Fresh questions were raised last night about Labour’s close links with the Libyan regime after it emerged that Saif Gaddafi was given special assistance by MI6 while he was a student in London.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1368026/MI6-gave-Gaddafi-s-son-London-minder-Questions-Labour-ties-Libya-playboy-Saif-given-point-man.html#ixzz1H92WDo7z
#NoAgenda #Libya
3/20/2011
Libyans form human chain against airstrikes by allied forces at Gaddafi's compound
http://www.sify.com/news/libyans-form-human-chain-against-airstrikes-by-allied-forces-at-gaddafi-s-compound-news-international-ldum4ihgihe.html
Thousands of Libyans crowded into Muammar Gaddafi's heavily fortified Bab Al-Aziziyah compound in Tripoli, which also includes military barracks, to form a human shield against possible air strikes by the allied forces.
The crowd included many women and children, who said they had family in Gaddafi's forces and had come to protect the compound from bombing, by forming a shield around it.
Gaddafi's supporters danced and sang songs quoting an often-repeated phrase in his speeches, "house by house, alley by alley." They shouted slogans and held portraits of Gaddafi, while loudspeakers boomed with songs praising the leader
The people fired defiant shots in the air after allied warplanes went into action in eastern Libya to stop the Gaddafi's forces from attacking the rebel-held city of Benghazi.
The western forces hit targets along the Libyan coast on Saturday, striking from the air and sea to force Gaddafi's troops to cease fire and end attacks on civilians, The New York Times reports.
In Misurata, the last major rebel holdout in western Libya, one person said residents were cheering the sound of air strikes. The Gaddafi forces had continued their siege on Saturday, and had cutoff of water and electricity, as they continued to fire at in the city.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect his family, he said that the rebels were happy with the air strikes by the western forces against Gaddafi. (ANI)
Was market-rigging computer program Goldman's or U.S. government's?
9:10p ET Friday, March 18, 2011
Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:
As The New York Times reported today in the story appended here, the computer programmer who got caught stealing Goldman Sachs' computer code for market-rigging operations has been sentenced by a federal judge to an astonishing eight years in prison. The most telling detail about the case may be, as the Times reports seemingly without awareness, the speed with which federal agents acted against the code theft. In early June 2009, the Times reports, the programmer copied the code from the Goldman Sachs computer system to a computer system in Germany. On July 2, 2009, the programmer delivered the code to his new employer in Chicago. He was arrested by six FBI agents the following day at the airport in Newark, New Jersey. The investigation was wrapped up within a month, perhaps in less than three weeks. Would the theft of computer programming from any other company (OK, except maybe JPMorgan Chase) be pursued so vigorously by the federal government when Osama bin Laden and dozens of murderers, bank robbers, and rapists remain on the loose? And was the government really obliging Goldman Sachs here, or was it taking care of itself, the market-rigging computer program really being part of a government operation, considered a matter of national security, like another market-rigging operation, the gold price suppression scheme?
CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
* * *
Ex-Goldman Programmer Gets Jail Term of 8 Years for Code Theft
By Azam Ahmed
The New York Times
Friday, March 18, 2011
http://www.gata.org/node/9714
Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:
As The New York Times reported today in the story appended here, the computer programmer who got caught stealing Goldman Sachs' computer code for market-rigging operations has been sentenced by a federal judge to an astonishing eight years in prison. The most telling detail about the case may be, as the Times reports seemingly without awareness, the speed with which federal agents acted against the code theft. In early June 2009, the Times reports, the programmer copied the code from the Goldman Sachs computer system to a computer system in Germany. On July 2, 2009, the programmer delivered the code to his new employer in Chicago. He was arrested by six FBI agents the following day at the airport in Newark, New Jersey. The investigation was wrapped up within a month, perhaps in less than three weeks. Would the theft of computer programming from any other company (OK, except maybe JPMorgan Chase) be pursued so vigorously by the federal government when Osama bin Laden and dozens of murderers, bank robbers, and rapists remain on the loose? And was the government really obliging Goldman Sachs here, or was it taking care of itself, the market-rigging computer program really being part of a government operation, considered a matter of national security, like another market-rigging operation, the gold price suppression scheme?
CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
* * *
Ex-Goldman Programmer Gets Jail Term of 8 Years for Code Theft
By Azam Ahmed
The New York Times
Friday, March 18, 2011
http://www.gata.org/node/9714
3/19/2011
More about Libya
World War III: One Nation at a Time
Look past the puppets and above the globalists' stage.
commentary by Tony Cartalucci
Foreign Intervention in Libya: Creation of 4th War Theater
http://tv.globalresearch.ca/2011/03/foreign-intervention-libya-creation-4th-war-theater
All Out War on Libya, Surge in the Price of Crude Oil...
"Humanitarian Wars are Good for Business".... Speculators Applaud....
by Michel Chossudovsky
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=23741
#Libya #NoAgenda
Look past the puppets and above the globalists' stage.
commentary by Tony Cartalucci
Foreign Intervention in Libya: Creation of 4th War Theater
http://tv.globalresearch.ca/2011/03/foreign-intervention-libya-creation-4th-war-theater
All Out War on Libya, Surge in the Price of Crude Oil...
"Humanitarian Wars are Good for Business".... Speculators Applaud....
by Michel Chossudovsky
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=23741
#Libya #NoAgenda
globaalin eliitin käsikassara a. stubb räksyttää ilta-sanomissa!
- Me emme voi katsoa läpi sormien, kun ihmisoikeuksia rikotaan ja ihmisiä tapetaan, Stubb sanoo.
http://www.iltasanomat.fi/kotimaa/Stubb%20YKn%20ilmaiskup%C3%A4%C3%A4t%C3%B6s%20historiallinen/art-1288376979796.html
kenen etua yk ajaa?! ei ainakaan libyan
#noagenda
WAR IS PEACE FUCKERS!
The Libyan Rebublic - Transitional National Council
WHO IS BEHIND THIS BULLCRAP?
Council members
The Council is composed of thirty one (31) members representing the various regions and cities of Libya. A number of these members have been named while the names of those representing Ajdabiya, Al Kufrah, Ghat, Nalut, Misratah, Az Zintan and Az Zawiya will not be declared for safety reasons. The Council is eagerly awaiting for the naming of representatives from Central and Southern Libya and Tripoli.
