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Sunday 5 October 2014

Texas Ebola patient fighting for life, new US drug 'all gone'

texas_ebola

© Reuters / Jim Young

A worker in a hazardous material suit carries out a barrel of contents from the apartment unit where a man diagnosed with the Ebola virus was staying in Dallas, Texas, October 5, 2014.



The first patient to be diagnosed with Ebola in the US is in critical condition at a Dallas hospital and is not receiving any of the new experimental drugs for the virus, which has killed over 3,400 people in Africa, media reports say.

Thomas Eric Duncan contracted the disease in Liberia and began to show symptoms after arriving in Texas two weeks ago, causing a panic that he could have infected another 10 individuals.


Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said Duncan is in critical condition, adding that the patient is not receiving ZMapp - an experimental medicine - because it is "all gone" and is "not going to be available anytime soon."


The comments were made during a briefing with reporters on Sunday.


Speaking on another experiential drug produced by Canada's Tekmira Pharmaceuticals Corp, Frieden described the treatment as "difficult for patients to take."


The decision whether to give this drug to the patient will be made by his doctor and family members, but to the medicine will be made available.


"As far as we understand, experimental medicine is not being used," Frieden said. "It's really up to his treating physicians, himself, his family what treatment to take."


Workers dressed in hazardous material suits

© Reuters / Jim Young

Workers dressed in hazardous material suits stand at the apartment unit where a man diagnosed with the Ebola virus was staying in Dallas, Texas, October 5, 2014.



Outbreak risks

Duncan's case has sparked fears of Ebola spreading across the US, particularly due to the fact that the Dallas hospital failed to diagnose the virus the first time around and sent the patient home with antibiotics.


"The issue of the missed diagnosis initially is concerning," Frieden told CNN's State of the Union. "We're seeing more people calling us, considering the possibility of Ebola - that's what we want to see. We don't want people not to be diagnosed."


Frieden added that it was unlikely for the disease to spread widely across the US.


US health officials are currently monitoring 10 quarantined people who had contact with Duncan. The individuals are considered to be and are being checked at regular intervals for symptoms of the disease.


Another 38 were previously being observed as potential contacts. The original list of all the people Duncan had contact with included 114 individuals.


In the meantime, the state of Nebraska is getting ready to receive a US Ebola patient who also became infected in Liberia, Reuters quoted Nebraska Medical Center spokesman Taylor Wilson as saying on Sunday.


Wilson identified the patient as male, refusing to provide any further details. However, Reuters reported that the patient might be a freelance cameraman working for NBC News, Ashoka Mukpo, citing the father of the individual.


Symptoms of the deadly Ebola virus, which has hit the West African countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, include fever, vomiting, and diarrhea. The disease is contagious and is acquired through contact with bodily fluids such as blood or saliva.


US-sponsored terrorism and subversion in China, 'The battle for Chinese sovereignty'


© AFP

Protesters resting, or practicing for "democracy" Western style?



fully exposed as US-backed protest movement, readers should be aware that this latest turmoil is but one part of a greater ongoing campaign by the United States to contain and co-opt the nation of China.

As early as the Vietnam War, with the so-called "Pentagon Papers" released in 1969, it was revealed that the conflict was simply one part of a greater strategy aimed at containing and controlling China.


Three important quotes from these papers reveal this strategy. It states first that:



"...the February decision to bomb North Vietnam and the July approval of Phase I deployments make sense only if they are in support of a long-run United States policy to contain China."



It also claims:

"China - like Germany in 1917, like Germany in the West and Japan in the East in the late 30′s, and like the USSR in 1947 - looms as a major power threatening to undercut our importance and effectiveness in the world and, more remotely but more menacingly, to organize all of Asia against us."



Finally, it outlines the immense regional theater the US was engaged in against China at the time by stating:

"there are three fronts to a long-run effort to contain China (realizing that the USSR "contains" China on the north and northwest): (a) the Japan-Korea front; (b) the India-Pakistan front; and (c) the Southeast Asia front."



While the US would ultimately lose the Vietnam War and any chance of using the Vietnamese as a proxy force against Beijing, the long war against Beijing would continue elsewhere.

This containment strategy would be updated and detailed in the 2006 Strategic Studies Institute report "String of Pearls: Meeting the Challenge of China's Rising Power across the Asian Littoral" where it outlines China's efforts to secure its oil lifeline from the Middle East to its shores in the South China Sea as well as means by which the US can maintain American hegemony throughout the Indian and Pacific Ocean.


The premise is that, should Western foreign policy fail to entice China into participating in Wall Street and London's "international system" as responsible stakeholders, an increasingly confrontational posture must be taken to contain the rising nation.


This proxy war has manifested itself in the form of the so-called "Arab Spring" where Chinese interests have suffered in nations like Libya that have been reduced to chaos by US-backed subversion and even direct military intervention. Sudan also serves as a proxy battleground where the West is using chaos to push Chinese interests off the continent of Africa.


More recently, political turmoil has hit Southeast Asia. Thailand has only just recently ousted a US-proxy regime headed by dictator Thaksin Shinawatra, while neighboring Myanmar attempts to stave off sedition headed by US-British political fronts led by Aung San Suu Kyi.


Within China itself, the US wields terrorism as a means to destabilize and divide Chinese society in an attempt to make the vast territory of China ungovernable. In the nation's western province of Xianjiang,the United States fully backs violent separatists.


Indeed, first and foremost in backing the Xinjiang Uyghur separatists is the United States through the US State Department's National Endowment for Democracy (NED). For China, the Western region referred to as "Xinjiang/East Turkistan" has its own webpage on NED's site covering the various fronts funded by the US which include:



International Uyghur Human Rights and Democracy Foundation $187,918

To advance the human rights of ethnic Uyghur women and children. The Foundation will maintain an English- and Uyghur-language website and advocate on the human rights situation of Uyghur women and children.




International Uyghur PEN Club $45,000

To promote freedom of expression for Uyghurs. The International Uyghur PEN Club will maintain a website providing information about banned writings and the work and status of persecuted poets, historians, journalists, and others. Uyghur PEN will also conduct international advocacy campaigns on behalf of imprisoned writers.




Uyghur American Association $280,000

To raise awareness of Uyghur human rights issues. UAA's Uyghur Human Rights Project will research, document, and bring to international attention, independent and accurate information about human rights violations affecting the Turkic populations of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.




World Uyghur Congress $185,000

To enhance the ability of Uyghur prodemocracy groups and leaders to implement effective human rights and democracy campaigns. The World Uyghur Congress will organize a conference for pro-democracy Uyghur groups and leaders on interethnic issues and conduct advocacy work on Uyghur human rights.



It should be noted that the above list was taken from NED's website in March 2014 - since then, NED has deleted several organizations from the list, as it has done previously regarding its support in other nations ahead of intensified campaigns of destabilization it wished to cover up its role in.

All of these NED-funded organizations openly advocate separatism from China, not even recognizing China's authority over the region to begin with - referring to it instead as "Chinese occupation."


Of the March 2014 terror attack in Kunming, the US-funded World Uyghur Congress would even attempt to justify it by claiming Chinese authorities have left the separatists with little other choice. The US State Department's "Radio Free Asia" report titled, "China's Kunming Train Station Violence Leaves 33 Dead," reported:



World Uyghur Congress spokesman Dilxat Raxit said in an emailed statement that there was "no justification for attacks on civilians" but added that discriminatory and repressive policies provoked "extreme measures" in response.



From full-blown proxy wars in the 1960′s spanning Southeast Asia, to the US-engineered "Arab Spring" in 2011, to terrorism in Xinjiang and turmoil in Hong Kong today - what is taking place is not a battle for "democracy" or "freedom of expression," but an existential battle for China's sovereignty. For whatever problems the Chinese people have with their government, it is their problem and theirs alone to solve in their own way. Using the promotion of "democracy" as cover, the US would continue its attempts to infect China with US-backed institutions and policies, subvert, co-opt, or overthrow the political order in Beijing, and establish upon its ashes its own neo-colonial order serving solely Wall Street and Washington's interests - not those of the Chinese people.

From Al Qaeda to ISIL, "The Terrorists R US"


© Unknown

United Nations Security Council Meeting, September 24, 2014, chaired by president Obama




© Unknown



Lest we forget, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, have been financing and training the ISIL terrorists on behalf of the United States. Israel is harboring the Islamic State (ISIL) in the Golan Heights, NATO in liaison with the Turkish high command has since March 2011 been involved in coordinating the recruitment of the jihadist fighters dispatched to Syria. Moreover, the ISIL brigades in both Syria and Iraq are integrated by Western special forces and military advisers.

All this is known and documented, yet not a single head of state or head of government has had the courage to point to the absurdity of the US sponsored United Nations Security Council resolution, which was adopted unanimously on September 24.


"Absurdity" is an understatement. What we are witnessing is a criminal undertaking under UN auspices.


While international diplomacy is often based on deception, US foreign policy lies are no longer credible. What we are witnessing is a total breakdown of established diplomatic practice. The "Forbidden Truth" is that the Islamic State is an instrument of Washington, a US " intelligence asset". ISIL is not an independent entity, nor is it an "outside enemy" which threatens global security, as conveyed by the Western media.


