Censorship in America

Thursday, May 16, 2013

ALERT: STATE KIDNAPPING? Darren Brown #JIMSTONE

MIRRORED FROM Occupy the Banks BY REQUEST

Regulars know we've helped out Jim Stone in the past, mirroring a few pages when he's had trouble staying up, and then, unbeknownst to us, the future Governor of Kansas, just contacted us, with a request to help out, with the below; the relevant part, published in full, along with a tiny teaser, the NUKING OF SYRIA, to get you up to Jim Stone's website, and GET THIS ACTIVIST RELEASED.

What is Password 17?

Secretly encrypted passwords may be the key to releasing an innocent man from secret detention After posting many items to the forum which proved the Australian government had been subverted, Darren Brown, who tried to launch the replicate project only to get the servers sabotaged, has come up missing. However, being experienced at the NSA I knew that getting secure information to Darren would be no easy task and, kept as a secret until now, I developed a method of getting secure information across the web, decryption be damned and "they" did not figure it out. And now this encrypted information may be the key to getting Darren Brown released.

Scenario:

After posting damning information that could cause the entire Australian sub continent to rightfully rebel, Darren went silent. In the past, when Darren was going to be offline for a while, even a day or two (for traveling or other reasons) he would clearly notify myself and others that he would not be available, because he was a key player at this web site. And suddenly, without warning he vanished. When we posted the "what happened to Darren Brown" thread to the forum we got a stressed "everything is OK" one liner response that made everyone suspicious. Later he followed up with a paragraph sent to me that seemed somewhat normal, but then followed with another message that looked like it had been written by someone who raided his hard drive and knew nothing about the subtleties of what our relationship was like. The message also contained factual errors Darren would not have made.

So I popped the question,
WHAT IS PASSWORD 17?

The following silence has caused me to have little doubt he is being detained.

I encoded passwords in a way that has never been done before. I sent those passwords to Darren. They were horribly difficult ones that no one would ever remember, so even after going through the correct procedure to reveal them no one would remember what they saw. And if Darren is being held hostage, he won´t be able to answer them even if he wants until the passwords, which were placed in a location (still fully encrypted) that would probably force him to hunt for them and perfectly hidden even if found would be totally inaccessible even if found and identified without going through a whole bunch of never been done before steps to reveal them.

The prying eyes and censorship monsters made an ex NSA guy think HARD about how to circumvent them, and I succeeded. Darren CANNOT provide the answer unless he is a totally free man.

Their asses are nailed. If he has been kidnapped by the local kikedom or police force, they will never get an answer at all.

So I would like to ask his captors - WHAT IS PASSWORD 17? You won't EVER answer that even if you have EVERYTHING he owned in your possession with your best decryption experts running in top gear, and if you have drugged him or in other ways wrecked his mind, you won't get the answer at all. And even if he is perfectly fine and can tell you where they are and exactly how to extract them, your agencies are so bloated and slow that even with precise instructions - which will require the correct expert to handle them, you won't get those passwords within 3 days.

The secret agencies operate successfully only behind a veil of lies and secrecy. If the Australian government wants to maintain an illusion of legitimacy, I suggest making it possible for Darren to magically appear in front of all of us RIGHT NOW, along with Alonso Quijana, ANOTHER great man associated with this web site who vanished on April 28 the same day and way Darren did and if I remember correctly was an Australian as well.

ORIGINAL SOURCE: http://www.jimstonefreelance.com/

Monday, May 6, 2013

Russia Prepares Law to Ban Gay Propaganda

Russia Bans Gay Propaganda from Activist TV on Vimeo.
Russia set to pass a law that will ban gay propaganda. This could include posters, film, radio, print, or any other communication methods.

MOSCOW — When a gay group held a film festival in Moscow in April, there were the usual anti-gay protesters. But this time, there was an unexpected visitor: a policeman armed with a Kalashnikov, checking ID’s.

Later this month, Russia’s Duma is expected to give final approval to a vaguely worded bill that would ban "homosexual propaganda" accessible to minors.

Despite protests, the bill won nearly unanimous approval in a preliminary vote last January.

Last month, France became the ninth country in Europe to legalize gay marriage. But in Russia, the trend is going in the opposition direction, away from tolerance.

