Really worth a watch.

DuPont vs. the World: Chemical Giant Covered Up Health Risks of Teflon Contamination Across Globe


Transcript here

News, views and opinions from the Alternative Media ... week ending September 11

9/11 Conspiracy Theory .... a short fable


James Bradley at ConsortiumNews
North Korea’s Understandable Fears

North Korea carried out its fifth nuclear test on Friday, drawing condemnation from President Obama and a charge from the Pentagon that the test was a “serious provocation.” Ho-hum, here we go again.

Every year, America pays its vassal-state South Korea huge sums of U.S. taxpayer money to mount 300,000-man-strong military “games” that threaten North Korea. North Koreans view images that never seem to make it to U.S. kitchen tables: hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of U.S. armaments swarming in from the sea, hundreds of tanks and thousands of troops – their turrets and rifles pointed north – and nuclear-capable U.S. warplanes screaming overhead.

But when a young dictator straight out of central casting responds to U.S. threats with an underground test on North Korea’s founding day, it’s the number-one story on the front page of the New York Times.....
Let’s connect some dots. Washington and their note takers in the American press constantly tell us that crazies in Pyongyang and Tehran are nuclear threats. The misplaced, but easily sold, fears of the “North Korean missile threat” and the “Iran missile threat” allows the Pentagon to install “defensive” missile systems in South Korea and Eastern Europe which actually amount to offensive systems targeting Beijing and Moscow (by making first strikes against China and Russia more feasible).....

UK High Court to Look Into British Arms Sales to Saudi Over Yemen Deaths: https://t.co/t8KuGdIJXM via @SputnikInt

— Maureen Callahan (@MaureenCallaha2) September 12, 2016

From ZeroHedge
US-Trained Special Ops Fighter Is The Islamic State's New Top Commander In Iraq

Just days after the news hit that ISIS' main propaganda officer, Mohammad al-Adnani, one of the Islamic State's most prominent leaders, the second in command of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as well as the unofficial spokesman of the terrorist organization, was killed (with a scandal promptly erupting between the US and Russia over who had taken him out), the power vacuum that formed at the top of the Islamic State has been promptly filled, after former Tajik Special Forces colonel Gulmurod Khalimov became the top ISIS battlefield commander in Iraq, after defecting last year and swearing jihad against the West....

....What makes the ascent of Khalimov particularly embarrassing for the US is that The former paramilitary unit commander of the Tajikistan armed forces received his battlefield training from American advisors and even came to the United States on several occasions to receive special counterterrorism training through the US State Department’s Diplomatic Security/Anti-Terrorism Assistance program. ....

Wayne Madsen at StrategicCulture
Obama-Duterte Blow Up: What the Corporate Media Doesn’t Get

The explanation by the Western corporate media, which caters to a very basic secondary school level of education, about the reasons behind the recent war of words between U.S. President Barack Obama and Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, had little to do with the leader of the Philippines calling Obama a «Putang ina» or «son of a whore» in Tagalog. The breakdown in relations between the Philippines, a former and much-abused American colony, and the United States is based on renewed Philippines nationalism, a disgust by Duterte for the selective human rights agenda of the Obama administration, and the Philippines leader’s antipathy for those schooled in Muslim beliefs in neighboring Indonesia.

Duterte knows full well that Obama prayed in a mosque and recited from the Koran in his early childhood years at a quasi-Islamic state school in Jakarta. And for Duterte, a former mayor of Davao City in Mindanao, -- a southern Philippines island plagued by Saudi-financed Abu Sayyaf Group Wahhabist terrorism nurtured from radicalized mosques across the Sulu Sea in Indonesia -- Obama’s upbringing in Southeast Asia is very germane.

Duterte’s reference to Obama’s mother was not uttered in a vacuum of history. Duterte fully understands Stanley Ann Dunham Obama-Soetoro’s role in the aftermath of the 1965 bloody Muslim- and Central Intelligence Agency-backed coup that toppled Indonesia’s secular president, Sukarno. The coup, in which Obama’s Indonesian stepfather, Lieutenant Colonel Lolo Soetoro, participated as a brutal thug out to identify and execute as many Communists and ethnic Chinese Indonesians as possible, was staffed out of the U.S. embassy in Jakarta.

In 1967, Obama’s mother took young Barack Obama to join her war criminal husband in Jakarta. After her arrival in the country with the world’s largest Muslim population, Obama’s mother worked for the CIA-linked U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) fanning out across central Javanese villages with orders to collect as many names of Communists as possible......

....Instead, Duterte is a fiery pragmatist who is on guard against Obama and the neoconservative war hawks and Wahhabi and Salafist accommodators who dominate America’s CIA and State Department. Duterte and his supporters know fully well that the bloody CIA purge of PKI members and sympathizers, along with ethnic Chinese, in Indonesia would not have been possible without the support of Indonesia’s Sunni Muslim hierarchy – a group in which Obama’s mother and stepfather were in total lockstep.....

Joon Ian Wong at Quartz
Norway is furious with Facebook and its algorithms for “censoring” an iconic war photo
A ruckus has erupted in Norway over Facebook’s repeated removal of an iconic 1972 war photograph of a naked young girl fleeing a napalm attack in Vietnam. Facebook has also suspended users who uploaded it. Things have come to a head today after Norway’s largest newspaper devoted its front page to an open letter to Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.

The letter, written by Aftenposten’s editor-in-chief, Espen Egil Hansen, accuses Zuckerberg of “abusing” his role as “the world’s most powerful editor.” Hansen wrote: “The media have a responsibility to consider publication in every single case. This may be a heavy responsibility … This right and duty, which all editors in the world have, should not be undermined by algorithms encoded in your office in California.”

Norway’s prime minister, Erna Solberg, also posted the iconic photo to her Facebook page today (Sept. 9) to protest “censorship” by the social network. “I say yes to a healthy, open and free debate on the internet,” she wrote in Norwegian. “But I say no to this form of censorship.” Her photo was later removed by Facebook, according to a subsequent post by Solberg. She posted a version of the photo with nudity blacked out. “What Facebook does by removing images of this kind, good as the intentions may be, is to edit our common history,” she wrote.....

8 soldiers killed as suicide car blast hits police station in Yemen: ADEN， Yemen， Sept. 11 (Xinhua) -- A suic... https://t.co/5oiwwEeZuc

— Yemen News Links (@dlyemennews) September 11, 2016

From Off-Guardian
why we’re covering 9/11 fifteen years on

....We aren’t interested in simply erecting new certitudes to replace the used ones. We aren’t claiming “Bush did it” or “Israel did it” or “the Saudis did it”, or indeed “Bin Laden did it.” We want to take a long and dispassionate look at the evidence for what actually happened that day, and give space, as our remit dictates, to those opinions and facts that tend to be silenced in the mainstream.

