Visit NewWorldNextWeek.com to get previous episodes in various formats to download, burn and share. And as always, stay up-to-date by subscribing to the feeds from Corbett Report here and Media Monarchy here. Thank you.
Visit NewWorldNextWeek.com to get previous episodes in various formats to download, burn and share. And as always, stay up-to-date by subscribing to the feeds from Corbett Report here and Media Monarchy here. Thank you.
brazil tv host turned politician 'ordered killings to boost ratings' from guardian: A Brazilian politician who fronts a popular television crime show is being investigated for allegedly ordering a series of executions in a bid to boost his ratings. Wallace Souza, a former police officer who used his lunchtime television slot to rail against the violence sweeping the jungle city of Manaus, is suspected of commissioning at least five murders to prove his claim that the region is awash with violent crime. "Manaus can no longer live with this wave of crime," Souza, 50, frequently told the audience of his daily show Canal Livre. "Nowadays everyone is killing." In a 2008 speech at Manaus's local parliament, Souza boasted that Canal Livre enjoyed complete editorial freedom and was conducted with "journalistic responsibility". But prosecutors in the remote Amazon city say the politician's actions went far beyond the call of journalistic duty, accusing Souza of links to drug trafficking, death squads and organised crime, and possessing illegal arms.
evangelical leader, 9 others charged in brazil from cbsnews: The founder of one of Brazil's biggest evangelical churches siphoned off billions of dollars in donations from his mostly poor followers to buy jewelry, TV stations and other businesses for himself, authorities charged Tuesday. A Brazilian judge accepted charges from prosecutors alleging that Bishop Edir Macedo and nine other people linked to the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God committed fraud against the church itself and against its numerous followers. Sao Paulo state's prosecutors office alleged in a statement that Macedo and the others took more than $2 billion in donations from 2003 to 2008 alone, but charged that the alleged scheme went back 10 years. Church lawyer Arthur Lavigne told the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo that the accused denied any wrongdoing. Church officials did not respond to attempts to reach them by phone and e-mail.
government readies schools as mass vaccination clinics from paul joseph watson: The government is telling schools across the country to prepare to be used as clinics for mass vaccination programs set to be instituted later this year, according to an Associated Press report. Schoolchildren are being targeted as the first recipients of a swine flu vaccine currently being developed, despite the fact that swine flu has proven far less lethal than originally feared, killing just 160 people worldwide, a figure dwarfed by the number of people who die annually from the regular flu virus.
The World Health Organization increased the hysteria surrounding swine flu last week, raising their alert status to level 6, indicating a global pandemic was underway. “Schoolchildren could be first in line for swine flu vaccine this fall — and schools are being put on notice that they might even be turned into shot clinics,” states the report.
“Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Tuesday she is urging school superintendents around the country to spend the summer preparing for that possibility, if the government goes ahead with mass vaccinations.”
The last such mass vaccination program to combat swine flu in 1976 resulted in dozens of deaths and hundreds of injuries, after the Ford administration attempted to use the infection of soldiers at Fort Dix as a pretext for a mass vaccination of the entire country.
Americans have been psychologically conditioned by the mass media to accept to inevitability of enforced mass vaccination campaigns for years. The latest such example appeared in Time Magazine six weeks ago, where it was mooted that officials would be forced to “institute draconian measures to combat the disease,” measures which would include mandatory mass vaccination programs.
high seas search for air france jet with 228 aboard from reuters: Search planes scoured the dark waters of the Atlantic Ocean early on Tuesday, looking for the remains of an Air France jetliner that disappeared in a severe storm with 228 people on board. The Airbus A330 went missing on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris and French President Nicolas Sarkozy said there was little chance of finding any survivors. France and Brazil sent military aircraft and ships to try to find wreckage on high seas between Brazil and West Africa...
It was carrying 216 passengers of 32 nationalities, including seven children and one baby, Air France said. Sixty-one were French citizens, 58 Brazilian and 26 German. Twelve crew members were also on board. Tearful relatives in Paris and Rio were attended to by teams of psychologists. One of the Brazilians on board was Pedro Luis de Orleans e Braganca, a direct descendant of Dom Pedro II, the last emperor of Brazil, a spokesman for the royal family told Reuters. Executives from French tire company Michelin (MICP.PA), the Brazilian unit of German steelmaker ThyssenKrupp (TKAG.DE), and Brazilian mining giant Vale (VALE5.SA) were also among the passengers, said company officials and family members.