1. Counselor: Mustafa Mohammed Abdul Jalil as chairman of The Council.
2. Mr. Othman Suleiman El-Megyrahi (Batnan Area)
3. Mr. Ashour Hamed Bourashed (Darna City)
4. Dr. Abdelallah Moussa El-myehoub (Qouba Area)
5. Mr. Zubiar Ahmed El-Sharif (Representative of the political prisoners)
6. Mr. Ahmed Abduraba Al-Abaar (Benghazi City)
7. Mr.Dr. Fathi Mohamed Baja (Benghazi City)
8. Mr. Abdelhafed Abdelkader Ghoga (Benghazi City)
9. Mr Fathi Tirbil and Dr. Salwa Fawzi El-Deghali (Representative of youth and women)
http://whois.domaintools.com/ntclibya.org
Domain ID:D161690458-LROR
Domain Name:NTCLIBYA.ORG
Created On:06-Mar-2011 12:00:18 UTC
Last Updated On:07-Mar-2011 20:53:49 UTC
Expiration Date:06-Mar-2013 12:00:18 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:Mesh Digital Limited (R1728-LROR)
Status:CLIENT DELETE PROHIBITED
Status:CLIENT TRANSFER PROHIBITED
Status:CLIENT UPDATE PROHIBITED
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Registrant ID:MNTC8B1063123
Registrant Name:Identity Protection Service
Registrant Organization:Identity Protect Limited
Registrant Street1:PO BOX 1125
Registrant Street2:
Registrant Street3:
Registrant City:Guildford
Registrant State/Province:Surrey
Registrant Postal Code:GU1 9LU
Registrant Country:GB
Registrant Phone:+44.1483307527
Registrant Phone Ext.:
Registrant FAX:+44.1483304031
Registrant FAX Ext.:
Registrant Email:
Admin ID:MNTC8B1063123
Admin Name:Identity Protection Service
Admin Organization:Identity Protect Limited
Admin Street1:PO BOX 1125
Admin Street2:
Admin Street3:
Admin City:Guildford
Admin State/Province:Surrey
Admin Postal Code:GU1 9LU
Admin Country:GB
Admin Phone:+44.1483307527
Admin Phone Ext.:
Admin FAX:+44.1483304031
Admin FAX Ext.:
Admin Email:
Tech ID:MNTC8B1063123
Tech Name:Identity Protection Service
Tech Organization:Identity Protect Limited
Tech Street1:PO BOX 1125
Tech Street2:
Tech Street3:
Tech City:Guildford
Tech State/Province:Surrey
Tech Postal Code:GU1 9LU
Tech Country:GB
Tech Phone:+44.1483307527
Tech Phone Ext.:
Tech FAX:+44.1483304031
Tech FAX Ext.:
Tech Email:
Name Server:NS0.BYTE-HOUSE.NET
Name Server:NS1.BYTE-HOUSE.NET
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
DNSSEC:Unsigned
Council members
The Council is composed of thirty one (31) members representing the various regions and cities of Libya. A number of these members have been named while the names of those representing Ajdabiya, Al Kufrah, Ghat, Nalut, Misratah, Az Zintan and Az Zawiya will not be declared for safety reasons. The Council is eagerly awaiting for the naming of representatives from Central and Southern Libya and Tripoli.
1. Counselor: Mustafa Mohammed Abdul Jalil as chairman of The Council.
2. Mr. Othman Suleiman El-Megyrahi (Batnan Area)
3. Mr. Ashour Hamed Bourashed (Darna City)
4. Dr. Abdelallah Moussa El-myehoub (Qouba Area)
5. Mr. Zubiar Ahmed El-Sharif (Representative of the political prisoners)
6. Mr. Ahmed Abduraba Al-Abaar (Benghazi City)
7. Mr.Dr. Fathi Mohamed Baja (Benghazi City)
8. Mr. Abdelhafed Abdelkader Ghoga (Benghazi City)
9. Mr Fathi Tirbil and Dr. Salwa Fawzi El-Deghali (Representative of youth and women)
http://whois.domaintools.com/ntclibya.org
Domain ID:D161690458-LROR
Domain Name:NTCLIBYA.ORG
Created On:06-Mar-2011 12:00:18 UTC
Last Updated On:07-Mar-2011 20:53:49 UTC
Expiration Date:06-Mar-2013 12:00:18 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:Mesh Digital Limited (R1728-LROR)
Status:CLIENT DELETE PROHIBITED
Status:CLIENT TRANSFER PROHIBITED
Status:CLIENT UPDATE PROHIBITED
Status:TRANSFER PROHIBITED
Registrant ID:MNTC8B1063123
Registrant Name:Identity Protection Service
Registrant Organization:Identity Protect Limited
Registrant Street1:PO BOX 1125
Registrant Street2:
Registrant Street3:
Registrant City:Guildford
Registrant State/Province:Surrey
Registrant Postal Code:GU1 9LU
Registrant Country:GB
Registrant Phone:+44.1483307527
Registrant Phone Ext.:
Registrant FAX:+44.1483304031
Registrant FAX Ext.:
Registrant Email:
Admin ID:MNTC8B1063123
Admin Name:Identity Protection Service
Admin Organization:Identity Protect Limited
Admin Street1:PO BOX 1125
Admin Street2:
Admin Street3:
Admin City:Guildford
Admin State/Province:Surrey
Admin Postal Code:GU1 9LU
Admin Country:GB
Admin Phone:+44.1483307527
Admin Phone Ext.:
Admin FAX:+44.1483304031
Admin FAX Ext.:
Admin Email:
Tech ID:MNTC8B1063123
Tech Name:Identity Protection Service
Tech Organization:Identity Protect Limited
Tech Street1:PO BOX 1125
Tech Street2:
Tech Street3:
Tech City:Guildford
Tech State/Province:Surrey
Tech Postal Code:GU1 9LU
Tech Country:GB
Tech Phone:+44.1483307527
Tech Phone Ext.:
Tech FAX:+44.1483304031
Tech FAX Ext.:
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Name Server:NS0.BYTE-HOUSE.NET
Name Server:NS1.BYTE-HOUSE.NET
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Name Server:
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DNSSEC:Unsigned
Saif al-Gaddafi 'wants money back from Sarkozy'
http://www.euronews.net/2011/03/16/exclusive-saif-al-gaddafi-wants-money-back-from-sarkozy/
now i see why that french criminal president sarkozy wants to carpetbomb libya back to stoneage.
3/18/2011
Feds after celebrity hacker ring
High School Musical star Vanessa Hudgens met with police yesterday to discuss her latest nude photo scandal.
The actress, 22, is 'deeply upset and angered' after photos taken several years ago were leaked onto an internet site.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have been called into investigate because they believe Hudgens is just one of many celebrity victims of a hacker ring.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1367160/Vanessa-Hudgens-talks-police-nude-photo-leak-FBI-close-celebrity-hacker-ring.html#ixzz1Gx73ANFc
Sotilaallis-teollinen kompleksi suomessa
Volanen väittää, että armeija ja poliisi ovat karanneet Suomessa hallituksen valvonnasta. Erityisesti sotilaat ovat vieneet poliitikoilta valtaa ja alkaneet johtaa itse itseään.
http://suomenkuvalehti.fi/jutut/kotimaa/varoitus-vallankaappauksesta-armeija-ja-poliisi-karanneet-hallituksen-valvonnasta-suomessa
3/17/2011
3/15/2011
Police arrest hundreds around the world in connection with the world’s largest pedophile network
THE HAGUE (BNO NEWS) -- Police have arrested a 37-year-old Dutch man on suspicion of running what is believed to be the world's largest online pedophile network, a police spokeswoman said on Tuesday.
The 37-year-old man was arrested in November 2009 and is suspected of running an international pedophile forum involving more than 60,000 members. It is believed to be the world's largest network of its kind and the international investigation lasted more than 3 years.
The operation was led by the the European Police Office (EUROPOL) and hundreds of arrests have been made in the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Italy, Australia and other nations.
(More to come.)
(Copyright 2011 by BNO News B.V. All rights reserved. Info: sales@bnonews.com.)
http://channel6newsonline.com/2011/03/police-arrest-hundreds-around-the-world-in-connection-with-the-worlds-largest-pedophile-network/
The 37-year-old man was arrested in November 2009 and is suspected of running an international pedophile forum involving more than 60,000 members. It is believed to be the world's largest network of its kind and the international investigation lasted more than 3 years.
The operation was led by the the European Police Office (EUROPOL) and hundreds of arrests have been made in the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Italy, Australia and other nations.
(More to come.)