On 9/11 three steel-framed high-rise buildings collapsed completely at near free-fall speed allegedly due to fires – which, if true, makes them the only steel-framed high-rises in construction history to have ever done this. Rationally and objectively, this is something worth examining, as unique events always are. Did the government-appointed enquiry by the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST) do a thorough job in explaining why this unique event occurred? Or did it do what government-appointed enquiries usually do and fudge? Do we have answers or evasions?

For some reason these questions are routinely avoided, even by those who are willing to ask similar questions about WMDs or Syrian chemical weapons or Chilcot. The fear of the label “conspiracy theorist” deters too many of us – which of course is just what it was intended to do.....

The real danger for Russia

#cdnpoli #TOpoli The real danger for Russia lies in Russia’s desire for Western acceptance" Yup! https://t.co/RFVjkGDpdr via @ForPolJournal

— MariaS Nunes (@Dodocanspell) September 4, 2016

Robert Parry at ConsortiumNews
UN Team Heard Claims of ‘Staged’ Chemical Attacks

United Nations investigators encountered evidence that alleged chemical weapons attacks by the Syrian military were staged by jihadist rebels and their supporters, but still decided to blame the government for two incidents in which chlorine was allegedly dispersed via improvised explosives dropped by helicopters.

In both cases, the Syrian government denied that it had any aircraft in the areas at the times of the purported attacks, but the U.N. team rejected that explanation with the curious argument that Syria failed to provide flight records to corroborate the absence of any flights. Yet, if there had been no flights, there would be no flight records.

The U.N. team also dismissed out of hand the possibility that jihadist rebels who had overrun some air bases and thus had operational helicopters at their disposal might have used them as part of a staged event designed to incriminate the Damascus regime and thus justify U.S. or other outside military intervention.

Another problem with the U.N. team’s findings is that the home-made chlorine bombs had minimal military value, inflicting relatively few casualties and only a handful of deaths.

Why the Syrian government, which was under intense international pressure regarding alleged chemical weapons use and was in the process of surrendering its stockpile of such weapons, would have jerry-rigged a handful of homemade bombs and dropped them for no discernible military effect makes little sense.

However, since Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has been thoroughly demonized over his harsh reaction to an uprising that began in 2011, pretty much any accusation against him – no matter how unlikely or implausible – is widely accepted in the mainstream Western media and political circles. In other words, the U.N. team was under pressure to reach a guilty verdict.....

Craig Murray at his blog
Thought is Dangerous to the USA

I have been refused entry clearance to the USA to chair the presentation of the Sam Adams Award to CIA torture whistleblower John Kiriakou and to speak at the World Beyond War conference in Washington DC. Like millions of British passport holders I have frequently visited the USA before and never been refused entry clearance under the visa waiver programme.....

....It is worth noting that despite the highly critical things I have published about Putin, about civil liberties in Russia and the annexation of the Crimea, I have never been refused entry to Russia. The only two countries that have ever refused me entry clearance are Uzbekistan and the USA. What does that tell you?....

Mrs Merkel defeated in her home region. Huge leap by anti-immigration AFD. #Germany turning? https://t.co/j0coPit8w7

— ?????? ????? (@KanchanGupta) September 4, 2016

Corey Schink at SottNet
The Easters: A case study in psychopathy and ponerization

....On April 6th, 1986, a series of bombs were detonated in a Berlin dance hall. The result was the deaths of US marines and the opportunity Reagan had been waiting for to strike Gaddafi. About a week later the US Air Force, having to bypass France due to pressure from French politicians, rained missiles down on Gaddafi's house, murdering his adopted Palestinian child. There was no evidence that Libya was involved in the terrorist attack, let alone justification for murdering an innocent child in response. As was revealed decades later, the allegation against Libya over the Berlin bombing was false, another staged event to provide justification for murder in broad daylight.

Gaddafi survived that attempt, but the US was always going to try again. In 1988 there were the Lockerbie bombings, and once again Gaddafi was fingered as the man responsible for the attacks, despite massive evidence to the contrary:

    British MP: Lockerbie 'evidence' against Libyans was planted by CIA
    Leaked documents: Lockerbie evidence 'was tampered with, destroyed and overlooked'
    BBC probe casts doubt on Lockerbie evidence

Fortunately for Gaddafi, Francis A. Boyle smelled a rat. A prominent international lawyer, Boyle effectively issued the international equivalent of a restraining order against the US. The night before US jets were poised to strike the country the motions were filed, and the US backed down. Clearly the international community had not yet lost its collective mind, and such a legal injunction was capable of working. As the decades went by it was clear that individuals within the US were ready to make sure such restraint would not work again.

By 2011, not only had Gaddafi survived repeated Western assaults, he had overseen a massive increase in the living standards and social rights of the Libyan population, including free health care, education, and women's rights that included free childcare and payment for raising children. Gaddafi wanted to emancipate Africa from Western corporate and imperial interests. Libya, the most prosperous African democracy, was a beacon of freedom in an increasingly dark world. Something had to be done to crush him and the Libyan people. ....

Pope Francis declares Mother Teresa a saint https://t.co/uK2vDA8eJz pic.twitter.com/06lXMIDZmY

— euronews (@euronews) September 4, 2016

Andrei Akulov at StrategicCulture
US Faces Major Setback As Europeans Revolt Against TTIP

France wants to halt thorny EU-US trade talks on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) as President Francois Hollande underlined there would be no deal until after President Barack Obama leaves office in January. Matthias Fekl, the French minister for foreign trade, has said his country will call for an end to the deal. France has been sceptical about the TTIP from the start and has threatened to block the deal, arguing the US has offered little in return for concessions made by Europe. All 28 EU member states and the European parliament will have to ratify the TTIP before it comes into force.

The statements came just a couple of days after German economy minister Sigmar Gabriel had said talks for TTIP had de facto failed. Gabriel, who leads Germany’s centre-left Social Democratic party and is vice-chancellor in the coalition government, said Europe mustn’t submit to the American proposals. ....

Prof Michel Choussudovsky at GlobalResearch
US-NATO-Turkey Invasion of Northern Syria: CIA “Failed” Turkey Coup Lays Groundwork for Broader Middle East War?
 

In mid-July, President Erdogan pointed his finger at the CIA, accusing US intelligence of having supported a failed coup directed against his government. Turkish officials pointed to a deterioration of US-Turkey relations following Washington’s refusal to extradite Fethullah Gülen, the alleged architect of the failed coup.

Erdogan’s Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag was categorical:

    “If the US does not deliver (Gulen), they will sacrifice relations with Turkey for the sake of a terrorist”

Public opinion was led to believe that relations with the US had not only deteriorated, but that Erdogan had vowed to restore “an axis of friendship” with Moscow, including “cooperation in the defence sector”. This was a hoax....

....The failed coup was indeed supported by the CIA, but the failure was coordinated with President Erdogan. It was an intelligence op which was meant to fail and mislead public opinion.....

Zika virus ... here's an example of how the powers-that-be create a problem to make $s from the solution.  EVIL INCARNATE !!