While everybody knows this, the big lie prevails. The Lie becomes the Truth.


The United Nations Security Council resolution calls upon member states to "suppress the recruiting, organizing, transporting, equipping and financing of foreign terrorist fighters." Specifically, the resolution points to the "the particular and urgent need to implement this resolution with respect to those foreign terrorist fighters who are associated with ISIL [Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant], ANF [Al-Nusrah Front]and other cells, affiliates, splinter groups or derivatives of Al-Qaida..." But are these not precisely the "opposition freedom fighters" trained and recruited by the Western military alliance in their quest to unseat the government of Bashar Al Assad?



© Unknown

John McCain with leaders of Al Qaeda entities in Syria



The ISIL are the foot soldiers of the Western military alliance. Their unspoken mandate is to wreck havoc and destruction in Syria and Iraq, acting on behalf of their US sponsors. The endgame is to transform countries into territories.

Political leaders present at the UN Security Council session applauded the US counter-terrorism initiative. France's President Francois Hollande pointed to the fact that "terrorism has taken on another dimension, and it wants to conquer territory now."


Several US allies including Jordan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar which are currently involved in supporting ISIL and Al Nusrah are now involved in the US sponsored air raids allegedly targeted against the ISIL inside Syria.


Turkey and Jordan have borders with Syria. Saudi Arabia and Turkey have borders with Iraq. The direct military involvement of these countries points to a scenario of escalation and sectarian warfare extending from the Mediterranean to Central Asia.


In this regard, Turkey has already announced that it will be involved in ground operations inside Syria and Iraq. The newly-elected Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu announced (a day prior to the UN Security Council meeting) that his government will be seeking the endorsement of the Turkish Parliament to intervene militarily in both Iraq and Syria.


What is at stake is a so-called "no fly zone" in disguise, a justification to bomb Iraq and Syria under a counter-terrorism mandate, largely targeting economic infrastructure as well as the civilian population. The political architects of the Islamic State including president Obama, prime minister Cameron and their counterparts in France, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, et al, are now waging a military campaign against the Islamic State, which they themselves created. Boots on the ground are also contemplated. According to Iraqi government sources, the US will sending some 13000 troops to Iraq.


The leaders of western countries are either utterly ignorant and stupid, or totally corrupt and complicit? "The Terrorists R US." Moreover, they seem totally unaware of the broad implications of their actions.


War propaganda is a criminal act under Nuremberg: Crime against the Peace. By upholding the lies and fabrications of US foreign policy, the mainstream media is complicit in war crimes.


Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron is to bring the matter to the British parliament. The revocation of citizenship is contemplated in Britain as well as in Canada for those suspected of supporting the jihadist movement. While Britain's Prime minister has called upon Her Majesty's government "to restrict or rescind the passports of British jihadists ... Home Secretary Theresa May has threatened to deprive those Britons already fighting with the Islamic State of their citizenship." ,


Ironically, Prime Minister Cameron is complicit in facilitating and organizing within the UK the recruitment of British jihadists. And indeed one might suggest, pending the formulation of criminal charges, that his passport should be revoked for "supporting the jihadist movement".


George W. Bush stated in 2001, "you are either with us or with the terrorists." The forbidden truth is that the US is involved in a diabolical undertaking: it has created an Islamic terror network with a view to destroying sovereign countries and now it is waging a war against its own terror network. Without media propaganda, this military agenda under the guise of counter-terrorism would fall flat, collapse like a deck of cards.


The US president and his indefectible British ally "R the Terrorists", they are the "state sponsors of terrorism", with a view to waging a war of conquest. The United Nations is complicit in this undertaking.


Barack Obama's 'looser policy': Syrian, Iraqi women and children are a subhuman species not worthy of protection from drone strikes

obama y drones

© Desconocido



While one can't help but snicker when the administration of a Nobel Peace Prize winner has launched at least 7 offensive wars, mostly against Muslim countries with virtually none obtaining prior approval from Congress, until now Obama at least showed the sense to realize that maintaining proper "made for propaganda media" optics matters, even if his underlying actions were the very definition of hypocrisy. And then something snapped. As reported by Yahoo News, the White House has acknowledged for the first time that strict standards President Obama imposed last year to prevent civilian deaths from U.S. drone strikes will not apply to U.S. military operations in Syria and Iraq. It has a "looser policy standards" when it comes to preventing civilian deaths from U.S. drone strikes in U.S. military operations in Syria and Iraq.

Now, we showed last weekend that Syrian "rebels", those people the US is supposedly helping, are furious at US bombing of their own people, but we wonder just how they will feel when they realize that according to the most powerful representative of the "free world" they are actually, well, subhuman and not worthy of the same civil rights as people in every other part of the globe (bombed by US drones).


According to Yahoo News, a White House statement confirmed the looser policy came in response to questions about reports that as many as a dozen civilians, including women and young children, were killed when a Tomahawk missile struck the village of Kafr Daryan in Syria's Idlib province on the morning of Sept. 23.


And if being equated with monkeys wasn't enough of an insult, the US also used its masterpiece fabrication, the "Khorasans" as the justification to do to Syrians what last year's false flag war campaign accused Syria's Assad of doing.


So this is what the US government is not telling you:



The village has been described by Syrian rebel commanders as a reported stronghold of the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front where U.S officials believed members of the so-called Khorasan group were plotting attacks against international aircraft.


But at a briefing for members and staffers of the House Foreign Affairs Committee late last week, Syrian rebel commanders described women and children being hauled from the rubble after an errant cruise missile destroyed a home for displaced civilians. Images of badly injured children also appeared on YouTube, helping to fuel anti-U.S. protests in a number of Syrian villages last week.


"They were carrying bodies out of the rubble. ... I saw seven or eight ambulances coming out of there," said Abu Abdo Salabman, a political member of one of the Free Syria Army factions, who attended the briefing for Foreign Affairs Committee members and staff. "We believe this was a big mistake."



And this is what US "assistance" looks like:

[embedded content]




But the bottom line is this: Caitlin Hayden, a spokesperson for the National Security Council, said that a much-publicized White House policy that President Obama announced last year barring U.S. drone strikes unless there is a "near certainty" there will be no civilian casualties - "the highest standard we can meet," he said at the time - does not cover the current U.S. airstrikes in Syria and Iraq.

The "near certainty" standard was intended to apply "only when we take direct action 'outside areas of active hostilities,' as we noted at the time," Hayden said in an email. "That description - outside areas of active hostilities - simply does not fit what we are seeing on the ground in Iraq and Syria right now."


Hayden added that U.S. military operations against the Islamic State (also known as ISIS or ISIL) in Syria, "like all U.S. military operations, are being conducted consistently with the laws of armed conflict, proportionality and distinction."


The laws of armed conflict prohibit the deliberate targeting of civilian areas and require armed forces to take precautions to prevent inadvertent civilian deaths as much as possible.


But one former Obama administration official said the new White House statement raises questions about how the U.S. intends to proceed in the conflict in Syria and Iraq, and under what legal authorities.



Wait, someone actually wondered under what legal authority the Obama administration is killing innocent people? How dare they: don't they know Obama has a Nobel peace prize, so none of his actions are subject to any scrutiny: surely the president himself is his own best moral censor.

But putting the bullshit aside, the bottom line here is quite simple: in order to help Qatar traverse Syria with its own Gazprom-bypassing natgas pipeline to Europe, and wipe out the same ISIS it created, and which has caused so many headaches for the Saudis, which in exchange for getting the US to bomb ISIS agreed to dump crude, split up OPEC once again, send the price of oil plunging and cause a Russian budget crisis... Obama not only has zero qualms to kill innocent women and children, but in doing so he has made it clear that Iraq and Syria's woman and children are not even worth of being called human.


In fact, as one other charismatic dictator several decades ago claimed, they are "subhuman" and thus exempt from any innocent civilian deaths policy.


Drinking water contaminated with tetrachloroethylene causing high rates of pregnancy complications and stillbirths

pregnancy complications PCE drinking water

© Shutterstock

PCE in drinking water doubles the risk of stillbirths for pregnant women.



There's something in the water for moms-to-be to be afraid of because it's causing stillbirths and other pregnancy complications. Researchers from the Boston University Medical Center found a dangerous chemical in drinking water, and published their findings in the journal

The pregnant women of Cape Cod, Mass., were experiencing some abnormally high rates of pregnancy complications and researchers set out to find what was making them twice as likely to have a stillbirth, and 1.35 times more likely to have a placenta abruption and high risk of vaginal bleeding. It wasn't until researchers looked into their drinking water that they found the cause; a sickening chemical called tetrachloroethylene (PCE) was harming moms and their unborn babies.


"Our results suggest that prenatal PCE exposure is not associated with all obstetric complications, but may increase the risk of certain ones, including stillbirth and placental abruption (when the placenta separates from the wall of the uterus)," the Boston University Medical Center researchers said in a university press release.


