviews with the man on the street is laughable for its entertainment value
because most of these blokes know what VIAGRA is but not the freedoms that the
U. S. Constitution guarantees them.

Many Americans can't even remember the name of the sitting Vice President of the
United States (not that I necessarily blame them). Many can't even recite the
Pledge of Allegiance from beginning to end, or the National Anthem. Show them a
picture of the Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner, and they scratch
their heads. It is of no consequence to the man on the street to learn that
Geithner was previously the 9th president and chief executive office of the
Federal Reserve Bank of New York; or even that he is a current member of the
Trilateral Commission.

So much for our schools, huh? So much for memorizing names and dates.
Who is John Galt?

The fact is, Baby Boomers and their progeny don't collectively deserve this
country. They take but they don't give back. They use and then throw things
away. They drive fast because they can, they text because they can, they dance
like there is no tomorrow while their knowledge of American history and world
geography stinks. They also don't recycle unless the government makes it as easy
as possible for them to do so.

We are the great ZERO GENERATION. We couldn't have an intelligent conversation
about the fate and future of this great Republic if our lives depended on it.

Oh, and it's OK that we are dropping bombs on Libya because we don't even know
where Libya is and who cares anyway? Those folks are half a world away and they
dress funny.

That's the sad state of affairs today, kids, like it or not. And that's why all
those liars out there lie to us. They lie to us because they can.

They sold us mortgages we couldn't afford because it sounded good, and it made
us look good. We liked that. They talked us into Iraq because, after all,
America is the proud POLICEMAN OF WORLD, no matter what the cost. We let our
porous borders soak up millions of undocumented aliens because the jerkos on
Capitol Hill and their progressive friends tell us it is the humane thing to do.

Not to mention the fact that it brings them (cough) votes and us more Great
Society entitlements.

We live in a world where the average American thinks the government owes them.
In their minds the government owes them everything from free health care to free
tickets to the Red Sox – not to mention food stamps and soup kitchens, oh, and
pensions that allow more and more of American workers to retire at the age of 50
with nearly 100% of their annual earnings (someone probably got a lot of votes
for that). Most Americans today think government is the answer to everything, so
much so that they don't even laugh at all the new regulations that tell us what
toilets to buy or what foods we can eat.

We do seem to collectively treasure our NANNY STATE, maybe because it relieves
us of having to take care of ourselves?

And Finally…

Americans aren't stupid. We aren't blind. Some of us see what's happening around
us. We just don't know any more what to do about it. We are empty-headed and
dumbfounded, that's what we are.

We've lost our tongues.

We've forgotten that the Founders gave their lives so that we could have a
country to be proud of, an exceptional one. We've forgotten about the years of
denial and strive previous generations of Americans endured so that we could
have a better life than them. We don't read any more. We don't dialogue with
each about life's important issues. We don't even say hello when we encounter
each other on the street.

Our grand Republic is going down the tubes as we speak because we don't have the
balls to stop it. We could, but we won't.

Still, do yourself a favor and read Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the
American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning by Jonah Goldberg. All
those who fight for individual liberty will appreciate this important work.
According one Amazon.com reviewer, "Fascism in all its forms is the enemy of
liberty, and recognizing it for what it is will always be a prerequisite for
stopping it."

*********************************************************************

WORLD VIEW NEWS SERVICE

To subscribe to this group, send an email to:
wvns-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

To leave this list, send an email to:
wvns-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

NEWS ARCHIVE IS OPEN TO PUBLIC VIEW
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/

Please consider contributing to WVNS today.
Email ummyakoub@... !

Journalist's Family in Shock Over Harsh Sentence
April 18, 2011
International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran

Nazanin Khosravani


On 17 April, reformist journalist Nazanin Khosravani was sentenced to six years
in prison on charges of "assembly and collusion for acting against national
security," and "propagating against the regime" by Branch 26 of Tehran's
Revolutionary Court with Judge Pirabbasi presiding.