#cdnpoli #tcot #TOpoli Meet yr rulers who r grateful 2 WaPo, NYT, Time n others 4 hiding the Zika secret for 40 yrs https://t.co/p1GTleuDbP

— MariaS Nunes (@Dodocanspell) September 5, 2016

Aram Mirzael at TheSaker
The latest development in northern Syria

...It is worthy of notice that just before the Turkish incursion, the Kurdish YPG and their police forces “Asayish” were attacking the Syrian government forces in the city of Al-Hasakah, and despite numerous attempts at a ceasefire by the Syrian government, the Kurdish forces refused and declared their intention to fully claim Al-Hasakah for themselves. This could also explain why Syria and Iran have been neglecting the fact that Turkish forces are attacking the YPG/SDF as well. Indeed both Syria and its allies have previously tried to cooperate with the SDF or at least remain neutral towards them, yet recent events have shown that they answer to Washington rather than taking an independent stance towards the conflict. This was very much clear when the SDF spokesman Talal Silo said in an interview that “in Syria, the Americans forbid us from talking to Russia”. [4]...

From ZeroHedge
40,000 Students In Limbo, 8,000 Employees Fired As ITT Suddenly Shuts Down

The long-running tragic saga of ITT Education Services, which was established nearly 50 ago and operates the ITT Technical Institutes for-profit college chain, finally came to a end this morning with both a bang and a whimper, when it announced that it is shutting down effective immediately, leaving the fate of 40,000 students currently enrolled in limbo, and some 8,000 workers without a job.

The company said the closure is due to an investigation and sanctions by the U.S. Department of Education.

"It is with profound regret that we must report that ITT Educational Services, Inc. will discontinue academic operations at all of its ITT Technical Institutes permanently after approximately 50 years of continuous service," the company stated Tuesday. "Effective today, the company has eliminated the positions of the overwhelming majority of our more than 8,000 employees."

As previously reported,  ITT Tech stopped enrolling new students on August 29, just a few days after it was cut off from a significant amount of federal funding by the government. ITT's collapse was catalyzed when the Department of Education effectively killed the company two weeks ago, when it told the company on August 25 that it couldn’t enroll new students who use federal financial aid. The school accused federal officials of forcing the closure and denying it due process. The company has been the subject of state and federal probes for various reasons, including its recruitment tactics, lending practices and job placement figures.

Among the measures imposed, ITT was been ordered to pay $152 million to the department within 30 days to cover student refunds and other liabilities in case the company closes. The chain, based in Indiana, is still paying another $44 million demanded by the department in June for the same reason.....

Third blast in Kabul, after earlier suicide bombings killed 24 https://t.co/b2k0g92XHG

— Natasha Fatah (@NatashaFatah) September 5, 2016

From RT
Times reporter abducted and shot in Syria says his kidnapper now US-backed rebel

A Times reporter who was kidnapped and twice shot in the leg in Syria claims to have recognized his abductor on a recent Facebook video, which shows him in the ranks of a US-backed “moderate” opposition rebel group.

Journalist Anthony Loyd was captured on his way from Syria to Turkey along with his colleague, photographer Jack Hill, not far from the Syrian town of Tal Rafat in 2014, a week after they had started covering the situation in Aleppo.
It was with some surprise watching a video of a victorious band of western-backed rebels that I noticed the face of America’s newest ally in the war against ISIS in Syria,” Loyd wrote in Britain’s Times newspaper on Saturday.

The Facebook video of a victory celebration by a CIA-vetted rebel group in the border town of al-Rai supposedly showed Hakim Abu Jamal, also known as Hakim Anza, or Abdel Hakim al-Yaseen....

Daisy Luther at her blog
Louisiana Officials Demand That Self-Reliant Locals Stop Surviving the Flood Without Permission

Around the world, governments have recently been issuing an unsettling call for their citizens to become more self-reliant. Just this week, the governments of both Germany and Czechoslovakia warned that people should be  “be prepared for the worst case possible scenario.”

But here in the United States, just the opposite is happening. Our government seems to have an unquenchable thirst for cracking down on those who take responsibility for themselves. There is an abundance of evidence of this in Louisiana.

The southern state has been hit with the worst flooding in over 500 years.

While the final numbers won’t be known for some time, Gov. John Bel Edwards’ office has estimated 60,646 houses were damaged and 30,000 people rescued; other people escaped on their own. FEMA says 109,398 people or households have applied for housing help, and 25,000 National Flood Insurance Program claims have been filed. The American Red Cross called it the worst natural disaster since Hurricane Sandy struck New Jersey in 2012.

This massive disaster was all but ignored by the mainstream media, since it didn’t fit the current agenda of divisiveness and racial tension. So what did the folks in Louisiana do?....

Not so "deranged" anymore... https://t.co/K8l5Egv6XF

— Sarah Palin (@SarahPalinUSA) September 12, 2016

The Living Matrix

Very interesting vid.  Worth a watch.  There's so much we don't know of our physical world and how we can live in peace and harmony of both body and mind. Instead of researching into such sciences for the benefit of mankind, the powers-that-be prefer to pour money into WMD to create disharmony, wars, death and misery.

News, views and opinions ... all from the more believable Alternative Media. Week ending May 8

From SputnikNews
Once a Shining Example in the Middle East, Turkey is No Longer Secular

Following the Turkish government’s decision to sentence two journalists for publishing images of the Prophet Muhammad, Kemal Okuyan speaks with Radio Sputnik’s Loud & Clear to consider the question of whether Turkey is still a secular state.

"They are being accused of insulting the holy beliefs of Turkish people," Okuyan, a journalist with SoL newspaper, tells Loud & Clear, referring to two reporters with Cumhuriyet, who illustrated articles with satirical images of the Prophet Mohammed from controversial French humor magazine Charlie Hebdo.
"The images were not insulting anything, but it was against terror…there was nothing related to it insulting religion or what they call in Turkish courts 'insulting the holy beliefs of people.'"

Charging journalists with crimes of insulting religions is shift away from the secular government in place prior to the administration of current President  Erdogan.

"Turkey is normally a secular country. For 15 years the [Justice Development Party] AKP government systematically changed the political system in Turkey," Okuyan says....

Corey Schink at SOTT net
Silencing Libya: NATO returns to the scene of the crime

NATO displayed its truly destructive and sadistic nature when it obliterated Libya 5 years ago. Those who expose what happened, and what is still occurring there, are 'soft-killed'.

What began in 2011 with a violent assault against Libyans ended in a NATO-requested and UN-approved 'no-fly zone' that resulted in a massacre of unprecedented proportions. Nicholas Kristol at the New York Times had the audacity to claim that Libyans were running around shouting, as bombs fell on their heads, "Thank you, America!" The murder and mayhem was necessary, we were told, to 'protect civilians' from their leader. A glorious and benevolent act of kindness, the 'humanitarian intervention' would usher in a new 'civilized' regime and 'up-lift' ordinary Libyans.

In reality, an entire population was killed, maimed and terrorized while NATO and its 'rebels' displayed apparent enjoyment at tearing the country apart.