The team of researchers studied nearly 1,100 pregnancies in women who had high exposure to PCE. They then compared them to approximately 1,000 women without exposure to the chemical. The women in Cape Cod were at an especially high risk for complications because the drinking water between the 1960s and 1980s flowed through vinyl-lined asbestos cement pipes, which leaked PCE. It's had high levels of the chemical ever since.


Stillbirth isn't just a pregnancy complication but a death that causes significant psychological turmoil on the mother - it occurs once every 60 pregnancies. PCE exposure doubles the chances of a baby dying after 20 weeks of pregnancy, before the mother goes into labor, according to the National Stillbirth Society . Placental abruption is a common cause of stillbirth, and is also connected to PCE exposure. It's a form of high blood pressure called preeclampsia, and doubles the chance of stillbirth due to the baby being deprived of a sufficient amount of oxygen or nutrients. This serious pregnancy complication destroys a mother's chance at having a healthy baby brought into the world at full-term. The researchers have found it all comes down to what these women are drinking.


"We need to have a better understanding of the impact of this common drinking water contaminant on all aspects of pregnancy," said the study's co-author Ann Aschengrau, a professor of epidemiology at Boston University School of Public Health, in a press release. It must have been years that pregnant women have been experiencing these pregnancy complications without knowing why. Although further testing on PCE is necessary, the researchers want to look at the links between all chemicals and their possible health hazards.


2014.


American Education: Brainwashing children and suffocating freedom


A modern historian looking to chronicle the destruction of the America we all once knew could do no better than to deconstruct the U.S. education system today.

Along with providing American students a middling education at best - we rank 17th in the world and well-below-average for developed nations - what's really wrong with America's education system is the fact that we're engineering the next generation to become acclimated to what this country is becoming ...


And it's becoming a police state, where tolerance is zero and everyone is presumed guilty. The notion of innocence? To hell with that!


This will not end well for you or me, or our children.


As a parent - I have two kids in school - I am always on the lookout for examples of governmental transgressions ... so these days, of course, I am paying an inordinate amount of attention to American school systems. In few domestic settings will you find such misconduct (and downright ignorance) percolating through our country.


Can It Get Any Worse Than This?


Consider these three solutions taken recently in America's schools to address so-called deviant acts of misbehavior:



  • Threaten to hold back a straight-A student for serving her country. A 13-year-old, straight-A student in the Washington D.C. school system was recently labeled a truant. Her crime: excelling at the piano. The young girl is so gifted musically that she has played around the world and was hand-picked to serve as an international music ambassador by a prestigious foundation. So, she travels a good bit. But ... she has maintained straight-A grades anyway. Though the D.C. school district does have the ability to override its attendance policy for extenuating circumstances, the wise owls atop the failing district decided that being a prodigy on a global level just doesn't cut the mustard.



  • Arrest a frightened teenager for checking in on her sick mother. In Houston, a teenager at Sam Houston High was using her cellphone to deal with a family emergency - her ill mother. The school's assistant principal demanded the teen's phone because of an asinine policy about cellphone usage on campus. The teen refused because - again - she was But the assistant principal, displaying an amazing grasp of rationality, had already called for back-up - the police! And thus it was that a 4'10", 70-pound girl, upset about her ill mother, found herself on the ground, the victim of jackbooted oppression. One cop pressed his knee on her skull while a second sat on her legs and handcuffed her. A third loomed nearby - you know, just in case the 4'10", 70-pound villain overpowered the two substantially larger men of law and order.



  • Throw a student in detention for sharing his lunch. Remember that golden rule you learned as a kid: Sharing is caring? Well, not so much in Weaverville, California. For his act of kindness - sharing part of his chicken burrito with a friend who was hungry - a 13-year-old boy landed in detention. "It seemed like he couldn't get a normal lunch," the teen told a local TV station, "so I just wanted to give mine to him because I wasn't really that hungry and it was just going to go in the garbage if I didn't eat it." To which the school responded that sharing food is prohibited because of food allergies and whatnot. That's a legitimate reason ... but detention is not a legitimate response to a non-crime. Weaverville, have you ever considered pulling the student aside to explain why the policy is in place instead of rushing to punish an act of kindness?


Too American to Take It

Such events, and scores of similar episodes in schools all over the country that I haven't the space to chronicle, serve as a microcosm of so much that is wrong with America today ... and it hints at a future that is so clearly heading our way.


As a country, we have become intolerant of any action that questions authority - a byproduct of the terror-laced world that government shoves down our throat with almost every news cycle. It's as though Orwell's Ministry of Truth is cranking out fear-mongering stories somewhere in the bowels of metropolitan D.C.


Epochal changes in society do not happen quickly. They're reprogrammed at a generational pace. My generation is too American to accept what's going on. We grew up in a tolerant America, where innocence was assumed. It was far freer than the America my kids are inheriting. There was the ever-present belief that change could be affected for the better across the country. The American Dream was still very much alive, instead of the withered, disillusioned shadow that it has now become.


But tomorrow's Americans, I fear, will not have the same values. And, I fear, it's because of the schools and what's going on inside them.


School systems, it seems to me, are inculcating our kids to accept an ever-present police state as a normal state of affairs. And it's a police state that is otherwise benign except in those moments when its authority is questioned ... and then it becomes ruthless in meting out justice on the fly. Kids learn quickly.


And before you know it, you have a generation of Stepford Americans who are submissive, compliant and reticent to question authority.


Seems the perfect world for an Orwellian government that wants its people to believe they are free, despite the obvious cages built around them.


That's why my generation will regularly rail against the malevolence of modern government ... or they will increasingly abandon ship for more hospitable locales, as a record number of Americans are doing, searching for a place that holds true to the values that our country was built upon.


Until next time, stay Sovereign ...


Vaccine Crimes: India holds Bill Gates accountable


As Bill Gates faces a lawsuit for the illegal testing of tribal children in India, it appears that his crimes against humanity have finally caught up with him.

A recent report published by Health Impact News has reported that the Gates Foundation has found itself facing a pending lawsuit, due to an investigation that is being carried out by the Supreme Courts of India.


Health Impact News stated:



While fraud and corruption are revealed on almost a daily basis now in the vaccine industry, the U.S. mainstream media continues to largely ignore such stories. Outside the U.S., however, the vaccine empires are beginning to crumble, and English versions of the news in mainstream media outlets are available via the Internet.


One such country is India, where the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and their vaccine empire are under fire, including a pending lawsuit currently being investigated by the India Supreme Court. [1]



The Health Impact News article centered largely on a four-page report that was recently published by Economic Times India.


Eager to know more, I investigated their story and discovered that the World Health Organization, the Gates Foundation and two organizations funded by them, PATH (Program for Appropriate Technology in Health) and GAVI (Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization), have found themselves under fire, after a writ of petition originally submitted to the Supreme Court of India, by Kalpana Mehta, Nalini Bhanot and Dr. Rukmini Rao in 2012, was finally heard by the courts.


The petitioners submitting the petition stated:



BMGF, PATH and WHO were criminally negligent trialling the vaccines on a vulnerable, uneducated and under-informed population school administrators, students and their parents who were not provided informed consent or advised of potential adverse effects or required to be monitored post-vaccination. [2]



Young Tribal Girls Tested With HPV Vaccines

The Economic Times India published their report August 2014. They stated that in 2009, tests had been carried out on 16,000 tribal school children in Andhra Pradesh, India, using the human papiloma virus (HPV) vaccine, Gardasil.


According to the report written by KP Narayana Kumar, within a month of receiving the vaccine, many of the children fell ill and by 2010, five of them had died. A further two children were reported to have died in Vadodara, Gujarat, where an estimated 14,000 tribal children were vaccinated with another brand of the HPV vaccine, Cervarix, manufactured by GlaxoSmitheKline (GSK).


Shockingly, the report stated that many of the consent forms used to vaccinate the girls were signed "illegally," either by the wardens from the hostels where many of the girls resided, or using thumbprints from illiterate parents.


This travesty was not discovered until a team of health activists from the non-government organization SAMA, an organization specializing in women's health, decided to investigate what had been going on.


According to the report, they were shocked to discover that a total of 120 girls had been taken ill, suffering from a variety of symptoms, including "epileptic seizures, severe stomach aches, headaches and mood swings."


The Economic Times stated:




The Sama report also said there had been cases of early onset of menstruation following the vaccination, heavy bleeding and severe menstrual cramps among many students. The standing committee pulled up the relevant state governments for the shoddy investigation into these deaths.


It said it was disturbed to find that 'all the seven deaths were summarily dismissed as unrelated to vaccinations without in-depth investigations ...' the speculative causes were suicides, accidental drowning in well (why not suicide?), malaria, viral infections, subarachnoid hemorrhage (without autopsy) etc.




This information is even more shocking when you discover that the organization funding the study was none other than the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, who declared the project a total success.

Kumar wrote:




According to the BMGF, the WHO, the International Federation of Gynaecology and Obstetrics, and the Federation of Obstetric and Gynaecological Societies of India have all recommended vaccination 'as a proven and highly effective preventive measure for cervical cancer.' The project used vaccines that are licensed in India and that have been administered safely around the world tens of millions of times, preventing countless cases of cervical cancer illness and death, 'maintains a BMGF spokesperson in an emailed response (see GAVI & PHFI create incentives ...'




