Category Archives: Viva!

International Harvest, Inc. Recalls Organic Go Smile! Raw Coconut Because of Possible Health Risk

International Harvest, Inc of Mount Vernon, NY is recalling 14,620 lbs. of bulk and 24,270 bags of Organic Go Smile! Raw Coconut, because it has the potential to be contaminated with Salmonella, an organism which can cause serious and sometimes fatal infections in young children, frail or elderly people, and others with weakened immune systems. Healthy persons infected with Salmonella often experience fever, diarrhea (which may be bloody), nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain. In rare circumstances, infection with Salmonella can result in the organism getting into the bloodstream and producing more severe illnesses such as arterial infections (i.e., infected aneurysms), endocarditis and arthritis.

Secretive religious charity run by top US housing officials raises questions

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GJH Global Ministries, which made its website private after inquiries by the Guardian, does not appear to have a clear purpose

One of the top officials in Donald Trump’s housing department runs an opaque religious charity with a colleague who resigned from the administration when the Guardian found he was accused of fraud and exaggerated his biography.

Related: US housing department adviser quits amid questions of fraud and inflated biography

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Washington Breaks Out the “Just Following Orders” Nazi Defense for CIA Director-Designate Gina Haspel

via Sophia, NOT Loren!

During the Nuremberg Trials after World War II, several Nazis, including top German generals Alfred Jodl and Wilhelm Keitel, claimed they were not guilty of the tribunal’s charges because they had been acting at the directive of their superiors.

Ever since, this justification has been popularly known as the “Nuremberg defense,” in which the accused states they were “only following orders.”

The Nuremberg judges rejected the Nuremberg defense, and both Jodl and Keitel were hanged. The United Nations International Law Commission later codified the underlying principle from Nuremberg as “the fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”

This is likely the most famous declaration in the history of international law and is as settled as anything possibly can be.

However, many members of the Washington, D.C. elite are now stating that it, in fact, is a legitimate defense for American officials who violate international law to claim they were just following orders.

View of some of the nazi leaders accused of war crimes during the world war II during the war crimes trial at Nuremberg International Military Tribunal (IMT) court, held between November 20, 1945 and October 1, 1946. (From L to R) At the first row, Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, at the Second row, Karl Doenitz, Erich Raeder, Baldur Von Schirach, Fritz Sauckel.  AFP PHOTO        (Photo credit should read STRINGER/AFP/Getty Images)

View of some of the Nazi leaders accused of war crimes during World War II during the war crimes trial at Nuremberg International Military Tribunal court, held between Nov. 20, 1945 and Oct. 1, 1946.

Photo: Stringer/AFP/Getty Images

Specifically, they say Gina Haspel, a top CIA officer whom President Donald Trump has designated to be the agency’s next director, bears no responsibility for the torture she supervised during George W. Bush’s administration.

Haspel oversaw a secret “black site” in Thailand, at which prisoners were waterboarded and subjected to other severe forms of abuse. Haspel later participated in the destruction of the CIA’s videotapes of some of its torture sessions. There is informed speculation that part of the CIA’s motivation for destroying these records may have been that they showed operatives employing torture to generate false “intelligence” used to justify the invasion of Iraq.

John Kiriakou, a former CIA operative who helped capture many Al Qaeda prisoners, recently said that Haspel was known to some at the agency as “Bloody Gina” and that “Gina and people like Gina did it, I think, because they enjoyed doing it. They tortured just for the sake of torture, not for the sake of gathering information.” (In 2012, in a convoluted case, Kiriakou pleaded guilty to leaking the identity of a covert CIA officer to the press and spent a year in prison.)

Some of Haspel’s champions have used the exact language of the popular version of the Nuremberg defense, while others have paraphrased it.

One who paraphrased it is Michael Hayden, former director of both the CIA and the National Security Agency. In a Wednesday op-ed, Hayden endorsed Haspel as head of the CIA, writing that “Haspel did nothing more and nothing less than what the nation and the agency asked her to do, and she did it well.”