When NATO left and the bulk of 'Islamist' mercenaries were moved on to Syria, Libya was left mired in civil war hell. At which point the West changed its narrative - no longer was the intervention a 'triumph of Western values'; now it was 'a regrettable mistake'. The utility of this change in narrative lies in the fact that they're now saying they'll have to go back and 'fix the mess' (that they made). It's like the psychopath returning to the scene of its crime.

But they have no intention of 'fixing' anything - rather, they want to make sure the victim has no chance of recovering and telling her side of the story. ....

On the Zika virus, Prof Francis Doyle makes us a little wiser. Always try to remember this: Today's conspiracy sounding statements become tomorrow's facts. Many of us don't want to believe that our own fellow beings can be so maliciously devious and grotesquely murderous.... and that's because we ourselves would never ever think of killing other human beings. Unfortunately, the powers-that-be, being psychopaths, don't think or act like us .  Power corrupts, etc.etc.

Ron Paul at InstituteForPeaceAndProsperity
Drafting Women Means Equality in Slavery

Last week the House Armed Services Committee approved an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act requiring women to register with Selective Service. This means that if Congress ever brings back the draft, women will be forcibly sent to war.

The amendment is a response to the Pentagon’s decision to allow women to serve in combat. Supporters of drafting women point out that the ban on women in combat was the reason the Supreme Court upheld a male-only draft. Therefore, they argue, it is only logical to now force women to register for Selective Service. Besides, supporters of extending the draft point out, not all draftees are sent into combat. 

Most of those who opposed drafting women did so because they disagreed with women being eligible for combat positions, not because they opposed the military draft. Few, if any, in Congress are questioning the morality, constitutionality, and necessity of Selective Service registration. Thus, this debate is just another example of how few of our so-called “representatives” actually care about our liberty. 

Some proponents of a military draft justify it as “payback” for the freedom the government provides its citizens. ....

.... Changing the people’s attitude toward the warfare state and its propaganda organs is the only way to return to a foreign policy of peace and commerce with all. ...

Do you sometimes get the feeling that the "Anglo" powers are protesting far too much and almost always, very unreasonably over anything to do with Russia?  Do you sometimes get a feeling that the "Anglo" powers AND Russia belong to the same club and are just putting up a show of pretending to be enemies to hoodwink us the sheeple?
Anything is possible!

Edward Snowden at the Intercept
Inside the Assassination Complex

Whistleblowing Is Not Just Leaking — It’s an Act of Political Resistance
"I’ve been waiting 40 years for someone like you.” Those were the first words Daniel Ellsberg spoke to me when we met last year. Dan and I felt an immediate kinship; we both knew what it meant to risk so much — and to be irrevocably changed — by revealing secret truths.

One of the challenges of being a whistleblower is living with the knowledge that people continue to sit, just as you did, at those desks, in that unit, throughout the agency, who see what you saw and comply in silence, without resistance or complaint. They learn to live not just with untruths but with unnecessary untruths, dangerous untruths, corrosive untruths. It is a double tragedy: What begins as a survival strategy ends with the compromise of the human being it sought to preserve and the diminishing of the democracy meant to justify the sacrifice.

But unlike Dan Ellsberg, I didn’t have to wait 40 years to witness other citizens breaking that silence with documents. Ellsberg gave the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and other newspapers in 1971; Chelsea Manning provided the Iraq and Afghan War logs and the Cablegate materials to WikiLeaks in 2010. I came forward in 2013. Now here we are in 2016, and another person of courage and conscience has made available the set of extraordinary documents that are published in The Assassination Complex, the new book out today by Jeremy Scahill and the staff of The Intercept. (The documents were originally published last October 15 in The Drone Papers.)

We are witnessing a compression of the working period in which bad policy shelters in the shadows, the time frame in which unconstitutional activities can continue before they are exposed by acts of conscience. And this temporal compression has a significance beyond the ......

It's gonna be a fun US Election.  A Conman vs A Conwoman ... unless Bernie Sanders, the naive nice guy, against all odds, somehow wins the Democratic nomination.
Whoever gets to the WH, I for one, am looking at it as another nail being hammered into the Empire's coffin because none of the three, including the nice guy, have the ability to turn back tides, leave alone the tidal waves heading towards the USA.

Patrick Henningsen at GlobalResearch
Aleppo Ceasefire: ‘US Ploy to Buy Time for Terrorist Reinforcements’

t’s now clearer than ever: The US are leading a dirty war, under the table, in Syria. This is the true backdrop of the stage play in Geneva, where US diplomats are providing cover and buying time for CIA and Pentagon covert operations on the ground in Syria.

What the US State Department said yesterday is very telling, and should be a clear guide to anyone about what Washington DC’s actual agenda is in Syria:

    “We look to Russia… to press for the Assad regime’s compliance with this effort, and the United States will do its part with the opposition,” Wednesday’s statement said. Russia and Iran are the primary backers of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, while the United States heads a group of regional and European countries supporting the opposition to his rule.”

Given the fact that the CIA (and the British) have both been working with these very forces – providing logistical support, weapons, and special forces training, and that it was also revealed yesterday that the ....

Jason Ditz at AntiWar
ISIS Kills US Navy SEAL, Overruns Northern Iraq Town
Defense Secretary Confirms Soldier Killed in 'Direct Combat'

ISIS forces attacked and overran the northern Iraqi town of Tel Asqof, near the major ISIS city of Mosul, with a number of suicide vehicle bombers forcing their way in through Kurdish forces, and fighting heavily. Among the slain in what officials are confirming is “direct combat” was a US Navy SEAL, Charles Keating IV.
This is the third US soldier killed in fighting on the ground in Iraq since the latest war began in 2014, despite repeated assurances from the Obama Administration that there would be “no boots on the ground” in Iraq whatsoever.

Despite those repeated pledges, some 5,000 US troops are presently in Iraq, and a growing number of them are on the front lines. They may not officially be labeled “combat troops,” but the reality of their situation is unmistakable, and Pentagon officials have repeatedly confirmed that many are in fact routinely engaging in combat....

Harleen Gambhir at UnderstandingWar
ISIS’s Campaign in Libya:

Key Takeaway: ISIS is executing a sophisticated, multi-front campaign against Libya’s oil facilities, demonstrating the organization’s growing capability abroad. President Obama reportedly ruled out significant military intervention against the group as of February 18. The administration opted to continue intermittent strikes against ISIS leaders in Libya instead, such as the strike on an ISIS leader in western Libya on February 19. This surgical approach is unlikely to defeat the group, which maintains more than 5,000 fighters and is reinforced by leadership sent from Iraq and Syria. Libyan ground forces are also unlikely to expel ISIS from its areas of control. ISIS’s safe haven in Libya will allow it to survive even if it is defeated in Iraq and Syria.  ISIS will use its Libyan base to exacerbate regional disorder and likely to attack Europe.

