Another record number of warrants for secret spy court

secret spy court

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved 2,370 warrants last year targeting people in the United States believed to be linked to international terror organizations.

That figure represents a 9 percent increase over 2006. The number of warrants has more than doubled since the terrorist attacks of 2001.

The secret intelligence court was established in 1978 to oversee government requests to conduct surveillance on suspected spies inside the U.S.

The court denied three warrant applications in full and partially denied one, the Justice Department said. Eighty-six times judges sent requests back to the government for changes before approving them.

Those oversight numbers also represent an increase over last year, when the court partially denied only one application and required changes to 73 applications.

Because the workings of the court are secret, however, it's impossible to know whether that increase was due to more court oversight, more aggressive government efforts or simply the nuances of individual cases.

Congress created the court in 1978 with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The government must get approval from the court to monitor phone conversations or e-mails on suspected terrorists or spies in the United States. The law does not apply to surveillance outside the U.S.

The Bush administration has recently sought to change what can be done without a warrant. The White House says the law needs to keep pace with new technology, which routes many foreign telecommunications signals through the U.S.

Civil rights and privacy advocates, however, worry that changing the law would make it easier for the government to eavesdrop on Americans without court approval.

A compromise bill has stalled. President Bush insists that the bill must shield telecommunications companies from lawsuits over wiretaps and other information they allowed without court approval following the 2001 attacks. Democrats in Congress oppose that provision.

Because the most recent wiretap figures are from 2007, however, the effect of this dispute on the workload of the court is not yet public.

___

On the Net:

Justice Department: http://www.usdoj.gov

who are they, where do they live?
if not for the people then then are traitors to USA
hang in Public

Is Organic Food Really Healthier

Is Organic Food Really Healthier

Don't ask the US federal government whether there are any health benefits to eating organic food. It won't tell. No mere coincidence, then, that no pictures of farmers or farms (or fertilizers or pesticides) appear in the USDA food pyramid logo. The federal government encourages the consumption of more fruits, vegetables, and grains, but stops short of evaluating the farming systems that produce these same foods. An apple is an apple regardless of how it has been grown, the USDA food pyramid suggests, and the only take-home message is that we should all be eating more apples and less added sugars and fats.

But this message may be too simplistic. Over the past decade, scientists have begun conducting sophisticated comparisons of foods grown in organic and conventional farming systems. They're finding that not all apples (or tomatoes, kiwis, or milk) are equal, especially when in comes to nutrient and pesticide levels. How farmers grow their crops affects, sometimes dramatically, not only how nutritious food is but also how safe it is to eat. It may well be that a federal food policy that fails to acknowledge the connection between what happens on the farm and the healthfulness of foods is enough to make a nation sick.

The Results Are In

In the late 1990s, researcher Anne-Marie Mayer looked at data gathered by the British government from the 1930s to the 1980s on the mineral contents of 20 raw fruits and vegetables. She found that levels of calcium, magnesium, copper, and sodium in vegetables, and of magnesium, iron, copper, and potassium in fruit had dropped significantly.

The 50-year period of Mayer's study coincides with the post World War II escalation of synthetic nitrogen and pesticide use on the farm. These powerful agri-chemicals allowed farmers to bypass the management-intensive methods of maintaining soil fertility by replenishing soil organic matter with cover crops, manure, and compost, and of controlling pests with crop rotation and inter-cropping. Reliance on chemical fertilizers and pesticides became a defining characteristic of conventional farming, while farmers who eschewed the use of agri-chemicals came to be considered organic.

of course it is, I have known this since early 70's when we did community gardens in Raleigh, NC with NOAH'S Food Co-op.
"you are what you eat"

.PREPARE..FOR. HARD..TIMES..AHEAD

.PREPARE..FOR. HARD..TIMES..AHEAD.
ckClick Link Above

Our grain reserves are now at their lowest since World War II:
Due to high prices caused by shortages abroad, our stockpiles of grain are now being exported fifteen times faster than expected, and we have committed to sell ALL of it to foreign countries, leaving our own wheat reserves at the lowest level since 1946, when we had half the current population to feed. In fact, it seems our farmers have probably committed to sell more grain to foreign countries than they've actually planted !
.
To make matters worse, America's farmers have switched to growing corn for ethanol, in place of food grade crops. Couple this with worldwide damage to farmlands and crops from droughts and floods, and it's obvious that the worst will come yet this summer.

