Haiti has a longstanding history of US military intervention and occupation going back to the beginning of the 20th Century. US interventionism has contributed to the destruction of Haiti’s national economy and the impoverishment of its population.

The devastating earthquake is presented to World public opinion as the sole cause of the country’s predicament.

A country has been destroyed, its infrastructure demolished. Its people precipitated into abysmal poverty and despair.

Haiti’s history, its colonial past have been erased. Read the full story

Future humans won’t have to wait to travel to Pandora for the chance to mine unobtanium, because Neptune and Uranus may have diamond icebergs floating atop liquid diamond seas closer to home. The surprise finding comes from the first detailed measurements of the melting point of diamond, Discovery News reports.

Scientists zapped diamond with a laser at pressures 40 million times greater than the Earth’s atmosphere at sea level, and then slowly reduced both temperature and pressure. They eventually found that diamond behaves like water during freezing and melting, and that chunks of diamond will float in the liquid diamond. Read the full story

(NaturalNews) The CDC is engaged in a very clever, statistically devious spin campaign, and nearly every journalist in the mainstream media has fallen for its ploy. No one has yet reported what I’m about to reveal here.

It all started with the CDC’s recent release of new statistics about swine flu fatalities, infection rates and vaccination rates. According to the CDC:

• 61 million Americans were vaccinated against swine flu (about 20% of the U.S. population). The CDC calls this a “success” even though it means 4 out of 5 people rejected the vaccines. Read the full story

Bears player Gaines Adams, 26, is dead, according to a report by the Greenville News of South Carolina.

Adams, a former Clemson University football star, died Sunday morning after he was taken to the Emergency Room at Self Regional in Greenwood, County Coroner James T. Coursey told the Greensville News.

Adams, a defensive end, was the fourth player chosen in the 2007 National Football League draft by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

He was traded from Tampa Bay to the Chicago Bears in October. An autopsy will be performed today by a forensic pathologist.

http://www.suntimes.com

According to the Chicago-Sun Times, Gaines passed away due to a heart attack:

Chicago-Sun Times Report

Gaines Adams, the defensive end the Bears acquired for a second-round draft pick from Tampa Bay this season, died this morning at 26.

Adams, according to reports in The Greenville News, was pronounced dead at the emergency room of Self Regional Hospital in Greenwood, S.C. according to County Coroner James T. Coursey.

Adams, 26, was a standout player at Clemson at defensive end, and was the fourth player chosen in the 2007 National Football League draft by the Buccaneers. He was traded from Tampa Bay to the Chicago Bears in October, though didn’t find much playing time with the struggling defensive unit.

An autopsy is planned by Anderson County officials following reports of a heart attack, though no cause of death has been declared yet.

In four years in the league, Adams, a native of South Carolina, recorded 13.5 sacks in 29 games.

The tragic news comes less than 24 hours after fellow Bears defensive lineman Dusty Dvoracek was arrested in relation to a bar brawl in Oklahoma.

http://blogs.suntimes.com/

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A bill seeking to legalize marijuana in California won initial approval from a legislative committee Tuesday in what may be a purely symbolic vote because a second committee likely won’t take it up in time.

The state Assembly’s public safety committee voted 4-3 on the measure that would tax and regulate marijuana in the same way alcohol is controlled.

But the health committee also must approve the measure by Friday before the full Assembly can consider it, an unlikely scenario. Read the full story

Just months after rushing to order enough swine-flu vaccine to protect their citizens, European governments are canceling orders and trying to sell or give away extra doses as they sit on a glut of the vaccine.

The main reason: European health officials decided that only one shot per person was needed, instead of the two originally planned. Low demand is also to blame. Many Europeans believe the pandemic has turned out to be fairly mild, and don’t see a reason to get vaccinated. Some are also concerned that they will suffer side effects from the shots, despite assurances otherwise from global health officials. Read the full story

TRENTON — The bill legalizing medical marijuana, which was passed by the New Jersey Legislature today, will go into effect six months after Gov. Jon Corzine signs it, as he promised to do before he leaves office Tuesday. New Jersey will become the 14th state to legalize marijuana for medicinal purposes, and each state’s laws have their own idiosyncrasies.

Until medical marijuana becomes legal here, the state Department of Health and Senior Services will face intense lobbying from advocacy groups as it outlines a wide range of rules, such as where marijuana can be grown in the state, how much it will cost and who gets to distribute the drug. Read the full story

To Help Support:

Text YELE to 501501 to donate $5 to help the people of Haiti.

http://www.yele.org/

PORT-AU-PRINCE — The United States, France, Canada and governments across Latin America were gearing up to help Haiti, after a massive 7.0 earthquake leveled buildings and caused an unknown number of casualties.

US President Barack Obama said his government stood “ready to assist the people of Haiti,” as the State Department, USAID and United States Southern Command mobilized, the White House said, “to coordinate an assessment and any such assistance.”

