Who Will Stand Up for the Children?

Dutch Catholic Church faces child sex abuse scandal

2010-02-27T13:39:00.000-08:00

http://www.rnw.nl/english/article/dutch-catholic-church-faces-child-sex-abuse-scandal

26 February 2010

"There was a knock at the door. I tried to scream but I couldn’t utter a sound." Janne Geraets, now 57, suffered repeated sexual abuse from the age of 11 at the hands of a priest at the Roman Catholic school where he was a boarder.

Amid the high-profile child sexual abuse scandals in the United States and other European countries, the reputation of the Roman Catholic Church in the Netherlands has remained unsullied. But a joint investigation by Radio Netherlands Worldwide and NRC Handelsblad reveals that this is unjustified.

Lured out of bed
Janne Geraets’ ordeal began in 1964, at the Don Rua monastery in the town of 's-Heerenberg in the east of the Netherlands. He was being trained by the Salesian Fathers of Don Bosco, in the hope of one day becoming a missionary. After a party, one of the priests lured Janne to the infirmary under the pretext of giving him medicine to ease his sore throat. "All of a sudden he was right up against me. He unzipped his trousers and forced my hand inside. I was in a state of utter confusion."

Absolution
After the incident, Janne returned to bed. But the next morning he was summoned by the same priest. "I remember how my heart was pounding as I knocked on the door. He opened it and said 'That should never have happened'. He gave me absolution; he pardoned my sin. That confused me even more."

Janne Geraets was summoned to that same room again and again. "He would lie on his couch and put me on top of him, riding back and forth. I remember a knock at the door on one occasion. I tried to scream, but no sound came out. I wanted to yell 'this isn’t right, this isn’t allowed'. But there was no one to turn to. You’re too afraid to say anything. You think you are the dirty one and that they’ll throw you out of school."

Nato Admits That Deaths of 8 Boys Were a Mistake

2010-02-27T07:42:00.001-08:00

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/afghanistan/article7040166.ece

Clockwise from top left: Sebhanullah, 17; Attahullah, 15; Rahimullah, 17; Matiullah, 16; guest Samar Gul, 12; Ismael, 12; Atiqullah, 15; and (not shown) Samiullah, 12

Jerome Starkey
The Times
Thu, 25 Feb 2010 23:02 EST

A night-time raid in eastern Afghanistan in which eight schoolboys from one family were killed was carried out on the basis of faulty intelligence and should never have been authorized, a Times investigation has found.

Ten children and teenagers died when troops stormed a remote mountain compound near the border with Pakistan in December.

At the time, Nato claimed that the assault force was targeting a "known insurgent group responsible for a series of violent attacks". Officials said that the victims were involved in making and smuggling improvised explosive devices. But Western sources close to the case now agree that the victims were all aged 12 to 18 and were not involved in insurgent activity.

When reports of the raid first surfaced eight weeks ago, The Times contacted the police chief in Kunar province and then the boys' head-master and uncle, Rahman Jan Ehsas.

Two men whose children and other relatives were killed agreed to come to Kabul to describe the incident. They provided pictures of their dead sons, a sketched map of the compound and copies of the compensation claim forms signed by local officials detailing their sons' names, relatives and positions at school. Their story was supported by Western military sources.

Farooq Abdul Ajan, who lost two sons, two brothers, three nephews and a cousin in the raid, said that the soldiers had had no idea whom they were killing. Afghan investigators, local officials and MPs from the province all maintain that the boys were innocent.

Nato's statement, issued four days after the event, said that troops were attacked "from several buildings" as they entered the village. Yesterday it said that ultimately, we did determine this to be a civilian casualty incident".

Anger is growing over civilian casualties. General Stanley McChrystal, the US commander, has warned that Nato risks "strategic defeat" by causing civilian deaths. The Independent Human Rights Commission said that more than 63 civilians had died in the past two weeks, including 27 killed when US special forces ordered an airstrike on a convoy of minibuses in the central Daikundi province. Nato recently introduced a new tactical directive to limit the use of night raids, the coalition's chief legal adviser, Colonel Richard Gross, said. "General McChrystal realised that this was one of the areas where we had to change the way we do business, or else we would not win this war," he said.

Exactly who carried out the Narang raid is unclear. Colonel Gross said that US forces were present but did not lead the operation. Nato insists that the troops were not part of the International Security Assistance Force (Isaf). US forces based in Kunar denied any knowledge of the raid.

Senior Western officers have hinted that the "trigger pullers" were Afghan; the Afghan Defence Ministry said its troops were not involved. Mohammed Afzal, Narang's district police chief, insisted that US special forces were involved. Assadullah Wafa, who led an Afghan investigation into the incident, said that relatives would get $2,000 compensation for each person killed.

The Warlord's Tune

2010-02-22T03:13:00.000-08:00

http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2010/s2824501.htm

"A documentary that tells how thousands of young Afghani boys are now being hunted and groomed to become sex slaves."

The Warlord's Tune
Reporter: Jamie Doran and Clover Films
Broadcast: 22/02/2010

Over six months an Afghani journalist, Najibullah Quraishi, has risked his life to document the practice of Bacha Bazi (boy play), where young men are forced into prostitution serving the needs of rich and powerful men.

The filmmaker follows those who make a living procuring young boys, and those who abuse them. The result is a deeply disturbing portrait of a society that publicly promotes a strict moral code while effectively condoning systematic child abuse.
Imagine being nine or ten years old. You are orphaned and living on the streets of a city in Afghanistan. You are approached by a man you do not know. He will clothe, feed and "protect" you. All you must do is learn to dance.

At first you will practice your routine with another young man. After weeks of training you will make your debut dancing before a crowd of men. Many are former warlords who helped the Karzai Government make its way to power. Others might be powerful businessmen.

Before you dance you will be given clothes and make up to make you look feminine. After the dancing, the men are excited and they bid for your company. If you please a warlord or businessman they will pay highly for your favours. Ultimately you will be traded, violated and abused by a large number of men.

This is the world of the Bacha Bereesh, which means "beardless boys". These children are groomed to become sex slaves. It is not a new practice. In Afghanistan the Warlords often kept young boys as their sexual partners. But in modern Afghanistan the practice has evolved into a lucrative and expanding business. In a country ravaged by war orphaned boys are being openly targeted by paedophiles. Some families are so poor that they are willing to sell their sons into slavery. Official reports now suggest thousands of children are at risk.

For the first time on television this practice is finally exposed. A locally born reporter has taken a camera and gone inside the world of the dancing boys. He goes with the "protector" as this man buys children. The reporter is told how the boys are trained and he is told how the "protector" will rent them out and take his "cut".

The documentary finds evidence that this practice is not confined to any one area of Afghanistan. Although it is popular in the north it is now spreading across the country.

The investigation also shows what happens when the boys mature or fall out of favour with the men who desire them. Some are abandoned, others are killed. Asked what impact this life has on the boys, one local says: "They are just boys, they will forget about it."

It is an investigation that has a special resonance for anyone watching in Australia. The people committing the abuse on these children are powerful figures in Afghan society. They are given license to commit these criminal acts by the very governments that are supposed to be our allies in the war on terror and the lethal contest against the Taliban.

"The Warlord's Tune" is produced and scripted by award winning documentary maker Jamie Doran.

It goes to air on Four Corners on Monday 22nd February at 8.30pm on ABC1. It is repeated on Tuesday 23rd at 11.35pm. Also available online.

Girls and boys being sexualised at early age, report warns

2010-02-21T15:37:00.001-08:00

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/children_shealth/7272392/Girls-and-boys-being-sexualised-at-early-age-report-warns.html

Girls and boys being sexualised at early age, report warns
Children are being sexualised from an increasingly early age by computer games, pornography and sex-related slogans, a government report will warn.
By Caroline Gammell
Published: 8:00AM GMT 20 Feb 2010
Players of Miss Bimbo aim to marry a billionaire, and can keep their weight down with diet pills

Girls are feeling under pressure to please boys while boys believe they must sleep with several girls to fit in.

The study was written by clinical psychologist Dr Linda Papadopoulos for the Home Office.

She said: “Little boys are always told ‘aren’t you clever, aren’t you strong’. Little girls are told ‘aren’t you pretty?’ even in 2010.

“They are adhering to what society expects and internalising behaviours.”

Dr Papadopoulos cited the example of the computer game Miss Bimbo, where the aim of the game is to accumulate boob jobs and marry a billionaire.

Her comments came as David Cameron said he tried to stop his six-year-old daughter Nancy from listening to Lily Allen songs because of the sexual content of some of her lyrics.

The report, due out later this month, will suggest imposing age restrictions on lads’ magazine such as Zoo and Nuts and introducing a symbol to signify when a image in a magazine has been airbrushed.

Dr Papadopoulos told the Times Educational Supplement: “It’s a drip-drip effect. Look at porn stars and look at how the average girls looks now.

“We are hypersexualising girls, telling them their desirability relies on being desired.

“They want to please at any cost.

“And we are hypermasculinising boys. Many feel they can’t live up to the porn ideal, sleeping with lots of women.”

A Home Office spokeswoman said: "We know that many parents are concerned about the pressures that their teenage and even pre-teen daughters are under to appear sexually available at a younger and younger age, and about the negative impact this may be having on boys too."

US Move To Capture “Star Children” Alarms Russian Church

2010-02-20T04:53:00.000-08:00

http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index1339.htm

February 18, 2010
By: Sorcha Faal, and as reported to her Western Subscribers

A most interesting transcript of this past weeks meeting between Chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate Metropolitan Hilarion, Irish Ambassador to Russia Philip McDonagh and Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Yakovenko shows their “troubling alarm” over the United States latest move to “identify and capture” all known “Star Children” currently living in, or passing through their Nation.

In order to fully understand who these Star Children are (or whom they are said to be) one must first have a knowledge of the most powerful German Nazi virtually no one in the West has ever heard of, General Karl Ernst Haushofer, who aside from brokering the Axis alliance between Germany and Japan prior to World War II, was the teacher and mentor of Adolph Hitler into the ancient mysticism of the East.

Of his past we can, in part, read: “Haushofer belonged to a family of artists and scholars. He was born in Munich, Germany, to Max Haushofer, a professor of economics, and Frau Adele Haushofer (née Fraas). On his graduation from the Munich Gymnasium (high school), Haushofer contemplated an academic career. However, service with the Bavarian army proved so interesting that he stayed to work, with great success, as an instructor in military academies and on the general staff.

In 1887, he entered the 1st Field Artillery regiment "Prinzregent Luitpold" and completed Bavarian war school (Kriegsschule), artillery academy (Artillerieschule), and Kingdom of Bavaria War Academy (Bayrische Kriegsakademie). In 1896, he married Martha Mayer-Doss (1877 - 1946) who was half-Jewish. They had two sons, Albrecht and Heinz.

Haushofer continued his career as a professional soldier, serving in the army of Imperial Germany, and rising through the Staff Corp by 1899. In 1903 he began teaching at the Bavarian Kingdom War Academy.

In November 1908 the army sent him to Tokyo to study the Japanese army and to advise it as an artillery instructor. He travelled with his wife via India and South East Asia and arrived in February 1909. Haushofer was received by the Japanese emperor and got to know many important people in politics and armed forces. In autumn 1909 he travelled with his wife for a month to Korea and Manchuria on the occasion of a railway construction. In June 1910 they returned to Germany via Russia and arrived one month later.”

During Haushofer’s 1910 stay in Russia he came under the influence of the powerful Greek-Armenian mystic and spiritual teacher George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, who was at that time warning both the East and West of the catastrophic dangers to come by their being deliberately manipulated by the “malevolent Universal forces of the ancient gods” through the likes of the Satanic English occultist Aleister Crowley (who Gurdjieff despised) and the Russian mystic Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin.

[Note: So fearful of Gurdjieff was Rasputin that in Colin Wilson’s book “Rasputin and the Fall of the Romanovs” (p. 103, Farrar Straus & Co., 1964 ASIN B001GIMPZ8) he was quoted to say “I had been especially careful not to look at Gurdjieff and not to allow him to look into my eyes...”]

Unfortunately for both the East and West Gurdjieff’s warnings were not heeded and because they weren’t led to the catastrophic events that have bathed our Planet Earth in the blood of countless hundreds of millions ever since.

Though this report is not even close to being sufficient in explaining Gurdjieff’s “Forth Way” for humanity it can be stated that he “argued that many of the existing forms of religious and spiritual tradition on Earth had lost connection with their original meaning and vitality and so could no longer serve humanity in the way that had been intended at their inception. As a result humanity was failing to realize the truths of ancient teachings and were instead becoming more and more like automatons, susceptible to control from outside and increasingly capable of otherwise unthinkable acts of mass psychosis.”

So powerful was Gurdjieff’s influence on Haushofer that upon his return to Germany he established the secretive Vril Society reported to have been funded by Western bankers and industrialists and credited with being the “mother” of the soon to come Nazi Party.

Haushofer also became a member of the secretive Thule Society which was a German occultist and völkisch group in Munich named after a mythical northern country from Greek legend. The Thule Society was the organization that sponsored the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP), which was later transformed by Adolf Hitler into the National Socialist German Workers (Nazi) Party.

Most important to realize about Haushofer’s actions upon his returning to Germany in 1910 was his “discovery” (gained through his many years of extensive training in Zen-Buddhism while in Japan, and reinforced by the secretive lessons taught to him by Gurdjieff in Russia) that our Earth was being inhabited by a race of “Star People” who were “reactivating” the “hidden spirit” they had implanted in human beings hundreds of thousands of years ago to create upon our Earth a new “master race” of humanity destined to have “godlike” powers.

[Note: The “hidden spirit” referred to in these writings we now know as DNA.]

Now the main goal of Haushofer, the Vril Society, the Thule Society and Adolph Hitler (and with the full backing of Western bankers and industrialists, including Prescott Bush, the father and grandfather of 2 American Presidents) was to “control” the “arrival” of these “Star People” upon our Earth (or more accurately stated the managing of human beings whose “hidden code” of their DNA was being “awakened”) and create for them a utopian society for them to live in through which they could then spread out and repopulate our entire Planet bringing true peace and prosperity to our human race for all time.

Unfortunately for Haushofer (and all of us actually) was that Hitler, and those Western powers backing him, had entirely different views as to how to “manage” the awakening of these “Star People” ,and so in being in fear of their losing their power over humanity opted instead to engage in the mass genocide of anyone even remotely showing signs of “awakening”, and using every device at their disposal to ensure that those who did “awaken” could be “totally controlled” and “manipulated”….forever.

Haushofer, at the time of Hitler’s betrayal, was the most powerful man in Germany and was the true “power behind the throne”, and upon his learning of what was to be the fate of the “Star People” ordered Hitler’s second in command, Rudolf Walter Richard Hess, on a secret mission to England to warn the United States and England of what was being planned. Hess, upon his landing in Scotland on May 10, 1941 was taken before the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill who ignored his pleas and ordered him imprisoned until the end of the war.

[Note: Upon the ending of the war Hess was convicted by the Allies for “crimes against humanity” and imprisoned for the rest of his life and never allowed to speak, hear or write, to any living person whatsoever about what he knew.]

Unknown to both Haushofer and Hess at the time was that Hitler had come “under the influence” of Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler who on July 1, 1935 had created the Ahnenerbe Society to compete with both the Vril Society and Thule Society and was based upon the “black occult” teachings of Aleister Crowley and in much favor in the West and meant to “uncover the hidden past of an imaginary Aryan race he and his Führer regarded as the noblest and most vital force in human history.”

[Note: Himmler’s co-opting of Haushofer and Gurdjieff’s “true agenda” for the protection of the “Star People” could not have been accomplished without the help of the Tibetan Monks who rebelled against the “True Universal Order” and aligned themselves with the Nazis, and after the Nazi’s defeat the West. For more information on this particular aspect of this story you are encouraged to watch the film “Dalai Lama, Tibet, and Nazi Germany Collaboration” that is described as follows:

“This illuminating National Geographic documentary reveals the "mutual understanding" that was established between Tibet and Nazi Germany during Ernst Shafer's expeditions. Shafer, an SS Officer, acted as a go between for the "Eastern and Western Swastikas". With imagery of the medieval conditions endured by ordinary Tibetans, including the fear-mongering monk police, this documentary opens a window to the Tibet that the Dalai Lama and his cronies would like to keep hidden from the world.” ]

[Note: “The Nazi leaders were attracted to Tibet by those of its secret doctrines which filtered through to the west. They believed, those members of the Thule group, the Luminous Lodge, and the various other occult organizations which helped shape the Third Reich, in an esoteric history of mankind. And it was in the archives of Tibetan monasteries that this history was preserved in its purest form.

Already, in the latter half of the previous century, intriguing hints about Tibetan secret teachings had been carried to the west by Helena Blavatsky, who claimed initiation at the hands of the Holy Lamas themselves. Blavatsky taught that her "Hidden Masters" and "Secret Chiefs" had their earthly residence in the Himalayan region. As soon as the Nazi movement had sufficient funds, it began to organize a number of expeditions to Tibet and these succeeded one another practically without interruption until 1943. One of the most tangible expressions of Nazi interest in Tibet was the party`s adoption of its deepest and most mystical of symbols-the swastika.

The swastika is one of mankind's oldest symbols, and apart from the cross and the circle, probably the most widely distributed. It is shown on pottery fragments from Greece dating back to the eighth century b.c. It was used in ancient Egypt, India and China. The Navaho indians of North America have a traditional swastika pattern. Arab-Islamic sorcerers used it. In more recent times, it was incorporated in the flags of certain baltic states.”

After Hess’s capture Haushofer retreated to his home where for the remainder of the war the protection of his Tibetan Monk bodyguards kept Hitler or Himmler from moving against him.(Which was important as Haushofer was part Jewish.) The same cannot be said about Haushofer’s son Albrecht, however, who was implicated by Himmler in the July 20, 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, placed in Berlin’s Moabit prison and then executed by SS Troops with a shot to the neck on April 23, 1945 as Russian Forces entered the Nazi’s capital city to prevent his capture and his telling what he knew to the Soviets.

Upon the Allies crushing defeat of Nazi Germany, Haushofer and his wife were taken into custody by American Forces and moved under the “strictest protection” to Nuremberg (location of the Nazi war crime trials) where under orders from President Truman no one was allowed to have contact with him except the American Jesuit Catholic priest, professor of geopolitics and founder of the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, Father Edmund Walsh, and who after his “interrogation” held Haushofer totally blameless for the Nazi reign of terror and mass genocide.

After holding Haushofer blameless for the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis Walsh did not release him, or his wife, and ordered their “immediate transfer” to Pähl, Bavaria, and where shortly after Haushofer and his wife’s arrival on March 10, 1946 Walsh reported to President Truman that they had both “committed suicide” by drinking poision.

[Note: Important to note about all of these events as they relate to the “Star People” awakening upon our Earth are the “Watchers” who the ancient myths and legends describe as being the protectors of the “Star People”, and who in the late stages of World War II were reported in skies over Germany (from November, 1944 onwards) in their “saucer like” crafts and referred to as “Foo Fighters” by Allied pilots.]

Now as these historical events pertain to Metropolitan Hilarion’s voiced concerns over the United States beginning a new purge against the “Star Children”, and as these transcripts relate, involves the theft (rumored, but not confirmed to have been a Russian GRU operation) from Germany this past fortnight of 11 tonnes of blood from the United States and bound for Austria where it was to be put into the custody of the pharmaceutical giant Baxter International Inc. for the “immediate creation” of a new flu virus as indicated by the instructions included with the shipment.

[Note: Baxter International Inc. has been implicated in the creation of swine flu virus and interestingly enough had filed for a patent on the vaccine for this disease a full year before its discovery.]

These transcripts further state that the West’s creation of this swine flu virus for the purpose of exterminating the “Star Children” currently awakening in their countries was thwarted by another “reactivation” of their DNA which rendered the virus harmless.

The United States however, these transcripts continue, not being content with the mass poisoning of these “Star Children” has also embarked upon an insidious campaign of indentifying them by their DNA which new reports are showing they have been collection from all of the children born in their country for years, and as we can read as reported by the InfoWars.Net News Service:

“The government is harvesting samples of DNA from every newborn child in the country, storing them in monolithic bio banks and providing them to outside researchers and other agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security, all without the consent or knowledge of parents.

It sounds like the stuff of dystopian nightmare, and it is, but it is also reality.

In April 2008, President Bush signed into law a bill which formerly announced the process that the federal government has been engaged in for years, screening the DNA of all newborn babies in the U.S. within six months of birth.

Described as a “national contingency plan” the justification for the law S. 1858, known as The Newborn Screening Saves Lives Act of 2007, is that it represents preparation for any sort of “public health emergency.”

The bill states that the federal government should “continue to carry out, coordinate, and expand research in newborn screening” and “maintain a central clearinghouse of current information on newborn screening… ensuring that the clearinghouse is available on the internet and is updated at least quarterly”.

Sections of the bill also make it clear that DNA may be used in genetic experiments and tests, both by the government and by researchers chosen to handle the DNA samples and the information that goes with them.”

Even more insidiously is the United States embarking on an unprecedented mission to hunt down any of these awakened “Star Children” attempting to leave their country and will now be DNA swabbed at their airports under the guise of determining if they had handled explosives.

To how many of these awakening “Star Children” are currently in the United States can be estimated by the number of their citizens being treated for depression with drugs designed to inhibit their DNA and which doubled between the years of 1996-2005 (the last year statistics are available) to over 27 million.

The United States destruction of these “Star Children” also includes the injection into their children’s bodies of DNA growth inhibiters disguised as vaccines and which turns them into autistics, and which the latest figures shows has risen to 1 out of every 110 children born in America.

Also to be noted of the United States war against these “Star Children” is its still ongoing injection into their water supplies of the powerful psychotic drug base known as sodium fluoride.

In this vast “cat and mouse” war between the West (led by the United States) and these “Star People” and their “Watchers” it is worth noting that the ancients have warned us of its final outcome, and to those not prepared for it will shake them to their very core.

© February 18, 2010 EU and US all rights reserved

Pa. Supreme Court Throws Out Thousands of Juvenile Delinquency Cases

2010-02-19T14:45:00.000-08:00

http://www.school-survival.net/blog/p/pa-supreme-court-throws-out-thousands-of-juvenile-delinquency-cases/1451

February 19, 2010

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled late Thursday that almost all juvenile delinquency cases heard by an indicted former judge must be thrown out. The ruling means cases heard by former Luzerne County Judge Mark Ciavarella from Jan. 1, 2003 to May 31, 2008 are in question for fairness and impartiality.

Ciavarella faces criminal charges that accuse him of taking millions of dollars in kickbacks from owners of private detention centers in exchange for placing juvenile defendants at their facilities, often for minor crimes.

In one reported case, a college-bound high school student served three weeks in juvenile detention for making fun of the school principal on a Web site.

The court said that it "cannot have any confidence that Ciavarella decided any Luzerne County juvenile case fairly and impartially while he labored under the specter of his self-interested dealings with the facilities," and called Ciavarella's actions a "travesty of juvenile justice."

The decision could impact up to 6,500 Pennsylvania youth, whose juvenile detention records will now be erased and their cases dismissed without the possibility of retrial.

Most of the affected youth have already served their time. In Pennsylvania, juvenile criminal records are not automatically expunged when children turn 18, so Thursday's ruling could give thousands of kids a clean slate, said Marsha Levick, deputy director of the Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia and an attorney for the children. About 100 Pennsylvania children could now be released from juvenile detention or taken off of probation, according to Levick.

"The court's far-reaching order is an exceptional response to the most serious judicial scandal in the history of the United States," Levick told ABC News.

The ruling is the latest stunning development in a story of corruption that first shocked Luzerne County residents in January 2009. Federal prosecutors announced that respected county judges Ciavarella and Michael Conahan had pleaded guilty to tax evasion and honest services fraud. However, their plea deal and relatively light sentence were later rejected by a federal judge who ruled that Ciavarella and Conahan had failed to accept responsibility for their crimes. In fact, Ciavarella had previously told "20/20" that "we would never agree that [the kids' sentencing] was improper."

Now, the two former judges face much more serious federal racketeering, bribery, and extortion charges. All of this is the result of a lengthy investigation by the Internal Revenue Service and the FBI. Ciavarella and Conahan have pleaded not guilty.

"They sold their oath of offices to the highest bidders and engaged in ongoing schemes to defraud the public of honest services that were expected from them," Deron Roberts, chief of the FBI's Scranton office, said at a late January news conference announcing the case.

The judges' arrests shed light on a mystery in Luzerne County: Why were so many kids getting sent directly to juvenile detention after seeing Ciavarella in his Wilkes-Barre juvenile court? And why were those kids sent away in such a rush?

'I Had No Clue What to Say'

Eric Stefanski had never been in trouble before he found himself in front of Ciavarella, who took office in 1996.

"I was 12 years old when I got locked up. I had no clue what to say when he asked me how do I plead," Stefanski told "20/20" correspondent Jim Avila.

"I was 12 years old. I didn't know too much about the court system."

His offense? He went joyriding with his mom's car and ran over a barrier, smashing the undercarriage. No one was hurt, not even Stefanski, but in order to get her insurance to pay for the damage, his mom, Linda Donovan, had to file a police report. Donovan even thought an appearance before a judge would be good for her son and give him a little scare. She wasn't prepared for what happened when Eric came before Ciavarella.

"He read me my charges and said, 'How do you plead?' And I didn't know what to say, so I looked at my mom, and I guess she didn't know I was looking, and I said, 'Guilty,'" Stefanski said.

"That's when I turned around, I looked at my mom and she started crying."

'The Most Egregious Abuse of Power'

Stefanski was locked up for two years. He was not represented by an attorney, his mom said, because she didn't think he needed one.

"His first offense, he's so young, I just didn't think that it was necessary," Donovan said.

It's not supposed to be like this in juvenile court, where incarceration is considered the last resort, legal experts said. But Levick told ABC News she saw a disturbing trend inside Ciaravella's courtroom. ,

And she had the evidence to back it up, she claimed.

"The numbers of children going into placement in Luzerne County tended to be two to three times higher than in other counties," she said.

Levick said kids were being locked up for minor infractions. "A child who shoplifted a $4 bottle of nutmeg," she said. "A child who was charged with conspiracy to shoplift because he was present when his friend was shoplifting. A child who put up a MySpace page, taunting her school administrator.

"I think what we have here in Luzerne County is probably the most egregious abuse of power in the history of the American legal system," Levick said.

Levick turned her findings over to the FBI, and the outcome rocked the Pennsylvania justice system.

Ciavarella and Conahan had allegedly devised a plot to use their positions as judges to pad their pockets. They shut down the old county-run juvenile detention center by first refusing to send kids there and, then, by cutting off funds, choking it out of existence.

They then replaced the facility with a cash cow -- a privately owned lockup built by the judges' cronies -- and forged a deal for the county to pay $58 million for a 10-year period for its use. At the time, Conahan was serving as president judge of the Luzerne County Common Pleas Court, a position that allowed him to control the county-court budget. Ciavarella was the Luzerne County juvenile court judge.

In the judges' original plea deal, they admitted that they took more than $2.6 million in payoffs from the private youth detention center between 2003 and 2006.

Prosecutors said the judges attempted to hide their income from the scheme by creating false records and routing payments through intermediaries. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court removed them from their duties after federal prosecutors filed charges Jan. 26. The investigation is ongoing.

"The defendants engaged in fraud by taking millions of dollars in connection with the construction, operation and expansion of juvenile detention facilities here in Luzerne County," U.S. Attorney Martin Carlson said.

And, according to state statistics, Ciavarella's incarceration rates of juveniles jumped after the privately owned juvenile detention center opened.

"The information alleges that the judges ordered juveniles into these detention facilities, the facilities in which they had a financial interest, and on occasion that those orders were done, despite the recommendation of juvenile probation officers that the child not be detained, not be imprisoned," Carlson said.

Ciavarella denies having sentenced kids for cash, and told ABC News last spring, "I'm not pleading guilty to anything relative to cash for kids, embezzlement, extortion, quid pro quo. Absolutely not."

Losing Faith in the Justice System

Dave Janoski, projects editor of the Citizens Voice newspaper of Wilkes-Barre, said, "You could see that, at the very moment, when they could make the most money, that's when the number of kids spiked."

Many Wilkes-Barre residents exploded with anger when they heard that men they elected, and trusted to judge their children, had profited from their incarceration.

"There's been a lot of outrage," said Terrie Morgan-Besecker, staff writer for the Times Leader newspaper in Wilkes-Barre.

"I think a lot of them have lost faith in the system of justice ... that they went in there blindly thinking that they were going to talk to the judge, he was going to listen to them and hand down an appropriate punishment ... and they're just yanked away from their parents and put in shackles," she said. "It just left them absolutely stunned and not believing that this could happen."

Many people wanted to know who was looking out for the kids as they worked their way through the judicial system.

"I think that we had a conspiracy of silence going on in Luzerne County," Levick said. "There were officers of the court, there were members of the district attorney's office, members of probation, private lawyers, public defenders, who were in the courtroom every day. And they had to know what was happening and whether it was by virtue of intimidation or an unwillingness to get involved. The fact remains that nobody stood up."

When Ciavarella was asked about families' complaints of his rapid-fire brand of justice and trials that lasted only minutes with even first-time offenders sent to detention centers, he told "20/20," "You take a look at their file and you look to see if this was the first time they had a run-in with the law. It might have been the first time they're in front of me. You may be surprised that it's not going to be as clear-cut as they would like you to think."

'The Judge Is Incorrect'

But Arthur Grim, a Pennsylvania juvenile judge himself, who was assigned to review Ciavarella's cases, said Ciavarella is wrong.

"Kids were in there for relatively minor first-time offenses and ended up being placed," Grim said. "The judge is incorrect.

"I'm seeing cases which seem to take in the neighborhood of a minute-and-a-half to three minutes. ... That simply is not the way to do business."

Chief Justice Ronald Castille of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court told ABC News last spring that "the Supreme Court is committed to righting whatever wrong was perpetrated on Luzerne's juveniles and their families." Thursday, he delivered on that promise.

Source

What other people are saying about this:

Supreme Court of Pa vacates 6500 juvenile convictions.
Ciavarella and Michael Conahan ,who was serving as president judge of the Luzerne County Common Pleas Court, a position that allowed him to control the county-court budget, entered a plea deal that would have them serve 7 year sentences. The federal judge presiding over the case, 83-year-old Edwin M. Kosik, last month rejected the plea agreements Ciavarella and Conahan had signed in exchange for their admissions of guilt.
Kosik ruled the sentences were too lenient and Conahan and Ciavarella had failed to fully accept responsibility for their alleged wrongdoing.

They now face much more serious charges including racketeering, bribery, extortion and money laundering. They have and pleaded not guilty, an opportunity that they did not extend to the thousands of juveniles they put in detention.

Judge Mark Ciavarella - "Hell Is For Children"
Side note, slightly off-topic: Here's a bizarre video based on Pat Benatar's song "Hell Is For Children", apparently put together by someone close to the Ciavarella situation. I think that's a picture of the Luzerne County Courthouse alternating with pictures of The Vatican???? The video ends with a painting of Jesus sitting in the clouds looking depressed over the whole situation. But if Christian fundamentalists are to be believed, he shouldn't. He's the one who invented the literal Hell For Children.

Judge Mark Ciavarella and Judge Michael Conahan
Suppose you had a 15 year old daughter in a high school. She’s a good kid, a good student with a big heart. She’s not perfect (what kid really is?) – her one flaw is when push comes to shove, she shoves back. When she senses she’s being treated unfairly, or worst yet, her friends are, she feels it’s her duty to strike back, figuratively speaking, and it’s gotten her into trouble with the school once or twice.

This time she decided to do a parody of the school’s vice principle. The school overreacts and she’s arrested, but her lawyer is sure because of her clean police record and high GPA that she”ll get a slap on the wrist. Instead, she comes out of the hearing wearing a pair of handcuffs and a brand spanking new 3 month sentence at a Juvenile Detention Facility.

Over Half a Million U.S. Kids Per Year Suffer Health Reactions From Drugs

2010-02-19T14:31:00.001-08:00

http://www.NaturalNews.com/z028143_children_side_effects.html

February 11 2010
Over Half a Million U.S. Kids Per Year Suffer Health Reactions From Drugs
by David Gutierrez, staff writer

(NaturalNews) More than half a million children suffer adverse reactions every year in the United States from prescription drugs, according to a study conducted by researchers from the Children's Hospital in Boston and published in the journal Pediatrics.

The researchers examined data on emergency room and clinic visits between the years of 1995 and 2005 by children under the age of 18. The average number of children receiving treatment for adverse prescription drug effects each year in that time period was 585,922. The number fluctuated very little from year to year.

Adverse drug events included accidental overdoses, side effects and wrong prescriptions.

Prior research has found that another half million children suffer adverse prescription drug reactions every year while in hospitals, bringing the total annual number of adverse drug effects in children up to more than one million. These numbers do not include negative reactions to over-the-counter drugs.

Researchers in the current study uncovered no reports of deaths caused by adverse drug reactions, but 5 percent of children did require hospitalization. Forty-three percent of the adverse reactions occurred in children under the age of five, with another 23 percent occurring in those between the ages of 15 and 18.

The most common causes of adverse effects in young children were prescription antibiotics. Some of the more common side effects were diarrhea, rash and stomach ache. Birth control pills were a common cause of side effects in teenagers, producing problems such as nausea, vomiting and disrupted menstrual cycles.

Drugs for depression and cancer were also significant causes of negative reactions.

According to lead author Florence Bourgeois, doctors need to inform parents of the possible side effects of any drugs children are given. Parents should watch their children especially carefully when a new drug is taken, she said, because "first-time medication exposures may reveal an allergic reaction."

Sources for this story include: www.foxnews.com; healthfieldmedicare.suite101.com.

Why British children are sad

2010-02-17T11:10:00.001-08:00

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/why_british_children_are_sad/

Joanna Bogle | Tuesday, 16 February 2010
Why British children are sad
And why 'happiness classes' in schools won't help them cheer up.

Children in England are feeling increasingly miserable, according to a recent survey. A third of young people said they were not happy with life, and one in 20 pupils at secondary schools admitted to having been drunk “two or three times” in the past month.

Should this surprise us? Not really. An increasing number of young people have to endure the misery of parental divorce, or the break-up of unmarried relationship. Many have to cope with the complications of what is coyly called a “merged family” with step-brothers and step-sisters in what may turn out to be yet another temporary arrangement. They are expected to manage the relationships involved in having step-grandparents and an assortment of step-uncles and aunts, some of whom may also be in various sorts of relationships with partners.

Since school discipline is acknowledged to be a problem – evident in a rising number of incidents of attacks on teachers, routine necessary searches for knives, a massive problem of swearing and rowdiness in classrooms – it is scarcely surprising that for many children an ordinary school day presents much that will induce fear and unhappiness. The consumer-culture also produces an array of nasty habits: envy, greed, the nonsense of the “must-have” jeans or trainers, the sneering or bullying involved when a child is deemed to be dressed unfashionably. Obesity presents a further problem: children who instead of family meals are presented with endless opportunities to grab snacks and given money for fast-food to be eaten on the way home from school, and/or in front of the TV at home.

A new book also notes that lack of structure and discipline in children’s lives induces misery. The Spoilt Generation: why restoring authority will make our children and society happier by Aric Sigman points out that children desperately need authority figures, boundaries and discipline and order, parents who are in control. It is cruel to deny children these things, which are essential to mental and emotional health and wellbeing.

If one single cause of misery could be brought out as heading a list, it would be the denial of a child’s right to a father. Cruel policies in divorce courts block fathers from seeing their children: a mother is deemed to have the right to force her children to live with her and her new boyfriend while a father becomes a marginal figure whose visits can be blocked or made extremely difficult by moving to a distant place.

Divorce can also bring other effects: conscious that their children are likely to be unhappy when a home breaks up, parents tend to try to compensate by soft-pedalling on discipline, allowing bad behaviour which really requires correction.

There are other ways of inducing heartache in children, too: over-indulgence and giving them a sense of entitlement to instant gratification makes them angry with themselves and with others, discontented, unable to manage small everyday challenges. Failure to punish bad behaviour means that they are confused and life seems to lack structure and purpose.

And the fashionable emphasis on “genderless parenting” mean that a simple truth has been ignored: children need both mothers and fathers, who relate to them in different ways. A family should not have to be politically-correct, and nor should its means of communication or discipline have to follow fashion. Families need to have a confidence in being what they are, and parents should be allowed and encouraged to make use of their best instincts and their common sense.

None of this seems to have reached Ggovernment circles of thought. Do politicians and bureaucrats live on a different planet from the rest of us? Britain’s “Children’s Minister” announced, in response to the recent survey, that the new system of “happiness” classes at school and compulsory “personal, social, health and economic education” would resolve the problems, along with promotion of healthy eating habits.

It makes one despair. A child needs a secure home, and the knowledge that there is a moral code and a meaning to life. You cannot teach “happiness” in a classroom, and it is bizarre that a government is attempting to do so. Structure and discipline should form a framework in which a child can flourish, a sort of secure flower-pot in which the young plant thrives before it is put out into the larger flower-bed to bloom in the garden.

The angry, frightening young men and women who shriek and vomit and lurch about drunkenly in the streets of Britain’s towns and suburbs on summer nights are evidence that we are getting something terribly wrong. It is very weird when a nation is afraid of its own young.

It is possible to change, and to start making the right decisions and restoring wisdom and truth to the task of child-rearing. If we don’t, the future looks bleak.

Joanna Bogle writes from London.