Khosravani's family remains in shock at the news of such a heavy sentence and do
not know what actions they need to take in order to have the sentence
overturned. Khosravani's lawyer, Farideh Gheirat, said that she will appeal the
sentence within the allotted time.

Nazanin Khosravani worked at the political desks of reformist newspapers
including Norooz, Kargozaran, and Sarmayeh. Khosravani was unemployed at the
time of her arrest in her home on 3 November 2010. After spending 132 days in
Ward 209 of Evin Prison, Khosravani was released on $600,000 bail on 14 March.
Her trial was held on 8 February.

Article printed from International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran:
http://www.iranhumanrights.org

URL to article: http://www.iranhumanrights.org/2011/04/khosravani-sentenced/

URLs in this post:

[1] Image:
http://www.iranhumanrights.org/wp-content/uploads/nazanin_khosravani_1-205x300.j\
pg

*********************************************************************

WORLD VIEW NEWS SERVICE

To subscribe to this group, send an email to:
wvns-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

To leave this list, send an email to:
wvns-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

NEWS ARCHIVE IS OPEN TO PUBLIC VIEW
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/

Please consider contributing to WVNS today.
Email ummyakoub@... !

Russia: Nato has overstepped UN mandate on Libya
Friday 22 April 2011
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sponsored/russianow/politics/8466680/Russia-pressure-\
Nato-Libya.html


Libya litmus test: Russia is following military developments in North Africa
closely Photo: Reuters/Vostock-Photo


Yevgeny Shestakov, Special to Russia Now 3:43PM BST 21 Apr 2011
As Nato members met to rally forces in the Libya operations, Russia kept up
pressure on the alliance to adhere to its UN mandate. Old concerns about missile
defences were close behind.

At a Berlin meeting of Nato foreign ministers, Russia reiterated its stance that
the western alliance’s Libya campaign has overstepped its UN mandate through use
of excessive force. It also pressed home concerns in the ongoing issue of
missile defences in Europe.

“We consider that certain actions by Nato in Libya do not correspond to its
mandate, and we would like to investigate this,” Sergey Lavrov, the Russian
foreign minister, said after Friday’s talks.

Participating in the framework of the Russia-Nato Council, Mr Lavrov added that
he had requested that the Nato leadership strictly observes the positions on
Libya adopted by resolution 1973 ofthe UN Security Council.

Russia saw the Nato action as a real-life litmus test of that organisation’s new
strategic conception and its readiness not to overstep its authority as defined
by the UN, Mr Lavrov told ministers from Nato’s 28 member states and leaders of
allied nations. Russia, which has power to veto UN resolutions, abstained from
last month’s vote that authorised the airstrikes by Nato.

As the alliance sought in Berlin to find extra aircraft for the campaign against
Colonel Gaddafi’s loyalists, Mr Lavrov stressed that “using excessive military
force will lead to additional casualties among civilians”. However, he went on,
“Russia does not intend to act as watchdog when it comes to respecting Security
Council resolutions on Libya.”

The Russian delegation expressed satisfaction that the first report by Nato
General Secretary Anders Fogh Rasmussen on the implementation of Libya-related
resolutions had been delivered to the UN Security Council.

Regarding the planned development of a European anti-ballistic missile defence
shield, a major sticking point in relations with Nato, Mr Lavrov underscored
Moscow’s basic position: all participants in the project must agree on criteria
guaranteeing that the system will not be directed against any of them. Russia
also wants guarantees that Nato’s military planning will not threaten its
interests.

The meeting in Berlin also failed to allay Russian apprehensions about Nato
plans to adopt a “stage-by-stage adaptive approach” in developing a European
shield. In the opinion of Russian military experts, the anticipated appearance
of missile interceptors near Russia’s borders within 8 to 10 years under current
plans would create potential risks for its intercontinental missiles.

It remains unclear to what extent the alliance and the US are willing to involve
non-Nato members like Russia in work on the system. After the Nato-Russia
Council meeting in Berlin, Mr Lavrov said talks about the possibility of Russia
joining the European system of missile defence are being conducted not only with
the alliance, but also in Washington.

