SEX OFFENDERS BEWARE!!!!! thanks Petra Luna™/ Artist Warrior For The Abused!
Category: News and Politics

This is a repost from my freind Petra Luna™/ Artist Warrior For The Abused!

Red's Blog~Local, national and global efforts track sex offenders who prey on children.
Current mood: ..busy
Category: News and Politics

WASHINGTON - It is 11 a.m. on a Tuesday, a time when Internet chat room traffic is at its lowest.

Yet 57 people are logged into a room dedicated to "childslavesex." Eighty-one more are visiting the "youngersex" chat room, and 94 are engaged in the "dadanddaughtersex" Internet venue.

"This goes on 24-7," says FBI Supervisory Agent Matt Vilcek.

Vilcek should know.

He heads the FBI's Innocent Images National Initiative task force, a global effort to combat child pornography, train law enforcement officers across the world on both the ways of detection and the laws of prosecution, and, more importantly, try to rescue the children who are victimized daily to produce the images.

"The problem is exponential," Vilcek said. "It grows daily. It's a very challenging effort."

For as long as humans have existed, there have been those among us who view children, even babies, as objects of sexual desire. That, Vilcek says, is nothing new.

"Humanity has always had this issue," he said.

But the advent of the Internet has, in the words of a veteran federal prosecutor, "exploded" the crime into a societal issue so huge that it requires a host of agencies and a litany of initiatives to combat.

"I think we're certainly more aggressive in prosecuting these cases, but there's no doubt in my mind the Internet has exploded this," Knoxville Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles Atchley said. "Before, it was very difficult to obtain. You had to visit a location that was selling the material. What the Internet has done is enable individuals in their own homes to go out and look for this material. Now they've got the whole world of it at their fingertips. It's just a terrible problem, a terrible problem."

Among the efforts to battle it are the FBI's Innocent Images National Initiative, the U.S. Department of Justice's Project Safe Childhood, and the Knoxville Police Department's Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force.

Whatever the name, the goal is the same: hunt down those who kidnap, rape and torture children and those who buy, collect and catalog videos and photographs of the attacks.

"We will do whatever is legally possible to bring these people to justice," Vilcek vowed.

'It's what they do'

KPD Sgt. Scott Shepherd finds it hard to sleep after a day's work as supervisor over ICAC, a nationally renowned, statewide unit focused on sex offenders who target children.

"This stuff will weigh on you heavy," Shepherd said. "You know there are children out there being victimized. It's pressure."

Too many of us, agents contend, think "Girls Gone Wild" when we hear the words "child pornography," when we should be thinking "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood."

"People need to understand when we're talking about child pornography, we're not talking about a 16-year-old girl being photographed in a pose with her top off," Atchley said. "Some appear to be images of children no more than a year old engaged in actual sex acts, bound and tied up. I've seen images of 2- and 3-year-olds bound and tied, videos of them being gang-raped."

They are real children sometimes snatched from real streets in real neighborhoods both in the U.S. and abroad.

"We have run into the monsters, the people who are out there seeking to abduct children," Vilcek said.

Sometimes, these children are being victimized by those they once held dear, Knoxville FBI Supervisory Agent Rob Root noted.

"A lot of times it's familial relationships," Root said. "Sometimes it's neighbors. It's someone who has an ability to have contact with these children in private."

U.S. Attorney Russ Dedrick added, "A lot of these kids are just ruined for the rest of their lives."

Vilcek, a self-described farm boy from Pennsylvania, still finds himself shocked by what he's seen as a hunter of the predators who stalk children. Ask him why he does what he does, and he'll recall the child in the dog cage rescued by the FBI from a child pornography mill.

"I know what it feels like to walk in the door and see the environment these kids live in," he said. "Just one case of recovering a victim is worth it."

Local agents contend that too many of us believe child pornography and those who peruse it are harmless.

"A lot of people do believe that they're just looking at pictures when they actually are contact offenders," said KPD ICAC Investigator Chris Line.

Shepherd cited a study by Andres E. Hernandez, director of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons sex offender treatment program.

In that study, Hernandez found in 2000 that 62 child pornography convicts upon sentencing admitted molesting a total of 55 victims. After treatment, that same group fessed up to another 1,379 victims. In 2006, Hernandez reviewed another 155 child pornography offenders. At sentencing, the group admitted 75 total victims. After treatment, that same group confessed molesting another 1,702 victims.

"Eighty-five percent of the inmates were, in fact, contact sexual offenders, compared to only 26 percent known at the time of sentencing," Hernandez wrote.

