Monday, May 17, 2010
Immigrants move away from the US with better opportunities abroad
The American Brain drain? Are you kidding me? We've been destroyed by design and no one seems to even give a shit.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Friday, April 9, 2010
Friday, April 2, 2010
Did CIA seed money help launch Google.com?
Ex-Agent: CIA Seed Money Helped Launch Google
Steele goes further than before in detailing ties, names Google's CIA liaison
An ex-CIA agent has gone further than ever before in detailing Google's relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency, claiming sources told him that CIA seed money helped get the company off the ground and naming for the first time Google's CIA point man.
Robert David Steele, a 20-year Marine Corps infantry and intelligence officer and a former clandestine services case officer with the Central Intelligence Agency, is the CEO of OSS.net.
Speaking to the Alex Jones Show, Steele elaborated on his previous revelations by making it known that the CIA helped bankroll Google at its very inception.
"I think Google took money from the CIA when it was poor and it was starting up and unfortunately our system right now floods money into spying and other illegal and largely unethical activities, and it doesn't fund what I call the open source world," said Steele, citing "trusted individuals" as his sources for the claim.
"They've been together for quite a while," added Steele.
Asked to impart to what level Google is "in bed" with the CIA, Steele described the bond as a "small but significant relationship," adding, "it is by no means dominating Google in fact Google has been embarrassed because everything the CIA asked it to do they couldn't do."
"I also think it's very very wrong of Google to have this relationship," cautioned Steele.
The former agent went further than before in identifying by name Google's liaison at the CIA.
"Let me say very explicitly - their contact at the CIA is named Dr. Rick Steinheiser, he's in the Office of Research and Development," said Steele.
Steele highlighted Google's blatant censorship policies whereby press releases put out by credible organizations that are critical of Dick Cheney and other administration members don't make it to Google News even though they are carried by PR Newswire.
We have repeatedly highlighted past examples of censorship on behalf of Google, including their blacklisting of a mainstream news website that was mildly critical of China, and also the deliberate stifling and manipulation of Alex Jones' Terror Storm film ranking on Google Video. Google was also caught red-handed attempting to bury the Charlie Sheen 9/11 story at the height of its notoriety.
Saying Google had become "too big for itself," Steele opined that Google was "long overdue for a public audit."
"One of the problems with privatized power is that it's not subject to public audit," said Steele, arguing that groups should rally to "put Google out of business unless they're willing to go the open source software route."
We regularly highlight Google's damaging role in aiding the march towards a big brother society, but the admission that Google were planning on teaming up with the U.S. government to use microphones in the computers of an estimated 150 million-plus Internet active Americans to spy on their lifestyle choices and build psychological profiles which will be used for surveillance and minority report style invasive advertising and data mining, astounded even us.
Steele said that our previous story about Google's ties to the CIA, which was picked up by dozens of top technology websites, concerned Google enough to lie to the public about it and deny its validity.
It remains to be seen how Google will react to these latest revelations.
Listen to the interview with Robert David Steele, in which he also questions the official version of 9/11, by clicking here.
Steele goes further than before in detailing ties, names Google's CIA liaison
An ex-CIA agent has gone further than ever before in detailing Google's relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency, claiming sources told him that CIA seed money helped get the company off the ground and naming for the first time Google's CIA point man.
Robert David Steele, a 20-year Marine Corps infantry and intelligence officer and a former clandestine services case officer with the Central Intelligence Agency, is the CEO of OSS.net.
Speaking to the Alex Jones Show, Steele elaborated on his previous revelations by making it known that the CIA helped bankroll Google at its very inception.
"I think Google took money from the CIA when it was poor and it was starting up and unfortunately our system right now floods money into spying and other illegal and largely unethical activities, and it doesn't fund what I call the open source world," said Steele, citing "trusted individuals" as his sources for the claim.
"They've been together for quite a while," added Steele.
Asked to impart to what level Google is "in bed" with the CIA, Steele described the bond as a "small but significant relationship," adding, "it is by no means dominating Google in fact Google has been embarrassed because everything the CIA asked it to do they couldn't do."
"I also think it's very very wrong of Google to have this relationship," cautioned Steele.
The former agent went further than before in identifying by name Google's liaison at the CIA.
"Let me say very explicitly - their contact at the CIA is named Dr. Rick Steinheiser, he's in the Office of Research and Development," said Steele.
Steele highlighted Google's blatant censorship policies whereby press releases put out by credible organizations that are critical of Dick Cheney and other administration members don't make it to Google News even though they are carried by PR Newswire.
We have repeatedly highlighted past examples of censorship on behalf of Google, including their blacklisting of a mainstream news website that was mildly critical of China, and also the deliberate stifling and manipulation of Alex Jones' Terror Storm film ranking on Google Video. Google was also caught red-handed attempting to bury the Charlie Sheen 9/11 story at the height of its notoriety.
Saying Google had become "too big for itself," Steele opined that Google was "long overdue for a public audit."
"One of the problems with privatized power is that it's not subject to public audit," said Steele, arguing that groups should rally to "put Google out of business unless they're willing to go the open source software route."
We regularly highlight Google's damaging role in aiding the march towards a big brother society, but the admission that Google were planning on teaming up with the U.S. government to use microphones in the computers of an estimated 150 million-plus Internet active Americans to spy on their lifestyle choices and build psychological profiles which will be used for surveillance and minority report style invasive advertising and data mining, astounded even us.
Steele said that our previous story about Google's ties to the CIA, which was picked up by dozens of top technology websites, concerned Google enough to lie to the public about it and deny its validity.
It remains to be seen how Google will react to these latest revelations.
Listen to the interview with Robert David Steele, in which he also questions the official version of 9/11, by clicking here.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Murder or Suicide?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1092246/CEO-Swiss-bank-dies-suddenly-sparking-rumours-suicide.html
CEO of top Swiss bank dies suddenly, sparking rumours of suicide
By DAILY MAIL REPORTER
Bank chief Alex Widmer died unexpectedly
The CEO of Julius Baer, Switzerland's biggest private bank, has died unexpectedly.
Alex Widmer, a widower, died aged 52, leaving behind three children.
It has been reported that close friends of Mr Widmer's family said he committed suicide, though Swiss police will not confirm this.
Julius Baer dates back to the 19th century and manages more than 360billion Swiss franch in assets for wealthy individuals and institutions.
Shares in Julius Baer have lost some 60 per cent this year as markets have worried about outflows at its hedge fund GAM.
However a spokesman for the bank said there was no link between Mr Widmer's death and the group's current activities, but declined to give further details on the cause of death on Wednesday night.
A source said employees at the bank had been told Widmer had died from an unspecified illness.