(Copyright 2011 by BNO News B.V. All rights reserved. Info: sales@bnonews.com.)
http://channel6newsonline.com/2011/03/police-arrest-hundreds-around-the-world-in-connection-with-the-worlds-largest-pedophile-network/
PEDO NETWORK: HUNDREDS OF ARRESTS MADE IN THE U.S., UK, BRAZIL, ITALY, AUSTRALIA AND OTHER NATIONS
THE HAGUE (BNO NEWS) -- Hundreds of people have been arrested in the United States, the UK, Brazil, Italy, Australia and other nations in connection with the world's largest pedophile network, Dutch police say.
(Copyright 2011 by BNO News B.V. All rights reserved. Info: sales@bnonews.com.)
http://channel6newsonline.com/2011/03/pedo-network-hundreds-of-arrests-made-in-the-u-s-uk-brazil-italy-australia-and-other-nations/
(Copyright 2011 by BNO News B.V. All rights reserved. Info: sales@bnonews.com.)
http://channel6newsonline.com/2011/03/pedo-network-hundreds-of-arrests-made-in-the-u-s-uk-brazil-italy-australia-and-other-nations/
3/14/2011
Cyber police is here - Consequences will never be the same!
ASIO has created a unit to combat cyber spying, in the latest move by government to protect Australia's online networks.
http://www.theage.com.au/technology/security/new-cyber-espionage-unit-revealed-20110309-1bo0y.html
remember this? :D
http://www.theage.com.au/technology/security/new-cyber-espionage-unit-revealed-20110309-1bo0y.html
remember this? :D
Murdoch reporter 'hired computer hacker'
A senior journalist at Rupert Murdoch's News of the World allegedly paid a private investigator to hack into the computer of a former intelligence officer.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/press/murdoch-reporter-hired-computer-hacker-2240975.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/press/murdoch-reporter-hired-computer-hacker-2240975.html
3/13/2011
Jeffrey Epstein, “Queen Bee” and other fucking disgusting lying elite perverts!
‘She told us that although Mr Epstein and she were a couple, we would see lots of beautiful girls passing in and out, but that was his nature.
‘She said that he gets what he wants but that she was always the “Queen Bee” and the one in charge.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1365733/How-Prince-Andrew-shared-room-Epsteins-Caribbean-hideaway-busty-blonde-claimed-brain-surgeon.html#ixzz1GTvGH0Oa
there must be shitloads of blackmailing material about these peeps in highplaces .. so who really pulls the strings??
3/12/2011
Japan Tsunami Caused by HAARP?
HAARP was turned on at approximately 0:00 hours 9 March, 2011 UTC
http://www.atlanteanconspiracy.com/2011/03/japan-tsunami-caused-by-haarp.html
Western Bankers Threatened Japan with HAARP Eco-Destruction a Year Before China Quakes
3/11/2011
3/10/2011
Homeland Security operation offered "sex tourism"
Department of Homeland Security last year launched an undercover web site that purported to arrange trips from the U.S. to Canada, where clients could engage in sexual activity with minors
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/internet/undercover-web-site-derailed-hosting-firm
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/internet/undercover-web-site-derailed-hosting-firm
COW FLU......
ANIMAL health experts in Scotland are investigating how to control a fatal wasting virus in cows amid fears it could be passed on to humans.
http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/fears-humans-could-catch-fatal-cow-virus-1.1089553?localLinksEnabled=false
3/09/2011
The capital of hell
During the Mubarak era the state security HQ in Nasr city had this infamous reputation not only inside the country but also outside it. Its international infamousness was recognized when it turned out that the Bush administration used its secret cells and also the expertise of its infamous officers to interrogate its illegal detainees during its unholy war on terrorism.
The Egyptians called that big building in Nasr city district “The capital of hell” and you can imagine why Egyptians called it like that. A scary building any taxi driver will tell you horror stories about it and about the secret underground prison cells and torture rooms...
http://egyptianchronicles.blogspot.com/2011/03/night-capital-of-hell-fell-down.html
The Egyptians called that big building in Nasr city district “The capital of hell” and you can imagine why Egyptians called it like that. A scary building any taxi driver will tell you horror stories about it and about the secret underground prison cells and torture rooms...
http://egyptianchronicles.blogspot.com/2011/03/night-capital-of-hell-fell-down.html
Charles Taylor is right ...
"this was not a trial at all" and that the prosecution was political.
Mr Taylor has long claimed that he was tried because powerful countries such as the US and the UK wanted him out of office in Liberia.
Mr Griffiths said justice should be applied equally to all and asked why Libya's leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was not in the dock.
Charles Taylor's Sierra Leone war crimes trial attacked
3/08/2011
Toimittaja Bettina Sågbom
Mitä helvettiä nyt taas? Mistä näitä vajakkeja tulee kokoajan lisää
toisaalta tämä ko toimittajan kommentti pistää miettimään josko hän onkin oikeassa?
Mutta oikeasti voi vittu nyt pää pois perseestä!
3/07/2011
European Parliamentarians vote to boost their expenses - again
The decision will increase the overall parliamentary budget by almost 13.25 million euros this year.
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,14888494,00.html
3/03/2011
Philadelphia Priest Blames Aliens for Why He Abused Children!
A Philadelphia area priest has been arrested for sexually abusing as many as 20 young males over a 15 year period. The priest told police that he was visited by aliens sent from God and was told that it was his mission to perform these sexual acts!
http://newsflavor.com/world/usa-canada/philadelphia-priest-blames-aliens-for-why-he-abused-children/#ixzz1FXINvOVc
Israel, Global CST and Lybia :)
Israeli arms distribution company Global CST has reportedly, under the authorization of Tel Aviv, provided Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi with African mercenaries to clamp down on anti-government protesters.
http://presstv.com/detail/167814.html
2/28/2011
Dead / Jailed /Missing Scientists & Individuals Affiliated With The BP Oil Disaster
Dead / Jailed /Missing Scientists & Individuals Affiliated With The BP Oil Disaster
Gregory Stone
February 17, 2011 - LSU scientist Gregory Stone, 54 - Unknown Illness
Anthony Nicholas Tremonte
January 26, 2011 - Anthony Nicholas Tremonte, 31 - Mississippi Department of Marine Resources officer, from Ocean Springs arrested on child porn charge
Dr. Thomas B. Manton
January 19, 2011 - Dr. Thomas B. Manton former President and CEO of the International Oil Spill Control Corporation - imprisonment and subsequent murder while jailed
John P. Wheeler III
December 31, 2010 - John P. Wheeler III, a former Pentagon official and presidential aide and a defense consultant and expert on chemical and biological weapons - was beaten to death in an assault, body was discovered in a Wilmington landfill
James Patrick Black
November 23, 2010 - James Patrick Black, an incident commander for BP's Gulf of Mexico oil spill response team, died Tuesday night near Destin, Florida in a small plane crash'
Chitra Chaunhan
November 15, 2010 - Chitra Chaunhan, 33 - Chauhan worked in the USF Center for Biological Defense and Global Health Infectious Disease Research - Found dead in an apparent suicide by cyanide at a Temple Terrace hotel. She leaves behind a husband and a young child.