The ministers in Berlin affirmed renewed efforts to fight terrorism. Actively
being promoted is a joint Russia-Nato programme to develop remote identification
of explosives carried by suicide bombers. For Afghanistan, the sides agreed to
create a special helicopter fund to help raise the qualifications of Afghan
personnel who service flight equipment.

===

Armed US Drones To Start Libya Missions
Thursday April 21, 2011
http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/World-News/Video-Libya---US-President-Approves-\
Use-Of-Armed-Predator-Drones-In-Libya/Article/201104315977157


Armed US Predator drones will start missions in Libya as rebels take control of
a key post on the border with Tunisia.

US President Barack Obama has given the go-ahead to use the unmanned aircraft
which have already seen action in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq.

Marine General James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
said the drones can help counteract Gaddafi forces' tactic of travelling in
civilian vehicles.

"What they will bring that is unique to the conflict is their ability to get
down lower, therefore to be able to get better visibility on targets that have
started to dig themselves into defensive positions.
"They are uniquely suited for urban areas."

It comes as Libyan rebels claimed the capture of the Wazin border crossing
following fighting outside the desert town of Nalut - about 140 miles southwest
of the capital Tripoli.

Moussa Ibrahim: 'We will unleash hell upon Nato'

Rebel leaders and witnesses said at least 13 Libyan military officers, including
two commanders, fled across the border.

A doctor with Tunisia's Red Crescent said the border post was in rebel hands and
relief officials fear it could lead to a new wave of refugees.

"The main worry now is an influx of families fleeing the fighting in Libya," Dr
Mongi Slim said.

"Before, when the post was under the control of the pro-Gaddafi forces, people
had been crossing on little paths. But now it will be much easier."

But Sky's Tom Rayner, reporting from Tripoli, said Gaddafi's Government had
denied these claims.

"They claim the rebels have control of the Tunisian side of the border, but they
[the Government] have control of the Libyan side."

Meanwhile a passenger ferry carrying about 1,000 people fleeing the western city
of Misratah has arrived in Benghazi.

Also aboard the vessel are the bodies of British Oscar-nominated photographer
and filmmaker Tim Hetherington and Getty photographer Chris Holdros.

They were killed on Wednesday in an attack that also injured two other
photographers.

A statement from Mr Hetherington's family said he was killed by a
rocket-propelled grenade.

It comes as the Ministry of Defence said Nato was now targeting most of its air
effort on the besieged city because of what it called the "grievous situation"
for the civilian population.

Rebels appear to be gaining more international support, including plans by
Italy, France and Britain to send combat advisers and other nations pledging
communications and other equipment under the Nato mission.

But Col Gaddafi's regime hit back with fierce threats if the alliance sends any
troops to Libya.

"If Nato comes to Misratah, or any Libyan city, we will unleash hell upon Nato,"
Government spokesman Moussa Ibrahim said.

"We will be a ball of fire. Libya will become one man, one woman, fighting for
freedom. We will make it 10 times as bad as Iraq."

*********************************************************************

WORLD VIEW NEWS SERVICE

To subscribe to this group, send an email to:
wvns-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

To leave this list, send an email to:
wvns-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

NEWS ARCHIVE IS OPEN TO PUBLIC VIEW
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/

Please consider contributing to WVNS today.
Email ummyakoub@... !

A great day for Palestine
Khalid Amayreh - amayreh@...
Fri Apr 29, 2011
The Palestine Information Center
http://www.palestine-info.co.uk


Much to the chagrin of the hateful Zionist entity, Hamas and Fatah seem to have
reached a final agreement, putting an end to four years of a crippling national
rift which exhausted the Palestinian people as never before and gave Israel a
valuable opportunity to try liquidate the Palestinian cause.

News of the agreement has already generated instantaneous reactions of
excitement and joy, even euphoria in the occupied territories.