"These guys are acting on their desires and victimizing children," Shepherd said.

Child pornography just "feeds their fantasies," Line added.

"They spend all day doing this," KPD ICAC Investigator Jay Levan said. "It's their lifestyle. It's what they do. If your passion is hunting, you don't want to just sit around reading about it. You want to go out and do it. It's the same thing with these suspects."

'We'll find a way'

"Do you have a master, Ashley?" the stranger asks.

It has been less than a minute since Vilcek logged into a secret world on the Internet where degenerates can go to find twisted talk of sexual deviance, images of brutal attacks on children and actual live victims.

"It's a relatively unflashy, low-tech way of connecting, but there's no monitoring," Vilcek explained. "It's the Wild West of the chat room environment."

Child pornography often is sold or traded through relationships developed among the chatters.

Vilcek, tucked inside a nondescript office building in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C., is posing as 13-year-old Ashley. He says nothing sexual. He doesn't need to.

"We've already been contacted," Vilcek said. "There's four people looking for us to chat."

Within minutes, a man posing as a teenage girl sends "Ashley" a video of himself dancing naked in front of a webcam. Vilcek immediately scans it for subtle clues of the man's identity and location.

"We'll find a way (to identify the perpetrator) no matter what measures the average subject takes to conceal their identity," Vilcek said. "Our undercovers have to play a part, and we train them in techniques and terminology."

But hunting what the FBI and ICAC calls "travelers," people who use the Internet to lure children out of their homes and into situations of sexual molestation, is a small part of what Vilcek's unit does.

His task force is bent not only on tackling child pornography and related crimes at home but abroad as well. So far, the group has offered training to some 50 lawmen from 20 countries.

"With the Internet, there are virtually no walls," Vilcek said. "So law enforcement cannot have any walls either. We're able to reach across those boundaries. We teach (foreign lawmen) about our laws. Many of these countries don't have these laws in place. As they stumble across people in other countries doing these bad things, we report to them, and they do the same with us. We've gone to Poland here recently. We've gone to Cypress. We've gone to Greece. We've gone to Paris. It's rare that we can do nothing in those countries.

"We target online groups, groups of distributors, Web sites that sell these images," he continued. "We branch out to our foreign partners across the globe."

Shepherd, Line, Levan and ICAC Investigators Tom Evans and Mel Pierce do the same sort of thing, only locally. Although much of the child pornography circulating in East Tennessee was produced overseas, investigators are finding a growing number of homegrown images, Atchley said.

"There is a whole lot of it that is made right here at home, Knox County, Jefferson County, Grainger County, Sevier County," he said.

For example, Atchley has prosecuted a Jefferson County grandfather who was raping his 8-year-old granddaughter and sharing photographs and videos of the attacks online. He also sent to prison for life a Knox County sports referee who broadcast live over the Internet his abuse of young players.

'It's just a matter of time'

Catching the bad guys is important. Identifying their victims is crucial.

"We will see these minors essentially grow up being abused," Vilcek said. "It's very frustrating for investigators who work in that environment to see that progression. We try to focus on identifying these victims."

Sometimes the FBI even turns to media heavyweights such as Oprah Winfrey, Bill O'Reilly and "America's Most Wanted" host John Walsh to try to put a name to the faces in these images. It is rarely successful, though.

"A lot of times these children are lost in a sea of child pornography images," Vilcek said.

There also have been problems with laws crafted to combat the problem. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional parts of a federal child pornography law that made it illegal to possess images designed entirely via computer that involved no child at all.

Knoxville defense attorney Gregory P. Isaacs led a similar and successful charge against the constitutionality of a Tennessee law. As a result, the state Legislature fixed the flawed law and used the opportunity to boost the penalties for someone convicted of sexual exploitation of a minor.

"We needed a good law to prosecute bad people," Isaacs said.

But that was just one battle in what is proving to be a veritable war that, like the fight against illegal drug use, can seem unwinnable.

"It's difficult, if not impossible, to break the urge," Dedrick said. "We've been told by offenders they're likely to do this again if we don't take them off the streets."

"Offenders now are younger," Evans added. "The victims are younger. There're more sadistic images. We're seeing much more videos."

And that war takes a toll on the soldiers who daily march into battle.

"You become very aware of the evil that's out there," Vilcek said. "You're never going to be able to figure out why. You can't focus on the why."

But folks like Levan still find cause to punch the time clock every day.

"The thought that you're going to get them, put them away, that helps a lot," Levan said.

For those deviants who, so far, have escaped prosecution, Root offered this warning.

"Be listening for the door," he said. "It's just a matter of time."

