Whistleblowing Wednesday: Report Says America Sent Spies To North Korea To Infiltrate The Regime’s Nuclear Facility

A team of specially-trained U.S. commandos infiltrated North Korea in a spy mission focused on the regime’s nuke program, according to a controversial report that the U.S. military denies.

According to a report in The Diplomat, Brigadier Gen Neil H. Tolley acknowledged that U.S. and South Korean special forces have parachuted into the North to get a closer look at underground military tunnels the regime has constructed.

From the report:

‘The entire tunnel infrastructure is hidden from our satellites,’ the online magazine reported Gen Tolley as saying at a Florida press conference last week.

‘So we send [South Korean] soldiers and U.S. soldiers to the North to do special reconnaissance.’

If true, the mission would break rules set in place by the 1953 armistice agreement that marked the end of the Korean War.

A portion of the document states: ‘No person, military or civilian, shall be permitted to cross the military demarcation line unless specifically authorized to do so by the Military Armistice Commission’.

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America Has The Second Highest Child Poverty Rate In The Developed World

According to a new report from the Office of Research at the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the U.S. has one of the highest rates of child poverty in the developed world. Of the 35 wealthy countries studied by UNICEF, only Romania has a child poverty rate higher than the 23 percent rate in the U.S.:

[The rate is] based on the definition of relative poverty used by the OECD. Under this definition, a child is deemed to be living in relative poverty if he or she is growing up in a household where disposable income, when adjusted for family size and composition, is less than 50% of the median disposable household income for the country concerned. By this standard, more than 15% of the 200 million children in the 35 countries listed in Figure 1b are seen to be living in relative poverty.

The top five positions in the league table are occupied by Iceland, Finland, Cyprus, the Netherlands and Norway (with Slovenia and Denmark close behind). All of these countries have relative child poverty rates below 7%. Another eight countries including two of the largest — Germany and France– have rates between 7% and 10%. A third group, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, post rates of between 10% and 15%. A further six, including populous Italy and Spain, show rates of between 15% and 20%. In only two countries are more than 20% of children living in relative poverty — Romania and the United States.

The Great Recession has, of course, exacerbated child poverty. According to a recent report, 8.3 million children in the U.S. have been affected by the foreclosure crisis that arose after the housing bubble burst.

However, the social safety net has helped alleviate some of this suffering. For instance, food stamps reduced the number of children living in extreme poverty by half last year.

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NDAA 2013: The House Approves Indefinite Detention of American Citizens, Pro-Government Propaganda, Gay Marriage Prohibition In The Military, etc.

Reauthorizing the indefinite detention of US citizens without charge might be the scariest provision in next year’s defense spending bill, but it certainly isn’t the only one worth worrying about.

An amendment tagged on the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013 would allow for the United States government to create and distribute pro-American propaganda within the country’s own borders under the alleged purpose of putting al-Qaeda’s attempts at persuading the world against Western ideals on ice. Former US representatives went out of there way to ensure their citizens that they’d be excluded from government-created media blasts, but two lawmakers currently serving the country are looking to change all that.

Congressmen Mac Thornberry (R-TX) and Adam Smith (D-WA) introduced “The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012” (H.R. 5736) last week during discussions for the NDAA 2013. It was voted on by the US House of Representatives to be included in next year’s defense spending bill, which was then voted on as a whole and approved. The amendment updates the antiquated Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 and Foreign Relations Authorization Act of 1987, essentially clarifying that the US State Department and the Broadcasting Board of Governors may “prepare, disseminate and use public diplomacy information abroad,” but while also striking down a long-lasting ban on the domestic dissemination in America.

Source /NDAA 2013 Text

The U.S. And Canada’s Middle Class Has Not Grown In Over 30 Years

Only Mexico’s middle class has grown over the past 30 years in North America, while income disparity has increased in Canada and the United States, according to a study here out Tuesday.

“Mexico’s middle class has benefited from urbanization, greater female employment, improved education and better social programs,” said economist Lars Osberg, the author of the report by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA).

Similar trends in Canada and the United States helped maintain middle-class growth until the 1970s, Osberg said, but those trends “have since run out of steam.

“Globalization, technological advances, a drop in unionized work, and a deregulated labour market have contributed to stagnant real incomes for most in Canada and the US since the 1980s,” he said.

Osberg said that income disparity “has accelerated” in both Canada and the United States.

“When the rising savings of the rich are parked in the financial markets, but everyone else falls deeper into debt, a house of cards is created, producing the kind of economic instability that led to the 1929 financial sector crash and the market meltdown of 2008.”

The path to stability “requires either an acceleration of the income growth rate of the bottom 99 percent or a decline in income growth of the top one percent,” Osberg said.

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1. The number of students who have to go into debt to get a bachelor’s degree has risen from 45% in 1993 to 94% today.

