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Posts Tagged ‘United States’

America’s Debt Could Soon Spark A European-Style Crisis

June 23, 2011 Comments off

economictimes

US debtWASHINGTON: America’s rapidly growing national debt could soon spark a European-style crisis unless Congress moves forcefully, the Congressional Budget Office warned Wednesday in a study that underscores the stakes for a bipartisan group working on a plan to reduce red ink.

Republicans seized on the nonpartisan report to renew their push to reduce costs in federal benefit programs such as Medicare, the federal government health care program that benefits the elderly.

At issue is the $9.7 trillion of US debt held by investors and foreign countries like China, the measure that economists deem most important. Government accounts like the Social Security trust funds account for the rest of the $14.3 trillion total debt.

Democrats and Republicans have been stepping up budget talks aimed at averting what could be the disastrous first-ever default on U.S. government debt. A bipartisan group led by Vice President Joe Biden tasked with reaching an agreement has not made the politically difficult compromises on the larger issues, such as Read more…

New Study Finds Direct Link Between Vaccines and Infant Mortality

June 23, 2011 Comments off

prisonplanet

United States, which administers highest number of vaccines in developed world, also has highest number of infant deaths in developed world

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, June 23, 2011

A shocking new study published in a prestigious medical journal has found a direct statistical link between higher vaccine doses and infant mortality rates in the developed world, suggesting that the increasing number of inoculations being forced upon children by medical authorities, particularly in the United States which administers the highest number of vaccines and also has the highest number of infant deaths, is in fact having a detrimental impact on health.

New Study Finds Direct Link Between Vaccines and Infant Mortality vaccination both legs

The study, entitled Infant mortality rates regressed against number of vaccine doses routinely given: Is there a biochemical or synergistic toxicity?, was conducted by Neil Z. Miller and Gary S. Goldman. It was published in the reputable Human and Experimental Toxicology journal, which is indexed by the National Library of Medicine.

According to his biography, “Goldman has served as a reviewer for the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Vaccine, AJMC, ERV, ERD, JEADV,and British Medical Journal (BMJ). He is included on the Editorial Board of Research and Reviews in BioSciences.”

Miller, a medical research journalist and the Director of the Thinktwice Global Vaccine Institute, has been studying the dangers of vaccines for 25 years.

“Linear regression analysis of unweighted mean IMRs showed a high statistically significant correlation between increasing number of vaccine doses and increasing infant mortality Read more…

Flood of US weapons in Afghanistan and Pakistan fueling militant groups, experts say

June 22, 2011 Comments off
Pakistan us weapons smuggling 2011 6 21

Local residents walk past a burning NATO supply truck after an attack by gunmen on the outskirts of Quetta on June 19, 2011. (Banaras Khan/AFP/Getty Images)

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Some of the U.S. weapons bound for U.S. and Afghan troops in Afghanistan are being stolen, landing instead in the hands of those they are meant to be used against, and fueling militant groups in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, Pakistani officials say.

These weapons — which are typically snatched from Afghan troops during raids or sold by them to the Pakistani Taliban after they defect, are easily available in black markets in Pakistan’s tribal regions.

Some weapons, along with other military-issue supplies, are also being seized by Taliban militants in attacks on NATO convoys passing through Pakistan on their way to resuply soldiers in Afghanistan. Although such raids have been taking place for years, the Pakistani Taliban appear to have widened the zone where they are willing to operate, attacking NATO trucks in major cities as well, including in the capital of Islamabad as recently as June 9.

An estimated one-third of the supplies bound for U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan travel by land from Read more…

Should We Label GMO Foods?

June 22, 2011 Comments off

stopagingnow

A hundred years ago, pretty much all of the food Americans ate was essentially organic and local – and not surprisingly, much more nutritious. But with the advent of Big Agra and industrialized food production, we moved towards a food supply heavily modified for higher yields and higher profits. First came pesticides, which U.S. farmers began using just after World War II. Then came genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. The first genetically modified food crop was introduced in 1994, and since then, the introduction of new GMO crops has accelerated at an alarming rate.

Throughout these changes, very little consideration has been given to food labeling, and by and large, consumers have had no idea to what extent the food they buy is contaminated with pesticides or genetically modified. Ironically enough, we now label Read more…

Surprise! TSA Is Searching Your Car, Subway, Ferry, Bus, AND Plane

June 22, 2011 Comments off

motherjones

Scott Ableman/FlickrScott Ableman/FlickrThink you could avoid the TSA’s body scanners and pat-downs by taking Amtrak? Think again. Even your daily commute isn’t safe from TSA screenings. And because the TSA is working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol, you may have your immigration status examined along with your “junk“.

As part of the TSA’s request for FY 2012 funding, TSA Administrator John Pistole told Congress last week that the TSA conducts 8,000 unannounced security screenings every year. These screenings, conducted with local law enforcement agencies as well as immigration, can be as simple as checking out cargo at a busy seaport. But more and more, they seem to involve giving airport-style pat-downs and screenings of unsuspecting passengers at bus terminals, ferries, and even subways.