Manny de Guerre, a long-term British resident of Russia, helped organize “Side by Side,” the gay film festival in Moscow.

“The impact of the law is that it creates fear in society,” said de Guerre who attended the festival with her partner. “It gives the green light to Orthodox activists, to nationalists, that it’s OK to beat up lesbian and gay people, that it’s OK to discriminate against them.”

Putin Defiant

With Russia increasingly standing out in isolation to the liberal trends of Western Europe, Russian President Vladimir Putin faced gay protesters when he visited Holland last month.

Back in Moscow, Putin was defiant when asked about European criticism.

"How can they demand that we introduce their standards?” he demanded in a nationally televised call in show. “Or maybe we should demand that they instill our standards in that country? Let's not demand anything from each other. Let's treat each other with respect."

Putin’s conservatism is backed by a nationwide Levada poll conducted in February. Two-thirds of respondents backed laws banning "gay propaganda." And large majorities said that gay propaganda could mean banning books, films, protests and parades.

Vladimir Ryzhkov, an opposition politician, says Putin is in step with Russian public opinion.

“It’s not like everyone wants a gay parade and Putin is against it,” said Ryzhkov, co-founder of the liberal Republic Party of Russia. “In this case, his point of view is exactly the same as 90 percent of the population.”

'Family Values'

At the offices of Young Guard, a Kremlin support group, Ekaterina Stenyakina, gives voice to mainstream Russians' distaste for homosexuality.

“We have traditional religions in which family values are among the most important of all,” said Stenyakina, a leader of the group. “That’s why our country, our state, is not ready for this kind of manifestation - gay parades on main squares.”

Oleg Grannikov, a Moscow gay activist, says that in this environment most Russian gays keep their personal lives in the shadows.

“In Moscow, of course, the situation is better than in the regions,” he said during a break at the film festival. “But still, while people may be open with their friends, very few are open with their parents or at their job.”

And Russia’s new legislation seems designed to keep Russian gays firmly in the closet for years to come.

'Erin Brockovich' Town to be Abandoned by 2023

HINKLEY, CALIFORNIA — The first and second graders at the Hinkley School gather in pairs to practice their vocabulary words. It seems business as usual for now, but with so many families leaving town, the school is scheduled to close forever in June.

“We’re learning every day different areas the kids are moving to now and we’ve had many, many tears," said Sonja Pellerin, a teacher at the school. "Some people have lived here for generations, and it is turning families upside down.”

Hinkley is the California town made famous by the movie, Erin Brockovich. Twenty years ago, the California-based energy company Pacific Gas & Electric paid hundreds of millions of dollars to settle legal claims by residents that PG&E had poisoned their well water by improperly dumping industrial waste into the ground. But that landmark legal victory, which was recounted in the Julia Roberts movie, was not the end of the story.

Since then, the plume of groundwater contaminated with toxic hexavalent chromium, also known as chromium 6, has continued to spread. Now, Hinkley residents are leaving, and the town's future is uncertain.

But Hinkley School's future is not. With enrollment falling sharply for several years, education officials say they can’t afford to keep the school open.

Roberta Walker, who came to school to have lunch with her grandchildren, is angry that the PG&E energy company declined school officials’ request to buy the campus in order to keep it open.

“The school was the biggest, biggest part of the community," Walker said. "And they refused to admit that they were at fault for the decline in enrollment.”

In the 1990s, Walker was the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit by hundreds of Hinkley residents against PG&E for dumping cooling water from a natural gas compression plant south of town into unlined ponds. The waste, laden with toxic chromium 6, contaminated Hinkley’s groundwater wells, and the suit blamed the company for the increased incidence of cancer and autoimmune disease that followed.

The company settled. With her share of the money, Walker built new homes for herself and her daughters several kilometers from the contamination site. Now, chromium 6 has turned up in her well water again. Walker and her daughters are negotiating with PG&E to buy their homes.

“There’s still that little hope that the state will continue pushing along, but am I gonna do it?" she said. "And once I leave, and once I get out of here, am I going to? No. I’m not. I’m tired. I’m done.”

PG&E has already agreed to buy out a third of Hinkley’s residents. Company spokesman Jeff Smith has said repeatedly over the years that PG&E wants to make sure Hinkley survives. But that’s getting more complicated.