Jamie Satterfield~ Knoxville News Sentinel

"This Advice Mr , Bush Shut The Hell Up"

Special Comment

By Keith Olbermann

Anchor, 'Countdown' - MSNBC

The war in Iraq, your war, Mr. Bush, is about how you accomplished the derangement of two nations, and how you helped funnel billions of taxpayer dollars to lascivious and perennially thirsty corporations like Halliburton and Blackwater, and how you sent 4,000 Americans to their deaths for nothing.

Posted 16/05/08

Part 1



Part 2



Transcript

President Bush has resorted anew to the sleaziest fear-mongering and mass manipulation of an administration and public life dedicated to realizing the lowest of our expectations. And he has now applied these poisons to the 2008 presidential election, on behalf of the party at whose center he and John McCain lurk.

Mr. Bush has predicted that the election of a Democratic president could "eventually lead to another attack on the United States." This ludicrous, infuriating, holier-than-thou and most importantly bone-headedly wrong statement came during a May 13 interview with Politico.com and online users of Yahoo.

The question was phrased as follows: "If we were to pull out of Iraq next year, what's the worst that could happen, what's the doomsday scenario?"

The president replied: "Doomsday scenario of course is that extremists throughout the Middle East would be emboldened, which would eventually lead to another attack on the United States. The biggest issue we face is, it's bigger than Iraq, it's this ideological struggle against cold-blooded killers who will kill people to achieve their political objectives."

Mr. Bush, at long last, has it not dawned on you that the America you have now created, includes "cold-blooded killers who will kill people to achieve their political objectives?" They are those in — or formerly in — your employ, who may yet be charged some day with war crimes.

Through your haze of self-congratulation and self-pity, do you still have no earthly clue that this nation has laid waste to Iraq to achieve your political objectives? "This ideological struggle," Mr. Bush, is taking place within this country.

It is a struggle between Americans who cherish freedom, ours and everybody else's, and Americans like you, sir, to whom freedom is just a brand name, just like "Patriot Act" is a brand name or "Protect America" is a brand name.

But wait, there's more: You also said "Iraq is the place where al-Qaida and other extremists have made their stand and they will be defeated." They made no "stand" in Iraq, sir, you allowed them to assemble there!

As certainly as if that were the plan, the borders were left wide open by your government's farcical post-invasion strategy of "they'll greet us as liberators." And as certainly as if that were the plan, the inspiration for another generation of terrorists in another country was provided by your government's farcical post-invasion strategy of letting the societal infra-structure of Iraq dissolve, to be replaced by an American viceroy, enforced by merciless mercenaries who shoot unarmed Iraqis and then evade prosecution in any country by hiding behind your skirts, sir.

Terrorism inside Iraq is your creation, Mr. Bush!

***

It was a Yahoo user who brought up the second topic upon whose introduction Mr. Bush should have passed, or punted, or gotten up and left the room claiming he heard Dick Cheney calling him.

"Do you feel," asked an ordinary American, "that you were misled on Iraq?"

"I feel like — I felt like, there were weapons of mass destruction," the president said. "You know, 'mislead' is a strong word, it almost connotes some kind of intentional — I don't think so, I think there was a — not only our intelligence community, but intelligence communities all across the world shared the same assessment. And so I was disappointed to see how flawed our intelligence was."

Flawed.

 

You, Mr. Bush, and your tragically know-it-all minions, threw out every piece of intelligence that suggested there were no such weapons.

You, Mr. Bush, threw out every person who suggested that the sober, contradictory, reality-based intelligence needed to be listened to, and fast.

You, Mr. Bush, are responsible for how "intelligence communities all across the world shared the same assessment."

You and the sycophants you dredged up and put behind the most important steering wheel in the world propagated palpable nonsense and shoved it down the throat of every intelligence community across the world and punished anybody who didn't agree it was really chicken salad.

And you, Mr. Bush, threw under the bus, all of the subsequent critics who bravely stepped forward later to point out just how much of a self-fulfilling prophecy you had embraced, and adopted as this country's policy in lieu of, say, common sense.

The fiasco of pre-war intelligence, sir, is your fiasco.

You should build a great statue of yourself turning a deaf ear to the warnings of realists, while you are shown embracing the three-card monte dealers like Richard Perle and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

That would be a far more fitting tribute to your legacy, Mr. Bush, than this presidential library you are constructing as a giant fable about your presidency, an edifice you might as well claim was built from "Iraqi weapons of mass destruction" because there will be just as many of those inside your presidential library as there were inside Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

 

***

Of course if there is one overriding theme to this president's administration it is the utter, always-failing, inability to know when to quit when it is behind. And so Mr. Bush answered yet another question about this layered, nuanced, wheels-within-wheels garbage heap that constituted his excuse for war.

