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Showing posts from January, 2013

A Tale of Cocaine Trafficking, Sex Crime Charges, Extraordinary Rendition & Julian Assange

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As reported at  Dailycensored.com on November 14, 2012, two sources have alleged that the CIA has been engaging in cocaine trafficking in Chile to fund an $88 million campaign to defeat President Rafael Correa in Ecuador’s upcoming presidential election: former  British Diplomat Craig Murray , and Chilean journalist  Patricio Mery Bell . It is no secret that the US wants to see Correa defeated and the presidential election scheduled next month in Ecuador will see whether he is. He has enacted policies the US government considers adverse to US interests including closing the US military base in Ecuador. Moreover, it is likely the US sees the defeat of Correa as key to getting its hands on Julian Assange. There is also the $19 billion judgment by an Ecuadorean court against Chevron for despoiling the Amazon rainforest. A group of the plaintiffs have recently begun initiating legal proceedings to seize Chevron’s assets in Canada,  Brazil and Argentina . The allegations of C

Anti-suicide nasal spray for U.S. Army

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US Army grants $3 million for anti-suicide nasal spray research The U.S. Army gave $3 million to the University of Indiana to develop an antidepressant that can be taken as a nasal spray. The grant could speed the development of a portable and easy-to-use device for preventing mental health problems. One of the reasons depression and suicidal tendencies are so challenging to treat is that most medicines can't easily be delivered to the brain. Your brain is protected by the aptly named blood-brain barrier, which is specifically designed to keep any outside material from getting inside. While that's good in most situations, the barrier also keeps out medicines. The nasal spray uses a nanoparticle delivery approach to send very tiny droplets of a drug called thyrotropin-releasing hormone (TRH) into the body and across the blood-brain barrier. That way, the drug reaches the brain and dissolves slowly. TRH has demonstrated the potential to prevent suicide, depression, an

Money, Sex, the Holy Bible...

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Catholic Church Makes A Fortune In The German Porn Business "Weltbild", Germany’s largest media company, sells books, DVDs, music and more -- and also happens to belong 100% to the Catholic Church. Few people knew about this connection until this month when Buchreport, a German industry newsletter, reported that the Catholic company also sells porn. A Church spokesman responded: “Weltbild tries to prevent the distribution of possibly pornographic content.” Well, it's prevention efforts have apparently not been so successful. For more than 10 years, a group of committed Catholics has been trying to point out what is going on to Church authorities, and they are outraged at the hypocrisy of the spokesman's statement. In 2008, the group sent a 70-page document to all the bishops whose dioceses have shared ownership of Weltbild for 30 years, detailing evidence of the sale of questionable material. Today, the Augsburg-based company employs 6,400 people, has a

Happy birthday, Guantánamo! 3

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  Each Year in January, MatrixLeaks will publish the same article - "Happy birthday, Guantanamo!" - until the cruel cage will not be closed - as Mr. Obama promised in January 2010.    "I intend to close Guantánamo, and would not give it up. Many times I have repeated that the United States does not conduct torture and I will make sure that indeed be so. I will make every effort to increase America's moral reputation in the world", Barack Obama said during his election campaign, in which, among other things, promised to be one of the first things you will do will be closing the Guantánamo base. Base Guantánamo will be closed to 22. January 2010., believe me." Already we in 2013 year, and Barack Obama president of the nearly four years. Gunatánamo this week have the birthday cake candles. Eleven years of existence. There is no indication that it will close the base, which thinks about its one hundred and seventy four inmates - um, who do they ask?

Joystick Death

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The Woes of an American Drone Operator A soldier sets out to graduate at the top of his class. He succeeds, and he becomes a drone pilot working with a special unit of the United States Air Force in New Mexico. He kills dozens of people. But then, one day, he realizes that he can't do it anymore. For more than five years, Brandon Bryant worked in an oblong, windowless container about the size of a trailer, where the air-conditioning was kept at 17 degrees Celsius (63 degrees Fahrenheit) and, for security reasons, the door couldn't be opened. Bryant and his coworkers sat in front of 14 computer monitors and four keyboards. When Bryant pressed a button in New Mexico, someone died on the other side of the world. The container is filled with the humming of computers. It's the brain of a drone, known as a cockpit in Air Force parlance. But the pilots in the container aren't flying through the air. They're just sitting at the controls. Bryant was one of them, a

The World Water Crisis

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I've just watched Irena Salina's incredible, infuriating documentary FLOW: For Love of Water, a film about the often-invisible and underreported global water crisis. Ranging from widespread US contamination to the tragedy of developing nations who are forced by the World Bank to sell their water companies like Vivendi, Nestle, Suez and Thames, who get sweetheart deals to offer substandard, overpriced monopoly water service, at terrible cost to human life. Global water profiteering is at the center of a global healthcare crisis that kills more people than AIDS or malaria. The film shows the grim reality of water in Asia, Africa, South and Central America, and the USA. The mortality is awful, and not just from bad water or no water -- also from police forces in states like Bolivia who go to war against people whose water supply has been sold to foreign multinationals who are reaping windfall profits while they die. In the US and Europe, the bottled water industry pull