Whole Truth Coalition

 A squad of anti-litter officials has been given instructions to film suspects on the street  -  even before they have done anything wrong.

The team of 11′ environmental enforcement officers’ has been equipped with mobile phone cameras and told to use them to film people they think may be about to drop litter.

The use of cameras to record individuals who have committed no crime or offence has generated a row over the spying powers of local councils and the growing willingness of officials to stretch them to the limit.

Ministers have already called on town halls to stop abusing the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which has allowed councils to watch those suspected of trying to cheat on school catchment areas, those thought to be wrongly parking with blue disabled badges and families who officials think are putting their bins out on the wrong day.

Litter police are employed by councils under environmental laws passed three years ago that allow officials to hand out onthespot fines to those who drop litter or break wheelie bin regulations.

The litter squad equipped to film suspects has been employed by Hackney Council in North London.

The team’s members have been involved in a number of controversial incidents. Officials have been reported chasing suspects on foot through traffic to capture them on camera and to have invaded a cafe while looking for a woman suspected of dropping a cigarette end.

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For eighteen months the entire 1.5 million people of Gaza experienced a punishing blockade imposed by Israel, and a variety of traumatizing challenges to the normalcy of daily life. A flicker of hope emerged some six months ago when an Egyptian arranged truce produced an effective ceasefire that cut Israeli casualties to zero despite the cross-border periodic firing of homemade rockets that fell harmlessly on nearby Israeli territory, and undoubtedly caused anxiety in the border town of Sderot.

During the ceasefire the Hamas leadership in Gaza repeatedly offered to extend the truce, even proposing a ten-year period and claimed a receptivity to a political solution based on acceptance of Israel’s 1967 borders. Israel ignored these diplomatic initiatives, and failed to carry out its side of the ceasefire agreement that involved some easing of the blockade that had been restricting the entry to Gaza of food, medicine, and fuel to a trickle.

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As a middle class American, it’s been difficult for me to understand how we are supposed to make a living when there are so many things working against us. How can we go on day after day with the rising cost of food, fuel, utilities, car insurance, taxes and health care, while dealing with the insecurity of unemployment? In the past, whenever I considered these things, I felt a hopeless sense of impending doom in the pit of my stomach. There is so much talk about how to solve these issues, but nothing ever seems to stop the downward spiral of struggle and stress that millions of folks are experiencing.

Like many working people, my life went along fine during the 1980s. I had a good paying job ($42,000 a year) and though I didn’t enjoy the kind of work I was doing as an industrial draftsman, receiving a steady paycheck every week kept me going without much complaint. But then came the Gulf War in the 1990s and after that point I faced nine layoffs over the span of 10 years. By the time September 11 happened, I hadn’t been able to maintain steady employment in the petrochemical industry for over a decade. I would work about three or four months, then back again to the unemployment line.

It was at this point that I realized that something was wrong. The life strategy I had grown up to believe in was no longer working and there didn’t seem to be any answers. Obviously no one was going to get me out of this, so I decided I needed to take matters into my own hands and figure out a way to redefine my basic approach to living.

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Vaccinations are modern medicine’s most-favored form of quackery. Even while the bulk of the evidence shows vaccines and flu shots ultimately harm more people than they help, they continue to be pushed by doctors, drug companies and state health authorities. Now you can add pediatricians to that list.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, a group of drug-pushing doctors that claim to care for children, is now demanding that parents get their children injected with an annual flu shot vaccine — even for six-month-old babies! According to the new AAP guidelines, all children from six months to eighteen years old should receive an annual flu shot vaccine injection even though flu shots have been scientifically shown to be effective on only about one percent of those receiving them!

But here’s the most disturbing part: The AAP is now aggressively attacking anyone who suggests flu shot vaccines should be spaced apart or skipped altogether in order to reduce the vaccine burden on a child.

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Taxpayers would have to pay hundreds of pounds in premiums every year while working, and would receive payouts if they later have to move into a nursing home.

The radical plan is being considered by ministers as a way to tackle the system of long-term support for the elderly in England, which is widely considered to be unfair, underfunded and too complex.

Currently thousands of middle-class pensioners are forced to sell their homes to pay for nursing home accommodation - which can cost £700 a week - while a postcode lottery of eligibility gives people in some parts of the country far more free help than elsewhere.