In an interview with Bloomberg conducted the day before his death, Mr Widmer said: 'Even if global wealth creation is getting slower, we should do better than the rest.'
A Zurich-based trader who did not want to be named said: 'It is a great shame. It is very sad. He [Mr Widmer] embodied Julius Baer. He was the most important person in private banking.'
Following the news, shares in Julius Baer fell 6.5 per cent to 34.60 Swiss francs, underperforming a 1.5 per cent drop in the DJ Stoxx index of European banking stocks.
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Mr Widmer will be succeeded by Hans de Gier, who served as the CEO of Julius Baer Group until September 2008 when he stepped down to focus on his role as chairman of hedge fund unit GAM.
'This is a setback for the bank. Widmer is widely regarded as the architect of its new direction,' Claude Zehnder, a ZKB trading analyst said.
'However, with De Gier they have someone very experienced in place who knows the bank inside out,' he said.
Commenting on Mr Widmer's death, Chairman Raymond Baer said in a statement: 'We have lost a dear friend, a good colleague and a charismatic leader. Alex very successfully opened up new dimensions for the Private Banking business of Julius Baer.
'His enormous commitment, his active relationship and close involvement with the clients and his passion for banking will forever serve as a model for us.'
Mr Widmer joined the Julius Baer Group in 2005 as a member of the executive board and head of private banking and became the CEO of Bank Julius Baer in November 2007.
The bulk of his career was spent at Credit Suisse, where he worked for 19 years, as global head of private banking from 2002 to 2005 and as a member of the executive board
Before that he was the chief executive of Credit Suisse's Asia-Pacific and Middle East business. He also worked in Tokyo and New York early in his career after gaining a doctorate in economics from the prestigious St. Gallen university in 1985.
http://www.ajc.com/news/gbi-husband-shot-ex-410703.html
GBI: Husband shot ex-senator, then self
The husband of a former state senator shot his wife before turning the gun on himself in the couple's Habersham County home, the GBI said Saturday night.
A handgun and several letters, including a suicide note written by Bruce Schaefer to family members, were found in the home he shared with Nancy Schaefer, his spouse and the one-time Georgia politician, according to John Bankhead, GBI spokesman.
"A GBI medical examiner determined that Mrs. Schaefer died from a single gunshot wound to the back and Mr. Schaefer died from a single gunshot wound to the chest," Bankhead said in a statement.
Autopsies on the Schaefers were conducted Saturday afternoon, and investigators said all evidence indicates the deaths were a murder-suicide.
“We’ve got some evidence of why it was done,” Sheriff Joey Terrell told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Why it happened? That question will never be answered.”
The bodies of Bruce and Nancy Schaefer, 74 and 73, respectively, were found Friday evening around 6 p.m. by their daughter at the couple’s Clarkesville home. The daughter, one of the Schaefers’ five children, lived in the same gated community as her parents and entered the home when she was unable to reach them. After finding her parents dead in their bedroom, the woman called 9-1-1.
The Habersham County Sheriff’s Office requested the assistance of the GBI, which sent several investigators to the crime scene Friday evening.
Roger Harvey, a nephew of Nancy and Bruce Schaefer, released a statement to the AJC on behalf of the couple’s five children.
“We are grieving over this indescribable loss of our parents who we all adored,” the family statement said. “Our parents were extremely loving and caring people who took great joy in helping those in need.”
News of the Schaefers’ deaths spread quickly at the state Capitol Friday evening. Several legislators offered their condolences following the death of a woman known for her conservative, Christian values, her large family and long-time marriage.
Sen. Don Thomas of Dalton, a friend of the Schaefers, said Friday evening that he believed Bruce Schaefer had an illness, possibly cancer. The family declined to discuss specifics about the couple.
“In those moments, you are not at your complete sanity,” Sen. Don Thomas of Dalton, a friend of the Schaefers, said Friday night. “Some people figure the best way is to end it for both of you. They were married for so long. Loved each other so much. When you see somebody that you love so much, every now and then, you think the best way out of it is to go and be with the Lord.”
Several notes written by Bruce Schaefer were left behind.
But the Schaefers' daughter told Sheriff Terrell that Bruce Schaefer was not suffering from any serious illnesses at the time of the shootings, the Gainesville Times reported. Authorities were unaware of Nancy Schaefer, 73, having any major health problems, Terrell said.
Terrell told the Times that financial problems could have contributed to the shootings.
"Some financial problems were mentioned [in the notes]," Terrell said. "That might have been one reason."
A two-term senator, Nancy Schaefer lost her seat in 2008 to Habersham County Commission Chairman Jim Butterworth in a north Georgia Republican runoff. She represented the 50th district, including Banks, Franklin, Habersham, Hart, Rabun, Stephens, and Towns counties, and part of White County.
During the family’s 35 years in Atlanta, Schaefer was a candidate for Atlanta mayor, Georgia lieutenant governor and governor.
The daughter of a North Georgia Superior Court Judge and granddaughter of a state legislator, Nancy Schaefer became visible to the public in 1985, when she organized a constitutional liberties rally in Atlanta. In 1986, she founded Schaefer Family Concerns, Inc., a nonprofit foundation dedicated to issues such as display of the Ten Commandments in public buildings and opposition to abortion.
Nancy Schaefer worked on the campaign team for former New York Republican Jack Kemp, who ran for president in 1988. During Kemp’s campaign, Schaefer met Rusty Paul, former head of the state Republican Party and State Senator from North Fulton.
“[With] her passion and tenacity, she was unyielding in her beliefs about what was important,” Paul said Saturday. “She was one of the leaders in trying to get fundamental Christians actively engaged in the political process.”
Schaefer was the Republican nominee for Lt. Governor in 1994. In 1998, she sought the GOP nomination for governor. Her political involvement also extended to the United Nations, where she represented both Family Concerns and the Southern Baptist Convention at various conferences.
Schaefer will likely be best remembered for efforts to blur the lines between politics and religion.
Sadie Fields, who chairs the Georgia Christian Alliance, first met and became friends with Schaefer during the latter’s Atlanta mayoral run. Fields, who saw the Schaefers at a luncheon a few weeks ago, described her friend as dedicated and unflappable in her commitment to the causes she championed.
“Nancy was a stalwart of conservative causes in Georgia,” Fields said. “As long as I’ve known her, she stood for what she believed in and never backed down. She was the epitome of the Southern gentlewoman. She handled everything with grace and was the epitome of the quintessential steel magnolia.”
Funeral arrangements for the Schaefers have not been announced.
Staff writers Peralte Paul and Ernie Suggs contributed to this report
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-488947/Did-hired-assassins-snatch-weapons-inspector-David-Kelly.html
Did two hired assassins snatch weapons inspector David Kelly?