He continued:


BMGF's role in funding the controversial studies, however, has led to many healthcare activists in India voicing their apprehensions. 'BMGF has to take full responsibility because PATH is funded by them. It is also unethical when people championing the cause of vaccines are the same ones who are also investing in vaccine development,' said V Rukmini Rao, one of the activists who filed a writ petition before the Supreme Court in connection with the HPV vaccine studies. [3]




Absolutely, and this is not the first time that these organizations have been caught illegally testing vaccines in developing countries.

Gates Foundation, WHO, PATH, GAVI, UNICEF Behind Chad Vaccine Disaster


In December 2012, in the small village of Gouro, Chad, Africa, situated on the edge of the Sahara Desert, five hundred children were locked into their school, threatened that if they did not agree to being force-vaccinated with a meningitis A vaccine, they would receive no further education.


These children were vaccinated without their parents' knowledge. This vaccine was an unlicensed product still going through the third and fourth phases of testing.


Within hours, one hundred and six children began to suffer from headaches, vomiting, severe uncontrollable convulsions and paralysis. The children's wait for a doctor began. They had to wait one full week for a doctor to arrive while the team of vaccinators proceeded to vaccinate others in the village.


After being shuttled around like cattle, many of these sick, weak children were finally dumped back in their village without a diagnosis and each family was given an unconfirmed sum of £1000 by the government. No forms were signed and no documentation was seen. They were informed that their children had not suffered a vaccine injury.


However, if this were true, why would their government award each family £1000 in what has been described as hush money?


The only mainstream news channel to have highlighted the plight of these poor children was a local channel called Tchad, which filmed footage of the then-Prime Minister of Chad visiting the children in hospital.


VacTruth has copies of both reports, along with medical and government documents.


Despite this evidence and VacTruth's detailed and extensive coverage, including highlighting television footage, once again, the vaccine program was hailed a success. To watch videos reporting the story, see here and here. [4] [5]


The groups involved with this project were PATH, WHO, UNICEF, and the Gates Foundation. During investigations, it was discovered that the whole project was being run by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.


In a press release, the Gates Foundation stated:



MenAfriVac is a tremendous success story for the global health community. It is the first vaccine developed specifically for Africa, and it proves that global partnerships can develop and deliver high-quality, low-cost vaccines.


Ten years ago, we invested in the Meningitis Vaccine Project, an innovative model that brought together PATH, the World Health Organization, African health ministers and the Serum Institute of India today, we celebrate the result: a modern vaccine selling for less than US 50 cents per dose with the potential to end Africa's deadly meningitis epidemics.


We believe that vaccines are one of the best buys in global health. In January, Bill and Melinda Gates called on the global community to make this the Decade of Vaccines. There is no better way to launch this decade than with a new vaccine that will improve and save lives. [6]



VacTruth can prove otherwise.

Government Inquiry Holds GAVI Accountable for Multiple Deaths


Despite the fact the Gates Foundation call vaccines "one of the best buys in global health," a government inquiry in Pakistan has found the complete opposite.


In 2011, the Express Tribune published a story stating that:



ISLAMABAD: A government inquiry has found that polio vaccines for infants funded by the Global Alliance for Vaccination and Immunisation are causing deaths and disabilities in regional countries including Pakistan.


The startling revelation is part of an inquiry report prepared by the Prime Minister's Inspection Commission (PMIC) on the working of the Expanded Programme on Immunisation (EPI). The PMIC, headed by Malik Amjad Noon, has recommended that Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani immediately suspend the administration of all types of vaccines funded by the GAVI.



According to the Express Tribune, the main vaccinations in question were the polio vaccine and the 5-in-1 pentavelent vaccine, which were said to be responsible for the deaths and disability of a number of children in Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and Japan.

The vaccines were funded by the Global Alliance for Vaccination and Immunization (GAVI) an organization financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Children's Vaccine Program, the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association, the Rockefeller Foundation, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank.


Writing on the official report, made exclusive to the newspaper, the Express Tribune stated:



The report states, 'The procured vaccines are not tested in laboratories to confirm their efficacy and genuineness. This leaves room for use of spurious and counterfeit vaccines.' [7] (emphasis added)



If this is true, then once again the Gates Foundation has been linked to mass vaccination initiatives using untested, unsafe vaccinations.

The Gates Foundation and WHO Labeled Unethical by Medical Experts


In 2012, Ramesh Shankar Mumbai, an author writing for the Pharmabiz website, reported that two medical experts from India had accused the Gates Foundation and WHO of being unethical.


In his report, Mumbai stated that Dr. Neetu Vashisht and Dr. Jacob Puliyel of the Department of Pediatrics at St. Stephens Hospital in Delhi, wrote the following information in their report in the April issue of Indian Journal of Medical Ethics.


It was unethical for WHO and Bill Gates to flog this program when they knew 10 years back that it was never to succeed. Getting poor countries to expend their scarce resources on an impossible dream over the last 10 years was unethical.


Pharmabiz.com reported that Dr. Vashisht and Dr. Puliyel had continued their report by stating:



Another major ethical issue raised by the campaign is the failure to thoroughly investigate the increase in the incidence of non-polio acute flaccid paralysis (NPAFP) in areas where many doses of vaccine were used. NPAFP is clinically indistinguishable from polio paralysis but twice as deadly.



Pharmabiz.com continued:

The authors noted that while India was polio-free in 2011, in the same year, there were 47500 cases of NPAFP. While data from India's National Polio Surveillance Project showed NPAFP rate increased in proportion to the number of polio vaccine doses received, independent studies showed that children identified with NPAFP 'were at more than twice the risk of dying than those with wild polio infection.' [8]



The corruption and deceit by these organizations does not stop there.

The Gates Foundation Blamed for 10,000 Vaccine-Related Deaths


In 2013, yet another report named the Gates Foundation and GAVI as being responsible for multiple deaths using untested vaccinations on children from the developing world.





It was found out through an investigation, that GAVI was using an untested vaccine; giving this dangerous vaccine to Pakistani children shows the lack of empathy associated with these organizations.


GAVI was blamed for the deaths of 10,000 children in Pakistan when they came in and administered polio vaccines that resulted in casualties. [9]



As we know, GAVI is heavily funded by the Gates Foundation. [10]

So, what was the name of the organization that investigated GAVI and found them using untested polio vaccinations in Pakistan?


According to the Express Tribune article, which I referred to earlier in this article, it was none other than the Indian government, who, upon discovering the shocking truth, recommended the immediate suspension of the administration of all types of vaccines funded by GAVI. [7]


In a recent radio show hosted by Sallie O. Elkordy, Susanne Posel gave her frank and honest views on the whole sorry mess that we find ourselves in today.


Warning: This report is not for the faint-hearted. [11]


Conclusion


It is difficult to believe that, despite the mounting evidence outlining the many crimes against humanity that have been committed by the Gates Foundation, GAVI, UNICEF and PATH, Bill Gates is portrayed as a hero among many.


However, according to the definition of hero in the Oxford Dictionary, the word hero means:



A person, typically a man, who is admired or idealized for courage, outstanding achievements, or noble qualities. [12]



The dictionary I used said nothing about vaccinating innocent, vulnerable children with untested and unsafe vaccinations, causing them to suffer agonizing, untimely deaths.

References



  1. healthimpactnews.com

  2. holyhormones.com

  3. economictimes.indiatimes.com

  4. youtube.com

  5. youtube.com

  6. gatesfoundation.org Press-Releases...

  7. tribune.com.

  8. pharmabiz.com

  9. occupycorporatism.com

  10. gavi.org

  11. blogtalkradio.com

  12. oxforddictionaries.com


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Newly discovered crystalline material can absorb and store oxygen

crystalline material

© sdu.dk

The crystalline material changes color when absorbing or releasing oxygen. Crystals are black when they are saturated with oxygen and pink when the oxygen has been released again.



Danish scientists have invented a revolutionary crystalline material that can absorb and store oxygen in high concentrations. A bucket of such material can suck the oxygen out of a room, which could potentially wave goodbye to heavy oxygen masks.

Imagine if you could get rid of the bulky scuba tank while taking a dive. Now, imagine practically any task to which the storage and timely release of oxygen is absolutely essential. And you have the new crystal developed at the University of Southern Denmark, with help from the University of Sydney, Australia.


A few microscopic grains are enough for one gulp of air, but a bucketful - or 10 liters - can completely suck the oxygen out of a room.


"In the lab, we saw how this material took up oxygen from the air around us," Professor Christine McKenzie, who led the study, said.


When different things are exposed to oxygen, they react differently - from wine to food to living organisms, varying factors (pressure, temperature etc.) and time of exposure can fundamentally alter things. However, what you get with the new discovery is a way of controlling oxygen by not reacting with it.


This was ascertained by using x-ray diffraction, showing the material's atomic behavior when it was full of oxygen, then when it was depleted of it.