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Spending billions on trying to reduce carbon emissions is one giant con that is depriving third world countries of vital funds to tackle famine, HIV and other diseases, Sammy Wilson said.

The DUP minister has been heavily criticised by environmentalists for claiming that ongoing climatic shifts are down to nature and not mankind.

But while acknowledging his views on global warming may not be popular, the East Antrim MP said he was not prepared to be bullied by eco fundamentalists.

“I’ll not be stopped saying what I believe needs to be said about climate change,” he said.

“Most of the people who shout about climate change have not read one article about it

“I think in 20 years’ time we will look back at this whole climate change debate and ask ourselves how on earth were we ever conned into spending the billions of pounds which are going into this without any kind of rigorous examination of the background, the science, the implications of it all. Because there is now a degree of hysteria about it, fairly unformed hysteria I’ve got to say as well.

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Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, can drive communists, leftists, Greens, and one-world globalists to near apoplectic fury. However, the popular Czech statesman (finance minister, 1989-1992; prime minister, 1992-1997; president since 2003, reelected 2008) has become a hero to a growing tide of Europeans from Prague to London who are resisting the increasingly oppressive rule by the European Union’s bureaucrats in Brussels and the socialist-dominated European Parliament in Strasbourg.

Klaus, a free-market economist who grew up under the tyranny of communism, is an outspoken critic of the “new European Soviet” — as former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has approvingly referred to the sprawling EU bureaucracy.

In January, the Czech Republic assumes the six-month rotating presidency of the European Union. Which means that Vaclav Klaus, an adamant “eurosceptic,” will serve as the ceremonial head of the EU, a supranational behemoth which he has described as a threat to freedom and national sovereignty. This will mark a sea change in attitude from that of France’s Nicolas Sarkozy, who is (reluctantly) stepping down from the current EU presidency. Sarkozy has basked in the glory of his EU spotlight and has campaigned for expanded EU powers, most especially for ratification of the stalled Lisbon Treaty. President Klaus has campaigned just as energetically in opposition to the Lisbon Treaty, a slightly disguised version of the EU Constitution that was rejected by French and Dutch voters.

President Klaus also stirs opponents to paroxysms of frenzied sputtering by referring to human-caused global warming as a myth, and by his opposition to the Kyoto Protocol and other climate change regulatory regimes. I interviewed him for The New American in New York City in March 2008, where he was a main speaker at the International Conference of Climate Change, featuring top scientists from around the world who challenge the Al Gore-United Nations thesis of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.

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The Home Office claims the new database, which can track phone calls and emails, is necessary in an advancing digital world to allow it to tackle terrorism and serious crime.

But Sir Ken MacDonald, the former Director of Public Prosecutions, said the multibillion pound behemoth would prove a “hellhouse” of personal private information that would inevitably leak into the public domain regardless of the stringent safeguards promised by Government.

His warning follows a series of major leaks of personal information in the past year, including the loss of 25 million child benefit records by the HM Revenue and Customs.

At present, Internet Service Providers and telephone companies can provide police with the lion’s share of information about the whereabouts and identities of suspects from their communications.

Under the new system, which will be outlined in the new year in a consultation paper on the interception modernisation programme, one or a number of organisations would proactively collect all communications data, including from broadband phone calls and chatrooms, instead of such information being retrieved at the behest of police or intelligence agencies.

The potential cost of such a database has been estimated to reach £12bn, but the consultation paper includes an option to put it out to private tender in a bid to cut costs.

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A report by Toronto Public Health advises children to limit their use of cell phones as much as possible, citing studies that have linked long-term mobile phone exposure to an increased risk of brain tumors.

“We think it’s responsible to limit children’s exposure,” the researchers wrote.

“While scientists were pretty dismissive of any risk years ago, with the accumulation of studies, it appears people who have been using their phones for a long period of time are at greater risk of certain kinds of brain tumors.” said report co-author Loren Vanderlinden.

Toronto Public Health recommends that children use land lines whenever possible, using mobile phones only for “essential purposes.” When cell phones are used, the report urges children to keep calls shorter than 10 minutes and to use headsets or other hands-free devices as much as possible. Limiting cellular phone use is especially important for pre-adolescents, the authors said.