"And so you feel that you didn't have all the information you should have or the right spin on that information?"

"No, no," replied the President. "I was told by people, that they had weapons of mass destruction …"

People? What people? The insane informant "Curveball?" The Iraqi snake-oil salesman Ahmed Chalabi? The American snake-oil salesman Dick Cheney?

"I was told by people that they had weapons of mass destruction, as were members of Congress, who voted for the resolution to get rid of Saddam Hussein.

"And of course, the political heat gets on and they start to run and try to hide from their votes."

 

Mr. Bush, you destroyed the evidence that contradicted the resolution you jammed down the Congress's throat, the way you jammed it down the nation's throat. When required by law to verify that your evidence was accurate, you simply resubmitted it, with phrases amounting to "See, I done proved it" virtually written in the margins in crayon.

You defied patriotic Americans to say "The Emperor Has No Clothes," only with the stakes — as you and the mental dwarves in your employ put it — being a "mushroom cloud over an American city."

And as a final crash of self-indulgent nonsense, when the incontrovertible truth of your panoramic and murderous deceit has even begun to cost your political party seemingly perpetual congressional seats in places like North Carolina and Mississippi, you can actually say with a straight face, sir, that for members of Congress "the political heat gets on and they start to run and try to hide from their votes" — while you greet the political heat and try to run and hide from your presidency, and your legacy — 4,000 of the Americans you were supposed to protect — dead in Iraq, with your only feeble, pathetic answer being, "I was told by people that they had weapons of mass destruction."

***

Then came Mr. Bush's final blow to our nation's solar plexus, his last reopening of our common wounds, his last remark that makes the rest of us question not merely his leadership or his judgment but his very suitably to remain in office.

"Mr. President," he was asked, "you haven't been golfing in recent years. Is that related to Iraq?"

"Yes," began perhaps the most startling reply of this nightmarish blight on our lives as Americans on our history. "It really is. I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the Commander in Chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be as — to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal."

 

Golf, sir? Golf sends the wrong signal to the grieving families of our men and women butchered in Iraq? Do you think these families, Mr. Bush, their lives blighted forever, care about you playing golf? Do you think, sir, they care about you?

You, Mr. Bush, let their sons and daughters be killed. Sir, to show your solidarity with them you gave up golf? Sir, to show your solidarity with them you didn't give up your pursuit of this insurance-scam, profiteering, morally and financially bankrupting war.

Sir, to show your solidarity with them you didn't even give up talking about Iraq, a subject about which you have incessantly proved without pause or backwards glance, that you may literally be the least informed person in the world?

Sir, to show your solidarity with them, you didn't give up your presidency? In your own words  "solidarity as best as I can" is to stop a game? That is the "best" you can do?

Four thousand Americans give up their lives and your sacrifice was to give up golf! Golf. Not "Gulf" — golf.

And still it gets worse. Because it proves that the president's unendurable sacrifice, his unbearable pain, the suspension of getting to hit a ball with a stick, was not even his own damned idea.

"Mr. President, was there a particular moment or incident that brought you to that decision, or how did you come to that?"

"I remember when [diplomat Sergio Vieira] de Mello, who was at the U.N., got killed in Baghdad as a result of these murderers taking this good man's life. And I was playing golf, I think I was in central Texas, and they pulled me off the golf course and I said, it's just not worth it any more to do."

 

Your one, tone-deaf, arrogant, pathetic, embarrassing gesture, and you didn't even think of it yourself? The great Bushian sacrifice — an Army private loses a leg, a Marine loses half his skull, 4,000 of their brothers and sisters lose their lives — and you lose golf, and they have to pull you off the golf course to get you to just do that?

If it's even true.

Apart from your medical files, which dutifully record your torn calf muscle and the knee pain which forced you to give up running at the same time — coincidence, no doubt — the bombing in Baghdad which killed Sergio Vieira de Mello of the U.N. and interrupted your round of golf was on Aug. 19, 2003.

Yet CBS News has records of you playing golf as late as Oct. 13 of that year, nearly two months later.

Mr. Bush, I hate to break it to you 6 1/2 years after you yoked this nation and your place in history to the wrong war, in the wrong place, against the wrong people, but the war in Iraq is not about you.

It is not, Mr. Bush, about your grief when American after American comes home in a box.

