LinkBlog

Sara Kruzan was 11 years old, a middle school student from Riverside, Calif., when she met a man -- he called himself GG -- who was almost three times her age. GG took her under his wing; he would buy her gifts, take her and her friends rollerskating. "He was like a father figure," she recalls. Despite suffering severe bouts of depression as a child, until then, Kruzan was a good student, an "overachiever" in her words. But her mother was abusive and addicted to drugs; as for her father, she had only met him a couple of times. So, more and more, GG filled in. "GG was there -- sometimes," she said. "He would talk to me and take me out and give me all these lavish gifts and do all these things for me …" Before long, he started talking to her about sex, giving her his expert advice on what men were really like and telling her that she didn't "need to give it up for free." Unbeknownst to her, GG was grooming Kruzan to be a prostitute. When she was 13, he raped her. "He uses his manhood to hurt," Kruzan recalls, "Like, break you in. I guess." Kruzan worked for GG as a prostitute for three years. The hours were 6 p.m. until 5:30 or 6 in the morning. She and "the other girls" would come back and hand over their earnings to him. "He was, like, married to all of us I guess," she says. " … Everything was his." After years of prostitution and sexual abuse, when she was 16, Kruzan snapped: She killed GG, was arrested and convicted of first-degree murder. Despite attempts by her lawyer to have her sentenced as a juvenile, the judge described her crime as "well thought-out" and sentenced her to life without parole. "My judge told me that I lacked moral scruples," she recalls, a term she did not know the meaning of.

A doctor who carried out a second post-mortem examination on the body of Timothy Hampton says the nuclear expert's fall from the UN building in Vienna was murder.

THE Federal Government's plan to immunise the population against swine flu is in chaos because insurers may not cover doctors who administer the jab. Inadequate testing and the possibility of spreading other infections means there is too high a risk patients will sue, the insurers say. Despite weeks of crisis talks, the Government has refused to underwrite doctors' liability for the vaccinations and medical groups say the program - due to start as early as mid-September - cannot proceed unless doctors are insured.

Today, Detroit looks like a war zone. The slowly rotting corpse of what had been America’s backbone, the leading city in the industrial “Rust Belt.” Today, those cities are on the decline and scheduled to be bulldozed, shrunk and returned to nature. Detroit, Flint, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Memphis. These centers of production and high-wage working class jobs are now collapsing in every sense. Their city governments are broke. Foreclosures range around 1 in 5 in the worst areas. Neighbors are in decline. The last jobs are about to go.

It’s hard not to wonder what would happen if, instead of dutifully reading from the Pentagon’s script on October 13, the media had done their job and informed the public about the real nature of the ‘service’ that potential enlistees were signing up for. Maybe if they had, those recruitment officers would not have been quite so busy recruiting – and stealing the lives of – unsuspecting young people in desperate need of employment. Maybe those eager masses of young men and women wouldn’t have been so hot to sign up if, for instance, they understood that anyone enlisting in the military right now – whatever branch – is required to sign a document that states: "Laws and regulations that govern military personnel may change without notice to me. Such changes may affect my status, pay allowances, benefits and responsibilities as a member of the Armed Forces REGARDLESS of the provisions of this enlistment/re-enlistment document.” (DD Form4/1, 1998, Sec.9.5b). In their book Army of None, published in 2007, Aimee Allison and David Solnit advise those who expect the military to pay for their college to “read the fine print.” The authors point out that only a fraction of recruits who signed up for the Montgomery GI Bill received a dime, and that 65 percent “received no money at all for college.” If you receive a less than honorable discharge (as one in four do), leave the military early (as one in three do), or later decide not to go to college, “the military will keep your deposit and give you nothing.”

Western Ukraine was hit by a severe epidemic of unidentified influenza, tentatively diagnosed by doctors as viral pneumonia. The number of dead has climbed dramatically. Doctors advise Western Ukrainians to stay at home and use preventive medication. The first pedestrians wearing face masks have been seen on Lviv streets.

In Philadelphia, the FBI has instructed tattoo shops to rat out their customers if they demand privacy, insist on paying with cash, engage in “suspicious behavior,” make “anti-US” comments, or request tattoos that are “extremist symbols.”

While some may criticize Rowley (as I have) for not publicly challenging the cover story about al Qaeda, Bin Laden and 19 hijackers, her demand for a new investigation is a necessary first step, and it stands as a strong statement on the record by one of America’s most famous 9/11 whistleblowers. As such it should be applauded.