These two ABC news articles confirm the above:
February 5: . .http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=4269201
February 8: . .http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=4263281

The shortage of ALL grains, even hay, is so severe that now we even have thoroughbred horses starving - even dying - in Kentucky, Tennessee, and at least five other states; The price of hay has doubled, even tripled. Grain wholesalers from as far away as Central Kentucky are receiving calls daily from people across the eastern part of the United States looking for hay. Horses are being abandoned on federal land, and in city parks, or are given away.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/03/26/eveningnews/main3971281.shtml

The Rush For Biofuels Threatens Starvation On A Global Scale:
"The rush towards biofuels is threatening world food production and the lives of billions of people, the Governments Chief Scientific Adviser said yesterday. Professor John Beddington put himself at odds with ministers who have committed Britain to large increases in the use of biofuels over the coming decades. In his first important public speech since he was appointed, he described the potential impacts of food shortages as the elephant in the room; a problem which rivaled that of climate change."

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article3500954.ece

The Sunday Times Says - We Are Running Out! (U.K. Times):
"THE WORLD is only ten weeks away from running out of wheat supplies after stocks fell to their lowest levels for 50 years. The crisis has pushed prices to an all-time high and could lead to further hikes in the price of bread, beer, biscuits and other basic foods."

Half Our Bees Have Died !
Half of America's honeybees are now dead and gone! So, do not expect abundant fruits, nuts, and vegetable crops as they will drop to as little as thirty (30) percent of normal production, for lack of pollination!

Per CBS - Sixty Minutes, Feb. 24, 2008. See: .http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/10/25/60minutes/main3407762.shtml

Summation:
Without grain, livestock cannot be fed. Without livestock there is no meat. Without bees, vegetables and fruit cannot grow. Without all three, a nation cannot survive.

A man should first direct himself in the way he should go. Only then should he instruct others. - Buddha

Bilderburg Group Info, Know the Enemy

IT WILL SURPRISE YOU
he Bilderberg Secretariat proclaims the conferences to be '...private in order to encourage frank and open discussion'. Frank and open discussion is a good thing in any forum but when those doing the discussing are some of the very most powerful financiers and media tycoons in the world it begs the question: If what they discuss is for the good of ordinary people why not publicise it! Isn't it a perverted use of the word 'open' when no-one can find out what they're saying?

Is Bilderberg a secret conspiracy?

When such rich and powerful people meet up in secret, with military intelligence managing their security, with hardly a whisper escaping of what goes on inside, people are right to be suspicious. But the true power of Bilderberg comes from the fact that participants are in a bubble, sealed off from reality and the devastating implications on the ground of the black-science economic solutions on the table.

No, it's not a 'conspiracy'. The world's leading financiers and foreign policy strategists don't get together at Bilderberg to draw up their 'secret plans for the future'. It's subtler than that. These meetings create an artificial 'consensus' in an attempt to spellbind visiting politicians and and other men of influence. Blair has fallen for this hook, line and sinker. It's about reinforcing - often to the very people who are on the edge of condemning Globalisation - the illusion that Globalisation is 'good', 'popular' and that it's inevitable.

Bilderberg is an extremely influential lobbying group. That's not to say though that the organisers don't have a hidden agenda, they do, namely acumulation of wealth and power into their own hands whilst explaining to the participants that globalisation is for the good of all. It is also a very good forum for 'interviewing' potential future political figures such as Clinton (1991) and Blair (1993). [see above for more on this]

The ideology put forward at the Bilderberg conferences is that what's good for banking and big business is good for the mere mortals of the world. Silently banished are the critical voices, those that might point out that debt is spiralling out of control, that wealth is being sucked away from ordinary people and into the hands of the faceless corporate institutions, that millions are dying as a direct result of the global heavyweight Rockefeller/Rothschild economic strategies.

When looking at one of the (partially reliable) participant lists it should be remembered that quite a number of participants are invited in an attempt to get them on-board the globalisation project. These are carefully selected people of influence, who have been openly critical of globalisation. Examples are Jonathan Porritt (Bilderberg 1999) and Will Hutton (Bilderberg 1997) but there are many others. Most of these kinds of participants are happy to speak about the conference afterwards, and may even be refreshingly critical.