It is not, Mr. Bush, about what your addled brain has produced in the way of paranoid delusions of risks that do not exist, ready to be activated if some Democrat, and not your twin Mr. McCain, succeeds you.

The war in Iraq, your war, Mr. Bush, is about how you accomplished the derangement of two nations, and how you helped funnel billions of taxpayer dollars to lascivious and perennially thirsty corporations like Halliburton and Blackwater, and how you sent 4,000 Americans to their deaths for nothing.

It is not, Mr. Bush, about your golf game! And, sir, if you have any hopes that next Jan. 20 will not be celebrated as a day of soul-wrenching, heart-felt thanksgiving, because your faithless stewardship of this presidency will have finally come to a merciful end, this last piece of advice:

When somebody asks you, sir, about Democrats who must now pull this country back from the abyss you have placed us at ...

When somebody asks you, sir, about the cooked books and faked threats you foisted on a sincere and frightened nation …

When somebody asks you, sir, about your gallant, noble, self-abnegating sacrifice of your golf game so as to soothe the families of the war dead.

This advice, Mr. Bush: Shut the hell up!
© 2008 MSNBC Interactive

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Dear friends,

Below are one-paragraph excerpts of important news articles you may have missed. These news articles include revealing information on the suspicious circumstances under which Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the "D.C Madam," was found dead, extreme profiteering by the world's largest food corporations while millions starve, the forced resignation of an EPA official who tried to make Dow Chemical Corporation clean up its toxic sites, and more. Each excerpt is taken verbatim from the major media website listed at the link provided. If any link fails to function, click here. Key sentences are highlighted for those with limited time. By choosing to educate ourselves and to spread the word, we can and will build a brighter future.

With best wishes,
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‘D.C. Madam’ Is Found Dead, Apparently in a Suicide
May 2, 2008, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/02/washington/02madam.html

A woman convicted two weeks ago of running a Washington call-girl ring that catered to the capital’s power elite was found dead ... and the authorities said she had apparently hanged herself. The body of the woman, Deborah Jeane Palfrey, 52, was found in a shed at her mother’s home ... about 20 miles northwest of Tampa. The police said Ms. Palfrey had left a notebook containing at least two suicide notes and other messages to her family, but they did not give additional details. Ms. Palfrey, who had quickly become known as the D.C. Madam when the case against her began unfolding, apparently hanged herself from the shed’s ceiling with nylon rope, the police said. Her mother, Blanche Palfrey, discovered the body. Blanche Palfrey had no sign that her daughter was suicidal. A federal jury in Washington found Ms. Palfrey guilty on April 15 of running a prostitution service that catered to powerful figures including Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana. She was convicted of money laundering, using the mail for illegal purposes and racketeering. Ms. Palfrey had vowed that she would never go to prison. When she disclosed telephone records last year that revealed the identity of some of her clients, she told ABC: “I’m sure as heck not going to be going to federal prison for one day, let alone four to eight years, because I’m shy about bringing in the deputy secretary of whatever. Not for a second. I’ll bring every last one of them in if necessary.” Despite that threat, Ms. Palfrey’s trial concluded without the testimony of either Mr. Vitter or another particularly prominent client, Randall L. Tobias. One of the escort service’s employees was Brandy Britton, a former professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who was arrested on prostitution charges in 2006. Ms. Britton committed suicide in January before she could go to trial.

Note: Isn't it interesting that this woman who brought about the resignations of top government officials is found dead in an apparent suicide? See the revealing AP article on this available here. Ms. Palfrey also stated publicly that she would never commit suicide, though at one point she mentioned that she might be "suicided." To verify this, click here.

Multinationals make billions in profit out of growing global food crisis
May 4, 2008, The Independent (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers)
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/multinationals-make-billions...

Giant agribusinesses are enjoying soaring earnings and profits out of the world food crisis which is driving millions of people towards starvation. And speculation is helping to drive the prices of basic foodstuffs out of the reach of the hungry. The prices of wheat, corn and rice have soared over the past year driving the world's poor – who already spend about 80 per cent of their income on food – into hunger and destitution. The World Bank says that 100 million more people are facing severe hunger. Yet some of the world's richest food companies are making record profits. Monsanto last month reported that its net income for the three months up to the end of February this year had more than doubled over the same period in 2007, from $543m (£275m) to $1.12bn. Its profits increased from $1.44bn to $2.22bn. Cargill's net earnings soared by 86 per cent from $553m to $1.030bn over the same three months. And Archer Daniels Midland, one of the world's largest agricultural processors of soy, corn and wheat, increased its net earnings by 42 per cent in the first three months of this year from $363m to $517m. The operating profit of its grains merchandising and handling operations jumped 16-fold from $21m to $341m. Similarly, the Mosaic Company, one of the world's largest fertiliser companies, saw its income for the three months ending 29 February rise more than 12-fold, from $42.2m to $520.8m, on the back of a shortage of fertiliser. Benedict Southworth, director of the World Development Movement, called the escalating earnings and profits "immoral."