Motorists honked their car horns, youngsters took to the streets
shouting "Fatah and Hamas: one people not two." Some women ululated with joy as
Fatah and Hamas leaders appeared on TV screens in Cairo,
announcing the conclusion of the long-awaited agreement.  Some
restaurants and eateries offered free coffee, tea and juices as
celebrations went on until around midnight.

On the Israeli side, Israeli leaders were visibly angry and
disappointed, with Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyah threatening the
Palestinian leadership with what looked like a virtual ultimatum:

"The PA would have to choose between peace with Hamas and peace with Israel. It
can't choose both."

One Fatah official retorted: "We also say Israel would have to
choose between peace with the Palestinian people and peace with racist settlers,
it can't choose both."

Well, Netanyahu's threats should be rejected outright and treated with the utter
contempt they deserve.

After all, this is an internal Palestinian matter and Israel has absolutely no
right to intervene in our internal affairs.

Netanyahu may argue that Hamas doesn't recognize Israel. Well,
Netanyahu should be reminded that he presides over a government the bulk of
which doesn't recognize Palestine.

In the final analysis, why should Hamas, or for that matter Fatah,
recognize Israel when Israel refuses to recognize the very existence of the
Palestinian people.

So, if the next Palestinian government of national unity shouldn't
include groups that don't recognize Israel, by the same token,
Palestinians have the right to demand that any Israeli government must exclude
groups and parties that don't recognize the legitimate rights of the Palestinian
people.

Needless to say, the current Israeli government includes explicitly fascist
parties that don't even recognize the very existence
of the Palestinian people.

The conclusion of the reconciliation agreement in Cairo has really
dealt a sharp blow to nefarious Zionist designs. Israel first lost a
great strategic asset in the dramatic downfall of the Mubarak dynasty
and now we have these good tidings from Cairo.  More good news is coming up,
inshallah (God willing).

Netanyahu and other Zionist supremacists may rant and rave for as
long as they may. This shouldn't shake even one hair on our bodies.

None the less, we must not be too preoccupied with self- congratulating
ourselves on this auspicious occasion.  Yes there is
no doubt that the present that both Hamas and Fatah have handed over to the
Palestinian people is great.

However, we must work overtime to rectify and correct all that
went wrong during these gloomy four years. Prisoners or detainees must be set
free, media incitement must end immediately, closed institutions must be
reopened; and human rights and civil liberties must be reinstituted. Also
grievances must be settled and hard feelings soothed
and reconciled.

In short, we must get the slate clean as soon as possible and
allow for the total obliteration of all the scars of division.

In this agreement, there seems to be only winners. Everyone is
winning as a result of this breakthrough except Israel and the enemies of our
people.

Hamas has won by having all its conditions and objections met. We
must not forget that Hamas was supposed to be destroyed according to the
American-Zionist designs; so the fact that Hamas has remained a hard,
independent variable is indeed a great achievement. This proves that not
everything Palestinian must be subject to the Zionist will.

Fatah has also won by showing Israel that Fatah won't be co-opted
and manipulated against Palestinian national interest. Fatah won by
demonstrating that it will remain a national and patriotic movement
despite American and Israeli designs.

And the Palestinian people has won by overcoming one of the most
formidable internal crises ever to  mar the Palestinian struggle for
freedom  from the claws of diabolic Zionism.

We must also thank our big sister, Egypt, without which the
conclusion of this agreement wouldn't have been possible.  The
revolutionary leadership in Cairo must be applauded for its tireless
efforts and dedication to bring about this paramount national
reconciliation among the brothers in Palestine. This should be a good
omen for the future.

Finally, we Palestinians should instill in ourselves a feeling of
optimism. The restoration of Palestinian national unity, along with the
strategic changes in the Arab region, is huge assets and opportunities that
should be utilized for the ultimate liberation of Palestine.

*********************************************************************

WORLD VIEW NEWS SERVICE

To subscribe to this group, send an email to:
wvns-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

To leave this list, send an email to:
wvns-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

NEWS ARCHIVE IS OPEN TO PUBLIC VIEW
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/

Please consider contributing to WVNS today.
Email ummyakoub@... !

