1,500 farmers commit mass suicide in India

Over 1,500 farmers in an Indian state committed suicide after being driven to debt by crop failure, it was reported today.

The agricultural state of Chattisgarh was hit by falling water levels.

“The water level has gone down below 250 feet here. It used to be at 40 feet a few years ago,” Shatrughan Sahu, a villager in one of the districts, told Down To Earth magazine

“Most of the farmers here are indebted and only God can save the ones who do not have a bore well.”

Mr Sahu lives in a district that recorded 206 farmer suicides last year. Police records for the district add that many deaths occur due to debt and economic distress.

In another village nearby, Beturam Sahu, who owned two acres of land was among those who committed suicide. His crop is yet to be harvested, but his son Lakhnu left to take up a job as a manual labourer.

His family must repay a debt of £400 and the crop this year is poor.

“The crop is so bad this year that we will not even be able to save any seeds,” said Lakhnu’s friend Santosh. “There were no rains at all.”

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Rabbi-in-chief: Barack Obama’s Jewish connection

Rabbi Capers Funnye is in a tiny minority in the US: he’s an African-American Jew. He’s also Michelle Obama’s cousin and has the ear of the US president. Zev Chafets meets the charismatic leader who wants mainstream Judaism to accept that Israelites don’t have to be white.

Rabbi Capers Funnye celebrated Martin Luther King Day this year in New York City at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, a mainstream Reform congregation, in the company of about 700 fellow Jews – many of them black.

The organisers of the event had reached out to four of New York’s Black Jewish synagogues in the hope of promoting Jewish diversity, and they weren’t disappointed. African-American Jews, largely from Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens, many of whom had never been in a predominantly white synagogue, made up about a quarter of the audience. Most of the visiting women wore traditional African garb; the men stood out because, though it was a secular occasion, most kept their heads covered. But even with your eyes closed you could tell who was who: the black Jews and the white Jews clapped to the music on different beats.

Funnye, the chief rabbi of the Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation in Chicago, one of the largest black synagogues in America, was a featured speaker that night. The overflowing audience came out in a snowstorm to hear his thoughts about two men: the Rev Dr. Martin Luther King Jr and Barack Obama. King is Funnye’s hero. Obama, whose inauguration was to take place the following day in Washington, is family – the man who married Funnye’s cousin Michelle.

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MIDEAST: Aid Rots Outside Gaza

AL-ARISH, Egypt, Apr 15 (IPS) – Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of aid intended for the Gaza Strip is piling up in cities across Egypt’s North Sinai region, despite recent calls from the United Nations to ease aid flow restrictions to the embattled territory in the wake of Operation Cast Lead.

Food, medicine, blankets, infant food and other supplies for Gaza’s 1.5 million people, coming from governments and non-governmental agencies around the world, are being stored in warehouses, parking lots, stadiums and on airport runways across Egypt’s North Sinai governorate.

Egypt shares a 14-kilometre border with Gaza that has been closed more or less permanently since the Islamist movement Hamas took control of the territory in June 2007.

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Cybersecurity Act would give president power to ‘shut down’ Internet

A recently proposed but little-noticed Senate bill would allow the federal government to shut down the Internet in times of declared emergency, and enables unprecedented federal oversight of private network administration.

The bill’s draft states that “the president may order a cybersecurity emergency and order the limitation or shutdown of Internet traffic” and would give the government ongoing access to “all relevant data concerning (critical infrastructure) networks without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule, or policy restricting such access.”

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Thermite

A recent article published in the respected peer-reviewed Open Chemical Physics Journal by nine noted scientists offers incontrovertible proof that the dust from the Twin Towers and Building Seven of the World Trade Center contains small intact samples of Thermite.

Thermite is a highly explosive agent consisting mostly of aluminum and iron oxide, and is used to cut steel in building controlled demolitions, and is also used in welding and in military applications.

Using optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, X-ray energy dispersive spectroscopy, and differential scanning calorimetry, the scientists were able to determine that the Thermite present is of a specialized type called Nano-thermite or Superthermite. It burns hotter and has a lower ignition temperature than normal Thermite, and is produced at laboratories such as Lawrence Livermore, incidentally thought to be the same lab that produced the anthrax sent out shortly after 9/11.

Nano-thermite could not be accidentally present in dust samples collected at four different sites, nor could it be the result of clean-up operations at ground zero, as one of the samples was retrieved a mere ten minutes or so after the collapse of the second tower. All samples show the same consistency.

This would explain the streams of molten steel (not aluminum) falling from one of the towers, and the fact that steel remained molten in the rubble for more than a month after the event. There is no scientific explanation for this other than the use of Thermite, which can achieve temperatures of 3500 C, while under ideal conditions jet fuel can achieve just approximately 285 C. It would also explain the otherwise physically impossible near freefall speed of the three buildings, and how they were able to fall so homogeneously.