Weapons inspector David Kelly was the decent man apparently hounded to suicide after exposing Tony Blair's lies on Iraq.
But the crusading MP Norman Baker felt sure there was something more to his death - and gave up his front-bench role to investigate the case.
In the Mail he revealed extraordinary evidence that he believes proves Kelly did not take his own life and was instead murdered by Iraqi dissidents. Here, he reveals how the murder may have been carried out . . .
While investigating the death of Dr David Kelly I have made many strange discoveries, not least some disturbing parallels with the case of a young American journalist named Danny Casolaro.
Mr Casolaro made himself deeply unpopular with elements in the murky world of U.S. defence by probing too deeply into their activities.
One morning in August 1991, he was found dead in a hotel room near Harpers Ferry in Virginia. He was in the bath, naked, with his wrist slashed.
There were no signs of bruising or other marks on the body and the police concluded that he had committed suicide.
But this was totally false according to Dr Christopher Green, who was the CIA's chief forensic pathologist for decades.
Dr Green participated in Casolaro's autopsy and last year he told veteran White House reporter Sterling Seagrave that the young journalist had been killed before being stripped, put in a full bath, and his left wrist cut in precisely the same manner as Dr Kelly's.
And as with Dr Kelly, there was remarkably little blood, bar a small amount smeared on the edge of the tub, suggesting that the wrist wound had been inflicted after the heart had stopped pumping.
This compelling demonstration of how effectively a murder can be disguised as suicide drove me on in my search for the truth about Dr Kelly, who was found dead in an Oxfordshire wood on July 18, 2003, having apparently taken his own life.
Before Danny Casolaro died, the journalist had been investigating the activities of America's private security companies which, according to Sterling Seagrave, are linked to the 'Grey Ghosts' - an army of professional killers commissioned by the Pentagon to carry out assassinations.
The similarities between the two men's deaths led Seagrave to suggest that Dr Kelly might also have fallen victim to these shadowy figures.
After all, he was the source behind a BBC report that the British government had 'sexed up' intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction in order to justify the invasion of Iraq. This can hardly have been well received by the White House.
As I explained in Saturday's Mail, my own information strongly suggests that those behind Dr Kelly's death were Iraqi dissidents opposed to Saddam Hussein's regime and angry at Dr Kelly for undermining the case for toppling him.
A well-placed source also told me that the British police or security services had been warned of a likely assassination attempt but were not in time to stop it.
Did they then try to disguise the murder as suicide for reasons of political expediency?
To understand what may have happened, we must return to Thursday, July 17, the day
Dr Kelly disappeared. That morning he was at home with his wife Janice in the village of Southmoor and it must be said that none of his behaviour fits the profile of a man about to commit suicide.
In her evidence to the Hutton inquiry into Dr Kelly's death, his wife said he was 'tired, subdued, but not depressed'. Indeed, it seems it was Janice Kelly, not her husband, who was more seriously under par.
During phone calls that morning, Dr Kelly told a colleague that he was basically 'holding up all right', but that his wife was having a difficult time, both physically and mentally, under the pressure of long-standing ill health and the political storm that had engulfed them.
At lunchtime she went to bed with a nauseous headache and arthritis pains. He, on the other hand, appears to have carried on working normally, eaten some lunch and taken the trouble to go upstairs to check on his wife, shortly before 2pm, to see how she was feeling.
Given his obvious concern, it hardly seems likely that he would want to exacerbate matters for her by committing suicide that day.
Dr Kelly told his wife he would be going out for one of the regular walks he took to help his bad back. These were normally short affairs lasting no more than 25 minutes.
Mrs Kelly estimates that her husband left the house shortly after 3pm. With him, we are led to believe, he had the knife later found by his corpse and three packets of the painkillers his wife took for arthritis. These would later be discovered in his jacket pocket - empty but for one of the 30 tablets.
According to the Hutton inquiry, Dr Kelly set out on that walk intent on killing himself.
But, if so, why does he appear to have waited so long before doing it?
Since the pathologist inexplicably failed to take Dr Kelly's body temperature when he first arrived on the scene the following day - a standard procedure which would have helped give an accurate time of death - we have to make our own deductions about when he died.
The pathologist offered a wide window of between 4.15pm on Thursday and 1.15am on Friday. But there is every reason to think this window is far too wide.
The Hutton inquiry heard that after Dr Kelly's body was found on Friday morning, two paramedics moved his arm away from his chest at about 10am so that they could attach electrodes and confirm that he was dead.
Clearly, rigor mortis - the stiffening of the body - had not yet fully set in. Since it is generally accepted that it reaches its peak after 12 hours, we can assume that Dr Kelly most likely died at some time after 10pm on the Thursday night, and quite possibly much later.
What then happened to him in the missing hours - at least seven of them - between leaving home and supposedly killing himself?
The last person known to have seen Dr Kelly alive was his neighbour, Ruth Absalom, who met him about three-quarters-of-a-mile from his home.
They passed the time of day briefly before going their separate ways. Dr Kelly's parting words were: "See you again then, Ruth."
According to Ms Absalom, he was heading towards the nearby village of Kingston Bagpuize.
That would be consistent with a circular half-hour walk back to his house - but in quite the wrong direction to reach Harrowrecords-down Hill, the lonely area of woodland where his body was discovered.
One of the few clues to what happened next is that Dr Kelly's phone was switched off when a colleague from the Ministry of Defence tried to call him between 5pm and 6pm.
This was odd. Dr Kelly himself would tell friends that his mobile was always on and, given that he had been in regular contact with the MoD that morning, and that the furore surrounding him was developing from hour to hour, it seems unlikely that he would have turned it off or let the battery run down.
If he did indeed intend to commit suicide, turning off his phone could be seen as a preliminary step. But for reasons I have made clear, I do not believe suicide is a credible explanation for his death.
This leaves us with an alternative possibility. Did someone else turn Dr Kelly's phone off so that his movements could not be traced via signal kept by the phone company? In other words, was he forcibly abducted?
If he headed in the direction Ms Absalom described, his walk would probably have taken him along Appleton Road, a quiet and rather empty stretch with only sporadic development alongside.
From there he is likely to have turned right into Draycott Road, which is even more deserted. A no-through road with some derelict buildings part-way down, it peters out into a footpath at the end.
On either of these roads it would certainly have been relatively easy for determined abductors to have forced the 59-year-old weapons inspector into a van without anyone seeing.
According to the information I have been given, the murder itself was carried out by a couple of not very well-paid hired hands.
As to the method used, I am told that they gave Dr Kelly an injection in his backside, which perhaps points to the use of succinylcholine, a white crystalline substance that acts as a muscle relaxant.