Dr. Jeffrey Gardner, Swan Doctor
November, 2010 - MIA Status - Dr. Geoffrey Gardner, Lakeland, FL - Swan expert who “ran into legal trouble over an expired prescription license has closed his practice” — Was investigating unexplained bird deaths near Sarasota abruptly and immediately closed his practice, and apparently his investigation into the deaths of swans in Sarasota, suspected to have been impacted by the BP Oil Disaster. No one has heard or spoken with him since. Watch this news report covering his investigation before his disappearance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqbx2TnbYlc&feature=player_embedded
Senator Ted Stevens
August 9, 2010 - Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, 86, the longest-serving Republican senator in history, was among nine people on board when the 1957 DeHavilland DHC-3 Otter, crashed into a brush- and rock-covered mountainside Monday afternoon about 17 miles north of the southwest Alaska fishing town of Dillingham, federal officials said. Stevens was the recipient of a whistleblower's communication relative to the BP Oil Disaster blow-out preventer, and a conspiracy of secrecy to hide the facts from the public. (http://beforeitsnews.com/story/132/410/Sen._Ted_Stevens_Killed_In_Plane_Crash_He_Got_A_Million_From_BP_And_Knew_Blow_Out_Preventer_Was_A_Problem._Was_He_Whacked.html)
"You and your fellow Committee members may wish to require BP to explain what action was ultimately instituted to cease the practice of falsifying BOP tests at BP Prudhoe drilling rigs. It was a cost saving but dangerous practice, again endangering the BP workforce, until I exposed it to Senator Ted Stevens, the EPA, and the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission." The cause of the crash is still an OPEN investigation by the NTSB (http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/GenPDF.asp?id=ANC10MA068&rpt=p)
Matthew Simmons
August 13, 2010 - Matthew Simmons, 67 - Simmons’ body was found Sunday night in his hot tub, investigators said. An autopsy by the state medical examiner’s office concluded Monday that he died from accidental drowning with heart disease as a contributing factor - “It was painful as can be” to be only insider willing to speak out against the "officials" during the BP Oil Disaster in the Gulf of Mexico
Scientist Joseph Morrissey
April 6, 2010 - Scientist Joseph Morrissey, 46 - cell biologist and college professor, a near-native Floridian who chose to return to South Florida after studying at elite universities - was fatally shot during what police say was a home invasion robbery.
Gregory Stone
February 17, 2011 - LSU scientist Gregory Stone, 54 - Unknown Illness
Anthony Nicholas Tremonte
January 26, 2011 - Anthony Nicholas Tremonte, 31 - Mississippi Department of Marine Resources officer, from Ocean Springs arrested on child porn charge
Dr. Thomas B. Manton
January 19, 2011 - Dr. Thomas B. Manton former President and CEO of the International Oil Spill Control Corporation - imprisonment and subsequent murder while jailed
John P. Wheeler III
December 31, 2010 - John P. Wheeler III, a former Pentagon official and presidential aide and a defense consultant and expert on chemical and biological weapons - was beaten to death in an assault, body was discovered in a Wilmington landfill
James Patrick Black
November 23, 2010 - James Patrick Black, an incident commander for BP's Gulf of Mexico oil spill response team, died Tuesday night near Destin, Florida in a small plane crash'
Chitra Chaunhan
November 15, 2010 - Chitra Chaunhan, 33 - Chauhan worked in the USF Center for Biological Defense and Global Health Infectious Disease Research - Found dead in an apparent suicide by cyanide at a Temple Terrace hotel. She leaves behind a husband and a young child.
Dr. Jeffrey Gardner, Swan Doctor
November, 2010 - MIA Status - Dr. Geoffrey Gardner, Lakeland, FL - Swan expert who “ran into legal trouble over an expired prescription license has closed his practice” — Was investigating unexplained bird deaths near Sarasota abruptly and immediately closed his practice, and apparently his investigation into the deaths of swans in Sarasota, suspected to have been impacted by the BP Oil Disaster. No one has heard or spoken with him since. Watch this news report covering his investigation before his disappearance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqbx2TnbYlc&feature=player_embedded
Senator Ted Stevens
August 9, 2010 - Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, 86, the longest-serving Republican senator in history, was among nine people on board when the 1957 DeHavilland DHC-3 Otter, crashed into a brush- and rock-covered mountainside Monday afternoon about 17 miles north of the southwest Alaska fishing town of Dillingham, federal officials said. Stevens was the recipient of a whistleblower's communication relative to the BP Oil Disaster blow-out preventer, and a conspiracy of secrecy to hide the facts from the public. (http://beforeitsnews.com/story/132/410/Sen._Ted_Stevens_Killed_In_Plane_Crash_He_Got_A_Million_From_BP_And_Knew_Blow_Out_Preventer_Was_A_Problem._Was_He_Whacked.html)
"You and your fellow Committee members may wish to require BP to explain what action was ultimately instituted to cease the practice of falsifying BOP tests at BP Prudhoe drilling rigs. It was a cost saving but dangerous practice, again endangering the BP workforce, until I exposed it to Senator Ted Stevens, the EPA, and the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission." The cause of the crash is still an OPEN investigation by the NTSB (http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/GenPDF.asp?id=ANC10MA068&rpt=p)
Matthew Simmons
August 13, 2010 - Matthew Simmons, 67 - Simmons’ body was found Sunday night in his hot tub, investigators said. An autopsy by the state medical examiner’s office concluded Monday that he died from accidental drowning with heart disease as a contributing factor - “It was painful as can be” to be only insider willing to speak out against the "officials" during the BP Oil Disaster in the Gulf of Mexico
Scientist Joseph Morrissey
April 6, 2010 - Scientist Joseph Morrissey, 46 - cell biologist and college professor, a near-native Floridian who chose to return to South Florida after studying at elite universities - was fatally shot during what police say was a home invasion robbery.
2/27/2011
2/26/2011
2/24/2011
ATF Gunrunning
ATF agents told my staff that the agency allowed the sale of assault rifles to known and suspected straw purchasers for an illegal trafficking ring near the southwest border. Authorities allegedly recovered two of those weapons at the scene of a firefight near the southwest border on December 14, 2010. Customs and Border Protection Agent Brian Terry lost his life in that firefight and may have been killed with one of those two rifles.
More calls for an investigation into ATF’s Project Gunrunner scandal
Scandal at DOJ: smuggling to pad statistics on U.S. guns in Mexico
America’s Third War: Agent Brian Terry, A Policy of Silence?
Libya: The Rest of the Story
Libyan opposition literally running protests from Washington.
by Tony Cartalucci
http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2011/02/libya-rest-of-story.html
by Tony Cartalucci
http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2011/02/libya-rest-of-story.html
Again we are told the protests are spontaneous, inspired by the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings. Again we are told it is the youth yearning for freedom and "democracy." But when we look behind the curtain, we see yet another old man from Washington pulling the levers, blowing the smoke, and flashing the lights.
Pyramids of Waste (2010)
Pyramids of Waste (2010) also known as "The lightbulb conspiracy". The documentary is about how our economic system -- based largely on consumerism -- is really breaking our planet down.
'Superpowers' crimes unprecedented'
“While the Palestinian nation did not have any role in the World War II, they (the Zionists) occupied their land by spreading fraudulent propaganda and took people from other parts of the world to Palestine and bring about the destitute of the native people,” he further explained.
“Within 65 years, [the global arrogance] imposed 5 heavy wars on the [Middle East] region … and used non-conventional bombs, killed women and children and in front of cameras demolished people's homes over their heads,” President Ahmadinejad went on to say.
But “the organizers of those crimes receive Nobel Prizes,” Ahmadinejad pointed out.
http://presstv.com/detail/166099.html
“Within 65 years, [the global arrogance] imposed 5 heavy wars on the [Middle East] region … and used non-conventional bombs, killed women and children and in front of cameras demolished people's homes over their heads,” President Ahmadinejad went on to say.