Ten arrested after abducting 33 Haitian children

2010-02-03T14:04:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHfBm77URRo

Wayne Madsen on Russia Today explains how three types of criminals abduct children in disasters: 1) con artists running adoption mills; 2) pedophiles; 3) worst yet, organ harvesters, who will steal children's vital organs. This is why the situation in Haiti must be monitored closely.

Saving the lives of women and children

2010-02-03T11:10:00.000-08:00

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/saving_the_lives_of_women_and_children/

Brian Lilley | Monday, 1 February 2010
Saving the lives of women and children

The G8 appears set to take on the issues of child and maternal mortality. Can they do it while saving lives, not destroying them?

Upon hearing the statistics it is hard not to be moved, to feel that something must be done to change this. Each year, in the developing world, more than 500,000 women die in pregnancy and childbirth, some 9 million children die each year before their fifth birthday. It was these grim numbers that Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper used in a keynote address at the Davos World Economic Forum to call for concerted action by G8 countries.

The problems of heightened infant and maternal mortality in the poorer countries of this planet are not news, they have been known for sometime. In 2000, leaders gathered at the United Nations headquarters to endorse the Millennium Development Goals, which included reducing child mortality by two-thirds and maternal mortality by three-quarters by 2015. In the years since, not much has happened.

So in an open letter published in the Toronto Star, Montreal’s La Presse and Le Figaro in Paris, Stephen Harper announced that as president of the G8 this year, Canada will host the G8 and G20 this June, he will push leaders to make a tangible difference for the women and children of the developed world, saying relatively simple health-care solutions could alter the outcomes.

"The solutions are not intrinsically expensive. The cost of clean water, inoculations and better nutrition, as well as the training of health workers to care for women and deliver babies, is within the reach of any country in the G8. Much the same could be said of child mortality. The solutions are similar in nature – better nutrition, immunization – and equally inexpensive in themselves."

The plan laid out by Prime Minister Harper is hard to criticize and it was good to hear, during his speech at Davos, that he has spoken with other G8 leaders and they appear willing to take on this neglected Millennium Development Goal. "It is therefore time," says Harper, "to mobilize our friends and partners to do something for those who can do little for themselves, to replace grand good intentions with substantive acts of human good will."

Yet, when Harper does try to reach out to other nations and get them on board he will face several challenges in bringing about the type of change most of us think of when a world leader says they want to improve the health outcomes of the world's poorest people. The first challenge surfaced in Ottawa at the same time that word of this plan was spreading through the frozen Canadian capital; some development agencies see abortion as the key to reducing infant and maternal mortality.

The change in policy towards family planning in Washington is well documented; abortion is back on the agenda as an acceptable public policy tool for the United States to export around the world. The case in other counties of the G8, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Japan plus Russia is less well known.

One of the key advisors to Britain's Labour government, or at least Prime Minister Gordon Brown, is Jonathon Porritt of the Optimum Population Trust. Porritt is the man who wants Britain's population cut in half to 30 million people. In conjunction with the United Nation's Population Fund, the OPT also wants to see Africa's population reduced for environmental reasons using family planning, which is often now a program well beyond contraception and includes abortion.

My reason for pointing this out is not to engage in an overall argument about abortion but to set the stage for the argument that what you and I hear when a politician promises something may not be what actually happens. When Prime Minister Harper, as president of the G8, speaks of infant and maternal mortality rates and says, "Far too many lives and futures have been lost." Most of us think his goal is to lower the mortality rates by saving the lives of pregnant women and children under five by improving access to clean water, primary health care, vaccines. That may be what Mr. Harper has in mind and those are in fact what he lists in his speech, but the policy people have other ideas in mind.

Shortly after Harper's push for the G8 to take on this issue became known, a media event was held with Canada's minister of International Cooperation Bev Oda. Ms. Oda gathered several non-governmental groups around the table for a chat on the issue, a brainstorming session of sorts and invited the media to attend. Several well known names were there, UNICEF, CARE, Plan International and World Vision, there was also a group I had not heard of until that day, Action Canada for Population and Development. One of the goals of Action Canada, as I discovered after chatting with their official afterwards, is to promote abortion around the world as a human right.

Now I don't really care which side of the abortion debate you are on, I think we can all agree that when a politician says we should reduce the number of children that die before their fifth birthday, one of the solutions you automatically think of is not abortion. Most reasonable people would think of improving health outcomes. After calls to the offices of Prime Minister Harper and Minister Oda, I've been assured that is what they mean when they speak of this problem, saving lives. Still, they will have a fight on their hands at the G8 from not only the worldwide coalition of NGOs who back Action Canada's viewpoint, but also from other G8 members, like Britain and the United States who may take a different view.

One of the other challenges Harper will face in getting his G8 partners to "replace grand good intentions with substantive acts of human good will," is that what has been tried over the past 15 years or so has not worked. Reducing the mortality rate among mothers and young children may have been a UN Millennium Development Goal but politicians have been speaking about it much longer than the last 10 years. Go back just a bit further and you find these same goals as central to the 1994 Cairo Conference.

Clearly what has been happening so far has not worked. Whether this lack of progress is due to a lack of funds or poorly designed programs is not clear but with billions having been poured into this field over the last decade and zero progress, I'd put my bet on the latter. That won't stop activists for the status quo from trying to ensure their current methods prevail. Stephen Lewis, the former U.N. Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS is chastising Harper for coming to this issue late, "It takes a lot of chutzpah to pretend that somehow you're championing something that others have championed so vigorously before you."

We can only hope, for the sake of the women and children whose lives are at risk, that Mr. Harper can convince his fellow G8 leaders not only to get on board with his initiative, but to look at it with fresh eyes, which will take chutzpah, and possibly also include ignoring Stephen Lewis.

Blackwater's Youngest Victim

2010-02-02T14:31:00.001-08:00

By Jeremy Scahill, The Nation
Posted on January 29, 2010, Printed on February 2, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145469/

Every detail of September 16, 2007, is burned in Mohammed Kinani's memory. Shortly after 9 am he was preparing to leave his house for work at his family's auto parts business in Baghdad when he got a call from his sister, Jenan, who asked him to pick her and her children up across town and bring them back to his home for a visit. The Kinanis are a tightknit Shiite family, and Mohammed often served as a chauffeur through Baghdad's dangerous streets to make such family gatherings possible.

Mohammed had just pulled away from his family's home in the Khadamiya neighborhood in his SUV. His youngest son, 9-year-old Ali, came tearing down the road after him, asking his father if he could accompany him. Mohammed told him to run along and play with his brothers and sister. But Ali, an energetic and determined kid, insisted. Mohammed gave in, and off the father and son went.

As Mohammed and Ali drove through Baghdad that hot and sunny Sunday, they passed a newly rebuilt park downtown. Ali gazed at the park and then turned to his father and asked, "Daddy, when are you gonna bring us here?"

"Next week," Mohammed replied. "If God wills it, son."

Ali would never visit that park. Within a few hours, he would be dead from a gunshot wound to the head. While you may have never heard his name, you probably know something about how Ali Mohammed Hafedh Kinani died. He was the youngest person killed by Blackwater forces in the infamous Nisour Square massacre.

In May 2008 Mohammed flew to Washington to testify in front of a grand jury investigating the shooting. It was his first time out of Iraq. The US Attorney, Jeffrey Taylor, praised Mohammed for his "commendable courage." A year after the shooting, in December 2008, five Blackwater guards were indicted on manslaughter charges, while a sixth guard pleaded guilty to killing an unarmed Iraqi. American justice, it seemed to Mohammed, was working. "I'm a true believer in the justness and fairness of American law," Mohammed said.

But this past New Year's Eve, federal Judge Ricardo Urbina threw out all the criminal charges against the five Blackwater guards. At least seventeen Iraqis died that day, and prosecutors believed they could prove fourteen of the killings were unjustified. The manslaughter charges were dismissed not because of a lack of evidence but because of what Urbina called serious misconduct on the part of the prosecutors.

Then, a few days after the dismissal of the criminal case, Blackwater reached a civil settlement with many of the Nisour Square victims, reportedly paying about $100,000 per death.

Blackwater released a statement declaring it was "pleased" with the outcome, which enabled the company to move forward "free of the costs and distraction of ongoing litigation." But Mohammed Kinani would not move on. He refused to take the deal Blackwater offered. As a result, he may well be the one man standing between Blackwater and total impunity for the killings in Nisour Square.

On September 15, 2009, the night before the second anniversary of his son's death, Mohammed Kinani sued Blackwater in its home state of North Carolina, along with company owner Erik Prince and the six men Mohammed believes are responsible for his son's death. In an exclusive interview providing the most detailed eyewitness account of the massacre that has yet been published, Mohammed told his story to The Nation.

***

Mohammed Kinani, 38, is a gentle man, deeply religious and soft-spoken. When we meet, he takes off his hat as he greets me with a slight bow. He then presents me with a gift -- a box of baklava -- and insists that we try some right away. Before we sit down to discuss the events that led to the death of his son, Mohammed goes out of his way to assure me that no question is off limits and that he wants Americans to know what happened that day. It was as though he was telling me it was OK to ask him to relive the horror. "Those few minutes in Nisour Square, I will never forget; so whatever you ask me, I will answer with absolute clarity," he said.

Before we talk about Nisour Square, Mohammed tells me about his life. He was born in Baghdad in 1971 and grew up in a large home with his siblings, aunts, uncles and grandparents. His father, Hafedh Abdulrazzaq Sadeq Kinani, was a merchant who traded cars and auto parts. After high school, Mohammed enrolled at a technical institute in Baghdad but ultimately dropped out to take over the family business with his brothers. He avoided mandatory military service in Saddam's forces by paying his way out. He married a relative from his mother's side of the family and bought a home in Baghdad's al Adel neighborhood, and they had three sons and a daughter. Mohammed said his family despised Saddam, "a dictator who stole people's freedom."

Mohammed welcomed the arrival of US forces in Baghdad in April 2003. "On the first day the US Army entered Baghdad I was personally giving away free juice and candy in the street," Mohammed remembers. He and Ali would give out water and take photos with the troops when when Humvees passed by their house. "One of the soldiers even carried Ali on board one of the Humvees and took a photo with my son," Mohammed remembers. "My son loved the American Army."

In November 2006, as sectarian violence spread across Baghdad, Mohammed and his family were driven from their home by a prominent Sunni militia leader, and they moved into Mohammed's parents' home. Mohammed was devastated, but he also saw it as part of the price of freedom. "We cannot question God's plans," he says.

Before September 16, 2007, Mohammed had never heard of Blackwater. When he would stop at a US checkpoint, he would smile at the soldiers and thank them for being there. Ali enjoyed sticking his head out the window at checkpoints and telling Iraqi police, "I'm in the Special Forces." The police would laugh, Mohammed recalls, and wave him through, saying, "You're one of us." So when Mohammed found himself in a traffic jam that he thought was the result of a US military checkpoint at Nisour Square, nothing seemed out of the ordinary to him.

To pick up his sister, Mohammed would have to pass Nisour Square twice. The first time he passed, he noticed it was extremely congested. There was a construction project nearby and Iraqi police lingering on the roadside directing traffic. Eventually, he and Ali picked up Jenan and her three children and began the return journey.

A few blocks from the square, they encountered two Iraqi checkpoints and were waved through. As they approached the square, they saw one armored vehicle and then another, with men brandishing machine guns atop each one, Mohammed recalls. The armored cars swiftly blocked off traffic. One of the gunners held both fists in the air, which Mohammed took as a gesture to stop. "Myself and all the cars before and behind me stopped," Mohammed says. "We followed their orders. I thought they were some sort of unit belonging to the American military, or maybe just a military police unit. Any authority giving you an order to stop, you follow the order." It turns out the men in the armored cars were neither US military nor MPs. They were members of a Blackwater team code-named Raven 23.

As the family waited in traffic, two more Blackwater vehicles became visible. Mohammed noticed a family in a car next to his -- a man, woman and child. The man was staring at Mohammed's car, and Mohammed thought the man was eyeing Jenan. "I thought he was checking my sister out," Mohammed remembers. "So I yelled at him and said, 'What are you looking at?'" Mohammed noticed that the man looked frightened. "I think they shot the driver in the car in front of you," the man told him.

Mohammed scanned the area and noticed that the back windshield of the white Kia sedan in front of him was shattered. The man in the car next to Mohammed began to panic and tried to turn his car around. He ended up bumping into a taxi, and an argument ensued. The taxi driver exited his car and began yelling. Mohammed tried to break up the argument, telling the taxi driver that a man had been shot and that he should back up so the other car could exit. The taxi driver refused and got back into his vehicle.

At that point, an Iraqi police officer, Ali Khalaf Salman, approached the Kia sedan, and it started to slowly drift. The driver had been shot, and the car was gliding in neutral toward a Blackwater armored car. Salman, in an interview, described how he tried to stop it by pushing backward. He saw a panicked woman inside the car; she was clutching a young man covered in blood who had been shot in the head. She was shrieking, "My son! My son! Help me, help me!" Salman remembered looking toward the Blackwater shooters. "I raised my left arm high in the air to try to signal to the convoy to stop the shooting." He said he thought the men would cease fire, given that he was a clearly identified police officer.

"As the officer was waving, the men on the armored cars started shooting at that car," Mohammed says. "And it wasn't warning shots; they were shooting as in a battle. It was as though they were in a fighting field. I thought the police officer was killed. It was insane." Officer Salman managed to dive out of the way as the bullets rained down. "I saw parts of the woman's head flying in front of me," recalled his colleague, Officer Sarhan Thiab. "They immediately opened heavy fire at us."

That's how the Nisour Square massacre began.

"What can I tell you?" Mohammed says, closing his eyes. "It was like the end of days."

Mohammed would later learn that the first victims that day, in the white Kia, were a young Iraqi medical student, Ahmed Haithem Al Rubia'y, and his mother, Mahassin, a physician. Mohammed is crystal clear that the car posed no threat. "There was absolutely no shooting at the Blackwater men," he says. "All of a sudden, they started shooting in all directions, and they shot at everyone in front of them. There was nothing left in that street that wasn't shot: the ground, cars, poles, sidewalks; they shot everything in front of them." As the Blackwater gunners shot up the Rubia'ys' vehicle, Mohammed said, it soon looked like a sieve "due to how many bullet holes it had." A Blackwater shooter later admitted that they also fired a grenade at the car, causing the car to explode. Mohammed says the Blackwater men then started firing across the square. "They were shooting in all directions," he remembers. He describes the shooting as "random yet still concentrated. It was concentrated and focused on what they aimed at and still random as they shot in all directions."

One of the Blackwater shooters was on top of an armored vehicle firing an automatic weapon, he says. "Every time he would finish his clip, he would throw it on the ground and would load another one in and would start shooting again, and finish the new one and replace it with another." One young Iraqi man got out of his car to run, and as he fled, the Blackwater shooter gunned him down and continued firing into his body as it lay on the pavement, Mohammed says. "He was on the ground bleeding, and they're shooting nonstop, and it wasn't single bullets." The Blackwater shooter, he says, would fire at other Iraqis and cars and then return to pump more bullets into the dead man on the ground. "He sank in his own blood, and every minute the [Blackwater shooter] would shoot left and right and then go back to shoot the dead man, and I could see that his body would shake with every bullet. He was already dead, but his body was still reacting to the bullets. [The shooter] would fire at someone else and then go back to shoot at this dead man." Shaking his head slowly, Mohammed says somberly, "The guy is dead in a pool of blood. Why would you continue shooting him?"

In his vehicle, as the shooting intensified, Mohammed yelled for the kids to get down. He and his sister did the same. "My car was hit many times in different places. All I could hear from my car was the gun shots and the sound of glass shattering," he remembers. Jenan was frantic. "Why are they shooting at us?" she asked him. Just then, a bullet pierced the windshield, hitting Jenan's headrest. Mohammed shows me a photo of the bullet hole.

As gunfire rained on the SUV, Jenan grabbed Mohammed's hair, yanked his head down and covered him with her body. "My young sister was trying to protect me by covering me with her body, so I forced myself out of her grip and covered her with my body to protect her. It was so horrific that my little sister, whom I'm supposed to protect, was trying to protect me." Mohammed managed to slip his cellphone from his pocket and was going to call his father. "It's customary that when in agony before death, you ask those close to you to look after your loved ones," he says. Jenan demanded that Mohammed put down the phone, reminding him that their father had had two strokes already. "If he hears what's happening, he'll die immediately," she said. "Maybe he'll die before us."

At that moment, bullets pierced the SUV through the front windshield. A bullet hit the rearview mirror, causing it to whack Mohammed in the face. "We imagined that in a few seconds everyone was going to die -- everyone in the car, my sister and I and our children. We thought that every second that passed meant one of us dying." He adds, "We remained still, my sister and I. I had her rest her head on my lap, and my body was on top of her. We'd sneak a peek from under the dashboard, and they continued shooting here and there, killing this one and that one."

And then the shooting stopped.

***

Ali and his father were inseparable. Ali's older brothers called him "Daddy's favorite," and the family affectionately called him by his kid nickname, Allawi. "He was the closest of my sons to me. He was my youngest and was always indulged," recalls Mohammed. "He would sleep on my arm. He's 9 and half years old but still sleeps on my arm. He has his own room, but he never slept alone." When the boy turned 9, Ali's father thought, "This can't go on -- him sleeping on my arm as his pillow. So I said, 'Son, you're older now; go sleep like your brothers, in your bed in your room. It doesn't work anymore; you're getting older. You're gonna be a man soon.'"

"As you wish, father," Ali said. "He always said that," Mohammed recalls. "As you wish, father." Ali left the room, but Mohammed looked over and saw the shadow of Ali's feet under the door. "So I called him in, and Ali opened the door and said, 'Daddy, I'm Allawi, not Ali,'" Mohammed remembers. "He was telling me that he's still young." Mohammed gave in, and Ali slept in his arms again. "He never had a pillow besides my arm," says Mohammed.

As he sat in his severely damaged SUV, Mohammed thought that, in the midst of horror, a miracle had blessed his car. We are alive, he thought. As the Blackwater forces retreated, Mohammed told Jenan he was going to go check on the man who had been repeatedly shot by Blackwater. "I was deeply impacted by that man they continued shooting at," Mohammed recalls. As he exited his car, Mohammed's nephew yelled, "Uncle, Ali is dead. Ali is dead!" Jenan began to scream.

Mohammed rushed around to Ali's door and saw that the window was broken. He looked inside and saw his son's head resting against the door. He opened it, and Ali slumped toward him. "I was standing in shock looking at him as the door opened, and his brain fell on the ground between my feet," Mohammed recalls. "I looked and his brain was on the ground." He remembers people yelling at him, telling him to get out while he could. "But I was in another world," he says. Then Mohammed snapped back to consciousness. He put Ali back in the car and placed his hand over his son's heart. It was still beating. He got in the driver's seat of his car, tires blown out, radiator damaged, full of bullets, liquids leaking everywhere, hoping still that he could save Allawi's life. Somehow he managed to get the car near Yarmouk Hospital, right near the square. He picked up Ali and ran toward the hospital. He nearly collapsed on the road, and an Iraqi police officer took Ali from his arms and ran him into the hospital.

Mohammed checked that the other children were safe and then dashed to the hospital. "I entered the emergency room, and blood was everywhere, dead people, injured people everywhere," he remembers. "My son was in the last bed; the doctor was with him and had already hooked him with an IV line." As Mohammed stood by Ali's bed, the doctor told him that Ali was brain dead. "His heart is beating," the doctor said, "and it will continue to beat until he bleeds out and dies." The doctor told him that if there were any hope to be found, it would require taking Ali in an ambulance to a neurological hospital across town. The fastest route meant that they had to pass through Nisour Square. Iraqi police stopped them and told them they could not pass. "The US Army is here and won't let you through," the officer told them. The driver took an alternate route and was going so fast the ambulance almost crashed twice. When they got to the hospital, Mohammed offered to pay the driver -- at least for the gas, which is customary. The driver refused. "No, I would like to donate blood to your son if he needs it," he told Mohammed. A few moments later, Mohammed stood with a doctor who told him there was nothing they could do. Ali was dead.

Mohammed wanted to take his son's body home with him, but the hospital regulations required that he get papers from the police. So Mohammed had to leave. He spent hours tracking down the right authority to sign off. Finally he was able to take Ali's body to prepare him for a Muslim burial. That night there was no electricity in Baghdad, so they had to run a generator to keep air-conditioning going to protect Ali's body from the sweltering heat. The next morning they took Ali to the southern holy city of Najaf to be buried at the family plot. "As Muslims, we believe that Ali died innocent with no obligation," says Mohammed. "My son died at an age where there were no strings attached. My son was young and innocent, so he flew up [to heaven] like a white dove. This is what's making it easier on me. I always tell my wife that your son is a bird in heaven, he's with God and when we die we will be united eternally." Mohammed looks down and then up. "I still thank God for everything. I thank him because we were six in that car, and he's the only one to go. Although that one is piece of my heart, it happened and I can't change it. I have my other kids that I will raise, and hopefully I'll be able to keep them safe."

***

After Ali's death, some of Mohammed's friends came to him and asked him if the death had changed his attitude toward the Americans. It hadn't, he told them. "I honestly separate distinctly between Blackwater and the American people and the American government," he says. "I honestly love America and the American people. What happened to my family is totally isolated from the American people and government."

Mohammed carries with him a letter to his family signed by Gen. Ray Odierno, commander of US forces in Iraq, dated June 25, 2009. The letter is the result of an extraordinary gesture made by the Kinanis after Ali's death. The US Embassy offered to provide a $10,000 condolence payment to the families of the victims of Nisour Square, making clear it was not a remedy for what happened and not a substitute for any potential legal action against the shooters. Initially Mohammed refused the money, but the embassy pursued his family, urging them to take it. They eventually did, but with one condition: that the US military accept a $5000 donation from the Kinanis to the family of a US soldier killed in Iraq. Mohammed's wife, Fatimah, delivered the gift to the US Embassy. "My wife labeled it as a gift from a mother who sacrificed a son on the path to freedom, a gift from Ali's family to whichever US military family the embassy chose, to any soldier's family that was killed here in Iraq, who lost his life in Iraq for the sake of Iraq." Soon thereafter, Fatimah received the letter from General Odierno. "Your substantial generosity on behalf of the families of fallen American soldiers has touched me deeply," Odierno wrote.

After Ali's death, the thought of suing Blackwater didn't cross Mohammed's mind. He readily cooperated with the US military and federal investigators, and he believed that justice would be done in America. But when he would go to the US Embassy, Mohammed recalls, he would get "hammered there. They all wanted me to shut up so they could defend Blackwater." He says an embassy official tried to convince him that there had been a firefight that day, not a massacre. Mohammed was unfazed by what he considered a grand lie and continued to cooperate with the US investigation. Then, he says, Blackwater stepped in.

In a letter to ABC News threatening a defamation lawsuit for a story the network had done about Nisour Square, a Blackwater attorney denied that Blackwater had killed Ali, claiming instead that he was killed by "a stray bullet" possibly fired by the US military "an hour after Blackwater personnel had departed the scene." The letter claimed Ali was killed by a "warning shot" that "ricocheted and killed the nine-year-old boy." It said it was not "even possible" Blackwater "was responsible."

Then an Iraqi attorney working with Blackwater approached Mohammed. But he wasn't just any lawyer. Ja'afar al Moussawy was the chief prosecutor of the Supreme Iraqi Criminal Tribunal, which prosecuted Saddam Hussein and other leading officials. He was the Iraqi lawyer.

Mohammed agreed to meet with Moussawy and Blackwater's regional manager. When Mohammed arrived at the Blackwater headquarters in the Green Zone, there was a lunch spread laid out on the table. Moussawy asked Mohammed if he wanted to eat, and Mohammed said he would, "to show you that I have nothing against you personally." Mohammed says he told them, "My problem is not with any of you, rather with the guys who killed my son." After lunch, the manager asked Mohammed to tell him what happened in the square that day. Mohammed did. The manager then said he had an offer for him.

"We want to give you $20,000," Mohammed recalls the Blackwater manager saying.

"I'm not taking a penny from you," Mohammed told him. "I want no money."

Mohammed asked for a blank piece of paper and a pen. "Look I have the paper and I can sign and waive all my [legal] rights. All my rights, I will sign away now, but under one condition: I want the owner of Blackwater to apologize to me publicly in America and say, 'We killed your son, and we're sorry.' That's all I want."

The Blackwater manager asked Mohammed why it was so important to have an apology. Mohammed reminded him of Blackwater owner Erik Prince's Congressional testimony two weeks after the Nisour Square shootings. In his testimony, Prince said his men "acted appropriately at all times" at Nisour Square and that the company had never killed innocent civilians, except perhaps by "ricochets" and "traffic accidents." At that hearing, on October 2, 2007, a document was produced showing that before Nisour Square the State Department, Blackwater's employer, had coordinated with Blackwater to set a low payout for Iraqi shooting victims because, in the words of a Department security official, if it was too high Iraqis may try "to get killed by our guys to financially guarantee their family's future."

Mohammed said he wanted Prince to publicly reject this characterization of "Iraqis as mercenaries." The Blackwater manager, he says, told him Blackwater does not apologize. "You killed my son!" Mohammed exclaimed. "What do you want, then? Why did you bring me here?"

Mohammed then confronted the Blackwater manager about the letter to ABC News. "I told him that Blackwater was trying to stain the reputation of the American Army" by blaming Ali's death on US soldiers. Mohammed recalls asking, "Aren't you an American company, and this is your national army? Why would you do this to your own?" Mohammed says he threw the pen and paper at the Blackwater manager and left. In a statement to The Nation, a Blackwater spokesperson confirmed that the company had offered Mohammed a "condolence payment" and that he declined it.

It was then that Mohammed decided that his best recourse would be to cooperate with the US criminal investigation of the incident and to sue Blackwater in civil court the United States. "I want Blackwater, who refused to apologize, to get what they deserve according to the rule of law," Mohammed says. "I had no other option but to go down the legal path, to have justice applied -- something that will be comforting to victims' families and something that might deter other criminals from committing the same act."

***

Mohammed's American lawyers contend, as did federal prosecutors, that the Blackwater men disobeyed orders from superiors not to leave the Green Zone, which ultimately led to the shooting at Nisour Square, and that they did not follow proper State Department guidelines for the use of force, instead shooting unprovoked at Mohammed's car and the other civilians in the square. They also allege that Blackwater was not guarding any US official at the time of the shooting and that the Nisour Square killings amounted to an offensive operation against unarmed civilians. "Blackwater was where it shouldn't have been, doing something it was not supposed to do," says Mohammed's lawyer Gary Mauney. They "weren't even supposed to be in Nisour Square, and if they hadn't have been, no shootings would have occurred."

Unlike the other civil suits against Blackwater, which were settled in federal court in January, Mohammed's case was filed in state court in North Carolina. It is also different because Mohammed is directly suing the six Blackwater men he believes were responsible for the shooting that day. The suit also argues that Prince and his network of Blackwater companies and affiliates are ultimately responsible for the conduct of the men at Nisour Square. The Blackwater shooters "weren't doing anything related to their work for the government," Mauney says. "After the events happened, Blackwater came out and said, 'We support what they did. We think it was justified.' They ratified the conduct of their employees."

Moreover, Mohammed's lawyers contend that the evidence that was ruled inadmissible in the criminal Nisour Square case because it was obtained in exchange for a promise of immunity and reportedly under threat of termination is valid evidence in their civil case. Several statements by Blackwater guards who were at the square that day directly bolster Mohammed and other Iraqis' claim that it was an unprovoked shooting.

Perhaps the most potent piece of evidence in Mohammed's case comes from one of the men he is suing. Jeremy Ridgeway, a turret gunner on the Raven 23 team that day, pleaded guilty to killing an unarmed civilian. In his sworn proffer that accompanied his guilty plea, Ridgeway admitted that he and the other five defendants "opened fire with automatic weapons and grenade launchers on unarmed civilians...killing at least fourteen people" and wounding at least twenty others. "None of these victims was an insurgent, and many were shot while inside of civilian vehicles that were attempting to flee" the Blackwater forces. Ridgeway also admitted that Raven 23 had "not been authorized" to leave the Green Zone and that after they departed, they "had been specifically ordered" by US Embassy officials to return. "In contravention of that order," they proceeded to Nisour Square. Ridgeway admitted to shooting and killing Dr. Al Rubia'y in the Kia sedan, adding that another Blackwater shooter launched an M-203 grenade, "causing the vehicle to erupt in flames." He acknowledged that "there had been no attempt to provide reasonable warnings to the driver." As the Raven 23 convoy exited the square against the flow of traffic, Ridgeway admitted, Blackwater forces "continued to fire their machine guns at civilian vehicles that posed no threat to the convoy."

Evidence in the criminal case also reveals that three other men on the Raven 23 convoy -- Adam Frost, Mark Mealy, Matthew Murphy -- were "horrified" at what their colleagues had done in the square that day. In a journal entry he wrote after the shooting, Frost recounted returning to the Green Zone, where he and Murphy confronted the men who did the killings at Nisour Square. "We started to curse at them and tell each other how fucked up they were," he wrote. "We could not believe what we had just seen." Murphy told the grand jury his colleagues were shooting "for nothing and for no reason." Mealy described two of the defendants, Evan Liberty and Paul Slough, giving each other high-fives, "patting each other on the back and bragging about what a great job they had done." In his testimony, Murphy described what he had seen that day as "pretty heinous shit."

Frost, who prosecutors say did not fire his weapon at Nisour Square, wrote in his journal that he "prayed for comfort to be given to those families that we had broken." When the FBI launched its investigation of the shooting, Frost said he was "strongly encouraged," though not ordered, by Blackwater management not to answer its questions. He said a Blackwater manager had told him that the company was already fully cooperating with the State Department and had been honest in detailing the shooting. "I thought to myself, you fuckers have been anything but honest with the State Department and their investigation," Frost wrote.

Mauney and his partner, Paul Dickinson, believe that these statements and others like them, along with the accounts of scores of Iraqi witnesses and forensic evidence, paint a case of overwhelming guilt on the part of the Blackwater shooters who killed Ali Kinani and the other Iraqis that day. "I think it's important for folks to know that Blackwater has not won," says Mauney. In addition to Mohammed, Mauney and Dickinson represent five other families impacted by Nisour Square, including those of two others killed by Blackwater. "They've come here with a heart full of belief in the US justice system," says Dickinson. In late January on a visit to Baghdad, Vice President Joe Biden announced that the United States would appeal the dismissal of the criminal cases, saying the judge's ruling was "not an acquittal." Blackwater's lawyers have said they believe the appeal will fail.

As we wrap up the interview, Mohammed Kinani gathers up all the photos he has brought to show me: pictures of Ali and his other children, pictures of his wife and of his severely damaged car. He stops and stares at a school portrait of Ali. We look at a video on his laptop of his home -- the one currently occupied by the Sunni militia leader -- and then he pauses and clicks on another video file. The screen pops up, and there is Ali, hopping around a swimming pool with his cousins and siblings. With a wide smile, Ali approaches Mohammed's cellphone camera and says, "I am Allawi!"

Mohammed tells me, "I wish the US Congress would ask [Erik Prince] why they killed my innocent son, who called himself Allawi. Do you think that this child was a threat to your company? This giant company that has the biggest weapons, the heaviest weapons, the planes, and this boy was a threat to them?" he says. "I want Americans to know that this was a child that died for nothing."

Go here to see a slideshow that accompanies this story.

Jeremy Scahill, an independent journalist who reports frequently for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now!, has spent extensive time reporting from Iraq and Yugoslavia. He is currently a Puffin Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute. Scahill is the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. His writing and reporting is available at RebelReports.com.

Haiti earthquake: orphans for sale for $50

2010-01-30T14:04:00.000-08:00

Life is getting cheaper and cheaper all the time!!!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/centralamericaandthecaribbean/haiti/7086466/Haiti-earthquake-orphans-for-sale-for-50.html

Haiti earthquake: orphans for sale for $50
Nick Allen
Telegraph
Thu, 28 Jan 2010 18:47 EST

Orphans in Haiti are being offered for sale to foreigners for as little as £30 amid warnings that up to one million children in the country have been left vulnerable to abuse and trafficking in the wake of the earthquake.

In a remote area north of Port-au-Prince, a man was reported to have offered to sell a young boy to a Canadian man for just $50.

The first confirmed case of a child being offered for sale since Haiti was devastated by a 7.0-magnitude earthquake on Jan 12 took place near Gonaives, 150km north of Port-au-Prince. It was reported by Noel Ismonin, a Canadian pastor who rescues orphans in the area. A man offered to sell him the boy but the pastor refused.

Meanwhile, in camps around the capital there were several reports of men being lynched after being accused by earthquake victims of trying to steal infants from tents.

The incident near Gonaives raised fears that child trafficking gangs could move into desperately poor rural areas that have yet to be properly reached by aid agencies. The gangs are also be less likely to be picked up by authorities there.

Abduction of children by child traffickers was already a chronic problem in pre-earthquake Haiti, where thousands were handed by their families into lives of domestic servitude.

"There are an estimated one million unaccompanied or orphaned children, or children who lost one parent," said Kate Conradt, a spokesman for Save the Children. "They are extremely vulnerable."

As fears for the safety of Haitian orphans grew a group of 78 children sleeping in the street outside their shattered orphanage in the capital were being guarded at night by a group of local people.

The bodies of 56 other children remained buried under a three-storey section of the collapsed orphanage in the Carrefour slum area. The youngest victims, Cedric Francois and James Alcius, were both just five months old.

Of the survivors, many had wounds to their heads and limbs. They sleep on blankets laid in the street. Three plastic sheets provided by Unicef have been strung from trees.

"If it rains it will be terrible," said Eviline Louis-Jacques, 61, who runs the Notre Dame de la Nativite orphanage.

"There are 56 dead over there," she said pointing to a pile of rubble. "Most of them were babies. That's why they were in there, they were sleeping. But I have 78 left."

Vanessa Line, three, was rescued after spending two days stuck in the rubble. She stares blankly ahead and does not speak, clearly traumatised by her ordeal.

Naika Simon, six, who suffered head wounds when timber fell on her, said: "It hurt me and I was crying. I could hear others crying as well. It was dark and I was scared. I miss my mummy and daddy."

Another child, Reginald Gibbs, five, who has a broken leg, was brought to the orphanage by his parents after their home collapsed. He was already up for legitimate adoption before the earthquake and a family in France is waiting for them.

His father, Daniel Gibbs, 50, said: "He is suffering. We want him to go to France as soon as possible because he will get better care."

Haiti's orphanages have also become targets for people desperate for food, water and medical supplies. Maison de Lumiere, which has 50 orphans, came under attack from a group of 20 armed men but security guards drove them off.

Charities and aid agencies are only supplying the orphanages with a few days of food and water at a time in case they are looted.

90 Percent of Cord Blood from U.S. Babies Tests Positive for BPA

2010-01-28T15:36:00.000-08:00

http://www.NaturalNews.com/z028042_babies_BPA.html

January 28 2010
by E. Huff, staff writer

(NaturalNews) For the first time in the history of its testing, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) has found bisphenol A (BPA) in the umbilical cord blood of American babies. Nine out of ten samples tested positive for the chemical, a shocking number when considering the laundry list of chronic illnesses that are associated with BPA exposure.

Used in the production of polycarbonate plastics and epoxy resins, BPA has come under increasing scrutiny over the past several years for its role in contributing to the development of cancer, endocrine damage, reproductive problems, and neurological dysfunction. Many plastics manufacturers have begun removing the additive from their products, despite continued reassurances by the FDA that the chemical is safe.

Studies continue to show that BPA is dangerous, even at minimal levels, and that it should not be used in consumer products. Several groups, including the Endocrine Society and the American Medical Association (AMA), have expressed opposition to the use of BPA. Scientists are finding that low-dose exposure, especially during early developmental years, can actually cause more endocrine and reproductive problems than larger-dose exposure due to the way the body recognizes the chemical.

Not only was BPA found in babies, but 231 other chemicals were detected as well, indicating that human beings are exposed to more toxic chemicals than ever. Experts fear that such an onslaught of toxicity may cause permanent damage to the next generation of Americans.

Public outcry over the FDA's continued approval of BPA despite numerous studies revealing its dangers has led the agency to express that it will reevaluate its position. The agency was supposed to issue an updated review about BPA safety on November 30 but it never actually followed through. The FDA most recently claimed that the report will be made available before the end of the year.

Experts and analysts believe the food industry is behind the push to keep BPA legal, exerting influence on the FDA to conceal the truth about its dangers. Many manufacturers have voluntarily been able to eliminate BPA from their products, illustrating that there is no reason why it should continue to be used by anyone.

The AMA, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists have all endorsed a resolution that calls on Congress to minimize or eliminate the use of BPA in consumer products. The EWG hopes that top priority will be given to the issue in light of the group's recent discovery.

To add to Haiti’s troubles - child trafficking

2010-01-27T17:32:00.000-08:00

http://www.mercatornet.com/family_edge/view/6459/

To add to Haiti’s troubles - child trafficking
Carolyn Moynihan | 25 Jan 2010

Children, the most vulnerable members of Haiti’s population, are suffering terribly as a result of the disastrous earthquake, many losing parents, homes and health. As if that was not bad enough, they are now more likely than ever to be captured by traffickers who buy and sell children for sex and cheap labour, says an expert on the subject.

From her base in India, which has seen the same thing happen after natural disasters, Nicolette Grams of the International Justice Mission predicts that trafficking gangs will be moving in to seize their prey. She says human trafficking is a problem in Haiti at the best of times, affecting a quarter-million Haitian children each year.