For less beneficent purposes, it can be used to induce paralysis and cardiac arrest and frequently goes undetected in post-mortems.
I asked Thames Valley Police whether the body had been checked for the presence of this or a similar substance. They told me that they did not know.
If this was not the substance used then, alarmingly, there appear to be a large number of other ways in which Dr Kelly might have been killed that would be difficult or even impossible to trace.
For this we can no doubt partly thank the work of Project Coast - a highly unpleasant chemical and biological warfare programme run by the South African government from 1981 onwards to develop exactly such capabilities.
With aims including the creation of a biological weapon designed to attack the black population while leaving whites unscathed, its prime mover was Dr Wouter Basson, variously described as 'the South African Mengele' and 'Dr Death'.
Ironically, in the week before Dr Kelly died, it is alleged he was due to be interviewed by MI5 about his links with Dr Basson, who in 1985 had visited the Porton Down research centre, where Dr Kelly was then head of the Chemical Defence Establishment.
This visit had happened at a time when Mrs Thatcher's government claimed that the South Africans were developing biological and chemical weapons solely for defensive purposes.
Only later was it revealed that they were working on chemicals such as parathion, an organophosphate that can be introduced into the body through hair follicles, perhaps under the arm or around the crutch.
This causes vomiting - evidence of which could be seen on Dr Kelly's body - and leads to a respiratory attack. It is extremely difficult to detect traces of such a chemical in the body, unless you know what you are looking for.
When I tracked down Wouter Basson at his home in the Western Cape earlier this year, I asked him if he thought Dr Kelly had been murdered.
He paused, as if choosing his words carefully, then replied that Dr Kelly 'didn't seem the sort to commit suicide'.
He was also in no doubt that the UK, and indeed other Western countries, have a capacity for assassination.
Other possible methods of killing Dr Kelly included the use of saxotoxin, found in some shellfish and known as the CIA Shellfish Toxin, after its alleged use by that agency to kill one of their targets. Even a tiny amount is effective seconds after injection and is completely untraceable after autopsy.
One private detective even suggested to me that Dr Kelly's killers might have made gruesome misuse of the equipment employed by undertakers in embalming, placing a tube into an artery and forcibly pumping the blood out of the body.
This would cause unconsciousness and then death, and reinforce the assumption that the victim had lost a lot of blood through a cut - the conclusion reached by Lord Hutton in Dr Kelly's case.
The detective told me that this process did not need access to a main artery like the jugular, but could be achieved through, say, the ulnar artery.
This was the one slashed with a knife in Dr Kelly's wrist. Was that incision an attempt to cover up the artery's previous use?
Another ghastly suggestion came to me from someone who signed themselves only as 'Nemesis'. Their letter alleged that he or she had been told by a 'member of the non-English diplomatic corps' that air had been introduced into Dr Kelly's bloodstream through a needle in a vein.
Apparently, if present in sufficient quantities, air in the major organs will kill and leave no scar. 'Nemesis' was in no doubt that this was how Dr Kelly's life had ended. "His heart and lungs were full of air," the letter said.
We know that the pathologist did retain one of Dr Kelly's lungs and some blood to test for substances such as chloroform but Assistant Chief Constable Michael Page, who gave evidence at the Hutton inquiry, revealed that the tests to the lung had not actually been carried out.
This was, he said, because no suspicious substances had shown up in the blood tests.
Whatever method might have been used to murder Dr Kelly, we have to wonder why those responsible did not kill him immediately. There would have been no insurmountable obstacles to doing so, after all.
Perhaps his kidnappers wanted an opportunity to take him into the woods at Harrowdown Hill under cover of darkness to minimise the chances of being spotted or disturbed.
It certainly would not have been difficult to have given him a shot to render him temporarily unconscious until his assailants forced him to walk to the spot where he would be killed and found the next day.
If they drove him there, the closest they could have got by road was about half a mile from where his body was found.
That walk is rather a public one, but there is another route and one seemingly not investigated by the police.
This path runs from a remote reach of the River Thames, about 500 yards away, up through a field and into the woods. With no houses or other dwellings nearby, anybody walking here is unlikely to be seen, particularly in the dead of night.
Intriguingly, this area was searched the following morning by Louise Holmes and Paul Chapman, the two volunteers who eventually found Dr Kelly's body.
They told the Hutton inquiry that some time after beginning their search at 8am they came across a group of three or four people in a boat and had a brief conversation with them.
Who they were, and what they were doing on the river at that time of the morning, has never been established. They could, of course, have been holidaymakers. But was the truth more sinister?
CEO of top Swiss bank dies suddenly, sparking rumours of suicide
By DAILY MAIL REPORTER
Bank chief Alex Widmer died unexpectedly
The CEO of Julius Baer, Switzerland's biggest private bank, has died unexpectedly.
Alex Widmer, a widower, died aged 52, leaving behind three children.
It has been reported that close friends of Mr Widmer's family said he committed suicide, though Swiss police will not confirm this.
Julius Baer dates back to the 19th century and manages more than 360billion Swiss franch in assets for wealthy individuals and institutions.
Shares in Julius Baer have lost some 60 per cent this year as markets have worried about outflows at its hedge fund GAM.
However a spokesman for the bank said there was no link between Mr Widmer's death and the group's current activities, but declined to give further details on the cause of death on Wednesday night.
A source said employees at the bank had been told Widmer had died from an unspecified illness.
In an interview with Bloomberg conducted the day before his death, Mr Widmer said: 'Even if global wealth creation is getting slower, we should do better than the rest.'
A Zurich-based trader who did not want to be named said: 'It is a great shame. It is very sad. He [Mr Widmer] embodied Julius Baer. He was the most important person in private banking.'
Following the news, shares in Julius Baer fell 6.5 per cent to 34.60 Swiss francs, underperforming a 1.5 per cent drop in the DJ Stoxx index of European banking stocks.
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Mr Widmer will be succeeded by Hans de Gier, who served as the CEO of Julius Baer Group until September 2008 when he stepped down to focus on his role as chairman of hedge fund unit GAM.
'This is a setback for the bank. Widmer is widely regarded as the architect of its new direction,' Claude Zehnder, a ZKB trading analyst said.
'However, with De Gier they have someone very experienced in place who knows the bank inside out,' he said.
Commenting on Mr Widmer's death, Chairman Raymond Baer said in a statement: 'We have lost a dear friend, a good colleague and a charismatic leader. Alex very successfully opened up new dimensions for the Private Banking business of Julius Baer.
'His enormous commitment, his active relationship and close involvement with the clients and his passion for banking will forever serve as a model for us.'