Military choppers startle downtown Miami
By LIDIA DINKOVA - ldinkova@...
Wednesday, 04.20.11
http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/04/19/2176185/military-style-helicopters-over.ht\
ml


If this was a movie, it could be called Sleepless in Brickell.
Residents in the neighborhood saw and heard several military-style,
"pitch-black" helicopters flying around and hovering on top of Brickell
buildings Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning.

Turns out that it was a training exercise by the Southeast Regional Domestic
Security Task Force. In other words, a Homeland Security operation, that few
other authorities apparently knew about, including the U.S. Coast Guard.

Lt. Russ Tippett, spokesman for the coast guard happens to live in Brickell, and
said the choppers didn't make it easy to sleep, as the drill went on for hours.

"It was extremely loud and annoying,'' Tippett said, theorizing at first that it
may have been a U.S. Customs Operation.

Miami-Dade Fire Rescue didn't know about it, referring media calls to the City
of Miami's Fire Rescue. A spokesman there assumed it was a film shoot.

Sgt. Bill Williams, who oversaw the operation for the Miami-Dade Police
Department, was not immediately available for details.

"I couldn't see them a lot of the time, but I could hear them because there are
echoes around the buildings," said Neilson Paty, who lives in Brickell Bay. "We
see helicopters every day, but it was very obvious that these are not tourist or
U.S. Coast Guard helicopters."

A Miami police spokesman said the helicopters were conducting an "operational"
training drill. He was not allowed to comment on details of the drill.

Paty said he is understanding of the city having its reasons to not inform
residents about the drill and that he is not upset for not getting any alerts of
the commotion.

"It was loud enough to wake up some people, but it wasn't overwhelming enough to
disturb the peace or something like that," he said.

On Tuesday, Miami police officers in Brickell said that it was all part of a
planned Homeland Security exercise, but confusion about the helicopters was
rampant about 6 a.m. Wednesday.

It all began about 9:15 p.m. Tuesday, when at least three large Black Hawk-like
choppers landed in a parking lot of the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing
Arts on Biscayne Boulevard and 14th Street.
The choppers then charged over the Brickell and Miami river area. Men who
appeared to be SWAT team members were also seen taking part in the exercise.

Witnesses were tweeting as the event unfolded.

"Three choppers just dropped a group of men on top of the Bank of America
building in Brickell," tweeted a man identified as Ianik Drouin, about 9:45 p.m.

"I just saw one of the brickell choppers turn so quickly, it had to go
sideways," tweeted Sarah Elles about midnight.

Diana Pedroni also had trouble sleeping.

"Oh not again! brickellchoppers flying on top of my building," tweeted Pedroni
about midnight.

About 1 a.m., Eddie Prieto was surprised to find out he may have to endure more
of it for the rest of the month.

"Five more niths? Boo! RT @Brickellinfo #DoD will be conducting drills through
April 25th," tweeted Prieto about 1 a.m.


Miami Herald Staff Laura Figueroa, Andrea Torres and Julie Brown contributed to
this report.

*********************************************************************

WORLD VIEW NEWS SERVICE

To subscribe to this group, send an email to:
wvns-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

To leave this list, send an email to:
wvns-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

NEWS ARCHIVE IS OPEN TO PUBLIC VIEW
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/

Please consider contributing to WVNS today.
Email ummyakoub@... !

Isolation Units in U.S. Prisons panel discussion,
San Francisco
by dave id
Thursday Apr 21st, 2011
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2011/04/21/18677734.php

     At the Women's Building in San Francisco, the Center for Constitutional
Rights gathered a panel of experts to discuss the history and the ramifications
of solitary confinement and experimental isolation units in the U.S. prison
system. The panel featured Zahra Billoo, Executive Director, Council on
American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)-San Francisco Bay Area; Dr. Terry Kupers,
M.D., the Wright Institute; Keramet Reiter, JD, PhD Candidate Berkeley Law;
Nahal Zamani, Education and Outreach Associate, Center for Constitutional
Rights; and Eddy Zheng, former inmate and prisoner rights advocate. The panel
was moderated by Sara Norman, attorney, Prison Law Office.