Hayden later said on Twitter that Haspel’s actions were “consistent with U.S. law as interpreted by the department of justice.” This is true: In 2002, the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department declared in a series of notorious memos that it was legal for the U.S. to engage in “enhanced interrogation techniques” that were obviously torture. Of course, the actions of the Nuremberg defendants had also been “legal” under German law.

John Brennan, who ran the CIA under President Barack Obama, made similar remarks on Tuesday when asked about Haspel. The Bush administration had decided that its torture program was legal, said Brennan, and Haspel “tried to carry out her duties at CIA to the best of her ability, even when the CIA was asked to do some very difficult things.”

Texas Republican Rep. Will Hurd used the precise language of the Nuremberg defense during a Tuesday appearance on CNN when Wolf Blitzer asked him to respond to a statement from Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.: “The Senate must do its job in scrutinizing the record and involvement of Gina Haspel in this disgraceful program.”

Hurd, a member of the House Intelligence Committee and a former CIA operative as well, told Blitzer that “this wasn’t Gina’s idea. She was following orders. … She implemented orders and was doing her job.”

Hurd also told Blitzer, “You have to remember where we were at that moment, thinking that another attack was going to happen.”

This is another defense that is explicitly illegitimate under international law. The U.N. Convention Against Torture, which was transmitted to the Senate by Ronald Reagan in 1988, states that “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

Notably, Blitzer did not have any follow-up questions for Hurd about his jarring comments.

Samantha Winograd, who served on President Obama’s National Security Council and now is an analyst for CNN, likewise used Nuremberg defense language in an appearance on the network. Haspel, she said, “was implementing the lawful orders of the president. … You could argue she should have quit because the program was so abhorrent. But she was following orders.”

Last but not least there’s Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, who issued a ringing defense of Haspel in Politico, claiming she was merely acting “in response to what she was told were lawful orders.”

Remarkably, this perspective has even seeped into the viewpoint of regular journalists. At a recent press conference at which Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul criticized Haspel, a reporter asked him to respond to “the counterargument” that “these policies were signed off by the Bush administration. … They were considered lawful at the time.”

It fell to Paul to make the obvious observation that appears to have eluded almost everyone else in official Washington: “This has been historically a question we’ve asked in every war: Is there a point at which soldiers say ‘no’? … Horrendous things happened in World War II, and people said, well, the German soldiers were just obeying orders. … I think there’s a point at which, even suffering repercussions, that if someone asks you to torture someone that you should say no.”

(Thank you to @jeanbilly545 and Scott Horton for telling me about Hurd and Paul’s remarks, respectively.)

Top photo: Gina Haspel speaks at the 2017 William J. Donovan Award Dinner.

The post Washington Breaks Out the “Just Following Orders” Nazi Defense for CIA Director-Designate Gina Haspel appeared first on The Intercept.

Russian hackers accused of attacking power grid but nuclear plants not compromised, US says

Hmmm… let’s see – they stole or reverse engineered attack code jointly developed by CIA and Mossad to attack Iranian nuclear power plants and now US President mired in traitorous activity claims outside power attacking US… Believe that and I have a bridge that I’d be willing to sell to you cheap… lol.

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The Trump administration accuses Russia of engineering a series of cyberattacks targeting American and European nuclear power plants, and water and electric systems.

Police launch murder inquiry over death of Nikolai Glushkov

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Met announces move after pathologist’s report on death of Russian exile in London this week

Police have launched a murder investigation into the death of the Russian businessman Nikolai Glushkov.

Scotland Yard announced the move after receiving a pathologist’s report that gave the cause of death as compression to the neck.

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Top Bottled Water Brands Contaminated with Plastic Particles: Report

By Editor, Sunday Times, Sri Lanka
Mar 15 2018 (The Sunday Times – Sri Lanka)

The world’s leading brands of bottled water are contaminated with tiny plastic particles that are likely seeping in during the packaging process, according to a major study across nine countries published Wednesday.

“Widespread contamination” with plastic was found in the study, led by microplastic researcher Sherri Mason of the State University of New York at Fredonia, according to a summary released by Orb Media, a US-based non-profit media collective.