But “the organizers of those crimes receive Nobel Prizes,” Ahmadinejad pointed out.
http://presstv.com/detail/166099.html
ME fights battle of true independence
Press TV: Yesterday the United Nations Security Council held a meeting on Libya. What makes Libya so different from Egypt and Tunisia as well as Bahrain, Yemen etc. for the UN Security Council to be playing such a role?
Bakach: The fear here is, since the Western colonial powers do not have a viable political alternative to have a controlled transition of power like what happened in Egypt and Tunisia, the UN Security Council steps in to possibly create justification for a later intervention in the pretext of safeguarding oil interest, stability and so on. We know after all that the UN Security Council is no more than a convenient tool for the West to use as a fig leave to cover their imperial agenda. When it suits them, they use it. When they do not need it, they bypass it.
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/166812.html
2/21/2011
Wall st. crooks & liars
Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer.
"Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail," he said. "That's your whole story right there. Hell, you don't even have to write the rest of it. Just write that."
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-isnt-wall-street-in-jail-20110216
John Wheeler Killed By Hitman?
Pentagon aide 'was killed by hitman' claims distraught widow
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1358447/Pentagon-aide-killed-hitman-claims-distraught-widow.html#ixzz1Ebx6ZGIu
2/19/2011
gov backdoors
Black ops: how HBGary wrote backdoors for the government
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/black-ops-how-hbgary-wrote-backdoors-and-rootkits-for-the-government.ars/
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/black-ops-how-hbgary-wrote-backdoors-and-rootkits-for-the-government.ars/
Fox News Fail part 2
Fox News caught using 2010 CPAC footage with booing when reporting that Ron Paul won the 2011 CPAC Straw Poll. Watch and compare the video We Are Change Oklahoma shot at CPAC 2011 as the straw poll results were read.
HAH
HAH
2/18/2011
Tavallinen Maisteri taitaa ollakin tavallinen idiootti
Over 10 Russian peacekeepers killed in S.Ossetia-agencies
Georgian tanks and infantry, aided by Israeli military advisers, captured the capital of breakaway South Ossetia, Tskhinvali, early Friday, Aug. 8, bringing the Georgian-Russian conflict over the province to a military climax.Israel backs Georgia in Caspian Oil Pipeline Battle with Russia
U.S. Attacks Russia Through Client State Georgia
Georgia's attack on South Ossetia was likely approved by the United States, says Russian Ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin.http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=96083
"It is hard to imagine that (Georgian President Mikheil) Saakashvili embarked on this risky venture without some sort of approval from the side of the United States," Churkin told Russian NTV television on Wednesday.
2/10/2011
2/09/2011
2/08/2011
2/04/2011
1/31/2011
UAE spy network busted in Oman
Oman says it has detected an espionage ring tasked by the United Arab Emirates with spying on the affairs of its government and military.
“Security services uncovered a spying network belonging to the state security apparatus of the United Arab Emirates,” Reuters quoted the state Oman News Agency as saying on Sunday.
The spy network was “targeting the ruling regime in Oman and the way its government and military work,” it added.
The discovery defied the good relations between the two sides.
Some two months ago, a number of Omani nationals, some employed by the government, were arrested, said an unnamed Omani government source.
The news agency said the suspects would have to stand trial.
HN/PKH/MMN
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/162769.html
“Security services uncovered a spying network belonging to the state security apparatus of the United Arab Emirates,” Reuters quoted the state Oman News Agency as saying on Sunday.
The spy network was “targeting the ruling regime in Oman and the way its government and military work,” it added.
The discovery defied the good relations between the two sides.
Some two months ago, a number of Omani nationals, some employed by the government, were arrested, said an unnamed Omani government source.
The news agency said the suspects would have to stand trial.
HN/PKH/MMN
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/162769.html
Revolution?! Global revolution
Are We Witnessing the Start of a Global Revolution?
North Africa and the Global Political Awakening, Part 1
by Andrew Gavin Marshall
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=22963
North Africa and the Global Political Awakening, Part 1
by Andrew Gavin Marshall
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=22963
1/29/2011
EU in 'secret talks' to stop illegal downloads
The European Commission stands accused of reneging on copyright rules as it is reportedly discussing a private deal to allow companies to disconnect users from the Internet for suspected piracy.
http://www.euractiv.com/en/infosociety/eu-secret-talks-illegal-downloads-news-501715
David Kelly death riddle grows
Further questions have been raised over the death of Dr David Kelly after police admitted that two personal items found with his body – his mobile phone and a watch – did not have any fingerprints on them.
In another disclosure, following questions submitted under the Freedom of Information Act, police admitted they still do not know who owned the watch found beside his body. Police did not bother to check with Dr Kelly’s relatives if it belonged to him.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1350898/David-Kelly-death-Personal-items-fingerprints.html
Texas is out of lethal injection drug..
Texas has 317 convicted murderers on death row, but because of a company's decision last week to stop making the key drug for lethal injections, Texas only has enough of the potion to execute two.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/shortage-death-penalty-drug-leads-states-scramble/story?id=12770923&page=1
1/21/2011
STOCKHOLM SWEDEN: Government staff knew of bomb threat: report
A Swedish government employee allegedly knew ahead of time about last month's suicide bomb attack in Stockholm, but failed to inform Swedish security service Säpo, according to new media reports.
http://www.thelocal.se/31530/20110119/
http://www.thelocal.se/31530/20110119/
1/17/2011
Now it is easier to be an informer
See something, say something
http://www.dr.dk/Nyheder/Andre_sprog/English/2011/01/13/095724.htm
If the thought that your neighbours may be committing benefit fraud is unbearable, anonymously informing on them to the municipal authorities is now easier.
The majority of municipalities in South and Southern Jutland have systematised the citizens’ reports.
- I do not actually care for informing. But fraud is just not tolerable, says Gylling Haahr, the Mayor of Varde, to dr.dk/syd.
It is possible to inform on others to the municipal authorities online. Yesterday, Varde municipality publicised a link on its website for citizens to provide anonymous information about others.
Profitable reports
It appears many locals are pleased to have somewhere to lodge their suspicions.
Last year, the eight municipalities of South and Southern Jutland received more than 300 anonymous reports.
Along with non-anonymous reports, it generated more than 18 million kroner extra to the public coffers.
http://www.dr.dk/Nyheder/Andre_sprog/English/2011/01/13/095724.htm
12/05/2010
11/30/2010
NASA Sets News Conference on Astrobiology Discovery; Science Journal Has Embargoed Details Until 2 p.m. EST On Dec. 2
WASHINGTON -- NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe.
http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2010/nov/HQ_M10-167_Astrobiology.html
11/25/2010
11/02/2010
Research material about Randy and Evi Quaid / Michael Jackson / other dead celebs
Rare Disorder Causing Paranoid Delusions?
Couple May Be Suffering From Folie a Deux Syndrome
How fucking stupid is that?
There must be something else behind all of this ridicule...
Illuminati Extorting Hollywood Stars?