“We certainly remain committed to working with the people of Hinkley," Smith said. "If their preference is to have their property purchased and to depart from the community, we want to make sure we have that option available to them as well.”

At the national level, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has spent the past 5 years studying new limits on chromium 6 in the environment. The EPA released a draft assessment in 2010, but that study is still under scientific review. The agency says it would be inappropriate to revise national drinking water standards until the process is complete.

“Hinkley is an example of, even when you get a lot of attention, still we can be lacking, on a larger society level, standards that are protecting people,” said Renee Sharp, with the Environmental Working Group, a private research and advocacy organization.

Under state orders, PG&E is still trying to clean up its mess. It's been pumping millions of liters of contaminated water onto nearby alfalfa fields each year, to let microbes in the soil break down the poison. The company also is pumping ethanol into the ground to trigger a chemical reaction designed to neutralize the chromium. At a public meeting in October, project engineer Kevin Sullivan offered this encouragement.

“We’re making a lot of progress. We’ve cleaned up like 54 acres [22 hectares]," he said. "I understand that if it’s not your property, you know, [you’ll ask] ‘What have you done for me lately?’ But 54 acres is a lot of progress. ”

But it’s only a fraction of the environmental damage. Three years ago, state water quality officials estimated the contamination plume was a little more than four kilometers long. According to the most recent state report, it may now stretch more than 11 kilometers, and the state water quality board says it's spreading more than half a meter per day.

“It seems like the more we look, the more we’re finding, and it’s something that is scary for folks,” said the state water quality board's Lauri Kemper.

Frightening as the pollution is, Patsy Morris, 83, was determined to stay until recently. With Hinkley emptying out, she’s decided she has no choice but to leave, too.

“You get a bitterness about the whole thing," Morris said. "They’re just going to make this a big dustbowl, that’s all I can say about it. My friends are leaving, one way or another. It gets you, you know?”

PG&E estimates it take could another 40 years to clean up all of the chromium 6 pollution. That draws grim laughter from people in Hinkley. They predict that within 10 years, their community will be a ghost town.

Paid to Prescribe: Two Dozen Doctors Named in Novartis Kickback Case

Written by Theodoric Meyer

On Jan. 23, 2008, the pharmaceutical company Novartis threw a party at a restaurant on Long Island. The party, which cost $1,250, was ostensibly for doctors to learn about cardiovascular drugs made by the company, with Novartis

sales representatives present as well.

But no doctors ever came, according to a whistleblower lawsuit against Novartis that was unsealed last week. Instead, nine sales reps ran up the tab, and the company wrote an honorarium check to Dr. Robert Nissan, a Long Island family practitioner who wasn’t present, the lawsuit alleges.

The party, the lawsuit maintains, was one of “countless” events held by Novartis over a decade that were designed to direct kickbacks — cash, meals and favors to relatives — to doctors who prescribed the company’s drugs.

Last week, the Department of Justice joined the whistleblower lawsuit, which was originally filed in 2011 by Oswald Bilotta, a former Novartis sales representative on Long Island. “Novartis corrupted the prescription drug dispensing process with multi-million dollar ‘incentive programs’ that targeted doctors who, in exchange for illegal kickbacks, steered patients toward its drugs,” Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement.

Novartis has disputed the government’s allegations of wrongdoing; Nissan did not return several requests for comment.

Whether such payments by drug companies to physicians are kickbacks or a legitimate marketing and educational practice is a recurring controversy — as ProPublica has extensively reported. Our Dollars for Docs database tracks $2 billion in payments to doctors from 15 drug companies, including Novartis. All but one have settled government lawsuits alleging improper marketing practices.
A number of the doctors named in the Novartis case have received substantial sums since 2009, Dollars for Docs shows, including one physician who was paid more than $150,000 combined from six different drug companies.

Historically, the doctors cited in cases alleging improper marketing have not faced consequences. A ProPublica investigation in 2011 found that none of more than 75 doctors named in lawsuits since 2008 had been sanctioned, despite charges of fraud or conduct that put patients at risk.

Generally, payments like those in Dollars for Docs made for speaking, consulting, travel, meals and other promotional purposes are legal.

