Archive for April 5th, 2009

SEOUL/UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – North Korea fired a long-range rocket on Sunday, provoking international outrage and sending the U.N. Security Council into an emergency meeting on how to react to Pyongyang’s defiance.

The reclusive communist state, which has tested a nuclear device and is in stalled six-party talks on ending its nuclear program, said a satellite was launched into orbit and was circling the Earth transmitting revolutionary songs.

The United States and South Korea, which called the launch a violation of U.N. resolutions, said the Taepodong-2 rocket failed to enter orbit. Analysts said the launch was effectively a test of a ballistic missile designed to carry a warhead as far as the U.S. state of Alaska.

“With this provocative act, North Korea has ignored its international obligations, rejected unequivocal calls for restraint, and further isolated itself from the community of nations,” U.S. President Barack Obama said.

China, the nearest North Korea has to a major ally, and Russia called on all sides for calm and restraint.

The 15-nation Security Council went into a closed-door session in New York on Sunday afternoon but China and Russia have made clear they will use their veto power to block any resolution imposing new sanctions on Pyongyang.

French Ambassador Jean-Maurice Ripert called on all members, including Russia and China, to unite in criticizing Pyongyang.

“We expect the council to unanimously condemn what has happened,” he told reporters ahead of the meeting.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called on North Korea to return to the nuclear talks with the United States, China, Japan, South Korea and Russia.

OBAMA SEEKS NUCLEAR CUTS

The launch was the first big challenge for Obama in dealing with North Korea, whose efforts to build a nuclear arsenal have long plagued ties with Washington.

Addressing a crowd in Prague during a European tour, Obama committed himself to reducing the U.S. nuclear arsenal and said Washington would seek to engage all nuclear weapons states in arms reduction efforts.

Obama remained committed to talks to “denuclearize” North Korea, the White House said.

South Korea branded the launch a “reckless” act, Japan said it was “extremely regrettable” and the European Union condemned Pyongyang’s step. NATO called it “highly provocative.”

“There is only one response possible: the union of the international community must punish a regime that doesn’t respect any international rules,” French President Nicolas Sarkozy said.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called her counterparts in Japan, South Korea, Russia and China to discuss the situation, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said.

He gave no further details. Clinton traveled with Obama during part of his European tour.

Analysts said the rocket launch may bolster North Korean leader Kim Jong-il’s authority after a suspected stroke last August raised doubts about his grip on power.

Kim toured the command center and witnessed the launch, North Korea’s official news agency KCNA reported, saying he met those who “contributed to the satellite launch by devoting all their wisdom and enthusiasm with ardent patriotism and warmly encouraged them before having a photograph taken with them.”

TOUGHER ENFORCEMENT

The United States, Japan and South Korea see the launch as a violation of a Security Council resolution passed in 2006 after Pyongyang’s nuclear test and other missile tests.

That resolution, number 1718, demands North Korea “suspend all activities related to its ballistic missile program” but China and Russia have said they were not convinced Sunday’s launch violated U.N. rules if the rocket carried a satellite.

Security Council diplomats said there was a flurry of phone calls and meetings before the afternoon session.

Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said the launch “merits an appropriately strong” U.N. response.

Washington and Tokyo planned to draft a resolution demanding stricter enforcement, and possibly expansion, of an existing arms embargo and financial sanctions.

“We will go back and work to both toughen existing regimes but (also) to add to that resolution,” Rice said, referring to resolution 1718.

Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi called officials in the United States, Russia, Japan and South Korea to discuss the launch, the Foreign Ministry said.

“All sides ought to look at the big picture (and) avoid taking actions which may exacerbate the situation further,” a Chinese statement said.

Using similar language, Russia’s foreign minister called on the international community to demonstrate a “balanced approach and caution” during the Security Council discussions.

‘NEGOTIATING HAND STRENGTHENED’

Washington, Seoul and Tokyo had said before the launch that in reality it would be a test of the Taepodong-2, which is designed to fly an estimated 6,700 km (4,200 miles).

The U.S. Northern Command said stage one of the missile fell into the Sea of Japan and the other stages, along with the payload, landed in the Pacific Ocean. No debris fell on Japan.

