GAIA AND HOMOSAPIENS

CBC Hourly News
- "LINK
- CBC World News at Six ^

---

Note-- The symbol ^ indicates that that article can be read in full at the link.

---

Breaking News

U.S. Approves Targeted Killing of American Cleric
New Tork Times - By Scott Shane - April 6, 2010
- LINK ^

Obama Administration Authorizes CIA to Kill US Citizen
Truthout - By Jason Leopold - April 7, 2010
- LINK ^

The Obama administration has lowered another legal barrier shielding Americans from extrajudicial punitive action by their own government, in this case authorizing the CIA to kill a US citizen suspected of having ties to al-Qaeda in Yemen and links to two attacks inside the United States last year.

'Ha ha, I hit 'em': Top secret video showing U.S. helicopter pilots gunning down 12 civilians in Baghdad attack leaked online
Daily Msil / UK - By David Gardner - April 7, 2010
- LINK ^

Video | Collateral US Murder in Iraq
Washington Monthly - By Steve Benen - April 6, 2010
- LINK ^

[ April 5, ] saw the release of a horrifying new video, documenting a 2007 attack in which a U.S. military helicopter killed a group of civilians, including two Reuters journalists, in a Baghdad suburb. WikiLeaks, which originally published the video, is calling the incident "Collateral Murder," and after watching the clip, it's not hard to understand why.

US Military To Break Silence On Wikileaks Video As Early As Today l Tuesday ]
The Plum Line Blog - By Greg Sargent - April 6, 2010
- LINK ^

Okay, get ready for this one to heat up big time, perhaps as early as today. The military will publicly address the veracity of the notorioius Wikileaks video, which apparently depicts an American helicopter killing two Reuters journalists during a July 2007 attack in Baghdad, as early as today, a Centcom spokesman confirms to me. Separately, a military official confirms (as he did to several other news orgs) that they’ve concluded the footage is genuine. “We have no indication it’s not authentic,” the official says.

One Day After 2007 Attack, Witnesses Describe US Killings of Iraqi Civilians
World Can't Wait / Democracy Now - April 8, 2010
- LINK ^

Watch this footage from 2007 - interviews with residents of the Baghdad neighborhood from the day after the now-notorious massacre of civilians caught on tape by the US military and released this week by Wikileaks. At the time, their reports went basically unnoticed. Now, with the military's own footage showing people walking down the street being gunned down by an unprovoked team of US troops circling above in an helicopter, there is widespread outrage and questioning.

"Our children know nothing else in their lives but violence. They are surrounded by high tech military recruiters and war games from the time they are in kindergarten, and are encouraged to be a card carrying patriot by their families, media, schools and society. Killing is engrained in the American psyche. So why is everyone so dismayed and upset every single time one of these videos gets “released.” -- World Can't Wait

Take This and Shove It
World Can't wait - By Cindy Sheehan - April 7, 2010
- LINK ^

Listen, I can't get involved. I've got work to do. It's not that I like the Empire; I hate it. But there's nothing I can do about it right now... It's all such a long way from here.” -- Luke Skywalker in Star Wars

Dear Reader—raise your hand if you don’t know that atrocities happen in war. Now put your hands in the air like you just don’t care.

Psychologist, Robert Jay Lifton, who is a pioneer in the study of what drives otherwise “normal” human beings to commit war crimes calls war: “an atrocity-producing situation.” Atrocities have been committed in every war since the beginning of time, and the sad thing is the barbarity hasn’t decreased. Recently a US soldier tried to justify to me committing atrocities because the "British did it to the Native Americans" in the French-Indian War. This soldier was essentially agreeing with Lifton.

How Americans Are Propagandized About Afghanistan War
Salon - By Glenn Greenwald - April 5, 2010
- LINK ^

On February 12 of this year, U.S. forces entered a village in the Paktia Province in Afghanistan and, after surrounding a home where a celebration of a new birth was taking place, shot dead two male civilians (government officials) who exited the house in order to inquire why they had been surrounded.

The Pentagon then issued a statement claiming that (a) the dead were all "insurgents" or terrorists, (b) the bodies of three women had been found bound and gagged inside the home (including two pregnant women, one a mother of 10 children and the other a mother of six children, and a teenage girl), and (c) suggested that the women had already been killed by the time the U.S. had arrived, likely the victim of "honor killings" by the Taliban militants killed in the attack.

Although numerous witnesses on the scene as well as local investigators vehemently disputed the Pentagon's version, and insisted that all of the dead (including the women) were civilians and were killed by U.S. forces, the American media largely adopted the Pentagon's version, often without any questions. But enough evidence has now emerged disproving those claims such that the Pentagon was forced yesterday to admit that their original version was totally false and that it was U.S. troops who killed the women.