Mr Widmer joined the Julius Baer Group in 2005 as a member of the executive board and head of private banking and became the CEO of Bank Julius Baer in November 2007.
The bulk of his career was spent at Credit Suisse, where he worked for 19 years, as global head of private banking from 2002 to 2005 and as a member of the executive board
Before that he was the chief executive of Credit Suisse's Asia-Pacific and Middle East business. He also worked in Tokyo and New York early in his career after gaining a doctorate in economics from the prestigious St. Gallen university in 1985.
http://www.ajc.com/news/gbi-husband-shot-ex-410703.html
GBI: Husband shot ex-senator, then self
The husband of a former state senator shot his wife before turning the gun on himself in the couple's Habersham County home, the GBI said Saturday night.
A handgun and several letters, including a suicide note written by Bruce Schaefer to family members, were found in the home he shared with Nancy Schaefer, his spouse and the one-time Georgia politician, according to John Bankhead, GBI spokesman.
"A GBI medical examiner determined that Mrs. Schaefer died from a single gunshot wound to the back and Mr. Schaefer died from a single gunshot wound to the chest," Bankhead said in a statement.
Autopsies on the Schaefers were conducted Saturday afternoon, and investigators said all evidence indicates the deaths were a murder-suicide.
“We’ve got some evidence of why it was done,” Sheriff Joey Terrell told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Why it happened? That question will never be answered.”
The bodies of Bruce and Nancy Schaefer, 74 and 73, respectively, were found Friday evening around 6 p.m. by their daughter at the couple’s Clarkesville home. The daughter, one of the Schaefers’ five children, lived in the same gated community as her parents and entered the home when she was unable to reach them. After finding her parents dead in their bedroom, the woman called 9-1-1.
The Habersham County Sheriff’s Office requested the assistance of the GBI, which sent several investigators to the crime scene Friday evening.
Roger Harvey, a nephew of Nancy and Bruce Schaefer, released a statement to the AJC on behalf of the couple’s five children.
“We are grieving over this indescribable loss of our parents who we all adored,” the family statement said. “Our parents were extremely loving and caring people who took great joy in helping those in need.”
News of the Schaefers’ deaths spread quickly at the state Capitol Friday evening. Several legislators offered their condolences following the death of a woman known for her conservative, Christian values, her large family and long-time marriage.
Sen. Don Thomas of Dalton, a friend of the Schaefers, said Friday evening that he believed Bruce Schaefer had an illness, possibly cancer. The family declined to discuss specifics about the couple.
“In those moments, you are not at your complete sanity,” Sen. Don Thomas of Dalton, a friend of the Schaefers, said Friday night. “Some people figure the best way is to end it for both of you. They were married for so long. Loved each other so much. When you see somebody that you love so much, every now and then, you think the best way out of it is to go and be with the Lord.”
Several notes written by Bruce Schaefer were left behind.
But the Schaefers' daughter told Sheriff Terrell that Bruce Schaefer was not suffering from any serious illnesses at the time of the shootings, the Gainesville Times reported. Authorities were unaware of Nancy Schaefer, 73, having any major health problems, Terrell said.
Terrell told the Times that financial problems could have contributed to the shootings.
"Some financial problems were mentioned [in the notes]," Terrell said. "That might have been one reason."
A two-term senator, Nancy Schaefer lost her seat in 2008 to Habersham County Commission Chairman Jim Butterworth in a north Georgia Republican runoff. She represented the 50th district, including Banks, Franklin, Habersham, Hart, Rabun, Stephens, and Towns counties, and part of White County.
During the family’s 35 years in Atlanta, Schaefer was a candidate for Atlanta mayor, Georgia lieutenant governor and governor.
The daughter of a North Georgia Superior Court Judge and granddaughter of a state legislator, Nancy Schaefer became visible to the public in 1985, when she organized a constitutional liberties rally in Atlanta. In 1986, she founded Schaefer Family Concerns, Inc., a nonprofit foundation dedicated to issues such as display of the Ten Commandments in public buildings and opposition to abortion.
Nancy Schaefer worked on the campaign team for former New York Republican Jack Kemp, who ran for president in 1988. During Kemp’s campaign, Schaefer met Rusty Paul, former head of the state Republican Party and State Senator from North Fulton.
“[With] her passion and tenacity, she was unyielding in her beliefs about what was important,” Paul said Saturday. “She was one of the leaders in trying to get fundamental Christians actively engaged in the political process.”
Schaefer was the Republican nominee for Lt. Governor in 1994. In 1998, she sought the GOP nomination for governor. Her political involvement also extended to the United Nations, where she represented both Family Concerns and the Southern Baptist Convention at various conferences.
Schaefer will likely be best remembered for efforts to blur the lines between politics and religion.
Sadie Fields, who chairs the Georgia Christian Alliance, first met and became friends with Schaefer during the latter’s Atlanta mayoral run. Fields, who saw the Schaefers at a luncheon a few weeks ago, described her friend as dedicated and unflappable in her commitment to the causes she championed.
“Nancy was a stalwart of conservative causes in Georgia,” Fields said. “As long as I’ve known her, she stood for what she believed in and never backed down. She was the epitome of the Southern gentlewoman. She handled everything with grace and was the epitome of the quintessential steel magnolia.”
Funeral arrangements for the Schaefers have not been announced.
Staff writers Peralte Paul and Ernie Suggs contributed to this report
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-488947/Did-hired-assassins-snatch-weapons-inspector-David-Kelly.html
Did two hired assassins snatch weapons inspector David Kelly?
Weapons inspector David Kelly was the decent man apparently hounded to suicide after exposing Tony Blair's lies on Iraq.
But the crusading MP Norman Baker felt sure there was something more to his death - and gave up his front-bench role to investigate the case.
In the Mail he revealed extraordinary evidence that he believes proves Kelly did not take his own life and was instead murdered by Iraqi dissidents. Here, he reveals how the murder may have been carried out . . .
While investigating the death of Dr David Kelly I have made many strange discoveries, not least some disturbing parallels with the case of a young American journalist named Danny Casolaro.
Mr Casolaro made himself deeply unpopular with elements in the murky world of U.S. defence by probing too deeply into their activities.
One morning in August 1991, he was found dead in a hotel room near Harpers Ferry in Virginia. He was in the bath, naked, with his wrist slashed.
There were no signs of bruising or other marks on the body and the police concluded that he had committed suicide.
But this was totally false according to Dr Christopher Green, who was the CIA's chief forensic pathologist for decades.
Dr Green participated in Casolaro's autopsy and last year he told veteran White House reporter Sterling Seagrave that the young journalist had been killed before being stripped, put in a full bath, and his left wrist cut in precisely the same manner as Dr Kelly's.