South Korea earlier said the rocket appeared to be carrying a satellite but Defense Minister Lee Sang-hee later told parliament it failed to orbit, Kyodo news agency reported.

Japan said it stopped monitoring the rocket after it had passed 2,100 km (1,305 miles) east of Tokyo.

In the only previous test flight of the Taepodong-2, in July 2006, the rocket blew apart 40 seconds after launch.

Sunday’s launch wins North Korea the attention it has sought as Obama’s new administration deals with the financial crisis and two wars, and it could bolster Kim’s hand in using military threats to win concessions from global powers.

“North Korea is likely to judge that its negotiating position has been strengthened now that it has both the nuclear and missile cards,” said Shunji Hiraiwa of Shizuoka Prefectural University in Japan.

The U.S. arms control coordinator, Gary Samore, said the launch meant missile defense would stay a priority.

Stephen Bosworth, U.S. special envoy for North Korea, said while the six-party talks were central to efforts to get North Korea to give up its nuclear program, Washington was ready for direct contact with Pyongyang.

(Additional reporting by Jon Herskovitz and Kim Yeon-hee in Seoul, Linda Sieg and Rodney Joyce in Tokyo, Caren Bohan and Matt Spetalnick in Prague; Editing by John O’Callaghan)

Wikipedia still thinks so, despite hundreds of pronouncements during G20 summit

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com

Despite the fact that the term “new world order” was mentioned in connection with the G20 this week hundreds of times by both global leaders and in news reports, it is still regarded as a “conspiracy theory” by that bastion of truthiness, Wikipedia.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown himself yesterday announced that the G20 heralded the creation of a “new world order” which would involve increased global regulation of economic markets.

A Google News search provides well over a thousand results of reports including the term “new world order” over the past couple of weeks.

Despite the fact that world leaders have been talking about a “new world order” for decades, in the context of the political agenda to diminish the power of sovereign states in favor of a move towards global governance, it was still regarded as a delusion of paranoid conspiracy theorists by the establishment media until relatively recently.

Now even Fox News and Sean Hannity are throwing their arms in the air and admitting that the “conspiracy theorists were right” as the agenda for global government is openly announced.

However, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which is notorious for being completely infested with maniacally obsessive trolls, crooked insiders, and establishment apologists, claims that in its warped version of reality, the “new world order” as a sinister concept is still a nebulous conspiracy theory.

But according to Wikipedia, it’s still a “conspiracy theory”.

Wikipedia attempts to make the differentiation by claiming that the new world order in the context of a sinister, undemocratic, and ultimately totalitarian political agenda, is a characterization embraced only by paranoid conspiracy theorists.

Presumably, Wikipedia is only willing to accept the fact that an agenda to create a new world order exists if that new world order equates to a happy, loving, positive move, where world bankers and global elitists really have the best interests of all of us at heart. Forgive us for being somewhat skeptical of that conclusion.

In reality, as we have exhaustively documented, the new world order has nothing to do with saving the world and everything to do with centralizing power and control into the hands of a gaggle of criminal globalists who are concerned about nothing other than increasing their domination over the planet – at the expense of the rest of the population.

The new world order is totalitarian by its very nature – shifting power away from sovereign countries to global institutions which have no accountability to the general public whatsoever, and through which the public has no voice or influence. That cannot be defined as anything else but undemocratic. There is no such thing as a “benign” new world order.

This very agenda was again enunciated this week by World Bank President and and Bilderberg elitist Robert Zoellick, who openly admitted the plan to eliminate national sovereignty and impose a global government during a speech on the eve of the G20 summit.

Speaking about the agenda to increase not just funding but power for international organizations on the back of the financial crisis, Zoellick stated, “If leaders are serious about creating new global responsibilities or governance, let them start by modernising multilateralism to empower the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank Group to monitor national policies.”

Proponents of a new world order have always disguised their rhetoric with flowery notions of achieving some kind of global utopia, but behind the scenes the real agenda has always been sinister, nepotistic and anathema to any reasonable notion of democratic freedom.

It’s about time the establishment media stopped parroting the words of globalists and blithely repeating the term “new world order” like it was going out of fashion, and actually started asking real questions about what it really means.

Discovery News

Gold nanospheres that bake tumors to death by attracting heat of low-powered lasers have been developed by scientists in California.