ISIS has executed an aggressive campaign to take over territory in the midst of Libya’s post-revolution civil war. ISIS deployed a contingent of 300 Libyan ISIS militants from eastern Syria to spearhead the creation of a new ISIS affiliate in Libya in mid-2014 as part of a larger strategy to seize terrain and exacerbate disorder outside of Iraq and Syria. ISIS established this affiliate in Sirte, on the central Libyan coast, in early 2015 and has since advanced outward from the city, capturing population centers and establishing checkpoints to its east, west, and south. ISIS has exploited the seams between the participants in Libya’s civil war and established itself amidst the conflict’s frontlines, taking over territory when no local forces are positioned to defend it. This approach mirrors ISIS’s military expansion and development of safe havens in Syria and Yemen, demonstrating the threat posed by the regional adoption of ISIS’s way of war.... 

From Telesur
Hypocritical Brazil Fraud Probe Targets Rousseff, Ignores Temer
President Dilma Rousseff and her allies continue to face disproportionate scrutiny over alleged fraud compared to her corrupt rivals.

As the Brazilian Senate continues to consider whether to give the green light to the impeachment process against President Dilma Rousseff, public prosecutors have turned up the heat on the ruling Workers’ Party and requested an investigation into the head of state and her predecessor Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva while the heavyweights behind the destitution proceducre remain untouched despite being embroiled major corruption scandals...

Strange isn't it that the Empire goes to the other side of the world pretending to fight their jihadi creations there while jihadis are at the doorstep in Mexico? Do you think the Empire is well aware of what's happening in their own backyard and letting it fester for some perverse reason?
From JudicialWatch
Cartels Help Terrorists in Mexico Get to U.S 
to Explore Targets; ISIS Militant Shaykh Mahmood Omar Khabir Among Them

Mexican drug traffickers help Islamic terrorists stationed in Mexico cross into the United States to explore targets for future attacks, according to information forwarded to Judicial Watch by a high-ranking Homeland Security official in a border state. Among the jihadists that travel back and forth through the porous southern border is a Kuwaiti named Shaykh Mahmood Omar Khabir, an ISIS operative who lives in the Mexican state of Chihuahua not far from El Paso, Texas. Khabir trained hundreds of Al Qaeda fighters in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen and has lived in Mexico for more than a year, according to information provided by JW’s government source.

Now Khabir trains thousands of men—mostly Syrians and Yemenis—to fight in an ISIS base situated in the Mexico-U.S. border region near Ciudad Juárez, the intelligence gathered by JW’s source reveals. Staking out U.S. targets is not difficult and Khabir actually brags in an Italian newspaper article published last week that the border region is so open that he “could get in with a handful of men, and kill thousands of people in Texas or in Arizona in the space of a few hours.” Foreign Affairs Secretary Claudia Ruiz, Mexico’s top diplomat, says in the article that she doesn’t understand why the Obama administration and the U.S. media are “culpably neglecting this phenomenon,” adding that “this new wave of fundamentalism could have nasty surprises in store for the United States.”

This disturbing development appears on the Open Source Enterprise, the government database that collects and analyzes valuable material from worldwide print, broadcast and online media sources for the U.S. intelligence community. Only registered federal, state and local government employees can view information and analysis in the vast database and unauthorized access can lead to criminal charges. Updated data gathered on Khabir reveals he’s 52 years old and was ordered to leave Kuwait about a decade ago over his extremist positions. Khabir is currently on ISIS’s (also known as ISIL) payroll and operates a cell in an area of Mexico known as Anapra, according to the recently obtained information. ....

Rebecca Gordon at TomDispatch
Exhibit One in Any Future American War Crimes Trial 

...These acts, in other words, are considered beyond the pale when Donald Trump suggests them, but here’s the strangeness of it all: what The Donald is only mouthing off about, a perfectly real American president (and vice president and secretary of defense, and so on) actually did.  Among other things, under the euphemistic term “enhanced interrogation techniques,” they ordered the CIA to use classic torture practices including waterboarding (which, in blunter times, had been known as “the water torture”).  They also let the U.S. military loose to torture and abuse prisoners in their custody.  They green-lighted the CIA to kidnap terror suspects (who sometimes turned out to be perfectly innocent people) off the streets of cities around the world, as well as from the backlands of the planet, and transported them to the prisons of some of the worst torture regimes or to secret detention centers (“black sites”) the CIA was allowed to set up in compliant countries.  In other words, a perfectly real administration ordered and oversaw perfectly real crimes.  (Its top officials even reportedly had torture techniques demonstrated to them in the White House.)

At the time, the CIA fulfilled its orders to a T and without complaint. A lone CIA officer spoke out publicly in opposition to such a program and was jailed for disclosing classified information to a journalist.  (He would be the only CIA official to go to jail for the Agency’s acts of torture.)  ....

Go to the 17:15 mark in the vid below to listen to Father John Dear talking about Father Dan Berrigan, fervent antiwar activist who passed away last week. Chances are he will probably be canonized a few years from because his legacy should  not be forgotten.

Joe Lauria at ConsortiumNews
If Russia Had ‘Freed’ Canada

As the United States plans to move thousands of NATO troops to Russia’s borders and continues to bolster a fiercely anti-Russian regime in neighboring Ukraine, the official line in Washington and its subservient corporate media is that beneficent America is simply seeking to curtail Moscow’s “aggression.” But the U.S. government and media might look at things quite differently if the shoe were on the other foot.

What, for instance, would the U.S. reaction be if Russia instead had supported the violent overthrow of, say, Canada’s government and assisted the new Ottawa regime’s “anti-terrorist operations” against a few rebellious “pro-American” provinces, including one that voted 96 percent in a referendum to reject the new Russian-backed authorities and attach itself to the U.S.?
If the U.S. government tried to help these embattled “pro-American” Canadians – and protect the breakaway province against the Russian-installed regime – would Washington see itself as the “aggressor” or as simply helping people resist anti-democratic repression? Would it view Russian troop movements to the U.S. border as a way to stop an American “invasion” or rather an act of “aggression” and provocation by Russia against the United States?

The Ukraine Reality
Before playing out this hypothetical scenario, let’s look at the actual scene in Ukraine today as opposed to ....

Paul Craig Roberts at his blog
A Dire Future

Do you remember all the hopes Americans had for Obama when we elected him to his first term? Painful memories. He betrayed the voters on every one of his promises. There was no change, except for the worst as Obama went on to become one of the most vicious war criminals in world history. Despite his horrific record, we re-elected him, only to have US economic policy turn against the people in order to bail out at our expense the mega-banks and the One Percent.

Now Obama is coercing Asia and Europe to turn the governments of their countries over to rapacious American corporations empowered by TPP and TTIP to subordinate all interests to their profits.....

When man screws with Nature, Nature returns the favor and wins every single time

According to the below, the Zika virus or the kind of mosquito responsible for the virus, is originally from Uganda.
However, rumor has it that experiments to genetically modify the male species of this mosquito type, which were conducted with the  best of intentions, at an USA-run lab in Brazil,  might have gone astray,  because doncha know ... scientists always know what's best for us. 
Read the article below the vid to gauge why and how.