US geologist & wife were on air france plane from ap: A spokesman for Devon Energy Corp. confirms that the Americans on an Air France plane which disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean were 60-year-old Michael Harris and his wife, Anne Harris. Chip Minty of Oklahoma City says Michael Harris was a geologist in Devon's Rio de Janeiro office. He started with Devon in 2004 and became a full-time employee in 2006. Minty says Harris had moved from Houston to Brazil in July.
video: french pilots' union doubts lightning downed flight 447
update1: brazil confirms air france jet crashed in ocean from ap: Brazilian Defense Minister Nelson Jobim says a 3-mile (5-kilometer) path of wreckage found in the Atlantic Ocean confirms that an Air France jet crashed in the sea. Jobin said Tuesday that discovery of the debris by Brazilian military pilots "confirms that the plane went down in that area" hundreds of miles (kilometers) from the archipelago of Fernando de Noronha.
pilot claims air france flight 447 was blown out of the sky from daily mail: Investigators are baffled how a modern plane operated by three experienced pilots could have suddenly plunged out of the sky on a routine transatlantic flight. One theory is that the jet was downed by a mid-air collision, possibly involving a military spy jet or an aircraft piloted by drug-runners. Another is that the jet was hit by lightning, causing a massive electrical short circuit. But an unidentified senior long-haul Air France pilot told a French newspaper: "I have flown these jets for Air France for more than ten years and the chances of an electrical fault seem unfeasible to me. There are five electricity supplies on the plane and they would all have to fail." He said a bomb was the only logical reason for why the captain failed to send out a mayday call.
flight447.com domain name registered in '07 from threat level: As investigators seek to unravel the fate of Air France flight 447, there’s been speculation online about an unusual domain name registration made some two years prior to this week’s plane crash, flight447.com. The mystery of the Air France flight that disappeared this week deepened after news agencies on Wednesday confirmed a previous Air France flight from Buenos Aires to Paris was the target of a bomb threat just days before. That plane was inspected and arrived without incident. Now it has emerged that someone registered a domain for the missing plane’s flight number on September 30, 2007. The domain name, which currently point(ed) to a search engine, expires on the same date this year and was registered to Success Incorporated in Malibu, California. It’s not unusual for individuals to register domain names shortly after news breaks on a big story and then to sell them. Indeed, a second domain AirFrance447.com was registered the day of the crash, hours after the news made headlines, and a third domain AirFranceLawSuit.com is being auctioned on e-Bay this week after being registered the day after the crash. The timing of the two-year-old flight447.com, however, makes it unusual. But when contacted, the owner of the latter domain, Kari Bian, said that the connection between his registration and the crash is coincidental. “It’s just an accident (that there’s a connection),” he said. “I have nothing to do with anything. I feel really bad for that flight.” The cause of the crash is still unknown.
air france tells families no hope of survivors from ap: Air France has told families of passengers aboard Flight 447 to abandon any hope of survivors. A counsellor present at a meeting with Air France's CEO Pierre-Henri Gourgeon says he told the families that the plane broke apart either in the air or when it slammed into the ocean's surface. Guillaume Denoix de Saint-Marc, who was asked by Paris prosecutors to help counsel family members, said Thursday "what is clear is that there was no landing. There's no chance the escape slides came out." Denoix de Saint-Marc says Gourgeon told families at the Wednesday meeting there were no survivors. Military rescue planes were trying to narrow the search zone Thursday as ships headed to the site to recover wreckage.
brazil recovers first air france flight 447 debris from ap: A Brazilian helicopter crew recovered the first wreckage from Air France Flight 447 on Thursday, pulling a cargo pallet from the sea. No sign of human remains have been spotted, and Air France has told families that the jetliner broke apart, killing all 228 people on board... Soldiers at Fernando de Noronha's airport, where any recovered human remains would be taken, unloaded body bags and a refrigerator truck on Thursday from a military plane... Patrick Smith, a U.S. airline pilot and aviation analyst, said the failures could have begun with a loss of electrical power, possibly as the result of an extremely strong lightning bolt. "What jumps out at me is the reported failure of both the primary and standby instruments," Smith said. "From that point the plane basically becomes unflyable. If they lost control and started spiraling down into a storm cell, the plane would begin disintegrating, the engines and wings would start coming off, the cabin would begin falling apart," he said. The pilot of a Spanish airliner flying nearby at the time reported seeing a bright flash of white light plunging to the ocean, said Angel del Rio, spokesman for the Spanish airline Air Comet. "Suddenly, off in the distance, we observed a strong and bright flash of white light that took a downward and vertical trajectory and vanished in six seconds," the pilot wrote in his report, del Rio told the AP. The pilot of the Spanish plane, en route from Lima, Peru to Madrid, said he heard no emergency calls. France's defense minister and the Pentagon have said there were no signs that terrorism was involved, and Jobim, the Brazilian defense minister, said "that possibility hasn't even been considered."