Panelists explain that it was without public involvement that supermax prisons
began to be built in the United States in the late 1980s. The first was in
Arizona, to be followed by Pelican Bay in California and a federal supermax in
Colorado in 1994. Today, a majority of states have at least one supermax prison
or penitentiary, several having up to four, and virtually every prison now
includes Security Housing Units (SHUs) which specialize in sensory deprivation.

While virtually all jails and prisons in the United States have historically
contained isolation units of one form or another, the newer style of prisons
known as "supermax", along with SHUs, consist entirely of segregated, solitary
confinement, isolation units, where prisoners are generally allowed outside of
their individual cells no more than one hour per day. The ill effects of sensory
depravation in these prisons can be devastating for inmates, even more so for
those previously suffering from any mental health issues. On a societal level,
isolation units are counterproductive to prisons being institutions for
rehabilitation when inmates are psychologically tortured while behind bars.

In California and some other states, monitoring prison conditions and inmate
health is made especially difficult due the the secrecy enforced through gag
rules against reporters interviewing prisoners. Panelists note that the U.S.
Constitution is being mooted by rules such as these and other denials of basic
civil rights in supermax prisons. Solitary confinement for years without trial,
or while awaiting trial, is used to "break" Muslim prisoners. Minors are being
held in solitary as well, charged as adults after the passage of Proposition 21
in California.

In 2006, a new type of isolation unit in federal penitentiaries was established
called Communications Management Units (CMUs), despite objections from civil
liberties organizations. These new facilities offer no contact visits and only
four hours a month with family and friends. Due to public pressure, the time
allowed was increased to two four-hour visits in January of 2010. Additionally,
visits are often difficult as prisoners can be sent hundreds if not thousands of
miles from where they live. CMU inmates are allowed two fifteen-minute calls per
month, in which family members must be as succinct as possible and pass the
phone quickly to everyone who wants to speak.

Over 65% of inmates in CMUs are Muslim. The next largest populations are
political prisoners, either environmental and animal activists who are now
classified as "terrorists" by law enforcement agencies and those who have become
prison civil liberties activists while behind bars. Given who is currently being
held in isolation units, there are obvious parallels between the growth of
supermax prisons, SHUs, and CMUs domestically and notorious U.S. military
prisons abroad such as Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

Panelists field questions from the audience for about twenty minutes at the
conclusion of their talk.

The event was co-sponsored by the Civil Liberties Defense Center, Solitary
Watch, Freedom Archives, Arab Resource and Organizing Center, National Lawyers
Guild - San Francisco Chapter, National Lawyers Guild - Boalt Hall Chapter,
California Prison Focus, Animal Legal Defense Fund-Stanford University,
California Coalition for Women Prisoners, Anti-Racism Committee of the National
Lawyers Guild-San Francisco Chapter, Legal Services for Prisoners with Children
and Hastings Prisoner Outreach, Stanford Criminal Law Society, ACLU of Northern
California, Prison Legal News, All of Us or None, Critical Resistance - Oakland
Chapter and Green is the New Red.


Event Announcement:
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2011/03/14/18674537.php


Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB)
http://curbprisonspending.org

Center for Constitutional Rights:
http://ccrjustice.org

*********************************************************************

WORLD VIEW NEWS SERVICE

To subscribe to this group, send an email to:
wvns-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

To leave this list, send an email to:
wvns-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

NEWS ARCHIVE IS OPEN TO PUBLIC VIEW
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/

Please consider contributing to WVNS today.
Email ummyakoub@... !

Will we ever finally realize that the bottom line leads straight to hell?


AMERICA IS ON THE WRONG SIDE
By John Kaminski - pseudoskylax@...
Thursday, 21 April, 2011
http://johnkaminski.info/

<http://www.archive.org/download/ClarityQuestApril14th2011/ClarityCurrency.mp3
>]


At this very moment, staunch allies of the United States in Bahrain and Yemen
are shooting their own citizens in the head and following the Jewish practice of
harvesting them for their organs ~ all for protesting government tyranny.