These slaves, known as restavecs, are typically sold or given away to new families by their own impoverished parents. Physical and sexual abuse is common for restavecs. Many owners use the girls as in-house prostitutes, sending them to live on the street if they become pregnant.

Not all of these trafficked children end up as domestic slaves within Haiti—plenty of others are promised work in the Dominican Republic but are instead sold to work in agricultural fields or brothels across the border. Poor children who escape a life in bondage most often end up in street gangs; if they are fortunate, they may be accepted into overcrowded orphanages.

Given the life and death needs facing the authorities and aid workers, watching out for traffickers is most unlikely to be on their list of priorities. Some voices have been raised against whisking children overseas with a view to adoption, but at least those children are being cared for well and can always be reunited with relations if that seems best for them.

Better adoption than enslavement.

Meanwhile, an international organisation whose solution to the social problems of Haiti is to prevent children being born, also continues to ply its trade there. International Planned Parenthood is appealing for funds for “basic first aid, as well as obstetric care and family planning” in Haiti, where its two largest clinics have been destroyed.

Before the earthquake each of these clinics was dishing out condoms, chemical contraceptives and abortions to 200 Haitians a day through the local IPPF affiliate, Profamilia (sic), and has been doing that sort of thing since 1984. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, Haiti has one of the highest rates of maternal mortality in the world, and the highest in the Western hemisphere.

One hoped these people would keep quiet about birth control, for once, as they deal with women who have lost children or other family members. Basic first aid and obstetric care could easily consume all the funds they raise.

One organisation that you can be sure is focused on helping mothers is MaterCare International, which is also appealing for funds for its emergency effort in Haiti.

Some 15 missng children have been counted so far, a UNICEF adviser says

2010-01-23T11:51:00.000-08:00

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hdU9m9nbztpo5MgWw162efflN3nA

Children going missing from Haiti hospitals: UNICEF

Agence France-Presse
Fri, 22 Jan 2010 08:06 EST

Children are going missing from hospitals in Haiti, raising fears that the youngsters are being trafficked for adoption abroad in the wake of the January 12 earthquake, the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) said.

"We have documented let's say around 15 cases of children disappearing from hospitals and not with their own family at the time," said UNICEF adviser Jean Luc Legrand.

"UNICEF has been working in Haiti for many years and we knew the problem with the trade of children in Haiti which existed before, and unfortunately many of these trade networks have links with the international adoption 'market'," Legrand said.

Comment: Kidnapped for 'adoption' hardly covers it. This report completely fails to recognize the trade in children who are abducted and abused by international pedophile rings. It also fails to mention the possibility of children being stolen so as to harvest their organs.

Without a clear understanding of the evils that exists in the world, we are powerless to perceive it, even as it is happening.

Body scanners threaten children's rights

2010-01-18T12:04:00.001-08:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2010/jan/04/airport-body-scanners

The troubled trial of body scanners at Manchester airport points to privacy problems with the counter-terrorism technology
Christina Zaba
guardian.co.uk
4 January 2010 17.31 GMT

The prime minister would have us believe that body scanners in airports are the latest catch-all for catching potential terrorists. Perhaps he wasn't looking when Manchester Airport launched the trial of the new Rapsican Secure 1000 Single Pose x-ray on October 13 2009.

Within a few hours of the announcement that the next generation of "convenient, hassle-free travel" was about to hit the security lanes, child protection campaigners were informing Manchester Airport management that any creation of an indecent picture of a child – "indecent" meaning showing the genitalia, and "child" meaning someone under 18 – is a criminal offence.

Director of Action on Rights for Children Terri Dowty noted that the Protection of Children Act 1978, as amended by the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, makes it an offence "to take, permit to be taken, or to make any indecent ... pseudo-photograph of a child". That includes "an image, whether made by computer graphics or otherwise, which appears to be a photograph."

Consternation ensued. The airport's PR department backpedalled furiously, with their spokesperson Sarah Barrett saying live on BBC Radio: "Imaging technology does not allow security staff to see passengers naked ... these images cannot be linked back to an individual. Children will be asked to take part in the trial, but only with their parents' consent."

But in law, a parent cannot give consent to the making of an indecent image of their own or any other child. Union officials representing 6,000 of the 20,000 workers at Manchester said no one had even told them that the scanner was being trialled, let alone that using it could leave working people, as well as as the airport itself, potentially facing serious charges and criminal prosecution.

The managing director of Manchester Airport, Andrew Cornish, promised to respond fully to the points raised. Today, Unite's national officer for civil aviation, Steve Turner, told me that as far as they knew, the Manchester trials were still suspended pending advice on the legality of the scanner machines.

However, a spokesperson for Manchester Airport confirmed that the trials have in fact been resumed, with some 500 passengers already scanned. "Under-18s can't go through at the moment – there's a grey area in the legal system," the spokesperson said. "But we're hoping for more direction from the Department for Transport soon."

Rapiscan is a subsidiary of a much bigger, California-based company, OSI Systems, with branches in Finland, India, Malaysia, Singapore and the UK. British MEP Philip Bradbourn is among those arguing at the European Union level that use of devices such as Rapiscan's would be "disproportionate" to the security threat faced. The MEP also believed, his spokesman later told me, that these whole-body scanners offered "very little increased benefit for security". Other members of the European Parliament agreed: in the face of an EU Commission proposal to establish a regulatory framework for the use of full-body scanners at EU airports, the parliament passed a resolution criticising the devices in the autumn of 2008. This, and strong opposition from some member states, forced the Commission to back away from such plans, though a spokesman has made clear in recent days that the Commission continues to see such scanners as a "useful additional tool" in impeding terrorists. [See footnote.]

In a world of increasing electronic surveillance – where computer images can be stored, hacked, replicated and passed around the world instantly, and where airport scans link to other ID details about passengers, from passports equipped with RFID chips with the capability to contain enormous amounts of electronically readable personal information – the privacy and data-sharing implications of body scanners are huge for all passengers, let alone children. Can there ever be any guarantee that images of children would indeed be safe, and instantly destroyed?

ARCH's legal adviser, barrister Ian Dowty, has no doubt: it doesn't matter whether the image is kept or not – it's the making of the image itself that is the offence.

• This article was amended on 5 and 6 January 2010. The original quoted an MEP appearing to say that the EU Commission had withdrawn a proposal to use the Rapiscan whole-body scanner at a European level over a year ago after finding the scanner offered "very little increased benefit for security". This view on security was, rather, that of the MEP being quoted, Philip Bradbourn. The EU Commission has issued no finding on a specific company's scanner. The story text has been corrected accordingly. The original article also named the MEP as Andrew Bradburn. This has been corrected.

Fast Times at Recruitment High

2010-01-16T15:10:00.000-08:00

http://motherjones.com/politics/2009/08/fast-times-recruitment-high

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan invited the Pentagon into Chicago's schools. Will he promote military schools nationwide?
By Andy Kroll | Sun Aug. 30, 2009

When Arne Duncan [1] stepped down as the head of the Chicago Public Schools to become the secretary of education in January, the school district he left behind had little to brag about. While Duncan served as its chief executive officer, CPS received mostly average or below average rankings in "The Nation's Report Card," a Department of Education assessment of the country's largest urban school districts. Its high school graduation rates lingered at around 50 percent, well short of the national average of 70 percent. And since 2004, CPS has failed as a district to meet No Child Left Behind [2]'s "adequate yearly progress" standards. In one area, however, Chicago's schools stood out: In large part to Duncan's efforts, they were—and remain—the most militarized in America.

Nearly 10,500 of Chicago's 203,000 sixth- through twelfth-graders participate in some kind of military program on campus, from joining the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps [3] to enrolling in Pentagon-sponsored JROTC academies. As the district's CEO (and previously as deputy chief of staff to his predecessor, Paul Vallas), Duncan oversaw the controversial move to bring full-fledged military academies to the Windy City. The district's first, the Chicago Military Academy at Bronzeville, opened in 1999, and three more followed during Duncan's tenure. Today, Chicago has six military high schools run by a branch of the armed services. Six smaller military academies share buildings with existing high schools. Nearly three dozen JROTC programs exist in regular high schools, where students attend a daily JROTC class and wear uniforms to school one day a week. And at the middle school level, there is a JROTC program for sixth, seventh- and eighth-graders.

Chicago may have the nation's biggest JROTC program, but it is no longer an anomaly. Due to increases in federal funding for JROTC programs, the military's presence in public schools is greater than ever before. More than a dozen academies partly funded by the Department of Defense have sprouted up from Philadelphia to Oakland, and the National Defense Authorization Act of 2009 passed last year will increase the number of JROTC units nationwide from 3,400 to 3,700 by 2020, at a cost of $170 million. (Peacework magazine obtained a list of schools [4] that have requested JROTC programs.) The Marines [5] are in discussions to open new JROTC academies in Atlanta, Las Vegas, and New Orleans, helping to expand a program that critics contend has blurred the line between education and recruitment.

Now that Duncan is the nation's top education official, anti-recruitment activists worry that he will use his position to promote the expansion of JROTC and military academies as solutions for cash-strapped or underperforming school districts. "We see he has been promoting military academies," says Darlene Gramigna, program director for the American Friends Service Committee's Truth in Recruitment Program. "Around the country, that's what going on—Arne Duncan believes in these military academies."

Back in Chicago, Duncan praised military academies, the pillars of the district's JROTC program, for the "leadership" and "discipline" they offered students. Enrollment in JROTC is mandatory for the 2,100 or so students attending the six academies, all of which are located in predominantly low-income and/or minority areas of the city. Students are referred to as "cadets," wear military uniforms, undergo daily dress inspections, and take classes on military history, drug abuse prevention, orienteering, and the armed services, among other subjects, alongside their regular high school course load. Cadets can study marksmanship, march on the drill team, and, at some schools, even earn a spot in the school's "chain of command." [6] JROTC teachers and administrators are often retired military service members, many of whom lack standard teaching credentials. The Pentagon has provided millions of dollars in funding to Chicago's military academies. A loyal backer of Chicago's military programs, Sen. Dick Durbin [7] (D-Ill.) has secured $2.1 million for the Rickover Naval Academy and $5 million for the Chicago Military Academy at Bronzeville.

Students who don't attend the Pentagon-affiliated academies also have plenty of options for getting military experience in the classroom. Thirty of Chicago's 131 high schools offer JROTC programs. Chicago also boasts six "schools within a school," in which the Navy or Army run large, autonomous JROTC programs in the same building as existing high schools. Brian Roa, a science teacher at Senn High School, which shares its facilities with the Rickover Naval Academy, says the divided-school setup fosters a sense of inequality on the campus. "Senn students are made to feel like second-class citizens inside their own school," he wrote [8] on the website Truthout.org. "The facilities and resources are better on the RNA side. RNA students are allowed to walk on the Senn side, while Senn students cannot walk on the RNA side."

And for students not yet in high school, a "Middle School Cadet Corps" program brings the JROTC's lockstep, uniformed culture to students as young as 11 or 12. Five hundred middle school students from more than 20 schools enrolled in the Cadet Corps in the 2008-2009 school year.

JROTC officials reject the assertion that such programs are little more than recruiting tools, but have released little data on how many students who go through them eventually enlist. The Associated Press recently reported that 5 to 10 percent of JROTC graduates join the military (compared to 3 percent of all high school graduates), but the Air Force, Army, Marines, and Navy chiefs of staff testified before Congress in 2000 that between 30 to 50 percent of JROTC cadets later sign up.

Supporters of military academies, including Duncan, have focused on the academies' educational accomplishments. "These are positive learning environments," Duncan said in 2007. "I love the sense of leadership. I love the sense of discipline." However, academic achievement at Chicago's military academies has been unremarkable: In 2007, while nearly 30 percent of 11th graders in the district met or exceeded standards on statewide achievement exams, just 14 percent did at Phoenix Military Academy and 8 percent at George Washington Carver Military Academy. Chicago Military Academy at Bronzeville fared somewhat better, with 33 percent of juniors meeting or exceeding the exam's standards.

Meanwhile, the military's presence in public schools continues to grow. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates [9]' request for JROTC funding in the 2009 budget brings last year's total from $76 million to $103 million. That boost in funding could be a boon for cash-strapped school districts. And though Duncan does not have control over JROTC programs, and has yet to make any major announcements regarding the military's role in his vision for education reform, he has a direct line to the superintendents and mayors who control the country's school districts, which certainly makes him the most prominent and influential backer of military programs in public schools. He reiterated his support for military academies and the JROTC in a recent AP story on the growth of military academies. "For the right child," he said, "these schools are a lifesaver."

Children's deaths spark anti-US outrage in Afghanistan

2010-01-08T13:27:00.001-08:00

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/200601-Children-s-deaths-spark-anti-US-outrage-in-Afghanistan

Children's deaths spark anti-US outrage in Afghanistan
Bill Van Auken
World Socialist Web Site
Fri, 08 Jan 2010 14:41 EST

More than 5,000 people demonstrated in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad Thursday to protest the deaths of four children and wounding of scores of others in an explosion that ripped through a crowd in a nearby village the day before.

The crowd blockaded the main highway to the Pakistan border for hours, shouting "Death to America" and burning US President Barack Obama in effigy.

Despite NATO denials of responsibility for the carnage and a claim by local police that the blast was caused by a police vehicle hitting a landmine, Afghans blamed the deaths on the US-led occupation.

The incident took place Wednesday as a group of US soldiers were visiting a road-construction site in the village of Mazzina. The village lies south of Jalalabad, which is the capital of Nangarhar Province.

Witnesses reported that the soldiers had begun throwing candy to local children when the blast took place.

The New York Times quoted a 38-year-old Afghan, Naimtullah, who said he had witnessed the incident: "I saw them throwing chocolate to the students and then suddenly they threw a grenade, followed by shooting."

The Times also quoted the uncle of one of the boys killed in the explosion, Salim, who denounced the occupation forces. "These people are here to help and protect us, or they are here to kill us - we don't want them anymore."

US military spokesmen and representatives of the security forces of the Afghan puppet regime pointed out that several American soldiers had also been wounded by the blast.

While the precise cause of the explosion may be in dispute, the significance of this sudden, violent transformation of what was intended as a "hearts and minds" mission to win over the local population into a provocation igniting mass anti-US protests is clear.

It is a telling expression of the mounting popular hostility to foreign occupation and the growing crisis confronting the US military as the Obama administration embarks on its 30,000-troop escalation of the eight-year-old war.

The killing of the four children Wednesday was far from an isolated incident. Afghan children are dying at the rate of at least three a day as a result of the US war and account for the majority of its civilian victims, according to a report released this week by an Afghan human rights group.

"At least three children were killed in war-related incidents every day in 2009, and many others suffered in diverse but mostly unreported ways," said Ajmal Samadi, the director of the Afghanistan Rights Monitor (ARM) in the report.

According to the figures compiled by ARM, more than 1,050 children under the age of 18 were killed in war-related violence in 2009.

The report singled out the killing of eight students in eastern Kunar Province by US special operations forces on December 26 "an appalling act of crime against civilian people" by foreign forces and their Afghan supporters.

The massacre in Kunar also triggered mass protests against the US occupation.

While NATO initially insisted that all those killed in the raid were "insurgents," subsequent investigation by both the United Nations and the US-backed regime of President Hamid Karzai found that eight of the victims were children, ages 11 through 17, all enrolled at local elementary and secondary schools. A ninth child, a 12-year-old shepherd boy, was also killed, along with a farmer.

The Times of London interviewed the local school principal, who described the killings. After landing in helicopters at one in the morning, the US commandoes assaulted a house where seven of the students were sleeping in one room, while the eighth student and the shepherd boy were in a guest room.

"First the foreign troops entered the guest room and shot two of them," the school principal said. "Then they entered another room and handcuffed the seven students. Then they killed them. Abdul Khaliq [the farmer] heard shooting and came outside. When they saw him they shot him as well."

Following the UN investigation, the international body's special representative in Afghanistan, Kai Eide, condemned the US military's night-time raids on Afghan homes.

"The United Nations remains concerned about night-time raids given that they often result in lethal outcomes for civilians, the dangerous confusion that frequently arises when a family compound is invaded, and the frustration of local authorities when operations are not co-ordinated with them," he said. He added that the raids "are a source of great distress to the families which are directly affected as well as communities throughout Afghanistan given safety and cultural concerns."

In a subsequent article from Kabul, the Times reported that the Afghan regime's security council, chaired by Karzai, had demanded that the occupation forces "hand over" those responsible for the killings.

The newspaper also cited unnamed NATO sources as saying that "the foreigners involved were non-military, suggesting that they were part of a secret paramilitary unit based in the capital."

The newspaper did not clarify the nature of this secret unit. The Central Intelligence Agency is carrying out its own "surge" in Afghanistan, and could potentially have mounted such a raid.

And, as the recent suicide bombing that killed seven CIA operatives made clear, the private security firm Xe - formerly known as Blackwater - remains active in Afghanistan. Two of the dead were Blackwater employees working as CIA contractors. Their presence has exposed as a lie the agency's claim that it had terminated its contracts with the company.

Whether the execution-style slaying of handcuffed school children was carried out by the US military, the CIA or hired mercenaries, it constitutes an atrocity and a war crime for which the Obama administration bears political responsibility.

The pouring into Afghanistan of 30,000 more US troops - including a substantial increase in the number of special operations forces - will mean a steady increase in the number of such atrocities and the deaths of thousands, if not tens of thousands, more Afghan children.

Shock study: 12% of kids sexually abused in government custody

2010-01-08T13:24:00.001-08:00

http://rawstory.com/2010/01/study-kids-sexually-abused-govt-custody/

Shock study: 12% of kids sexually abused in government custody
Daniel Tencer
Raw Story
Fri, 08 Jan 2010

Some 12 percent of minors held in government custody are sexually abused, and in some facilities the rate reaches a stunning one in three children, says a report released Thursday by the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

The first-ever National Survey of Youth in Custody found that no less than 10 percent of the 26,550 juveniles being held in detention facilities in the US are abused by staff at the facility, while another 2.6 percent report abuse at the hands of other inmates.

Among the facilities studied were six identified to have rates of sexual abuse as high as three in 10. According to the Associated Press, those six facilities are Pendleton Juvenile Correctional Facility in Indiana; Corsicana Residential Treatment Center in Texas; Backbone Mountain Youth Center in Swanton, Maryland; Samarkand Youth Development Center in Eagle Springs, North Carolina.; Cresson Secure Treatment Unit in Pennsylvania; and the Culpeper Juvenile Correctional Center, Long Term, in Mitchells, Virginia.

"The widespread sexual abuse of children in juvenile facilities shows that public officials either aren't paying attention or can't be bothered to do the right thing," said Jamie Fellner, senior counsel for Human Rights Watch. "The high rates of victimization are powerful testimony to the failure of governments to safeguard the boys and girls in their care."

The study was mandated by a 2003 law, the National Prison Rape Elimination Act, which also created the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission. Human Rights Watch notes that six months ago the commission set out "comprehensive, effective standards for the prevention, detection, and punishment of prison rape," but the Justice Department has yet to act on those recommendations.

"Every day Attorney General Eric Holder fails to promulgate national prison rape elimination standards is another day in which kids and adults are being abused behind bars," Fellner said. "The attorney general already has on his desk proposed standards that reflect the best thinking and effective practices to end this widespread scourge. There is no need to reinvent the wheel or to delay moving forward."

The survey found that gay youth were at higher risk than heterosexual youth, with one in five reporting abuse at the hands of a staffer or fellow inmate. Males were more likely to report being abused than females (10.8 percent to 4.7 percent). And 95 percent of those abused by staff reported that the abuser was female. But that number may be influenced by the fact that 91 percent of youth in custody are male.

The AP reports:
Although advocates said the level of abuse wasn't surprising, the prevalence of sexual abuse by staff, particularly female workers, was shocking, said Linda McFarlane, deputy executive director of Just Detention International, which fights to end sexual abuse of those who are detained.

"Many of these are already the most vulnerable and traumatized youth from all of our communities and they're placed for custody because they're considered to be a danger," she said. "If sexually abused in those very institutions that are supposed to help them prepare for life in the community, then it's just an incredible travesty."
The Associated Press also notes that sex abuse by staffers was higher in state-run facilities than in privately-run or municipal detention centers, and smaller facilities appear to have lower abuse rates than larger ones.

The study investigated a 12-month period, and was carried out from June, 2008, to April, 2009.

Shock study: 12% of kids sexually abused in government custody

2010-01-08T13:24:00.000-08:00

Cows' milk, diabetes connection bolstered

2010-01-08T13:20:00.001-08:00

http://sciencenews.org/pages/sn_arc99/6_26_99/fob2.htm

Cows' milk, diabetes connection bolstered
Nathan Seppa
Science News
Sat, 26 Jun 1999 15:05 EDT

Many studies have linked cows' milk consumed by babies to subsequent diabetes, but some researchers still doubt that it causes the disease. The association is based on animal experiments, they note, or indirect evidence, such as studies in which parents of diabetic children try to recollect when their babies first started drinking milk-based formula.

Now, Finnish researchers have avoided the vagaries of poor recall by studying children from birth. In so doing, they have added to the case against cows' milk.

By monitoring babies in diabetes-prone families, the scientists find that infants getting formula that includes cows' milk are more likely later to develop the immune reactions associated with juvenile-onset, or type I, diabetes than are babies getting a substitute. The scientists reported the findings this week in San Diego at the 59th Annual Scientific Sessions of the American Diabetes Association.

The researchers tracked, until age 8 months, 173 newborns in Finland who had a close relative with type I diabetes. To augment their mothers' milk, half of these babies received milk-based formula and the rest got a formula in which the cows' milk proteins had been broken into fragments called peptides. The two formulas taste and smell the same, so parents and researchers didn't know which one a baby was drinking.

Babies' immune systems largely ignore cows' milk proteins that have been chopped up. However, contact with one intact protein in cows' milk, bovine insulin, may set off a destructive process, suggest immunologist Outi Vaarala and her colleagues at the University of Helsinki. The immune system would attack pancreas islet cells that make human insulin, which resembles bovine insulin, and would produce antibodies.

At 2 years of age, 10 of 89 children getting cows' milk formula had formed antibodies associated with type I diabetes. However, only 3 of 84 babies receiving the treated milk showed these antibodies, says Hans K. Akerblom, a pediatrician at the University of Helsinki.

These autoimmune antibodies, or autoantibodies, are made by immune B cells and appear to dispose of damaged pancreatic islet cells, says Hans-Michael Dosch, an immunologist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. The antibodies indicate that bovine insulin might be spurring an immune system T-cell reaction against the child's own islet cells, he says. Insulin regulates sugar metabolism in the body.

Research had already determined that having one type of autoantibody to insulin indicates that a baby has roughly a 4 in 10 chance of contracting type I diabetes within the next decade, says study coauthor Suvi M. Virtanen, a nutritional epidemiologist at the University of Tampere in Finland. Having more types of these autoantibodies is a sign of greater risk; having three imparts an 80 to 90 percent likelihood of getting type I diabetes. In this study, 3 of the 10 children in the cows' milk group who had diabetes-related autoantibodies showed one type of such antibody, and the rest had two or more.

The precise cause of diabetes remains unclear. The children in the study were genetically predisposed to it, but most will never get the disease. Something in the environment or diet may trigger it.

Some researchers suggest that changing a predisposed child's diet might derail the disease. However, the proteins and calcium in cows' milk impart great benefits, Akerblom says. "None of this [research] is strong enough ... to start changing habits about how mothers raise children," he warns.

Dosch agrees but notes that the evidence against cows' milk is piling up. As an example, he cites research from Puerto Rico. There, fewer than 5 percent of mothers breast-feed their children. Instead, nearly all use formula made from cows' milk. Meanwhile, type I diabetes incidence in Puerto Rico is roughly 10 times the rate seen in Cuba, where breast-feeding is nearly universal.

Such findings suggest that the problem may be cows' milk ingested in the first few months of life. After all, Dosch says, "we are the only species that drinks another species' milk. It's a weird thing. We have not evolved to be exposed to [bovine insulin] protein."

Orphaned by Violence: UNRWA's John Ging & Children's Psychiatric Hospital in Gaza

2010-01-08T13:17:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsxkquaMDo0&feature=player_embedded

Orphaned by Violence: UNRWA's John Ging & Children's Psychiatric Hospital in Gaza

Youtube / One Nation / Sky
Mon, 04 Jan 2010 09:26 EST

John Ging, Director of Operations, Gaza, UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East discusses how the situation in Gaza has intensified following Operation Cast Lead.

He visits Gaza Community Mental Health Project to visit young Palestinian children who have lost family members to the violence. Nearly 1,400 Palestinian people were killed during Operation Cast Lead. We visited a psychiatric hospital in Gaza that cared for young children who had been orphaned by the violence. To hear them talk about their experiences losing loved ones was intensely powerful. Some of the children we met witnessed their whole family being killed. When you hear children talk about pulling out dismembered members of their family out of the rubble its tough, emotional stuff.

Infant Formula Study Just a Marketing Gimmick to Push Formula Over Breastfeeding

2010-01-08T10:44:00.001-08:00

http://www.NaturalNews.com/z027895_infant_formula_brstfeeding.html

January 8 2010
by David Gutierrez, staff writer

(NaturalNews) A recent study lauding the benefits of fortified infant formula has been greeted with skepticism by child development specialists, who suspect that the study is only the first part of an attempt to promote formula over breast milk.

"It is clear that the food industry fascination with nutraceuticals (strategically fortified food products) is now spreading into infant formula," said Barbara Moore of Shape Up America! "This is a disturbing new development. We have parents thinking that sticking their tiny infants in front of a Baby Einstein video will improve their child's mental development when the data suggest that parent-child interactions (and plenty of them) are the most critical factor for such development. Now parents will be encouraged to forego breastfeeding -- which is optimal for both mothers and babies -- in favor of a hyped up infant formula."

A recent study concluded that children who consumed infant formula fortified with the omega-3 fatty acid DHA had higher cognitive function than children who consumed unfortified formula. Breastmilk was not included in the study, and the formula used in the study was provided for free by a manufacturer.

Miriam Labbok of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill said she was doubtful about the study's findings.

"It might be reasonable from these industry-funded studies to consider that this would be a good additive to formula if you are forced to stop breastfeeding," she said. "However, 1) none of these studies compare to continued breastfeeding, 2) you could also get these [nutrients] from other sources if you stop breastfeeding, and 3) there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other components in human milk that cannot be replaced."

Pediatrician Lori Feldman-Winter of New Jersey noted that many mothers come to her believing that DHA-fortified milk is healthier for their infants than breastmilk.

"The marketing has actually dissuaded mothers from choosing exclusive breastfeeding, which is preferred from all the outcomes that we understand," she said.

All major health and pediatric associations recommend exclusive breastfeeding for at least the first six months of life, if not longer.

Sources for this story include: abcnews.go.com.

Afghan War Kills 3 Children a Day: Report

2010-01-07T14:36:00.000-08:00

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/01/07

by Agence France Presse
Afghan War Kills 3 Children a Day: Report
by Lynne O'Donnell

KABUL - Children are the biggest victims of the war in Afghanistan, with more than 1,050 people under 18 years old killed last year alone, according to an Afghan human rights watchdog.

Afghan children watch a US soldier in the mountains of Nuristan Province, December 19. Children are the biggest victims of the war in Afghanistan, with more than 1,050 people under 18 years old killed last year alone, according to an Afghan human rights watchdog. (AFP/File/Tauseef Mustafa) Taliban-linked militants caused around 64 per cent of all violent child deaths last year, the Afghanistan Rights Monitor (ARM) said in a report.

Children were also press-ganged, sexually exploited, deprived of health and education, and illegally detained by all sides in a war that is dragging into its ninth year since the U.S.-led invasion toppled the Taliban regime.

"At least three children were killed in war-related incidents every day in 2009 and many others suffered in diverse but mostly unreported ways," ARM director Ajmal Samadi said.

Children died in suicide attacks and roadside bombings - at the crux of the Taliban's arsenal against U.S., NATO and Afghan troops fighting the increasingly virulent insurgency as it spreads across the impoverished country.

The Taliban "reportedly caused more harm and intentionally abused more children for illegal purposes than pro-government Afghan and international forces," the report said.

"Through a horrible anti-education policy of heinous attacks, intimidation and terror the insurgents deprived hundreds of thousands of children, boys and girls, from education mostly in the insecure south and east of the country."

On the other hand, the Western-backed government has failed to introduce or implement laws to protect children against the abuses of war or "bring alleged criminals and abusers to justice," Samadi said.

ARM called on the Afghan authorities to set up an official child protection body and liaise with the warring parties on child rights.

The report by ARM, an independent rights monitoring group set up in Kabul in 2008, comes after the United Nations said civilian deaths in Afghanistan rose 10.8 per cent in the first 10 months of 2009, most caused by the Taliban.

The United Nations put civilian deaths at 2,038 for that period, up from 1,838 for the same period of 2008, with the vast majority killed by insurgents.

It said 468 deaths were caused by pro-government forces, including NATO and U.S.-led forces, and 166 by "other actors."

ARM released the report as a suspected roadside bomb attack killed four children and wounded more than a dozen in volatile eastern Nangahar province.

Reports that foreign forces killed eight students in Kunar province on December 26 caused widespread outrage, including U.S. flag-burning demonstrations in two cities, though reports of what happened varied widely.

A government investigation found the teenagers were unarmed and killed in cold blood, while Western military sources said the group were armed, opened fire at foreign and Afghan forces, and were killed in self-defence.

Civilian deaths at the hands of foreign forces fuel distrust between the Afghan population, the government and U.S. and NATO troops, even though most are caused by insurgent tactics such as homemade bombs.

The Taliban regularly exploit deaths caused by foreign and Afghan forces, and Western military intelligence officials say the militants have gained the upper hand in a sophisticated propaganda war.

Militant leaders, based largely in Pakistan, rarely claim responsibility for operations that kill large numbers of civilians but routinely exaggerate losses among foreign forces.

The United States and NATO are boosting their troop numbers in Afghanistan to 150,000 over the course of 2010, as part of a new strategy determined to clear and secure insurgent strongholds.

U.S. General Stanley McChrystal, commander of foreign forces in Afghanistan, has ordered civilian casualties be kept to a minimum, yet as more troops pour in, a higher death rate is inevitable, experts say.

Number of UK Children Put on Obesity Drugs Soars 1500 Percent in Seven Years

2010-01-07T13:34:00.001-08:00

http://www.naturalnews.com/027887_children_obesity.html

January 7 2010
Number of UK Children Put on Obesity Drugs Soars 1500 Percent in Seven Years
by David Gutierrez, staff writer

(NaturalNews) The number of children in the United Kingdom taking prescription weight loss drugs increased by 15 times between 1999 and 2006, according to a study conducted by researchers from the University College London and published in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology.

"This rise in the use of drugs is a real indictment on society," said Tam Fry of the National Obesity Forum. "It seems to me that we are ignoring measures to prevent our children becoming obese and then turning to drugs as a treatment of choice when they should be a last resort. That borders on criminal because it means that all the messages about healthy eating and exercise for reducing weight are just being tossed aside by [doctors]."

As many as 1,300 children under the age of 18 may now be taking the drugs, which are only approved for adults. Adult use exceeds one million.

The study also found that among children who took weight loss drugs, most stopped using them before experiencing any benefit.

"It's possible that the drugs are being given inappropriately, or that they have excessive side-effects that make young people discontinue their use," researcher Russell Viner said. "On the other hand, they could be expecting the drugs to deliver a miracle 'quick fix' and stop using them when sudden, rapid weight-loss does not occur."

Fry said that juvenile use of weight loss drugs will probably increase with the recent approval of Alli, an over-the-counter version of the weight loss drug Xenical, for sale in the United Kingdom. He blamed the childhood obesity crisis on excessive food intake, caused in part by poor regulation of the food industry, combined with a shortage of open spaces where children can exercise and play. Drugs, he said, will not solve the problem.

"It's the failure to regulate the energy in and the energy out," Fry said. "[Children] are failing to exercise enough to maintain the balance."

More Toddlers, Young Children Given Antipsychotics

2010-01-07T12:03:00.000-08:00

http://www.businessweek.com/lifestyle/content/healthday/634536.html

January 04, 2010, 16:00 EST
Researchers question the 'worrisome' trend
By Jennifer Thomas
HealthDay Reporter

MONDAY, Jan. 4 (HealthDay News) -- The rate of children aged 2 to 5 who are given antipsychotic medications has doubled in recent years, a new study has found.

Yet little is known about either the effectiveness or the safety of these powerful psychiatric medications in children this age, said researchers from Columbia University and Rutgers University, who looked at data on more than 1 million children with private health insurance.

"It is a worrisome trend, partly because very little is known about the short-term, let alone the long-term, safety of these drugs in this age group," said study author Dr. Mark Olfson, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University in New York City.

Prescribing antipsychotics to children in the upper range of that age span -- ages 4 and 5 -- is justifiable only in rare, intractable situations in which all other treatments, including family and psychological therapy, have been tried and are not working, Olfson said.

And it's questionable whether 2- and 3-year-olds should ever be prescribed antipsychotics, Olfson said.

The study is published in the January issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.

Presumably, only children with the most severe mental problems would be given the potent drugs. Yet, less than half of children on antipsychotics had received any mental health services, including a mental health assessment or treatment from a psychotherapist or psychiatrist, the study authors noted.

"You don't see the kinds of mental health services you would expect to see if we were dealing with the most profoundly disturbed toddlers," Olfson said, raising the question of whether doctors had done everything they could to help the child before turning to medications.

The overall numbers of children prescribed antipsychotics remains small, at less than one half of one percent of the national sample. But the numbers are rising. In 1999-2001, about one in 1,300 were being treated with antipsychotics. By 2007, that had risen to one in 630, according to Olfson.

For 5-year-olds, about one in 650 were being treated in 1999-2001. That doubled, to one in 329, in 2007, he noted.

Research published online in December in the journal Health Affairs by the same research team suggested children on Medicaid are even more likely than children with private insurance to be prescribed antipsychotics.

The most common antipsychotic drug prescribed to children was risperidone (Risperdal), which accounted for nearly three-quarters of antipsychotic prescriptions. In adults and teens, risperidone is used to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Risperidone is also approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat unstable mood or irritability in children with autism aged 5 and up.

Children who were most likely to receive risperidone were male and aged 4 or 5, according to the report. The most common diagnosis was pervasive developmental disorder or mental retardation, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder or disruptive behavior disorder.

Previous research has shown children on the drugs may experience metabolic and endocrine abnormalities. Little is known about their impact on the developing brain, Olfson added.

"I don't want to minimize the problems children can have at this age, but there are psychological treatments that have been proven to help parents and the kids that emphasize the quality of the parent-child relationship," Olfson said.

One reason for the uptick may be increasing numbers of children diagnosed with autism and some research showing risperidone may help with autism-related irritability, the researchers noted.

Dr. Peter Jensen, co-director of the division of child psychiatry and psychology at the Mayo Clinic, agreed that the trend is concerning. "We have no doubt there are prescribing practices out there that are very, very worrisome," Jensen said.

It's imperative that children receive a full mental health assessment before getting these drugs, to understand the family situation and school environment and if there is a family history of psychiatric problems, as well as undergoing a physical exam to rule out other medical problems.

"These agents should not be used as an adjunct to a family stressed to the max," Jensen said. "With kids who are 2 to 5, most can be managed without these medicines. Rarely a 5-year-old goes on them. But a child of 2 or 3, in my experience, I have never had to put them on [an antipsychotic]. There is so much else that can be done."

The stress and difficulty of coping with a child who has significant mental health issues, the need to have a child behave well enough to be permitted to attend school, as well as lack of adequate coverage for family therapy and mental health services, may push doctors and parents into believing they have little choice other than medicating the child, Jensen said.

More information

The U.S. National Mental Health Information Center has more on children and mental health issues.

SOURCES: Mark Olfson, M.D., M.P.H., professor, clinical psychiatry, Columbia University, New York City; Peter Jensen, M.D., co-director, division of child psychiatry and psychology, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn.; January 2010, Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry

Copyright © 2010 ScoutNews, LLC. All rights reserved.

US-Led Forces Accused of Executing Schoolchildren in Afghanistan

2010-01-06T17:05:00.000-08:00

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/6/us_led_forces_accused_of_executing

In Afghanistan, hundreds have taken to the streets of Kabul and elsewhere to protest the US killing of civilians. The incident that has sparked the most outrage took place in eastern Kunar on December 27th, when ten Afghans, eight of them schoolchildren, were killed. According to the Times of London, US-led troops dragged innocent children from their beds and shot them during a nighttime raid. Afghan government investigators said the eight students were aged from eleven to seventeen, all but one of them from the same family. [includes rush transcript]

Guest:
Jerome Starkey, the Times of London correspondent in Afghanistan.
Website: JeromeStarkey.com

ANJALI KAMAT: Afghan President Hamid Karzai had harsh words for US and NATO forces on Tuesday in the wake of a string of attacks that has killed dozens of civilians. His comments came in an interview on Al Jazeera.

PRESIDENT HAMID KARZAI: We are going to ask the international community to end nighttime raids on Afghan homes. We are going to ask them to stop arresting Afghans. We are going to ask them to reduce and eliminate civilian casualties. We are going to ask them not to have Afghan prisoners taken. Those are the most sensitive areas of sovereignty for any nation, and we want to have that sovereignty retained and taken back.

ANJALI KAMAT: On Monday, hundreds of people, mostly students, protested in Kabul and in the province of Nangarhar against the US killing of civilians. Nearly thirty civilians have died over the past two weeks alone in US-led air strikes and ground operations.