Randy Quaid Speaks to Media
Who is Lloyd Brown (Randy Quaid named Braun as part of the "monstrous ring of accountants, estate planners and lawyers" who are "trying to kill my career and, I believe, murder me in order to gain control of my royalties.")()
Wonderwall: BermanBraun's New Model Celeb Site
http://wonderwall.msn.com/
Michael "Worth more dead than alive"Jackson Connection
Michael Jackson Was Murdered for His Music Catalogue
Michael Jackson said Sony kills the music
Michael Jackson Left 'Dozens' Of Unreleased Songs, Tommy Mottola Says
Jacksons music attorney Peter Lopez commits suicide: George Lopez tweets condolences
BTW theres great comment
and MJ wasnt broke..
more here How Michael Jackson Made $1 Billion Since His Death
Couple May Be Suffering From Folie a Deux Syndrome
How fucking stupid is that?
There must be something else behind all of this ridicule...
Illuminati Extorting Hollywood Stars?
Randy Quaid Speaks to Media
Who is Lloyd Brown (Randy Quaid named Braun as part of the "monstrous ring of accountants, estate planners and lawyers" who are "trying to kill my career and, I believe, murder me in order to gain control of my royalties.")()
Wonderwall: BermanBraun's New Model Celeb Site
http://wonderwall.msn.com/
Michael "Worth more dead than alive"Jackson Connection
Michael Jackson Was Murdered for His Music Catalogue
Michael Jackson said Sony kills the music
Michael Jackson Left 'Dozens' Of Unreleased Songs, Tommy Mottola Says
Jacksons music attorney Peter Lopez commits suicide: George Lopez tweets condolences
BTW theres great comment
Sadly Mike has followed so many legends before him. Dead at an early age and broke.why is that why legends die broke and early?? Maybe theres lots of talent lacking scumbag lawyers, banksters and filthy label owners??
and MJ wasnt broke..
Jackson also owns half of Sony/ATV, formed in 1995 when Sony paid Jackson $90 million for 50% of ATV Music Publishing
more here How Michael Jackson Made $1 Billion Since His Death
11/01/2010
Vinnie Paz - End Of Days Ft. Block Mccloud & David Icke
The greatest form of control is when you think you're free when you're being fundamentally manipulated and dictated to. One form of dictatorship is being in a prison cell and you can see the bars and touch them. The other one is sitting in a prison cell but you can't see the bars but you think you're free.
What the human race is suffering from is mass hypnosis. We are being hypnotized by people like this: newsreaders, politicians, teachers, lecturers. We are in a country and in a world that is being run by unbelievably sick people. The chasm between what we're told is going on and what is really going on is absolutely enormous.
[Chorus: Block McCloud]
It's like we all know what's going down
But no one's saying shit, what happened to the home of the brave?
These motherfuckers they're controlling us now
But no one's talking about it, made us proud to be slaves
And everybody's just walking around
Head in the clouds, we won't awake until we're dead in the grave
By then it's too late, we need to be ready to raise up
Welcome to the end of days
[Verse 1: Vinnie Paz]
Everybody is slave, only some are aware
That the government releasing poison in the air
That's the reason I collect so many guns in my lair
I ain't never caught slipping, never underprepared
Yeah, The Shaytan army, they just break it proudly
George Bush the grandson of Aleister Crowley
They want you to believe the lie that the enemy Saudi
The enemy ain't Saudi, the enemy around me
There's fluoride in the water but nobody know that
It's also a prominent ingredient in Prozac (for real?)
How could any government bestow that?
A proud people who believe in political throwback
That's not all that I'm here to present you
I know about the black pope in Solomon's Temple
Yeah, about the Vatican assassins and how they will get you
And how they cloned Barack Hussein Obama in a test tube
[Chorus]
[Verse 2: Vinnie Paz]
Whoever built the pyramids had knowledge of electrical power
And you know that that's the information that they suppress and devour
Who you think the motherfuckers that crashed in the tower?
Who you think that made it turn into ash in an hour?
The same ones that invaded Jerome
The ones that never told you about the skeletons on the moon
Yeah, the ones that poison all the food you consume
The ones that never told you about Mount Vesuvius Tomb
The Bird Flu is a lie, the Swine Flu is a lie
Why would that even come as a surprise?
Yeah, the Polio vaccine made you die
It caused cancer and it cost a lot of people their lives
Do y'all know about Bohemian Grove?
How the world leader sacrificing children in robes?
Lucifer is God in the public school system
I suggest you open up your ears and you listen
[Chorus]
[Outro]
The greatest hypnotist on the planet Earth is an oblong box in the corner in the room. It is constantly telling us what to believe is real. If you can persuade people that what they see with their eyes is what there is to see you've got them. Because they'll laugh in your face of an explanation then which portrays the big picture of what's happening... and they have
10/28/2010
New Footage Implodes 9/11 Cover-up
9/11 The FDNY Video Team Right After The Demolition Job Tape1 NIST Clips 1-27
http://www.infowars.com/new-footage-implodes-911-cover-up/
http://www.infowars.com/new-footage-implodes-911-cover-up/
10/26/2010
After Haiti: A Conversation with John Perkins
http://www.opednews.com/articles/After-Haiti-A-Conversatio-by-Elizabeth-Ferrari-100326-873.html
John Perkins is Author of the bestselling book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
John Perkins is Author of the bestselling book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
Why Ideological War holds a peculiar fascination for West ?
It may be still a worthy deal in the eyes of the West that they spend US$ 1.4 million on a momentum they have been coveting to wage a new bout of ideological war against China.
And they exude enough enthusiasm in such an undertaking, when they awarded the jailed Liu Xiaobo the Nobel Peace Prize. Liu Xiaobo, to Oslo's Nobel Committee as well as to the manipulating hands behind the far-from-wise judge, is a Chinese citizen about whom little is known and might well just serve as a symbol, representing the adverse current going against the main stream in China. Perhaps, it is this that is highly valued by those who hope to harass China's rise and press China to surrender more interests, and even hope that China will one day collapse under the West's ideological bombardment.......
http://english.people.com.cn/90002/96417/7173209.html
8/08/2010
Astana, Kazakhstan: the space station in the steppes
Guardian.co.uk
The futuristic city in Kazakhstan is just the latest in the growing phenomenon of a capital from zero
"Peas and beans! Peas and beans!" The famous Japanese architect was in his office, high in a Tokyo tower, its walls crowded with framed honours and diplomas. Assistants of exceptional beauty shimmered in with tea, but what he wanted to talk about was pulses. Rising prosperity in China would lead to rising meat consumption, and in turn a global protein crisis. It was the greatest problem, he said, facing mankind today. The solution lay in Kazakhstan, the vast former Soviet republic, for whose president the architect, Kisho Kurokawa, was masterplanning a new capital. This country, to the south of Russia, stretches from the eastern edge of Europe almost to Mongolia. For Kurokawa it offered ample opportunity for growing peas and beans, and – in a symbolic way – his plan would help. It was based on the interweaving of city and nature, with swaths of green between the buildings. It represented an idea of interdependence of which pulse-growing on an immense scale would be the practical outcome.
This meeting was in 2001, and Kurokawa died in 2007, but his city is now there, more or less following his plan. There are plenty of parks and trees. Called Astana, it is the world's latest example of a rare but persistent type, the capital from zero. It is in a line that includes St Petersburg, Washington DC, Canberra, Ankara and Brasilia and like them it provokes a question: can a city, in all its teeming complexity, really be planned? Or does the attempt lead only to a synthetic simulacrum, a kind-of city that is not quite the real thing?
To look at, Astana is so strange that it has one grasping for images. It's a space station, marooned in an ungraspable expanse of level steppe, its name (to English speakers) having the invented sound of a science fiction writer's creation. It's a city of fable or dream, as recounted by Marco Polo to Kublai Khan. Except it's not quite so magical: it's also like a battery-operated plastic toy, all whirring noises and flashing colours, of a kind sold by the city's street vendors.
