A senior Iranian anti-drug official has accused the US, Britain and Canada of playing a major role in Afghanistan’s lucrative drug trade.

On the sidelines of an anti-drug conference in Tehran, deputy head of Iran’s Drug Control Headquarters Taha Taheri said that Western powers are aiding the drug trade in Afghanistan.

“According to our indisputable information, the presence of the United States, Britain and Canada has not reduced the drug trade and the three countries have had major roles in the distribution of drugs,” IRIB quoted Taheri as saying on Thursday. 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

via http://www.disinfo.com/

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration plans to announce a new policy on Wednesday to curb the spread of biological weapons, but it will reaffirm the Bush administration’s opposition to an international regimen for verifying stockpiles of anthrax, smallpox and other agents.

The policy, to be disclosed in a speech in Geneva by the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, Ellen O. Tauscher, will focus on increasing health security to reduce the impact of outbreaks of infectious disease, whether natural or man-made, administration officials said Tuesday. Read the full story

2009 will go down as the beginning of the end of the United States drug war. I have worked at the Drug Policy Alliance promoting alternatives to the war on drugs for 10 years, and I can say without a doubt that there was more debate and movement toward sensible drug policies this year than in the last 9 years combined! Here are 10 stories that contributed to the unprecedented momentum to end America’s longest running war.

1) Three Former Latin American Presidents Call Drug War a Failure (February) Read the full story

Three years in the making, this cinéma-vérité feature from acclaimed filmmaker Joe Berlinger (Brother’s Keeper, Paradise Lost, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster) is the epic story of one of the largest and most controversial environmental lawsuits on the planet

. The inside story of the infamous “Amazon Chernobyl” case, Crude is a real-life high stakes legal drama, set against a backdrop of the environmental movement, global politics, celebrity activism, human rights advocacy, the media, multinational corporate power, and rapidly-disappearing indigenous cultures. Presenting a complex situation from multiple viewpoints, the film subverts the conventions of advocacy filmmaking, exploring a complicated situation from all angles while bringing an important story of environmental peril and human suffering into focus.

The landmark case takes place in the Amazon jungle of Ecuador, pitting 30,000 indigenous and colonial rainforest dwellers against the U.S. oil giant Chevron. The plaintiffs claim that Texaco – which merged with Chevron in 2001 – spent three decades systematically contaminating one of the most biodiverse regions on Earth, poisoning the water, air and land. The plaintiffs allege that the pollution has created a “death zone” in an area the size of the Rhode Island, resulting in increased rates of cancer, leukemia, birth defects, and a multiplicity of other health ailments. They further allege that the oil operations in the region contributed to the destruction of indigenous peoples and irrevocably impacted their traditional way of life. Chevron vociferously fights the claims, charging that the case is a complete fabrication, perpetrated by “environmental con men” who are seeking to line their pockets with the company’s billions.

The case takes place not just in a courtroom, but in a series of field inspections at the alleged contamination sites, with the judge and attorneys for both sides trudging through the jungle to litigate. And the battleground has expanded far beyond the legal process. The cameras rolled as the conflict raged in and out of court, and the case drew attention from an array of celebrities, politicians and journalists, and landed on the cover of Vanity Fair. Some of the film’s subjects sparked further controversy as they won a CNN “Hero” award and the Goldman Award, the environmental equivalent of the Nobel Prize.

Shooting in dozens of locations on three continents and in multiple languages, Berlinger and his crew gained extraordinary access to players on all sides of the legal fight and beyond, capturing the drama as it unfolded while the case grew from a little-known legal story to an international cause célèbre. Crude is a ground-level view of one of the most extraordinary legal dramas of our time, one that has the potential of forever changing the way international business is conducted. While the environmental impact of the consumption of fossil fuels has been increasingly documented in recent years, Crude focuses on the human cost of our addiction to oil and the increasingly difficult task of holding a major corporation accountable for its past deeds. www.crudethemovie.com…

(CNN) — Garth Brooks, one of the biggest country stars of all time, said Thursday he is coming out of retirement after nine years away from the music business, and will start a concert engagement in Las Vegas. Read the full story

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Ken Lewis, the beleaguered CEO of Bank of America, announced Wednesday that he will retire at year’s end.

Lewis, who was stripped of his chairman title in April, will also step down from the board. No successor was named. Read the full story

You are a slave. You probably do not realize it, but you are.