But the incident that has sparked the most outrage took place in eastern Kunar province on December 27th, when ten Afghans, eight of them schoolchildren, were killed. According to the Times of London, US-led troops dragged innocent children from their beds and shot them during a nighttime raid. Afghan government investigators said the eight students were aged from eleven to seventeen, all but one of them from the same family. The headmaster of the local school said seven of the children were handcuffed and then executed. A preliminary investigation by the United Nations reinforced Afghan claims that most of the dead were schoolboys.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we go to Afghanistan now to speak with Jerome Starkey. He’s the Times of London correspondent in Afghanistan who reported on this story. He’s joining us on the telephone from Kabul.
Jerome, welcome to Democracy Now! Lay out the story for us. What is exactly being alleged happened?

JEROME STARKEY: Well, the Afghan investigators believe that an Americans unit—they’re not sure which one, possibly a company with [inaudible]—flew from Kabul to Narang district in Kunar province. They say—Assadullah Wafa, the former governor who led the investigation—they probably landed about two kilometers outside the village where these killings are alleged to have taken place and then walked on foot into the village.

They then say that when they got there—this is where the version of events vary. Some people say that the victims were killed in three separate buildings. Some say they were three separate rooms, all part of the same compound. What most of the people on the scene agree on, though, is that at least eight of them were schoolchildren enrolled in a local—in two schools, one—some in a local high school and some in a local primary school. One of the victims was apparently a local shepherd boy who was staying as a guest in the compound overnight. And the tenth victim was a farmer, a day laborer who was working on the nearby fields, who came out when he heard the shooting and was shot where he stood.

ANJALI KAMAT: Jerome, what’s been the response from US and NATO forces?

JEROME STARKEY: Well, initially, US and NATO forces here were very slow to say anything at all, and that possibly reflects the most secret nature of this raid. The fact that, according to Afghan investigators, these troops appear to have flown to the scene from Kabul appears to confirm speculation that this was an operation carried out by some sort of Special Forces unit, possibly even by some sort of paramilitary unit attached to one of the intelligence agencies, the foreign intelligence agencies, which operate occasionally out of the capital.

They have, however, confirmed that there was an incident. Off the record, speaking on background, a number of NATO officials have insisted that they believe the people who were killed were part of a Taliban network making improvised explosive devices, homemade bombs, the roadside explosives, which has exacted such a deadly toll against their forces in Iraq and in Afghanistan here. They’ve also issued a statement suggesting that they believe there is nothing to suggest that these people were unarmed. They say that they were shot at as they approached the village and that they killed the ten Afghans by when they returned fire.

AMY GOODMAN: You also spoke with the headmaster of the school, explaining his version of what happened?

JEROME STARKEY: That’s right. He was very keen to give the names of all of the students. He even gave what he said were their enrollment numbers, their registration numbers at the school, as sort of corroborating evidence that they were indeed students. I think even the United Nations’ investigations have confirmed that they believe at least some of the victims were enrolled in local schools. Now that doesn’t necessarily prove that they weren’t involved in any other nefarious sort of activities, but it does corroborate the fact that they were indeed children. And much of the outrage that this attack has caused comes from the fact that the victims were children, ranging from just eleven to seventeen years old. But the headmaster, as I said, he was also an uncle to about eight of the boys. These village communities often—families are very sort of interlinked. But he was very adamant to stress that the victims were innocent schoolchildren.

AMY GOODMAN: Were the kids handcuffed?

JEROME STARKEY: Well, this is one of the facts which is in dispute. But certainly, we spoke to the headmaster. We also spoke to another local called Jan Mohammed from the area. And both of them gave versions of events which suggested that some of the victims, at least some of the victims, had been handcuffed before they were shot. But this is where the exact details of what happened appear to break down, and not all the stories completely corroborate one another. Given the nature of the environment, we haven’t been able to travel there ourselves, and we’ve been relying on telephone interviews with people who are there and people who’ve visited the scene.

ANJALI KAMAT: And Jerome Starkey, can you describe the mood in Kabul? A number of civilians have been killed in recent weeks. The President, Hamid Karzai, has come out strongly against these killings. What does it feel like on the streets of Kabul? There have been protests.

JEROME STARKEY: Civilian casualties is, without doubt, one of the key, touchstone issues that is very quick to inflame public anger. Right across Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of this attack, there were a number of protests. There was one here in Kabul that we went to where there were schoolchildren of a similar age as these—to these victims on the street demanding an immediate withdrawal. They listed a series of incidents in the last few years where large numbers of innocent civilians have been killed. In some cases, more than a hundred civilians have been killed in single attacks. And they question whether or not international forces attach the same value to Afghan lives as they do to the lives of their own soldiers.

AMY GOODMAN: And the significance, Jerome Starkey, of President Karzai speaking out against the United States right now, as well as his security chiefs? And the question of who these forces were—were they paramilitary secret, covert forces? Were they US soldiers?

JEROME STARKEY: Well, it’s impossible for me to tell you absolutely who these soldiers were. I spoke to Assadullah Wafa, who led the investigation, just this morning and asked him that question again, whether or not he had any more information as to exactly who these people were who had carried out this raid. And he said he didn’t. He found speaking to the foreign military very difficult to get any sort of information from them.

Crucially, it is interesting and it is unusual that the National Security Council should have demanded that the soldiers behind the—or the gunmen behind this attack be handed over to face Afghan justice. Foreign forces in Afghanistan aren’t governed by a legal status of forces agreement, as foreign troops, as most American troops, usually are in other countries around the world, including Iraq. It’s not unusual for the President to come out and criticize America and criticize foreign forces, particularly when they are behind civilian casualties. He has come not many times in the past, often very emotional statements.

He has been known to cry, publicly weep, as he mourns the loss of innocent civilians. But what is unusual this time is there appears to be an escalation. There has been a suggestion from the security chiefs that they want these people responsible to be handed over. Now, Afghan justice is certainly not a particularly transparent process, and even Assadullah Wafa, who led the investigation, admitted to me this morning he thinks it’s absolutely very unlikely that these soldiers or these gunmen will be handed over.

AMY GOODMAN: Jerome Starkey, we want to thank you very much for being with us. He is the Times of London correspondent in Afghanistan. He’s speaking to us from Kabul.

Child Stealing By the State

2010-01-06T07:39:00.000-08:00

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Part Six

Part Seven

Did U.S. Forces Execute Kids in Afghanistan?

2010-01-06T07:27:00.001-08:00

By Dave Lindorff, OpEdNews.com
January 6, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/144955/

The Taliban suicide attack that killed a group of CIA agents in Afghanistan was big news in the U.S. over the past week. The attack took place on a base that was directing U.S. drone aircraft used to attack Taliban leaders. The airwaves and front pages were filled with sympathetic stories referring to the fact that the female station chief, who was among those killed, was the "mother of three children."

But the apparent mass murder of Afghan school children, including one as young as 11 years old, by U.S.-led troops, was pretty much blacked out in the American media. Especially blacked out was the claim by UN investigators that the students had not just been killed but executed, many of them after having first been rousted from their bedrooms and handcuffed.

Here is the excellent report on the incident that ran in the Times of London (like Fox News, a Rupert Murdoch-owned publication) on Dec. 31: 

Western troops accused of executing 10 Afghan civilians, including children

By Jerome Starkey in Kabul

American-led troops were accused yesterday of dragging innocent children from their beds and shooting them during a night raid that left ten people dead.

Afghan government investigators said that eight schoolchildren were killed, all but one of them from the same family. Locals said that some victims were handcuffed before being killed.

Western military sources said that the dead were all part of an Afghan terrorist cell responsible for manufacturing improvised explosive devices (IEDs), which have claimed the lives of countless soldiers and civilians.

"This was a joint operation that was conducted against an IED cell that Afghan and US officials had been developing information against for some time," said a senior Nato insider. But he admitted that "the facts about what actually went down are in dispute."

The article goes on to say:

In a telephone interview last night, the headmaster [of the local school] said that the victims were asleep in three rooms when the troops arrived. "Seven students were in one room," said Rahman Jan Ehsas. "A student and one guest were in another room, a guest room, and a farmer was asleep with his wife in a third building.

"First the foreign troops entered the guest room and shot two of them. Then they entered another room and handcuffed the seven students. Then they killed them. Abdul Khaliq [the farmer] heard shooting and came outside. When they saw him they shot him as well. He was outside. That's why his wife wasn't killed."

A local elder, Jan Mohammed, said that three boys were killed in one room and five were handcuffed before they were shot. "I saw their school books covered in blood," he said.

The investigation found that eight of the victims were aged from 11 to 17. The guest was a shepherd boy, 12, called Samar Gul, the headmaster said. He said that six of the students were at high school and two were at primary school. He said that all the students were his nephews.

Compare this article to the one mention of the incident that appeared in the New York Times, one of the few American news outlets to even mention the incident. The article, which appeared on Dec. 28, focused entirely on the difficulty civilian killings cause for the U.S. war effort, and not on the allegations of a serious war crime:

Attack Puts Afghan Leader and NATO at Odds

By Alissa J. Rubin and Abdul Waheed Wafa

KABUL, Afghanistan -- The killing of at least nine men in a remote valley of eastern Afghanistan by a joint operation of Afghan and American forces put President Hamid Karzai and senior NATO officials at odds on Monday over whether those killed had been civilians or Taliban insurgents.

In a statement e-mailed to the news media, Mr. Karzai condemned the weekend attack and said the dead had been civilians, eight of them schoolboys. He called for an investigation.

Local officials, including the governor and members of Parliament from Kunar Province, where the deaths occurred, confirmed the reports. But the Kunar police chief, Khalilullah Ziayee, cautioned that his office was still investigating the killings and that outstanding questions remained, including why the eight young men had been in the same house at the time.

"There are still questions to be answered, like why these students were together and what they were doing on that night," Mr. Ziayee said.

A senior NATO official with knowledge of the operation said that the raid had been carried out by a joint Afghan-American force and that its target was a group of men who were known Taliban members and smugglers of homemade bombs, which the American and NATO forces call improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.'s.

According to the NATO official, nine men were killed. "These were people who had a well-established network, they were I.E.D. smugglers and also were responsible for direct attacks on Afghan security and coalition forces in those areas," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the issue.

"When the raid took place they were armed and had material for making I.E.D.'s," the official added.

While the article in the New York Times eventually mentions the allegation that the victims were children, not grown men, it nonetheless begins with the unchallenged assertion in the lead that they were "men." There is no mention of the equally serious allegation that the victims had been handcuffed before being executed, and the story leaves the impression, made by NATO sources, that they were armed and had died fighting. There is no indication in the Times story that the reporters made any effort, as the more enterprising and skeptical London Times reporter did, to get local, non-official, sources of information. The New York Times reporters attributed the claim that the victims had been making bombs to an anonymous NATO source, even though there was no legitimate reason for the anonymity ("because of the delicacy of the situation" was the lame excuse offered). Indeed, the use of an anonymous source here would appear to violate the Times' own standards.

It's not that American newsrooms lacked the knowledge that a major war crime may have been committed. Nearly all American news organizations receive the AP news wire. Here is the AP report on the killings, which ran under the headline "UN says killed Afghans were students":

The United Nations says a raid last weekend by foreign troops in a tense eastern Afghan province killed eight local students.

The Afghan government says that all 10 people killed in a village in Kunar province were civilians. NATO says there is no evidence to substantiate the claim and has requested a joint investigation.

UN special representative in Afghanistan Kai Eide said in a statement Thursday that preliminary investigation shows there were insurgents in the area at the time of the attack. But he adds that eight of those killed were students in local schools.

Once again, the American media are falling down shamefully in providing honest reporting on a war, making it difficult for the American people to make informed judgments about what is being done in their name.

If the charges are correct -- that American forces, or American-led forces, are handcuffing their victims and then executing them -- they are committing egregious war crimes. If they are killing children, they are committing equally egregious war crimes. If they are handcuffing and executing children, the atrocity is beyond horrific. If true, this incident would actually be worse than the infamous war crime that occurred in My Lai during the Vietnam War. In that case, we had ordinary soldiers in the field, acting under the orders of several low-ranking officers in the heat of an operation, shooting and killing women, children and babies. But in this case we appear to have seasoned special forces troops actually directing the taking of captives, cuffing them, herding them into a room and spraying them with bullets, execution-style.

Given the history of the commanding general in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal -- who is known to have run a massive death squad operation in Iraq before being named to his current post by President Obama, and who is known to have called for the same kind of tactics in Afghanistan -- it should not be surprising that the U.S. would now be committing atrocities in Afghanistan. If this is how this war is going to be conducted, the U.S. media should be making a major effort to uncover and expose the crime.

On January 1, the London Times' Jerome Starkey, in Afghanistan, followed up with a second story, reporting that Afghan President Hamid Karzai is calling for the U.S. to hand over the troops who killed the students. Starkey quoted a "NATO source" as saying that the "foreigners involved" in the incident were "non-military, suggesting that they were part of a secret paramilitary unit based in the capital" of Kabul. He goes on to quote a "Western official" as saying: "There's no doubt that there were insurgents there, and there may well have been an insurgent leader in the house, but that doesn't justify executing eight children who were all enrolled in local schools."

Good enterprise reporting by the London Times and its Kabul-based correspondent. Silence on these developments in the U.S. media.

Meanwhile, it has been a week since New York Times reporters Rubin and Wafa made their first flawed report on the incident, and there has been not a word since then about it in the paper. Are Rubin and Wafa or other Times reporters on the story? Will there be a follow-up?

On the evidence of past coverage of these U.S. wars and their ongoing atrocities by the Times and by other major U.S. corporate media news organizations, don't bet on it. You'll do better looking to the foreign media.

By the way, given that we're talking about allegations of a serious war crime, it is important to note that, under the Geneva Conventions, it is a legal requirement that the U.S. military chain of command immediately initiate an official investigation to determine whether such a crime has occurred. One would hope that the Commander-in-Chief, President Obama, would order such an inquiry.

Any effort to prevent such an inquiry, or to cover up a war crime, would be a war crime in itself. We just had one administration that did a lot of that. We don't need another one.

Airports Set To Become Primary Peddlers Of Child Porn

2010-01-05T14:16:00.000-08:00

http://www.infowars.com/airports-set-to-become-primary-peddlers-of-child-porn/

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, January 5, 2010

The establishment is ensuring that pedophiles and perverts are kept entertained at airport security checkpoints by mandating the mass rollout of naked body scanners that provide detailed images of your child’s genitalia, to be enjoyed by officials sitting alone in back rooms.

Despite official assurances and media talking points that claim the naked body scanners now being implemented in airports worldwide do not show enough detail to be considered a violation of privacy, the true measure of how much of an intrusion they really are is proven by the fact that they break child pornography laws in the UK that bar the production of indecent images of children.

Ministers in the UK will be forced to exempt under-18’s from the virtual strip searches or pass new legislation that protects airport workers from being prosecuted as pedophiles.

“They also face demands from civil liberties groups for safeguards to ensure that images from the £80,000 scanners, including those of celebrities, do not end up on the internet,” reports the Guardian. “The Department for Transport confirmed that the “child porn” problem was among the “legal and operational issues” now under discussion in Whitehall after Gordon Brown’s announcement on Sunday that he wanted to see their “gradual” introduction at British airports.”

“They do not have the legal power to use full body scanners in this way,” said Terri Dowty, of Action for Rights of Children, adding there was an exemption in the 1978 law to cover the “prevention and detection of crime” but the purpose had to be more specific than the “trawling exercise” now being considered.

As the Guardian report highlights, despite the fact that news organizations routinely blur out sensitive areas of the body when showing images produced by the scans, the actual resolution of the images allows airport workers to see “genitalia and breast enlargements”.

Despite the promise that the images would immediately be deleted, Simon Davies of Privacy International warns that scans of celebrities or of people with unusual or freakish body profiles would prove an “irresistible pull” for some employees.

Indeed, the fact that your sons and daughters will potentially be subject to a virtual strip search where the shape and detail of their genitalia will be visible to someone sat alone in a back room begs the question of what kind of people would want to apply for such a job. If such technology is rolled out on a widespread basis, working in airport security will undoubtedly become a pull for perverts and pedophiles who will be given free reign to lust over your naked child’s body. How far will Americans acquiesce in the name of safety?

This compilation of articles proves that people in positions of power have routinely and illegally abused surveillance technologies for their own personal titillation, particularly in regard to young women and children.

A school in Overton County, Tennessee was sued to the tune of $4.2 million in damages by parents after school officials allowed surveillance cameras to be installed in locker rooms of children aged 10-14, with the images showing both girls and boys in various stages of undress.

Another case in Sutherland high school New York found that head school custodian Allen Wemes had kept a pornographic stash of footage filmed by a secret surveillance camera placed in a female restroom.

In June 2004, the director of a tutoring center in Chicago was charged with manufacturing and possessing child pornography after he was discovered to be operating a sophisticated video surveillance system in the bathroom of the Beverly Instructional Center.

These are just a few of dozens of cases in the U.S. alone where officials have been caught abusing invasive surveillance technologies for their own perverted pleasure. If similar technology is to be implemented on a mass scale in airports as is being proposed, we are going to see such violations skyrocket to an industrial level.

A familiar tactic employed to convince the public that the scanners are necessary is the repeated use of images that show concealed weapons, creating the perception that everyone is guilty and needs to be scanned. This is reinforced by the public being made to hold their hands up when they enter the scanner in a symbolic act of submission, when holding their arms out horizontally would be no different.

How much humiliation, fealty and degradation are we prepared to accept in the name of being protected from a menace that the government has proven time and again it has no motivation in stopping? The very people promoting the mass implementation of body scanners stand to reap the financial rewards because they are heavily invested in the technology.

Are we going to allow perverts and pedophiles in positions of power enjoy naked images of our children or are we finally going to draw a line in the sand and say enough is enough and start boycotting and filing lawsuits against airports and other institutions that attempt to ram through these revolting and dehumanizing measures?

Children reaching age 3 without being able to say a word, survey finds

2010-01-05T13:53:00.000-08:00

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article6974590.ece

January 4, 2010
Children reaching age 3 without being able to say a word, survey finds
Joanna Sugden

Children are reaching the age of 3 without being able to say a word, according to a survey that also found boys are almost twice as likely to struggle to learn to speak as girls.

The average age for a baby to speak their first word is 10 to 11 months. However, a significant minority (4 per cent) of parents reported that their child said nothing until they were 3.

Toddlers between the ages of 2 and 3 should be able to use up to 300 words, including adjectives, and be able to link words together, according to I CAN, the children’s communication charity. Late speech development can lead to problems, such as low achievement at school or mental health problems.

The survey of more than 1,000 parents found that a child’s background was not a factor in how quickly they learnt to talk. Working parents who put their babies in day care are just as likely to have a child whose speech develops late as those who leave their baby in front of the television.

Virginia Beardshaw, the chief executive of I CAN, said that learning to talk required help and encouragement. “We know there is a golden period for developing children’s communication between 0 and 5 and that early intervention is vital if children are struggling,” she said. “Chatting to your child, playing word games, pointing things out and having fun together every day all give your child the right start to communication.”

Parents should interact as much as possible, reading stories and talking to their children to encourage them to start talking, speech therapists advise. They say that dummies should only be resorted to at bedtime so children are free to make sounds and form words during the day.

More girls than boys (34 per cent against 27 per cent) said their first word before they reached nine months, the YouGov poll of 1,015 parents of children aged 1 to 7 found.

Almost one in six parents reported that their child had problems learning to talk. Among parents of boys the figure rose to one in four.

The vast majority (95 per cent) of parents remembered their child’s first word. The most common was “Dadda” (15 per cent), with 10 per cent saying “Mama” first. Besides parental names the top word was “cat”, followed by “car” and “no”. Some more unusual choices were “beer”, “gadget”, “hoover” and even “tits-up”.

Girls were quicker to join words together, with more than 20 per cent having done so by the age of 1, compared to 16 per cent of boys. Almost one quarter of those who had problems learning to talk did not receive any help from a speech and language therapist, nursery or playgroup staff.

Jean Gross, the Government’s new adviser on childhood language development, said that it was a real problem that children as old as 3 were unable to talk. “It has lifelong effects for children in terms of their ability to learn to read and write,” she said.

Ms Gross said childhood health targets were too focused on obesity levels and immunisation rates at the expense of more subtle difficulties.

All of those surveyed last month reported looking at picture books with their child, telling stories, playing word games and singing nursery rhymes, with boys and girls enjoying these activities equally and at a similar age.

However, children from more affluent families were said to enjoy doing so at a younger age than children from less affluent families.

Eighty per cent of parents knew that the correct response if their child mispronounced a word was to repeat it back to them in the correct way.

Case study: 'He's now chatty and sociable'

Lee Rose reached the age of 3 able to say only five words. His parents were not worried. “I had no other children to compare him with and his father was a late talker,” said Emma Rose, from Plymouth.

Doctors and health visitors did not pick up the problem. It was not until Lee’s nursery teachers noticed that he lashed out at another child in frustration that concerns were raised. After an assessment he was referred to an I CAN centre — a mainstream nursery school with a specialist speech and language department and a support group for parents.

Lee spent 12 months at the centre. “It was the one-to-one help that he needed and early intervention,” said Mrs Rose. Now 8, he is in the top group for all his lessons at primary school. “They have turned my little boy’s life around. He is chatty, sociable and has lots of friends.” Mrs Rose, 39, a former hospital technician, is retraining as a speech and language assistant.

New scanners break child porn laws

2010-01-05T13:49:00.000-08:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/jan/04/new-scanners-child-porn-laws/print

New scanners break child porn laws
Alan Travis, home affairs editor
4 January 2010

The rapid introduction of full body scanners at British airports threatens to breach child protection laws which ban the creation of indecent images of children, the Guardian has learned.

Privacy campaigners claim the images created by the machines are so graphic they amount to "virtual strip-searching" and have called for safeguards to protect the privacy of passengers involved.

Ministers now face having to exempt under 18s from the scans or face the delays of introducing new legislation to ensure airport security staff do not commit offences under child pornography laws.

They also face demands from civil liberties groups for safeguards to ensure that images from the £80,000 scanners, including those of celebrities, do not end up on the internet. The Department for Transport confirmed that the "child porn" problem was among the "legal and operational issues" now under discussion in Whitehall after Gordon Brown's announcement on Sunday that he wanted to see their "gradual" introduction at British airports.

A 12-month trial at Manchester airport of scanners which reveal naked images of passengers including their genitalia and breast enlargements, only went ahead last month after under-18s were exempted.

The decision followed a warning from Terri Dowty, of Action for Rights of Children, that the scanners could breach the Protection of Children Act 1978, under which it is illegal to create an indecent image or a "pseudo-image" of a child.

Dowty told the Guardian she raised concerns with the Metropolitan police five years ago over plans to use similar scanners in an anti-knife campaign, and when the Department for Transport began a similar trial in 2006 on the Heathrow Express rail service from Paddington station.

"They do not have the legal power to use full body scanners in this way," said Dowty, adding there was an exemption in the 1978 law to cover the "prevention and detection of crime" but the purpose had to be more specific than the "trawling exercise" now being considered.

A Manchester airport spokesman said their trial had started in December, but only with passengers over 18 until the legal situation with children was clarified. So far 500 people have taken part on a voluntary basis with positive feedback from nearly all those involved.

Passengers also pass through a metal detector before they can board their plane. Airport officials say the scanner image is only seen by a single security officer in a remote location before it is deleted.

A Department for Transport spokesman said: "We understand the concerns expressed about privacy in relation to the deployment of body scanners. It is vital staff are properly trained and we are developing a code of practice to ensure these concerns are properly taken into account. Existing safeguards also mean those operating scanners are separated from the device, so unable to see the person to whom the image relates, and these anonymous images are deleted immediately."

But Shami Chakrabarti, of Liberty, had concerns over the "instant" introduction of scanners: "Where are the government assurances that electronic strip-searching is to be used in a lawful and proportionate and sensitive manner based on rational criteria rather than racial or religious bias?" she said.

Her concerns were echoed by Simon Davies of Privacy International who said he was sceptical of the privacy safeguards being used in the United States. Although the American system insists on the deletion of the images, he believed scans of celebrities or of people with unusual or freakish body profiles would prove an "irresistible pull" for some employees.

The disclosures came as Downing Street insisted British intelligence information that the Detroit plane suspect tried to contact radical Islamists while a student in London was passed on to the US.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's name was included in a dossier of people believed to have made attempts to deal with extremists, but he was not singled out as a particular risk, Brown's spokesman said.

President Barack Obama has criticised US intelligence agencies for failing to piece together information about the 23-year-old that should have stopped him boarding the flight.

Brown's spokesman said "There was security information about this individual's activities and that was shared with the US authorities."

HOW THE SECRET SOCIETIES PAEDOPHILE RINGS WORK

2009-12-31T11:51:00.000-08:00

http://mccannexposure.wordpress.com/2009/12/30/how-the-secret-societies-paedophile-rings-work/

HOW THE SECRET SOCIETIES PAEDOPHILE RINGS WORK
by oceanlblue @ 2009-05-24 – 12:07:49

Certain Clandestine Networks within our Government authorities who have created and are running our social structure, are psychologically, emotionally and sexually abusing our children.

These authorities are presently being exposed and FULL public awareness of ALL those involved in this horrendous atrocity by our
Worldwide Masonic Secret Society-run social system, is only a matter of time.

From the top of the web, of this Black-Occult-Ritual Child Abuse & Murder Network all the way down to the bottom, they will be held accountable.

EVERY LAST ONE OF THEM.

Let’s stop Masonic Government Child Abuse NOW – Please be informed

Now and then, a fraction of paedophile ring cases make national headlines because of mass public pressure. However the wholehearted truth of the matter is this – these, and other Masonic government-run child abuse cases are NOT isolated – they are all part and parcel of the intricate global network of child abuse – engineered, by the CORE OF RAPE within our Government Intelligence Network. Whenever public pressure on these atrocities creates exposure throughout the public domain via the mass media as well as alternative publications and over the internet – it is ALL just the tip of the iceberg – of what is going on – all the time.

When the rare child abuse scandal by the authorities does hit the headlines and is then systematically covered up, it does not stop. The abuse continues underground as it always has – powered by the all-knowing, all-seeing eye of the secret societies hierarchy. The documented cases in this website are but a few of the countless cases which are presently being exposed.

The abuse is rife – yet it is only a matter of time when the veil will be lifted for everyone within society to fully acknowledge the absolute truth of what is going on behind our backs, since the secret societies have existed. All the perpetrators involved will then be held directly accountable by us – the people.

When we ALL become fully aware, then and only then, will these Government paedophile rings be completely destroyed and all sexual abuse against children can be, and will be stopped.

The facts in the following documentation are NOT isolated events. They are all clandestinely connected nationally and internationally, through a network of deceit, lies, deception, propaganda, greed and a lust for power within the Secret Societies networking regime.

For the seeker of truth – a person must research the numerous ways in which the Secret Societies work, to propagate their atrocities – cover up their atrocities – and attempt to destroy any evidence or anyone that may threaten their insidious crimes and agenda. When the truth is sought with an open mind and heart – the truth will come to you!

A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF SOME OF THE ATROCITIES

HOW IT WORKS
Global Secret Societies Child Abuse Network is clandestinely engineered and run identically to a Trans-national Corporation.

SECRET SOCIETIES ARE BLACK-OCCULT NETWORKS
The Secret Societies Ceremonial Rituals are steeped in ancient Black-Occult Magical Practices toward gaining occult power and control over others.

PAEDOPHILE POLICE ESCAPE PROSECUTION
High Level Masons such as Chief Superintendent Gordon Angelsea and at least 12 of his colleagues were “let off the hook” for sexual abuse crimes on children (some of who are now dead) in the North Wales Paedophile Ring Cover-Up.

PAEDOPHILE POLITICIANS ESCAPE PROSECUTION
High Level Government Masons such as Lord McAlpine, ex aid to Margaret Thatcher, was accused by numerous children of sexual crimes in the North Wales Child Abuse Cover-Ups. He escaped public exposure by a specifically appointed Masonic Paedophile Judge.

CATEGORY 1 PAEDOPHILE PROTECTOR LORD CULLEN
Lord Cullen who was appointed to the investigation and “100 year cover up” of Thomas Hamilton’s Mass Murder spree – were BOTH members of the same “boy’s club”.

SOHAM PAEDOPHILE POLICE
The two Liaison Officers assigned to the murder investigation of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman were known to the British Police hierarchy as Paedophiles at least 3 months prior to the investigation, due to Operation Ore.

PAEDOPHILE POLITICIANS ESCAPE MASS MEDIA EXPOSURE
Prime Minister Tony Blair’s senior clerk Phillip Lyon is charged by police for possessing child pornography, yet there was mass media censorship regarding his arrest.

MASONIC PAEDOPHILE DOCTOR ESCAPES PUBLIC EXPOSURE
Paedophile masons can escape public exposure of their atrocities by giving the Masonic “Signal of Distress” to a freemason “brother” judge, in a court of law.

CONDEMNED AND SACKED FOR EXPOSING THE NORTH WALES PAEDOPHILE RINGS
Alison Taylor the social worker who constantly complained for 14 years to the North Wales Police and Parliament (both run by Masons) of the North Wales Child Abuse Network, was ignored, condemned and sacked for telling the truth.

MASONIC PROPAGANDA MASS MEDIA MACHINE “COVER-UP”
Although the North Wales Child Abuse Cover-Up was the Biggest Paedophile Ring Expose in Britain’s history, the Mass Media machine (rife with masons) did their damnedest to keep the case “unreported” and therefore out of societies awareness.

MASONIC INTELLIGENCE MASS MEDIA MACHINE “DECEPTION”
The mass media propaganda machine, introduce Government intelligence agents trained in the art of provocation, disinformation and deception. They clandestinely thwart the truth of societies “paedophile problem”, on national TV documentaries, discussing the social problem of sexual child abuse.

MASONIC MASS MEDIA PROPAGANDA MACHINE “BRAINWASHING”
Mass media propaganda machine are brainwashing society that all child molesters cannot be cured. They also use so-called satire, to instigate violence against paedophiles as a “solution”. These tactics are executed to further propagate society’s paedophile problem as a whole – therefore covering up where the root of the real problem lies – The Masonic Child Abuse Network.

FREEMASON PAEDOPHILE MASS MURDERER THOMAS HAMILTON
The freemason mass murderer Thomas Hamilton was granted a gun licence by his Masonic “brother” Inspector McMurdo, to a amass his arsenal of weapons, even although he was well known to be of “odd character” with paedophilic tendencies.

GOVERNMENT INTELLIGENCE INTERNET CHILD PORNOGRAPHY “PROBLEM” PROPAGANDA
The World-wide Government Intelligence Network (run by freemasonry and other interconnecting secret societies) are informing society with blatant contradictions on societies Child Pornography “Problem” via the internet, to cover up the truth of their own Child Abuse Network of molestation and murder.

C.I.A.’s Pseudo-science – false memory syndrome
The C.I.A. (run by masons) created the pseudo – science and organisation “Institute of False Memory Syndrome” to whitewash children’s experiences of sexual abuse.

C.I.A. PAEDOPHILES APPOINTED AS FALSE MEMORY SYNDROME “EXPERTS” – The CIA appointed some of their top psychiatric trained in the art of mind-control to run the “False Memory Syndrome Institute”. One has admitted to being a paedophile as well as others who have been publicly exposed for sexually abusing their own children.

MASONIC BLACK-OCCULT HUMAN SACRIFICE RITUAL UPON WACO
The women and children who were executed at Waco were first psychologically tortured, incinerated alive by flame-throwers, before Government Intelligence went in to dismember their heads and limbs. This was not only to destroy vital evidence. The main agenda of this Masonic atrocity was perpetrated toward a mass Black-Occult Human Sacrifice on innocent men, woman and in particular, children.

WACO EXPOSES THE C.I.A.’s PAEDOPHILE NETWORK
One of the reasons, the Branch Davidson’s were “executed”, in the black-occult ritual by the F.B.I. and the B.A.T.F. (run by masons) is that they had discovered and were distributing documentation pertaining to the C.I.A.’s paedophile rings.

SACRIFICING A CHILD EFFIGY BY HIGH LEVEL SECRET SOCIETY INITIATES
High Level Secret Society initiates of world-wide notoriety burn the effigy of a small child in a Black-Occult ritual to one of their satanic “gods” – Molec, every year at Bohemian Grove. This is symbolic of what these same people do for real, in less public ceremonies,

U.S. GOVERNMENT HIERARCHY RIDDLED WITH MASONIC PAEDOPHILES
33 degree Mason President George Bush Senior, has been linked to the Franklin Child Abuse Cover-Up. He is also exposed along with numerous U.S. Political Figures for paedophilic and murder atrocities at Bohemian Grove – in the book – Trance Formation of America.

HIGH LEVEL SECRET SOCIETY INITIATE AND CHILD SACRIFICER ALISTAIR CROWLEY
Alistair Crowley, high level initiate of Freemasonry, Order of the Golden Dawn, O.T.O. and the Knights Templar admits to sacrificing children, and quoted – “a white male child of perfect innocence and intelligence makes the most suitable victim.”

CORRUPT UK JUDGES, POLICE, SOCIAL WORKERS AND PSYCHIATRISTS DIRECTLY INVOLVED IN PROTECTING PAEDOPHILES AND PROPAGATING RITUAL CHILD ABUSE
Corrupt Masons within our social structure are “hand-picked” to deal with allegations of Ritual Satanic Child Abuse. Time after time the same “officials” are chosen to cover-up and compound these atrocities against innocent children, as well as “threatening” the loving, caring parent when they complain.

MASON PAEDOPHILES USE “COVER MEMORIES” TO ABUSE CHILDREN
High level paedophile Masons are Black-Occult initiated with psychic abilities and mind control techniques which they use to give a child a “cover memory” while they are being sexually molested.

GOVERNMENT INTELLIGENCE BLACK OCCULT RITUALS AT STONEHENGE
British Government intelligence and Senior Police (both rife with Masons) are directly involved in clandestine Black-Occult Rituals involving agent provocateurs trained in the art of psychic warfare. Young babies are also part of their rituals at public gatherings on ancient sites of worship. Stonehenge Summer Solstice Festival 2002.

BRITAIN – THE LAND OF FREE SPEECH – UNLESS YOU PUBLICLY EXPOSE THE MASONS CHILD ABUSE NETWORK – THEN YOU’RE A CRIMINAL!

Britain is the land of “free speech”, up to a point. If a person publicly exposes the Governments Secret Society run Child Abuse Network, then they will be liable to receive Death Threats and violent assaults by Government Intelligence agent’s provocateurs as well as unprovoked violent assaults by Masonic Police.

There will be constant cover-ups regarding violent assaults by corrupt Police, Procurator Fiscals and Judges, The Paedophile Protectors. Criminal charges and imprisonment will be enforced onto anyone actively involved in publicly exposing the Masonic Child Abuse Network and their supporters. Especially when campaigning in the centre of the Masons Control Centre – The Scottish Houses of Parliament and the Edinburgh High Court.

232 Toxic Chemicals found in 10 Babies

2009-12-31T11:47:00.000-08:00

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/12/31/232-Toxic-Chemicals-found-in-10-Babies.aspx

232 Toxic Chemicals found in 10 Babies
Posted by: Dr. Mercola
December 31 2009

Laboratory tests commissioned by the Environmental Working Group have detected bisphenol A (BPA), a plastic component and synthetic estrogen, in umbilical cord blood of American infants.
Nine of 10 randomly selected samples of cord blood tested positive for BPA, an industrial petrochemical.

BPA has been implicated in a lengthening list of serious chronic disorders, including cancer, cognitive and behavioral impairments, endocrine system disruption, reproductive and cardiovascular system abnormalities, diabetes, asthma and obesity.

In all, the tests found as many as 232 chemicals in the 10 newborns, all of minority descent. The cord blood study has produced hard new evidence that American children are being exposed, beginning in the womb, to complex mixtures of dangerous substances that may have lifelong consequences.

And in a separate study, researchers found that complications of pregnancy, such as preterm labor, preterm birth, and infection were lowest in women with the highest vitamin D levels.

Blood levels of activated vitamin D usually rise during very early pregnancy, and some of it crosses the placenta to bathe the fetus, especially the developing fetal brain, in activated vitamin D. But many -- in fact most -- pregnant women do not make as much vitamin D as they need.

4,000 IU of vitamin D per day during pregnancy was found to be safe (not a single adverse event). However, this amount only resulted in a mean vitamin D blood level of 27 ng/ml in the newborn infants, indicating that even 4,000 IU per day during pregnancy is not enough.

Ritalin Linked With Sudden Death of Children

2009-12-30T05:57:00.001-08:00

http://www.naturalnews.com/027833_ritalin_sudden_death.html

December 30 2009
Ritalin Linked With Sudden Death of Children
by E. Huff, staff writer

(NaturalNews) Research from The National Institute of Mental Health has revealed that popular Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) drugs like Ritalin are responsible for causing sudden death in many children. Study numbers indicate a 500 percent increased risk in childhood death from taking such mental health drugs.

For years, many experts, scientists, and health practitioners have speculated that ADD drugs are dangerous and can cause serious injury and death. Etta Brown, a licensed educational psychologist and author of Learning Disabilities: Understanding the Problem and Managing the Challenges explained in response to the study that drugs like Ritalin actually destroy the neural function in children's brains. As a result, children who have undergone treatment with Ritalin will actually have a much more difficult time processing information and learning new things.

