British Cabinet advisor on Swine Flu also heads pharmaceutical company selling Tamiflu

Anderson is one of the first people in Great Britain to have called the swine flu a “pandemic”

Cabinet H1N1 Advisor Heads GlaxoSmithKline

javno.com | Jul 28, 2009

There are already conspiracy theories for the swine flu, vaccinations and medication for the illness. Britons now have new proof.

Professor Sir Roy Anderson is a very well positioned person. On one hand he has a nearly compulsory product which is very sought after in today’s time, and on the other hand he officially advises the British Cabinet for the distribution of the same product.

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The person in question is the president of the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline, with a yearly salary of 116,000 pounds, and the product in his hands is Tamiflu, the drug for the largest current problem – H1N1 – the so called Swine Flu.

His function for the cabinet is to advise about the illness which has infected hundreds of thousands of Britons, together with 20 or so other experts which make up SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group of Experts).

Whilst the Britons protest about the conflict of interests that Anderson is in, the Ministry of Health and GSK deny any wrongdoing, and claim the disputed person has never attended any SAGE meetings which discussed vaccines and drugs.

Furthermore, according to Daily Mail, Anderson is one of the first people in Great Britain to have called the swine flu a pandemic, and GSK had a turnover of around 2.1 billion pounds in the last quarter. They expect similar results in autumn, when they total in the profit from the announced vaccine and the Relenza inhaler, which is mostly used by pregnant women. Also, the shares of the company rose by 10 percent since May, when in a radio interview he praised the flu drugs and called for their intense distribution.

The question is if what the Austrian journalist Jane Burgermeister says is true, with the FBI filing suits against the leading world pharmaceutical companies, banks and state leaders, for the suspicion that they intend on massively thinning the world population.

Council on Foreign Relations backs amnesty for illegals, opposes Arpaio-style raids

The uber-establishment Council on Foreign Relations said Wednesday it favors granting legal status to many of the roughly 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S., creating a guest worker program for low-skilled foreign workers to come and work in the U.S and opposes local police getting to conduct immigration raids.

Phoenix Business Journal | Jul 8, 2009

by Mike Sunnucks

The CFR issued an immigration policy report Wednesday that looks to lift caps on foreign university students in the U.S. and allow skilled foreign graduates to get more work visas. The international policy group also wants to create legal paths to citizenship for the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants already in the U.S.

The CFR also said local police should not take lead roles in immigration enforcements and workplace raids. Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas have been conducting immigration raids and prosecutions against businesses hiring illegal immigrants, as well as drop-houses used by smugglers trafficking illegal immigrants into Arizona from Mexico.

The CFR report does not specifically mention Arpaio but the Valley’s sheriff is the most notable local enforcer of immigration laws in the U.S.

The CFR’s recommendations on guest workers and amnesty mirror plans to be pushed in Congress this year by President Barack Obama. Arizona State university professor Raul H. Yzaguirre and former Florida governor Jeb Bush served on the CFR task force that wrote the recommendations.

The group also wants the U.S. to tweek or ease some post 9/11 security measures that have discouraged immigration and foreign tourism into the U.S. and want the U.S. government to develop new technologies to secure border areas, verify workers’ employment status and enforce immigration laws.

The New York-based CFR is a heavyweight international policy group whose members includes powerful politicians, CEOs and university presidents as well as multinational corporations, media firms and private equity firms.

The Council’s corporate members include Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, American Express, Chevron, ExxonMobil Corp., Rothschild North America Inc., News Corp., General Electric, KBR Inc., Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Co., Soros Fund Management and Google Inc.

U.S. Sen. John McCain, former Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, Arizona State University President Michael Crow and Thunderbird School of Global Management president Angel Cabrera are Arizonans that are CFR members.

Other notable CFR members include:

• Former U.S. Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell, James Baker and Madeline Albright.

• Former U.S. Treasury secretaries Henry Paulson and Robert Rubin.

• Financier George Soros and JP Morgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon.

• Former Federal Reserve Bank chairmen Alan Greenspan and Paul Volcker.

• Former presidents George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton and former vice president Dick Cheney.

• Media notables such as NBC’s Tom Brokaw, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, Newsweek International editor and CNN commentator Fareed Zakaria and New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger.

India Introduces New Form Of Birth Control: TV

Worried you don’t have the cash to have another baby? Don’t worry, just turn on the TV!

babble.com.au | Jul 27, 2009

by JeanneSager

The Indian government is making a push to bring televisions into more homes in rural parts of the nation in hopes that people will be so busy watching the tube they’ll spend less time having sex… and making babies.

In a country that once boasted the dubious honour of adding more people to the world’s population per year than any other place on earth and eighty-one million people living below the poverty line in its urban centers alone, population control is big issue. And they’ve tried other measures – including fast-tracking special gun permits for men who agree to vasectomies.