From AntiMedia:
Zika Outbreak Epicenter   in Same Area Where GM Mosquitoes Were Released in 2015
The World Health Organization announced it will convene an Emergency Committee under International Health Regulations on Monday, February 1, concerning the Zika virus ‘explosive’ spread throughout the Americas. The virus reportedly has the potential to reach pandemic proportions — possibly around the globe. But understandingwhy this outbreak happened is vital to curbing it. As the WHO statement said:

“A causal relationship between Zika virus infection and birth malformations and neurological syndromes … is strongly suspected. [These links] have rapidly changed the risk profile of Zika, from a mild threat to one of alarming proportions.
“WHO is deeply concerned about this rapidly evolving situation for 4 main reasons: the possible association of infection with birth malformations and neurological syndromes; the potential for further international spread given the wide geographical distribution of the mosquito vector; the lack of population immunity in newly affected areas; and the absence of vaccines, specific treatments, and rapid diagnostic tests […]

“The level of concern is high, as is the level of uncertainty.”

Zika seemingly exploded out of nowhere. Though it was first discovered in 1947, cases only sporadically occurred throughout Africa and southern Asia. In 2007, the first case was reported in the Pacific. In 2013, a smattering of small outbreaks and individual cases were officially documented in Africa and the western Pacific. They also began showing up in the Americas. In May 2015, Brazil reported its first case of Zika virus — and the situation changed dramatically.

Brazil is now considered the epicenter of the Zika outbreak, which coincides with at least 4,000 reports of babies born with microcephaly just since October.....

....Those genetically-modified mosquitoes work to control wild, potentially disease-carrying populations in a very specific manner. Only the male modified Aedes mosquitoes are supposed to be released into the wild — as they will mate with their unaltered female counterparts. Once offspring are produced, the modified, scientific facet is supposed to ‘kick in’ and kill that larvae before it reaches breeding age — if tetracycline is not present during its development. But there is a problem.....

WHO wants $8.4+ B to aid MILLIONS of diseased and wounded Syrians ....

I see more than half that money giving the world new millionaires and just a piddly little going to the real needy .... the sick, wounded and dying Syrians.  What do you see?  
Our world has become so very corrupt that the poor, the helpless and especially the honest, have no chance of keeping afloat in its bloodied waters.  The disparity between the rich and poor continues to grow.
The warmongering heartless bastards advocating for wars are doing so for precisely the chance of making money off the miseries that war brings with it.  We the sheeple are manipulated by the warmongers to back their money-making schemes in the name of patriotism with the mantra of helping citizens of the targeted countries from the "dictators" ruling over them.

Oliver Holmes writing at Reuters:
One million people wounded, diseases spreading in Syria: WHO

One million people have been wounded during Syria's civil war and diseases are spreading as regular supplies of medicine fail to reach patients, the World Health Organization's Syria representative said.

A plunge in vaccination rates from 90 percent before the war to 52 percent this year and contaminated water have added to the woes, allowing typhoid and hepatitis to advance, Elizabeth Hoff said in an interview late on Thursday.

More than 200,000 people have been killed in Syria's conflict, which began in March 2011 with popular protests against President Bashar al-Assad and spiraled into civil war after a crackdown by his security forces.

"In Syria, they have a million people injured as a direct result of the war. You can see it in the country when you travel around. You see a lot of amputees," said Hoff. "This is the biggest problem."

She said a collapsed health system, where over half of public hospitals are out of service, has meant that treatments for diseases and injuries are irregular..........

..........More than 6,500 cases of typhoid were reported this year across Syria and 4,200 cases of measles, the deadliest disease for Syrian children, Hoff said.

There was just one reported case of polio, which can paralyze children within hours, in 2014 following a vaccination drive, but other new diseases appeared, including myiasis, a tropical disease spread by flies which is also known as screw-worm, with 10 cases seen in the outskirts of Damascus.....

.........The United Nations called on Thursday for more than $8.4 billion to help nearly 18 million people in need in Syria and across the region in 2015.

Hoff said that the WHO delivered more than 13.5 million treatments of lifesaving medicines and medical supplies in 2014, up nearly threefold from the year before..........

Canadian veterans made to wait half a year and more for mental health help

Canadians are supposedly getting the best health care possible, right?  WRONG!
If veterans who should be at the very front of the queue are made to wait for months on end, what do you think is the waiting time for the rest of the citizens?   

Lee Berthiaume writing at OttawaCitizen:
One in five Canadian veterans  suffering from a mental illness and injury is being forced to wait more than eight months before the government approves a request for help, Canada’s auditor general says.

In an explosive report Tuesday, Auditor General Michael Ferguson says bureaucratic red tape and other barriers are preventing hundreds of veterans from getting timely access to the mental health services they need.

“These delays may jeopardize a veteran’s stabilization and/or recovery,” the report says.

The finding appeard to confirm complaints voiced by a number of injured veterans in recent years. It will also turn up the heat on the Conservative government, which has faced a litany of criticism for its treatment of those who have served in uniform.

Ferguson takes specific aim at Veterans Affairs’ disability benefits program, which helps pay for various health services not covered by provincial health plans. These can include specialized psychological care, residential treatment and some medications.

About 15,000 veterans and serving military personnel were eligible to receive mental health support from Veterans Affairs through the program at the end of March. That number is expected to increase as more Afghan vets leave the military for civilian life in the coming years.

Ferguson’s report did find the government “has put in place important health supports for veterans,” including a rehabilitation program that was providing timely support to about 4,600 veterans with mental health conditions who had recently been released from the military.

“However, access to the disability benefits program – the program through which most veterans access mental health services – is slow, and the application process is complex,” the report reads.....

Liberia, Sierra Leone and Chad held back from attaining their economic freedom?

Watch the vid below from the 17 min mark and  see if it makes you wonder about the Ebola "opportunity" that has made the USA and UK send military personnel to a part of Africa the USA has long wanted to have military bases set up in,  more so because of the immense wealth under its soil and the excellent sea access for naval ports.

Long before the end of next year you are likely to hear that the USA and UK have set up military bases in at least 2 of the 4+ countries where supposedly "Ebola is raging" or "being controlled"  or "likely eradicated" according to our MSM and the WHO.

Over and above setting up the military bases, you can trust the USA and her allies to have signed tonnes of blackmail agreements with the elite in those countries promising to make them into billionaires for rights to the mineral wealth of their countries, which wealth belongs to all the people ....  but doncha know, only the few the Americans smile on will became billionaires and those people will likely be the biggies in the government bodies ... the rest will remain poor, uneducated and disease-ridden. 

I bet USA and the other Anglo nations were terrified that China's influence would overwhelm that part of Africa too and those countries would become immune to USA's bribes...... so, voila, Ebola the nasty virus was born.  

One has to also wonder how come only American medics operating in those countries are coming down with Ebola and not the Chinese nor the Cubans who have large teams in West Africa combating the virus.  Are their preventive measures better than the USA's or is everything blown up by the MSM in North America?