Brown also notes that Ritalin is responsible for causing a permanent tic in the face, neck, and head of many of the children who have taken or are taking it. Ironically, Ritalin is responsible for causing far more serious neurological damage than the problems it is alleged to treat. Comprehensive studies over the years have revealed that while drugs like Ritalin visibly calm children, these drugs destroy their delicate, developing nervous systems and can permanently cripple their ability to function as normal human beings.

Ritalin remains one of the primary drugs prescribed for children with supposed behavioral problems. Rather than be encouraged to modify diet and increase exercise, children are being given drugs by their doctors instead. Increases in behavioral and learning problems among children have been increasing right alongside escalating levels of environmental toxins. Children are also spending more time at home alone while their parents work, eating greater amounts of junk food, and not getting adequate sleep.

Etta Brown, and others, suggest better nutrition, adequate sleep, and increased exercise and physical activity as a proper treatment for children with behavioral and learning disabilities. Nutrition alone is of vital importance since inadequate nutrient intake is arguably the most significant factor in children's inability to behave and learn. Proper brain function cannot be achieved if the brain is not being fed what it needs to process information and grow.

Parental guidance in regulating and maintaining a proper lifestyle for their children is also vital if true improvement is ever to be achieved. Medical professionals, child psychologists, and others will have to come to grips with the fact that drugs are not the answer to childhood developmental problems.

Hundreds of Chemicals Found in Newborns

2009-12-26T10:02:00.000-08:00

http://www.naturalnews.com/027800_newborns_chemicals.html

December 26 2009
Hundreds of Chemicals Found in Newborns
by Kim Evans, citizen journalist

(NaturalNews) The umbilical cord is the lifeline of infants; it brings nutrients and oxygen to the baby. These days, it also brings hundreds of poisons. Recently, the Environmental Working Group tested the umbilical cord blood of ten American minority infants, and found a total of 232 known poisons in their blood.

The study found BPA, a petrochemical found in baby bottles, water bottles, and computer equipment. BPA is an environmental estrogen connected to birth defects, sexual dysfunction, hormonal problems, and diminished intellectual capability. BPA was found in nine out of ten of the blood samples.

Perfluorobutanoic acid was found; it's a member of the PFC chemical family and is common in non-stick cookware and water-resistant coatings. The most studied PFCs are linked to cancer, birth defects, and infertility. Substances banned in the 70's were found in the blood headed to these infants. These substances, PCBs, cause damage to the immune system and disrupt the endocrine system. Synthetic fragrances from perfumes and detergents were found. Nine out of ten of the umbilical cords contained chemical components from rocket fuel, which interfere with brain development and the thyroid. A fire retardant was found that interferes with the thyroid's function and may disrupt the production of T-cells - and our bodies use T-cells to fight disease. Lead and mercury were also found.

Years ago, scientists thought that many of these chemicals weren't able to cross into the umbilical cord blood and into the infant. However, once again, the scientists who make claims that man-made chemicals don't harm us or accumulate in the body are shown to be wrong.

The Environmental Working Group conducted the study to influence public policy to actually protect us from the man-made poisons that are everywhere. It's an admirable step. However, a few other points have yet to be addressed, including: When will the medical profession get the point that having an abundance of poisons in our bodies is cause for concern and at the root of many common health problems? And: When will the people and companies putting these poisons in common consumables, thereby poisoning entire populations, be held accountable? Simply banning these substances isn't enough; the profits from the sale of them should be distributed to the members of the community that have been exposed to them, and who have problems that these chemicals create. And finally: When will the average consumer become fully aware of the dangers of man-made chemicals and whenever possible, refuse to buy or use them?

In light of the fact that most of us are poisoned from birth - which keeps on coming with exposure to more chemicals in life - it seems a little crazy that Congress is battling over who is going to pay for drugs (more chemicals) for people with health problems. Wouldn't a more viable path be to open federally funded detoxification centers across the country to get these poisons out of our bodies - while finding more effective and efficient ways to remove these chemicals from each of us here on Earth?

The Environmental Working Group conducted a similar study in 2005 which focused on the industrial poisons found in the umbilical cord blood of American infants, but not necessarily of minorities. The 2005 study found 287 known poisons in their blood, and due to the expense of the testing, only 400 chemicals were tested for. There are over 80,000 industrial chemicals currently in use, and the vast majority have never had any safety testing.

Study finds orphanages can be a 'viable option'

2009-12-23T14:48:00.001-08:00

Fascism is here! Taking the children out of their homes! Rape and abuse farms! Demonically evil!

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-12-18-orphanages_N.htm

Study finds orphanages can be a 'viable option'
Wendy Koch
USA Today
Fri, 18 Dec 2009 17:31 EST

Children who live in orphanages fare as well or better than those in family homes, reports a Duke University study that tracked more than 3,000 children in five Asian and African countries.

The study, released today, is touted as one of the most comprehensive ever done on orphans. Orphaned and abandoned children ages 6-12 were evaluated over a three-year period in 83 institutions and 311 families in Cambodia, Ethiopia, India, Kenya and Tanzania. Those in institutions had significantly better health scores, lower prevalence of recent sickness and fewer emotional problems.

"Our research is not saying that institutions are better. What we found is that institutions may be a viable option for some kids," says study leader Kathryn Whetten, director of the Center for Health Policy at the Duke Global Health Institute. She says what matters most is the caregiving.

The study's findings contrast with U.S. and international child-welfare policies that strongly favor family placement over institutional care for orphaned or abandoned children.

In the U.S., group homes and other forms of institutional care exist, but they are no longer called orphanages. They housed about 16% of the 463,000 children in foster care in September 2008, according to the most recent data available from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

"Institutional care is not always Dickensonian," says Richard McKenzie, an economics professor at the University of California-Irvine. He lived in a North Carolina orphanage from age 10 to 18 and wrote a memoir about his mostly positive experience.

McKenzie says the Duke study debunks the myth that families are the better choice. He says some foster care kids are abused or bounced from home to home.

The study does not apply to U.S. foster care, says Olivia Golden, who studies child and family programs at the Urban Institute, a research group. She says the U.S., unlike some poorer countries, provides schooling and health insurance to its foster care kids and tries, in addition, to find them families so they can thrive.

Golden says research on child development shows that children, especially very young ones, benefit from having a consistent caregiver.

The Duke study, published in the peer-reviewed journal PloS ONE, was funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Development.

Autism Jumps 57% in Just 4 Years

2009-12-20T14:39:00.000-08:00

http://www.webmd.com/brain/autism/news/20091218/autism-jumps-57percent-in-just-4-years

Autism Jumps 57% in Just 4 Years
1 in 110 U.S. Kids Has Autism, CDC Study Confirms
By Daniel J. DeNoon
WebMD Health News Reviewed by Louise Chang, MD

Dec. 18, 2009 – Autism disorders increased by 57% in just four years, the CDC today reported.

By the end of 2006, one in 110 U.S. kids had an autism disorder diagnosed by age 8: one in 70 boys and one in 315 girls, reflecting a nearly fivefold higher risk for males.

The new CDC estimate of autism prevalence, obtained from analysis of child evaluation records in 11 states, is virtually identical to autism numbers reported for 2007 from a huge telephone survey reported last October.

Are today's kids really more likely to have autism, or are doctors and parents just getting better at recognizing this family of developmental disorders?

"At this point it is hard to say how much is a true increase and how much is improved identification," CDC behavioral health scientist Catherine Rice, PhD, said at a news conference. Rice is the lead author of the CDC report.

Rice admits that no single factor or simple explanation can account for the increase. And advocates for autism research say the size and rapidity of the increase can't be explained away.

"Two decades ago we were looking at a prevalence of one in 5,000 children. Now we're looking at one in 100. That really is a staggering increase," Geraldine Dawson, PhD, chief science officer of advocacy group Autism Speaks, tells WebMD.

Dawson said the new numbers justify a huge increase in federal spending on research and treatment.

"The question is what will it take for the federal government to begin to respond to this crisis," Dawson says. "President Obama during the election campaign made a promise that there would be a billion dollars spent every year on finding the causes of autism. We feel that this kind of data coming from a CDC study really requires that level of response."

Rice expressed similar concern.

"The CDC considers autism spectrum disorders to be a significant public health issue," she said. "This report underscores the need for a coordinated and strong response to improve lives of people with ASDs."

Parents Detect Autism Earlier
A major finding from the CDC study was that the vast majority of parents of children with an autism disorder -- 70% -- expressed concern over their child's development when the child was younger than 3 years old. Most expressed concern by the time the child was 2.

Yet children were, on average, four and a half years old before they were diagnosed with an autism disorder.

"The American Academy of Pediatrics has encouraged routine screening of children for autism at ages 18 and 24 months," Rice said. "Pediatricians should listen to parents if they have a concern, but also proactively follow the screening recommendations regardless of whether parents have concerns."

The Rice study was released today by the CDC as special report of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

U.S. Gets a Near Failing Grade on Premature Births Report Card

2009-12-19T18:52:00.000-08:00

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/12/19/US-Gets-a-Near-Failing-Grade-on-Premature-Births-Report-Card.aspx

U.S. Gets a Near Failing Grade on Premature Births Report Card
Posted by: Dr. Mercola
December 19 2009 |

More than half a million babies, one out of eight, are born prematurely each year in the United States, prompting the March of Dimes to give the nation a D on its premature births report card.

The report card did not give an A to a single state. Vermont, which has a preterm birth rate of 9 percent, got a B, while 17 states got F’s, including Mississippi, with a preterm birth rate of 18.3 percent. The prematurity rate in Puerto Rico, at 19.4 percent, was the highest in the country.

The nationwide rate has barely budged in the most recent three years reported -- to 12.7 percent in 2007, according to preliminary figures, from 12.8 percent in 2006 and 12.7 percent in 2005. It was 11.4 percent in 1997.

All babies born before 37 weeks of gestation are considered premature. They are at higher risk for death and for complications that include cerebral palsy and mental retardation.

Adolescents in a pornified culture

2009-12-16T11:53:00.000-08:00

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/adolescents_in_a_pornified_culture/

Tuesday, 15 December 2009
Adolescents in a pornified culture

By undermining marriage and family life, by assailing them on the internet, pornography is doing serious harm to young people.

"Pornography is a visual representation of sexuality which distorts an individual’s concept of the nature of conjugal relations. This, in turn, alters both sexual attitudes and behaviour. It is a major threat to marriage, to family, to children and to individual happiness. In undermining marriage it is one of the factors in undermining social stability."

So begins a major new report on pornography by Patrick Fagan, Senior Fellow and Director of the Centre for Research on Marriage and Religion at the Family Research Council in Washington.

"Social scientists, clinical psychologists, and biologists have begun to clarify some of the social and psychological effects, and neurologists are beginning to delineate the biological mechanisms through which pornography produces its powerful negative effects,” says Dr Fagan, whose 30-page report, The Effects of Pornography on Individuals, Marriage, Family and Community, is a synthesis of these recent findings.

MercatorNet presents here some excerpts on adolescents and pornography from the report.

One of the biggest tasks of adolescent members of all societies is to come to grips with their burgeoning sexuality. Some have always tested the limits of sexual expression even when strong social controls were in place. In well-ordered societies, such testing triggers immediate social sanctions from parents, mentors, and community.

But contemporary culture is alarmingly sexualized, and the traditional sexual taboos of a well-functioning society have broken down. Nearly two-thirds of United States high-school students have had sexual intercourse by grade twelve. Of these sexually active high-schoolers, 70 percent of females and 55 percent of males report that they wish they had waited instead.

These numbers have massive implications for the future of the American family, for of women who have had three sexual partners other than their eventual husband, only 39 percent will be in a stable marriage by their mid-thirties. In 2007, 20 percent of U.S. girls in grade 12 already have had sexual intercourse with four or more partners.

A substantial factor in this shift has been the growth of digital media and the Internet. Two recent reports, one by the American Psychological Association on hyper-sexualized girls, and the other by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy on the pornographic content of phone texting among teenagers, make clear that the digital revolution is being used by younger and younger children to dismantle the barriers that channel sexuality into family life.

The role of the Internet

Though most U.S. parents (78 percent) are worried about their adolescents accessing Internet pornography, not all teenagers readily take to this sexualized culture. Most start out being ill at ease with any display of pornography: they tend to be upset or embarrassed, with reactions ranging from fear to shame to anger to fascination. In one survey, about a quarter were “very” upset by this exposure, but they tend not to report it.

Adolescents often come across pornography accidentally on the Internet. One study found that 70 percent of youth aged 15 to 17 accidentally came across pornography online. A study of 1,501 youth aged ten to seventeen examined unwanted exposure incidents more thoroughly: in 26 percent of the cases, respondents reported that when they tried to exit an unwanted site, they were actually brought to an additional sex site. The same study showed that out of the total number of unwanted exposure incidents, 44 percent of the time the youth did not disclose the episode to anyone else.

These initial reactions of disgust, however, rapidly dissipate so that older adolescents tend to use sexually explicit Internet material more often than younger adolescents and are twice as likely to report intentional pornography use as are younger adolescents. Repeated exposure to pornography eventually wipes out any feelings of shame and disgust and gives way, instead, to unadulterated enjoyment.

A 2005 survey showed that respondents who reported unintentional exposure to pornography were over 2.5 times as likely to then report intentional exposure as those who did not report any unintentional exposure. It seems the unintentional exposure has its effect of bringing them back for more, which of course is one of the fears of parents.

Risk factors for use of pornography

Several factors predict an adolescent’s use of pornography. Teenagers who watch pornography more frequently tend to be high sensation seekers, less satisfied with their lives, have a fast Internet connection, and have friends who are younger. Adolescents are at greater risk for intentionally seeking out sexual material when they have high levels of computer use. The more time spent on the computer, the more likely these adolescents will search for sexually explicit content. Not surprisingly, given all that has already been reported, viewers who masturbate while viewing sexually explicit material assess the material more favourably than those who do not masturbate.

There is a difference between boys’ and girls’ reasons for seeking pornographic sites, differences that parallel the different patterns of adult male and female use of pornography. Boys tend to seek pornography initially because they are curious or want sexual arousal, while girls tend first to go to non-pornographic but sexually oriented sites for sexual health or relationship-related information.

Also, the impacts are different for boys and girls: males report more positive memories of sexually explicit material than females, and report “more positive attitudes toward uncommitted sexual exploration” as their use of pornography increases. In one study, adolescents who watched the highest level of sexual content on television doubled the likelihood they would initiate intercourse

Impact on adolescent development and behaviour

Pornography viewing among teenagers disorients them during that developmental phase when they have to learn how to handle their sexuality and when they are most vulnerable to uncertainty about their sexual beliefs and moral values. A study of 2,343 adolescents found that sexually explicit Internet material significantly increased their uncertainties about sexuality. The study also showed that increased exposure to sexually explicit Internet material increased favourable attitudes toward sexual exploration with others outside of marriage and decreased marital commitment to the other spouse.

Other studies have shown links between pornography and low levels of sexual self-esteem, as well as feelings of loneliness, including major depression.

Viewing pornography can engender feelings of shame: In a study of high school students, the majority of those who had viewed pornography felt some degree of shame for viewing it. However, 36 percent of males and 26 percent of females said they were never ashamed of viewing pornography, giving some idea of the level of desensitization already reached in society.

High adolescent consumption of pornography also affects behaviour. Male pornography use is linked to significantly increased sexual intercourse with non-romantic friends, and is likely a correlate of the so-called “hook-up” culture.

Exposure to pornographic sexual content can be a significant factor in teenage pregnancy. A three-year longitudinal study of teenagers found that frequent exposure to televised sexual content was related to a substantially greater likelihood of teenage pregnancy within the succeeding three years. This same study also found that the likelihood of teenage pregnancy was two times greater when the quantity of that sexual content exposure, within the viewing episodes, was high rather than low.

The protective role of parental involvement

Although U.S. adolescents indicate their preferred source of sexual information is their parents, more than half of them report they have learned about intercourse, pregnancy, and birth control from television, and half of teenage women report they first learned about intercourse from magazines.

A study of 1,300 eight- to thirteen-year-old girls found that, among those who engaged in “cybersex,” 95 percent of the parents were completely unaware of their children’s involvement. Compared to adolescents who do not search for pornography online, adolescents who search for pornography online are about three times as likely to have parents who do not monitor their behaviour at all (or very little). Compared to those who do not seek out pornography, those who seek Internet pornography are three times as likely to give a poor rating of their attachment to their parent.

Clearly there is a lot that parents can do, but it takes a good family life, lots of communication with the adolescent, and a relationship that permits such communication about such an anxiety-provoking topic.

The key to militating against these damaging patterns and to protecting against the effects of pornography is to foster relationships of affection and attachment in the family. The first and most important relationship is between the father and the mother. The second is engaged parents who love their children. In today’s technological society, this means limiting, monitoring, and directing their children’s Internet use. This, in turn, provides an invaluable shield against Internet pornography, and allows room for a healthy sexuality to unfold in a natural and socially supported way.

In our over-sexualized culture, with a longer pre-marriage period, children need the capacity for abstinence if their sexuality is to be channelled into stable marriage, procreation, and healthy family life for their children. Strong families remain the best defense against the negative effects of pornography, especially when aided by regular religious worship with all the proven benefits it brings.

Finally, the fundamental role of government (including the courts) is to protect innocent citizens, most especially children and adolescents, and to protect the sound functioning of the basic institutions of family, church, school, marketplace, and government. They are all interdependent. Pornography, clearly, undermines both marriage and the family, and has a host of ill effects. It is time for government to reassess its laissez-faire attitude towards the proliferation of pornography, especially on the Internet.

Our present and future families need protection from this insidious enemy of love, affection, and of family and social stability.

US Kids Represent Psychiatric Drug Goldmine

2009-12-16T10:37:00.003-08:00

http://www.truthout.org/1213091

US Kids Represent Psychiatric Drug Goldmine
Evelyn Pringle
Truthout
Sat, 12 Dec 2009

Prescriptions for psychiatric drugs increased 50 percent with children in the US, and 73 percent among adults, from 1996 to 2006, according to a study in the May/June 2009 issue of the journal Health Affairs. Another study in the same issue of Health Affairs found spending for mental health care grew more than 30 percent over the same ten-year period, with almost all of the increase due to psychiatric drug costs.

On April 22, 2009, the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality reported that in 2006 more money was spent on treating mental disorders in children aged 0 to 17 than for any other medical condition, with a total of $8.9 billion. By comparison, the cost of treating trauma-related disorders, including fractures, sprains, burns, and other physical injuries, was only $6.1 billion.

In 2008, psychiatric drug makers had overall sales in the US of $14.6 billion from antipsychotics, $9.6 billion off antidepressants, $11.3 billion from antiseizure drugs and $4.8 billion in sales of ADHD drugs, for a grand total of $40.3 billion.

The path to child drugging in the US started with providing adolescents with stimulants for ADHD in the early 80s. That was followed by Prozac in the late 80s, and in the mid-90s drug companies started claiming that ADHD kids really had bipolar disorder, coinciding with the marketing of epilepsy drugs as "mood stablizers" and the arrival of the new atypical antipsychotics.

Parents can now have their kids declared disabled due to mental illness and receive Social Security disability payments and free medical care, and schools can get more money for disabled kids. The bounty for the prescribing doctors and pharmacies is enormous and the CEOs of the drug companies are laughing all the way into early retirement.

Psychiatric Drugs Explained

During an interview with Street Spirit in August 2005, investigative journalist and author of Mad in America, Robert Whitaker, described the dangers of psychiatric drugs. "When you look at the research literature, you find a clear pattern of outcomes with all these drugs," he said, "you see it with the antipsychotics, the antidepressants, the anti-anxiety drugs and the stimulants like Ritalin used to treat ADHD."

"All these drugs may curb a target symptom slightly more effectively than a placebo does for a short period of time, say six weeks," Whitaker said. However, what "you find with every class of these psychiatric drugs is a worsening of the target symptom of depression or psychosis or anxiety, over the long term, compared to placebo-treated patients."

"So even on the target symptoms, there's greater chronicity and greater severity of symptoms," he reports, "And you see a fairly significant percentage of patients where new and more severe psychiatric symptoms are triggered by the drug itself."

Whitaker told Street Spirit that the rate of Americans disabled by mental illness has skyrocketed since Prozac came on the market in 1987, and reports: (1) the number of mentally disabled people in the US has been increasing at a rate of 150,000 people per year since 1987, (2) that represents an increase of 410 new people per day and (3) the disability rate has continued to increase and one in every 50 Americans is disabled by mental illness.

The statistics above beg the question of how could this happen when the so-called new generation of "wonder drugs" arrived on the market during the exact same time period. The truth is, the "wonder drugs" cause most of the bizarre behaviors listed by doctors to warrant a mental illness disability.

Psychiatric Drug Goldmine

The CIA "World Factbook" estimate the world population to be about 6.8 billion and the US population to be a mere 307 million. In an April 2008 report, the market research firm Datamonitor reported that the "US dominates the ADHD market with a 94 percent market share."

ADHD drug prices at a middle dose for 90 pills at DrugStore.com, are: Adderall $278, Concerta $412, Desoxyn $366, Strattera $464 and Vyvanse $385. Daytrana costs $437 for three boxes of 30 nine-hour patches.

The SSRI and SNRI antidepressants include GlaxoSmithKline's Paxil and Wellbutrin, Pfizer's Zoloft, Celexa and Lexapro from Forest Labs, Luvox by Solvay, Wyeth's Effexor and Pristiq and Lilly's Prozac and Cymbalta. The average price of these drugs is about $300 for 90 pills at DrugStore.com.

The prices for anticonvulsants can run as high as $929 for 180 tablets of Glaxo's Lamictal, and $1170 for 180 tablets of Johnson & Johnson's Topamax.

In 2008, the atypical antipsychotics took over the slot as the top revenue earners in the US, and include Seroquel by AstraZeneca; Risperdal and Invega marketed by Janssen, a division of J&J; Geodon by Pfizer; Abilify from Bristol-Myers Squibb; Novartis' Clozaril and Eli Lilly's Zyprexa. The average price on these drugs for 100 pills at DrugStore.com is about $1,000. Lilly also sells Symbyax, a drug with Zyprexa and Prozac combined, at a cost $1,564 for 90 capsules at DrugStore.com in May 2009.

The briefing material submitted to an FDA advisory panel in April 2009 reported that an estimated 25.9 million patients worldwide had been exposed to Seroquel since its launch in 1997 through July 31, 2007, in the US, and the second quarter of 2007 for countries outside the US. Of that number, an estimated nearly 15.9 million took Seroquel in the US, compared to only ten million patients in the rest of the world. In 2008, the US accounted for roughly $3 billion of Seroquel's $4.5 billion in worldwide sales.

For the full-year of 2008, Eli Lilly reported worldwide Zyprexa sales of about $4.7 billion, with US sales of $2.2 billion and only $2.5 billion for the rest of the world.

FDA as Promotional Tool

On June 12, 2009, an FDA advisory panel gave the green light to expand the marketing of Zyprexa, Seroquel and Geodon for use with 13 to 17 year-olds diagnosed with schizophrenia and 10 to 17 year-olds diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The FDA usually follows its advisers' recommendations.

"Such approval gives manufacturers a shield from liability - for illegally promoting the drugs for off-label use," said Vera Hassner Sharav, president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection.

"And such approval ensures increased use of these drugs," she warned. "Manufacturers and mental health providers will profit while children's physical and mental health will be sacrificed."

"The body of evidence showing these drugs to be harmful is irrefutable," she said, "it is documented in FDA's postmarketing database, and in secret internal company documents uncovered during litigation."

According to Dr. Stefan Kruszewski, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the atypicals increase the risk of obesity, type II diabetes, hypertension, heart attacks and stroke.

He said the drugs were marketed as safer and easier to tolerate than the older, cheaper antipsychotics because they would cause fewer neurological injuries like tardive dyskinesia and akathisia.

Those claims turned out to be totally false, he said, and "they continue to cause same neurological side-effects as the older antipsychotics."

"Children are known to be compliant patients and that makes them a highly desirable market for drugs, especially when it pertains to large-profit-margin psychiatric drugs, which can be wrought with issues of non-compliance because of their horrendous side effect profiles," according to a June 29, 2009 paper titled, "Drugging Our Children to Death," in Health News Digest.com, by Gwen Olsen, who spent over a decade as a pharmaceutical sales rep, and authored the book, Confessions of an Rx Drug Pusher.

Children are forced to take their drugs by doctors, parents and school personnel, she said. "So, children are the ideal patient-type because they represent refilled prescription compliance and 'longevity.'"

"In other words," Olsen noted, "they will be lifelong patients and repeat customers for Pharma!"

"The initiative to drug our children for profit has exceeded all common sense boundaries and is threatening the welfare of every American child," she stated, and it "is up to each and every one of us to stop this madness!"

Drug Makers Busted

Most all of the psychiatric drug companies have come under investigation over the past several years for promoting their drugs for off-label use, especially with children. However, the fines they end up paying are trivial compared to the profits earned through the illegal marketing campaigns.

In September 2007, Bristol-Myers Squibb entered into a $515 million civil settlement with the US Department of Justice for illegally marketing drugs, including Abilify, for off-label uses. In the first six months of 2009, Abilify had sales of $1.9 billion. In 2008, the salary and compensation package of Bristol-Myers' CEO, James Cornelius, was $23,150,236, according to the AFL-CIO's Executive PayWatch Database.

On January 29, 2009, Paxil and Wellbutrin maker, GlaxoSmithKline, announced that it would record a legal charge in the fourth quarter of 2008 of $400 million relating to an ongoing investigation initiated by the US attorney's office in Colorado into the US marketing and promotional practices for several products for the period 1997 to 2004. The government inquired about alleged off-label marketing as well as medical education programs for doctors, "other speaker events, special issue boards, advisory boards, speaker training programmes, clinical studies, and related grants, fees, travel and entertainment," according to a Glaxo annual report.

In January 2009, Eli Lilly settled with the DOJ and more than 30 states for $1.4 billion over the off-label marketing of Zyprexa. The agreement included a $615 million fine for a federal criminal charge. But $1.4 billion was chump change considering that Zyprexa was still Lilly's best seller in 2008, with sales of $4.69 billion. Lilly also has paid over $1 billion to settle lawsuits filed by Zyprexa patients. In the first six months of 2009, Zyprexa sales were $1.5 billion. In 2008, Lilly's CEO, John Lechleiter, had a pay package worth $12,856,882

In September 2009, the DOJ reached a $2.3 billion settlement with Pfizer related to the off-label promotion of several drugs, including the psychiatric drugs, Geodon, Zoloft and Lyrica, in the largest health-care fraud settlement in history. But even though Pfizer took the entire $2.3 billion as an earnings charge for the fourth quarter of 2008, the drug maker was still able to post a fourth quarter profit of $268 million. Pfizer's CEO in 2008, Jeffrey Kindler, had a salary and pay package of $15,547,600.

Johnson & Johnson is also dealing with the DOJ and state-level investigations into the off-label marketing of Risperdal. The company's latest SEC filing lists nine subpoenas received by the company involving promotions of Risperdal, including one "seeking information regarding the Company's financial relationship with several psychiatrists." In the first six months of 2009, Risperdal earned $660 million. J&J's CEO, William Weldon, had a pay package worth $29,127,432 in 2008.

AstraZeneca's third quarter SEC filing lists a $520 million tentative settlement agreement with the US attorney's office in Philadelphia to resolve allegations related to the off-label marketing of Seroquel. At "least 34 states are pursuing separate investigations of AstraZeneca's marketing practices as part of a joint investigation and others may be conducting their own probes," according to Ed Silverman on Pharmalot.

"A half a billion dollar one-time settlement is just a small cost of doing business for a company that sold $17 billion worth of the offending drug in the last five years," Dr. Roy Poses points out on the Health Care Renewal web site. In 2008 alone, Seroquel had world-wide sales of more than $4.4 billion.

As of July 13, 2009, AstraZeneca was also defending approximately 10,381 served or answered personal injury lawsuits and approximately 19,391 plaintiff groups involving Seroquel, according to SEC filings. Some of the cases also include claims against other drug makers such as Eli Lilly, Janssen Pharmaceutica and/or Bristol-Myers Squibb, the filing notes.

On September 23, 2009, Shire Pharmaceuticals received a subpoena from the US Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General in coordination with the US attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, seeking production of documents related to the sales and marketing of Adderall XR, Daytrana and Vyvanse, according to Shire's third quarter report for 2009.

In a November 6, 2009, SEC filing, Abbott Labs said the federal prosecutor for the Western District of Virginia was conducting an investigation for the US Justice Department of whether the company's sales and marketing of Depakote violated civil or criminal laws, including the Federal False Claims Act and an anti-kickback statute related to reimbursement by Medicare and Medicaid programs to third parties.

In 2008, Depakote had sales of $1.36 billion and Abbott CEO, Miles White, had a salary and compensation package of $28,253,387.

In February 2009, the DOJ unsealed a lawsuit alleging that Forest Laboratories marketed the antidepressants Celexa and Lexapro for unapproved uses in children, and paid kickbacks to induce doctors to promote the drugs, including Dr. Jeffrey Bostic at Harvard University. In its latest SEC filing, Forest disclosed that it reached an agreement in principle in May 2009 to settle the civil aspects of US federal and state probes. "Penalties in the civil settlement are covered by a $170 million reserve Forest created in April," according to a November 9 report by Dow Jones.

Forest also disclosed that the agreement "does not resolve the government's ongoing investigation into potential criminal law violations" related to Celexa and Lexapro, and thyroid drug Levothroid, Dow Jones notes. In 2008, the salary and compensation for Forest CEO, Howard Solomon, was $6,565,324.

Over the past year and a half, a large number of so-called "Key Opinion Leaders" in the field of psychiatry have been exposed for not fully disclosing money received from many of the drug companies above through an investigation by the US Senate Finance Committee under the leadership of Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley.

The list so far includes Harvard University's Joseph Biederman, Thomas Spencer and Timothy Wilens; Charles Nemeroff and Zackery Stowe from Emory; Melissa DelBello at the University of Cincinnati; Alan Schatzberg, president of the American Psychiatric Association from Stanford; Martin Keller at Brown University; Karen Wagner and Augustus John Rush from the University of Texas and Fred Goodwin, the former host of a radio show called "Infinite Minds," broadcast by National Pubic Radio.

Fines as a Business Expense

The fraud settlements are "merely a cost of doing business to these pharmaceutical Goliaths and, in fact, caps their liability for these crimes," said Alaskan attorney Jim Gottstein, the leader of the Law Project for Psychiatric Rights (PsychRights), a public interest law firm.

"Most importantly," he noted, "these settlements have not stopped the practice of psychiatrists and other prescribers giving these drugs to children and youth and Medicaid continuing to pay for these fraudulent claims."

"Because of the massive, harmful, increase in the psychiatric drugging of America's children and youth, who are inherently forced, PsychRights has made addressing the problem a priority," he said.

Gottstein conducted an investigation and determined that the vast majority of off-label psychotropic drug prescriptions for children and youth that are paid for by Medicaid constitute Medicaid fraud.

PsychRights now has a national "Medicaid Fraud Initiative Against Psychiatric Drugging of Children & Youth," designed to address this problem by "having lawsuits brought against the doctors prescribing these harmful, ineffective drugs, their employers, and the pharmacies filling these prescriptions and submitting them to Medicaid for reimbursement," according to its web site.

"Anyone who submits or causes claims to be submitted to Medicaid for drugs that are not for a 'medically accepted indication' is committing Medicaid Fraud," said Gottstein, in a July 27, 2009 press release announcing the launch of the national campaign.

"Those guilty of this Medicaid Fraud include psychiatrists and other physicians prescribing these drugs, their employers, and pharmacies submitting the false claims to Medicaid," he pointed out.

PsychRights estimates that over $2 billion in such fraudulent Medicaid claims are being paid by the government each year.

"Once one sues over specific offending prescriptions, all of such prescriptions can be brought in, which means that any psychiatrist on the losing end of such a lawsuit will almost certainly be bankrupted, because each offending prescription carries a penalty of between $5,500 and $11,000," PsychRights explained.

It is hoped that once the doctors and pharmacies realize they are subject to financially ruinous Medicaid fraud judgments, the practice will be stopped or substantially reduced.

"Each prescriber may have a million dollars or few, at most, to lose, but the pharmacies' financial exposure can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars and it is hoped this will attract attorneys to take these cases," the web site noted.

In September and October 2009, Gottstein gave presentations on the initiative at the annual conferences of the National Association of Rights Protection and Advocacy and the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology in order to find people who are potentially interested and willing to pursue such cases.

"This was successful and we have at least a few such cases cooking," he reported. "PsychRights stands ready to help people interested in bringing such suits."

In late 2006, Gottstein won international fame by subpoenaing and releasing thousands of documents involving Eli Lilly's illegal marketing of Zyprexa, which resulted in front page stories in The New York Times.

PsychRights also has an appeal pending on a lawsuit filed against the state of Alaska and responsible state officials seeking declaratory and injunctive relief that Alaskan children and youth on Medicaid have the right not to be administered psychotropic drugs unless and until a number of specific conditions are met. The lawsuit seeks to prohibit the state from paying for psychiatric drugs prescribed off-label to children and youth.

In responding to the lawsuit, the state claimed that they do have any control over or responsibility for the psychiatric drugging of children in their custody, or any responsibility under Medicaid, and moved for dismissal on the grounds that PsychRights does not have standing, or the right to bring the suit, because it was not harmed by the state's actions.

The court agreed and dismissed the case. "We think the judge is wrong and have filed an appeal," said Gottstein.

In May 2009, Gottstein sent letters to Sens. Charles Grassley and Herb Kohl and Reps. Henry Waxman, Bart Stupak, John Dingell and Barney Frank, describing the massive Medicaid fraud involved in the prescribing of psychiatric drugs to children in the US and asked for "assistance in stopping these illegal reimbursements."

As of November 8, 2009, Gottstein reported, "I haven't gotten as much as an acknowledgment of receipt from any of the members of Congress to whom I wrote."

While pursuing causes on behalf of PsychRights, Gottstein donates all of his time on a pro bono basis.

Most priest abusers had free rein in schools

2009-12-15T11:03:00.001-08:00

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2009/1215/1224260711618.html

Most priest abusers had free rein in schools
Tue, Dec 15, 2009

ANALYSIS: SINCE ITS publication, it is clear that the Murphy report has accentuated a fundamental shift in the relationship between the Irish people and the Roman Catholic Church, writes MARY RAFTERY

The intimacy of trust which for over a century defined that relationship is nowhere more evident than in the unquestioning access which people allowed priests have to their children. Priests, together with the schools in which they played such a big part, were the other half of the partnership which provided moral foundation to the vast majority of the nation’s children.

In this context, it is worth searching the Murphy report for what it has to say about the exposure of children to abuse directly as a result of clerical access to schools. Every priest in Dublin has some involvement with schools, usually as a member of a board of management and invariably through direct contact with the seven- or eight-year-olds making their First Communion and the 11/12-year-old Confirmation class.

The Dublin diocesan report singles out 21 priests (out of its sample of 46 examined) for mention in the context of their connections to schools. Most of the prominent clerical paedophiles had continuous access to schools. Fr Noel Reynolds for instance, who finally admitted to sexually abusing over 100 children, was parish priest in Glendalough in the 1990s and chair of the board of management of the local primary school.

The Dublin report details complaints made about his behaviour with children in the school, whom he was able to take on various outings, although the principal told the commission that he “never left him in a class on his own”.

Throughout his long career, Reynolds had also been chaplain to numerous schools, including the exclusive, fee-paying Mt Anville Convent in Goatstown, Dublin. Before Glendalough, however, it appears he was viewed with suspicion in only one school – he himself referred to a nun in East Wall who “made life difficult – wanted me in and out of the school in half an hour – because of my talks on the facts of life with children”.

Fr Thomas Naughton’s abuse of children was widely known to the bishops of Dublin by the time they transferred him to yet another parish in 1986. Bishop Donal Murray was deeply immersed in his case and was aware of his criminal activities in the parishes of Valleymount and Donnycarney.

Upon his arrival in Ringsend, Naughton was, according to the Dublin report, “despite his background, given responsibility for some work in schools”. Inevitably, he continued his abuse. The principal of the local girls’ primary school complained about his engaging in “horseplay” with the children and refusing to stop when asked. We also know that he sexually abused a number of boys in this parish.

Then there is the case of Fr Patrick Maguire, another priest who admitted sexually abusing more than 100 children. He was a member of the Columban order, but did some parish work in Dublin and around schools. At one stage, his order sent him around the country on a recruitment drive for youngsters. The Dublin report describes this decision as “disastrous” as it gave him access “to every Catholic school in the country, in effect, to virtually every child in the country”.

“He duly took advantage of that access”, the report notes.

Another priest who made extensive use of schools to source his child victims was Vincentian priest Fr Donal Gallagher. His particular targets were deaf girls. Despite knowledge in the 1980s that he was a child abuser, he was appointed chaplain to St Mary’s School for deaf girls in Cabra. His habit was to abuse the children in confession and then wash his hands afterwards in the altar bowl.

Fr James MacNamee, the Crumlin parish priest and serial paedophile who built a swimming pool in his back garden, was also intimately bound up within the education system. One victim described to the Murphy commission how children would flock around him whenever he arrived at the local primary school. He invariably spent school break times holding hands with boys in the yard.

Fr X (his name is concealed by court order) had a lengthy career of child abuse, much of which was well known to the Dublin bishops. Archbishop Dermot Ryan remarked in the early 1980s that one of the ways he accessed victims was by befriending families involved in “good works” for the parish, including parents who were members of school boards.