Feingold, Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and new Democrat Arlen Specter (Pa.) had the constitutional courage to oppose the Judiciary Committee bill eventually going to the floor that with few exceptions, leaves the Patriot Act intact. I'll be reporting on the crucial fight to bring the Bill of Rights back into the Patriot Act as Senate and House versions merge into a law to be signed by Obama as he continues the Bush-Cheney legacy. It was Feingold who, in October 2001, was the only member of the Senate to vote against the original Patriot Act as, on the floor, he accurately predicted our greatly weakened privacy, due process and other rights since then.

Millions of people are refusing to take the H1N1 vaccine. In the weeks ahead — if Obama’s emergency declaration falls under the above directives — we may witness a move toward martial law, forced vaccination, and internment of those who refuse. At best, Obama’s declaration is a flimsy attempt to scare people into taking the toxic soft kill vaccination. Let’s hope this is the case.

The declaration of this national emergency seems suspicious from the start. Where's the emergency? The number of people killed by swine flu in the United States is far smaller than the number of people killed each year from seasonal flu, according to CDC statistics. People obviously aren't dropping dead by the millions from H1N1 influenza. Most people are just getting mild flu symptoms and a few days later they're fine. So where's the emergency? The only emergency I can see is the emergency fabricated by Big Pharma to sell more vaccines. By declaring a national emergency over the H1N1 pandemic, Obama is playing right into their hands. I find the timing of all this curious. Two days ago, New York gave up on its efforts to require mandatory vaccinations of health care workers. This was designed to defuse a large number of planned protests from health freedom-conscious people who don't want government-mandated chemicals pumped into their veins.

We invite you to browse our website, read the materials, and, hopefully, sign our petition of support for a new 9/11 investigation. With your time and effort a new investigation will be increasingly likely. We sincerely appreciate your contribution.

The White House on Saturday said Obama signed a proclamation that would allow medical officials to bypass certain federal requirements. Officials described the move as similar to a declaration ahead of a hurricane making landfall.

Behind all the rhetoric about “change,” this is Obama’s most important constituency. In his run for the presidency in 2008, he captured the lion’s share of donations from Wall Street, taking in $15 million from securities and investment firms, $3 million from commercial banks, and $6 million from other financial institutions. The New York Times reported that some major financial firms, including Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, had decided to limit their participation in the fund-raising gala. The newspaper offered seemingly contradictory explanations for their shying away from the event. The Times quoted Scott Talbot of the Financial Services Roundtable, an industry lobby group, as saying, “There are sensitivities there,” and citing fears that contributions from Wall Street firms “can make a donor a target.” In other words, some leading figures of finance capital are conscious of the growing popular outrage over soaring bank profits and lavish executive bonuses—subsidized by public money—under conditions where virtually nothing is being done for the unemployed and the millions losing their homes.

By taking anti-AIDS medicine after a rape, Christina Turner discovered that she had made herself all but uninsurable.

Even companies outside of the medical industry are benefiting: the UPS division that delivers vaccines in specially designed containers, for example, has seen a bump in business.

For six years, the agency has fought in federal court to keep secret hundreds of documents from 1963, when an anti-Castro Cuban group it paid clashed publicly with the soon-to-be assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. The C.I.A. says it is only protecting legitimate secrets. But because of the agency’s history of stonewalling assassination inquiries, even researchers with no use for conspiracy thinking question its stance.

The deaths of three 9/11 first responders in the past week is enough proof for Mayor Bloomberg that people are getting sick from working at Ground Zero. "Probably - nobody's sure - but probably contracted during breathing the air down at the World Trade Center site," the mayor said yesterday after the Daily News reported that two cops and a firefighter recently died of cancer. NYPD Officer Robert Grossman died of cancer Friday at the age of 44. The next day, Firefighter Richard Mannetta, 44, died of cancer. And last Wednesday, 37-year-old Police Officer Cory Diaz also died of cancer. Firefighter John McNamara, 44, died of cancer last month.

Charlie has announced a video contest. Contestants are asked to creatively interpret the script and produce and execute a video. The completed videos will be posted on YouTube or a similar service and will be promoted on Infowars and the 20 Minutes with the President website. In this way the message and call for a new investigation ignored by the corporate media will go viral on the internet.

Jackson was still gone. My guess is that all of this took place within a period of 10 minutes or less. It felt like hours… days even. My son was gone.

Be that as it may - I would very much rather have an old whore extol the virtues of chastity to me than have mainstream media tell me what is or is not ethical for the simple reason that I expect the former to be far more entertaining than the latter. OK, mainstream media, now that you've heard this little rant - carry on. Keep on doin' Pravda and Der Sturmer proud!

Note: A friend on the Hill made an important point to me by email. Maxine Waters and Ron Paul get almost nothing [from the financial lobby. Sherman, Kucinich, Grayson and Kaptur are some other congress members who have not been bought and paid for]. The story isn’t just that a lot of members are bought and paid for, it’s that some aren’t.