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Amnesty International and other human rights organizations have decried Israel’s continued aerial bombing campaign as unlawful and denounced the killing of more than 300 Palestinians since 27 December, including scores of unarmed civilians not taking part in the hostilities. Israel’s attacks on the densely populated Gaza Strip also elicited condemnation from numerous world politicians and sparked protests in global cities.

Despite international outcry over escalating violence, the U.S. mainstream media continues to privilege a prepackaged narrative in which Israel’s actions are never disproportionate, never counterproductive and certainly never gratuitous. According to the mainstream media, the U.S. must continue uncompromisingly supporting Israel because the allegedly beleaguered democracy is held hostage by monomaniacal Islamofascists who are inherently evil.  Promoting a paradigm in which Israel is always David up against Goliath, the U.S. media presents suffering Palestinians as expendable for the greater cause of Israel winning its epic struggle.

To justify U.S.’s carte blanche to Israel, the mainstream media restricts American readers to an echo chamber in which the following claims are repeated ad nausem until they are mistaken for fact:

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Bernie Madoff showed us how it was done: you induce many investors to invest their money, promising steady above-market returns; and you deliver – at least on paper. When your clients check their accounts, they see that their investments have indeed increased by the promised amount. Anyone who opts to pull out of the game is paid promptly and in full. You can afford to pay because most players stay in, and new players are constantly coming in to replace those who drop out. The players who drop out are simply paid with the money coming in from new recruits.

 The scheme works until the market turns and many players want their money back at once. Then it’s game over: you have to admit that you don’t have the funds, and you are probably looking at jail time.

A Ponzi scheme is a form of pyramid scheme in which earlier investors are paid with the money of later investors rather than from real profits. The perpetuation of the scheme requires an ever-increasing flow of money from investors in order to keep it going.

Charles Ponzi was an engaging Boston ex-convict who defrauded investors out of $6 million in the 1920s by promising them a 400 percent return on redeemed postal reply coupons. When he finally could not pay, the scam earned him ten years in jail; and Bernie Madoff is likely to wind up there as well.

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‘The myth of “al Qaida” is built on an expansive foundation of many half-truths and hidden facts. It is a CIA creation. It was shaped by the agency to serve as a substitute “enemy” for America, replacing the Soviets whom the Islamist forces had driven from Afghanistan. Unknown American officials, at an indeterminate point in time, made the decision to fabricate the tale of a mythical worldwide network of Islamic terrorists from the exploits of the Afghan Mujahedeen.

The CIA already had their own network of Islamic militant “freedom fighters,” all that was needed were a few scattered terrorist attacks against US targets and a credible heroic figurehead, to serve as the “great leader”.’

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Students should be allowed to take brain-boosting drugs such as Ritalin, a leading academic has claimed.

Professor John Harris said that the drugs should be made available over-the-counter for study purposes.

Currently ‘cognition-enhancing drugs’ such as Ritalin require a prescription but the government should ’seriously consider’ a change, according to Professor Harris, the director of the Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation at the University of Manchester.

The move would provoke intense debate. There are fears about the safety of the medications and claims that such drugs are already overused.

Latest figures showed that GPs wrote more than 535,000 prescriptions for antihyperactivity drugs in 2007  -  more than 10,000 a week. The figure has doubled since 2002.

Critics have accused doctors of using such medications as a ‘chemical cosh’ to calm thousands of youngsters who are boisterous and unable to concentrate at school.

But Professor Harris claimed that a sizeable body of evidence showed that stimulants such as Ritalin, Adderall and Provigil  -  described by U.S. students as ‘Viagra for the brain’  -  significantly improve concentration and academic performance.

He told the Times Higher Education magazine that their side-effects were not excessive.

‘It would make sense to try to maximise their benefits,’ he added.

The Daily Mail

Professor John Harris yet another ‘expert’ pushing psychotropic drugs on our children and yet another one in the pocket of Big Pharma.

Chair of the Ethics and Governance Board of Virgin Health Bank

Member of the Chief Medical Officer’s Council, GlaxoSmithKilne

His research is currently supported by The European Commission, The British Embassy, Washington and The Greenwall Foundation.