     But in Libya, the story is very different, where a legitimate and
independent government is being destroyed so that the Western powers and
international bankers can steal the valuable supplies of oil and water from a
much defamed but always peaceful and productive nation.

     <http://www.twf.org/News/Y2011/0401-Paradise.html>

     America is on the wrong side, in every subject, on every question,
concerning any matter of principle, practice or policy in the world.

Instead of being on the side of people it pretends to protect, America is on the
side of the international bankers who are squeezing the life out of everyone.
How many more disasters will it take for people to realize this? And if America
ultimately succeeds in its totalitarian quest, how long will it be before people
everywhere are forbidden to think about the moral depravity of state-sponsored
criminality at all?

America as a government and hence as nation is on the wrong side of everything.

     One need look no further than how it is misleading its own citizens on the
dangers of radiation from Japan as it closes down its radiation monitoring
stations and deliberately deceives the public with rosy reports of minuscule
radioactivity over North America.

     All the while, reports from nongovernmental radiation monitors reveal the
worst. The question of which reporting is true will be answered in a very short
time when millions of people begin to get seriously sick.

America has become like an abused piñata that has been slammed so many times by
people stealing its money that all its treasures are spilling to the ground like
so much blood from a bleeding heart that has been forcibly carved out of the
carcass of its owner, who is each one of us.

In matters of money, medicine, media and aggression against other hapless target
countries whose resources we want to steal and whose people we want to enslave,
America is absolutely, irrevocably and permanently on the wrong side.

Why?

Because America is not run by Americans.

It is run by people who claim to have no nationality, they just work for the
common good. That's why they've let all those non Americans into the country,
they say. It's for the common good. Now that we have a bonafide non American
president, who refuses to defend American borders that are being overrun by
illegal immigrants, we can see clearly that America is no longer being run by
Americans.

Who are they, you ask?
No, the problem is you're afraid to ask.
I've been telling you the answer for years,
but you think you'll be harmed
if you believe what I tell you,
never realizing that
you are being terminally injured because you don't.

The rest of the world should realize (and I believe they probably already have
and I just don't know it) that any country that lies to its own citizens will
lie to every other country it deals with.

The U.S. track record with its own native population should have answered that
question a hundred years ago, but the American people have gone on believing
their government has always been telling them the truth, and that is the course
that was followed in our way to the ultimate destruction of America day, which
to all observers appears to be not more than a few months off, if that long.

I began to think about how America has always been on the wrong side after I
read Adolf Hitler's declaration of war against the U.S. four days after Pearl
Harbor.  In part, Hitler said: "The American President and his plutocratic
clique have called us the "have not" nations. The is correct! But the "have
nots" also want to live, and they will certainly make sure that what little they
have to live on is not stolen from them by the "haves."

(Read Hitler's whole speech at

<https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=gmail&attid=0.5&thid=12f3dc66ec341a87&mt\
=application/pdf&url=https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui%3D2%26ik%3D43bc9b1fcc%26vi\
ew%3Datt%26th%3D12f3dc66ec341a87%26attid%3D0.5%26disp%3Dattd%26zw&sig=AHIEtbQIxY\
t4E2qw5A4kD8O9Krw12Brtxw>

It will definitely open your eyes as it sounds like a description of the world
today.

America is on the wrong side. Think about it. Where does that put your "support
our boys in uniform" shtick, our boys who are raping Iraqi children for kicks,
bombing wedding parties in Afghanistan by pushing buttons in Tampa, and siding
with the Israelis as "God's Chosen people" as these insane Jews slaughter
well-meaning people who try to bring food to starving people in Gaza?

America is on the wrong side. Think about the big push to get you to take the
poison swine flu vaccine, the cover-up of autism-producing Thimerosal in most
vaccines, forcing its own troops to take vaccines whose ingredients are never
revealed, and vaccinating the cervixes of little girls to prevent a disease they
will never get and likely complicate the delivery of healthy children they will
never have.