"An important aspect of this new material is that it does not react irreversibly with oxygen - even though it absorbs oxygen in a so-called selective chemisorptive process. The material is both a sensor, and a container for oxygen - we can use it to bind, store and transport oxygen - like a solid artificial hemoglobin," McKenzie says.


"It is also interesting that the material can absorb and release oxygen many times without losing the ability. It is like dipping a sponge in water, squeezing the water out of it and repeating the process over and over again," she continues.



© sdu.dk



To release the stored oxygen, all that is needed is to heat up the material, or pressure it. And those are just the known, natural ways. McKenzie and the team are now looking further than that.

"We are now wondering if light can also be used as a trigger for the material to release oxygen - this has prospects in the growing field of artificial photosynthesis," she says.


What may be surprising to some is how natural the process of storing the oxygen really is. The key component in the new material is the metal cobalt. It possesses a natural quality for absorption and "gives the new material precisely the molecular structure that enables it to absorb oxygen from its surroundings."


There was also the question of time and speed: different conditions can affect this differently, and so can different versions of the material. This is crucial for the types of applications where controlled release is necessary - like in a gas mask or diving gear. Layering and arranging the material correctly will prevent its ability to just suck up the stuff from the surrounding air or water.


"When the material is saturated with oxygen, it can be compared to an oxygen tank containing pure oxygen under pressure - the difference is that this material can hold three times as much oxygen," McKenzie went on.


This could be valuable for lung patients who today must carry heavy oxygen tanks with them. But also divers may one day be able to leave the oxygen tanks at home and instead get oxygen from this material as it "filters" oxygen from its surroundings.


Creepy ties between pharmaceutical companies and doctors


© thesocioeconomicmarket.blogspot.com



On Tuesday, the federal government released details of payments to doctors by every pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturer in the country. The information is being made public under a provision of the 2010 Affordable Care Act. The law mandates disclosure of payments to doctors, dentists, chiropractors, podiatrists and optometrists for things like promotional speaking, consulting, meals, educational items and research.


It's not quite clear what the data will show - in part because the first batch will be incomplete, covering spending for only a few months at the end of 2013 - but we at ProPublica have some good guesses. That's because we have been detailing relationships between doctors and the pharmaceutical industry for the past four years as part of our Dollars for Docs project.


We've aggregated information from the websites of some large drug companies, which publish their payments as a condition of settling federal whistle-blower lawsuits alleging improper marketing or kickbacks. In cooperation with the website Pharmashine, we've added data for 2013, which now covers 17 drug companies accounting for half of United States drug sales that year. (You can look up your doctor using our easy search tool.)


Here are some facts we've learned from the data:


1. Many, many health professionals have relationships with industry.


Below are the approximate numbers of health professionals who received some payment from each company in 2013, excluding research. We based this on the number of unique names, cities and states per company.


Company & Doctors Paid



  • Pfizer $142,600

  • AstraZeneca $111,200

  • Forest $98,900

  • Johnson & Johnson $97,000

  • GlaxoSmithKline $85,100

  • AbbVie $82,900

  • Boehringer Ingelheim $82,900

  • Merck $81,300

  • EliLilly $79,000

  • Novartis $64,500

  • Amgen $50,500

  • Valeant $21,200

  • UCB $21,200

  • Cephalon* $14,600

  • EMD Serono $7,900

  • ViiV $3,400


.

Dollars for Docs now includes 3.4 million payments since 2009, totaling more than $4 billion, of which $2.5 billion was for research. For 2013 alone, there were 1.2 million payments valued at nearly $1.4 billion.


It's not possible to calculate the exact number of physicians represented, because drug companies haven't used unique identification numbers that cross company lines. But it's clear that the figure is in the hundreds of thousands.


Excluding research payments, the drugmaker Pfizer appeared to have interactions with the most healthcare professionals last year - about 142,600. AstraZeneca came in second with about 111,200. Johnson & Johnson and Forest Labs each had nearly 100,000. There are an estimated 800,000 to 900,000 active doctors in the United States.


"Most physicians that are in private practice are touched in some way" by the industry, said George Dunston, co-founder of Obsidian HDS, the creator of Pharmashine. "You add that up and it's a pretty significant number."


Surveys conducted in 2004 and again in 2009 showed that more than three-quarters of doctors had at least one type of financial relationship with a drug or medical device company. The figure dropped from about 94 percent in 2004 to 84 percent in 2009, said the lead author, Eric Campbell, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and director of research at the Mongan Institute for Health Policy at Massachusetts General Hospital.


Dr. Campbell, who has been critical of physician-pharma ties, says he hasn't conducted a followup survey but suspects that the percentage of doctors receiving payments has probably decreased somewhat since then.


"The old approach was just to try to get as many docs as you can, blanket coverage, and establish relationships," he said. "I think they're being much more targeted and specific."


2. Some doctors have relationships with many companies.


Those who read the fine-print disclosures accompanying medical journal articles know that doctors often have relationships with several companies that compete in a drug category (such as heart drugs or those for schizophrenia). Our data bear that out.


Some highly sought-after key opinion leaders, as they are known in the industry, work for half a dozen or more companies in a given year.


Marc Cohen, chief of cardiology at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center, received more than $270,000 last year for speaking or consulting for six companies listed in Dollars for Docs. He is a prolific researcher and author.


In an interview, Dr. Cohen said he works only with companies whose drugs are backed by large clinical studies. "In general terms, the science behind the product is very strong," he said. "These are the companies that I've chosen to work with."


3. The biggest companies aren't always the ones that spend the most. Some smaller drug companies spend big, too.


Consider Forest Labs, a midsize drug company that was acquired in July by Actavis, a larger company based in Dublin. Forest's $3.8 billion in United States drug sales in 2013 placed it on the edge of the top 20 companies, according to IMS Health, a health information company.


Its sales were far lower than those of Novartis and Pfizer, the top two companies by sales last year. Yet Forest easily outspent these competitors on promotional speaking events last year.


Forest spent $32.3 million on paid talks in 2013, compared with $12.7 million for Novartis and $12.6 million for Pfizer.


An Actavis spokesman declined to comment on the company's strategy, but a Forest spokesman said last year that the company spent more on speakers because it didn't use pricey direct-to-consumer TV marketing. It also had more new drugs than its competitors.


Companies with newer drugs or newly approved uses for their existing drugs often seem to spend more. Companies that don't have many new products or have lost patent protection on their drugs, or are about to lose it, tend to pull back.


"A lot of this has to do with where companies are in their development cycle of new products or emerging products, rather than an industry-specific trend," said John Murphy, assistant general counsel at the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, an industry trade group.


4. Meals vastly outnumber all other interactions between drug companies and doctors. But they account for a much smaller share of costs.


Food accounted for nearly 50,000 of Amgen's 55,000 payment reports, excluding research, in 2013, or roughly 91 percent. But at a cost of $3.1 million, those meals represented only about 20 percent of its payments. By comparison, the company spent almost double that amount, $6 million, on just 600 physician speakers.


Other companies followed the same pattern; speakers can command $2,000 to $3,000 per engagement, or more.


Given doctors' busy schedules treating patients, mealtimes are often the only time to reach them, said Murphy, PhRMA's lawyer. Company sales representatives bring information - and a meal. "A lot of doctors' offices are closed for lunch," he said. "During patient care hours, we want them to see patients."


Researchers say that whatever the motivation, even small gifts or meals can influence a doctor's perception of a drug and lead to more prescribing of it.


5. From year to year, doctors cycle in and out of relationships with companies.


Massachusetts has required drug and device companies doing business there to publicly report their payments to its licensed health professionals since 2009.


We looked at all of the physicians - about 3,500 of them - who received at least one payment for "bona-fide services," such as speaking or consulting, from 2010 to 2012.


About 60 percent of the doctors received payments in only one of those years. What this suggests is that most speakers and consultants are tapped for a particular task.


Still, some doctors do appear to have long-term roles with companies. About 20 percent of doctors in the data received a payment in all three years. They represented most of the top-earners over the three-year period - and for that matter, the top earners in any given year.


Los Angeles Times titled


FLASHBACK: Unheralded mathematician Yitang Zhang bridges the prime gap

Yitang Zhang prime numbers

© University of New Hampshire

Yitang Zhang



On April 17, a paper arrived in the inbox of , one of the discipline's preeminent journals. Written by a mathematician virtually unknown to the experts in his field - a 50-something lecturer at the University of New Hampshire named Yitang Zhang - the paper claimed to have taken a huge step forward in understanding one of mathematics' oldest problems, the twin primes conjecture.

Editors of prominent mathematics journals are used to fielding grandiose claims from obscure authors, but this paper was different. Written with crystalline clarity and a total command of the topic's current state of the art, it was evidently a serious piece of work, and the editors decided to put it on the fast track.


Just three weeks later - a blink of an eye compared to the usual pace of mathematics journals - Zhang received the referee report on his paper.


"The main results are of the first rank," one of the referees wrote. The author had proved "a landmark theorem in the distribution of prime numbers."