Long live false flags while shortening the lives of the innocent and the poor.

PTSD, Suicides and Psychological Toll on vets and their families

You might hear talk of veterans coming back destroyed in body and mind, but we seldom talk about what it does to their families, do we? That unpleasantness is kept hidden and the military families themselves are to be blamed for keeping things in the dark.  
The vid below is from 2 years ago.

 Jaeah Lee writing at MotherJones... Thu Jan. 17, 2013
Charts: Suicide, PTSD and the Psychological Toll on America's Vets
14 staggering stats about the invisible wounds of Iraq and Afghanistan......


Mac McClelland writing in Mother Jones January/February 2013 issue
Is PTSD Contagious?
It's rampant among returning vets—and now their spouses and kids are starting to show the same symptoms.
BRANNAN VINES HAS NEVER BEEN to war. But she's got a warrior's skills: hyperawareness, hypervigilance, adrenaline-sharp quick-scanning for danger, for triggers. Super stimuli-sensitive. Skills on the battlefield, crazy-person behavior in a drug store, where she was recently standing behind a sweet old lady counting out change when she suddenly became so furious her ears literally started ringing. Being too cognizant of every sound—every coin dropping an echo—she explodes inwardly, fury flash-incinerating any normal tolerance for a fellow patron with a couple of dollars in quarters and dimes. Her nose starts running she's so pissed, and there she is standing in a CVS, snotty and deaf with rage, like some kind of maniac, because a tiny elderly woman needs an extra minute to pay for her dish soap or whatever.

Part 2 here

Brannan Vines has never been to war, but her husband, Caleb, was sent to Iraq twice, where he served in the infantry as a designated marksman. He's one of 103,200, or 228,875, or 336,000 Americans who served in Iraq or Afghanistan and came back with PTSD, depending on whom you ask, and one of 115,000 to 456,000 with traumatic brain injury. It's hard to say, with the lack of definitive tests for the former, undertesting for the latter, underreporting, under or over-misdiagnosing of both. And as slippery as all that is, even less understood is the collateral damage, to families, to schools, to society—emotional and fiscal costs borne long after the war is over.

More banking scandals in Britain ....

the country that is preening itself to send soldiers yet again to Muslim lands and beyond.  Brits, just like the Americans have not learnt that making wars when the economy is in dire straits, does not help the floundering economy.  Wars probably helped oil the economy's machinations in the past .... now all they do is spell doom, nothing but. 

Ebola funnies

"Nice" rant .....

from Greg Hunter on Ebola, economy, Obamacare, etc.   Hah!

Who came first, the egg or the chicken?

MERS has been forgotten by our lovely MSM because MERS' home is Saudi Arabia and dontcha know the Saudis are our pals and we should never ever say or do anything to upset our pals.  
Ebola, presumably started somewhere in West Africa and none of those African countries nor that entire continent means anything to the powers-that-be when compared to the region of the Middle East.

From AlAkhbar:
Saudi Arabia said late on Wednesday   it had detected six new cases of the deadly Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in 24 hours, the biggest daily jump for months with officials blaming lax hospital procedures.

The recent surge in cases, now numbering 32 since the start of October, has been focused in Riyadh and the western city of Taif, but it remains far less extensive than an outbreak in April and May that infected hundreds.

MERS causes coughing, fever and sometimes pneumonia, killing around 40 percent of its victims. The vast majority of confirmed cases worldwide have been found in Saudi Arabia, where 786 people have been infected, of whom 334 have died.

Two of the new cases announced by the health ministry were in medical personnel, adding to concerns about the standard of infection control procedures in medical facilities. Three different Taif hospitals have been affected.........

Ron Paul .... a commonsense voice on Ebola

Ebola updates .... October 18 .... Cuba at forefront combating Ebola

If you like thinking for yourself, you gotta wonder how the almost 200 Cuban doctors and assistants have managed not to get infected themselves while in the land of the mighty Americans, medical staff don't have enough knowledge to keep themselves and others around them safe from the plague.

From ABCNews:
A leftist Latin American summit next week should generate more aid to fight Ebola, including additional Cuban doctors and support staff from other nations, the head of Cuba's effort to slow the disease said Friday.

Jorge Perez, the head of Cuba's top tropical medicine institute, said he expects the meeting of the socialist ALBA bloc hosted by Cuba and Venezuela in Havana on Monday to result in pledges of financial and human resources that can be sent to African nations trying to contain the Ebola outbreak.

Cuba has sent 165 doctors to Sierra Leone and plans to send 296 more to Liberia and Guinea, the largest commitment of medical personnel so far. Perez said Cuba is ready to send more doctors as long as there is enough funding and infrastructure to support them.

"What do I expect as a scientist from the summit? That the countries in attendance join the international effort against Ebola, for the protection not just of their countries but also to see how they can help those countries experiencing such difficult situations," he said.

"There are countries that have resources and can send money, but there are also those who can send human resources. It's not just doctors. We also need nurses, technicians."

He said he was certain that if there was money to fund the effort, Cuba could send more doctors, but he also called on other countries to send more of their own doctors and medical staff, and not just money and equipment.

Perez said the Cuban doctors were receiving their ordinary salaries from the communist government, while extra expenses such as the costs of lodging and transportation in Africa were being borne by the World Health Organization......

From YahooNews:
Cuba stands ready to cooperate    with the United States in the battle against Ebola, former leader Fidel Castro said in an article published Saturday.
Cuba is sending about 460 doctors and nurses to West Africa to help fight Ebola, an effort that was praised on Friday by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry......
......"With pleasure we will cooperate with U.S. personnel in that task," the 88-year-old ex-leader wrote in the Communist Party daily Granma. He said it would not be to seek peace between two countries long at odds, but "for the peace of the world."......

From GovtOfCanada NewsRelease:
Government of Canada ships Ebola vaccine    to World Health Organization
October 18, 2014 - Ottawa, ON -Public Health Agency of Canada
The Government of Canada will ship 800 vials of its experimental Ebola vaccine to the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, beginning with its first shipment on Monday, October 20, 2014.
The vaccine vials are being sent in three separate shipments, as a precautionary measure, due to the challenges in moving a vaccine that must kept at a very low temperature at all times.
The Public Health Agency of Canada is supplying the vaccine to the WHO in its role as the international coordinating body for the Ebola outbreak, so that the vaccine can be made available as an international resource......

From TelegraphUK:
France introduces Ebola screening at airport 
French authorities start checking the body temperatures of passengers arriving from Guinea as Air France staff demand the suspension of flights to the west African nation hit by the Ebola epidemic....

And, the most promising news of all is from ComputerWorld:
Researchers to meet with aid workers  to build Ebola-fighting robots
Nov. 7 meeting would explore use of robots to transport food, act as interpreters and even bury the dead
Robotics researchers from around the country are working together to come up with technology that could help fight the deadly Ebola outbreak.

Scientists are considering telepresence robots that could act as rolling interpreters, autonomous vehicles that could deliver food and medicine, and robots that could decontaminate equipment and help bury the victims of Ebola......