The Bilderberg organisers are accepted by those 'in the know' as the prophets of Capitalism. Will Hutton, deputy Editor of The Observer newspaper in London and left-leaning Economist, described private clubs of the elite as masterminded by 'The High Priests of Globalisation'. The ecclesiastical allusion is not accidental. The Bilderberg high-priests are a force against good, out to wipe morality from the earth. For the organisers Bilderberg Conferences are an annual ideological assault by the world's most power-hungry people. Not content with owning unimaginable amounts of money and property they want to use that wealth to acquire even more power for themselves. Power is the most dangerous and addictive drugs known to man. Will the craving be satisfied when a handful of men own and control everything on earth?

And just like the Nazi party in the 1930's the global Capitalist Elite are rising in power by peaceful means. There are some very uncomfortanble and unexplained connections between Bilderberg and the Nazis through the Conference's founder Prince Bernhard.

These crown princes of capital use violence at the sharp end - the destruction of dissent - the repossession of homes men and women have worked a lifetime for - needless deaths from starvation and geopolitical machinations - this violence is notable by its absence from the annual meetings.

One can't help but wonder, when the Bilderberg organisers, Rothschild, Rockefeller, Kissinger and the rest have completed their project of enclosing all global goods and services into their own hands, enclosing too the media to stop people freely discussing what they are up to. What then?? What happens when the men who would be gods turn out to be the global devils?

Who is behind Bilderberg?

Bilderberg is run by a Steering Group - if you're wondering who's responsible for so much of the capital-friendly and dissent-crushing law-making, poverty and general misery in the world this may be the place to look. Up-to-date lists are available from the Bilderberg Secretariat. This is the closest approximation to a shadow world government. And this is another hidden agenda at Bilderberg.

There may be other groups pulling the strings behind even the Steering Group possibly even high degree occult groups such as The Masons or Illuminati! [eg.] - but that is 'conspiracy theory', Bilderberg is not.

There must certainly be some sociopathic minds behind Bilderberg since they go to so much trouble to promote policies that lead to exploitation, inequality and despair. These individuals seem oddly switched off from the suffering they are clearly causing. Surely only pernicious people would want to control the ideology of the world's mainstream press, and undermine natural political discourse. Public opinion and democratic institutions are a threat when you want to own the world.

The perverse objective of the Bilderberg Steering Group is to dress totalitarian corporate ideology up to appear rational and push it out, unattributable, for mass consumption under Chatham House rules. Meanwhile, outside the Bilder-bubble, 'god-is-money' globalisation is the new religon with the greedy given a pat on the back as they plunder both the earth and a large part of the human spirit.

Source: http://www.bilderberg.org/bilder.htm#What

This is a 'VERY WELL DONE BLOG' !!!!!!

angryindian.blogspot.com




This has got to be a very important site for organizing for The Revolution, so stay tuned

fuck the CIA and NSA little dick pendejos

World food prices soar as Asia consumes more

Food prices are soaring, a wealthier Asia is demanding better food and farmers cannot keep up. In short, the world faces a food crisis and in some places it is already boiling over.

Around the globe, people are protesting and governments are responding with often counterproductive controls on prices and exports - a new politics of scarcity in which ensuring food supplies is becoming a major challenge for the 21st century.

Damaged by severe weather in producing countries and plundered by a boom in demand from fast-developing nations, global wheat stocks are at 30-year lows. Grain prices have been on the rise for five years, ending decades of inexpensive food.

Drought, a declining dollar, a shift of investment money into commodities and use of farm land to grow biofuel crops have all contributed to food woes. But population growth and the growing wealth of China and other emerging countries are likely to be more enduring factors.

World population is set to hit 9 billion by 2050, and most of the extra 2.5 billion people will live in the developing world. It is in these countries that the population is demanding dairy and meat, which require more land to produce.

what did I tell you fools,

best to sink all Chinese and Jap fishing boats off Latinoamerica

wake the fuck up

they stay on their side, we on ours,

but no crap from USA bullshit

Cyprus tears down barricade dividing island

he reopening of Ledra Street was meant to be a step towards ending the island's division, an obstacle to Turkey's membership of the European Union and a source of tension between NATO partners Athens and Ankara.

Hundreds of Greek and Turkish Cypriots crossed Ledra after the 80-metre (262 ft) stretch of road in the main commercial district of Nicosia was opened to pedestrians in a ceremony attended by UN envoys and dignitaries from both communities.

"I couldn't sleep all night. I will walk to St Loukas church (on the Turkish Cypriot side) and light a candle," said Loukia Skordi Salidou, 65.