It’s also not NEW news that the Indian people need help to keep the population in check. A NY Times article from the early eighties reveals the government was paying women cash back then as an incentive for undergoing tubal ligations, and the government was subsidising both the pill and condoms.

But TV? As birth control?

The London Times quoted Ghulam Nabi Azad, the Health and Family Welfare Minister, on the issue, saying “If there is electricity in every village, then people will watch TV till late at night and then fall asleep. They won’t get a chance to produce children.”

I suppose he’s right – after all – what happens when the electric goes out during storms? You end up with the hurricane baby booms!

Is this going to be the new “I have a headache?” Sorry honey, can’t have sex because there’s a new episode of “Grey’s Anatomy” on tonight. Then again, the sight of McSteamy may simply make for sex LATER in the evening.

Mobile laboratory seeks children for swine flue vaccine tests

al.com | Jul 23, 2009

By CASANDRA ANDREWS

Coastal Clinical Research is looking for children between the ages of 1 and 8 to test a pediatric vaccine for the H1N1 virus — commonly referred to as swine flu.

The Mobile-based research group was selected, along with several others across the country, by a pharmaceutical company to test the vaccine in August, said Appie Head, patient recruiter with CCR.

“Without vaccine research trials, there won’t be a vaccine on the market,” Head said, noting that parents wouldn’t be able to have their children immunized against the seasonal flu or other viruses if previous studies hadn’t been done.

Compensation for taking part in the local clinical trials varies, Head said. Last year, CCR paid participants between $35 and $100 to take part in four different seasonal flu vaccines.
How much will be paid to those who try the swine flu vaccine had not yet been established, Head said.

The number of confirmed and probable U.S. swine flu cases has surpassed 37,000, with more than 200 deaths reported, according to the most recent numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

As of last week, there were 469 confirmed cases of novel H1N1 influenza in Alabama, according to the state Department of Public Health.

A total of 250 of those affected are children under 13 years old in Alabama.

There have been 22 confirmed cases of the H1N1 strain reported in Mobile and 14 confirmed cases reported in Baldwin County.

Swine flu was first identified in the U.S. in April, and quickly spread throughout the country. Since then, more than 94,000 cases have been reported in more than 100 countries, according to the World Health Organization.

To be eligible for the H1N1 influenza vaccine pediatric trial in Mobile, children must be free from illness, accompanied by a legal guardian and submit to a screening process that includes a physical exam. A urine sample is also required during the first appointment.

Here’s how the clinical trial will work: After a first visit to establish eligibility, the participant will be required to return to the CCR offices on the Springhill Medical Center campus, 100 Memorial Hospital Drive, Suite 3-B for two additional visits.

During the second visit, a patient will have blood drawn for lab testing and will be given an injection of the vaccine. A legal guardian receives a symptom diary to record any side effects after the shot.

A staff member from CCR will call the patient at least twice after the injection to check on them, Head said.

A month after the shot, the patient is required to visit the research offices again to have more blood drawn to assess the effectiveness of the vaccine, Head said.

Patients, or their guardian, are paid at the end of each visit.

“It’s very important that people recognize we have to do trials to get drugs on the market,” said Dr. Raymond Peterson, a pediatrician and an investigator on another clinical trial about to begin at Coastal Clinical Research.

While Peterson said that there is risk involved with nearly everything, “the vaccines have been studied to the point we know they are safe. This is just to prove that.”

Later this month, Peterson will work as the lead investigator on a study for a pediatric Respiratory Syncytial Virus vaccine with the Mobile research group.

The virus more commonly referred to as RSV is one of the most prevalent causes of lower respiratory infections in children younger than 3, according to the World Health Organization.

DARPA spying squirrels, dolphins helped inspire ‘G-Force’ guinea pig super hero movie

Darwin in a scene from the motion picture G-Force.  By Disney

DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, provided plenty of ideas for G-Force

Real spying squirrels, dolphins helped inspire ‘G-Force’

USA TODAY | Jul 27, 2009

By Dan Vergano

Hollywood has a curious crush on science, seen this year in movies such as Star Trek (anti-matter engines), Angels & Demons (anti-matter bombs) and Transformers (a critical bomb).

The latest dose of oddball silver screen science comes this week with G-Force, a talking guinea pig spy movie from Walt Disney Pictures. The science in the movie — talking guinea pig ninjas save the world from evil — is nuts, as director Hoyt Yeatman freely acknowledges. But he points out a lot of military animal science is out there, and the movie reflects some real world science.

“I actually had the idea from my 5-year-old son dressing up a guinea pig in gear,” Yeatman says. But after a year and a half of researching a script, “I began to see there were a lot of crazy things really out there.”