And as with Dr Kelly, there was remarkably little blood, bar a small amount smeared on the edge of the tub, suggesting that the wrist wound had been inflicted after the heart had stopped pumping.
This compelling demonstration of how effectively a murder can be disguised as suicide drove me on in my search for the truth about Dr Kelly, who was found dead in an Oxfordshire wood on July 18, 2003, having apparently taken his own life.
Before Danny Casolaro died, the journalist had been investigating the activities of America's private security companies which, according to Sterling Seagrave, are linked to the 'Grey Ghosts' - an army of professional killers commissioned by the Pentagon to carry out assassinations.
The similarities between the two men's deaths led Seagrave to suggest that Dr Kelly might also have fallen victim to these shadowy figures.
After all, he was the source behind a BBC report that the British government had 'sexed up' intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction in order to justify the invasion of Iraq. This can hardly have been well received by the White House.
As I explained in Saturday's Mail, my own information strongly suggests that those behind Dr Kelly's death were Iraqi dissidents opposed to Saddam Hussein's regime and angry at Dr Kelly for undermining the case for toppling him.
A well-placed source also told me that the British police or security services had been warned of a likely assassination attempt but were not in time to stop it.
Did they then try to disguise the murder as suicide for reasons of political expediency?
To understand what may have happened, we must return to Thursday, July 17, the day
Dr Kelly disappeared. That morning he was at home with his wife Janice in the village of Southmoor and it must be said that none of his behaviour fits the profile of a man about to commit suicide.
In her evidence to the Hutton inquiry into Dr Kelly's death, his wife said he was 'tired, subdued, but not depressed'. Indeed, it seems it was Janice Kelly, not her husband, who was more seriously under par.
During phone calls that morning, Dr Kelly told a colleague that he was basically 'holding up all right', but that his wife was having a difficult time, both physically and mentally, under the pressure of long-standing ill health and the political storm that had engulfed them.
At lunchtime she went to bed with a nauseous headache and arthritis pains. He, on the other hand, appears to have carried on working normally, eaten some lunch and taken the trouble to go upstairs to check on his wife, shortly before 2pm, to see how she was feeling.
Given his obvious concern, it hardly seems likely that he would want to exacerbate matters for her by committing suicide that day.
Dr Kelly told his wife he would be going out for one of the regular walks he took to help his bad back. These were normally short affairs lasting no more than 25 minutes.
Mrs Kelly estimates that her husband left the house shortly after 3pm. With him, we are led to believe, he had the knife later found by his corpse and three packets of the painkillers his wife took for arthritis. These would later be discovered in his jacket pocket - empty but for one of the 30 tablets.
According to the Hutton inquiry, Dr Kelly set out on that walk intent on killing himself.
But, if so, why does he appear to have waited so long before doing it?
Since the pathologist inexplicably failed to take Dr Kelly's body temperature when he first arrived on the scene the following day - a standard procedure which would have helped give an accurate time of death - we have to make our own deductions about when he died.
The pathologist offered a wide window of between 4.15pm on Thursday and 1.15am on Friday. But there is every reason to think this window is far too wide.
The Hutton inquiry heard that after Dr Kelly's body was found on Friday morning, two paramedics moved his arm away from his chest at about 10am so that they could attach electrodes and confirm that he was dead.
Clearly, rigor mortis - the stiffening of the body - had not yet fully set in. Since it is generally accepted that it reaches its peak after 12 hours, we can assume that Dr Kelly most likely died at some time after 10pm on the Thursday night, and quite possibly much later.
What then happened to him in the missing hours - at least seven of them - between leaving home and supposedly killing himself?
The last person known to have seen Dr Kelly alive was his neighbour, Ruth Absalom, who met him about three-quarters-of-a-mile from his home.
They passed the time of day briefly before going their separate ways. Dr Kelly's parting words were: "See you again then, Ruth."
According to Ms Absalom, he was heading towards the nearby village of Kingston Bagpuize.
That would be consistent with a circular half-hour walk back to his house - but in quite the wrong direction to reach Harrowrecords-down Hill, the lonely area of woodland where his body was discovered.
One of the few clues to what happened next is that Dr Kelly's phone was switched off when a colleague from the Ministry of Defence tried to call him between 5pm and 6pm.
This was odd. Dr Kelly himself would tell friends that his mobile was always on and, given that he had been in regular contact with the MoD that morning, and that the furore surrounding him was developing from hour to hour, it seems unlikely that he would have turned it off or let the battery run down.
If he did indeed intend to commit suicide, turning off his phone could be seen as a preliminary step. But for reasons I have made clear, I do not believe suicide is a credible explanation for his death.
This leaves us with an alternative possibility. Did someone else turn Dr Kelly's phone off so that his movements could not be traced via signal kept by the phone company? In other words, was he forcibly abducted?
If he headed in the direction Ms Absalom described, his walk would probably have taken him along Appleton Road, a quiet and rather empty stretch with only sporadic development alongside.
From there he is likely to have turned right into Draycott Road, which is even more deserted. A no-through road with some derelict buildings part-way down, it peters out into a footpath at the end.
On either of these roads it would certainly have been relatively easy for determined abductors to have forced the 59-year-old weapons inspector into a van without anyone seeing.
According to the information I have been given, the murder itself was carried out by a couple of not very well-paid hired hands.
As to the method used, I am told that they gave Dr Kelly an injection in his backside, which perhaps points to the use of succinylcholine, a white crystalline substance that acts as a muscle relaxant.
For less beneficent purposes, it can be used to induce paralysis and cardiac arrest and frequently goes undetected in post-mortems.
I asked Thames Valley Police whether the body had been checked for the presence of this or a similar substance. They told me that they did not know.
If this was not the substance used then, alarmingly, there appear to be a large number of other ways in which Dr Kelly might have been killed that would be difficult or even impossible to trace.
For this we can no doubt partly thank the work of Project Coast - a highly unpleasant chemical and biological warfare programme run by the South African government from 1981 onwards to develop exactly such capabilities.
With aims including the creation of a biological weapon designed to attack the black population while leaving whites unscathed, its prime mover was Dr Wouter Basson, variously described as 'the South African Mengele' and 'Dr Death'.
Ironically, in the week before Dr Kelly died, it is alleged he was due to be interviewed by MI5 about his links with Dr Basson, who in 1985 had visited the Porton Down research centre, where Dr Kelly was then head of the Chemical Defence Establishment.
This visit had happened at a time when Mrs Thatcher's government claimed that the South Africans were developing biological and chemical weapons solely for defensive purposes.
Only later was it revealed that they were working on chemicals such as parathion, an organophosphate that can be introduced into the body through hair follicles, perhaps under the arm or around the crutch.