From DailyMailUK:
Mutant Ebola warning:  Leading U.S. scientist warns deadly virus is already changing to become more contagious 
Fears that the deadly virus could mutate and become even more contagious
Dr Peter Jahrling says amount of virus in patients is higher than expected
The U.S. scientist says new strain of Ebola may burn 'hotter and quicker' 
This would mean that the disease would spread more easily 
Comes as David Cameron urged EU to commit £800m to tackling virus 
UK is also stepping up Ebola checks with screening extended at airports
Manchester and Birmingham also set to screen passengers from West Africa 
But U.S. health experts say banning travellers entering U.S. from affected region would be a bad idea .....

From Reuters:
Congo lends a hand to fight Ebola, urges African solidarity
Democratic Republic of Congo plans to train more than 1,000 volunteers to help fight an Ebola epidemic raging across West Africa, even as it battles the last traces of an outbreak at home.
Having endured six previous outbreaks of the deadly virus in 40 years, Congolese officials say they are eager to share their expertise with countries suffering from the worst epidemic in history, which has already killed more than 4,500 people.....

How will soldiers combat Ebola? What's going on?

Something more than just the  Ebola crisis is going on and we puny nobodies will not get the whole picture (if ever) from the powers-that-be.  Why would the USA send 4000 soldiers to Liberia? Soldiers to fight a disease? Presumably, the troops are building treatment units. Really? Wouldn't it have been far more constructive to give the contract for those units to a construction company ... a construction company based in

Liberia itself?  And, now we hear that the British are sending 91 army medics to join 40 UK soldiers already there.  Why are soldiers required in plague hit areas? Why is an RN ship also on its way there?  
I don't get it.  Too many questions and no logical answers. What are the powers-that-be not telling us? 
Has the Ebola crisis been too good an opportunity for USA and UK to blackmail the governments of that strategic port area of west Africa for a military foothold in that region?  Under the guise of doing good, a whole lot of evil can be accomplished very, very easily.

From BBC:
Ebola crisis: British army medics  travel to West Africa
British army medics are on their way to West Africa to help in the fight against the deadly Ebola virus.
A team of 91 medics from 22 Field Hospital in Aldershot will run a hospital in Sierra Leone, set aside for healthcare workers who risk infection.
The nurses, doctors and infectious disease consultants will join 40 soldiers already in the West African country.

Ebola has killed more than 4,500 people, nearly all in West Africa.
The British medics are travelling ahead of the departure of Royal Navy ship the RFA Argus on Friday.....

From WSJ:
After almost a month in Liberia, U.S. troops have completed construction on a 25-bed medical facility to treat health-care workers who come into contact with Ebola and are running five mobile labs that expedite tests for the deadly virus.

The Pentagon effort against Ebola will enter its next phase this weekend, when the head of the American military’s 101st Airborne Division, Maj. Gen. Gary Volesky, arrives in Liberia to take over the U.S. effort. The Kentucky-based Army division will send about 700 members who will join up to 4,000 others to finish building 17 treatment units with more than 100 beds each, and to train hundreds of medical workers..........

Ebola updates .... October 11

One can't help but agree with Dr  Paul Craig Roberts
We have known since . . . well, when  haven’t we known that our public officials are incompetent. Their incompetence is always expensive, but now it risks a worldwide ebola pandemic.

With so little known about a deadly disease, one would think that with ebola on the rampage in three west Africa countries, air flights to and from these countries would be halted.

When riots or kidnappings present dangers in foreign lands, the State Department issues a travel advisory and warns, and sometimes prevents, Americans from traveling to areas of danger. As the ebola danger goes beyond the person himself, one would think public officials would have halted traffic to and from west Africa. In fact, it is harder for a critic of the US government, especially if the critic is Muslim, to enter the US than for a person infected with ebola. Indeed, there are a number of Russians who cannot enter the US because of unilaterally imposed US sanctions. But there are no sanctions against ebola.

Apparently, public health officials have an outdated and incorrect comprehension of ebola and how it spreads. A sufficient number of medical personnel protected against ebola patients’ body fluids but without respirators have now been infected to indicate that the current strain of ebola can spread by air like flu. This also means surface contact.

Airplane cleaning crews at New York LaGuardia are on strike because there are no precautions or protections for cleaners who could come into contact with ebola from an infected passenger. Neither does the next passenger on an outgoing flight have any assurance that he will not be sitting in the seat occupied by an ebola carrier on the incoming flight.

In fact, something like this might have already occurred. A British citizen who has not been to countries where there are ebola outbreaks has just died in Skopje, Macedonia, apparently from ebola. His companion told authorities that they had travelled straight from the UK. The hotel has been sealed off, and the hotel staff and ambulance crew have been isolated. I assume also the traveling companion, but the report doesn’t say.......



From CNN:
Health screenings to help prevent   the spread of Ebola begin Saturday for some travelers to New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport.
Four other airports will add the screenings next week, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
This won't be a mass event, with long lines of travelers waiting for screening. Only about 150 travelers a day will receive the screenings, according to CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden.
Under the program, passengers originating from Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone will be subject to the additional screening, according to the CDC..........

From HuffPo:
A Spanish nurse    who is the first person to contract Ebola outside of Africa may have touched her face with the gloves of her protective suit while caring for a priest who died of the disease, a doctor treating her said on Wednesday.
The nurse, Teresa Romero, was being treated for the deadly infection at a Madrid hospital while Spanish officials launched an investigation into how she was able to contract Ebola despite strict protocols for handling contagious patients.

From AP:
....The infected nursing assistant,   Teresa Romero, was scheduled to start receiving the experimental Ebola drug ZMapp after Spain managed to obtain some of the drug, which is in extremely short supply worldwide, a spokeswoman for Madrid's regional health agency said on condition of anonymity because of agency rules. She could not immediately provide information on where Spain had obtained it.

There is no proof that ZMapp works, and at least one Ebola patient who received the drug produced by a small U.S. company later died......

From RTNews:
A Briton with symptoms of Ebola  has died in Macedonia, local authorities said. The hotel in Skopje where he was staying has been sealed off, while another Briton and hotel staff are being kept inside to prevent possible spreading of infection.

According to Macedonian authorities the man came to Skopje from London on October 2 and was taken to hospital on Thursday where he died several hours later.

The man reportedly suffered from fever, vomiting and internal bleeding. His condition deteriorated rapidly, Dr. Jovanka Kostovska of the ministry's commission for infectious diseases said.

"We could not determine whether a citizen of England suffered from the disease. It is possible to question haemorrhagic fever,” Kostovska told MRT news, as she expects the results from the autopsy in two days’ time.

“The patient had symptoms of mild fever, 37.4 C, which does not correspond to Ebola, taking into account that the characteristic temperature for people with Ebola is above 38.5 C. However, rapid and severe clinical picture, vomiting, internal bleeding, and sudden and rapid death, symptoms of Ebola, raised suspicions,” Kostovska said.......