The result is a Jerry Bruckheimer Films parody of a Jerry Bruckheimer movie, sort of Mission Impossible meets Rin Tin Tin. The guinea pigs are squad boss Darwin (voiced by Sam Rockwell), weapons nut Blaster (voiced by Tracy Morgan) and martial arts vixen Juarez (voiced by Penelope Cruz). Plus a star-nosed mole computer geek, Speckles (voiced by Nicolas Cage, of course.)

Squirrels, not guinea pigs, were arrested as spies in Iran two years ago, according to the Islamic Republic News Agency, after border guards spotted their eavesdropping equipment. “Squirrel espionage would not be without precedent,” noted Wired’s Sharon Weinberger, at the time. “Other members of the animal kingdom have been tagged as possible spies, including pigeons and cats.”

Indeed, from carrier pigeons, to suicidal dogs equipped with anti-tank mines in World War II, to dolphins used to patrol waters in the Vietnam War, armies have recruited animals for all sorts of missions.

DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, provided plenty of ideas for G-Force, Yeatman says. The Defense Department research agency’s HI-MEMS program is “aimed at developing tightly coupled machine-insect interfaces” in moths, according to its website. The idea was the inspiration for G-Force’s fly spy “Mooch” (voiced by Edwin Louis), who provides surveillance for the guinea pig team. This should keep Iran’s border police on their toes.

DARPA and Los Alamos National Laboratory have also recruited bomb-sniffing bees to find land mines. “Honeybees are as good as dogs,” Los Alamos entomologist Timothy Haarmann told USA TODAY in 2006. Los Alamos researchers have also looked into training bees to sniff out cocaine and other drugs at border crossings.

“The chief conceit in G-Force that the guinea pigs have been trained to understand people,” Yeatman says. “They could talk amongst themselves all the time, it’s just that people haven’t been smart enough to understand them.”

And in fact, animal communication also is a hot topic among researchers. Parrots, most famously the gray parrot Alex trained by Harvard University’s Irene Pepperberg, can learn the basic elements of English, attaining roughly the intellectual development of a 5-year-old.

The honeybee “waggle dance” (decoded six decades ago by Karl von Frisch), which the insects use to recruit nest mates to find food, “is one of the most celebrated communication behaviors in the animal world,” wrote entomologists Christoph Grüter and Walter Farina in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution last year.

Of course, “guinea pigs aren’t known for their athletic abilities,” says Yeatman. Or vocabulary. “So, we had to take a few liberties in the film,” he says, to create a team of ninja rodents.

Still, he argues there’s enough real science alluded to in the film to touch on real world issues. “If we can back up the story with a little bit of real science, we really make the movie a better experience for the audience,” Yeatman says.

Thousands of children to be used as Swine Flu vaccine guinea pigs

RT News Report: Children used to test potentially dangerous flu vaccine

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Guinea Pigs? The next big pet craze?

G-Force Guinea Pig Super Heros

Armed and fuzzy: Guinea pig super spies face a formidable foe in ‘G-Force’: the plot

History Channel: Weather warfare, chemtrails, tectonic weaponry and “plausible deniability”

“Technology will make available to the leaders of major nations, techniques for conducting secret warfare, of which only a bare minimum of the security forces need be appraised…..techniques of weather modification could be employed to produce prolonged periods of drought or storm.”

- Former National Security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, in  Between Two Ages,  1970

“Others are engaging even in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves.”

- United States Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen, April, 1997

Full Documentary – Weather warfare, chemtrails, on the History Channel

Posted by The Liberty Channel

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Evolution machine speeds up search for better bugs

Multiplex automated genome engineering or MAGE, can create hundreds or thousands of mutations in a few days at a cost of a few thousand dollars.  Wang and Farren’s approach produced hundreds, even thousands of mutations simultaneously, resulting in billions of different strains.

New Scientist | July 27, 2009

by Ewen Callaway

If humans want to persuade microbes to produce vast quantities of fuels or pharmaceuticals, we may need to give evolution a helping hand. A new genome engineering machine that tweaks dozens of genes to create billions of unique strains in a few days does just that.

“This technique allows us to do some amount of rapid evolution,” says Harris Wang, a researcher at Harvard Medical School, who led the project along with colleagues Farren Isaacs and George Church.

“The general motivation behind what we’re trying to do is develop a set of techniques that will allow us to write into the genome of any organism with the same ease that we are able to read from the genome by DNA sequencing,” he adds.

Cheap and fast

Traditionally, genetic engineers tackle one gene at a time, systematically mutating its letters to achieve a particular effect, such as higher protein yield or stability. But since many commercially useful chemicals rely on networks of dozens of genes, it becomes difficult, bordering on impossible, to systematically mutate each gene in a complex pathway.