Note: For a cornucopia of reports on corporate corruption from reliable, verifiable sources, click here.

9/11 theorist not curtailing his research
May 3, 2008, Deseret News (One of Utah's leading newspapers)
http://deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,695275973,00.html

Sixteen months ago, Brigham Young University and Steven Jones parted ways, but he said this week he isn't bitter about the academic divorce. He certainly hasn't curtailed his volatile research on the collapse of the three World Trade Center towers after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In fact, Jones is the lead author of a paper on the collapses published April 18 in a civil engineering journal. Most importantly, he is preparing several more papers that, if they pass peer review and are published, will give him the peace of mind that his case reached the public. Jones was energized in November when he ... received a response from the national lab charged by Congress to determine why and how the towers collapsed. The letter contained the following phrase: "We are unable to provide a full explanation of the total collapse." "That," Jones said, "really was progress. It made me believe we could talk with them." It is striking. After producing a 10,000-page report, the National Institute of Standards and Technology can't explain the collapse. Meanwhile, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has said that its best hypothesis for the fall of the third tower, WTC 7 — diesel fuel stored in the building caused fires that collapsed the building — has a "low probability" of being correct. [Jones'] new peer-reviewed paper in the Open Civil Engineering Journal ... lays out 14 points of agreement Jones and his colleagues have with the official government reports. "We're getting to a higher level of discussion with this paper," Jones said. The open paper can be found for free on the Web at www.bentham.org.

Note: For many revealing reports on the path-breaking work of renowned physicist Steven Jones to shed light on what really happened on 9/11, click here.

EPA official ousted while fighting Dow
May 2, 2008, Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/green/chi-epa-official-resigns

The battle over dioxin contamination in [the Saginaw, Mich.] region had been raging for years when a top [EPA] official turned up the pressure on Dow Chemical to clean it up. On Thursday, following months of internal bickering over Mary Gade's interactions with Dow, the [Bush] administration forced her to quit as head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Midwest office. Gade told the Tribune she resigned after two aides to national EPA administrator Stephen Johnson took away her powers as regional administrator and told her to quit or be fired by June 1. Gade has been locked in a heated dispute with Dow about long-delayed plans to clean up dioxin-saturated soil and sediment that extends 50 miles beyond its Midland, Mich., plant into Saginaw Bay and Lake Huron. Gade, appointed ... regional EPA administrator in September 2006, invoked emergency powers last summer to order the company to remove three hotspots of dioxin near its Midland headquarters. She demanded more dredging in November, when it was revealed that dioxin levels along a park in Saginaw were 1.6 million parts per trillion, the highest amount ever found in the U.S. Dow then sought to cut a deal on a more comprehensive cleanup. But Gade ended the negotiations in January, saying Dow was refusing to take action necessary to protect public health and wildlife. Dow responded by appealing to officials in Washington, according to heavily redacted letters the Tribune obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. On Thursday, Gade said of her resignation: "There's no question this is about Dow. I stand behind what I did and what my staff did. I'm proud of what we did."

Note: For many powerful reports on government corruption from the major media, click here.

White House Blocked Rule Issued to Shield Whales
May 1, 2008, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/30/AR2008043003189.html

White House officials for more than a year have blocked a rule aimed at protecting endangered North Atlantic right whales by challenging the findings of government scientists, according to documents obtained by the Union of Concerned Scientists. The documents, which were mailed to the environmental group by an unidentified National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration official, illuminate a struggle that has raged between the White House and NOAA for more than a year. In February 2007, NOAA issued a final rule aimed at slowing ships traversing some East Coast waters to 10 knots or less during parts of the year to protect the right whales, but the White House has blocked the rule from taking effect. North Atlantic right whales, whose surviving population numbers fewer than 400, are one of the most endangered species on Earth, and scientists have warned that the loss of just one more pregnant female could doom the species. Some shipping companies have opposed the NOAA proposal, saying slowing their vessels will cost the industry money. The documents, which House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) released yesterday, show that the White House Council of Economic Advisers and Vice President Cheney's office repeatedly questioned whether the rule was needed. Waxman, who sent a letter to the White House asking for an explanation, said the exchange "appears to be the latest instance of the White House ignoring scientists and other experts." Since NOAA initially proposed the regulation, at least three right whales have died from ship strikes and two have been wounded by propellers.