Researchers tested 250 bottles of water in Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Lebanon, Mexico, Thailand, and the United States.

Plastic was identified in 93 percent of the samples, which included major name brands such as Aqua, Aquafina, Dasani, Evian, Nestle Pure Life and San Pellegrino.

The plastic debris included polypropylene, nylon, and polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which is used to make bottle caps.

“In this study, 65 percent of the particles we found were actually fragments and not fibers,” Mason told AFP.

“I think it is coming through the process of bottling the water. I think that most of the plastic that we are seeing is coming from the bottle itself, it is coming from the cap, it is coming from the industrial process of bottling the water.”

Particle concentration ranged from “zero to more than 10,000 likely plastic particles in a single bottle,” said the report.

On average, plastic particles in the 100 micron (0.10 millimeter) size range — considered “microplastics,” — were found at an average rate of 10.4 plastic particles per liter.

Even smaller particles were more common — averaging about 325 per liter.

Other brands that were found to contain plastic contaminated included Bisleri, Epura, Gerolsteiner, Minalba and Wahaha.

Experts cautioned that the extent of the risk to human health posed by such contamination remains unclear.

“There are connections to increases in certain kinds of cancer to lower sperm count to increases in conditions like ADHD and autism,” said Mason.

“We know that they are connected to these synthetic chemicals in the environment and we know that plastics are providing kind of a means to get those chemicals into our bodies.”

– Time to ditch plastic? –

Previous research by Orb Media has found plastic particles in tap water, too, but on a smaller scale.

“Tap water, by and large, is much safer than bottled water,” said Mason.

The three-month study used a technique developed by the University of East Anglia’s School of Chemistry to “see” microplastic particles by staining them using fluorescent Nile Red dye, which makes plastic fluorescent when irradiated with blue light.

“We have been involved with independently reviewing the findings and methodology to ensure the study is robust and credible,” said lead researcher Andrew Mayes, from UEA’s School of Chemistry.

“The results stack up.”

Jacqueline Savitz, chief policy officer for North America at Oceana, a marine advocacy group that was not involved in the research, said the study provides more evidence that society must abandon the ubiquitous use of plastic water bottles.

“We know plastics are building-up in marine animals, and this means we too are being exposed, some of us, every day,” she said.

“It’s more urgent now than ever before to make plastic water bottles a thing of the past.”

This story was originally published by The Sunday Times, Sri Lanka

The post Top Bottled Water Brands Contaminated with Plastic Particles: Report appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Nos matan porque pueden

Shameful, sham men kill women because they can…

Por negra, por lesbiana, por feminista, por haber salido de la favela, por estudiar, por obtener un título, por investigar, por política, por pensar, por denunciar la violencia policial, por mujer. ¡Marielle Franco, presente! Por querer fumar un porro, jorobar un rato, ratearse del colegio, por adolescente, por confiada. ¡Lucía Perez, presente! Por no querer…

The post Nos matan porque pueden appeared first on Cosecha Roja.

English classes aren’t a cure-all for racial inequality and division in Britain

Everyone speak, read, write which English? Londoner, Cockney, Scotch, Midlander, Dockside? Wanger English? What a toady idea.

Media Diversified

Maya Goodfellow discusses the idea of teaching English to migrants for the purposes of ‘integration’

Some myths refuse to die: austerity is a public necessity or the British Empire did a lot this country can be proud of. Periodically these ideas float to the surface of public discourse and produce the same, predictable flurry of conversation. This week, dressed up in one of its many different forms, it’s that immigrants, people of colour and specifically Muslims undermine ‘community cohesion’.

Cue the government’s former integration tsar, Louise Casey. This week she’s demanded the government set a target date for “everybody in the country” to speak English for the purposes of integration. In an effort to respond, Sajid Javid pledged to expand the teaching of English for immigrants after claiming 770,000 people in England can’t speak English.  This is a tired old tune – in 2011 David Cameron said immigrants who couldn’t speak English…

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