The American chemicals firm DuPont, for instance, spent nearly seven years and hundreds of millions of dollars to identify 20 genetic changes that optimise microbes to produce a chemical used as a commercial solvent called 1,3-propanediol, Isaacs and Wang say.

By contrast, the new approach, which is called multiplex automated genome engineering or MAGE, can create hundreds or thousands of mutations in a few days at a cost of a few thousand dollars.

Red bugs

To demonstrate MAGE, the researchers engineered Escherichia coli that churn out five times as much of a chemical called lycopene than their forbearers. Lycopene is an antioxidant abundant in tomatoes that is related to compounds used to fight cancer and malaria.

With at least 20 genes known to affect lycopene production, conventional genetic engineering techniques that re-write a gene or a part of gene at a time wouldn’t suffice.

In many cases, a mutation in one gene that stymies production can be offset by a mutation in another gene. Occasionally, these double mutants produce a chemical more efficiently than a strain with no changes.

But instead of trying to directly create double-mutants, Wang and Farren’s approach produced hundreds, even thousands of mutations simultaneously, resulting in billions of different strains. Because lycopene colours cells red, the researchers simply selected the brightest bacteria.

“There might be cells out there that may have these properties, but what we’re trying to do is accelerate this process to find the specific traits we’re interested in,” Wang says.

Powerful tool

MAGE relies on the tendency of cells to incorporate little bits of laboratory made DNA into their dividing chromosomes. Researchers can customise those bits so they modify specific genes and even parts of genes.

This lets scientists exert as much or as little control over the mutations as they see fit. “A lot of times when you’re doing engineering, you have a very specific objective: ‘I need to make this change’,” Wang says. “For a lot of what we do in terms of genetic engineering, we don’t necessarily know the solution.”

Engineering vitamin-producing bacteria isn’t the only use for the new technique, Isaacs says. “It will immediately decrease the time it will take to improve the efficiency and production of virtually any compound that’s generated, right now, in E. coli and looking beyond into other types of organisms as well.”

The team is planning to adapt the technique to yeast soon, and plant and animal cells should also prove amenable to MAGE, they say.

Currently, the researchers are teaming up with biofuels and chemical manufacturers in hopes of creating blockbuster strains in the lab that could eventually be used on an industrial scale.

“I … look at this paper and think, that’s really cool and it’s a stepping stone,” says Andy Ellington, a biochemist at the University of Texas in Austin. By mapping out the myriad mutations that endow bacteria with useful traits, such as bio-fuel production, researchers will eventually learn to predict the effects of mutations and create their own custom strains.

“Gosh, when it becomes cheap to make E. coli from scratch, why won’t we do that,” Ellington says.

“Microwave weapon will rain pain from the sky”

The new antenna will be steered electronically and is capable of generating multiple heat beams. The microwave beams can cause serious burns at levels not far above those required to repel people.

newscientist.com | Jul 23, 2009

by David Hambling

THE Pentagon’s enthusiasm for non-lethal crowd-control weapons appears to have stepped up a gear with its decision to develop a microwave pain-infliction system that can be fired from an aircraft.

The device is an extension of its controversial Active Denial System, which uses microwaves to heat the surface of the skin, creating a painful sensation without burning that strongly motivates the target to flee. The ADS was unveiled in 2001, but it has not been deployed owing to legal issues and safety fears.

Nevertheless, the Pentagon’s Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate (JNLWD) in Quantico, Virginia, has now called for it to be upgraded. The US air force, whose radar technology the ADS is based on, is increasing its annual funding of the system from $2 million to $10 million.

The transmitting antenna on the current system is 2 metres across, produces a single beam of similar width and is steered mechanically, making it cumbersome. At the heart of the new weapon will be a compact airborne antenna, which will be steered electronically and be capable of generating multiple beams, each of which can be aimed while on the move.

The ADS has been dogged by controversy. Jürgen Altmann, a physicist at Dortmund University in Germany, showed that the microwave beams can cause serious burns at levels not far above those required to repel people. This was verified when a US airman was hospitalised with second-degree burns during testing in April 2007.

The airborne version will not make it any less contentious. “Independent of the mode of production, with this size of antenna the beam will show variations of intensity with distance – not just a simple decrease – up to about 500 metres,” says Altmann. Shooting it on the move with any accuracy will be difficult, he adds.

Dave Law, head of the technology division of the JNLWD, says the new antenna will operate at the lowest possible effective power level and will have a sophisticated automated target-tracking system.

In a recent cost-benefit analysis, the US Government Accountability Office rated the ADS worst out of eight non-lethal weapons currently in development.