These surprise visits are part of the TSA’s VIPR program: Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response. The VIPR program first started doing searches in Read more…

War Evolves With Drones, Some Tiny as Bugs

June 21, 2011 Comments off

nytimes

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

A microdrone during a demo flight at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio — Two miles from the cow pasture where the Wright Brothers learned to fly the first airplanes, military researchers are at work on another revolution in the air: shrinking unmanned drones, the kind that fire missiles into Pakistan and spy on insurgents in Afghanistan, to the size of insects and birds.

The base’s indoor flight lab is called the “microaviary,” and for good reason. The drones in development here are designed to replicate the flight mechanics of moths, hawks and other inhabitants of the natural world. “We’re looking at how you hide in plain sight,” said Greg Read more…

Bernanke to Invent New Term for Printing Money

June 20, 2011 1 comment

inflation.us

When the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) reported their latest consumer price index (CPI) inflation data last week, everybody in the mainstream media worked tirelessly to spin the data in order to proclaim that U.S. price inflation is not a problem. Most articles in the media reported that inflation slowed in May due to falling gas prices. The truth is, gas prices rose last month and U.S. price inflation is spiraling out of control.  Price inflation based on the CPI on a year-over-year basis rose during the month of May to 3.57%, up from 3.16% in April, 2.68% in March, 2.11% in February, 1.63% in January, 1.5% in December, and 1.1% in November. The official rate of price inflation has more than tripled over the past 6 months. Yes, maybe the rate of Read more…

Nations to Spend $1 Trillion on Nukes, Group Says

June 20, 2011 Comments off

globalsecuritynewswire

The planet’s nine nuclear weapons states are anticipated in the next 10 years to expend $1 trillion on acquiring and updating their systems, a prominent nuclear disarmament organization said (see GSN, June 7).

The group Global Zero — whose goal is total nuclear disarmament no later than 2030 — calculated the nuclear weapons expenditure figures for China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States, the Financial Times reported. The organization is seeking to bring attention to the high price countries pay for their nuclear arsenals in a time of increasing government budget restraints.

Nuclear costs among the nine nations this year are estimated at $100 billion, with similar annual numbers anticipated throughout the decade, according to Global Zero.

The organization determined that nuclear arsenal expenditures take up roughly 9 percent of the countries’ total military spending; that percentage is anticipated to increase as traditional defense programs are curtailed in a number of the nations. Nuclear weapons spending encompasses research, development, weapons assessments and acquisitions.

“Spending will increase because of decisions by both nations to upgrade and replace,” Global Zero founder Bruce Blair said. “Modernization is progressing at such a pace we are seeing more spending on nuclear weapons than at any time since the Cold War.”

The group is to convene a two-day forum in London this week with participants including Russian Federation Council international affairs committee Chairman Mikhail Margelov, ex-Indian defense chief Jaswant Singh, ex-CIA intelligence agent Valerie Plame and multiple senior Chinese officials.

Global Zero wants to see other nuclear nations besides the United States and Russia take part in formal discussions on nuclear arms control.

The two former Cold War rivals together hold 95 percent of the planet’s nuclear weapons. They recently implemented a bilateral treaty that requires both sides to reduce their deployed stockpiles of strategic warheads to 1,550. U.S. President Obama has said he would like to see negotiations with Moscow for a treaty on tactical weapons begin in 2012 (see GSN, June 2; James Blitz, Financial Times, June 19).

CIA informants’ detention by Pakistan’s spy agency intensifies U.S-Pak edgy ties

June 16, 2011 Comments off

allvoices

CIA Director Leon Panetta

 

The detention of Pakistani informants, who helped the CIA by providing information prior to the raid that killed the Al Qaida leader, by Pakistan’s top intelligence agency has intensified the already tense relationship between the United States and Pakistan.

According to a report that appeared in the New York Times on Wednesday, Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) has detained five CIA informers who supplied information to CIA ahead of the raid the previous month in which the Al Qaida leader was killed.

One of the arrested CIA informants was reported to be a currently serving major in the rank of Pakistan Army. According to U.S authorities, the detained major took note of license plates of vehicles stopping over at the compound of Osama Bin Laden.

Meanwhile U.S officials have stated that Read more…

Solar Threat: We’ll Have Minutes to Respond; Government Plans Controlled Blackouts; Elite Contingency Plans

June 15, 2011 Comments off

shtfplan

While many will claim that solar storms are an unrealistic threat to our world, the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom aren’t taking any chances.

According to a report put together by Alex Thomas of The Intel Hub, the threat is not only real, but very likely, and could change the world as we know it from one day to the next:

In a stunning announcement, The United States and United Kingdom are likely set to began “controlled” power cuts in preparation of a giant solar storm.

The announcement by Thomas Bogdan, the director of the US Space Weather Prediction Centre, comes a week after a large scale solar flare released a massive amount of radiation and threatened to cause moderate disruption.

The solar flare on June 7th, 2011 was luckily pointed away from Earth but caused Read more…