Astana's ornaments include a 62-metre-high silver pyramid, designed by British architects Foster + Partners, giant gold-green cones and a gold orb resting on a structure of erupting white steel. At night its buildings go purple, pink, green and yellow. Astana's latest, most technically ambitious addition is a 150-metre-high translucent tent, also by Lord Foster. Called Khan Shatyr, a single leaning mast props its roof, which offers shelter from a harsh climate to a shopping and entertainment complex underneath. It follows a familiar Foster strategy, to be seen in the Great Court of the British Museum, or his airports at Stansted, Hong Kong and Beijing, which is to create an impressively engineered roof – a thing to be looked at and admired but not inhabited – hovering over a lower, less ordered, zone where the activity of the buildings, in this case shops and theme-park rides, takes place. This strategy, derived from the geodesic domes which the visionary American designer Buckminster Fuller once proposed throwing over whole cities, makes for striking architecture but also for awkward clashes where the two zones meet. Top and bottom seem to be different worlds.
Khan Shatyr opened last month with an extravagant celebration which coincided with the 70th birthday of President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who is the beginning and end of everything that happens in Astana. The building is there "because the idea came from the president", says its German-born manager: that there were four other malls within a square kilometre "didn't matter for him". The gold orb on the white steel tower, which signifies the egg laid annually on the tree of life by the mythical bird Samruk, was designed by Nazarbayev himself. When Nazarbayev commissioned Foster to design his Palace of Peace and Reconciliation, he told them he wanted it pyramid-shaped, which may be the first and only time a client has told the mighty Foster what a building should look like, and been obeyed.
Such cities are often the work of a single strong man. There is a museum of the founder in Astana, as there are of Kemal Atatürk in Ankara and President Kubitschek in Brasilia, pharaonic insurance against the afterlife that contains such things as Nazarbayev's grandfather's seal of office as a local judge. There is the president's palace, which stands on a long axis linking the two Foster works, the tent and the pyramid, and the golden orb. The palace is a version of the White House, improved by the addition of a blue dome. Also by its dominating location: the American original is placed off-centre from Washington's Mall, signifying a separation of powers that is not quite the Kazakh style.
The common view of Nazarbayev, among those western politicians who have one, is that he is by some distance the best of the extremely bad bunch running the former Soviet republics of central Asia. Margaret Thatcher has written a foreword to Nazarbayev's book The Kazakhstan Way, praising him for throwing off "the Soviet yolk [sic]". He established himself as a reformer in the 1980s, enough for Gorbachev to ask him, unsuccessfully, to be prime minister of the Soviet Union. The west was also extremely grateful to him for giving up his ballistic missiles when the collapse of the Soviet Union left him the master of the world's fourth-largest nuclear arsenal.
Kazakhstan may rank 142nd in the world press freedom index, and 120th in the corruption perception index, and he may win elections and referendums with suspiciously high votes of 91% and 95%, but – goes the pro-Nazarbayev argument – nobody else could have stabilised his country's potentially explosive ethnic combinations, and ridden the violent post-Soviet economic storms. This argument is set out in Nazarbayev and the Making of Kazakhstan, an eloquent, if oily, book by the British former minister Jonathan Aitken. Among its gems is a description of the romance between the president and his future wife, which flourished after an accident at a steel works: "While the flames of the blast furnace were damped down, the fires of love ignited."
Aitken reports how his subject, as a young champion of steelworkers' rights, was scathing about both grandiose building projects and the decision to locate a steel plant in a site with an appalling climate. Yet he chose to build Astana, which can fairly be called grandiose, in a place that had been notable previously for its Soviet penal colonies and where the temperature runs from -40C to 40C (-40 to 104F). His logic was that the previous capital, Almaty, was too close to China, too congested, and prone to earthquakes.One can guess that, as for other rulers, building a new capital gave Nazarbayev a place he could control, made on his own terms. In keeping with his status as a better-than-average dictator, this is done subtly: Astana is not littered with statues and images of its maker, and when his followers suggested that it should be named after him, he modestly demurred. (Although the somewhat neutral "Astana" – it means "capital" – might indicate that the space is being kept open for a renaming in the future.)
Instead you hear, again and again, that things are the way they are "because the president wants it", which is delivered as a sufficient and unarguable statement. The shopping centre manager says it, as does the waiter serving horse steak. President Medvedev of Russia said that Nazarbayev "has given this city not only his work but also his soul". He wanted the city, and he specified its monuments in detail. He had his government officials, who initially left their families in more hospitable Almaty, shipped in. David Nelson, of Foster + Partners, describes long design meetings with the president: "He had thought about the building. That's what's impressive."
What he wanted he got, thanks partly to oil revenues from the distant Caspian Sea, which Nazarbayev claimed for Kazakhstan in a protracted haggle with Boris Yeltsin – closing the deal with the help of vodka and a map doodled on a napkin, which is now in the Museum of the First President of the Republic of Kazakhstan.
Like Gulf cities, Astana floats on an exhalation of petrodollars. Like Gulf cities and new Chinese cities such as Shenzhen, Astana inspires wonder that it is there at all; but while having some buildings of eye-aching ugliness, it has a greater sense of order. At street level in Dubai all is congestion. Here it is trimmed hedges, well-behaved traffic, well-kept paving and a complete lack of litter, or of visible signs of prostitution, drug-taking or beggary. It most resembles the controlled cleanliness of Singapore.
The world's most famous Kazakh is the fictional Borat, but people in Astana are nothing like him. Except, perhaps for a taxi driver who growled like a tomcat whenever he saw a woman. In general Astanans are placid and dignified. They gather in the hour or so around dusk, when the hammering heat of the day gives way to deliciously balmy air, and promenade in the city's grand avenue. Children career over the pavements in electric cars like unfenced dodgems, while everyone gasps obediently at the pre-programmed fountain displays. The avenue is decorated with topiary giraffes and elephants, and vast swirling carpets of brightly coloured bedding plants. There are artificial trees, made of steel rods, blossoming with pink or orange lights and the plastic roof of Khan Shatyr now joins the display, lit from within with a spectrum of disco colours. Sam Cooke's Wonderful World plays from the shrubberies. The place offers childish delights, laid on by the unseen hand of a benevolent daddy.
There is not, yet, much more to Astana than this. It doesn't have bohemian quarters, or a rich nightlife, or hidden surprises. It feels sedated. The striking architecture is combined with a lack of excitement in the street life, as if the design of buildings were a cipher for risk and drama. These are very early days, of course, and over the decades Astana might mature into something different.
The futuristic city in Kazakhstan is just the latest in the growing phenomenon of a capital from zero
"Peas and beans! Peas and beans!" The famous Japanese architect was in his office, high in a Tokyo tower, its walls crowded with framed honours and diplomas. Assistants of exceptional beauty shimmered in with tea, but what he wanted to talk about was pulses. Rising prosperity in China would lead to rising meat consumption, and in turn a global protein crisis. It was the greatest problem, he said, facing mankind today. The solution lay in Kazakhstan, the vast former Soviet republic, for whose president the architect, Kisho Kurokawa, was masterplanning a new capital. This country, to the south of Russia, stretches from the eastern edge of Europe almost to Mongolia. For Kurokawa it offered ample opportunity for growing peas and beans, and – in a symbolic way – his plan would help. It was based on the interweaving of city and nature, with swaths of green between the buildings. It represented an idea of interdependence of which pulse-growing on an immense scale would be the practical outcome.