This causes vomiting - evidence of which could be seen on Dr Kelly's body - and leads to a respiratory attack. It is extremely difficult to detect traces of such a chemical in the body, unless you know what you are looking for.
When I tracked down Wouter Basson at his home in the Western Cape earlier this year, I asked him if he thought Dr Kelly had been murdered.
He paused, as if choosing his words carefully, then replied that Dr Kelly 'didn't seem the sort to commit suicide'.
He was also in no doubt that the UK, and indeed other Western countries, have a capacity for assassination.
Other possible methods of killing Dr Kelly included the use of saxotoxin, found in some shellfish and known as the CIA Shellfish Toxin, after its alleged use by that agency to kill one of their targets. Even a tiny amount is effective seconds after injection and is completely untraceable after autopsy.
One private detective even suggested to me that Dr Kelly's killers might have made gruesome misuse of the equipment employed by undertakers in embalming, placing a tube into an artery and forcibly pumping the blood out of the body.
This would cause unconsciousness and then death, and reinforce the assumption that the victim had lost a lot of blood through a cut - the conclusion reached by Lord Hutton in Dr Kelly's case.
The detective told me that this process did not need access to a main artery like the jugular, but could be achieved through, say, the ulnar artery.
This was the one slashed with a knife in Dr Kelly's wrist. Was that incision an attempt to cover up the artery's previous use?
Another ghastly suggestion came to me from someone who signed themselves only as 'Nemesis'. Their letter alleged that he or she had been told by a 'member of the non-English diplomatic corps' that air had been introduced into Dr Kelly's bloodstream through a needle in a vein.
Apparently, if present in sufficient quantities, air in the major organs will kill and leave no scar. 'Nemesis' was in no doubt that this was how Dr Kelly's life had ended. "His heart and lungs were full of air," the letter said.
We know that the pathologist did retain one of Dr Kelly's lungs and some blood to test for substances such as chloroform but Assistant Chief Constable Michael Page, who gave evidence at the Hutton inquiry, revealed that the tests to the lung had not actually been carried out.
This was, he said, because no suspicious substances had shown up in the blood tests.
Whatever method might have been used to murder Dr Kelly, we have to wonder why those responsible did not kill him immediately. There would have been no insurmountable obstacles to doing so, after all.
Perhaps his kidnappers wanted an opportunity to take him into the woods at Harrowdown Hill under cover of darkness to minimise the chances of being spotted or disturbed.
It certainly would not have been difficult to have given him a shot to render him temporarily unconscious until his assailants forced him to walk to the spot where he would be killed and found the next day.
If they drove him there, the closest they could have got by road was about half a mile from where his body was found.
That walk is rather a public one, but there is another route and one seemingly not investigated by the police.
This path runs from a remote reach of the River Thames, about 500 yards away, up through a field and into the woods. With no houses or other dwellings nearby, anybody walking here is unlikely to be seen, particularly in the dead of night.
Intriguingly, this area was searched the following morning by Louise Holmes and Paul Chapman, the two volunteers who eventually found Dr Kelly's body.
They told the Hutton inquiry that some time after beginning their search at 8am they came across a group of three or four people in a boat and had a brief conversation with them.
Who they were, and what they were doing on the river at that time of the morning, has never been established. They could, of course, have been holidaymakers. But was the truth more sinister?
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Obamacare: Taxing The American People Into Oblivion > Health Care Reform
Obamacare: Taxing The American People Into Oblivion
“The Obama administration has turned the insurance industry into the Blackwater of socialized medicine.”
H.R. 3590, The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, to give it its full title, is rammed full of tax increases which will further economically cripple Americans already laboring under the worst financial crisis since the great depression.
The partnering Reconciliation Act, currently in the Senate, also contains a raft of pork barrel and tax hikes, there to fund the trillion dollar cost of nationalizing medicine.
As reported by Bloomberg News today, analysis by the nonpartisan congressional Joint Committee on Taxation reveals that the bill will generate $409.2 billion in additional taxes by 2019.
In addition, the Congressional Budget Office states that the bill also levies almost $69 billion more in penalties for those who fail to meet mandates to buy insurance.
The Journal of Accountancy boils down some of the tax hikes and penalty fees in H.R. 3590 and the Reconciliation Act – the highlights include:
Excise Tax on Uninsured Individuals – Individuals who fail to maintain minimum essential coverage will be subject to a penalty equal to $750. The fee for an uninsured individual under age 18 is one-half of the adult fee.
Excise Tax on High-Cost Employer Plans – The federal government would impose a 40% tax on the value of employer-sponsored health coverage exceeding certain thresholds. Those levels are projected to be $8,500 for self only and $23,000 for any other level by the year 2013. This excise was announced with fanfare by the White House and labor unions in January and remains in the final bill.
Increase in additional tax on distributions from Health Savings Accounts and Archer Medical Savings Accounts not used for qualified medical expenses – An increase from 10% to 20% on taxes of money in a health savings account not used for qualified medical expenses. For Archer medical savings accounts, an increase from 15% to 20%.
Additional Hospital Insurance Tax on High-Income Taxpayers – High income tax payers, making on a joint return over $250,000 and a standard return over $200,000, are required to pay an additional 0.5% of wages. This applies to both self-employed, and regularly employed individuals.
Fees on Health Plans – A fee applied to all health insurance providers based upon net premiums and any third party fees associated with the administration of those programs. The fees will total $6.7 billion annually. This figure begins at $8 billion in the Reconciliation Act and rises to $14.3 billion by 2018.
Tax on Indoor Tanning Services – The act imposes a 10% tax on amounts paid for indoor tanning services. Like a sales tax, the tax will be collected from the person tanning when payment for the tanning services is made.
Business Insider boils down 15 more tax hikes here – highlights include:
Tax on individuals without acceptable health care coverage – A 2.5% income tax on individuals who do not have health care coverage, limited to a cost less than the average national health care premium.
Excise tax on elective cosmetic medical procedures – A tax of 5% is levied upon the am mount paid for any cosmetic surgery. This does not include the need for such surgeries created by trauma or a disfiguring disease. If the tax is not collected by that professional completing the procedure, their business is still liable for the requirement.
The Reconciliation Act also legislates for the following surcharges: 1% surcharge on individuals making more than $350,000, 1.5% surcharge on individuals making more than $500,000, 5.4% surcharge on individuals making more than $1 million.
Yet more tax provisions in the bill are highlighted by INvestors Business Daily in their piece titled 20 Ways ObamaCare Will Take Away Our Freedoms – highlights include:
Taxes On Employers – If you are a large employer (defined as at least 101 employees) and you do not want to provide health insurance to your employee, then you will pay a $750 fine per employee (It could be $2,000 to $3,000 under the reconciliation changes) (Section 1513).