debris 'not from air france jet' from bbc: Debris recovered from the Atlantic by Brazilian search teams is "sea trash" and not from a lost Air France jet, a Brazilian air force official has said. Brig Ramon Borges Cardoso contradicted earlier reports, saying "no material from the plane has been recovered". Teams found buoys and a wooden pallet and spotted a fuel slick, and are now searching for an airline seat and a chunk of metal seen earlier this week.
air france crash mystery deepens from afp: The mystery surrounding the crash of an Air France plane off the coast of Brazil deepened after Brazilian officials said items they had pulled from the sea were not in fact debris from the downed Airbus. The search by ships for wreckage from Air France flight AF 477, which came down early Monday as it was flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris with 228 people on board, continued in a zone where confirmed items from the plane had been spotted earlier in the week. "Up to now, no material from the plane has been recovered," Brigadier Ramon Cardoso, director of Brazilian air traffic control, told reporters in the northeastern city of Recife late Thursday. That contradicted a statement Cardoso made earlier Thursday when he said a pallet and two buoys plucked from the Atlantic by navy crews were the first pieces of the Air France crash. In fact, Cardoso admitted later, they were nothing more than sea "trash," probably from a ship, as was a big oil patch originally described as a fuel slick from the French jet.
a hurricane-killing, space-based power plant from wired science: How's this for crazy?: A company files a patent to destroy hurricanes as they form by beaming them with energy from a space-based solar plant. Maybe it is crazy, but that same company, Solaren, took a first step in that direction this week when it inked a deal with the northern California utility, PG&E, to provide 200 megawatts of power capacity transmitted from orbit in 2016. Apparently, sending up billions of dollars worth of solar collectors and using microwaves to send the energy onto two square miles of receivers in the desert is a little ho-hum to Solaren's wild minds. "The present invention relates to space-based power systems and, more particularly, to altering weather elements, such as hurricanes or forming hurricanes, using energy generated by a space-based power system," Jim Rogers and Gary Spirnak write in their 2006 patent application... Attempts at weather modification have taken many forms over the decades from cloud seeding to the strange fans that vineyards use for hyperlocal weather modding. Some analysts have even speculated that geoengineering techniques could allow countries to weaponize the climate by subtly turning an enemy country's breadbasket into a desert, for example. Hurricanes have also been a target of dozens of plans to alter their courses or slow their winds.
are we ready for a solar katrina? from abcnews: More than a million people without power. The distribution of drinkable water disrupted. Transportation, communication and banking upset. Trillions of dollars in damage. Hurricanes, blizzards and other earthly tempests aren't the only natural forces with the potential to sow catastrophe. Severe weather in the sun's outer atmosphere could knock out much of the country's power grid, incapacitate navigational systems and jeopardize spacecraft, scientists say. While the odds of a solar disaster are relatively small, scientists warn that we need to ramp up our defenses against solar storms, especially given our increasing dependence on technology that is so susceptible to radiation from the sun. "It's one of those events that is of low probability but high consequence," Dr. Roberta Balstad, a research scientist with Columbia University's Center for Research on Environmental Decisions. "The consequences could be extreme."
nazi dr mengele is responsible for the astonishing number of twins in a small brazilian town, an historian has claimed from telegraph: The steely hearted "Angel of Death", whose mission was to create a master race fit for the Third Reich, was the resident medic at Auschwitz from May 1943 until his flight in the face of the Red Army advance in January 1945. His task was to carry out experiments to discover by what method of genetic quirk twins were produced – and then to artificially increase the Aryan birthrate for his master, Adolf Hitler. Now, a historian claims, Mengele's notorious experiments may have borne fruit. For years scientists have failed to discover why as many as one in five pregnancies in a small Brazilian town have resulted in twins – most of them blond haired and blue eyed. But residents of Candido Godoi now claim that Mengele made repeated visits there in the early 1960s, posing at first as a vet but then offering medical treatment to the women of the town. Shuttling between Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil, he managed to evade justice before his death in 1979, but his dreams of a Nazi master race appeared unfulfilled.