Rumors swept through the mathematics community that a great advance had been made by a researcher no one seemed to know - someone whose talents had been so overlooked after he earned his doctorate in 1991 that he had found it difficult to get an academic job, working for several years as an accountant and even in a Subway sandwich shop.


"Basically, no one knows him," said Andrew Granville, a number theorist at the Université de Montréal. "Now, suddenly, he has proved one of the great results in the history of number theory."


Mathematicians at Harvard University hastily arranged for Zhang to present his work to a packed audience there on May 13. As details of his work have emerged, it has become clear that Zhang achieved his result not via a radically new approach to the problem, but by applying existing methods with great perseverance.


"The big experts in the field had already tried to make this approach work," Granville said. "He's not a known expert, but he succeeded where all the experts had failed."


The Problem of Pairs


Prime numbers - those that have no factors other than 1 and themselves - are the atoms of arithmetic and have fascinated mathematicians since the time of Euclid, who proved more than 2,000 years ago that there are infinitely many of them.


Because prime numbers are fundamentally connected with multiplication, understanding their additive properties can be tricky. Some of the oldest unsolved problems in mathematics concern basic questions about primes and addition, such as the twin primes conjecture, which proposes that there are infinitely many pairs of primes that differ by only 2, and the Goldbach conjecture, which proposes that every even number is the sum of two primes. (By an astonishing coincidence, a weaker version of this latter question was settled in a paper posted online by Harald Helfgott of École Normale Supérieure in Paris while Zhang was delivering his Harvard lecture.)


Prime numbers are abundant at the beginning of the number line, but they grow much sparser among large numbers. Of the first 10 numbers, for example, 40 percent are prime - 2, 3, 5 and 7 - but among 10-digit numbers, only about 4 percent are prime. For over a century, mathematicians have understood how the primes taper off on average: Among large numbers, the expected gap between prime numbers is approximately 2.3 times the number of digits; so, for example, among 100-digit numbers, the expected gap between primes is about 230.


But that's just on average. Primes are often much closer together than the average predicts, or much farther apart. In particular, "twin" primes often crop up - pairs such as 3 and 5, or 11 and 13, that differ by only 2. And while such pairs get rarer among larger numbers, twin primes never seem to disappear completely (the largest pair discovered so far is 3,756,801,695,685 x 2666,669 - 1 and 3,756,801,695,685 x 2666,669 + 1).


For hundreds of years, mathematicians have speculated that there are infinitely many twin prime pairs. In 1849, French mathematician Alphonse de Polignac extended this conjecture to the idea that there should be infinitely many prime pairs for any possible finite gap, not just 2.


Since that time, the intrinsic appeal of these conjectures has given them the status of a mathematical holy grail, even though they have no known applications. But despite many efforts at proving them, mathematicians weren't able to rule out the possibility that the gaps between primes grow and grow, eventually exceeding any particular bound.


Now Zhang has broken through this barrier. His paper shows that there is some number smaller than 70 million such that there are infinitely many pairs of primes that differ by N. No matter how far you go into the deserts of the truly gargantuan prime numbers - no matter how sparse the primes become - you will keep finding prime pairs that differ by less than 70 million.


The result is "astounding," said Daniel Goldston, a number theorist at San Jose State University. "It's one of those problems you weren't sure people would ever be able to solve."


A Prime Sieve


The seeds of Zhang's result lie in a paper from eight years ago that number theorists refer to as GPY, after its three authors - Goldston, János Pintz of the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics in Budapest, and Cem Yıldırım of Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. That paper came tantalizingly close but was ultimately unable to prove that there are infinitely many pairs of primes with some finite gap.


Instead, it showed that there will always be pairs of primes much closer together than the average spacing predicts. More precisely, GPY showed that for any fraction you choose, no matter how tiny, there will always be a pair of primes closer together than that fraction of the average gap, if you go out far enough along the number line. But the researchers couldn't prove that the gaps between these prime pairs are always less than some particular finite number.


GPY uses a method called "sieving" to filter out pairs of primes that are closer together than average. Sieves have long been used in the study of prime numbers, starting with the 2,000-year-old Sieve of Eratosthenes, a technique for finding prime numbers.


To use the Sieve of Eratosthenes to find, say, all the primes up to 100, start with the number two, and cross out any higher number on the list that is divisible by two. Next move on to three, and cross out all the numbers divisible by three. Four is already crossed out, so you move on to five, and cross out all the numbers divisible by five, and so on. The numbers that survive this crossing-out process are the primes.


[embedded content]




The Sieve of Eratosthenes

This procedure, which dates back to the ancient Greeks, identifies all the primes less than a given number, in this case 121. The Sieve of Eratosthenes works perfectly to identify primes, but it is too cumbersome and inefficient to be used to answer theoretical questions. Over the past century, number theorists have developed a collection of methods that provide useful approximate answers to such questions.


"The Sieve of Eratosthenes does too good a job," Goldston said. "Modern sieve methods give up on trying to sieve perfectly."


GPY developed a sieve that filters out lists of numbers that are plausible candidates for having prime pairs in them. To get from there to actual prime pairs, the researchers combined their sieving tool with a function whose effectiveness is based on a parameter called the level of distribution that measures how quickly the prime numbers start to display certain regularities.


The level of distribution is known to be at least ½. This is exactly the right value to prove the GPY result, but it falls just short of proving that there are always pairs of primes with a bounded gap. The sieve in GPY could establish that result, the researchers showed, but only if the level of distribution of the primes could be shown to be more than ½. Any amount more would be enough.


The theorem in GPY "would appear to be within a hair's breadth of obtaining this result," the researchers wrote.


But the more researchers tried to overcome this obstacle, the thicker the hair seemed to become. During the late 1980s, three researchers - Enrico Bombieri, a Fields medalist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, John Friedlander of the University of Toronto, and Henryk Iwaniec of Rutgers University - had developed a way to tweak the definition of the level of distribution to bring the value of this adjusted parameter up to 4/7. After the GPY paper was circulated in 2005, researchers worked feverishly to incorporate this tweaked level of distribution into GPY's sieving framework, but to no avail.


"The big experts in the area tried and failed," Granville said. "I personally didn't think anyone was going to be able to do it any time soon."


Closing the Gap


Meanwhile, Zhang was working in solitude to try to bridge the gap between the GPY result and the bounded prime gaps conjecture. A Chinese immigrant who received his doctorate from Purdue University, he had always been interested in number theory, even though it wasn't the subject of his dissertation. During the difficult years in which he was unable to get an academic job, he continued to follow developments in the field.


"There are a lot of chances in your career, but the important thing is to keep thinking," he said.


Zhang read the GPY paper, and in particular the sentence referring to the hair's breadth between GPY and bounded prime gaps. "That sentence impressed me so much," he said.


Without communicating with the field's experts, Zhang started thinking about the problem. After three years, however, he had made no progress. "I was so tired," he said.


To take a break, Zhang visited a friend in Colorado last summer. There, on July 3, during a half-hour lull in his friend's backyard before leaving for a concert, the solution suddenly came to him. "I immediately realized that it would work," he said.


Zhang's idea was to use not the GPY sieve but a modified version of it, in which the sieve filters not by every number, but only by numbers that have no large prime factors.


"His sieve doesn't do as good a job because you're not using everything you can sieve with," Goldston said. "But it turns out that while it's a little less effective, it gives him the flexibility that allows the argument to work."


While the new sieve allowed Zhang to prove that there are infinitely many prime pairs closer together than 70 million, it is unlikely that his methods can be pushed as far as the twin primes conjecture, Goldston said. Even with the strongest possible assumptions about the value of the level of distribution, he said, the best result likely to emerge from the GPY method would be that there are infinitely many prime pairs that differ by 16 or less.


But Granville said that mathematicians shouldn't prematurely rule out the possibility of reaching the twin primes conjecture by these methods.


"This work is a game changer, and sometimes after a new proof, what had previously appeared to be much harder turns out to be just a tiny extension," he said. "For now, we need to study the paper and see what's what."


It took Zhang several months to work through all the details, but the resulting paper is a model of clear exposition, Granville said. "He nailed down every detail so no one will doubt him. There's no waffling."


Once Zhang received the referee report, events unfolded with dizzying speed. Invitations to speak on his work poured in. "I think people are pretty thrilled that someone out of nowhere did this," Granville said.


For Zhang, who calls himself shy, the glare of the spotlight has been somewhat uncomfortable. "I said, 'Why is this so quick?'" he said. "It was confusing, sometimes."


Zhang was not shy, though, during his Harvard talk, which attendees praised for its clarity. "When I'm giving a talk and concentrating on the math, I forget my shyness," he said.


Zhang said he feels no resentment about the relative obscurity of his career thus far. "My mind is very peaceful. I don't care so much about the money, or the honor," he said. "I like to be very quiet and keep working by myself."


Meanwhile, Zhang has already started work on his next project, which he declined to describe. "Hopefully it will be a good result," he said.


UK anti-war protests: Hundreds rally in London against British airstrikes



Hundreds of activists rallied against Britain's involvement in airstrikes against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria on Saturday. Protesters marched through central London holding banners and chanting anti-war slogans.