"My generation is dying. Thank God I'm alive to see this."

most other countries are tearing down these walls, here in arrogant obese, greedy USA they are building them

need to hang all these military and so called defense CEO"s

Lawmakers heavily invested in defense

Not all the companies in which lawmakers invested are typical defense contractors. Corporations such as PepsiCo, IBM, Microsoft and Johnson & Johnson have at one point received defense-related contracts, notes the report by the Washington-based Center for Responsive Politics.

The center's review of lawmakers' 2006 financial disclosure statements suggests that members' holdings could pose a conflict of interest as they decide the fate of Iraq war spending. Several members earning money from these contractors have plum committee or leadership assignments, including Democratic Sen. John Kerry, independent Sen. Joseph Lieberman and House Republican Whip Roy Blunt.

The study found that more Republicans than Democrats hold stock in defense companies, but that the Democrats who are invested had significantly more money at stake. In 2006, for example, Democrats held at least $3.7 million in military-related investments, compared to Republican investments of $577,500.

Overall, 151 members hold investments worth $78.7 million to $195.5 million in companies that receive defense contracts that are worth at least $5 million. These investments earned them anywhere between $15.8 million and $62 million between 2004 and 2006, the center concludes.

It is unclear how many members still hold these investments and exactly how much money has been made. Disclosure reports for 2007 aren't due until this May. Also, members are required to report only a general range of their holdings.

According to the report, presidential hopefuls Barack Obama and John McCain did not report any defense-related holdings on their filings; Hillary Rodham Clinton did note holdings in such companies as Honeywell, Boeing and Raytheon, but sold the stock in May 2007. All candidates three are members of the Senate.

Earning dividends from companies tied to the military "could be problematic" for lawmakers who oversee defense policy and budgeting, noted the center's Lindsay Renick Mayer. Avoiding every company with a military contract, however, would not be easy for an investor.

"So common are these companies, both as personal investments and as defense contractors, it would appear difficult to build a diverse blue-chip stock portfolio without at least some of them," Mayer wrote

Kerry, D-Mass., a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is identified as earning the most — at least $2.6 million between 2004 and 2006 from investments worth up to $38.2 million.

Spokesman David Wade said Kerry, who staunchly opposes the war in Iraq, is one of many beneficiaries of family trusts that he doesn't control. Wade also noted that Kerry does not sit on the Appropriations Committee, which has direct control of the defense budget.

"He has a 24-year Senate record of working and voting in the best interests of our men and women in the military, not of any defense contractors," Wade said.

Lieberman, I-Conn., chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and a member of the Armed Services Committee, held a considerably smaller share at $51,000. A spokesman said the senator, who supports continued operations in Iraq, is "careful to make his policy decisions based only on what is best for the country."

A spokesman for Blunt, R-Mo., a senior member of House GOP leadership who held at least $15,000 in Lockheed Martin stock in 2006, said the insinuation that lawmakers' votes might be affected by their portfolios is "offensive." Like Lieberman, Blunt has been a fierce supporter of the war.

"I don't pretend to speak for other offices, but I am fairly certain that no member would consider their personal finances when voting on issues as important as sending our men and women in uniform into harm's way," said Blunt spokesman Nick Simpson. The Lockheed Martin stock was given to Blunt's wife by her mother, he said.

___

On the Net:

Center for Responsive Politics' Capital Eye:

http://www.capitaleye.org/inside.asp?ID342

then everyone of these cocksuckers need to be hung in public, yesterday Viva La Revolucion, see 'Term Limits" Vince Flynn,
maybe some one will shoot these assholes!!!

Vegetal steel: bamboo as eco-friendly building material

GIRARDOT, Colombia (AP) - Forget steel and concrete. The building material of choice for the 21st century might just be bamboo.

This hollow-stemmed grass isn't just for flimsy tropical huts any more - it's getting outsized attention in the world of serious architecture. From Hawaii to Vietnam, it's used to build everything from luxury homes and holiday resorts to churches and bridges.

Boosters call it "vegetal steel,'' with clear environmental appeal. Lighter than steel but five times stronger than concrete, bamboo is native to every continent except Europe and Antarctica.

And unlike slow-to-harvest timber, bamboo's woody stalks can shoot up several feet a day, absorbing four times as much world-warming carbon dioxide.

"The relationship to weight and resistance is the best in the world. Anything built with steel, I can do in bamboo faster and just as cheaply,'' said Colombian architect Simon Velez, who almost single-handedly thrust to the vanguard of design a material previously associated with woven mats and Andean pan pipes.