U.S. Admits Role in February Killing of Afghan Women
The New York Times - By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. - April 4, 2010
- LINK ^

Comment - War as a video game!
Alternet - By Mahuika - April 8, 2010
Complete here
- LINK ^
Scroll down.

In video games virtual enemies are eliminated - in war real human beings are killed and wounded. Unfortuneatly watching the ground through a video screen makes it seem more like a game than a real war. In the case of these men in the Apache they were at least at risk from an RPG or rifle fire from the ground (if there were any such weapons present which is obviously not the case). Drone operaters in Afganistan, Pakistan or anywhere else are even more psychologically removed from the targets and hence even more likely to view them as virtual constructs than as real people.

In 1974, when my now 40 year old son was just 4, a good friend of ours was killed in a road accident. My son, who had seen cartoon characters crushed by steamrollers or fall off cliffs etc and be brought back to life, wanted to know when Barry would come alive again. He was devastated to lean that in the real world this does not happen - dead is dead. I get the feeling that many of the operators of sophisticated long-distance weapons, although they are adults, have rather the same attitude to their targets as that little 4 year old boy.

Opinion | Commentary | Editorials | Op-Eds

US | How much taxation is enough?
'Tea Partiers' understand the link between taxes and freedom. Somehow, liberals just don't get it.
USA Today - By Jonah Goldberg - April 6, 2010
- LINK ^

Congratulations! This is your last week working for the man — at least for this year. The Tax Foundation calculates that Tax Freedom Day for 2010 is April 9, which means that by Friday, Americans will have spent nearly 100 days working just to pay their taxes. If Democrats have their way, Tax Freedom Day will keep getting later and later.

Hold that thought. Imagine for a moment that Tax Freedom Day was Dec. 31. In other words, picture working 365 days a year for the government. Now, the government would "give" you a place to sleep, food to eat and clothes to wear, but all your income would really be Washington's income to allocate as it saw fit. Some romantics might call this sort of arrangement "socialism" or "communism." But another perfectly good word for it is "slavery" or, if you prefer, involuntary servitude.

Editorial | Abuse of Power in Roman Catholic Heirarchy
Forward, The Xatholic Sajky - April 16, 2010
- LINK ^

The Roman Catholic Church’s defensive response to the cascading charges of clergy sexual abuse has unleashed an astonishing spectacle: the world’s most powerful church draping itself in the mantle of victimhood. In the process, the church has managed to draw Jews into this story, with an offensive comparison made by the preacher of the papal household that the church’s bad press is somehow akin to historical antisemitism — a statement the Vatican later disavowed.

As this drama unfolds, it’s important to focus on the real victims: certainly not the church itself, no matter how much it protests, but the thousands of people who claim to have been abused by Catholic priests and whose stories were cruelly ignored or discounted while the alleged perpetrators have been allowed by a protective church hierarchy to skirt justice and accountability.

Why Pope Benedict Must Resign
Consortium News - By Daniel C. Maguire - March 28, 2010
- LINK ^

Pope Benedict XVI now faces a major hypocrisy test. He has been accepting resignations from bishops around the world who failed to take action against priest rapists. It is now no longer in dispute that he himself is guilty of the same criminal negligence in the Milwaukee case and in Germany when he was archbishop. The pope can only serve the church by resigning. If he were in charge of some secular institution, he would be forced to resign and be subject to criminal prosecution. He has no moral right to hide behind Vatican walls

US | Why Are Pedophilia-Hiding, Child-Abusing Church Fathers Allowed to Write Laws About Women's Bodies?
The moral authority granted the Catholic Church in the secular world is the most repellent aspect of the current crisis.
Slternet - By Katha Pollitt - April 3, 2010
- LINK ^

My favorite moment of the whole child abuse scandal in the Catholic Church was when Father Klaus Malangré suggested that Peter Hullermann, the redoubtable German pedophile priest, might be sent to work in a girls' school. No boys, no molestation. Or, in churchly language, no occasion of sin. Problem solved! Plus, the good father would spend his life warding off female cooties. Malangré must not have heard about priests -- and they do exist -- who abused both male and female children. Nor had he learned the lesson of Watergate: the cover-up is worse than the crime.

Washington besieged by an occupying force of corporate lobbyists
Hightower Lowdon - By Jim Hightower - April 2010
- LINK ^

300 ex-Congress critters are among the hired guns who kill progressive reforms.