“You could send a person home, have them shine a laser on the specific part of the body with cancer for a couple weeks, and they could be cured of cancer,” said Jin Zhang, a professor at the University of California in Santa Cruz who helped develop the nanoparticles.

To create the gold nanospheres, the scientists started with nanospheres made from cobalt, then replaced the cobalt atoms with gold atoms, using the same process that turns the calcium in dinosaur bones into fossils.

The gold nanospheres are then coated in antibodies that detect, and then latch onto, cancer cells.

Once the nanospheres attach to cancer cells their uniform size of 30 nanometers becomes important in destroying the cancer cells.

Gold nanospheres of that size respond to a narrow range of infrared light by becoming hot. When the laser is shined onto the skin, the nanospheres heat up to searing temperatures and essentially bake the cancer cells to death.

If the gold nanospheres had different sizes, they would respond to different wavelengths of light. To compensate, scientists would have to either add an step to sort the nanospheres by size or inject more of them into the blood stream.

To test their idea, scientists intravenously injected skin cancer-ridden mice with a solution of the gold nanoparticles. After four hours the gold nanospheres had used their antibody-antigen to latch onto the harmful cells. Scientists shined a laser beam onto the mice, killing the cancer cells.

Once the nanoparticles have done their job and destroyed the tumor, the kidneys filter them out of a patient’s body within a few hours, explained Shouheng Sun, a professor at Brown University who also studies gold nanoparticles coated with tumor-specific antibodies.

Gold nanoparticles can be seen on an MRI machine and therefore used to locate a tumor. Sun’s team added iron nanoparticles to their gold units since iron nanoparticles can carry a chemotheraphy drug to the tumor as well.

The antibody-antigen approach to identifying tumor cells is the most important part of all the research, Sun says.

“Right now the biggest problem is that there is no capability to identify cancer cells,” said Sun. “With this new particle we can specifically target the agent for tumor cells, to enhance its therapeutic effects,” while minimizing the painful side effects of current chemotheraphy for cancer patients.

The unemployed twenty-two year old man who killed three Pittsburgh police officers and wounded two others in a four-hour shootout on Saturday morning had been heavily influenced by extremist conspiracy theories prior to the incident.

According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Richard Poplawski was “convinced the nation was secretly controlled by a cabal that would eradicate freedom of speech, take away his guns and use the military to enslave the citizenry. … He appeared to share a belief that the government was controlled from unseen forces, that troops were being shipped home from the Mideast to police the citizenry here, and that Jews secretly ran the country.”

Some of Poplawski’s beliefs are fairly commonplace among conservatives. For example, fears that the Obama administration intends to somehow ban gun ownership have recently become a staple on such relatively mainstream outlets as Glenn Beck’s program on Fox News.

However, many of his ideas appear to have come from more obscure sources. Poplawski’s best friend, Edward Perkovic, told the Post-Gazette, “He was really into politics and really into the First and Second amendment. … We recently discovered that 30 states had declared sovereignty. One of his concerns was why were these major events in America not being reported to the public.”

Perkovic was apparently referring to the so-called “sovereign state movement,” promoted by the Tenth Amendment Center, which presents secession as a reasonable response to federal gun laws and the power of the Federal Reserve and has recently encouraged legislators in a number of states to introduce resolutions reaffirming states rights.

The Post-Gazette also mentions the conspiracy theory website PrisonPlanet, run by radio talk show host Alex Jones, as a source for some of Poplawski’s more off-the-wall notions.

Last fall, that site ran an article, “U.S. Troops In Homeland ‘Crowd Control’ Patrols From October 1st,” which claimed that “U.S. troops returning from duty in Iraq will be carrying out homeland patrols in America from October 1st in complete violation of Posse Comitatus for the purposes of helping with ‘civil unrest and crowd control’ – which could include dealing with unruly Americans after a complete economic collapse.”

Poplawski had also posted pictures of himself at , a white supremacist website whose slogan is “white pride worldwide.” The discussion of the shootings at Stormfront, which began with speculations that the gunman would turn out to be “some non-white” or “a jew,” then turned to suspicions that the recent rash of shootings is a “setup” to push through gun control legislation, has become oddly muted since the revelation that Poplawski appears to be one of theirs.