Demonstrators chanted "Hands off the Middle East, No justice, No peace," which marching toward Prime Minister David Cameron's Downing Street office, where the rally was planned to end.


They held banners which read: "Stop bombing Iraq" and "Iraq III No!"


UK ISIS anti-war protests

© Unknown



"I think the solution to all these problems is for Britain and the US to get their nose out of the Middle East, to stop interfering and let that part of the world sort out their own problems. I think our interference has created these problems. Everything we touch in the Middle East turns to crap," one of the demonstrators told RT. "Let's get out as soon as possible."

UK ISIS anti-war protests 2

© Unknown



"History teaches us that when we go and bomb people, militants appear and go stronger. All that is going to happen by us going there is just get the situation worse," another protester said.

Up to 1,000 people participated in the protest, despite pouring rain. Many shared their demonstration experiences on social media.


UK ISIS anti-war protests 3

© Unknown



Organized by anti-war groups including Stop the War Coalition, the protest came in response to the UK government's support of airstrikes against militants last week and the deployment of six Royal Air Force (RAF) Tornado fighter jets to Akrotiri base in Cyprus. From there, British pilots are launching airstrikes at the Islamic State as a part of an international US-led coalition.

It also followed the release of a video by militants, which showed the execution of British aid worker Alan Henning.


"The solution is never to kill. War is a solution for nothing. The solution is a diplomatic one. We need more diplomatic effort. Today ISIS (IS) is committing atrocities, but we are really making the situation worse," an activist told RT.


[embedded content]




This week, Prime Minister David Cameron announced that two more British Tornado planes will join the fight against the Islamic State. He hailed British troops for the "vital work to defeat these barbaric ISIL (IS/ISIS) terrorists who threaten security."

Cameron also announced that Britain will no longer be disbanding its II Squadron - comprising of 16 Tornados - in March as initially planned. Instead, the 102-year-old squadron will assist with airstrikes in Iraq. The squadron was originally scheduled to be disbanded following the closure of operations in Afghanistan.


UK ISIS anti-war protests 4

© Reuters/Luke MacGregor

Demonstrators march through London to protest British air strikes against Islamic State in Iraq, October 4, 2014.



Dallas Ebola-positive man possibly infected 10 in Texas

ebola workers

© Reuters/Jim Young

Workers wearing hazardous material suits arrive at the apartment unit where a man diagnosed with the Ebola virus was staying in Dallas, Texas, October 3, 2014.



US health officials are monitoring 10 quarantined people who had contact with a Liberian man infected by the deadly Ebola virus. The individuals are being checked regularly as medical officials play down the risk of an outbreak.

The 10 individuals are considered to be at 'high risk,' and are being checked at regular intervals for symptoms of the disease that has already killed thousands of people in West Africa.


Another 50 people who had indirect contact with Thomas Eric Duncan, the infected visitor who entered the United States from Liberia on September 19, are under daily observation, Dr. David Lakey, commissioner of the Texas Department of State Health Services, told Reuters.


Initially the authorities identified 100 people who had any kind of contact with Duncan and risked exposure to the deadly virus.


In Washington, government officials were pressed by reporters as to how Duncan was able to enter the territory of the United States from Liberia, one of the hardest hit of three West African countries where the Ebola virus has killed an estimated 3, 439 people, according to the latest figures released by the World Health Organization.


"There were things that did not go the way they should have in Dallas, but there were a lot of things that went right and are going right," Dr. Anthony Fauci, a director at the National Institutes of Health, told reporters at a White House press conference.


"So although certainly it was rocky" in terms of how people perceived the response, "the reason I said there wouldn't be an outbreak is because of what is going on right now," he said.


Fauci attempted to downplay fears that there would be another Ebola case in the United States, saying that the preventive actions being undertaken by health officials "would make it extraordinarily unlikely that we would have an outbreak."


Symptoms of the Ebola virus, which has hit the West African countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, include fever, vomiting and diarrhea. The disease is contagious and is acquired through contact with bodily fluids such as blood or saliva.


ebola dead burial

© Reuters/Christopher Black

A burial team wearing protective clothing, remove a body of a person suspected of having died of the Ebola virus, in Freetown September 28, 2014.



During Friday's news conference, White House adviser Lisa Monaco was asked whether President Barack Obama would impose a travel ban on West African countries, as some public officials have demanded.

"Right now we believe those types of steps actually impede the response," Monaco said.


A hazardous materials cleanup crew has been working to decontaminate the Dallas apartment where Duncan had been residing before he was admitted to the hospital almost a week ago. Four family members of Duncan who were quarantined in the apartment have been relocated to an undisclosed location, said Sana Syed, the public information officer for the City of Dallas.


Meanwhile, news of another possible Ebola-positive patient has turned up at the nation's capital.


On Friday, Howard University Hospital in Washington, DC, announced it was caring for a patient with possible Ebola symptoms who had recently traveled from Nigeria.


"In an abundance of caution, we have activated the appropriate infection control protocols, including isolating the patient," said hospital spokesperson Kerry-Ann Hamilton in a statement.


The US House Appropriations Committee has set an October 17 deadline for the Obama administration to provide details as to how it is working to protect the mainland from an outbreak.


NBC News said on Thursday that one of its freelance cameramen had contracted Ebola in Liberia, becoming the fifth American to be diagnosed outside of the US with the disease.


A look back at the trial that made rape a war crime




Sara Darehshori and Pierre-Richard Prosper photographed in 1997.



The task was almost unimaginable in its magnitude.

After the Rwandan genocide, in which an estimated 800,000 people were slaughtered over a hundred days in 1994, the U.N. created the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda with the goal of bringing the organizers of the bloodshed to justice.


The tribunal's inaugural case, led by two young U.S. prosecutors, would set a number of precedents -- but perhaps none more significant than classifying rape as a war crime.


Journalists Michele Mitchell and Nick Louvel have directed a new documentary, "The Uncondemned," that takes a powerful look back at the tribunal and the unique challenges faced by Pierre-Richard Prosper and Sara Darehshori, the lawyers who prosecuted the first genocide trial. They won their case in 1998 and made history as sexual violence was judged part of genocide for the first time.


"When people think about war crimes tribunals today, they have a vision because it's been going on for 20 years. But back then, the last time someone had attempted to do anything like that was Nuremberg," Prosper told HuffPost. "Failure literally was not an option -- too much depended on it. If we lost, what would that mean to the victims and the survivors? Their deaths were not being recognized or valued."


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Darehshori, his co-counsel, was only two years out of law school when she got the assignment of a lifetime.

"It was all very crazy," she said. "We were sort of isolated. We didn't have the Internet. We didn't have email, still sending faxes; it wasn't that reliable. We kind of felt like we were on our own. There wasn't a huge body of law to look to. We were winging it."


Among the unsettled matters of law was the connection between rape and genocide, despite their long historical association.


According to a 1996 U.N. report on the Rwandan genocide, perpetrators of the killings used rape systematically as a weapon. "Rape was the rule and its absence the exception," the report noted, estimating that between 250,000 and 500,000 women and girls were raped during the course of the three-month genocide.


The rape crisis that accompanied the mass killings was so widespread that Prosper and Darehshori saw the need to argue that rape should be classified as a war crime and was itself a major component of the genocide.


"Before [the tribunal], rape and sexual violence was just seen as spoil of war," Prosper said. "For the first time in history, rape was put on equal footing with all other crimes committed during the time of war."


reported at the time that the decision advanced the "world's legal treatment of rape and sexual violence," and provided the first international definition of rape as "a physical invasion of a sexual nature, committed on a person under circumstances which are coercive."


While participating in the documentary, Prosper and Darehshori returned to Rwanda, where they were reunited with the three Rwandan women who testified about their rapes. While the women were anonymous during the tribunal and had code names to protect their identities, they have come forward publicly for the first time in the documentary.


"It was interesting, over this much time, to get their perspective on the trial and to see they really appreciated playing a role in this," said Darehshori. "It was important to them to tell their story. They felt empowered by their experience at the tribunal."


SOTT FOCUS: Of Head Choppers and Climate Chaos


When the first ISIS 'beheading' video was released I was immediately struck by how utterly counter-productive it was for the 'Islamic State' to produce a glossy, high-definition video of the event and make it available to Western audiences. If the goal of such a dubious PR campaign was to intimidate the anglo-American Empire into backing off from attacking the alleged Levantine 'rebels', then it failed miserably. What's most amazing however is that the IS leadership were unable to foresee that loping the heads of US and UK citizens and producing a made for TV video of the gruesome spectacle would simply gift the anglo-American Empire builders with the justification to launch a bombing campaign against the video makers. I mean, how politically ignorant do you have to be to not realise that? Did they learn nothing from the 9/11 attacks? Western civilian casualties are the US military industrial complex's bread and butter! They use Western civilian casualties of Arab terrorism to justify the invasion and occupation of the Arab countries that the erstwhile Arab terrorists are trying to rid of US occupation!