Movies and public school like to portray slaves as bound by chains and beaten with whips, creating a polarized image of slavery that can be pointed to with the comment, “You are not like that, therefore you are not a slave.” But history shows that slaves have been treated in all manner of ways, some more cruel than others, yet even with the most kind treatment, a slave remains a slave. Read the full story

Clearly you can see in this more recently released video a line of demo charges going off vertically on the right middle of the building. Note the charges start going off and only then does the building start to collapse with them. And I say this to any who will insist that the “structural failure” caused these effects. Nuh uh, no way in hell.

Something went off inside that building, in a line, just like demo charges!

From the Financial Times (FT.com) Read the full story

At the time, Mom’s question caught me by surprise: “Have you ever tried marijuana?” she asked, sloshing her coffee around in a mug as we stood together in the kitchen. My mind went blank. Could this be the fabled “drug talk” that parents are supposed to give to their teenage children? If so, why was I getting it at 30?

It turned out my mother was less interested in my drug use than her own. When I told her I’d smoked pot in college, and a bunch of times since, she took the news in stride. The thing was, she and my father were hoping to score some weed. Did I know anybody? Read the full story

BOSTON (AP) — James S. McDonald, president and chief executive of investment management firm Rockefeller & Co., has died of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound, Massachusetts authorities said Tuesday. Read the full story

Jay-Z’s 9/11 Benefit Turns Into All-Star Marathon With Beyonce, Kanye, Rihanna, Mayer and More

take the time, enlighten yourself, please keep an open your mind, you must ask questions to know the truth..

Read the full story

America was behind the 9/11 atrocities, says actor Charlie Sheen

Charlie Sheen has provoked outrage with claims that the U.S. government was behind the September 11 terror attacks.

Ahead of today’s eighth anniversary of the atrocities that killed 3,000, the Hollywood star has insisted there was a cover-up.

And he has appealed to President Barack Obama to hold a new investigation into the attacks on the World Trade Centre towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington DC.

Actor Charlie Sheen, shown here with ex-wife Denise Richards in 2005, has demanded Barack Obama open a new investigation into 9/11

Sheen, the highest-paid actor on U.S. TV, argues that ‘the official 9/11 story is a fraud’ and says the commission set up to investigate was a whitewash.

He claims the attacks simply served ‘as the pretext for the systematic dismantling of our Constitution and Bill of Rights’.

The actor, 44, says the administration of former president George Bush was behind the attacks, which they were then able to use to justify an invasion of Iraq.

He even hints that Osama Bin Laden was working with the CIA up until 9/11.

Sheen, who appears in the hit comedy series Two And A Half Men, made his claims in the transcript of a fictional encounter with Mr Obama, called Twenty Minutes With The President.

Sheen also slammed Mr Obama, above, over his own track record on 9/11 policy

It was published on the website of radio show host Alex Jones, PrisonPlanet.com, two days ahead of Sheen’s appearance on Jones’s show today.

Most of his observations make up the basis of all the conspiracy theories surrounding the terror attack. Those who support the theories in the U.S. are known as Truthers.

He voices doubts over whether the planes really were passenger jets and questions how passports identifying the hijackers survived the infernos.

The actor, whose father Martin played the president in The West Wing, said he hoped the work would be seen by Mr Obama.

He urged other Americans who were sceptical of the investigation into the attacks to demand the truth.

He said: ‘We cannot allow governments to continue to advance their political agendas by exploiting forged pretexts and the fact that big budget hit pieces against 9/11 truth are still being rolled out proves that the establishment is upset that the population is waking up to false flag terror.’

Sheen first questioned the events of 9/11 in 2006 when he said: ‘It seems to me like 19 amateurs with box cutters taking over four commercial airliners and hitting 75 per cent of their targets, that feels like a conspiracy theory. It raises a lot of questions.’

This week President Obama’s ‘green jobs’ tsar was forced to resign after it was revealed he had signed a petition from a 9/11 Truther movement that claimed the U.S. government staged the attacks.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/

The answer to the eternal mystery of what makes up a Filet-O-Fish sandwich turns out to involve an ugly creature from the sunless depths of the Pacific, whose bounty, it seems, is not limitless.

The world’s insatiable appetite for fish, with its disastrous effects on populations of favorites like red snapper, monkfish and tuna, has driven commercial fleets to deeper waters in search of creatures unlikely to star on the Food Network.

One of the most popular is the hoki, or whiptail, a bug-eyed specimen found far down in the waters around New Zealand and transformed into a major export. McDonald’s alone at one time used roughly 15 million pounds of it each year. Read the full story