In a new book, Mengele: the Angel of Death in South America, the Argentine historian Jorge Camarasa, a specialist in the post-war Nazi flight to South America, has painstakingly pieced together the Nazi doctor's mysterious later years...
While the twins birthrate varies widely in different countries, it is typically about one in 80 pregnancies – a statistic that has left Mr Camarasa certain in his claim that Mengele was successfully pursuing his dreams of creating a master race, a real-life Boys from Brazil.
pakistan &the national reconnaissance office reunite for more blackop terror drills? from arizona daily star: To troops downed in combat, few sights are sweeter than the approach of military rescuers. In a few weeks, Tucson will be at the center of efforts to speed up that lifesaving process. Personnel from around the globe will converge at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base from Dec. 1 to Dec. 12 for the largest rescue exercise of its kind. The effort, dubbed Angel Thunder, will involve the U.S. Army and Air Force, troops from Germany, Chile, Colombia and observers from Canada, Mexico, Brazil and Pakistan. Several non-military U.S. agencies such as the State and Justice departments, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office, also will take part in the drills, which aim to smooth interaction between military branches, allied nations and civilian agencies. With about 450 personnel involved, Angel Thunder "is the most complex and largest Department of Defense personnel- recovery exercise to date," said a news release from Air Combat Command in Langley, Va. D-M will be at the hub of the effort, but most of the mock rescue action will take place elsewhere in Arizona and in New Mexico.
JTFEX 08-4 serves as a ready-for-deployment certification event for the Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group (TR CSG) and the Iwo Jima Expeditionary Strike Group (IWO ESG). The exercise will also serve as a Joint Task Force Capable Headquarters sustainment event. In addition, JTFEX 08-4 will offer preliminary accreditation for 2nd Fleet's Maritime Headquarters with Maritime Operations Center (MHQ with MOC)). MHQ with MOC is a new approach to command and control for fleet commanders.
"This exercise is a tremendous opportunity to train; not only as the Navy and Marine Corps team, but with our joint and coalition partners as well," said Commander, 2nd Fleet Vice Adm. Marty Chanik.
"JTFEX 08-4 will flex our warfighting capabilities from the operational level through expeditionary strike force and strike group operations with several of our coalition partners – France, Brazil and the United Kingdom."
from afp: Around 300 women rural residents in Brazil burst into a property owned by the US company Monsanto and destroyed a plant nursery and crops containing genetically modified corn, their organization said.
The women were protesting what they saw as environmental damage by the crops.
They trashed the plants within 30 minutes and left before police arrived at the site in the southern state of Sao Paulo, a member of the Landless Workers' Movement, Igor Foride, told AFP.
The Brazilian government had "caved in to pressure from agrobusinesses" by recently allowing tinkered crops to be grown in the country, he said.
from german press agency/raw story: Some 10,000 demonstrators Thursday took over the financial centre of Sao Paulo to protest the visit of US President George W Bush.
Carrying signs with slogans like "Out with Bush!" and "No to War!" demonstrators were led by feminist groups who combined their protest with demands to mark International Women's Day.
"The world in which Bush promotes war is the same world in which women live. They suffer the consequences of war, of imperialistic politics," said feminist militant Sonia Coelho, who also criticized Bush's position against abortion.
Protestors gave out leaflets with an image of Bush's face on the body of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and called the US president "humanity's number-one enemy."
Students, trade unionists, landless peasants and left-wing activists - including members of Lula's own Workers' Party (PT) - were also present at the march.
"We are taking advantage of International Women's Day to protest the arrival of Bush. We want to reveal the other side of the story and show that he wants to deconstruct the Latin American economy," said the lawyer Rogerio Batalha Rocha.
Bush's visit is accompanied by the largest security operation ever launched in Brazil to host a foreign dignitary. Around 4,000 troops from the Army, Air Force and the federal, militarized and civil police corps are involved in securing the Bush visit.
The US president is set to remain less than 24 hours in the Brazilian metropolis and is to leave Friday for Uruguay, on a Latin American tour that also includes planned stops in Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico.
fair use notice: this site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. we are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, & social justice issues, etc. we believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US copyright law. In accordance with title 17 usc section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
Welcome to New World Next Week - the video series from Corbett Report and Media Monarchy that covers some of the most important developments in open source intelligence news. This week:
Visit NewWorldNextWeek.com to get previous episodes in various formats to download, burn and share. And as always, stay up-to-date by subscribing to the feeds from Corbett Report here and Media Monarchy here. Thank you.