In Paris, Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said France “expresses its complete solidarity” with Haiti, adding that his ministry’s crisis center had begun working “to mobilize and dispatch without delay urgent aid to Port-au-Prince.” Read the full story

With a lanky legspan of up to nearly a half foot, a newly discovered spider species is the largest among its family of arachnids in the Middle East.

The spider, now dubbed Cerbalus aravensis, was discovered in the dunes of the Sands of Samar in the southern Arava region in Israel by a team of biologists from the University of Haifa-Oranim. The scientists say C. aravensis is nocturnal and mostly active during the hottest months of the year. Read the full story

How much entertainment versus news can be found in American mainstream television news shows? Read the full story

ScienceDaily (Dec. 26, 2009) — The “magnetically best shielded room on earth” has the size of an apartment block and is located on the site of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB), Institute Berlin. Magnetic fields such as that of the earth are kept out here as effective as nowhere else. Such ideal conditions allow to measure the tiny magnetic fields of, e.g., the human heart.

This was the motivation for the American National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to ask PTB to jointly test a newly developed optical magnetic field sensor. It is based on a physical principle very different from SQUIDs, which are usually applied for biomagnetic field measurements. The optical sensor does not need advanced cooling and has the size of a lump of sugar. A high-quality measurement of the human heart signal was demonstrated using this optical sensor. The sensor’s suitability was thus proven for biomagnetic measurements in the picotesla range. In future magnetocardiographic measurement devices — to be used as a supplement or an alternative to the ECG — could become simpler and less expensive.

Up until now one had to cool as much as one could for biomagnetic measurements. This was necessary as SQUIDs, superconducting quantum interference devices, work optimally at -269 degrees Celsius and can only then fulfil their purpose of measuring tiny magnetic fields. SQUIDs are the best suited sensors to record the magnetic fields arising during the electrical activity of the human heart. A magnetocardiogram (MCG) can be compiled supplementing a conventional electrocardiogram (ECG). (The same applies to the magnetoencephalogram, MEG, which is a recording of the magnetic field of the brain.) Yet to use SQUIDs requires well-shielded rooms and complicated cooling systems. The latter might become obsolete in the future if the optical magnetometer developed by NIST continues to fulfil expectations.

Read More:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/

The initial reports of a disturbance on a flight landing in Detroit were all over Twitter news feeds on Christmas: Read the full story

Dec. 18, 2009 – Autism disorders increased by 57% in just four years, the CDC today reported.

By the end of 2006, one in 110 U.S. kids had an autism disorder diagnosed by age 8: one in 70 boys and one in 315 girls, reflecting a nearly fivefold higher risk for males.

The new CDC estimate of autism prevalence, obtained from analysis of child evaluation records in 11 states, is virtually identical to autism numbers reported for 2007 from a huge telephone survey reported last October. Read the full story

It looks like the tagline “Chris Brown album in stores everywhere on December 8th” was a bit of an overstatement -  at least in his opinion. The R&B singer is accusing Walmart of intentionally not selling his new album, Grafitti. It all started two weeks ago when fans of the 20-year-old singer claimed that they were having difficulty finding the album at mainstream CD retailers. To investigate what he determined as “major retailers blackballing his album”, Brown visited a Walmart  store in Wallingford, Connecticut last weekend and found that the store did not have his album on shelves and also did not have any copies of his CD in stock. Read the full story

CUERNAVACA, Mexico – Two hundred Mexican Navy marines stormed an upscale apartment complex and killed a reputed drug cartel chief in a two-hour gunbattle, one of the biggest victories yet in President Felipe Calderon’s drug war.

Arturo Beltran Leyva, the “boss of bosses,” and six members of his cartel died in the shootout Wednesday in Cuernavaca, just south of Mexico City, according to a navy statement Thursday. Read the full story

The latest calculation of the National Debt as posted by the Treasury Department has – at least numerically – exceeded the statutory Debt Limit approved by Congress last February as part of the Recovery Act stimulus bill.

The ceiling was set at $12.104 trillion dollars. The latest posting by Treasury shows the National Debt at nearly $12.135 trillion.

A senior Treasury official told CBS News that the department has some “extraordinary accounting tools” it can use to give the government breathing room in the range of $150-billion when the Debt exceeds the Debt Ceiling. Read the full story

The Federal Government will introduce compulsory internet filtering to block overseas sites which contain criminal content, including child sex abuse and sexual violence.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy announced the changes today following a controversial trial to filter the internet which was conducted earlier this year.

Senator Conroy says some internet content is simply not suitable in a civilised society.

“It is important that all Australians, particularly young children, are protected from this material,” he said. Read the full story

WASHINGTON, DC (Herald de Paris) - EXCLUSIVE - Researchers have revealed the first images from the Caribbean sea floor of what they believe are the archaeological remains of an ancient civilization.  Guarding the location’s coordinates carefully, the project’s leader, who wishes to remain anonymous at this time, says the city could be thousands of years old; possibly even pre-dating the ancient Egyptian pyramids, at Giza. Read the full story