Novartis has only publicly reported payments since 2010, when the company pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and paid $422.5 million to settle charges it had illegally promoted Trileptal, an anti-seizure drug, and had paid kickbacks for prescribing its drugs. Aside from the misdemeanor plea, Novartis denied wrongdoing.

The latest lawsuit is one of two filed last week by the Justice Department against Novartis in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. The company is also accused of paying kickbacks to pharmacies to promote Myfortic, a drug that suppresses the immune system. Novartis — which is bound by a corporate integrity agreement from its 2010 settlement — has disputed the allegations in both cases.
“We disagree with the way the government is characterizing our conduct in both of these matters and we stand behind our Compliance program,” Andre Wyss, the head of Novartis’s U.S. operations, said in a statement.

The whistleblower lawsuit alleges that Lotrel, a blood-pressure medication with sales of nearly $1.3 billion in 2006, “became a big seller for NOVARTIS because it paid physicians to write Lotrel prescriptions.” Novartis sales reps allegedly rewarded doctors with cash or gift checks and recruited them to attend “Clinical Learning Days” with honoraria of $250 to $500 a pop.

The meetings could be as short as half an hour, the whistleblower suit alleges, and doctors would be paid even if they didn’t show up. “So long as a physician was writing Lotrel prescriptions,” it says, “he or she could expect to be paid.”

Thousands of doctors took part in the alleged kickback scheme, according to the whistleblower lawsuit. But the case singles out 24 Long Island doctors and nurses, including Nissan. Nissan and two other physicians — Edward Condon, who specializes in internal medicine, and Mark Jagust, a family practitioner — “each received tens of thousands of dollars” from Novartis, according to the lawsuit.

Novartis also hired Ross Fishberger — the son of Kenneth Fishberger, another one of the doctors named — as a sales representative “in order to assure that Dr. Fishberger continued to prescribe” Lotrel and other Novartis drugs, according to the lawsuit. Novartis also allegedly employed Condon’s wife and daughter-in-law as sales reps.

Reached by ProPublica, Condon said he had no knowledge of the lawsuit, and hung up when asked more detailed questions. Jagust and the elder Fishberger did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Ross Fishberger declined to comment when reached by ProPublica.
Dollars for Docs shows that drug companies have made payments to many of the 24 doctors named in the whistleblower lawsuit since 2009.

Condon received at least $156,094 in meals, travel, speaking fees and other expenses from six companies, including Novartis. Another doctor, Michael Shanik of Smithtown, N.Y., was paid at least $97,754 from six companies, including more than $30,000 from Novartis.

Robert Mormando, an internal medicine specialist in Port Jefferson Station, N.Y., who was also named in the case, told ProPublica he hadn’t taken any kickbacks and didn’t know of Long Island doctors who had.

“I would say it’s up for interpretation whether paying someone to be part of a speaking program” constitutes a kickback, he said. “I’m not aware of any doctors who have taken it to that level.”

Mormando said he had been a paid speaker for Novartis on three occasions a number of years ago and estimated he had earned between $1,200 and $1,500. According to Dollars for Docs, he was paid at least $9,958 from nine pharmaceutical companies since 2009, only $19 of which came from Novartis.

Another of the named doctors, Howard Hertz of Babylon, N.Y., also denied taking kickbacks in a brief interview. Hertz was paid at least $9,888 since 2010 from five drug companies, including $4,110 from Novartis, according to Dollars for Docs.

The main plank of the Justice Department’s lawsuit is the federal anti-kickback statute, which makes it illegal for drug companies to pay doctors with the intent of getting them to prescribe a particular drug or to reward them for doing so.

Kevin Outterson, a professor at Boston University Law School who has studied health care fraud, said it can difficult to prove intent in pursuing kickback cases.

“What it boils down to is they need smoking gun evidence,” he said.

But Outterson said he thought the Justice Department had a strong case. “It goes directly to the culture of wining and dining and having lavish entertainment and educational events in order to induce prescription writing,” he said.

Re-published from propublica.org under Creative Commons.

Chemical Plant Protest Censored in China

Written by Abby

Residents of China’s southwestern Kunming city took to the streets on May 4, 2013 to protest against the potential production of a toxic chemical at a nearby factory.