Despite this knowledge, Fr X was glibly transferred around the diocese. In one parish, the Dublin report informs us, he “stepped into the role of the previous curate and in that capacity was given free access to the schools of the parish. No information was given to the three other priests who were ministering in the parish. Fr X was given charge of the Confirmation class in one of the schools and it was from that source that the next official complaint arose”.

Fr Septimus, a parish priest, abused a number of boys by savagely beating them on their bare buttocks and masturbating during it in at least one case. He used the local school, to which he had a key, for some of this abuse. One child was so badly beaten that he had to remain in bed for three weeks.

Fr Bill Carney, another serial paedophile, had a long career in schools in Ballyfermot, Ayrfield (on Dublin’s northside), Clonskeagh and Crumlin (Clogher Road). Even after his conviction for the abuse of two young brothers in 1983, he was still saying Mass in schools all over the diocese, and was described by one parish priest as someone who could “really communicate with the children”. This apparently raised no alarm bells among the bishops of Dublin.

Fr Sergius, another career paedophile, was in a new parish in 1999, and was in and out of the local school instructing the children making their Confirmations. Parents began to complain that he “arrived late, smelled strongly of alcohol and was truculent in his demeanour”.

There followed a meeting between the principal, the children’s class teacher, the parish priest and members of the board of management. According to the Dublin diocesan report: “the parish priest expressed surprise that Fr Sergius had been appointed as chaplain to the school. This seems to the commission to be an extraordinary statement. As the archbishop is the patron of the school, the appointment of chaplain is delegated to the parish priest, so the parish priest must himself have asked Fr Sergius to deal with the Confirmation class.”

The report concludes that Fr Sergius “should not have been allowed involvement with the Confirmation class”.

The cases outlined above provide just a sample of how paedophile priests had such easy access to children through the school system. Involvement with schools was (and continues to be) an intrinsic part of the ministry of most diocesan priests.

Consequently, when the Dublin bishops discussed problems of child-abusing priests at their monthly meetings during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, and decided to return many of them to parish work, this automatically gave these highly dangerous men immediate and intimate access to schools, to hundreds of children and to more small victims.

As a society, we have chosen to give these bishops enormous and unaccountable power over our education system and over the lives of the vast majority of our children. The Catholic Church has a controlling involvement with 3,000 out of the country’s 3,200 primary schools.

For as long as each local bishop is enshrined in law as patron of all Catholic primary schools in his diocese, with power over the appointment of boards of management, teachers and principals, we should ponder carefully the findings of the Dublin report as they pertain to the negligence of the Dublin bishops in this regard.

© 2009 The Irish Times

Why Are We Drugging Our Kids?

2009-12-14T13:56:00.001-08:00

Why Are We Drugging Our Kids?
By Evelyn Pringle, TruthOut.org
December 14, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144538/

Prescriptions for psychiatric drugs increased 50 percent with children in the US, and 73 percent among adults, from 1996 to 2006, according to a study in the May/June 2009 issue of the journal Health Affairs. Another study in the same issue of Health Affairs found spending for mental health care grew more than 30 percent over the same ten-year period, with almost all of the increase due to psychiatric drug costs.

On April 22, 2009, the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality reported that in 2006 more money was spent on treating mental disorders in children aged 0 to 17 than for any other medical condition, with a total of $8.9 billion. By comparison, the cost of treating trauma-related disorders, including fractures, sprains, burns, and other physical injuries, was only $6.1 billion.

In 2008, psychiatric drug makers had overall sales in the US of $14.6 billion from antipsychotics, $9.6 billion off antidepressants, $11.3 billion from antiseizure drugs and $4.8 billion in sales of ADHD drugs, for a grand total of $40.3 billion.

The path to child drugging in the US started with providing adolescents with stimulants for ADHD in the early 80s. That was followed by Prozac in the late 80s, and in the mid-90s drug companies started claiming that ADHD kids really had bipolar disorder, coinciding with the marketing of epilepsy drugs as "mood stablizers" and the arrival of the new atypical antipsychotics.

Parents can now have their kids declared disabled due to mental illness and receive Social Security disability payments and free medical care, and schools can get more money for disabled kids. The bounty for the prescribing doctors and pharmacies is enormous and the CEOs of the drug companies are laughing all the way into early retirement.

Psychiatric Drugs Explained

During an interview with Street Spirit in August 2005, investigative journalist and author of "Mad in America," Robert Whitaker, described the dangers of psychiatric drugs. "When you look at the research literature, you find a clear pattern of outcomes with all these drugs," he said, "you see it with the antipsychotics, the antidepressants, the anti-anxiety drugs and the stimulants like Ritalin used to treat ADHD."

"All these drugs may curb a target symptom slightly more effectively than a placebo does for a short period of time, say six weeks," Whitaker said. However, what "you find with every class of these psychiatric drugs is a worsening of the target symptom of depression or psychosis or anxiety, over the long term, compared to placebo-treated patients."

"So even on the target symptoms, there's greater chronicity and greater severity of symptoms," he reports, "And you see a fairly significant percentage of patients where new and more severe psychiatric symptoms are triggered by the drug itself."

Whitaker told Street Spirit that the rate of Americans disabled by mental illness has skyrocketed since Prozac came on the market in 1987, and reports: (1) the number of mentally disabled people in the US has been increasing at a rate of 150,000 people per year since 1987, (2) that represents an increase of 410 new people per day and (3) the disability rate has continued to increase and one in every 50 Americans is disabled by mental illness.

The statistics above beg the question of how could this happen when the so-called new generation of "wonder drugs" arrived on the market during the exact same time period. The truth is, the "wonder drugs" cause most of the bizarre behaviors listed by doctors to warrant a mental illness disability.

Psychiatric Drug Goldmine

The CIA "World Factbook" estimate the world population to be about 6.8 billion and the US population to be a mere 307 million. In an April 2008 report, the market research firm Datamonitor reported that the "US dominates the ADHD market with a 94 percent market share."

ADHD drug prices at a middle dose for 90 pills at DrugStore.com, are: Adderall $278, Concerta $412, Desoxyn $366, Strattera $464 and Vyvanse $385. Daytrana costs $437 for three boxes of 30 nine-hour patches.

The SSRI and SNRI antidepressants include GlaxoSmithKline's Paxil and Wellbutrin, Pfizer's Zoloft, Celexa and Lexapro from Forest Labs, Luvox by Solvay, Wyeth's Effexor and Pristiq and Lilly's Prozac and Cymbalta. The average price of these drugs is about $300 for 90 pills at DrugStore.com.

The prices for anticonvulsants can run as high as $929 for 180 tablets of Glaxo's Lamictal, and $1170 for 180 tablets of Johnson & Johnson's Topamax.

In 2008, the atypical antipsychotics took over the slot as the top revenue earners in the US, and include Seroquel by AstraZeneca; Risperdal and Invega marketed by Janssen, a division of J&J; Geodon by Pfizer; Abilify from Bristol-Myers Squibb; Novartis' Clozaril and Eli Lilly's Zyprexa. The average price on these drugs for 100 pills at DrugStore.com is about $1,000. Lilly also sells Symbyax, a drug with Zyprexa and Prozac combined, at a cost $1,564 for 90 capsules at DrugStore.com in May 2009.

The briefing material submitted to an FDA advisory panel in April 2009 reported that an estimated 25.9 million patients worldwide had been exposed to Seroquel since its launch in 1997 through July 31, 2007, in the US, and the second quarter of 2007 for countries outside the US. Of that number, an estimated nearly 15.9 million took Seroquel in the US, compared to only ten million patients in the rest of the world. In 2008, the US accounted for roughly $3 billion of Seroquel's $4.5 billion in worldwide sales.

For the full-year of 2008, Eli Lilly reported worldwide Zyprexa sales of about $4.7 billion, with US sales of $2.2 billion and only $2.5 billion for the rest of the world.

FDA as Promotional Tool

On June 12, 2009, an FDA advisory panel gave the green light to expand the marketing of Zyprexa, Seroquel and Geodon for use with 13 to 17 year-olds diagnosed with schizophrenia and 10 to 17 year-olds diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The FDA usually follows its advisers' recommendations.

"Such approval gives manufacturers a shield from liability - for illegally promoting the drugs for off-label use," said Vera Hassner Sharav, president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection.

"And such approval ensures increased use of these drugs," she warned. "Manufacturers and mental health providers will profit while children's physical and mental health will be sacrificed."

"The body of evidence showing these drugs to be harmful is irrefutable," she said, "it is documented in FDA's postmarketing database, and in secret internal company documents uncovered during litigation."

According to Dr. Stefan Kruszewski, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the atypicals increase the risk of obesity, type II diabetes, hypertension, heart attacks and stroke.

He said the drugs were marketed as safer and easier to tolerate than the older, cheaper antipsychotics because they would cause fewer neurological injuries like tardive dyskinesia and akathisia.

Those claims turned out to be totally false, he said, and "they continue to cause same neurological side-effects as the older antipsychotics."

"Children are known to be compliant patients and that makes them a highly desirable market for drugs, especially when it pertains to large-profit-margin psychiatric drugs, which can be wrought with issues of non-compliance because of their horrendous side effect profiles," according to a June 29, 2009 paper titled, "Drugging Our Children to Death," in Health News Digest.com, by Gwen Olsen, who spent over a decade as a pharmaceutical sales rep, and authored the book, "Confessions of an Rx Drug Pusher."

Children are forced to take their drugs by doctors, parents and school personnel, she said. "So, children are the ideal patient-type because they represent refilled prescription compliance and 'longevity.'"

"In other words," Olsen noted, "they will be lifelong patients and repeat customers for Pharma!"

"The initiative to drug our children for profit has exceeded all common sense boundaries and is threatening the welfare of every American child," she stated, and it "is up to each and every one of us to stop this madness!"

Drug Makers Busted

Most all of the psychiatric drug companies have come under investigation over the past several years for promoting their drugs for off-label use, especially with children. However, the fines they end up paying are trivial compared to the profits earned through the illegal marketing campaigns.

In September 2007, Bristol-Myers Squibb entered into a $515 million civil settlement with the US Department of Justice for illegally marketing drugs, including Abilify, for off-label uses. In the first six months of 2009, Abilify had sales of $1.9 billion. In 2008, the salary and compensation package of Bristol-Myers' CEO, James Cornelius, was $23,150,236, according to the AFL-CIO's Executive PayWatch Database.

On January 29, 2009, Paxil and Wellbutrin maker, GlaxoSmithKline, announced that it would record a legal charge in the fourth quarter of 2008 of $400 million relating to an ongoing investigation initiated by the US attorney's office in Colorado into the US marketing and promotional practices for several products for the period 1997 to 2004. The government inquired about alleged off-label marketing as well as medical education programs for doctors, "other speaker events, special issue boards, advisory boards, speaker training programmes, clinical studies, and related grants, fees, travel and entertainment," according to a Glaxo annual report.

In January 2009, Eli Lilly settled with the DOJ and more than 30 states for $1.4 billion over the off-label marketing of Zyprexa. The agreement included a $615 million fine for a federal criminal charge. But $1.4 billion was chump change considering that Zyprexa was still Lilly's best seller in 2008, with sales of $4.69 billion. Lilly also has paid over $1 billion to settle lawsuits filed by Zyprexa patients. In the first six months of 2009, Zyprexa sales were $1.5 billion. In 2008, Lilly's CEO, John Lechleiter, had a pay package worth $12,856,882

In September 2009, the DOJ reached a $2.3 billion settlement with Pfizer related to the off-label promotion of several drugs, including the psychiatric drugs, Geodon, Zoloft and Lyrica, in the largest health-care fraud settlement in history. But even though Pfizer took the entire $2.3 billion as an earnings charge for the fourth quarter of 2008, the drug maker was still able to post a fourth quarter profit of $268 million. Pfizer's CEO in 2008, Jeffrey Kindler, had a salary and pay package of $15,547,600.

Johnson & Johnson is also dealing with the DOJ and state-level investigations into the off-label marketing of Risperdal. The company's latest SEC filing lists nine subpoenas received by the company involving promotions of Risperdal, including one "seeking information regarding the Company's financial relationship with several psychiatrists." In the first six months of 2009, Risperdal earned $660 million. J&J's CEO, William Weldon, had a pay package worth $29,127,432 in 2008.

AstraZeneca's third quarter SEC filing lists a $520 million tentative settlement agreement with the US attorney's office in Philadelphia to resolve allegations related to the off-label marketing of Seroquel. At "least 34 states are pursuing separate investigations of AstraZeneca's marketing practices as part of a joint investigation and others may be conducting their own probes," according to Ed Silverman on Pharmalot.

"A half a billion dollar one-time settlement is just a small cost of doing business for a company that sold $17 billion worth of the offending drug in the last five years," Dr. Roy Poses points out on the Health Care Renewal web site. In 2008 alone, Seroquel had world-wide sales of more than $4.4 billion.

As of July 13, 2009, AstraZeneca was also defending approximately 10,381 served or answered personal injury lawsuits and approximately 19,391 plaintiff groups involving Seroquel, according to SEC filings. Some of the cases also include claims against other drug makers such as Eli Lilly, Janssen Pharmaceutica and/or Bristol-Myers Squibb, the filing notes.

On September 23, 2009, Shire Pharmaceuticals received a subpoena from the US Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General in coordination with the US attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, seeking production of documents related to the sales and marketing of Adderall XR, Daytrana and Vyvanse, according to Shire's third quarter report for 2009.

In a November 6, 2009, SEC filing, Abbott Labs said the federal prosecutor for the Western District of Virginia was conducting an investigation for the US Justice Department of whether the company's sales and marketing of Depakote violated civil or criminal laws, including the Federal False Claims Act and an anti-kickback statute related to reimbursement by Medicare and Medicaid programs to third parties.

In 2008, Depakote had sales of $1.36 billion and Abbott CEO, Miles White, had a salary and compensation package of $28,253,387.

In February 2009, the DOJ unsealed a lawsuit alleging that Forest Laboratories marketed the antidepressants Celexa and Lexapro for unapproved uses in children, and paid kickbacks to induce doctors to promote the drugs, including Dr. Jeffrey Bostic at Harvard University. In its latest SEC filing, Forest disclosed that it reached an agreement in principle in May 2009 to settle the civil aspects of US federal and state probes. "Penalties in the civil settlement are covered by a $170 million reserve Forest created in April," according to a November 9 report by Dow Jones.

Forest also disclosed that the agreement "does not resolve the government's ongoing investigation into potential criminal law violations" related to Celexa and Lexapro, and thyroid drug Levothroid, Dow Jones notes. In 2008, the salary and compensation for Forest CEO, Howard Solomon, was $6,565,324.

Over the past year and a half, a large number of so-called "Key Opinion Leaders" in the field of psychiatry have been exposed for not fully disclosing money received from many of the drug companies above through an investigation by the US Senate Finance Committee under the leadership of Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley.

The list so far includes Harvard University's Joseph Biederman, Thomas Spencer and Timothy Wilens; Charles Nemeroff and Zackery Stowe from Emory; Melissa DelBello at the University of Cincinnati; Alan Schatzberg, president of the American Psychiatric Association from Stanford; Martin Keller at Brown University; Karen Wagner and Augustus John Rush from the University of Texas and Fred Goodwin, the former host of a radio show called "Infinite Minds," broadcast by National Pubic Radio.

Fines as a Business Expense

The fraud settlements are "merely a cost of doing business to these pharmaceutical Goliaths and, in fact, caps their liability for these crimes," said Alaskan attorney Jim Gottstein, the leader of the Law Project for Psychiatric Rights (PsychRights), a public interest law firm.

"Most importantly," he noted, "these settlements have not stopped the practice of psychiatrists and other prescribers giving these drugs to children and youth and Medicaid continuing to pay for these fraudulent claims."

"Because of the massive, harmful, increase in the psychiatric drugging of America's children and youth, who are inherently forced, PsychRights has made addressing the problem a priority," he said.

Gottstein conducted an investigation and determined that the vast majority of off-label psychotropic drug prescriptions for children and youth that are paid for by Medicaid constitute Medicaid fraud.

PsychRights now has a national "Medicaid Fraud Initiative Against Psychiatric Drugging of Children & Youth," designed to address this problem by "having lawsuits brought against the doctors prescribing these harmful, ineffective drugs, their employers, and the pharmacies filling these prescriptions and submitting them to Medicaid for reimbursement," according to its web site.

"Anyone who submits or causes claims to be submitted to Medicaid for drugs that are not for a 'medically accepted indication' is committing Medicaid Fraud," said Gottstein, in a July 27, 2009 press release announcing the launch of the national campaign.

"Those guilty of this Medicaid Fraud include psychiatrists and other physicians prescribing these drugs, their employers, and pharmacies submitting the false claims to Medicaid," he pointed out.

PsychRights estimates that over $2 billion in such fraudulent Medicaid claims are being paid by the government each year.

"Once one sues over specific offending prescriptions, all of such prescriptions can be brought in, which means that any psychiatrist on the losing end of such a lawsuit will almost certainly be bankrupted, because each offending prescription carries a penalty of between $5,500 and $11,000," PsychRights explained.

It is hoped that once the doctors and pharmacies realize they are subject to financially ruinous Medicaid fraud judgments, the practice will be stopped or substantially reduced.

"Each prescriber may have a million dollars or few, at most, to lose, but the pharmacies' financial exposure can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars and it is hoped this will attract attorneys to take these cases," the web site noted.

In September and October 2009, Gottstein gave presentations on the initiative at the annual conferences of the National Association of Rights Protection and Advocacy and the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology in order to find people who are potentially interested and willing to pursue such cases.

"This was successful and we have at least a few such cases cooking," he reported. "PsychRights stands ready to help people interested in bringing such suits."

In late 2006, Gottstein won international fame by subpoenaing and releasing thousands of documents involving Eli Lilly's illegal marketing of Zyprexa, which resulted in front page stories in The New York Times.

PsychRights also has an appeal pending on a lawsuit filed against the state of Alaska and responsible state officials seeking declaratory and injunctive relief that Alaskan children and youth on Medicaid have the right not to be administered psychotropic drugs unless and until a number of specific conditions are met. The lawsuit seeks to prohibit the state from paying for psychiatric drugs prescribed off-label to children and youth.

In responding to the lawsuit, the state claimed that they do have any control over or responsibility for the psychiatric drugging of children in their custody, or any responsibility under Medicaid, and moved for dismissal on the grounds that PsychRights does not have standing, or the right to bring the suit, because it was not harmed by the state's actions.

The court agreed and dismissed the case. "We think the judge is wrong and have filed an appeal," said Gottstein.

In May 2009, Gottstein sent letters to Sens. Charles Grassley and Herb Kohl and Reps. Henry Waxman, Bart Stupak, John Dingell and Barney Frank, describing the massive Medicaid fraud involved in the prescribing of psychiatric drugs to children in the US and asked for "assistance in stopping these illegal reimbursements."

As of November 8, 2009, Gottstein reported, "I haven't gotten as much as an acknowledgment of receipt from any of the members of Congress to whom I wrote."

While pursuing causes on behalf of PsychRights, Gottstein donates all of his time on a pro bono basis.

Underage marriage vs protecting kids' rights

2009-12-14T13:54:00.000-08:00

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2009/12/05/underage-marriage-vs-protecting-kids039-rights.html

Tuesday, December 15, 2009 4:29 AM
Underage marriage vs protecting kids' rights
Muhrisun Afandi
Victoria, Australia
Sat, 12/05/2009

The acquittal of Syech Puji, the deviant cleric indicted for marrying an underage student, in a preliminary verdict at Ungaran District Court a couple of weeks ago, was a serious wake-up call for the backwardness of the child protection system in Indonesia. It reinforced the assumption that underage marriage is legal in this country and is simply treated as something that is not out of ordinary in the society.

From some arguments that came out in the trial process we can see there are serious loopholes in Indonesia's child protection law, which allow children's rights to be violated easily.

The trial process showed us how the child protection system in Indonesia country is seriously ill-equipped to deal with child abuse cases that are carried out under the perceived authority of religious values and dogma, as shown in the case of Syech Puji.

It is important to note that religion remains widely accepted as a source of authoritative guidance on child protection among Indonesian society.

However, the fact is that religious dogma can act as a boomerang - putting Indonesian children in serious danger of abuse and exploitation as it is easily misinterpreted.

In this case the discourse on child abuse may need to focus, not only on protecting children from violence, exploitation and neglect, but also from having their vulnerability exploited by aspects of religious dogma and values.

The Syech Puji case is just the tip of an iceberg of the hidden problems of child abuse in Indonesia that are being justified according to self-serving religious norms and traditions. Some parents still use religious dogma to encourage or force their children, especially daughters, into early or arranged marriages.

Children's birth dates on ID cards or birth certificates can be easily falsified to fulfill minimum age requirements for marriage, particularly for girls.

Complexities such as these demonstrate the fact that cultural and religious issues cannot be excluded from any discussion of child abuse and child protection policy in Indonesia.

From some arguments in response to the Syech Puji case, on one hand, we can see clearly how some classical Islamic texts covering children's issues are still widely accepted as authoritative sources and guides for child welfare among Muslim communities, even though the concepts they propagate may no longer be relevant to contemporary society.

This case, on the other hand, highlights the importance of exploring how Muslim communities in Indonesia apply Islamic law for child protection in a way that may differ to other Muslim countries.

Such exploration seems to be more urgent given the recent increase in number of new Islamic groups in Indonesia. Particularly since many of these new groups are vigorously promoting the adoption of the orthodox Islamic family model common in the Middle East, which is clearly alien to Indonesian culture and tradition.

Limited attention was paid to child welfare in contemporary Indonesian Muslim society in the discourse on developing family law for Indonesia's Muslims.

However, attempts to challenge or change the content of the family law have been problematic and, accordingly, very little attention has been focused on child protection issues.

Family law is considered the core of sharia (Islamic law) by many Indonesian Muslims, so any proposed changes to this law generally trigger controversy, since they are often regarded as corrupting the core of the religion. This may be the reason why there has been little discourse on Islam and child welfare in Indonesia.

International experts have discussed the compatibility of international child protection legislation with Islamic norms. Some are optimistic that Islamic teachings and concepts are parallel with international discourse on children's rights.

The fact is that in Indonesia, however, different concepts and contradictions arise when adapting international legislation on the protection of children for local conditions.

For example, the basic definition of children's rights in Indonesian child protection law, which defines a child on the basis of age (under 18), is different from that understood by Indonesian Muslims.

Islamic legal traditions determine children's rights based on such concepts as baligh and mumayiz, age of consent, religious criteria for determining children's competency, which is not solely determined on the basis of age. A child may be able to be categorized as a mature and capable individual earlier or later than others in the same age group.

The lack of reaction from society to the acquittal of Syech Puji shows that public awareness of child abuse was limited. It is striking that there could be a massive public protest as shown by a group of social networking supporting antigraft officials on Facebook, which has been dominating the media for the last couple of weeks, but very few seem to be speaking up for the victims of child abuse in this country.

160,000 U.S. Children Had Cosmetic Surgery in 2008

2009-12-14T13:53:00.001-08:00

http://www.NaturalNews.com/z027728_cosmetic_surgery_children.html

December 14 2009
160,000 U.S. Children Had Cosmetic Surgery in 2008
by David Gutierrez, staff writer

(NaturalNews) More than 160,000 U.S. children underwent cosmetic surgery in 2008, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery.

In 2008, cosmetic interventions such as breast augmentation, liposuction, Botox injections, hair removal, birthmark removal or "Asian eye surgery" were performed in 160,283 U.S. residents under the age of 19. Due to the economic recession, this actually represented a drop from the 2007 figure of 205,119, but was still higher than the 2006 figure of 145,094.

Experts say that cosmetic surgery has become more societally acceptable, fueled in part by celebrities and reality shows embracing it as a normal practice. In addition, modern parents are more willing than ever to consider the procedure for their kids.

"Boomer parents may themselves even be undergoing cosmetic surgery and may feel for our children that it's not such a stretch," said cosmetic surgeon Donn Chatham, president of the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery.

While many cosmetic surgeries in children are considered medical in nature, such as the repair of a cleft palate or cleft lip, others fall into more of a gray area -- such as the construction of an ear for an otherwise healthy child who was born without one. Other procedures, such as liposuction or breast surgery, are billed as "necessary" to increase children's self confidence or self esteem.

"One of the challenges is that there is not a lot of evidence that it improves psychosocial well-being," said Alice Dreger of Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University. "The goal is admirable, right? Better lives. The question is: Does it work and is it necessary?"

Among the more controversial cosmetic procedures is blepharoplasty, also known as "Asian eye surgery," in which people of Asian descent undergo surgery to widen their eyes and add the eyelid crease normally found only in people of European descent.

Blepharoplasty was performed on 369 children in 2008.

U.S. grapples with child hunger ‘epidemic’

2009-12-13T18:12:00.000-08:00

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34390296/ns/us_news-washington_post/

U.S. grapples with child hunger ‘epidemic’
Complex problem unlikely to be solved by spending more on food programs
The Washington Post
Dec. 12, 2009

Three weeks before he was elected president, Barack Obama set an audacious goal: end hunger among children in the United States by 2015.

Since his inauguration, Obama has seldom broached the subject. His aides brainstorm weekly with several agencies, but their internal conversations so far have not produced fundamentally new approaches. The president's goal could prove daunting: Childhood hunger is more complex than previously understood, new research suggests, and is unlikely to be solved simply by spending more money for food programs.

If Obama intends to erase childhood hunger, the government will need to reach even further into the rowhouse kitchen where Anajyha Wright Mitchell sometimes takes tiny portions so her mother will have more food. "I tell her to eat, eat, eat, because she is real skinny," Anajyha, 12, said of her mother, Andrea Mitchell.

Anajyha, a serious girl with two younger brothers and a mother who has lost two of her three part-time jobs, is growing up with an ebb and flow of food typical of a growing number of families. In her home, in a scuffed neighborhood called Strawberry Mansion a few miles north of the Liberty Bell, food stamps arrive but never last the month. There can be cereal but no milk. Pancake mix and butter but no eggs.

The intricacy of the problem -- and of the Obama administration's task -- plays out here, where Anajyha could have enough to eat but shortchanges herself.

Philadelphia offers a particularly vivid ground-level view of what researchers call a "silent epidemic" of hungry and undernourished youngsters. For years, local civic activists, health experts and politicians have tried some of the nation's most innovative experiments -- and learned how intractable hunger can be. Researchers here have also been at the leading edge in trying to fathom the effects of a scarcity of food.

Even when children are not hungry, studies have found that slight shortages of food in their homes are associated with serious problems. Babies and toddlers in those homes are far more likely to be hospitalized than children in families with similar incomes but adequate food. School-age children tend to learn and grow more slowly, and to get into trouble more often. Teenage girls are more prone to be depressed or even flirt with thoughts of suicide.

Solving the problem is further complicated by its subtle nature. "Most people who are hungry are not clinically manifesting what we consider hunger. It doesn't even affect body weight," said Mariana Chilton, a Drexel University medical anthropologist who is part of Children's HealthWatch, a network of pediatricians and public health researchers in Philadelphia and four other cities. Hunger cannot be solved by food alone, their work shows, because it is one strand in a web of pressures that trap families, including housing and energy costs.

A nuanced problem
This more nuanced picture is emerging as the problem has become more widespread. With the economy faltering, the number of youngsters living in homes without enough food soared in 2008 from 13 million to nearly 17 million, the Agriculture Department reported last month.

In Philadelphia, researchers found that, during the first half of this year, one in five homes with a baby or toddler did not have enough food. And one of every dozen young children was outright hungry, a rate twice that of the same period the year before.

Although the problem has deepened, White House and Agriculture Department officials say the president's goal remains, as one put it, "something that seems manageable." Congress increased food stamp benefits this year by $20 billion and, more recently, set aside money to test ways to feed children when school is out for the summer. The president's aides are focusing on a congressional debate, deferred from this year to next, on how to renew the nation's main child nutrition law.

Although ideas in Washington have not fully crystallized, an unlikely lobbying force is at work. A group of Philadelphia women has begun appearing on Capitol Hill and at national conferences as part of a "Witnesses to Hunger" project, organized by Chilton, who handed video cameras to 42 mothers to document their efforts to feed their children.

But learning to dress for success at news conferences, these women are discovering, does not solve the food problem at home. One of the "witnesses" is Christina Koch, whose younger son Jesus, 2, wakes up at night thirsty for milk or juice. "If I don't have it," she said, "I take him into bed and try to rock him to sleep."

Running out of drinks for her toddler is part of a tangle of obstacles that shape Koch's days. At 26, she lives in North Philadelphia with her son, Dale, 5, a picky eater, as well as Jesus and her fiance, Jesus Nieves, who has had as much trouble finding and keeping jobs as she has.

Not long ago, when she had the money, Koch bought more than 20 boxes of macaroni and cheese and stored them under her kitchen sink. The sink leaked. Every box was ruined. For the past few months, the gas and electricity have been cut off because she hadn't paid the bills.

She has been cooking on a hot plate, borrowing electricity from the neighbor in the rowhouse next door, who let her thread a jumbo extension cord through the kitchen window. But when the neighbor was evicted last month, she was down to using candles until her family chipped in to pay her bill.

She is bad, she knows, at budgeting. In early November, when $650 in food stamps came, she splurged on $18 in Chinese takeout. When the food stamps run out, she buys on credit from Indio's Mini Market, a few blocks away. In October, she ended up with a $300 tab.

Koch met Chilton, the anthropologist, in the emergency room at St. Christopher's Hospital for Children, where Chilton and her co-workers spend hours on questionnaires to measure the food shortage. Across the hospital parking lot is the GROW clinic, which provides more evidence of the effort it takes to make a difference, even a few children at a time.

Inside the clinic -- similar to Children's HealthWatch clinics in Baltimore, Boston, Little Rock and Minneapolis -- pediatrician Hans Kersten and a team see about a dozen young children and their parents each week. Four in five children here and at the other sites are not getting adequate food. The team checks head circumference as a clue to brain growth, motor skills, toddlers' vocabulary.

"Hi, beautiful," nutritionist Kristen Roscioli says as the team walks into the examining room where 14-month-old Joeanna, the first child of Sherita Parks and Joseph Mouzon, is waiting in a diaper and pink barrettes.

"She has managed to gain about two pounds, which is great," Kersten tells Joeanna's parents.

"But she still is underweight?" Parks asks.

"She is a tiny girl," he replies. "We just want her to be healthy."

The main problem, her parents say, is that Joeanna doesn't like to eat. But Parks also says, "It would be great if we could get food stamps." Mouzon's pay from working in a pharmaceutical warehouse means they just miss qualifying.

A novel experiment
Long before the GROW clinic existed, Philadelphia's school officials and anti-poverty activists began a novel experiment whose future the Obama administration, in one of its first decisions about children and food, has put in doubt.

Instead of requiring people to fill out paperwork for their children to get free lunch and breakfast at school, Philadelphia officials persuaded the government 19 years ago to let every child qualify automatically in neighborhoods with enough poor families. The number of students getting the meals soared. Last year, the Bush administration decided that the experiment was too old and must end soon.

After Obama arrived, the local congressional delegation and others appealed. Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, upheld the Bush administration's decision. Pennsylvania Gov. Edward G. Rendell (D) fired off a letter, saying that "hundreds if not thousands of eligible students" would lose meals. Vilsack relented, for now.

Administration officials say they want families nationally to have easier access to food programs. But they want to leave the question of Philadelphia's approach for the congressional debate on childhood nutrition.

Though safe for the moment, the program has never been a complete solution. At W.G. Smith Elementary School in South Philadelphia, 155 of the school's 380 students came for a free breakfast on a recent Monday. Many parents simply bring their children to school too late.

Cuerethea Travis, Smith's school nurse for 13 years, stockpiles graham crackers, yogurt and fruit for the trickle of children who come to her every morning, drooping and with stomachaches. "You feel like you are Dick Tracy," she said. "Is it the kind of pain you feel like you need to go to the bathroom? Or is it the kind you feel like you want to put something in your stomach?"

Often, she asks children to look at the clock on her wall, then count back, telling her how many hours it has been since they had something to eat.

The Weapons Used In Iraq - Afghanistan Have Far Reaching Effects

2009-12-13T16:16:00.000-08:00

http://www.paltelegraph.com/columnists/peter-eyre/3125-the-weapons-used-in-iraq-afghanistan-have-far-reaching-effects

The Weapons Used In Iraq - Afghanistan Have Far Reaching Effects
SATURDAY, 12 DECEMBER 2009 22:46 ADDED BY PT EDITOR SARAH PRICE

UK, December 12, 2009, (Pal Telegraph) - We have seen the terrible consequences to human life and the environment that has been caused by weapons that contain uranium components. Genetically speaking the US and UK have destroyed the DNA of the Iraqi people as well as causing catastrophic effects on the environment.

Presidents and Prime Ministers really have a lot to answer for when they started the wars in the Balkans, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Gaza and now Pakistan. We are now seeing their continued aggression and intimidation against Iran and North Korea and one wonders that they have up their sleeve.

What we the public do not understand is that these very acts alone and the weapons being used are creating a mass genocide of millions of people around the world. It has become the most evil act imaginable against humankind.

Let's just take a moment and see what is really going on as a direct result of US manufactured weapons and how these weapons have or still are being used by US, UK, NATO countries and the IDF in the above areas of conflict. Should however, this extend to Iran, then we are about to see the catastrophic contamination of the entire Middle East within one week and the rest of the world within two weeks or more...subject to prevailing winds and weather systems. When the reporter threw his shoe at GW Bush he certainly was speaking for all the people of the Middle East.

Iraq and Afghanistan are at the centre of this evil act and therefore I will try to explain the complexity of the contamination/pollution that has already taken place and that will continue to take place both locally and beyond.

We can first look at one of the most important river systems in the world that of the Himalayas and what such contamination can do that has and will affect millions of people and their livelihood. The Himalayas lies directly under the main downwind air flow path from Afghanistan and to some extent from Iraq. The usage of weapons containing uranium components has been much more intense in Afghanistan than in Iraq. The main onslaught started with carpet bombing of the Tora Bora Mountains up in the north west of Afghanistan and the extensive use of such weapons continues to this day as well as across the border in Pakistan. The initial impact is a dramatic rise in Cancers, Diabetes, Brain disorders, Infertility, Still Birth and gross birth defects. This is now showing up in statistics in places such as the Punjab but what happens further afield.

The Himalayas is the birthplace of many rivers for South East Asia and therefore the water catchment area for these magnificent rivers extends from the Himalayas all the way down into the Indian Continent, China, Indo China Peninsula and the Far East. The Himalayas gives birth to the following rivers:: Indus, Sutlej, Chenab, Beas, Ravi, Jhelum, Spiti, Ganga (Ganges), Ghaghara,Yamuna and Brahmaputra on the Indian side and over the border in China we have the following rivers Tarim, (which is the longest inland river of China), Haung (Yellow River), Yangtze, Wu River, Hongshui and many other tributaries. To the southeast we have the Mighty Mekong, Red River, Salween, Chindwin and the Irrawaddy. To the west over in Afghanistan itself we have the Helmand and the Hari Rud rivers. To the northwest we have the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya rivers. One could go on forever with other tributaries but these are the main lifeline rivers of many countries.

So many lives depend on these river systems that the economies of emerging Asia could be ravaged and there could be immense contamination leading to many thousands if not millions of deaths, social upheaval, including the loss of food security and employment. About 450 million people draw water, food and electricity supplies from the Yangtze alone, while many more use it for transportation.

The Mekong River basin supports 60 million people, including parts of China, Myanmar and Vietnam, nearly one-third of Thailand and most of Cambodia and Laos. It supplies two of the world's most important rice bowls, central Thailand and the delta region of southern Vietnam.

In India, the Ganges Plain comprises one-third of the country's land area and 120 million people rely on its waters for fishing and farming. Tens of millions live on tributaries of the Ganges in Bangladesh. As habitats are progressively destroyed, the ecological toll would mount and be irreversible. So that is the big picture, rather gloomy isn't it?

So who is responsible for this genocide of epic proportions? As you have already guessed it is the manufacturers, exporters and users of most of these weapons, mainly the USA and its associated allies the UK, NATO countries and Israel.

Let's look now as to how this happens by showing you a typical wind flow chart for the region. This chart is based on aviation flight planning data for a given day and shows the wind patterns at low - medium - high levels. It clearly reveals that the problem does not stop at the Himalayas but rather continues on its journey around the world. If we take depleted uranium as one example, the highly toxic/radioactive aerosols (nanoparticles) can reach the UK within one week and cover most of the planet within two weeks (even shorter if they hitch a ride on a jet stream).

On this particular example we can see that if weapons were used containing uranium components in either Gaza, Iraq or Afghanistan (which is more than likely) we would see the uranium laced aerosols travel to all corners of the globe. However, in this particular example the main concentration would head east passing over the northern areas of Pakistan and India, over the Himalayas, over China and then on this particular day would enter a very complex low pressure system over Japan where it would be rained out of the atmosphere into the soil, crops and water systems of Japan putting that nations residents at risk. Whilst in transit it can be inhaled, adsorbed or ingested by millions of people who live below its path.

We have seen the health results of these terrible weapons in the Balkans, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Gaza and now Pakistan. Because these contaminated nanoparticles do not recognize international border and are totally indiscriminate it also means that the US, UK, NATO and IDF forces, that use these weapons, are also at grave risk. What was even more remarkable was that when the Israeli military used these weapons in Lebanon (2006) and on Gaza in 2008/9 they did in actual fact "Nuke" themselves with dramatic rises in Cancers, Diabetes and Infertility etc.