Even the kids in the schoolyard know it's a bad idea to kick the bully in the shins, he'll just turn around and knock your head off. It's definitely an unequal exchange. So why would anyone in their right mind pursue such a strategy? I'm assuming that the leaders of ISIL are 'in their right minds' because they're shown themselves perspicacious and able enough to mount a successful blitzkreig through Iraq northern Iraq. You don't do that without being somewhat proficient in military strategy. Seems to me we need to look for an alternative narrative about what the role of ISIL really is.


The first idea that springs to mind is an obvious one. The US and UK governments in particular want to remove Assad. Last year they were prevented from doing so by the diplomatic efforts of Russia. Included in those efforts was a warning that an attack on Syria would be no 'cake-walk' because of Russian and Iranian support (military and other) for Syria's political integrity, and the lack of direct overt involvement by Gulf onarchies in such an attack.


The US backed off, but only temporarily. The Gulf monarchies desire stability, both for their reign and the market for the primary source of their wealth - oil. The are mainly concerned therefore with their own survival and who can best ensure it. All Gulf monarchies owe their existence to Western imperialist gerrymandering of borders in the aftermath of WW1, so the monarchs allegiance has, until now, been with their progenitors.





This game is getting boring...





Since the 1980's US military involvement in S.E. Eurasia has been for the express purpose of preventing Eurasian integration. The Taliban were armed and trained in Afghanistan to prevent the Soviets from forming strategic alliances in the oil and mineral rich 'Middle East' region. The 9/11 attacks were used to justify the direct invasion and occupation of the same region for the very same reason, except this time it was a significantly more potent Putin's Russia that was the target. It's always been about Russia, its location, size and resources is a natural threat to the hegemony of the anglo-American empire.

Iraq was secured as a result of the 10 year occupation. But by the time most US troops left in 2011, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Shia dominated government had already been snuggling up to Iran. Under Maliki, Iraq supported Iran, Iran supports Syria. Syria supports Hizb'allah, Hizb'allah supports the Palestinians, and Russia directly and indirectly supports all five. Israel is not happy and thinks the best approach is to take out the middle, i.e. Iran, hence the hilarious sabre-rattling over the past 10 years from the Jewish State In the Levant (JSIL) about Iran's program to 'get the bomb' in order to annihilate the Jews. The anglo-American empire is not happy either.


In June this year, Iran-ophile Maliki was told to step down by Obama (yaay democracy!). He did so, and was replaced by another 'Iraqi exile' Haider al-Abadi. Like Maliki, al-Abadi is a Shia. From the early 1980s until 2003, both had been in exile from Saddam's Iraq. Maliki was exiled in Iran and Syria, al-Abadi, on the other hand, spent his 20 years in the bosom of the anglo-American empire, servicing the lifts at BBC HQ in London. All Iraqi Shia politicians are not equal obviously, and the anglo-American Imperialists are expecting al-Abadi to pay back the nation that took him in all those years ago. But politics is a dirty business, and nothing is certain, especially with a resurgent Russia already in the game.





Gulf state 'royals' - fond of a bit of head chopping





Russia likes the 'Middle East' (S.E. Eurasia) just as it is. It can do a lot of business there, it's right in its back yard. For this reason, the anglo-American empire fears Russia and has always done so. The Gulf monarchies don't really care who the global mob boss is, they have no ideological convictions in that regard, just as long as the boss has the political, economic and military clout to maintain his position, and theirs Western powers realise this and are desperate to maintain the allegiance of the monarchies and therefore Western control over the Middle East.

Their strategy to achieve this is with a carrot and a stick rather than a carrot a stick. ISIL is the stick, it could easily be used to push for 'regime change' in the monarchies. The carrot is the promise of another 100 years of Western-backed rule, if they quit their prevaricating and sign up in full to the anti-Russia/Iran/Syria alliance. The monarchies are currently in the position of having to bet on what the outcome of the renewed great game between Russia and the West will be. So far, they're being swayed by the formidable military prowess of the USA, but they're taking note of the Russo-Chinese alliance, Russia's major weapons sales to Iraq, Egypt, Iran, Syria, not to mention oil deals with all of the above.


So to get back to the point (apologies for digressing, but the whole situation is a bit complex); ISIS - made up of a diverse gang of fighters provided by or poached from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iraq, Libya and Syria, trained, armed and funded by the CIA and the Gulf monarchies - is used as a proxy army to take down Assad, isolate Iran and therefore Russia, and restore 'order' in Iraq in the form of a Western (i.e. not Iranian) aligned government. But as the plan progressed, it became obvious that ISIS couldn't do it all by themselves, not with Russia supporting Assad and muscling in on Middle Eastern politics.


Help was needed from the mob boss in Washington, but, as always, the home guard had to be convinced that Middle East invasion part three was necessary, and as everyone knows, 'useless eaters' are most effectively manipulated by fear. Hence the 'beheadings' brought to you by IStm and that mysterious organisation known as Site ( Search for International Terrorist Entities Intelligence Group) run a committed Zionist and daughter of an ex-Israeli spy in Iraq.





Rita Katz - at the cutting edge of ISIL videos





Funded by various US federal agencies, Site is dedicated to "monitoring Islamic extremist websites and exposing terrorist front groups" and released the obviously fake 2007 bin Laden video "before al-qaeda could" (pretty impressive!). Most recently, Site has been releasing the IS 'beheading' videos. Katz is on record as saying that she finds the 'beheading' videos online and releases them (to the US media) and "". Is it just me or does that make it sound like Katz is essentially a promoter of ISIL's beheading videos with the goal of beating ISIL to the punch? Why doesn't she just pass details of the offending web sites and videos to the NSA and have them take the sites down and destroy the videos? If ISIL is making these videos as part of a 'propaganda war' against the West, doesn't it make sense to thwart their intentions in that respect?

Katz and her activities are certainly strange, especially in light of British PM David Cameron's closing speech at the 69th session of the United Nations General Assembly last week, where he said:



"We must work together to take down illegal online material like the recent videos of ISIL murdering hostages."



Maybe someone should give him Katz's phone number? Wouldn't Western audiences be happier if they knew nothing about the 'beheadings' of their fellow citizens? Surely they could do without Katz offering them the evidence in full HD on the internet?

One other point made by Cameron at the UN caught my eye:



"As evidence emerges about the backgrounds of those convicted of terrorist offences, it is clear that many of them were initially influenced by preachers who claim not to encourage violence, but whose world view can be used as a justification for it. We know this world view.


The peddling of lies: that 9/11 was a Jewish plot or that the 7/7 London attacks were staged. The idea that Muslims are persecuted all over the world as a deliberate act of Western policy. The concept of an inevitable clash of civilisations"



Apart from terrorists like me who question 9/11 and the 7/7 bombings, if Dave has a problem with the concept of the inevitable clash of civilizations, he really should address his concerns to the ideological descendants of US political scientist and White House Coordinator of Security Planning for the NSC in the



Found him! He's in Qatar! You can invade now!...



Carter administration, Samuel P. Huntington, for it was he who proposed the 'Clash of Civilizations' in a 1992 lecture at the American Enterprise Institute, which was then developed in a 1993 article titled "".

And if Dave and his US masters really want to deal with the "mortal threat we all face from the rise of ISIL" maybe they should focus on the leaders of such groups and the states that harbor and fund them. After all, Afghanistan was 'harboring' bin Laden and 'we' invaded to 'get him', right? Well it just so happens that there's a 'Jihadi' of note who is not only financing ISIL in Iraq and Syria, but is responsible for bankrolling nothing less than the 9/11 attacks! He's gotta be a high value target, right? Well, sort of. Like the 7 alleged 9/11 hijackers of Saudi origin, this guy is from Qatar and, like the Saudis, the Qatari government doesn't have too much of a problem with America's most wanted 'Mooslim t'rrrists'. In fact, they give them lenient prison sentences and then let them go, with money, and weapons.



According to the official US report issued in 2008, al-Subaiy was identified as "a Qatar-based terrorist financier and facilitator who has provided financial support to, and acted on behalf of, al-Qaeda senior leadership, including senior al-Qaeda leader Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) prior to KSM's capture in March 2003".


"The scope of Qatar-based terrorist fundraising is astonishing," said Dr Weinberg, "According to current US officials, tiny Qatar has displaced its much bigger neighbour Saudi Arabia as the number one source of private donations to Isil and other violent extremists in Syria and Iraq."


Dr Weinberg added: "Qatar has a long history of turning a blind eye to backers of al-Qaeda in its midst. Now the Qataris are repeating history all over again, refusing to arrest blacklisted terror financiers right under their noses. The known al-Qaeda funders whom they let out of jail have gone on to become some of terrorism's top moneymen, boosting Isil, Khorasan, and other al-Qaeda linked groups."



So, when can we expect Qatar and Saudi Arabia to be shocked and awe'd and occupied in the name of the war on terror? Right after the US gets the final remittance of that $60 billion arms deal they made with head-choppers Я Us.

So, you get the picture. Big Lies, massive manipulations and unbelievable insanity reign supreme in our world run by psychopaths, and while Western citizens are being either terrified or turned off by ISIL head chopping, our planet is in a state of geological and climate chaos, and no one seems to be noticing.


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