Change. That's what Americans want. We the People--a.k.a. the body politic, the majority, the great unwashed, the hoi polloi, "us"--have made it clear that we want real, substantive change in the way Washington works, and for whom it works. We're sick of a "jobless recovery," rampant banksterism, collapsing bridges, corporate-owned elections, tinkle-down economics, oil dependency, made-in-China everything, mountaintop "removal," corporate welfare, falling wages, skyrocketing tuition, the demise of the middle class, and on and on. Enough! Ya basta! Stop it--change, dammit, CHANGE!

Rescuing capitalism from Wall Street
The Washington Post - By Matt Miller - April 8, 2010
- LINK ^

At what point does the ubiquity of the undeserving rich become so corrosive in a democracy that it sparks a backlash that wrongly discredits capitalism altogether? That's my question for Bob Rubin and Charles Prince, both formerly of Citigroup, when they testify before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission on Thursday. Though first I'd put it this way: How'd you guys make so much money running Citigroup into the ground and leaving it a ward of the state?

Prince earned at least $120 million for running Citi for four years, during which time $64 billion in market value vanished. Rubin made at least $115 million (plus stock options) between 1999 and 2008, before the feds had to inject $45 billion and then guarantee $300 billion of the firm's liabilities to keep the place afloat.

Audio | US - Opening up the Fed's Secret Wall Street Bailout
Hightower Lowdown - By Jim Hightower - March 30, 2010
- LINK ^

Nstional News

Afghanistan | Karzai threat to join Taleban
AFGHAN leader Hamid Karzai has threatened to abandon the political process and join the Taleban if he continues to come under outside pressure to reform.
Scotsman - By Christopher Bodeen and Stephen McGinty - April 6, 2010
- LINK ^

Canada | Criticism of scholarships for children of fallen soldiers draws sharp rebuke
Anger, outrage follows letter from sixteen professors at the University of Regina urging withdrawal from educational program
The Globe and Mail - By Jennifer Graham - March 26, 2010
- LINK ^

Veterans and political leaders say they’re dismayed with criticism being levelled at a scholarship for the children of soldiers killed in the line of duty.
Sixteen professors at the University of Regina have sent a letter to the school’s president saying the school should withdraw from the program known as Project Hero. The program, created by retired general Rick Hillier, offers free tuition to the children of dead Canadian soldiers. But the professors say the program is “a glorification of Canadian imperialism in Afghanistan and elsewhere.”

United States Government

"In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm and three or more is a congress." -- John Adams

"Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But then I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
"It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog." -- Mark Twain

Audio | EPA Takes A B old Step Forward
Guess what? We won one!
Jim Hightower - By Jim - April 6, 2010
- LINK ^

In a big victory for America's environment and the hard-hit people of Appalachia, Barack Obama's reorganized and revitalized EPA has just proposed to veto a massively-destructive mountaintop removal operation in West Virginia. The decision reverses the approval of a permit application that George W's industry-run EPA had rubber stamped for the giant Arch Coal corporation three years ago. Grassroots Appalachian advocates had tied up that permit in court, and they are now celebrating EPA's new stand against the grotesque mining practice of decapitating Appalachia's ancient, ecologically-rich mountains.

After extensive scientific analysis, EPA officials found "unequivocal" evidence that Spruce No. 1, the mine owned by Arch Coal, would cause "significant and irreversible damage" to the area. Indeed, the corporation would have blasted off the tops of Logan County Mountains, destroyed nearly 2,300 acres of forest, shoved toxic debris into six valleys and nearly eight miles of streams, and contaminated downstream surface waters with selenium, aluminum, and other metals – not to mention endangering the health and safety of people living around the mine.

---

Topical News

---

Activism at the Ground Level

"The strength of a democracy is, as in nature, in the roots, not in the flamboyant leaves that wither and die after two seasons or so in public office." -- John Davidson Miller

Take action | Keep the Internet open
Color of Change - Current
- LINK ^

Big telecom and cable companies want to fundamentally change the way the Internet works, so they can make millions by acting as a gatekeeper over what you see and do online.Our communities rely on the Internet to speak without a corporate filter, and to be able to organize and hold public officials and corporations accountable. But if these companies succeed, a few major corporations would control which voices are heard most easily, and it would be much harder for grassroots groups, individuals, and small businesses to compete with large corporations and well-funded special interests.

Please join Color of Change in calling on the FCC to keep the Internet open and democratic.

Take action | Help Change.org Start an Earth Day Revolution - Sign the Declaration!
Targeting: The U.S. Senate. Help start an Earth Day revolution by signing our Declaration of Energy Independence to the Senate.
- LINK ^

Save Our Environment
Nearly 40 years ago, Earth Day was started to help focus public attention on our fragile environment and what we can do to protect the air we breathe, the water we drink, and natural habitats throughout the world.As we approach this Earth Day on April 22nd, the Senate is considering climate and clean energy legislation that would have an important and lasting impact on our environment. We must urge them to pass it.

