More than 1,300 girls in the United Kingdom have experienced negative reactions to the government-mandated Cervarix vaccine for the human papillomavirus (HPV), according to adverse events reports collected from doctors by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA).

“When they introduced this new vaccine, we had major concerns about its safety,” said Jackie Fletcher of Jabs, a support group for those negatively affected by vaccines. “The current statistics detailing adverse reactions — including cases of epilepsy and convulsions — bears out that we were right to be concerned.”

Cervarix, manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline, inoculates patients against strains 16 and 18 of HPV, which are believed to be responsible for 70 percent of cervical cancer cases. The British government began a program to vaccinate all secondary school girls in September 2008, and 700,000 have received the injections so far. The government’s plan is to have all girls under the age of 18 vaccinated by 2011.

Critics have objected, however, that the government based its decision on studies of women under the age of 26, rather than studies conducted on school-age girls. In addition, while the vaccine has been shown to prevent against HPV infection in the short term, there is no evidence of its long-term efficacy or that it actually lowers cancer rates.

The MHRA reports show a total of 2,891 adverse events reported in 1,340 girls. The majority were minor and short-lived problems, such as swelling, rashes, pain or mild allergies to the vaccine. A number of cases were more severe, however, including 20 cases of blurred vision, four cases of convulsions, one case of seizures and one epileptic fit. Five cases of partial paralysis were reported, including Bell’s palsy (face), Guillain-Barre syndrome (legs), hyopaesthesia (loss of sense of touch) and hemiparesis (severe weakening or paralysis of half the body).

“The government needs to look at the future of this program given the number of side-effects coming through,” Fletcher said.

Source: Natural News

Financial sector executives should not fear government imposed caps on their salaries even as the Obama administration moves to influence how firms pay their employees. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Monday that government should place “broad constraints” on the incentives that huge pay packages create for executives to take short-term risks. But he drew the line at government determining levels of pay.

“I don’t think our government should set caps on compensation,” Geithner said Monday during an interview at an invitation-only luncheon hosted by Newsweek.

He said government’s goal should be to minimize excessive risk-taking by financial firms — the kind of gambles that helped precipitate the current financial crisis.

“You had a crisis magnified by the fact that people were paid to take huge amounts of short term risk,” he said. “That’s something that is preventable.”

Geithner said government standards could require that incentive pay be tied to long-term performance. He said such standards could combine with compensation disclosure requirements and giving shareholders the ability to vote on salary packages — a practice known as “say on pay.”

Wall Street bonuses and retention packages have provoked anger among the public and in Congress. Lawmakers have moved to limit pay for top employees at financial institutions that have received federal government assistance. The standards Geithner envisioned would apply to all financial institutions.

Geithner also said the economy is stabilizing but unemployment would continue to rise. He pointed to positive signs in the economy, including improvements in credit markets. But he called the recession the most challenging economic crisis the nation has seen in generations.

“We’re not going to have a steady, even process of repair,” he said. “It’s going to be bumpy and still feel fragile for a while. It’s not going to feel better for a long time for millions of Americans.”

On other topics:

_The deficit: “We have to wait until we see recovery firmly established before we start to withdraw this extraordinary stimulus that we put in place.” He called reducing the deficit, “one of the defining economic challenges, political challenges of the next five years.”

_His short-handed staff at Treasury: “We’re doing quite well in terms of speed and quality of policy….Things that normally takes years, we’re doing very, very quickly.” He said he hoped to be staffed at the levels he needs by the beginning of August.

_Financial regulation: Geithner said the administration, “in the next few weeks,” plans to announce a comprehensive set of proposals for overhauling oversight of the financial sector.

Source: Raw Story

3 facts show that the government “fixed the facts” regarding 9/11 around a policy decision to exonerate the government from any blame whatsoever.

1. 9/11 Commission’s Chief Counsel says Official Story “Almost Entirely Untrue . . . There Was an Agreement Not to Tell the Truth about What Happened”

As Daily Kos notes in a recent recommended story, the senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission – John Farmer – states in a new book that the official story of 9/11 “almost entirely untrue“.

As I noted last month, he also says:

At some level of the government, at some point in time…there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened.

and

I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described …. The [Norad air defense] tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years…. This is not spin. This is not true.

If you think that Farmer has gone nuts, you should see what his colleagues on the 9/11 Commission say.

2. The Government Used Communist-Style “Minders” to Intimidate Witnesses

The government used “minders” to intimidate witnesses to the 9/11 Commission. In fact, according to an internal memo:

• Minders “answer[ed] questions directed at witnesses;”
• Minders acted as “monitors, reporting to their respective agencies on Commission staffs lines of inquiry and witnesses’ verbatim responses.” The staff thought this “conveys to witnesses that their superiors will review their statements and may engage in retribution;” and
• Minders “positioned themselves physically and have conducted themselves in a manner that we believe intimidates witnesses from giving full and candid responses to our questions.”

3. The Main Sources of Information Were Not Even Remotely Credible

The fact that people were tortured in order to justify the Iraq war by making a false linkage between Iraq and 9/11 is gaining attention.

Many people are starting to understand that top Bush administration officials not only knowingly lied about a non-existent connection between Al Qaida and Iraq, but they pushed and insisted that interrogators use special torture methods aimed at extracting false confessions to attempt to create such a false linkage.

Indeed, the Senate Armed Services Committee found that the U.S. used torture techniques specifically aimed at extracting false confessions (and see this).

And as Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times:

Let’s say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link.

But many people still assume that the basics of the 9/11 Commission Report must be accurate, and based on reliable evidence. However, that is incorrect.