Note: For more reports on major threats to marine mammals, click here.

FDA warns Merck to fix vaccine plant problems
April 30, 2008, San Francisco Chronicle/Associated Press
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/04/30/financial/f084419D47.DTL

The Food and Drug Administration has ordered Merck & Co. to correct numerous manufacturing deficiencies at its main vaccine plant. The agency ... released a warning letter sent to Merck's chief executive, Richard T. Clark, that states FDA inspectors determined manufacturing rules are not being followed at the plant in West Point, Pa., just outside Philadelphia. The plant, which recalled two vaccines in December over sterility problems, makes a number of children's vaccines and four for adults. The nine-page letter states FDA found "significant objectionable conditions" in the manufacture of vaccines and drug ingredients during repeated inspections from Nov. 26 to Jan. 17. According to the heavily redacted warning letter, Merck officials didn't thoroughly investigate when vaccine batches inexplicably failed to meet specifications, even if batches had been distributed, and some combination measles-mumps-rubella shots that failed "visual inspection for critical defects" were distributed anyway. Production of two vaccines made at West Point — PedvaxHIB, to prevent Haemophilus influenza type B, and Comvax, a combination vaccine for Haemophilus B and hepatitis B — stopped last year and 1.2 million doses of them were recalled after a sterility problem was discovered in October. The plant also makes ProQuad, which protects children against measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox; hepatitis A, hepatitis B and meningitis vaccines for children and adults; and Gardasil, to protect young women against cervical cancer.

Note: For further revelations from reliable sources on the dangers of vaccines, click here.

Bush Aware of Advisers' Interrogation Talks
April 11, 2008, ABC News
http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/LawPolitics/Story?id=4635175

President Bush says he knew his top national security advisers discussed and approved specific details about how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to an exclusive interview with ABC News. "Well, we started to connect the dots in order to protect the American people," Bush told ABC News White House correspondent Martha Raddatz. "And yes, I'm aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved." As first reported by ABC News, the most senior Bush administration officials repeatedly discussed and approved specific details of exactly how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the CIA. The president had earlier confirmed the existence of the interrogation program run by the CIA in a speech in 2006. But before [ABC's original] report, the extraordinary level of involvement by the most senior advisers in repeatedly approving specific interrogation plans -- down to the number of times the CIA could use a certain tactic on a specific al Qaeda prisoner -- had never been disclosed. Critics at home and abroad have harshly criticized the interrogation program, which pushed the limits of international law and, they say, condoned torture. In the interview with ABC News, Bush defended the waterboarding technique used against KSM. "We had legal opinions that enabled us to do it," Bush said. "And no, I didn't have any problem at all trying to find out what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed knew." The president said, "I think it's very important for the American people to understand who Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was. He was the person who ordered the suicide attack -- I mean, the 9/11 attacks."

Note: For a transcript of the interview with President Bush on the Washington Post website, click here. For a powerful two-page summary of many unanswered questions about who really ordered the 9/11 attacks, click here.

What Power Looks Like
April 14, 2008 issue, Newsweek magazine
http://www.newsweek.com/id/130637

[In] speaking [with New York Federal Reserve Bank president Timothy] Geithner while I was doing the research for my recently published book Superclass, he sketched in fascinating detail how the world's power elite rallies when the markets quake. Recalling an earlier crisis in global securities markets that he helped to manage, Geithner said the Fed brought together the leaders of the world's 14 major financial firms, from five countries, representing 95 percent of all the activity in global markets. The Swiss were there, the Germans were there, the British were there. Goldman Sachs chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein "jokingly called them 'the 14 families,' like in 'The Godfather'," says Geithner. "And we said to them, 'You guys have got to fix this problem. Tell us how you are going to fix it and we will work out some basic regime.' You ... need a critical mass of the right players. It is a much more concentrated world." Geithner's description of the financial elite in crisis mode came many months before the recent meltdown of Bear Stearns, yet foreshadowed [it] in an uncanny way. The people ... described by Geithner, plus a few thousand more like them, not only in business and finance, but also politics, the arts, the nonprofit world and other realms, are part of a new global elite that has emerged over the past several decades. I call it the "superclass." They have vastly more power than any other group on the planet. Each of the members is set apart by his ability to regularly influence the lives of millions of people in multiple countries worldwide. Each actively exercises this power, and often amplifies it through the development of relationships with other superclass members.