I find it incredible that Obama has now received his Nobel Peace Prize for his continued war effort in Afghanistan and for sending thousands of extra troops into battle. This war, just like the Iraqi war, has nothing to do with democracy but all to do with economic greed for oil and for clearing the way for the TAPI pipeline.

It is also remarkable that "Global Warming" talks are underway in Copenhagen and yet our bankrupt United Kingdom has managed to find over a billion pounds to help the poor countries reduce their carbon footprint. Why are the affluent G20 (especially the G8) allowed to bully in such a way whilst they continue to abuse their energy usage and manipulate the third world countries into taking new technology and WB/IMF loans? There is no doubt that stringent conditions will be attached that will probably entail lowering of tariffs and trade barriers so that the G8 can take over their markets.

As long as the US, UK, NATO and the IDF continue to use weapons containing uranium components there is little point to even worry about global warming. Contaminated aerosols from these weapons are killing people in mass as well as our respective eco - systems.

The United Nations(UN) - United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) - The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP World Health Organisation (WHO) - The International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) - International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) - The Governments of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) - The respective Departments of Defence/ Military - The Nuclear Industry - The Pharmaceutical Industry and all those Medical Experts and Institutions who accepted that DU was safe should all be put on trial for crimes against humankind. Shame on you all.

- Peter Eyre, Middle East Consultant

Ukraine Academic: Israel Imported 25,000 Kids for Their Organs

2009-12-11T14:45:00.000-08:00

http://www.almanar.com.lb/NewsSite/NewsDetails.aspx?id=113776&language=en

Ukraine Academic: Israel Imported 25,000 Kids for Their Organs

03/12/2009 Stories appearing on several Ukrainian Web sites claim Israel has brought around some 25,000 Ukrainian children into the country over the past two years in order to harvest their organs.

The claim, which was made by a Ukrainian philosophy professor and author at a pseudo-academic conference in Kiev five days ago, is the latest expression of a wave of anti-Semitism in the country. It comes a few months after a Swedish tabloid ran an article saying that Israeli occupation soldiers have killed Palestinian civilians for their organs.

Jews, Israel and anti-Semitism have become a major motif of the presidential election campaign in Ukraine, with some figures making anti-Semitic statements and others condemning them. Some candidates, including a Jew and someone whose rivals claim is Jewish, blame a third rival - Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko - for bringing anti-Semitism into the race. "Ukraine's political system is a parody of democracy," Russia's Chief Rabbi, Berel Lazar, said.

Vyacheslav Gudin told the estimated 300 attendees of the Kiev conference a detailed story about a Ukrainian man's fruitless search for 15 children who had been adopted in Israel. The children, Gudin said, had clearly been taken by Israeli medical centers, where they were used for "spare parts." Gudin said it was essential that all Ukrainians be made aware of the genocide Israel was perpetrating.

The conference, some of whose participants belong to a Slavic-rights movement, also featured two professors who presented a book blaming "the Zionists" for the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s as well as the country's current condition.

Many Ukrainian Web sites covered the speeches without putting them into context. In response to a request by the country's Jewish community Ukraine's police force is investigating ZUBR, one of the Web sites that reported the speeches.

Meanwhile, Ukrainians demonstrated outside the Israeli Embassy in Kiev on Tuesday to protest a letter signed by 26 Knesset members condemning what they described as anti-Semitic remarks by presidential candidate Sergey Ratushnyak. Protesters chanted "Ukraine isn't the Gaza Strip," indicating they consider the MKs to be trying to exert control over their country.

The letter, sent to Ukrainian leaders last month, articulated fear of a new "wave of anti-Semitism in the Ukraine that has come to a peak with the authorization of Ratushnyak, the current mayor of Uzhgorod, to run for president." In his mayoral campaign Ratushnyak blamed the Holoc

The Collar of Impunity - Sexual abuse of Haiti children by Priests and Charity Workers

2009-12-10T13:20:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Sexual-abuse-of-Haiti-chil-by-Ezili-Danto-091205-402.html

December 8, 2009
The Collar of Impunity - Sexual abuse of Haiti children by Priests and Charity Workers
By Ezili Danto

The Collar of Impunity - Sexual abuse of Haiti children by Priests, Charity Workers

For 500 years the whites (settlers/colonists) have tried to erase us. Today they want us to believe they're the only ones who can save us" --- Edike from Daniel 'Dadi' Beaubrun's Lataye (buy album)

*******

A recent report about sexual abuse of children maintains that for 60 years Catholic priests systematically raped 36,000 Irish children. In another recent related revelation the headlines announced: "Abuse claims against Jesuits reach 500." If this level of sexual abuse is possible in Catholic Ireland or even in the United States, imagine what totally unregulated, ex-patriot Catholic priests have been doing in Haiti and Africa for centuries!

According to just this one small look at things in the US, more than 500 people have filed claims accusing Jesuits of sexually abusing children across the Northwest (United States)...Among them were claims by 110 Alaska Natives..."

In Haiti, the issue of the Catholic's church, other religious orders and charity workers' sexually abusing Haitian children has barely been exposed. But it has gone on, with impunity, for centuries.

Ezili's HLLN is raising-public-awareness on two current cases - accused pedophiles, Douglas Perlitz from the United States and ex-priest John Duarte from Canada. (See also, Fr. Paul Carrier, S.J. Near The End Of The Line, Posted by Good Jesuit, Bad Jesuit blog. ) We've also written to the United Nations about their soldiers' rape and sexual abuse of Haitian children and people since their landing in Haiti in 2004. (See, I am a the History of Rape: Letter to the UN asking for investigative reports on UN rapes in Haiti and UN Peacekeepers and Humanitarian Aid Workers raping, molesting and abusing Haitian children.)

*

Douglas Perlitz: The bond issue has been dropped by the lawyers for accused pedophile of Haiti children, defendant Douglas Perlitz. Jury trial is set for May 3, 2010 at 9:00 AM in Courtroom Two, 141 Church St., New Haven, Connecticut before Judge Janet Bond Arterton. Trial schedules are fluid, so Ezili's HLLN will let those interested in being in court know if the trial date remains unchanged and when it would be advisable to come to court in support of the Project Pierre Toussaint children from Haiti who complain and accuse defendant Douglas Perlitz of rape, sexual abuse and molestation. We take this opportunity to thank all of you who remain vigilant and called to find out if the last court date was still going forward. Ezili's HLLN will continue to follow this case and let everyone know when there is further movement.

At this point, the accused Perltiz remains in jail pending trial and that is good news for children everywhere. But the Haiti children who were victimized need counselling, education, shelter, clean water, food, medical help and the basics in life support, protection and nurturing. Some have gone back to living in the streets and feel they've been punished for coming forward with their stories of abuse. At the beginning of the year, with the help, collaboration and advice of our Haitian collaborators in Cap Haitian Haiti, Ezili's HLLN will push for a fund to get basic housing, clean water, a tutor and an indigenous trauma counselor made available for the children in need of such help suffering from the after-effects of the Perlitz investigation. It has been clinically proven that many predators were abused as children themselves and continue the trajectory as adults. We would like to break that cycle for these children and for Haiti's next generation of children who could suffer the after effects of this Perlitz abuse. Help for the abused children will be feasible only with your assistance. Please consider making a donation, or booking an Ezili Dantò presentation or speaking engagement to assist HLLN in continuing this public-awareness-raising work and to help push to set up a fund to help the Project Toussaint children of abuse. Our interconnectedness is indisputable, so together we must rise to help break the abuse cycle. Let's try to help these identifiable survivors of sexual abuse.

Understand that the Catholic Church is very powerful colonizing factor in Haiti, and foreign charity workers and NGOs in Haiti (over 10,000 strong in Haiti right now) have been using piety, religion, from all the orders - Catholicism, Protestants, etc... - and the white hero archetypes of colonial and popular culture and its inseparable but mostly unconscious vampire shadow as a cover and opportunity to get away with all sorts of crimes, fleece Haiti's poor, contain-it-in-poverty to perennially assure themselves of do-gooder jobs and, as in the Perlitz and The 'Father Teresa' of Haiti – Armand Huard cases, for sexual abuse, domination, and to take in their sadistic serotonin rushes.

In the article, Oil in Haiti - Economic Reasons for the UN/US occupation by Ezili Dantò, I wrote:

Going shopping in Haiti:

In the age of humanitarian imperialism, globalization, financial colonialism and neocolonial-violence obfuscated behind forced assimilation and cultural imperialism, what exactly do some whites or modern missionaries go shopping in Haiti for: sex, self-esteem, adulation, fun, challenge, adventure, the boost in serotonin-consumption, to exploit cheap labor, plunder Haiti's natural resources, for self-improvement, recovery, to use Haiti as in excuse to raise funds for their salaries and living expenses, or as an easy way to gain international expert credentials in any field and move up the socio-economic ladder at home and/or for securing the good tropical lifestyle with mountain and oceanfront houses, the maids, gardeners and seafood they couldn't obtain as easily in their Euro/US countries where they are the majority, ordinary, can't use the white privilege inheritance without some scrutiny and are not as exotic and special as in neocolonial devastated Haiti. It's all hidden, of course, behind the mask of being good humanitarians and helping Haitians. (Haiti's Holocaust and Middle Passage Continues; The-To-Tell-The-Truth-About-Haiti Forum 2009 ; and, Proposed solutions to create a new paradigm.)

John Duarte: On another but similarly horrid note, another accused pedophile of Haitian children, ex-Catholic priest John Duarte, was recently and court in Canada and denied bail. Like Douglas Perlitz, John Duarte remains in jail (in Windsor, Canada) while he waits for his trial to begin. During his court appearance recently in Canada, the accused pedophile Duarte had at least 30 supporters, dubbed the "Friends of John Duarte" in court to support him. Mostly, it's reported, friends from the Catholic church. Where are the Ezili's HLLN folks in Canada? People, please take a look at the John Duarte case and make your presence known. Let the people in Canada know, Haitian children cannot be abused without consequences and that you are present and counted for as a voice against the abuse of Haiti's children under the guise of "saving their souls" or bringing sustenance, security and "education."( See, A former Windsor priest who was arrested in the Dominican Republic and accused of sexually abusing teenaged boys in Haiti was denied bail Thursday and Ex-priest's supporters crowd courtroom and I am the History of Rape.)

Ezili's HLLN urges Canadian residents in Windsor and surrounding areas to help us bring to the courtroom, on John Duarte's next substantive court hearing, supporters for the defenseless Haitian children defendant John Duarte is accused of raping and sodimizing.

Please contact HLLN at erzilidanto@yahoo.com for details. Remember Haitian children had no public voice in the Douglas Perlitz process until you came on the scene. The more concerned citizens speak up, the less these systemic abuses of Haiti's people and children by charity workers will occur or continue to be covered up. Men anpil Chay pa lou! - Many Hands Make Light A Heavy Load!

The collar of impunity: Also, the articles on reports on abuse by Catholic priests for more than half-a-century in Ireland and on the Jesuit abuses of Native Alaskan village children are posted on our website. This is relevant to our Haitian community as many converted and most assimilated Haitians/Africans are happy to send their kids to Catholic schools, both abroad and in Haiti. One report reveals that for 60 years over 36,000 innocent children in Catholic schools, homes and orphanages in Ireland where routinely raped, beaten and sexually abused by Catholic priests and that this was systematically covered up the Catholic Bishops and hierarchy. Another report of 320 cases of child abuse explains that between 1975 and 2004 the Catholic hierarchy in the Archdiocese of Dublin consistently favored the interests of the Church over those of the children and "kept the sexual abuse of children, at least until the mid-1990s, secret to avoid scandal, protect the reputation of the Church and to preserve its assets."

This is an important piece of information to share, not only because of the current Perlitz and Duarte pedophile cases and the fact so many elite-schooled Haitians have been sexually abused by the degenerate priests and pastors "educating" them in Haiti, but because, if this level of abuse is possible in Ireland, a country where the rule of law is institutionalized and where US/Euro colonialism is not dehumanizing the Irish majority and summarily denying them the right to vote and rule themselves through sponsorship of coup d'etats and regime changes; if this repugnance is possible in such a developed country by the Catholic priests, imagine what perverted Catholic priests, missionaries, foreign soldiers, mercenaries, colonist adventurers, aid workers and nuns have been doing in defenseless Haiti and Africa for centuries!

Going back to source, self-reliance, cultural autonomy, control of our territory, domestic economy and children's education and not dependency is the way to Haiti's freedom, respect, dignity and owning our own selves.

In love, respect and towards more harmony,

Ezili Dantò/HLLN

*********************

Outlaw Child Abuse in Schools

2009-12-10T10:05:00.001-08:00

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/198682-Outlaw-Child-Abuse-in-Schools

Outlaw Child Abuse in Schools
George Miller and Cathy McMorris Rodgers
CNN
Wed, 09 Dec 2009 08:48 EST

CNN Editor's Note: U.S. Rep. George Miller, D-California, is the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee and the chairman of the House Democratic Policy Committee. U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Washington, is a member of the House Education and Labor Committee and vice chairman of the House Republican Conference.

Washington - All Cedric wanted was lunch.

A 14-year old student in a special education classroom in Texas, Cedric was living with a foster family because of a history of neglect, including malnutrition. But on this day in 2002, his teacher tried to punish him by withholding food, despite the abuse he had suffered as a young child.

Cedric's teacher delayed his lunch for hours to discipline him for refusing to do his work. When he wouldn't comply, his teacher put him in a face down restraint and sat on him in front of his classmates. Cedric said repeatedly that he could not breathe. He died minutes later on the classroom floor.

Cedric's tragic story isn't an isolated case in America's schools today.

According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, over the last 20 years there have been hundreds of allegations of school personnel using restraint and seclusion in abusive ways on children. It's happening disproportionately to students with disabilities, often at the hands of untrained staff. Many of these students bear haunting physical and emotional scars. And in a number of cases, students have died.

It's difficult to believe, but there are no federal laws to prevent this from happening.

Local newspapers recount bone-chilling stories of schoolchildren tied to chairs, or with their mouths taped shut, sometimes locked in dark closets, or pinned to the floor for hours at a time. If parents treat their kids this way, it's considered a criminal offense.

But unlike in hospitals and other institutions that receive federal taxpayer funding, there are no federal protections against these abusive practices when they happen in schools.

Cedric said repeatedly he could not breathe. He died minutes later on the classroom floor.

The Children's Health Act of 2000 regulates how and when restraint and seclusion can be used in medical settings and community facilities. But classrooms, where students spend the majority of their day, are exempt.

In the absence of a federal standard, state protections for kids are all over the map. Many states have no regulations whatsoever. Children are left vulnerable and staff untrained.

Restraint and seclusion techniques should be used only as a last resort, when someone is in imminent danger of physical injury and there are no alternatives. Without proper training, staff can be hurt and students, especially small children, are at risk.

Yet the GAO and news reports confirm that these practices are used frequently, often as discipline, when students aren't physically aggressive. While there is no centralized reporting, data from the few states that do track incidents paints a troubling picture. In the 2007-2008 school year in California alone, the GAO reports, there were more than 14,300 cases of restraint, seclusion and other "emergency interventions." We don't know how many of these merited real emergencies.

In one California case, Paige, a young girl with Asperger's syndrome, was restrained in class because she was wiggling her loose tooth. Her mother, who had never consented to physical interventions, had no idea restraint was regularly imposed until her daughter came home with bruises.

As parents, when we send our children to school, we expect they will be safe from danger. And when the very people we entrust with our children's well-being inflict this type of abuse, it's not just the victims and their families who suffer. It hurts their classmates, who witness these terrifying events. It undermines the vast majority of teachers and staff who are trying to give students a quality education. It's a nightmare for everyone involved.

The easy answer here would be to blame teachers. But it would be the wrong one.

Ultimately, the root of this problem has been our system-wide failure to provide direction and enforcement. As long as school systems continue to lack the tools they need to create good policies and properly train staff, these incidents will continue.

The solution is a balanced approach to make classrooms safe for students and teachers.

With that goal in mind, on Wednesday we are introducing legislation to finally ensure that schools in every state have the resources they need to prevent inappropriate restraint and seclusion.

Our bill would set minimum safety standards in schools, similar to the protections children already receive in other institutions, so that states can ensure appropriate school district policies. It would limit physical restraints or locked seclusion to situations involving imminent danger, and require staff to be trained in administering these practices. It would outlaw mechanical restraints, such as strapping kids to chairs, and prohibit restraints that restrict breathing.

It will increase transparency and oversight, so we will finally know just how widespread these practices are, and provide the Secretary of Education with tools to enforce the law.

And it would give schools the support they need to equip their staff to handle difficult situations in the most positive manner possible.

In a time of deep partisan divide, some may wonder what prompted strange bedfellows -- a member of Democratic leadership and a member of Republican leadership -- to team up.

It's as simple as this: Schools are places for our children to learn, grow, and thrive. As a nation we must do better.

It's time to ensure that no child in this country suffers the same fate as Cedric.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of U.S. Reps. George Miller and Cathy McMorris Rodgers.

Number of missing migrant children up

2009-12-09T16:45:00.000-08:00

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2009/1209/1224260354333_pf.html

Number of missing migrant children up
MARIE O'HALLORAN
Wed, Dec 09, 2009

FIVE MIGRANT children have gone missing each month this year, twice as many as for all of last year, the Dáil has heard.

Fine Gael spokesman on migration Denis Naughten sharply criticised Minister of State for Children Barry Andrews who he said had told the Dáil in February that 24-hour care was being provided to unaccompanied children seeking asylum in the State. But the report of the Children’s Ombudsman had shown that “security guards provide care after 6pm”.

Mr Andrews said it was of serious concern the figure had increased in 2009 after a “very low figure” of 22 in 2008. Figures for missing migrant children who enter the State unaccompanied, showed that 32 went missing in 2007, from the care of the Health Service Executive (HSE), 22 disappeared in 2008 and up to October this year 45 had gone missing.

To prevent this happening, “we need to bring children seeking asylum into a position of equality with children in residential or foster care so that they are provided with the same services and the accommodation is properly registered and inspected. This has not been the case until now,” said the Minister.

He hoped to “phase out the four hostels that remain providing services to children” by December 2010 and the move to foster care “should help to ensure that fewer children go missing”.

He said that children “go missing very soon after coming to the attention of State agencies”. He said that if they were in inappropriate accommodation it was certain that “inappropriate service will be provided”.

Mr Naughten claimed that the Minister “clapped himself on the back” because the number of missing children was reduced last year, a claim Mr Andrews sharply rejected. Mr Naughten said, however, that the Minister “took credit in the House for the fact that only 22 children had gone missing last year. Two in every five children placed in care this year have disappeared from accommodation. Will you take responsibility for that?” he asked Mr Andrews.

Mr Naughten also objected to HSE proposals to “put new accommodation alongside existing asylum centres” which were a focal point for traffickers.

Rejecting the assertion that he had clapped himself “on the back”, the Minister pointed out that he had only been Minister of State for half of last year. “I fail to see how I could be credited with positive development that occurred in the previous year.”

He added that a process was in place to ensure the closure of hostels by the end of 2010 “is done with the best interests of children at heart”.

Why do some people want to hurt children?

2009-12-09T16:30:00.000-08:00

Those who want to hurt children are called psychopaths! They are demons in skin who were created by the demon god setan!

http://www.viewzone.com/pedocrime.html

Crimes Against Children
Why do some people want to hurt children?
By Dan Eden for viewzone.com

WARNING
This article deals with child predators and pornography. Although the examples shown in this article are legal, they may be offensive to some viewers. We show them only to make a point of the type of content currently allowed on the internet. Thanks for understanding our motives.

In late March of 2009 a beautiful little 8 year old girl was missing from her home in Tracy, California. Reports stated that she left her home to play at a friends home, then was returning home -- but never arrived. Surveillance cameras at the trailer park where she lived showed the petite child skipping happily in front of her home just hours before she apparently vanished.

In the age of television, little Sandra Cantu was featured nightly on Headline News (CNN) with an assortment of family photos and videos. America watched as her distraught mother begged for her return as speculation mounted that she had likely been abducted.

Interviews with police and FBI agents revealed that, if an abducted child is not found within the first several hours after being reported missing, the child is almost always found dead.

True to the profiles of abduction, little Sandra's body was found in a suitcase, thrown in to a nearby farm aquaduct, on April 6th. Autopsy reports indicated that she had been "raped" with a foreign object. Eventually, to everyone's surprise, the alleged perpetrator was not a man but a 28 year old woman -- a Sunday school teacher -- who lived just doors away from Sandra's home. The murder was a shock to everyone but it reminded me that we need to know more about the kind of person or persons that can commit such an act of pure evil.

Who could do this?

Criminal profilers tell us that the people who harm and kill children are suffering from what psychologists call pedophilia. The primary motive of these attackers is sexual and the subsequent murder usually results from fear of being "revealed" by the victim. One might think that the attacker would know that molesting or raping a child will result in severe criminal penalties before they commit the crime, but often the attackers claim that murder was an "after-thought" which they did not initially intend to do. Psychologists explain that the sexual urges of pedophiles are so strong that the consequences of their actions are not thought out until their urges are gratified -- when it is unfortunately too late. So this brings us to ask, what is a pedophile?

According to wikipedia:

The term pedophilia or paedophilia has a range of definitions as found in psychology, law enforcement, and the vernacular. As a medical diagnosis, it is defined as a psychological disorder in which an adult experiences a sexual preference for prepubescent children. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), pedophilia is specified as a form of paraphilia in which a person either has acted on intense sexual urges towards children, or experiences recurrent sexual urges towards and fantasies about children that cause distress or interpersonal difficulty. The disorder is frequently a feature of persons who commit child sexual abuse; however, some offenders do not meet the clinical diagnosis standards for pedophilia. In strictly behavioral contexts, the word "pedophilia" has been used to refer to child sexual abuse itself, also called "pedophilic behavior".

What makes a person a pedophile?

Most human adults have a psychological preference for the opposite sex of child-bearing age. This would appear to be "hard wired" in the brain for the continuation of the species. Any deviation from this norm is viewed as "unnatural," since sexual intercourse between a man and pre-pubescent child results in no offspring.

Most psychologists had, until the last decade, traditionally grouped homosexuality with pedophilia as a form of pathology. Both are still considered "evil" by many church goers and moralist and who believe these sexual orientations to be matters of "choice." Why anyone would choose to become a homosexual, with all of the social condemnation, has always been a mystery and this concept has recently been seriously challenged.

With regards to homosexuality, it has been proven that brains have gender. As many scientists suspected, homosexuals appear to have aquired specific parts of their brain -- specifically the hypothalamus -- with traits of the opposite sex. In simple terms, male homosexuals can have a male body, but the part of their brains responsible for sexual preference is female. The opposite appears true for lesbians.

In the case of homosexuality, the abnormality seems linked to maternal stress during the first trimester of pregnancy. Stress produces androstendione in the shared placental blood of the mother and child. Androstendione strongly resembles testosterone and interferes with the early development of the hypothalamus and causes this part of the brain to develop characteristics of the opposite sex responsible for sexual preference.

So it's not a choice.

I wrote about this a few years ago and I was tempted to describe this as a "birth defect." I received hundreds of e-mails from homosexual men and women who resented this lable. I understand this and so I have been resigned call it "natural." But what can one say about pedophilia?

What causes pedophilia?

In a Dutch book about treatment, written by Bernard ten Hag, a psychologist, he argues that pedophilia is a matter of choice:

"Pedophilia: A word that better may replaced by pedosexuality, because what offenders do with children is contrary to what most people understand as love. Pedophilia is not on the same level as homophilia or heterophilia, because pedophilia is not a preference but a choice." (Hag 2004)
Is pedophilia a choice?

There is remarkably little that is known about this condition. Most of what psychologists know is based on statistics and family histories obtained during therapy of criminal offenders. While this is helpful, it really only profiles those who act on their impulses and does not describe covert pedophiles who harbor these feelings but never allow them to be expressed -- except in fantasies.

Here's what we know:

Having a powerful or controlling mother has been shown to be a dominant factor. In theory, the male pedophile develops an aversion to adult women and their percieved power and focuses on younger, more passive females as the object of sexual preference. Some regard pedophilia as the result of a distorted need to dominate a sexual partner. Since children are smaller and usually weaker than adults, they may be regarded as nonthreatening potential partners. This drive for domination is sometimes thought to explain why most pedophiles are males. In one blog, a convicted child sex offender wrote:

"From my experience of being mothered - I hate mothers. Even now typing the word on my keypad makes me feel like wretching. But I know that my experience is not the same as everyone else, I cannot generalise form my particular experience."
Next up is a history of sexual abuse as a child. Statistically, one third of pedophiles say that they were abused growing up (Cloud, April 2002). Some researchers attribute pedophilia to arrested emotional development from the trauma of abuse; that is, the pedophile is attracted to children because he or she has never matured psychologically.

The most frequently assessed neuropsychological characteristic has been general intelligence or IQ. Some investigators have compared sex offenders against children with noncriminal community control groups, finding the sex offenders to score lower in intelligence (Langevin et al., 1985). Other investigators have compared sex offenders against children with men convicted of nonsexual crimes, thus controlling for their status in the legal system and any antisociality. The offenders against children again scored lower (Hambridge, 1994)

Most experts regard pedophilia as resulting from psychosocial factors rather than biological characteristics. But this assumption has some flaws.

Pedophilia is one of the more common sexual pathologies; the large worldwide market for child pornography suggests that it is more frequent in the general population than prison statistics would indicate. Together with voyeurism and exhibitionism, pedophilia is one of the three pathologies most commonly leading to arrest by the police.

The onset of pedophilia usually occurs during adolescence. Occasional pedophiles begin their activities during middle age but this late onset is uncommon. In the United States, about 50% of men arrested for pedophilia are married.

The frequency of behavior associated with pedophilia varies with psychosocial stress. As the pedophile's stress levels increase, the frequency of his or her acting out generally rises also.

Pedophilia is more common among males than among females (about 10%). In addition, the rate of recidivism for persons with a pedophilic preference for males is approximately twice that of pedophiles who prefer females.

Little is known about the incidence of pedophilia in different racial or ethnic groups.

Despite all the efforts to treat pedophilia, the brain mechanisms that cause this disorder still remains a mystery. A new study published in Biological Psychiatry demonstrated how pedophilic patients responded to functional brain imaging.

During the test, the screening showed that brain area hypothalamus responsible for regulating of sexual arousal and hormone release was reduced in pedophilic patients. The activation of this brain region in individuals who are not pedophilic would normally be heightened when they look at sexually arousing pictures of adults.It means that pedophilic patients have little response in pleasure areas of the brain when they view sexually arousing pictures of adults, thus it may predispose them to change their sexual interest. John H. Krystal, M.D., Editor of Biological Psychiatry says that understanding the neurobiological peculiarities of this disorder should be taken into account to find a treatment.

Canadian researchers discovered that men with a primary sexual attraction to children have a much higher likelihood of being left handed than the general population. This research suggests that there is a neurological component to pedophilia, since left-handedness appears to be biologic. Some scientists speculate that it might be a case of right-hemisphere dominance more than a particular region, such as the hypothalamus, that provides a predisposition to pedophilia.

Right-hemisphere dominance might also be the result of faulty connections in the brain. If the brain can not integrate input from both hemispheres, as a normal brain does, perhaps this problem with connectivity allows one hemisphere to dominate control of the mind. According to new research released by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), a study utilizing MRIs and a sophisticated computer analysis technique compared a group of pedophiles with a group of non-sexual criminals. The pedophiles had significantly less of a substance called "white matter" which is responsible for wiring the different parts of the brain together.

In my previous article of left-right brain activity I showed the unique characteristics of each human brain's left and right hemisphere. I will list these again here.

One interesting theory suggests that right-brained individuals are more child-like and so tend to be adolescent or even pre-adolescent in their thinking. While these traits are considered positive in creative writing, the arts and tasks involving fantasy, they might also lead one to have an affinity for children who utilize these same traits. It has also been suggested that being left-handed creates stress and trauma at an early age -- living in a world of right-handed people -- and that this can also contribute to the previously described "arrested emotional development."

How common is pedophilia?

Pedophilia is running rampant, not only in the US but all over the world. Children are being sexually exploited by a pedophile at the rate of 1 out of 6 boys before the age of 16 and 1 out of 3 girls before the age of 18 (1 out of 4 before the age of 14). As a result, some psychologists are attempting to describe pedophilia as a valid sexual orientation.

Dr. Fred S. Berlin asserts that, "It is likely that no one would choose voluntarily to develop a pedophilic sexual orientation. Those with such an orientation have no more decided to have it than have any of us decided as children to be either heterosexual or homosexual." Berlin also defends the classification of pedophilia as a mental disorder, stating, "In our society, to have a pedophilic sexual orientation can create both psychological burdens and impairments."

Richard Green was involved in the removal of homosexuality from the DSM list of mental disorders and is now actively trying to have pedophilia removed as well (Gieles, 2002). Green believes that pedophilic feelings are normal.

One quarter of "normal" people are said to feel attracted towards children and more than twenty five percent react with penile erection to pedophilic stimuli. Green also states that one can not reasonably argue that one quarter of the population is mentally ill (Gieles, 2002). Considering these statistics it seems sensical to conclude that pedophilia is not a mental disorder. However, the one quarter of the population that react to pedophilic stimuli do not necessarily act on their urges.

Child pornography

The huge amount of child pornography on the internet speaks volumes about the popularity and frequency of pedophilia. Although so-called hard core pronography is aggressively combatted by the governments and police of most countries, a suprisingly large amount of "soft pronography" (non-nude) remains accessible to the public and claims to be protected under the articles of free speech.

While I am not stupid enough to download any "hard core" pornography depicting children, I did use a simple google search (try "preteen" and "models") to locate sites such as the one pictured below.

This site, depicting girls as young as 5 or 6 in their underpants, in supposedly erotic poses, was just one of hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of web sites in which parents apparently sell images of their scantily clad children to anyone with a MasterCard or PayPal account.

A button named "links" brought me the page below. Once again a reminder, this material is declared "legal"! The site contains the following "legal notice":

Site contains works of Art that demonstrate admiration and appreciation of beauty and style. All content submitted on this site was prepared and belongs to Model Agency. Given material - images of outstanding models dressed in fashionable and exclusive clothing - was produced in compliance with norms of Law and Morality.

If you come across any web sites like this I suggest that you write down the URL -- the web site address (beginning with "www...") and use one of the following links to report this. Remember, these people believe this is "legal" and claim these are "modeling" web sites. By complaining you will help to shut them down and stop feeding these desires:

www.usdoj.gov/criminal/ceos/childporn.html
www.antichildporn.org

Elsewhere, I noticed an article in alternet.org recently which described the "in vogue" phenomenon where adult women are now pandering to the desires of men by having their pubic hair removed (the so-called "Brazillian" look) and their vaginal labia surgically reduced to resemble pre-pubescent girls. Apparently the whole world is harboring pedophilic fantasies!

Remember when girls worried about having hairy underarms? It looks like those girls might be part of a bigger trend. The New York Times reports on Nair's new endeavor: Marketing a new product line to 10- to 15-year-olds.
Intended for middle-schoolers, Nair Pretty is a chemical hair remover that comes in kiwi and peach scents. The packaging features illustrations of teenage girls, and along those lines, the print advertisements target the girls directly. "I am a citizen of the world," they read. "I am a dreamer. I am fresh. I am so not going to have stubs sticking out of my legs." (Heaven forbid a 10-year-old girl might have hair on her legs.)

Australians pushing "Brazilians" on Pre-teen!

Things are getting kinda hairy Down Under. Parents are extremely ticked off because a website is promoting Brazilian waxes -- for preteen girls. Girl.com.au, whose slogan is "Girl Power -- Empowering Girls Worldwide," is a girl-centric website that usually covers things like Nancy Drew online games and PG movies. But along with this kid-friendly fare, there's a primer on Brazilian waxing that includes this gem:

"Nobody really likes hair in their private regions and it has a childlike appeal. Men love it, and are eternally curious about it."
The article also tells girls what to expect during a wax, claiming that the procedure is "surprisingly not as painful as you might think."

So why do some pedophiles hurt children?

After all, this is the reason for writing this article. But the answer is still illusive for me. I can only be reminded of something I read years ago when studying the great philosopher, Plotinus. Though he was not describing pedophilia, he made an observation of evil that seems to make sense.

The soul forgets its value and learns to dispise itself. The one consists in showing her the low value of all the things she [the soul] at present esteems. The other consists in instructing and reminding her of her nature and worth. The second argument preceeds the first and once it has been made clear will support the first." -- Enneads VI -- Chain of Realities, Book 2 Plotinus.
In other words, the pedophile has to repress the strong desire to fantasize about children as a valid sexual object. This desire can never be socially accepted and so continues to cause psychological (and perhaps even spiritual) conflicts that are resolved by diminishing the value of the desired object -- in this case the child -- allowing the opposite feelings to be expressed. Love turns to hate. Gentle affection turns to violence. The internal war of morality and ideology becomes expressed as action.

Indeed, as was the case of Sandra's murderer, subsequent acts often allow the perpetrator to be caught, as if they wanted to finally rid themselves of the guilt.

The more our culture sexualizes children with things like Barbie and Bratz dolls, inappropriate "lolita" web sites, fashions hyping sexuality, and allows such things as "sexting" (sending pornographic images of teens and pre-teens over cell phones) the more we feed this apparently innate sexual fantasy of children in a large chunk of the human population. We set a double standard. While the fantasy of children as sexual objects is being encouraged and the expression of the resulting desires is simultaneously being repressed we may unfortunately expect to see more cases such as little Sandra Cantu in the news.

What do you think about this?

*See Biol Psychiatry. 2007 Sep 15;62(6):698-701. Epub 2007 Apr 2. Pedophilia is linked to reduced activation in hypothalamus and lateral prefrontal cortex during visual erotic stimulation.

Orthodox Jewish Community Struggles With Abuse Allegations
Alleged Victims and Advocates Say Sex Abuse Common, Rarely Discussed

By SCOTT MICHELS

May 5, 2009

When Joel Engelman was 8 years old, he says, he was called from his Hebrew class to the principal's office at his Brooklyn yeshiva, a Jewish religious school. His parents had recently told Rabbi Avrohom Reichman that their son had been abused by an older boy at the school, he says.

Joel Engelman, pictured as a child, and Tamir Weissberg said they were victims of sexual abuse by members of the Orthodox Jewish community. They said they were told not to discuss the alleged abuse. (Courtesy Joel Engelman and Tamir Weissberg)But he says the rabbi was not offering to help that day.

When Engelman arrived at the principal's office, he says, Reichman told him to close the door. He told the boy to sit on his lap and began swiveling his chair back and forth, Engelman says. Reichman then touched him, moving from his shoulders down, Engelman claims.

The same kind of abuse went on twice a week for several months before he left the school, Engelman claims in a civil lawsuit filed against the yeshiva, the United Talmudical Academy.

For more than 10 years, Engelman, now 23, kept what he says happened to himself. He left the orthodox community and found new friends. It wasn't until about two years ago, when he says he heard that other boys allegedly had been abused by Reichman, that he tried to do something about it.

But Engelman says the response from religious leaders has been just as disturbing as the alleged abuse. He claims the school's religious leaders told him not to go to the police, and promised to remove Reichman from the school, which they did for a few months.

"They kept telling me, 'Don't go to the police, don't do anything. We've dealt with this before,'" with other teachers, he said. "It really shocked me."

A few days after the statute of limitations for Engelman to file a civil or criminal case against Reichman for abuse passed, the school reinstated the rabbi, the lawsuit claims.

Engelman's is among a handful of publicized cases of alleged abuse within the insular Orthodox Jewish community. But alleged victims and their advocates say it is far from an isolated instance.

The Brooklyn district attorney's office, which last month announced a hotline for alleged Orthodox sex abuse victims, says it has 19 active cases of alleged sex abuse in the borough's Orthodox Jewish community. And advocates say the problem extends beyond Brooklyn.

"If you're a pedophile, just go to one of the orthodox communities. You're probably safest there," said New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, himself an Orthodox Jew. "It's sad for me to say that, but it's true."

Toxic munitions cause of baby deaths and deformities in Fallujah

2009-12-09T05:49:00.000-08:00

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16442

Toxic munitions cause of baby deaths and deformities in Fallujah

By David Randall
Global Research, December 7, 2009
View Zone

In September this year, say campaigners, 170 children were born at Fallujah General Hospital, 24 per cent of whom died within seven days. Three-quarters of these exhibited deformities, including "children born with two heads, no heads, a single eye in their foreheads, or missing limbs". The comparable data for August 2002 -- before the invasion -- records 530 births, of whom six died and only one of whom was deformed.

The data -- contained in a letter sent by a group of British and Iraqi doctors and campaigners to the United Nations last month -- presaged claims made in a report in The Guardian yesterday that there has been a sharp rise in birth defects in the city. The paper quoted Fallujah General's director and senior specialist, Dr Ayman Qais, as saying: "We are seeing a very significant increase in central nervous system anomalies... There is also a very marked increase in the number of cases of brain tumours." Earlier this year Sky News reported a Fallujah grave-digger saying that, of the four or five new-born babies he buries every day, most have deformities. [right: Iraqi boys play with remains of US rocket.]

The campaigners' letter to the UN calls for an independent investigation to be set up, "the cleaning up of toxic materials used by the occupying forces, including depleted uranium and white phosphorus", and an inquiry launched to discover if any war crimes have been committed.