2. There is now more than $1 trillion in outstanding student loan debt in the United States.

3. Over the last 10 years, tuition and fees at state schools have increased 72%.

4. During the late 1970s, Ohio spent 17% of their budget on higher education and 4% of prisions. Today, Ohio spends 11% on higher ed and 8% of prisons.

5. This year, national, state and local spending on higher education reached a 25-year low.

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Anti-Islam Teaching Widespread In U.S. Law Enforcement

A course at a military academy that taught US officers to prepare for “total war” with Islam does not represent an isolated incident, campaigners have warned.

The Pentagon moved swiftly to distance itself from revelations that officers in a defense department class were taught that “Hiroshima”-style tactics would be needed to combat the threat from Islam.

“It was totally objectionable, against our values and it wasn’t academically sound,” said General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.

The class in question was canceled in April and Dempsey noted the instructor responsible for the course, army lieutenant colonel Matthew A Dooley, is “no longer in a teaching status”. Dooley, however, is still employed at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia.

Linda Sarsour, executive director at the Arab American Association of New York, said the course is merely the latest example in a proliferation of anti-Muslim teaching materials in law-enforcement agencies. “It’s part of a much larger problem,” Sarsour said, pointing to similar controversies involving the FBI and the New York police department.

On Thursday, Danger Room — a national security blog at Wired.com – published a series of documents revealing that a defense department class for US military officers urged soldiers to prepare for a “total war” against the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims. In this battle for supremacy, Geneva Convention standards for armed conflict would be irrelevant and the historical precedents of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be applied to civilian populations “wherever necessary”.

Hundreds of pages of teaching material and reference documents obtained by Danger Room show the course – which was open to US military commanders, lieutenant colonels, captains and colonels – argued that the real threat to US national security stemmed not from radical militants, but from Islam itself.

In a July presentation, Dooley claimed: “We have now come to understand that there is no such thing as ‘moderate Islam’. It is therefore time for the United States to make our true intentions clear. This barbaric ideology will no longer be tolerated. Islam must change or we will facilitate its self-destruction.” He proposed a four-stage solution that included the possibility of reducing Islam to “a cult status” and threatening Saudi Arabia with starvation.

Dooley brought in several ideological allies to support his conclusion, including Shireen Burki, who in 2008 told future military decision makers that “Obama is bin Laden’s dream candidate”. John Guandolo, a former FBI employee, presented students with an array of materials including a paper in which he argued: “It is a permanent command in Islam for Muslims to hate and despise Jews and Christians.”

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Americans Are Too Broke To Go Bankrupt

This year, hundreds of thousands of Americans are expected to be too broke to file for bankruptcy.

The average cost to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection, the most common form of consumer bankruptcy, is more than $1,500, according to recent research submitted to the National Bureau of Economic Research.

As a result, anywhere between 200,000 and one million consumers are estimated to be unable to afford that steep cost this year.

The research, conducted by a group of professors from Columbia University, the University of Chicago and Washington University in St. Louis,examined how bankruptcy filings spiked after people received their tax rebates in previous years. They estimate that another 200,000 consumers, who would otherwise not have enough money to file, will use their tax refunds to pay for bankruptcy this year.

“It becomes harder and harder to pay off the debt as interest payments get higher, so your debt grows larger and larger,“ said Jialan Wang, co-author of the report.

Among those fees is a charge of about $300 just for filing the paperwork with the federal court, while the rest typically goes to bankruptcy lawyers, said Wang.

And there are other expenses on top of that, including fees for mandatory pre-bankruptcy credit counseling and a pre-discharge debtor education course. These average about $85 altogether, according to a recent study sponsored by the American Bankruptcy Institute, she said.

That means many of the Americans who have seen their debt snowball out of control due to events like job loss, foreclosure or a medical emergency during the economic downturn are now left without their last financial lifeline, she said.

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42% of Americans Will Be Obese By 2030

Cut the growth in rates of obesity by just 1 percent a year over the next two decades, and you’ll slice health care costs by $85 billion.

Keep obesity rates at their current levels – which is well below a 33 percent increase being projected — and you’ll save nearly $550 billion during the same time frame.

Those are the attention-grabbing conclusions of a new paper being released this morning at the “Weight of the Nation” conference in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Researchers from Duke University, RTI International and CDC prepared the study, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

In the new study, researchers estimate that obesity will continue to expand and will affect 42 percent of adults by 2030.  (Obesity represents a body mass index score, a ratio of weight to height, of 30 or higher.  Separate estimates for children aren’t calculated.)

That projection takes account of recent evidence that obesity has leveled off among some groups, and as a result it’s lower than an earlier estimate that just over half of the nation’s adults would be obese by 2030.  It also factors in conditions in the states that can affect the prevalence of obesity, such as unemployment, the availability of fast food, and price differences between healthy and less healthy food items.