This meeting was in 2001, and Kurokawa died in 2007, but his city is now there, more or less following his plan. There are plenty of parks and trees. Called Astana, it is the world's latest example of a rare but persistent type, the capital from zero. It is in a line that includes St Petersburg, Washington DC, Canberra, Ankara and Brasilia and like them it provokes a question: can a city, in all its teeming complexity, really be planned? Or does the attempt lead only to a synthetic simulacrum, a kind-of city that is not quite the real thing?
To look at, Astana is so strange that it has one grasping for images. It's a space station, marooned in an ungraspable expanse of level steppe, its name (to English speakers) having the invented sound of a science fiction writer's creation. It's a city of fable or dream, as recounted by Marco Polo to Kublai Khan. Except it's not quite so magical: it's also like a battery-operated plastic toy, all whirring noises and flashing colours, of a kind sold by the city's street vendors.
Astana's ornaments include a 62-metre-high silver pyramid, designed by British architects Foster + Partners, giant gold-green cones and a gold orb resting on a structure of erupting white steel. At night its buildings go purple, pink, green and yellow. Astana's latest, most technically ambitious addition is a 150-metre-high translucent tent, also by Lord Foster. Called Khan Shatyr, a single leaning mast props its roof, which offers shelter from a harsh climate to a shopping and entertainment complex underneath. It follows a familiar Foster strategy, to be seen in the Great Court of the British Museum, or his airports at Stansted, Hong Kong and Beijing, which is to create an impressively engineered roof – a thing to be looked at and admired but not inhabited – hovering over a lower, less ordered, zone where the activity of the buildings, in this case shops and theme-park rides, takes place. This strategy, derived from the geodesic domes which the visionary American designer Buckminster Fuller once proposed throwing over whole cities, makes for striking architecture but also for awkward clashes where the two zones meet. Top and bottom seem to be different worlds.
Khan Shatyr opened last month with an extravagant celebration which coincided with the 70th birthday of President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who is the beginning and end of everything that happens in Astana. The building is there "because the idea came from the president", says its German-born manager: that there were four other malls within a square kilometre "didn't matter for him". The gold orb on the white steel tower, which signifies the egg laid annually on the tree of life by the mythical bird Samruk, was designed by Nazarbayev himself. When Nazarbayev commissioned Foster to design his Palace of Peace and Reconciliation, he told them he wanted it pyramid-shaped, which may be the first and only time a client has told the mighty Foster what a building should look like, and been obeyed.
Such cities are often the work of a single strong man. There is a museum of the founder in Astana, as there are of Kemal Atatürk in Ankara and President Kubitschek in Brasilia, pharaonic insurance against the afterlife that contains such things as Nazarbayev's grandfather's seal of office as a local judge. There is the president's palace, which stands on a long axis linking the two Foster works, the tent and the pyramid, and the golden orb. The palace is a version of the White House, improved by the addition of a blue dome. Also by its dominating location: the American original is placed off-centre from Washington's Mall, signifying a separation of powers that is not quite the Kazakh style.
The common view of Nazarbayev, among those western politicians who have one, is that he is by some distance the best of the extremely bad bunch running the former Soviet republics of central Asia. Margaret Thatcher has written a foreword to Nazarbayev's book The Kazakhstan Way, praising him for throwing off "the Soviet yolk [sic]". He established himself as a reformer in the 1980s, enough for Gorbachev to ask him, unsuccessfully, to be prime minister of the Soviet Union. The west was also extremely grateful to him for giving up his ballistic missiles when the collapse of the Soviet Union left him the master of the world's fourth-largest nuclear arsenal.
Kazakhstan may rank 142nd in the world press freedom index, and 120th in the corruption perception index, and he may win elections and referendums with suspiciously high votes of 91% and 95%, but – goes the pro-Nazarbayev argument – nobody else could have stabilised his country's potentially explosive ethnic combinations, and ridden the violent post-Soviet economic storms. This argument is set out in Nazarbayev and the Making of Kazakhstan, an eloquent, if oily, book by the British former minister Jonathan Aitken. Among its gems is a description of the romance between the president and his future wife, which flourished after an accident at a steel works: "While the flames of the blast furnace were damped down, the fires of love ignited."
Aitken reports how his subject, as a young champion of steelworkers' rights, was scathing about both grandiose building projects and the decision to locate a steel plant in a site with an appalling climate. Yet he chose to build Astana, which can fairly be called grandiose, in a place that had been notable previously for its Soviet penal colonies and where the temperature runs from -40C to 40C (-40 to 104F). His logic was that the previous capital, Almaty, was too close to China, too congested, and prone to earthquakes.One can guess that, as for other rulers, building a new capital gave Nazarbayev a place he could control, made on his own terms. In keeping with his status as a better-than-average dictator, this is done subtly: Astana is not littered with statues and images of its maker, and when his followers suggested that it should be named after him, he modestly demurred. (Although the somewhat neutral "Astana" – it means "capital" – might indicate that the space is being kept open for a renaming in the future.)
Instead you hear, again and again, that things are the way they are "because the president wants it", which is delivered as a sufficient and unarguable statement. The shopping centre manager says it, as does the waiter serving horse steak. President Medvedev of Russia said that Nazarbayev "has given this city not only his work but also his soul". He wanted the city, and he specified its monuments in detail. He had his government officials, who initially left their families in more hospitable Almaty, shipped in. David Nelson, of Foster + Partners, describes long design meetings with the president: "He had thought about the building. That's what's impressive."
What he wanted he got, thanks partly to oil revenues from the distant Caspian Sea, which Nazarbayev claimed for Kazakhstan in a protracted haggle with Boris Yeltsin – closing the deal with the help of vodka and a map doodled on a napkin, which is now in the Museum of the First President of the Republic of Kazakhstan.
Like Gulf cities, Astana floats on an exhalation of petrodollars. Like Gulf cities and new Chinese cities such as Shenzhen, Astana inspires wonder that it is there at all; but while having some buildings of eye-aching ugliness, it has a greater sense of order. At street level in Dubai all is congestion. Here it is trimmed hedges, well-behaved traffic, well-kept paving and a complete lack of litter, or of visible signs of prostitution, drug-taking or beggary. It most resembles the controlled cleanliness of Singapore.
The world's most famous Kazakh is the fictional Borat, but people in Astana are nothing like him. Except, perhaps for a taxi driver who growled like a tomcat whenever he saw a woman. In general Astanans are placid and dignified. They gather in the hour or so around dusk, when the hammering heat of the day gives way to deliciously balmy air, and promenade in the city's grand avenue. Children career over the pavements in electric cars like unfenced dodgems, while everyone gasps obediently at the pre-programmed fountain displays. The avenue is decorated with topiary giraffes and elephants, and vast swirling carpets of brightly coloured bedding plants. There are artificial trees, made of steel rods, blossoming with pink or orange lights and the plastic roof of Khan Shatyr now joins the display, lit from within with a spectrum of disco colours. Sam Cooke's Wonderful World plays from the shrubberies. The place offers childish delights, laid on by the unseen hand of a benevolent daddy.
There is not, yet, much more to Astana than this. It doesn't have bohemian quarters, or a rich nightlife, or hidden surprises. It feels sedated. The striking architecture is combined with a lack of excitement in the street life, as if the design of buildings were a cipher for risk and drama. These are very early days, of course, and over the decades Astana might mature into something different.
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