Velez created the largest bamboo structure ever built: the 55,200-square-foot (5,128 sq. meter) Nomadic Museum, a temporary building that recently debuted in Mexico City and takes up half of the Zocalo, Latin America's largest plaza.

The museum, open until May, is the brainchild of Canadian artist Gregory Colbert, who wanted a monumental structure built entirely of renewable resources to house his tapestry-sized photos of humans interacting in dreamlike sequence with animals.

He turned to Velez, who two decades ago made a simple discovery.

By using small amounts of bolted mortar at the joints - instead of traditional lashing methods with vines or rope - he was able for the first time to fully leverage the natural strength and flexibility of guadua, a thick Colombian bamboo, to build cathedrallike vaults and 28-foot (8.5-meter) cantilever roofs capable of supporting 11 tons.

Curing the stalks with a borax-based solution deterred termites.

He perfected his technique on hundreds of projects, mostly in Colombia but also in Brazil, India and Germany with structures as graceful as they are muscular.

In steamy Girardot, a two-hour drive from his bamboo home in Bogota, the 58-year-old Velez has just completed a prototype of an energy-saving store for French retail giant Carrefour.

The 21,500-square-feet (2,000 sq. meters) structure has a domed roof made of guadua - instead of sun-absorbing metal - that will cut down on air conditioning costs. In Bali, German Joerg Stamm applied the same technique - learned as an apprentice to Velez - in constructing a 160-foot (50-meter) bridge strong enough to hold a truck. But Velez, the son and grandson of architects who grew up in a Bauhaus-inspired glass house in western Colombia, has little patience for environmentalists now drawn to his work for its planet-saving possibilities.

"I hate environmentalists. Like all fundamentalists, they just want to save the world,'' he says.

For this iconoclast who designs exclusively in freehand, bamboo is foremost a high-tech material.

Seismic testing of bamboo seems to back his claim. After years developing construction codes for bamboo in his lab in the Netherlands, Jules Janssen was in Costa Rica in 1991 when a deadly 7.7 magnitude earthquake struck. Touring the epicenter hours later, he found every brick and concrete building had collapsed.

"But 20 bamboo structures built there by coincidence held up marvelously. There wasn't a single crack,'' said Janssen, a civil engineer and expert on bamboo's physical properties.

In an age of diminishing resources and burgeoning populations, bamboo's environmental and social benefits are its biggest selling point as construction material.

Unlike steel, which is produced in only a handful of industrialized nations, more than 1,100 bamboo species - a few dozen of them suitable for building - proliferate in the tropics. Culms, or stalks, shoot up almost anywhere, easing carbon dioxide's choke on the planet while absorbing water as efficiently as a desert cactus.

But building with bamboo is labor intensive and can be costly in parts of the world, depending on local supply.

Velez estimates that 80 percent of his costs on any project go to paying the 300 specialized craftsmen who follow him around the world, most recently to Guangdong province, China, where he built the country's first commercial bamboo project, the award-winning Crosswaters Ecolodge for tourism.

Bamboo's abundance is, ironically, an obstacle to wider acceptance. Its most visible use is as rickety, makeshift housing - feeding the stereotype that it is poor man's lumber.

That hasn't stopped David Sands. The Hawaii-based architect creates Robinson Crusoe revival homes in Vietnam then ships them in panels around the world for quick assembly.

After building a hundred homes in Hawaii and a resort in Bali, his Bamboo Technologies company is aiming for the U.S. mainland, where its challenges include insulating against colder temperatures and coping with uninformed building inspectors.

But in a sure sign that bamboo's time may have come, Sands says he's had to turn down a $20 million (euro13.5 million) unsolicited offer for his company from potential investors.

"It came as a total shock. We're not ready for the kind of scale they were proposing,'' Sands said, laughing.

The world's bamboo crops may not be ready either - there are few commercial bamboo farms to meet a growing demand, and the United Nations in 2004 warned that as many as half of all wild species may be in danger of extinction due to forest loss.

For the Nomadic Museum, Velez had to ship 9,000 pieces of guadua to Mexico, undercutting much of the material's "grow your own house'' mystique.

But shortages may also be filled as bamboo plywood - already a major industry in China - gains acceptance in the United States and Europe, and growers rush to meet the demand.

"The rate at which it grows is amazing,'' says Raul de Villafranca, consultant for Agromod, a Mexican company that is planting 9,880 acres (4,000 hectares) in the southern state of Chiapas. "In one year, you can harvest stalks 15 meters (50 feet) tall, and unlike hardwood, it never needs to be replanted.''