America is on the wrong side. Think about the buildings they blew up in New York
City. That there are still people who believe Muslim terrorists did this
dastardly deed attests to the dumbing down of the greatest country that ever was
into an Army of robot droids willing to do the bidding of their Jewish masters
who control them with trivial television and meaningless religion.

I could write a thousand more paragraphs like this
and so could you.

But the point of it all is to realize that this group of paid off politicians
who supposedly represent American interests around the world actually do not
represent Americans at all, they represent the international Jewish bankers who
control all the countries of the world except the half dozen or so the U.S. is
constantly threatening and/or invading.

America is on the wrong side in everything. And as a result, whether you like it
or not, if you're an American, so are you. So while you're looking for a way to
rebut this argument, you need look no further than your own soul.

If you continue to keep your head down, try not to rock the boat, and hope some
government program doesn't suddenly remove you from this life, I'm afraid the
odds are increasing daily and exponentially that you are going to die in that
position.

The people now in charge all need to be removed and arrested for their easily
provable crimes. That you are not now working to make this happen with all
possible speed, you might say, is counterintuitive to your own chances of
survival, because as long as they continue to remain in charge, their policies
of population reduction and the eradication of all peoples' most basic rights
will only accelerate.

The whole world knows this, except for people in the United States — America is
on the wrong side.

John Kaminski is a writer who lives on the Gulf Coast of Florida preaching the
message that no problem in the world can be authentically addressed without
first analyzing tangents caused by Jewish perfidy, which has subverted and
diminished every aspect of human endeavor throughout history. Support for his
work is wholly derived from people who can understand what he's saying and know
what it means. http://johnkaminski.info/  250 N. McCall Rd. #2, Englewood FL
34223 USA

[PS: My Mac spellchecker doesn't recognize Kaminski as a valid spelling; it only
lists the Jewish version of the name, Kaminsky, as correct. Imagine that. Just
like Wikipedia, Google, and all those people who write me pretending not to be
Jews.]

[For further study, also see Andrew Winkler's brilliant recap of "Eustace
Mullins and the Zionist Complicity with the alleged 'Jewish Holocaust'"
<http://www.rebelnews.org/opinion/editorial/771557>]

*********************************************************************

WORLD VIEW NEWS SERVICE

To subscribe to this group, send an email to:
wvns-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

To leave this list, send an email to:
wvns-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

NEWS ARCHIVE IS OPEN TO PUBLIC VIEW
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/

Please consider contributing to WVNS today.
Email ummyakoub@... !

Some Complaints of Campus Anti-Semitism Are Called Attempts at Censorship
Thursday, April 21, 2011, 8:39 AM
The Chronicle of Higher Education
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/some-complaints-of-campus-anti-semitism-are-ca\
lled-attempts-at-censorship/32321?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en


Some recent complaints of anti-Semitic incidents on American college campuses do
not involve actual discrimination but instead represent attempts "to silence
anti-Israel discourse and speakers," argues a statement issued today by Cary
Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, and
Kenneth Stern, the American Jewish Committee's point person on anti-Semitism and
extremism.

The statement, which cites recent complaints of anti-Semitism at Rutgers
University and the University of California's Berkeley and Santa Cruz campuses,
says it is "dangerous" to characterize anti-Israel remarks as ethnic
discrimination, in violation of federal civil-rights laws.

Doing so, it says, changes the campus debate "from one of exposing bigotry to
one of protecting free speech, and the last thing pro-Israel advocates need is a
reputation for censoring, rather than refuting, their opponents." The
organizations and students who have brought the complaints have argued that the
behavior they cite clearly crossed a line and created a hostile environment for
Jewish students.

*********************************************************************

WORLD VIEW NEWS SERVICE

To subscribe to this group, send an email to:
wvns-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

To leave this list, send an email to:
wvns-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

NEWS ARCHIVE IS OPEN TO PUBLIC VIEW
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/

Please consider contributing to WVNS today.
Email ummyakoub@... !