Take action | Thank Justice Stevens
Credo Action - Current
- LINK ^

Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens announced he is stepping down from the court. With his retirement, we will lose the longtime leader of the liberal bloc of judges on the Supreme Court and one of the court's champions for the rights of individuals, the dignity of each person, civil rights, women's rights, and environmental stewardship. For his decades of service upholding these basic American values, Justice Stevens deserves our thanks.

Take action | After 50 years, it's time to protect the Arctic Refuge for good
Alaska Wilderness League - current
- LINK ^

On December 6, 2010, the Arctic Refuge will celebrate its 50th anniversary. The American people have successfully defended this last true wilderness refuge from Big Oil's attacks for 50 years. Tell Washington to wake up: the American people have spoken. Let's finally protect the Arctic Refuge for good!

Take action | Don't allow corporate take over of public lands for clear cutting!
Alaska Wilderness League - current
- LINK ^

The future of our Tongass National Forest is a puzzle awaiting completion. A complex network of human needs depends on this intricately balanced ecosystem. Realizing that the future depends on a healthy forest and vital communities, stakeholders in the region have set aside decades of conflict to put the pieces together.

Take action | Sound science is critical to decisions on our only Arctic
Alaska Wilderness League - current
- LINK ^

There is no proven technology to clean up an oil spill amidst the swells and sea ice of treacherous Arctic waters. All it takes is one spill. Yet the Obama administration's new offshore drilling plan gives the go-ahead to drilling in 2.7 million acres of Arctic waters. While the administration has talked the talk of wise decisions based on sound science, they unwisely called for exploratory drilling, the riskiest type of drilling for oil spills, even as they admit they cannot clean up those spills. If this controversial portion of the plan is implemented, drilling will begin there this summer.

Arts & Culture

Musicians mix Coldplay and Taylor Swift together - Enjoy
- LINK ^

Music Video | "Democracy Is Coming to the USA" - Leonard Cohen
- LINK

Economy and Finance

"I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle." -- Winston Churchill

"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." -- Ronald Reagan (1986)

Bloomberg Economic News
- LINK ^

Bloomberg Current Worldwide Financial News
LINK

US | A Public Official Who Stands for Us
The first thing you need to know about Elizabeth Warren is that the big shots of Wall Street despise her. And isn't that refreshing?!
Jim Hightower - By Jim - April 7, 2010
- LINK ^

Again and again, grassroots America has had to watch in dismay and disgust as our Washington officials (both Republicans and Democrats) have rushed to pat the hands and soothe the fevered brows of the very banksters who stole the American dream from millions of ordinary folks. Isn't anyone on our side?

Meet Ms. Warren, presently the head of an independent agency set up by Congress to monitor the government bailout of Wall Street bankers. "Dang gummit," she says in her Oklahoma twang, "somebody has to stand on behalf of middle-class families." Not only has she been doing that by fearlessly grilling Gucci-clad bankers and weak-willed treasury officials, but also by conceiving of and pushing hard for a new regulatory agency that would protect us consumers against banker greed. Wall Street profiteers shudder in fear at the very mention of Warren's proposal for a totally-independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency, and they're lobbying ferociously to kill it and demonize her.

Goodbye Paper Money: Does It Mean More Ways for the Banks to Screw Us?

The spiral of economic calculation is dizzying, when you factor in inscrutable fees and other invisible transactions banks attach to the light-speed movement of our money.
Alternet - By Scott Thill - April 6, 2010
- LINK ^

Food and Nutrition

What You're Eating Could Make or Break Our Planet -- 7 Principles of a Climate-Friendly Diet
Anna Lappe talks about her new book "Diet for a Hot Planet" and explains how to change our diet so it becomes part of the solution, not the problem.
Alternet - by Jill Richardson - April 6,2010
- LINK ^

Anna Lappe's new book, Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It, may just be the most important book published this year. This past month, rising oceans buried New Moore Island, a tiny island in the Bay of Bengal that India and Bangladesh fought over for nearly 30 years. Closer to home, Massachusetts has suffered "two 50-year storms in the course of two or three weeks," according to Governor Deval Patrick. That's a reality check that the climate crisis has already caused tangible effects on our planet, with much more to come. Lappe's book does not only expose how our current dominant methods of food production, processing, distribution and disposal significantly contribute to climate change; she also tells us how food production can actually mitigate climate change by sequestering carbon in the soil.