According to state media, the China National Petroleum Corporation plans to build a chemical plant in the nearby town of Anning to produce 500,000 tonnes of paraxylene (PX) used to make fabric. Close to 3,000 people gathered in the city center to protest against the dangers of a possible PX spill.

China's state media kept the news of the protest quiet, and online censors have aggressively deleted information and photos about the demonstration on popular microblogging site Sina Weibo since May 4, 2013. Many Web users switched their Weibo profile photos to an image of “Kunming PX” crossed-out to show support.
Kunming is well-known for its flowers and plants thanks to its perpetual spring-like weather. It is one of the few Chinese cities that regularly enjoy clear blue skies.

Similar protests had erupted in different cities in recent years. In 2007, thousands of people in China's eastern Xiamen city protested the construction of a PX plant. In the past two years, two large NIMBY protests erupted in Dalian and Ningbo.

One Weibo user “Boluocun Yihao” from Kunming called for [zh] more support online:

媒体被控制，手机信号被切断，保卫人民生命安全的警察却没有保卫，＂XX石化炼油厂，滚出昆明！＂我们不要牛奶河，我们不要PM2.5，我们不要PX。希望大家可以接力转载，转发。保护我们的母亲昆明。

Media control, cell phone signals cut off, the police who are supposed to defend the safety of the people didn't protect the people, “XX petrochemical refinery, get out of Kunming!” We do not want milk river[a polluted river in Kunming has turned the color of milk], we do not want PM2.5 [pollution], we do not want PX. Please repost this message. Protect our mother Kunming.

Another Weibo user from Kunming criticized [zh] the media censorship:

那么大一个中国，只有《北京晚报》一家如实报道了昆明昨天发生的事。而且还不是亲自采访的，是引用网易的。据说中新社的采访了昨天的事，但是最后没能发表。新华社，央视更是能躲则躲…..中国已经没有媒体能为百姓说话了，同意的速转.

Such a big country, yet only “Beijing Evening News” truthfully reported what happened in Kunming yesterday. It was not an original report, but quoted from NetEase. It is said that China news agency did the interview yesterday, but was forbidden to publish in the end. Xinhua News Agency or CCTV hide as far away as they can….China has no media to speak for its people. Please repost the message if you agree.

A musician from Kunming “Yinyue Xiaosun” echoed [zh] the sentiment:

各位昆明的媒体朋友，我理解你们的工作，就像我们理解今天的警察哥哥，警察叔叔，警察姐姐一样。但是，你们都生活在昆明，都爱自己家乡，都希望自己的孩子呼吸新鲜的空气，不是吗？？不是吗？不是吗？

Media friends in Kunming, I understand your work, just like we understand today's police. But you live in Kunming. We all love our own hometown and want our children to breathe the fresh air, don’t you?? Don’t you? Don’t you?

Weibo user “Kong Batian” recalled [zh] the World Horticultural Exposition in Kunming in 1999:

14年前的今天，在“人与自然，和谐发展——共同迈向21世纪”的口号下，昆明人满怀激动与自豪迎来了中国第一个世博会！而14年后的今天，云南人竟然要为了自己的生存环境走上街头进行抗争！这真是对昆明人民莫大的讽刺！

14 years ago, under the theme of “man and nature, marching into the 21st century”, the Kunming people ushered in the first World Expo in China with pride and excitement! 14 years later, Yunnan people had to take to the streets to fight for the environment! This is the great irony for the Kunming people!

Many Weibo users quoted [zh] a poem written by famous journalist Bai Yansong:

用不了多久，这座城市将慢慢退出人们的视线，沦为历史的鸡肋，美丽的传说将永远成为传说，没有人会对此负责，应该对此负责的人早已离开了这个城市，甚至这个国家，他们的子女早已远居海外，留下的只是一个破烂污染的废城，一方癌症的区域，一群朴实、愚昧的人民，这个城市叫作昆明。

Soon the city will slowly become out of sight and forgotten by history. The beautiful legend will always be a legend. No one will be held responsible because the ones that should be have already left the city, and their children have already immigrated, leaving a tattered and polluted city with innocent people, a cancer area ….. this city is called Kunming.