The campaigners believe that either white phosphorus or depleted uranium is a major, if not only, cause of the birth defects. White phosphorus, which US military has admitted firing on insurgents in heavily populated Fallujah, has a long history of military use, dating back to the First World War.

And although no scientific study has ever proved a causal link between depleted uranium and serious medical problems Ð and several studies seem to have proved the opposite -- it is by no means in the clear. Ever since the first Gulf War, its use has been linked to cancers among returning troops.

WHAT IS DEPLETED URANIUM?

Depleted Uranium, or DU, is a waste material left over from the nuclear industry. A vast amount of this waste DU is produced when natural uranium is enriched for use in nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons. Only the uranium isotope U-235 can be used in nuclear processes, such as reactors and weapons. As most of this isotope is removed from naturally occurring uranium, the remaining uranium product comprises U-238 and smaller amounts of the more highly radioactive U-235 and U-234. DU is both chemically toxic and radioactive. It is this latter product, the left over uranium, comprising mainly U-238, which has been used to make 'depleted' uranium weapons. It is used for weapons because this heavy, dense metal is judged by the army to be an excellent penetrator of enemy armour, tanks, and even buildings.

A large amount of DU in the stockpiles held in the United States has been contaminated with recycled spent nuclear fuel from nuclear reactors. For example trace amounts of U-236 and highly radioactive substances such as plutonium, neptunium and technetium were found in a DU anti-tank shell used in Kosovo. Hundreds of thousands of tons of this contaminated stock was exported to the UK, France and other countries in the 1990s. The extent to which this DU has been contaminated with recycled spent fuel is still unknown and undisclosed.

Governments have largely ignored the serious dangers this recycled fuel represents. A common defence used by the British and US governments and their militaries is to claim that depleted uranium is less radioactive than natural uranium and therefore does not constitute a risk to human health. This statement is, however, misleading. In its natural form uranium is present in our environment in very small quantities as an ore, for example in rocks and soil. Conversely, the DU used by the military has been concentrated relative to background amounts, and is therefore many times more radioactive than uranium ore.

In May 2003 Scott Peterson, a writer with the US newspaper CSM, examined radioactivity levels next to DU bullets in Baghdad and found Geiger-counter readings were 1900 times greater than background radiation levels next to DU bullets. When natural uranium is concentrated in a similar form to 'depleted' uranium it emits about 40% more alpha radiation, 15% more gamma radiation and around the same level of beta radiation. The chemical toxicity of uranium does not depend on the isotope, therefore enriched, 'normal', and depleted uranium are equally toxic chemically.

It is extremely difficult and expensive for the nuclear industry to store DU. It is thought that the US currently has 1 billion tonnes of depleted uranium radioactive waste, while the UK has at least 50,000 tonnes. This waste is stored in cylinders at many sites across the US and UK and is vulnerable to corrosion and leaks owing to ageing cylinders and outside storage. It is stored mainly in the form of depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUF6) which can leak if the corroding cylinders are breached. At least 10 cylinders are known to have breached during the past 10 years.

Turning this DU waste into weapons solves some of the problem faced by the Government and nuclear industry, concerning what to do with these large stockpiles. Not only is DU practically free of charge for the arms manufacturers, but it no longer has to be stored and monitored indefinitely.

THE HEALTH EFFECTS OF DEPLETED URANIUM

Depleted uranium is a risk to health both as a toxic heavy metal and as a radioactive substance. The UK and US Governments have long sought to play down these risks. While, as late as 2003, the UK Government was claiming that DU presented no harm to soldiers or civilians, yet accumulating and alarming evidence from scientists, soldiers and activists has forced them to back down and recognise the risks posed.(1) However what is clear from reading all major studies is that more research urgently needs to be done. There exists very little research on the effects of uranium contamination in humans and accurate tests to understand exposure doses from military uses of DU have never been done.

There are three main routes through which DU exposure on the battlefield takes place: inhalation, ingestion and wounding.(2) As a DU penetrator hits its target some of the DU from the weapon reacts with the air in the ensuing fire and becomes a fine dust (often called an 'aerosol') that makes inhalation and ingestion a possibility for those in the area. Even after the dust has settled, the danger remains that it may be resuspended in the future by further activity or the wind, and again pose a threat to civilians and others for many years into the future. DU particles have been reported as travelling twenty-five miles on air currents.(3) Open wounds also allow a gateway for DU into the body and some veterans have also been left with DU fragments in their bodies, remaining after combat.

Inhaled DU dust will settle in the nose, mouth, lung, airways and guts. As a DU penetrator hits its target, the high temperatures caused by the impact ensure the DU dust particles become ceramic and therefore water insoluble. This means that, unlike other more soluble forms of uranium, DU will stay in the body for much longer periods of time. This aspect of uranium toxicology has often been ignored in studies of the health effects of DU, which base their excretion rates on soluble uranium. DU dust can remain in the sticky tissues of the lung and other organs such as the kidneys for many years. It is also deposited in the bones where it can remain for up to 25 years.(4) This helps explain why studies of Gulf War veterans have found that soldiers are still excreting DU in their urine over 12 years after the 1991 conflict (5) . Ingested DU can be incorporated into bone and from there will irradiate the bone marrow, increasing the risk of leukaemia and an impaired immune system. (6)

External exposure to DU entails exposure to alpha, beta and gamma radiation. Although the skin will block alpha particles, beta and gamma radiation can penetrate beyond the dead outer skin layers and damage living tissue. Beta particles can penetrate to a depth of 2 cm, while gamma radiation (through a process called 'the Compton effect') generates beta particle radiation along its trajectory through the body. Neither is all external exposure to alpha radiation harmless. Cataracts, for example, can be caused by exposure to alpha radiation.(7)

Inside the body, DU poses a health risk in a variety of ways to different organs. The kidneys are the first organ to be dfamaged by DU. At a high dose kidney uranium levels can lead to kidney failure within a few days of exposure.8 Lower doses lead to kidney dysfunction, and can lead to an increased risk of kidney disease later in life.

As a radioactive emitter, DU also presents a risk to the lungs. Traditionally, radiation dosimetry measures the extent of harm by calculating the external radiation absorbed by the tissues; the so-called 'absorbed' dose.(9)However because DU dust is inhaled or ingested, it can remain in the body tissues and emit intensive radiation over a longer period. This way it can cause a large amount of damage over a relatively small area, changing a person's genetic codes and causing cancers. For these reasons soldiers and civilians exposed to DU risk developing lung cancers, particularly if they are smokers because their lungs will already have been irritated.

There is much new evidence emerging about the risks from so-called 'low level' radiation and the damage it can do to DNA. Considerable evidence has been accumulated recently about the 'by-stander' effect, which shows that irradiated cells pass on damage to surrounding healthy cells. In this way it is thought low-level radiation can cause much greater damage than would otherwise be expected.(10) Studies have also shown that irradiated cells pass on chromosomal aberrations to their progeny so that non-irradiated cells several generations, or cell divisions later, will exhibit this radiation-induced genomic instability (RIGI).(11)

New evidence is also suggesting that the chemical toxicity of DU and its radioactivity reinforce each other in a so-called 'synergistic effect', which means it 'punches above its own weight' in terms of the damage it can do to cells. Alexandra Miller of the US Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute in the USA found in a study in 2003 that when human bone cells are exposed to DU, fragments break away from the chromosomes and form tiny rings of genetic material. This damage was seen in new cells more than a month after removal of the DU, leading to an eight-fold increase in genetic damage relative to that expected.

It's not just in terms of increased risk of cancer that DU DNA damage can affect health. It is also implicated in causing a depressed immune system, reproductive problems, and birth defects. For example, a study of US Gulf War veterans has found that they are up to three times as likely to have children with birth deformities than fathers who had not served; and that pregnancies result in significantly higher rates of miscarriage.(12) A major 2004 Ministry of Defence-funded survey study from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine has found that babies whose fathers served in the first Gulf War are 50 per cent more likely to have physical abnormalities. They also found a 40 per cent increased risk of miscarriage among women whose partners served in the Gulf.

In Basra, in southern Iraq, there have been striking reports for a number of years about the rise in local childhood cancers and birth deformities seen there. The findings of a leading Iraqi epidemiologist, Dr Alim Yacoub,13 were presented in New York in June 2003 and suggest there has been a more than five fold increase in congenital malformations and a quadrupling of the incidence rates of malignant diseases in Basra.(14)

The Dutch Journal of Medical Science reported the findings of the Flemish eye doctor, Edward De Sutter. He found 20 cases out of 4000 births in Iraq of babies with the phenomenon anophthalmos: babies who have been born with only one eye or who are missing both eyes. The very rare condition usually only affects 1 out of 50 million births.

The damaging effects to health that DU weapons present are of particular concern because of the likelihood of civilians becoming exposed after conflicts have ended. Children especially are at risk because of playing in and ingesting contaminated soil and most of the health risks discussed are of particular danger to younger children.

ENVIRONMENTAL CONTAMINATION FROM DU

The release of DU into the environment can pollute land and water for decades to come. Its danger is not limited to battlefield releases but will expose present and future generations of civilians to contaminated food and water supplies. Environmental releases of this sort can also be expected to have negative effects on plant and animal life although little is known about this.

DU dust in the environment can become resuspended through weather conditions and human activity, such as farming. Of particular worry is that children are especially vulnerable to receiving significant exposures through playing on sites and ingestion of contaminated soil by way of typical hand-to-mouth activity.

DU can also contaminate soil through corrosion from the original penetrator. It is believed that 70-80% of all DU penetrators used in the Gulf and the Balkans remain buried in the soil. A United Nations Environment Programme study in Spring 2002 found that recovered penetrators had decreased in mass by 10-15%. Corrosion can feed uranium into groundwater, where it can travel into local water supplies. DU in soil can also enter the food chain since it is taken up by plants grown in it and by animals used for food. A UNEP post- conflict report on Bosnia and Herzegovina has indeed found that DU had also leached into local groundwater. The same study found that radioactive hotspots persisted at some of the sites studied. Klaus Toepfer, the Executive Director of UNEP, said at the time, "Seven years after the conflict, DU still remains an environmental concern and, therefore, it is vital that we have the scientific facts, based upon which we can give clear recommendations on how to minimise any risk".

The British and US militaries have demonstrated extreme irresponsibility in releasing DU into the environment, using it without proper monitoring or information about the risks it poses even in their own countries. In January 2003, the US Navy admitted routinely firing DU from its Phalanx guns in prime fishing waters off the coast of Washington state since 1977. At the Dundrennan testsite in Scotland around 30 tonnes of DU rounds have been fired into the Solway Firth. Only one has ever been retrieved, when it was found in a fisherman's net.

Both governments have been equally callous in their disregard concerning the long term risk to civilians in countries where they have used DU.

DU AND THE MILITARY

DU is used in a variety of military applications. It is attractive to the military, governments and the nuclear industry for three main reasons. Firstly, as mentioned earlier, it is in cheap and plentiful supply and solves the problem of storage and monitoring. Secondly, it is a very effective battlefield weapon because its high density and self-sharpening qualities enable it to penetrate hard targets with ease. Thirdly, DU is pyrophoric, which means it burns on impact, enhancing its ability to destroy enemy targets. The UK test firing of DU began at the Eskmeals range in Cumbria in the early 1960s. Testing continues today at Dundrennan, in Southern Scotland, most recently before the 2003 attack on Iraq. DU is now used in two types of ammunition in the British armed forces: the 120 mm anti-tank rounds (CHARM 3), which is fired by the Army's Challenger tanks and 20mm rounds used by the Royal Navy's Phalanx Close-In Weapon System (a missile defence system). The Phalanx system was developed by the US Navy and is used by both the Australian and British Navies. In 1993, a leaked Pentagon report revealed how the use of DU could lead to increased cancer risks: this leak caused the US manufacturers to switch to tungsten alternatives. Because of this the Royal Navy has been forced to convert its replacement ammunition to tungsten too, although it still has stockpiles of DU.

The US military uses DU mainly for its Abrahams tanks and A10 warplanes, although it is also used in its Bradley fighting vehicles, AV-8B Harrier aircraft, Super Cobra helicopter and its Navy Phalanx system. It is also used by the US military for a variety of other applications including bombshells, tank armour plating, aircraft ballast and anti-personnel mines. Although the US and UK militaries are the only countries who have been properly documented as using DU weapons, they are known to be held by at least seventeen other countries including: Australia, Bahrain, France, Greece, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates.

The testing of DU weapons has caused considerable contamination at test sites across the world. At Dundrennan, in Scotland, for example, a 2004 Ministry of Defence report revealed how, since 1982 over 90 shells had either been misfired or had malfunctioned and scattered fragments of DU across the ground. Despite searches, some of these fragments have never been recovered. Contamination levels were high in these areas, which have had to be fenced off. At Okinawa in Japan, and Vieques, an island of Puerto Rico, the US military used DU weapons without the appropriate licences and without informing their respective governments or local populations. In the US, the Army is attempting to walk away from its responsibilities to decontaminate former test sites, such as Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey and Jefferson Proving Ground in Indiana.

It is now clear that the military have known the risks of depleted uranium but failed to provide safety instructions to soldiers in both the 1991 Gulf Wars and the Balkan conflicts. A study prepared for the US Army in July 1990, a month before Iraq invaded Kuwait, says: "The health risks associated with internal & external DU exposure during combat conditions are certainly far less than other combat-related risks. Following combat, however, the condition of the battlefield and the long-term health risks to natives & combat veterans may become issues in the acceptability of the continued use of DU."

Furthermore, a leaked 1993 document from the US Army Surgeon General's office said, "When soldiers inhale or ingest DU dust they incur a potential increase in cancer risk ... that increase can be quantified in terms of projected days of life loss."

DU IN IRAQ

The 1991 Gulf War saw the first verified use of DU weapons. Around 320 tonnes of DU in weapons were used in the war, of which about 1 tonne was used by the UK military. According to data from the US Department of Defense, tens or hundreds of thousands of US military personnel could have been exposed to DU. Both the US and UK Governments refused any responsibility for decontamination and both refused to study the exposure rates or after-effects of this DU use. After a few years, evidence began to emerge from Iraq about the increasing incidence of cancer and birth deformities in the south of the country. After heavy US lobbying in November 2001 the UN General Assembly voted down an Iraqi proposal that the UN study the effects of the DU used there.

In the 2003 attack on Iraq, the US and UK militaries used DU again despite the lack of reliable data on the effects of using it in Iraq 12 years previously. The British Government has admitted using 1.9 tonnes of DU. Even though this is only a tiny proportion of all DU used in Iraq, it is double the amount used in 1991. The US authorities have still not said how much has been used, although an initial Pentagon source revealed 75 tons of DU may remain in Iraq from A-10 planes alone.

The implications for Iraqi civilians are very alarming. Unlike the first Gulf War, which was largely confined to desert areas, much of the DU use has been in built-up, heavily populated areas. The US Government has refused any cleanup of DU in Iraq, clinging to the statement that it has no link with ill health, while the British Government has for the first time admitted it does have a responsibility but says it is low on their list of priorities.

OTHER COUNTRIES CONTAMINATED BY DU

BOSNIA 1994-1995

DU rounds were used in Bosnia by US A-20 warplanes under the auspices of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). Around 10,800 DU rounds, or 3 tonnes, were used in Bosnia. However NATO always denied DU had been used until 2000, 6 years after the attacks, when media reports began to emerge. For all this time no cleanups or public awareness campaigns could be run, leading to unnecessary civilian exposures. The UNEP report,1 mentioned earlier, and released in March 2003, found DU contamination of drinking water and radioactive 'hotspots'. UNEP recommended ongoing monitoring of drinking water, cleanup of DU sites, cleaning of contaminated buildings and the release by NATO of all DU-attack coordinates.

KOSOVO, YUGOSLAVIA - 1999

US A-10 aircraft fired around 31,300 rounds of DU, or 9 tons of DU in areas of Kosovo, Serbia and Montenegro during NATO action there in 1999. Partial information about the use of DU was released a year after the war when UN Secretary General KofiAnnan sent a letter requesting the information to NATO Secretary General Lord George Robertson. An analysis in a UNEP Post-Conflict field study of recovered DU shells, published in March 2001, found that some of the shells were made with recycled uranium (that is, with uranium that had been through a nuclear reactor) and were contaminated with plutonium. The study did not find widespread contamination but did find evidence of airborne movement of DU dust. It also found localised points of concentrated contamination showing U-238 at 10,000 times normal background levels. The study recommended decontamination, removal of penetrators and drinking water monitoring. A separate report published by UNEP on DU contamination in Serbia and Montenegro found "widespread, but low-level DU contamination, airborne DU particles" and that "DU dust was widely dispersed into the environment."

As well as official reports there has been widespread anecdotal evidence of so-called 'Balkans syndrome' among both soldiers deployed in the region and civilian populations. Symptoms are similar sounding to "Gulf War Syndrome" with heightened levels of leukaemia, respiratory and immune system illnesses. By mid-2004 twenty-seven Italian soldiers have died of symptoms thought to be linked to DU exposure. A court in Rome ordered the Italian Ministry of Defence to compensate the family of Stefano Melone, a soldier who died of a malignant vascular tumour. According to the court, Mr Melone's death was "due to exposure to radioactive and carcinogen substances" on missions in the Balkans.

Tension was caused within NATO as member countries were not warned that their soldiers would be entering DU contaminated zones.

AFGHANISTAN 2001- 2004

There is some evidence that DU has been used in Afghanistan, although this has never been confirmed officially. For example, US A-10s and Harrier aircraft, which both use DU ammunition, are known to have been active in the region. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has said that the US has found radioactivity indicating DU use by the Taliban or Al-Qaeda.

Geneva Convention Rules (to which US and UK are signees)

- The limitation of unnecessary human suffering [Art.35.2]
- The limitation of damage to the environment [Art. 35.3 and 55.1]
- It is prohibited to employ weapons, projectiles and material and methods of warfare of a nature to cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering [Art. 35.3]
- It is prohibited to employ methods or means of warfare which are intended, or may be expected, to cause widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment. [Art. 35.2]
- In order to ensure respect for and protection of the civilian population and civilian objects, the Parties to the conflict shall at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives and accordingly shall direct their operations only against military objectives. [Art. 48]
- Indiscriminate attacks are prohibited. Indiscriminate attacks are:
(a) those which are not directed at a specific military objective;
(b) those which employ a method or means of combat which cannot be directed at a specific military objective; or
(c) those which employ a method or means of combat the effects of which cannot be limited as required by this Protocol; and consequently, in each such case, are of a nature to strike military objectives and civilians or civilian objects without distinction. [Art.51.4]
- Care shall be taken in warfare to protect the natural environment against widespread, long-term and severe damage. This protection includes a prohibition of the use of methods or means of warfare which are intended or may be expected to cause such damage to the natural environment and thereby to prejudice the health or survival of the population. [Art. 55.1]

Deployments Taking Toll on Military’s Children

2009-12-07T16:33:00.001-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/07/us/07study.html

December 7, 2009
Deployments Taking Toll on Military’s Children
By JAMES DAO

After eight years of war, children with parents in the military are reporting signs of emotional wear and tear from long and repeated deployments, a new study shows.

The study by the RAND Corporation found that children in military families were more likely to report anxiety than children in the general population. The researchers also found that the longer a parent had been deployed in the previous three years, the more likely their children were to have difficulties in school and at home.

Those difficulties included things like missing school activities, feeling that people did not understand their problems, having to take care of siblings and struggling to deal with parents returning from deployment.

The study, which was to be published Monday by the journal Pediatrics, is considered the largest on the subject, and was based on telephone interviews with nearly 1,500 children, ages 11 to 17, and their primary caregivers. It was commissioned by the National Military Family Association, a nonprofit support group.

Anita Chandra, the primary investigator, said she was surprised by the correlation between the months a parent was deployed and the problems reported by their children. “We thought the challenges of deployment would wane as the deployment went on,” Ms. Chandra said in an interview.

Almost all of the families in the study, 95 percent, said a parent had deployed in the previous three years; those deployments lasted on average a total of 11 months.

The researchers found that children in families that lived on military bases tended to report fewer difficulties related to deployment than children who lived off post.

“Potentially, people living on post are more connected to support services,” Ms. Chandra said, adding that 70 percent of military children live outside military bases.

The study also found that many families encountered difficulties adjusting to the return of a deployed parent, a period known as reintegration.

For instance, Ms. Chandra said, the researchers found that caregivers who worked were more likely to report that their children were having problems during reintegration than caregivers who did not work. The vast majority of those caregivers were women.

Ms. Chandra said it was possible that the strain of reintegration was compounded by the stress on the family of a nondeployed parent’s job. But being employed is generally considered good for the mental health of a caregiver during deployment, she said.

The study found that girls tended to have more problems than boys during reintegration, and that older children struggled more during and after deployments than younger children. The researchers speculated that the pressure on girls and older children to assume household responsibilities might be one reason for the difference.

Ms. Chandra said the study suggested that the military should consider directing services to families during the later stages of long deployments, when more families report problems.

She said one potential shortcoming of the study was that its subjects were selected from applicants to a free camp sponsored by the National Military Family Association, called Operation Purple. She said it was possible that those families were not representative of the average military family.

Madagascar: Poverty Forces 2 Million Children into Hard Labour

2009-12-07T14:11:00.000-08:00

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=48552

Madagascar: Poverty Forces 2 Million Children into Hard Labour
Fanja Saholiarisoa
IPS News
Tue, 22 Sep 2009 15:42 EDT

Antanarivo - Poverty has increased dramatically in Madagascar since January, when a national protest movement to end the regime of former president Marc Ravalomanana plunged the country into a socio-economic crisis. Since then, the number of child laborers has risen by a whopping 25 percent.

Two million children under the age of 15 go to work every day instead of attending school, according to newly published research by the International Labour Office (ILO), United Nations children's fund UNICEF and the National Institute of Statistics (known by its French acronym, INSTAT).

In Ambalakely, a rural town in the south of the island, more than a hundred children pitch up for physically grueling work in the local stone quarry. They crush stones alongside their parents to produce rubble for the building industry. Due to widespread poverty and unemployment, day labor under the harshest conditions is their only means of survival.

"We leave home early each morning to reach the place. We don't return until late in the evening," said Jeannine Raheriniaina, a mother of four. To justify the presence of her children at the quarry, she hastens to say: "We have no other means to ensure our livelihood. They are here on their own (free will) because they know what their parents endure."

Her seven-year-old son, Mamitiana complains about the hard and exhausting work he has to perform each day: "I have to crush two big bags of gravel per day to make my mother happy."

Crushing stones

The ILO, UNICEF and INSTAT study found about 1.8 million children between the ages of 5 and 17 years have to work, and most are performing hazardous occupations, despite the fact that child labor is against international and Madagascan law. Many children are working as day laborers in the fishing industry, in stone quarries or as domestic servants, and most have to leave school and miss out on receiving even the most basic primary education.

The fate of one exploited teenager recently received national attention. 17-year-old Jeannine Razananirina from Behenjy, 60 kilometres south of the islands capital Antananarivo, was seriously injured when her employer deliberately burnt her with boiling water in June, and social workers helped her to lay charges.

"I could not bear the hardship any longer. I had no-one to rely on. After my experience, I will advise girls in my countryside not to go working in Antananarivo any more," the teenager said.

 Razananirina's case is not an isolated one, but children's plight gets little attention on the island. Poverty forces parents to ignore laws prohibiting child labor.

 "It's hard to educate parents who work in the stone quarries about the importance of sending their children to school," said Berthine Ralaivelo, director of Ilempona Primary School. She says many children come to school irregularly, depending on whether they have to work that day. As a result, enrollment figures fell this year from 50 percent to about 20 percent in the primary school, according to Ralaivelo.

Apart from denying children their right to education, child labor bears great health risks. According to the survey, 37 percent of child laborers said their activities have caused them harm. Many reported falling ill or being injured, with those performing physical tasks in the mining, manufacturing and agriculture sectors being the most vulnerable.

Health risks

Ever increasing poverty has turned child labor into normality in Madagascar. According to 2005 figures from UNICEF, almost 70 percent of the population live on under $1.25 per day. Although there are no recent statistics available, experts reckon the number of extremely poor people has increased substantially since the beginning of the socio-economic crisis earlier this year.

 "Poverty is the main cause for child labor. Parents don't have the means to feed their families, so they involve their children in work to increase the amount of money they make," explained Norotiana Jeannoda, president of the Association of Graduated Professionals in Social Work in Antananarivo.  

"A day in a stone mine makes 1,900 Malagasy ariary ($1). The more family members work, the more money they make."

A countrywide campaign to fight child labor, launched four years ago by ILO, has shown only little success, despite the fact that it has found government support. "The campaign has helped to (rescue) thousands of children in the work field, but many need still help," said Francesco D'Ovidio, ILO coordinator in Madagascar.

Although Madagascar has signed and ratified the ILO International Convention on the Minimum Age for Labor in 2000 and passed a national law in 2007, which prohibits children under the age of 15 from performing any kind of work, no one has been arrested or prosecuted for child labor in the country. Experts believe the law is futile, since fighting for survival will continue to take precedence over sending children to school.

"There is no effective solution to hold families who are in need responsible," explained independent psychologist Victorine Rakotondranivo. Only if government provides the poor with grants to help them out of poverty and manages to drastically reduce unemployment will children be able to return to school, she says.

Paraguay's Traffic Hub Imperils Female Teens

2009-12-07T14:10:00.000-08:00

http://www.womensenews.org/story/the-world/080108/paraguays-traffic-hub-imperils-female-teens

Paraguay's Traffic Hub Imperils Female Teens
Andy Footner
womensenews.org
Tue, 08 Jan 2008 15:30 EST

Trafficked girls and women from the Paraguayan interior are among the merchandise in the triple-border shopping region with Argentina and Brazil. Advocates try to help traumatized survivors find "some way to live."

Ciudad Del Este, Paraguay - The central business district of this border city is lined with stalls selling counterfeit goods. Shopping centers offer seemingly everything and at the right price to a constant stream of shoppers from Brazil and Argentina and tourists on their way to the magnificent nearby Iguazu Falls.

One dollar buys a bus ticket from Puerto Iguazu in Argentina, through Foz da Iguazu in Brazil, and into Ciudad del Este in Paraguay.

After leaving Argentina there are no further customs or passport checks. From the center of Ciudad del Este, a rickety bus--boarded at every stop by children selling bananas, socks or tissues--takes you to a wealthier part of town, marked by a McDonald's restaurant and security guards with huge guns outside half-constructed houses.

At the end of an unevenly cobbled street, facing a deserted park, is a small outfit with a long name: the Office of the Center for Awareness, Prevention and Companionship for Children and Adolescents in Situations of Commercial Sexual Exploitation.

Seventy percent of the cases that the children's charity, set up in 2003, assists are trafficking victims. Seventy percent of those have been trafficked internationally. All the children there are female.

Inside the building--which serves as an office as well as a temporary home for survivors with nowhere else to go--female teens take turns washing one another's hair. Two have young children crawling on the floor; a third is heavily pregnant. A volunteer is teaching them the basics of working in a beauty salon.

An important part of the charity's work is teaching skills to replace prostitution, says Celina Figueredo, director of the charity.

Notorious Hub

Ciudad del Este's surrounding Tri Border Area--where Paraguay meets Brazil and Argentina--has over the past five years attracted notoriety as a major hub in international people-trafficking.

Eighty-five percent of trafficking in Paraguay is for sexual exploitation, the International Organization of Migration estimates.

"Women are the victims," says Martha, who doesn't want her name mentioned. She says she has received anonymous death-threats for her anti-trafficking work in Paraguay and the wider region. "More than 90 percent of the victims are women, and more than 90 percent of the exploiters are men."

Martha says that after women are sexually exploited some are used to carry drugs "until they are caught or killed or whatever."

The region attracts women from the outlying countryside, mostly from Paraguay where almost half of the population scrape out a subsistence living from agriculture. Over a third of the population earns less than $1 a day each.

False Promises, Financial Desperation

Some of the young women who wind up being trafficked have come to the region following promises of work as domestic employees. Some are from local families desperate for any form of income.

In Puerto Iguazu in Argentina, Marcelina Antunez, a program coordinator with the anti-trafficking organization Light of Infancy, pulls out some examples from a thick file of case studies and press clippings about who gets trafficked.

Most are between 10 and 20 and were offered work in restaurants, as salespeople or in domestic service. Initially, many cooperate with traffickers and accept false documents to cross borders or lie to their parents about the work they are expected to do.

In some cases, the captive girls and young women choose to stay so they can earn small amounts of money and send it back to their families. But many are subject to isolation, starvation and violence. Many are introduced to drugs and alcohol--especially cheap cocaine derivatives similar to crack--and forced to work in prostitution.

"With birth control proscribed by the Catholic Church, it is common to find families of eight children all under 18, exacerbated by teenage pregnancies at the age of 13 or 14," says Figueredo. "Many of the families make the problem worse by making the children responsible for providing for the family. They have to go out onto the street and bring back money; it doesn't matter how. Often they get exploited so they can bring back money, or sometimes in exchange for goods, clothes, fruit or vegetables."

Grimly Realistic

Figueredo is grimly realistic about what her group can hope to achieve. "It's not a question of getting back to normal, which is impossible, but to regain some self-esteem and to find a way to live," she says.

Aside from the barely controlled movement of people over borders in the region, another growth factor in prostitution and trafficking hub is the recent influx of sex tourists drawn to the hotels and commercial districts around the monumental Iguazu.

"Brazil is taking steps to shore up the border," says Martha. "But their interest is mainly economic and doesn't take the social aspect into consideration. The truth is that for the traffickers the borders don't really exist. No one will ask who the child traveling with you is."

But while the border is porous for traffickers advocates says it's tough for anti-trafficking efforts because the area requires triple-nation cooperation.

"There are so many different officials to deal with on three levels--the local, regional and national--in three countries and in three different languages," says Martha. In addition to Spanish and Portuguese, advocates also need to understand Jopara, the mixture of Spanish and the indigenous language, Guarani, used in Paraguay. "If the area was one country it would be possible to control it much more easily, but we are trying to get the different authorities to work with each other when they don't even speak the same language."

Nonetheless, there are signs of progress.

In September the International Office of Migration--an intergovernmental agency of 122 countries, established in 1951--opened an office in Asuncion, Paraguay's capital, to focus, among other issues, on the outflow of its citizenry.

There is also a widespread publicity campaign--now on radio, on posters and on bus tickets--about the dangers of trafficking.

"The problem is that we're working like tortoises and there's an enormous network out there," says Figueredo. "Some of the people involved are very high up and untouchable. It's on a very big scale."

The Deadly Trade of Child Organ Trafficking

2009-12-07T14:08:00.000-08:00

http://www.aawsat.com/english/news.asp?section=3&id=7723

The Deadly Trade of Child Organ Trafficking
Prakriiti Gupta
Asharq Alawsat
Sat, 20 Jan 2007 10:40 EST

The horrific killings of 19 children and women in the Indian slum of Nithari, close to the affluent area of Noida on the outskirts of India's capital, Delhi, has brought into focus the horrific trade of human organ trafficking that is claiming the lives of thousands of children worldwide.

There is huge demand and a market for body parts especially eyes, hearts and kidneys belonging to children. Estimates indicate that at least one million children have been kidnapped and killed in the past 20 years for organs. A kidney or eyes can fetch up to US $10,000 and a heart could cost US $50,000 or more. Estimates further indicate that money laundering in this deadly trade accounts for up to 10% of the world's GDP, or as much US $5 trillion. As a result, the black market for children's organs is expanding and more and more children are kidnapped and killed.

While victims are primarily from Asia, Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Latin America and Africa, trafficking also takes place in developed countries.

Those who take part in this trade make false promises about employment opportunities for the children and give money to the parents. Children are also stolen from orphanages, or handed over through a fake adoption process and killed for their organs. The intermediary may earn between US $50 and US $20, 000 per child according to the source countries. In many cases, impoverished parents are sometimes persuaded to sell their children's organs for as little as US $500.

According to Dr Sam Vaknin, the Senior Business Correspondent for United Press International (UPI), a kidney fetches US $5000 in Turkey. A kidney from an Indian or Iraqi child, however, would cost a mere US $2000. Such amounts are pitiful in comparison to the thousands of dollars that wealthy individuals would pay for an organ.

A recent report of a retired Italian couple, who had been arrested for buying a five-year-old Albanian boy to provide organs for a transplant for their grandson and who paid US $6000 to the trafficking gang, is a clear indicator to this trade.

In Russia in late 2000, a grandmother was arrested for trying to sell her five-year-old grandson Andrei. With the help of the boy's uncle, the child was handed over to a man in exchange for US $90,000 who would then take him to "the West," where his kidneys and other organs would be removed and sold.

In 2001, Britain was also pressed by allegations of storing hearts, lungs, brains and other organs from children in hospitals. A Dutch pathologist Dick Van Velzen at the Alder Hey Children's Hospital in Liverpool had confessed to removing hundreds of thousands of organs from children's bodies and storing them in hospitals all over the country. The doctor told the BBC program 'Panorama' that body parts from living children were given to a pharmaceutical company for research in return for financial donations following management's instructions.

An inquiry by a British Medical Officer reported that in addition to over 2,000 hearts, there were a large number of brain parts, eyes taken from over 15,000 stillborn foetuses and perhaps most disturbingly of all, a number of children's heads and bodies. Professor Van Velzen, who was sacked from a hospital in Canada where he faced similar charges also worked at a hospital in Holland.

In 2004, Israeli doctors were charged of harvesting organs from Palestinian children.

In a culture where everything can be bought for a price, it seems as if the children are the ones paying the ultimate price.

Human organ trafficking has become a particularly profitable international trade. International criminal organisations have identified the opportunity created by the large gap between organ supply and demand.

There are millions of affluent individuals who await organs such as the heart, lung, liver, pancreas, kidney and intestines for transplants.

An escalating global demand for transplantable organs has been exacerbated by advances in pharmacology, better immunosuppressant drugs, and by improved medical transplant procedures. Thanks to the progress of science, the human body has become a valuable source of raw materials. Blood, organs, tissue, bone, sperm, ova, corneas, skin, embryos and placenta now all have commercial value.

A research team led by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Professor of Anthropology at Berkeley and one of the founding members of Organ Watch, has conducted comprehensive field research into the global trafficking of human organs and documented the practices of organ harvesting in many parts of the world, notably Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Israel, Turkey, South Africa, the United States, the United Kingdom and Asia. This research shows that abuses range from the harvesting of organs from executed prisoners in China to the removal of organs from live and dead bodies in Argentina and South Africa without the permission and knowledge of the families of the deceased.

Organ Watch has reported cases such as the charging of four American men in 1996 who illegally took bones and organs from over 1000 corpses. The men are said to have paid up to US $1000 per body to funeral home directors, with the bodies yielding up to US $250,000 dollars.

Dr. Crockett, an English kidney specialist, lost his license to practice medicine for life in 1989 because he had organized a network to sell children in Turkey to India for kidney transplants.

An American lawyer was arrested in Peru in 2004, after having exported a total of three thousand children in thirty months to the United States and Italy for organ transplants.

Latin America, Mexico and Brazil where human organ trafficking has been practiced for decades have the worst proven record of abuses against children for organ transplants.

The first official exposure was in 1986 in the Altiplano and Tamaulipas areas and the suburbs of San Luis in Latin America when children began disappearing rapidly and then returned to their families several weeks later with one kidney missing. The probe disclosed that the children had been taken to clinics near the U.S border.

A few years later, the police discovered several clandestine "nurseries" known as "casas de engorde" in Honduras. The children from here were illegally exported out of the country "for adoption." Investigations made a dramatic disclosure that the children were bought or stolen from poor families, and were sold for a minimum of US $10,000 each to organizations in the United States to be used as organ donors.

In August 1988 the revelations of Judge Angel Campos in Asuncion, Paraguay in Brazil also attracted a lot of attention. The police broke up an organization that was exporting children from Brazil in lieu of adoption.

The judge became wary about the fact that the children were being adopted by people "who did not seem to care whether the child walked with a limp, or had a harelip, or was born with an arm missing."

An adoption scandal also broke out in Italy in 1999 when 4000 Brazilian children arrived in Italy for adoption in four years. One thousand of them were located, however the other three thousand had disappeared without a trace. Two Italian judges, Angelo Gargani and Cesar Martinello went to Salvador de Bahia in Brazil. Upon their return, they warned the government that the Mafia was taking part in "human organ trafficking." These children were sent to clandestine clinics in Mexico and Thailand, as well as in Europe where they were dissected for their organs.

The trade continues to flourish even today. During the Dirty War in Argentina in the late 1970s and early 1980s, children were stolen and killed as physicians often collaborated with the military state. Anthropologist Marcelo Suarez Orozco (1987) described in lurid detail the abuse of children during the Dirty War. Babies and small children were kidnapped and then returned to their families with organs missing. In another case, in Ukraine, babies were stolen at birth and used for stem cell research. In 2005, media reports said that babies were taken from the mothers after delivery and parents were told that the babies had died after birth.

The trade, outlawed in all but a handful of countries, is legal and booming in Pakistan. According to a recent Pakistan Tribune report, frustrated by lengthy waiting lists at home and fearful of premature death, "transplant tourists," from Europe, the US and the Middle East are flocking to private Pakistani hospitals for operations which can be arranged in a matter days at a fraction of the cost in their native countries.

In 2004, similar instances of kidnapping in Afghanistan also made headlines. Ali Ahmad Jalali, the Interior Minister had also said that hundreds of children had been taken out of the country illegally in recent years, and some had been kidnapped for their organs.