However, climate-friendly agriculture is a money-loser for currently powerful industries -- agrochemicals, oil and meatpackers to name a few. Lappe debunks their spin, putting the lie to claims that people on earth would starve without Big Ag and factory farms. Instead she reveals the truth, based on well-documented science, on how agriculture can be part of the solution.

Health and Fitness

US | America is under assault. From coast to coast, we are being invaded by horrific, body-consuming mutants
Hightower - By Jim Hightower - April 8, 2010
- LINK ^

America is under assault. From coast to coast, we are being invaded by horrific, body-consuming mutants that are already destroying 65,000 American lives a year. As a Duke University scientist puts it, "This is a living, breathing problem. It's here. It's arrived." These are not invaders from mars, but from within our own countryside. Ironically, these are mutants of our own creation, leaving America face to face with a spreading plague of drug-resistant germs.

For decades, we have benefited enormously from the healing wonders of antibiotics. These drugs save millions of lives that would otherwise be lost to microbial infections. But more and more of the antibiotics in America's medical kit are proving to be ineffective against the plethora of germs that endanger us. Why? Too much of a good thing.

America has overdosed on antibiotics, using about 35 million pounds a year – so much that germs, which are savvy survivors, have rapidly been mutating to develop resistance to the drugs. Thus, drug-resistant microbes now kill more Americans than breast cancer and prostate cancer combined.

Media and Journalism

"If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed, if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed." -- Mark Twain

What If AT&T Prevented You from Reading This Article?
Comcast, AT&T and Verizon are making a play to control the Internet. Tell Obama and the FCC to preserve an open and free Internet.
Color of Change - April 8, 2010

Editor's Note: The following is the text of a powerful email sent by activist group Color of Change to its members, urging direct action against the telecoms' onslaught on Net Neutrality.

Now, Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon — the most powerful broadband providers — are trying to fundamentally change the way the Internet works. They're seeking to make even bigger profits by acting as gatekeepers over what you can see and do online. If they succeed, the Internet would be more like radio and television: a few major corporations would control which voices are heard most easily, and it would be much harder for grassroots groups, individuals, and small businesses to compete with large corporations and well-funded special interests.

Politcal Issues

"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." -- P.J. O'Rourke, Civil Libertarian

Real clear Politics Daily Rundown
- LINK ^

Guilty of Sedition? How the Right Is Undermining Our Government's Authority and Capability to Run the Country
It's time to openly confront the fact that conservatives have spent the past 40 years systematically delegitimizing the very idea of US government.
- LINK ^

Science and Technology

Bloomberg Index of Current Science News
- LINK ^

Video | Paleontology - South African fossils could be new hominid species
The fossils of a female adult and a juvenile male - perhaps mother and son - are just under two million years old. They were uncovered in cave deposits at Malapa not far from Johannesburg.
BBC News - By Jonathan Amos, Science correspondent - april 8, 2010
- LINK ^

^Social Issues

"Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else." -- Frederic Bastiat, French Economist (1801-1850)

US | The Preposterous Reality: 25 Hedge Fund Managers Are Worth 680,000 Teachers (Who Teach 13 Million Students)
What work do we value most? "It’s going to take a lot of political will — over a long period of time — to reorder our most basic economic values."
Alternet - By Les Leopold - April 10, 2010
- LINK ^

---

Sound off at Carrumpah-Lobo, the Homosapiens.ki Blog
- Check in

---

Sound and Fury

This website incorporates clips from mainstream and alternative media and, less frequently, blogs, and even obviously biased and counter-point-of-view sources. The clips are taken directly from the websites noted in each source link. Quotation marks are used where they appear in the cited source.

Homosapiens.ki has been developed on the XOOPS website production program.

Subscribe to a brief email notification as each issue of this site is posted. See top, left of any page io subscribe - no fee.

The editorial offices of Homosapiens.ki are located in New York City and Nelson BC Canada. Website hosting and technical services are provided from Sydney, Australia. The domain name registration ( .ki ) is a service of the Republic of Kiribati ( South Pacific ) domain registrar. Special thanks are due to all those who have assisted in bringing this site to life on the internet.

You may email the editor at
orchill@earthlink.net

In accordancee with TITLE 17 U.S.C. Sectopm 107, this material is distributed free to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes, Homosapiens.ki has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this content nor is Homosapiens.ki endorsed or sponsored by any originator.

Links are provided for access to source articles and for verification of authenticity. However, as originating pages are sometimes updated by their host sites, a version posted here may not match the version our readers view when clicking the source link on this site.

Privacy - we will not sell, rent, or give your name, address or any other personal information to any entity or person whatsoever at any point in time.

---