Note: For many revealing stories from reliable sources on secret societies of the world's most powerful people, click here.

Albert Hofmann, the Father of LSD, Dies at 102
April 30, 2008, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/30/world/europe/30hofmann.html

Albert Hofmann, the mystical Swiss chemist who gave the world LSD, the most powerful psychotropic substance known, died ... at his hilltop home near Basel, Switzerland. He was 102. Dr. Hofmann first synthesized the compound lysergic acid diethylamide in 1938 but did not discover its psychopharmacological effects until five years later, when he accidentally ingested the substance that became known to the 1960s counterculture as acid. More important to him than the pleasures of the psychedelic experience was the drug’s value as a revelatory aid for contemplating and understanding what he saw as humanity’s oneness with nature. He earned his Ph.D. ... in 1929, when he was just 23. It was during his work on the ergot fungus, which grows in rye kernels, that he stumbled on LSD, accidentally ingesting a trace of the compound one ... afternoon in April 1943. Dr. Hofmann’s work produced other important drugs, including methergine, used to treat postpartum hemorrhaging, the leading cause of death from childbirth. But it was LSD that shaped both his career and his spiritual quest. “Through my LSD experience and my new picture of reality, I became aware of the wonder of creation, the magnificence of nature and of the animal and plant kingdom,” Dr. Hofmann told the psychiatrist Stanislav Grof during an interview in 1984. “I became very sensitive to what will happen to all this and all of us.” Dr. Hofmann became an impassioned advocate for the environment and argued that LSD, besides being a valuable tool for psychiatry, could be used to awaken a deeper awareness of mankind’s place in nature and help curb society’s ultimately self-destructive degradation of the natural world.

Doctor finds higher calling when death knocks
May 4, 2008, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/05/04/BA8MUSL28.DTL

Dr. Frank Artress looked down at his fingers. His nail beds were turning blue. He was running out of oxygen near the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro. A cardiac anesthesiologist, Artress knew the signs of high altitude pulmonary edema. He knew there was a 75 percent chance that he would perish on Africa's highest peak. Artress led his wife to a rock, and they sat together above the clouds. Then it hit him. He wasn't afraid to die; he was ashamed. He had lived only for himself - practicing medicine in a Modesto hospital, traveling with his wife, purchasing luxury vacation homes and collecting art. He felt as if he had nothing to show for his 50 years. He felt as if his life had been a waste. In that moment, Artress and his wife realized they were living for the wrong reasons. In that moment, everything changed. Some people dream of giving up the trappings of success and starting life anew, with a purpose, with a social conscience. For Artress and his wife, the idea suddenly seemed real. That day on Mount Kilimanjaro would lead the Modesto doctor and his wife to leave their comfortable life in California to become bush doctors, dedicated to easing the heartbreak of Africa. They knew their decision was the right one when they returned to their creekside ranch home in Modesto. The things they normally missed when they were away - the matching silver sports cars, the signed Mirós and Picassos, the full-throttle espresso machine and the swimming pool - no longer had any charm. That week, Artress quit his job at Doctors Medical Center in Modesto and Gustafson gave notice as an educational psychologist for the public schools. Then they sold everything ... and made plans to return to the foot of Kilimanjaro to administer medical care as a way of repaying the community that saved Artress' life.

Note: This inspiring story should be read in its entirety.

Key Articles From Years Past

Songs for a Brighter Tomorrow
December 14, 2007, New York Times
http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/12/14/movies/14revo.html

Can singing change history? “The Singing Revolution,” a documentary by James Tusty and Maureen Castle Tusty about Estonia’s struggle to end Soviet occupation, shows that it already has. The first part of “Revolution” provides a thumbnail sketch of 20th-century Estonian history, and it’s not pretty. This small nation was a satellite state of the former Soviet Union for much of that time, except for a brief period when the Germans controlled it. Under the Soviets, especially, Estonian culture was brutishly suppressed, but it welled up every five years in July, when Estonians gathered in Tallinn for the Estonian song festival, which often drew upward of 25,000 people. The images of these festivals are moving already; the force of the singers and the precision of their conductors are stunning to behold. But the emotion swells further when Estonians defy their occupiers by singing nationalist songs. This bold act reclaimed Estonian identity and set the stage for a series of increasingly daring rebellions under the Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who advocated glasnost and got more than he bargained for. Imagine the scene in “Casablanca” in which the French patrons sing “La Marseillaise” in defiance of the Germans, then multiply its power by a factor of thousands, and you’ve only begun to imagine the force of “The Singing Revolution.”

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