For example, according to NBC news:

• Much of the 9/11 Commission Report was based upon the testimony of people who were tortured

• At least four of the people whose interrogation figured in the 9/11 Commission Report have claimed that they told interrogators information as a way to stop being “tortured.”

• One of the Commission’s main sources of information was tortured until he agreed to sign a confession that he was NOT EVEN ALLOWED TO READ

• The 9/11 Commission itself doubted the accuracy of the torture confessions, and yet kept their doubts to themselves

In fact, the self-confessed “mastermind” of 9/11 also confessed to crimes which he could not have committed. He later said that he gave the interrogators a lot of false information – telling them what he thought they wanted to hear – in an attempt to stop the torture. We also know that he was heavily tortured specifically for the purpose of trying to obtain false information about 9/11 – specifically, that Iraq had something to do with it.

(By the way, the supposed corroborating witness who “independently” fingered the “mastermind” was clinically crazy, so his testimony would be thrown out in any real trial).

Remember, as discussed above, the torture techniques used by the Bush administration to try to link Iraq and 9/11 were specifically geared towards creating false confessions (they were techniques created by the communists to be used in show trials).

So why do people believe the torture confessions regarding 9/11 itself?

The above-linked NBC news report quotes a couple of legal experts to this effect:

Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, says he is “shocked” that the Commission never asked about extreme interrogation measures.

“If you’re sitting at the 9/11 Commission, with all the high-powered lawyers on the Commission and on the staff, first you ask what happened rather than guess,” said Ratner, whose center represents detainees at Guantanamo. “Most people look at the 9/11 Commission Report as a trusted historical document. If their conclusions were supported by information gained from torture, therefore their conclusions are suspect.“…

Karen Greenberg, director of the Center for Law and Security at New York University’s School of Law, put it this way: “[I]t should have relied on sources not tainted. It calls into question how we were willing to use these interrogations to construct the narrative.”

The interrogations were “used” to “construct the narrative” which the 9/11 Commission decided to use.

Remember (as explored in the book The Commission by respected journalist Philip Shenon), that the Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission was an administration insider whose area of expertise is the creation and maintenance of “public myths” thought to be true, even if not actually true. He wrote an outline of what he wanted the report to say very early in the process, controlled what the Commission did and did not analyze, then limited the scope of the Commission’s inquiry so that the overwhelming majority of questions about 9/11 remained unasked (see this article and this article). Just as the “facts” about Saddam’s WMDs were “fixed around” the policy of launching a war in Iraq, the use of specialized torture techniques geared towards extracting false confessions appear to have been “used” to “construct the narrative” which Zelikow and other administration insiders had decided to use.

As constitutional law expert Jonathan Turley stated:

[The 9/11 Commission] was a commission that was really made for Washington – a commission composed of political appointees of both parties that ran interference for those parties – a commission that insisted at the beginning it would not impose blame on individuals.

Am I saying that 9/11 was an inside job? No, this essay is not addressing that issue one way or the other.

For the sake of clarity, however, it should be noted that there are 4 possibilities:

(1) 9/11 was carried out entirely by Muslim extremists

(2) 9/11 was carried out by Muslim extremists, but elements within the United States government and/or defense industry aided them either actively or by passively failing to stop them

(3) 9/11 was carried out by Muslim extremists, but they were aided by the secular Iraqi government

or

(4) 9/11 was not carried out by Muslim extremists

We already know that the Bush administration tried to falsely create evidence for the third option. Whether or not they also tried to falsely create evidence in favor of the first option and contradicting the second (or fourth) option is an important question, one which lies beyond the scope of this essay.

See also this.

Source: Washingtons Blog

Alan Miller of Patriots Question 9/11 has a new roundup entitled:

“41 U.S. Counter-Terrorism and Intelligence Agency Veterans Challenge the Official Account of 9/11 – Official Account of 9/11: “Terribly Flawed,” “Laced with Contradictions,” “a Joke,” “a Cover-up””

Click here to see the roundup.

The counterterrorism officials speaking out include, by way of example only:

* Terrell (Terry) E. Arnold, MA – Former Deputy Director, Office of Counter-Terrorism and Emergency Planning, U.S. State Department. Former Chairman, Department of International Studies, National War College. Graduate of the National War College. Retired Senior Foreign Service Officer of the U.S. Department of State.
http://patriotsquestion911.com/#TArnold

* William Christison – Former National Intelligence Officer. Former Director of the CIA’s Office of Regional and Political Analysis, a 250-person unit responsible for political analysis of every country and region in the world. 29-year CIA veteran.
http://patriotsquestion911.com/#Christison

* Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, PhD, U.S. Air Force (ret) – Former member of the staff of the Director of the National Security Agency. Former Political-Military Affairs Officer in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. 20-year Air Force career.
http://patriotsquestion911.com/#Kwiatkowski

* Robert David Steele – U.S. Marine Corps infantry and intelligence officer for twenty years. Second-ranking civilian (GS-14) in U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence from 1988 – 1992 and a member of the Adjunct Faculty of Marine Corps University. Also former clandestine services case officer with the CIA. 25-year U.S. military and intelligence career. Currently Founder and CEO of OSS.net and a proponent of Open Source Intelligence.
http://patriotsquestion911.com/#Steele

* Wayne Madsen – Former U.S. Navy Intelligence Officer, specialist in electronic surveillance and security. Formerly assigned to the National Security Agency and the State Department. Currently, investigative journalist, nationally distributed columnist, and author. http://patriotsquestion911.com/#Madsen

Check it out for yourself!

Source: Prison Planet