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About 15 million premature babies are born every year, and the United States fared badly in the first country-by-country global comparison of premature births released Wednesday by the World Health Organization and other agencies.

More than 1 in 10 of the world’s births are premature — and 1.1 million of these newborns die as a result. Even those who survive can suffer lifelong disabilities.

Most of the world’s preemies are born in Africa and Asia, the report said. But it’s a problem for the United States, too, where half a million babies are born too soon. That’s about 1 in 8 U.S. births, a higher rate than in Europe, Canada, Australia or Japan — and even worse than rates in a number of less developed countries, too, the report found.

About 12 percent of U.S. births are preterm. (In contrast, just 5.9 percent of births in Japan and Sweden are premature.) That stems from the specific U.S. combination of many pregnant teenagers and many women older than 35 giving birth, sometimes to twins or triplets implanted after in vitro fertilization, the authors said. Twins and triplets are often deliberately delivered early by Caesarean section to avoid the unpredictable risks of vaginally delivering multiple babies.

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More Than One-Third Of All U.S. Executions Took Place In Texas

The Economist maps out every American execution since 1976, when the Supreme Court announced the modern constitutional regime governing death penalty cases after effectively suspending all executions nationwide for four years. Over one-third of all executions during this period took place in Texas, for a total of 481 people killed by that state. Of the remaining, non-Texas executions, the overwhelming majority are clustered in a small group of southern states

It’s worth noting that, although the death penalty is still technically legal in most states, actual executions are very rare in most of the country — even after a person has been sentenced to death row. According to a 2011 study by the Death Penalty Information Center, thirty-two U.S. jurisdictions executed no one in the previous five years and more than half of those jurisdictions executed no one after the Supreme Court permitted executions to continue in 1976. Only 12 states executed someone in 2010, and only 7 states executed more than one person.

The increasing rarity of the death penalty in most of the country not only reflects America’s evolution away from inhumane and irreversible criminal justice policy, it also has constitutional implications. The Constitution forbids “cruel and unusual punishments,” and the death penalty is increasingly unusual in the overwhelming majority of the nation. At the very least, Texas’ status as the outlier jurisdiction suggests that an Eighth Amendment solution may be necessary.

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Israel Forces ‘Ready To Hit Iran If Ordered’

Israeli forces are carrying out more special operations beyond the country’s borders and will be ready to attack Iran’s nuclear sites if ordered, the chief-of-staff said in an interview on Sunday.

In an extract from an interview with the top-selling Yediot Aharanot daily, Lieutenant General Benny Gantz said that 2012 would be a critical year in efforts to halt what Israel and much of the international community believe is an Iranian nuclear arms programme.

“We think that a nuclear Iran is a very bad thing, which the world needs to stop and which Israel needs to stop — and we are planning accordingly,” Gantz said.

“In principle, we are ready to act.

“That does not mean that I will now order (air force chief) Ido (Nehushtan) to strike Iran,” he added in the interview which will be published in full on Wednesday, on the eve of Israel’s 64th anniversary as a state.

The United States says it does not believe Iran has so far taken a decision to develop a nuclear weapon, or that the time is right for military action, preferring to give international sanctions time to work.

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Full Report 2012 (PDF)

Full Report 2013 (PDF)

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Mother of Former Patient Suing Judge Rotenberg Center For Torturing Her Son

Cheryl McCollins, the mother of a teen who received controversial electro-shock treatment at the Judge Rotenberg Center ten years ago, is suing three workers and the center itself.

In October of 2002, Andre McCollins, 18, received painful shock treatments the Judge Rotenberg Center in Canton.

Shocking evidence was revealed in a Dedham courtroom on Wednesday. A video showed Andre McCollins at the center — for people with behavioral disorders — screaming in pain and begging for help while apparently receiving electro-shock treatment.

The Judge Rotenberg Center has been a controversial facility. About 1.5 years ago, a UN official said the shock therapy at the facility amounts to torture, and he urged the U.S. government to put a stop to it.

Though some families say the shock aversion therapy has worked, an expert hired by McCollins as a witness testified that after more than 30 shock treatments, the defendants should have known they were dealing with a different sort of patient — who was not responding well.

“He was essentially in what we would call a catatonic condition. That means a condition that happens with people that are acutely psychotically disturbed and they let him stay in the facility basically sitting still, not eating, refusing fluids for the most part, for the next few days. They’re lucky he didn’t die,” said Dr. Marc Whaley, expert witness.

The jury was ordered to disregard Dr. Whaley’s opinion.

Cheryl McCollins testified Tuesday she never signed up for her son Andre, who is now in his late 20s, to be “tortured, terrorized, and abused.”

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