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You Are Being Lied to About Pirates

As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia’s seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish-stocks by over-exploitation – and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster and other sea-life is being stolen every year by vast trawlers illegally sailing into Somalia’s unprotected seas. The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods, and they are starving.

Who imagined that in 2009, the world’s governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy – backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China – is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labeling as “one of the great menace of our times” have an extraordinary story to tell — and some justice on their side.

Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the “golden age of piracy” – from 1650 to 1730 – the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage thief that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda-heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: pirates were often rescued from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can’t? In his book Villains of All nations, the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence to find out. If you became a merchant or navy sailor then – plucked from the docks of London’s East End, young and hungry – you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off for a second, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the Cat O’ Nine Tails. If you slacked consistently, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.
Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied against their tyrannical captains – and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls “one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century.” They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed “quite clearly – and subversively – that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal navy.” This is why they were popular, despite being unproductive thieves.

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Urgent: Breakthrough in the Danish press. Unexploded Nanothermite found in the WTC dust

Better late than never. The late news program on one of the two most respected Danish television channels (TV2) aired an interview with Chemist Dr. Niels H. Harrit. In it he explains the find of unexploded chips of compressed Nanothermite. This material is a highly  secretive and very expensive demolition explosive only used by the US army. The same schientists asked to investigate the collapse of the three WTC towers on 9/11 as organised in NIST are the same schientists involved in the development of Nanothermite. Sounds like a conflict of interest to me.

Injustices against Maori ‘need to be addressed’

Oh, and by the way, judging by how National and Act deal with advisory committees an all out war for those Maori seats in Auckland instead of another advisory board seems in perfect order to me.

The Waitangi Tribunal says several injustices against the Urewera people from 1865 to 1872 need to be addressed by the Crown, even though the tribes did not sign the Treaty.

The tribunal today issued part one of its report into Treaty of Waitangi claims made by people from Te Urewera, including Tuhoe.

It noted that these tribes did not sign the Treaty of Waitangi – because they were not given a chance to do so – and were effectively independent until at least 1865.

Dutch TV show exonerates Osama bin Laden

Sometimes I’m really proud to be Dutch. This is one of them. Lawyer Spong is a real life high profile lawyer and not some dippy just from law school. Good for the AVRO for bringing this on.

A Dutch TV jury has found Osama bin Laden not guilty of the Sept. 11 attacks.

In the conclusion Wednesday night to the show “Devil’s Advocate” on Dutch public broadcaster Nederland 2, the jury of two men and three women, along with the studio audience, ruled there was no proof bin Laden was the mastermind behind the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001.

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The best way to rob a bank is to own one

more about "The best way to rob a bank is to own one", posted with vodpod

Anybody’s guess how bad unemployment will get: English

Am I the only one or is this not something you don’t want to hear from the finance minister either?

Well let me tell you something Bill, it will get very bad. In fact if you really want to know how bad it will get I suggest you talk to your smarmy boss, he was there and made his money selling the crap that is now collapsing our world economic system. Think about that when the plebs drags you out of your limo to the guillotine in oh, the next year or so.

With some indicators pointing towards unemployment rates pushing 10 per cent, Finance Minister Bill English says “it is anyone’s guess” how bad it will get.

Treasury has warned that the recession, which started in January 2008, would last at least until March 2010.

The outlook, delivered yesterday, was more pessimistic than previously, with unemployment picked to be higher than the previous 7.2 per cent worst case scenario – leaving a further 60,000 out of work by next year.

A business opinion survey released today by New Zealand Institute of Economic Research (NZIER) made further grim reading.

The survey found that when seasonally adjusted the net balance of firms reporting a fall in their own activity worsened to 47 per cent in the March quarter.

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Let’s start with this one: Unexploded Nanothermite found in the WTC dust

Circumstances beyond my control

Dear readers,

Due to circumstances beyond my control I have not been able to post over the last week.
I apologise for this because I know that many of you have come to rely on this humble blog for information outside of the mainstream media.

As of tomorrow I hope to resume blogging. It may be a bit sketchy at first but I hope that within two weeks I will be up to normal speed.

Kia ora and peace to you all.

Trav

G20: protestor dies

This is so sad and he won’t be the last I’m afraid.

A protestor has died during clashes with riot police at anti-G20 demonstrations in London’s financial centre.

London’s Metropolitan police said the man had collapsed on the street in London’s financial district.

He was looked at by two police officers who called an ambulance.

Police said they had to move the man after protesters hurled bottles at them.

He was pronounced dead at the hospital.

Police did not give a possible cause of death.

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G20 Protesters Storm Bank And Clash With Cops

This is what it looks like when people wake up to the ugly truth. Bankers have been on a rampage for the last twenty years and people are finding out. This could go very ugly. And just in case you think this was just a small demonstration think again. This was thousands of people.

When are the New Zealanders understand that they’ve elected a fox into their chicken coop?

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