Taxes on Pharmaceutical Companies – The government will extract a fee of $2.3 billion annually from the pharmaceutical industry (Section 9008 (b)).
Taxes on medical device manufacturers – The government will extract a fee of $2 billion annually from medical device makers (Section 1405).
As a candidate and President, Barack Obama has had one core message for middle class Americans: I won’t raise your taxes.
By putting his name to the health care reform bill today he has swiftly put to bed any pretence that he would uphold that pledge (multi-trillion dollar bailouts aside).
While the new taxes on individuals are bad enough, the penalties imposed on pharmaceutical corporations, health insurers and employers are will inevitably serve as a double whammy as the hikes will undoubtedly be passed on to the general public in the form of higher costs.
“Simply, you have nationalized healthcare by proxy.” writes Jonah Goldberg of the LA Times.
“Insurance companies are now heavily regulated government contractors. Way to get big business out of Washington! They will clear a small, government-approved profit on top of their government-approved fees. Then, when healthcare costs rise — and they will — Democrats will insist, yet again, that the profit motive is to blame and out from this Obamacare Trojan horse will pour another army of liberals demanding a more honest version of single-payer.”
“The Obama administration has turned the insurance industry into the Blackwater of socialized medicine.” Goldberg concludes.
A swift dose of propaganda is sure to silence some critics. However, if the softly softly approach fails, the myriad of new taxes and regulations contained in the Obamacare bill will be aggressively enforced by no less than 16,500 new “combat trained” IRS agents armed to the teeth with shotguns, who will also closely scrutinize Americans’ income tax returns and be waiting to pounce should they find evidence of anyone trying to avoid paying for mandatory government health care.
Even if you agree with socialized health care in principle, the fact is that this will only benefit the insurance companies who wrote it. Meanwhile millions of Americans will be subjected to more taxation, harassment, and oppression at the hands of a federal government run amok. An out of control leviathan, hell-bent on an agenda to control every aspect of your life, as they lay in wait to exploit the momentum achieved through the passage of Obamacare by ramming through nightmare cap and tax levies to further financially castrate already beleaguered Americans.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Blacks represent 16% of the US population, and two-thirds of the prison population
I've always been of the belief that the culture of ignorance among our black population was funded and cultured by elements of the CIA. Why? for profit, of course. When we have a prison system as large as we do in the state of California, it becomes very evident that this way of thinking and way of life has been planted by the seeds of our very own secret government. Blacks represent only 16% of the US population, and two-thirds of the prison population. The state of California has built (since '84) 21 new prisons, and only 1 new University. There has been not one effect on percentages in crime statistics, either.
Hearing the stories of Rail cars full of guns isn't anything new. I heard it from the mouth of a former gang member when I lived in Sacramento, an area heavily influenced by gangs and gang activity. Why would unattended rail cars full of guns be left in the suburban ghetto? To fuel violence, murder rates, and imprisonment. If you are sentenced to life for killing someone, or multiple people - you sit there and do nothing but make the state money for the rest of your pathetic life. That's why there's gangster rap, and rappers preaching the glamorous life of 'pimping hoes' and carrying automatic weapons for protection...
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Telepathic computer can read your mind
Telepathy has taken a step closer to reality after British scientists developed a computer that can read your thoughts.
By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent
Published: 5:00PM GMT 11 Mar 2010
The system is able to decipher thought patterns and tell what people are thinking simply by scanning the brain.
The breakthrough is a step forward because it can delve into people's memories and differentiate between different recollections.
The breakthrough follows research last year by the same team who used the same technique to track a person's movements around a computer-simulated room.
The study published online in Current Biology focussed on the hippocampus, an area at the centre of the brain that plays a crucial role in short term memory.
A telepathy machine raises the prospect of a lie detector tests and could even lead to manipulations of memories such as in the film the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless MInd.
In their latest experiment the researchers showed 10 volunteers three seven second films featuring different women carrying out an everyday task in a typical urban street such as posting a letter or drinking coffee from a paper cup.
The volunteers were asked to memorise what they saw and then recall each one in turn whilst inside an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scanner which records brain activity by measuring changes in blood flow within the brain.
The computer algorithm then studied the electrical patterns and could tell which film the volunteer was recalling with an accuracy of about 50 per cent - which was well above chance.
Prof Eleanor Maguire, of University College London, said: "In our previous experiment we were looking at basic memories, at someone's location in an environment.
"What is more interesting is to look at 'episodic' memories – the complex, everyday memories that include much more information on where we are, what we are doing and how we feel.
"We've been able to look at brain activity for a specific episodic memory — to look at actual memory traces. We found our memories are definitely represented in the hippocampus.
"Now that we've seen where they are, we have an opportunity to understand how memories are stored and how they may change through time."
The researchers used the same scanning technique in their earlier study to work out the locations of four men as they navigated their way around a virtual reality room.
The pattern of brain activity was different for each of the four points they visited - allowing the team to work out where the men were.
By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent
Published: 5:00PM GMT 11 Mar 2010
The system is able to decipher thought patterns and tell what people are thinking simply by scanning the brain.
The breakthrough is a step forward because it can delve into people's memories and differentiate between different recollections.
The breakthrough follows research last year by the same team who used the same technique to track a person's movements around a computer-simulated room.
The study published online in Current Biology focussed on the hippocampus, an area at the centre of the brain that plays a crucial role in short term memory.
A telepathy machine raises the prospect of a lie detector tests and could even lead to manipulations of memories such as in the film the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless MInd.
In their latest experiment the researchers showed 10 volunteers three seven second films featuring different women carrying out an everyday task in a typical urban street such as posting a letter or drinking coffee from a paper cup.
The volunteers were asked to memorise what they saw and then recall each one in turn whilst inside an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scanner which records brain activity by measuring changes in blood flow within the brain.
The computer algorithm then studied the electrical patterns and could tell which film the volunteer was recalling with an accuracy of about 50 per cent - which was well above chance.
Prof Eleanor Maguire, of University College London, said: "In our previous experiment we were looking at basic memories, at someone's location in an environment.
"What is more interesting is to look at 'episodic' memories – the complex, everyday memories that include much more information on where we are, what we are doing and how we feel.
"We've been able to look at brain activity for a specific episodic memory — to look at actual memory traces. We found our memories are definitely represented in the hippocampus.
"Now that we've seen where they are, we have an opportunity to understand how memories are stored and how they may change through time."
The researchers used the same scanning technique in their earlier study to work out the locations of four men as they navigated their way around a virtual reality room.
The pattern of brain activity was different for each of the four points they visited - allowing the team to work out where the men were.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
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