XIAM007

Making Unique Observations in a Very Cluttered World

Monday 29 July 2013

Documentarian Claims Secret Service Agent Was ‘Second Shooter’ in JFK Assassination -

Documentarian Claims Secret Service Agent Was ‘Second Shooter’ in JFK Assassination - 



A new documentary alleges that a Secret Service agent was the second (and accidental) shooter in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

At the Television Critics Association press tour in Los Angeles on Sunday, producers and investigators behind Reelz Channel's new documentary "JFK: The Smoking Gun" made the claim that George Hickey, a Secret Service agent riding in the car behind Kennedy, accidentally shot the president on Nov. 22, 1963. The film follows veteran police detective Colin McLaren in his four-year investigation of the assassination and points at Hickey, who died two years ago.

McLaren's research built on the work of Howard Donahue, who spent 20 years studying the assassination and had his findings documented in Bonar Menninger’s book Mortal Error: The Shot That Killed JFK. McLaren and Menninger were on hand Sunday to take questions about their film, which the network billed in press notes as a "docudrama."

Addressing the crowd, McLaren claimed that Hickey and other Secret Service agents were out partying the night before Kennedy's fatal motorcade drive through Dallas. Based on his painstaking investigation, McLaren said, evidence suggests Hickey was not qualified to use the weapon he was holding the morning of the shooting.

"It was his first time in the follow car, his first time holding the assault weapon he was using," McLaren said. Producers said the film's theory is that shots rang out, and Hickey grabbed his weapon to return fire. When his car stopped suddenly, Hickey accidentally discharged his weapon -- making him the second shooter, the film's investigators and producers alleged.

McLaren said he believes that Hickey's weapon had hollow-point rounds -- different from the ammunition for the weapon used by Lee Harvey Oswald, whom the Warren Commission declared in 1964 was the lone gunman in the case. Menninger and McLaren said that based on their review of the forensics in the case, they believe that Kennedy was also struck by a hollow-point round.

Oswald was killed before he could stand trial, but the case has continued to inspire various theories around just how the tragedy occurred. Books and films have advanced different ideas -- including a second shooter theory.

"We're not saying this was intentional," Menninger said Sunday. "This was a tragic accident in the heat of the moment."

"We don't suggest he was in any way involved in a conspiracy," Menninger added.

Donahue wrote about his theory decades ago, but McLaren said it's taken decades -- and the release of thousands of JFK-related documents during the Clinton administration -- for a proper review of all the evidence and information related to the case. The authors acknowledged Sunday that there are many other books and films on the assassination, but said theirs is unique because it is based on a new review of the documents released during the 1990s.

McLaren and Menninger also alleged that the government -- including Robert F. Kennedy -- covered up the involvement of the Secret Service and Hickey.

The producers were pressed on how the alleged involvement of the Secret Service could be covered up for 50 years.

"Nobody was going to gain" from having this out there, Menninger said.

"We're not here to blacken the name" of Hickey or any other individual, or the modern-day Secret Service, McLaren said.

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Surge in handcuff mishaps blamed on 50 Shades of Grey... -


Surge in handcuff mishaps blamed on 50 Shades of Grey... - 



London firefighters say they have freed hundreds of people with body parts trapped in household objects in the last three years, including 18 children with heads stuck in potties or toilet seats and 79 people trapped in handcuffs.

The London Fire Brigade speculated that the popularity of erotic novel "Fifty Shades of Grey" may account for a rise in handcuffs-related emergencies.

"I don't know whether it's the 'Fifty Shades' effect, but the number of incidents involving items like handcuffs seems to have gone up," said Third Officer Dave Brown.

Since 2010, London firefighters have treated almost 500 people with rings stuck on their fingers, nine with rings stuck on their penises, and one man with his penis stuck in a toaster.

Rescue crews also helped five people with hands stuck in shredders and 17 children with their hands trapped in toys.

The brigade released the list of incidents Monday to encourage people to be more careful. It advised people to exercise common sense — and always to keep the keys nearby when using handcuffs.



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Secret letter reveals Lockerbie bomber release linked to arms deal... -


Secret letter reveals Lockerbie bomber release linked to arms deal... - 



The release of the Lockerbie bomber was linked by the Government to a £400 million arms-export deal to Libya, according to secret correspondence obtained by The Sunday Telegraph.

An email sent by the then British ambassador in Tripoli details how a prisoner transfer agreement would be signed once Libya “fulfils its promise” to buy an air defence system.
The disclosure is embarrassing for members of the then Labour government, which always insisted that Abdelbaset al-Megrahi’s release was not linked to commercial deals.
The email, which contained a briefing on the UK’s relations with Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime, was sent on June 8 2008 by Sir Vincent Fean, the then UK ambassador, to Tony Blair’s private office, ahead of a visit soon after he stepped down as prime minister.
Mr Blair flew to Tripoli to meet Gaddafi on June 10, in a private jet provided by the dictator, one of at least six visits Mr Blair made to Libya after quitting Downing Street.
The briefing, which runs to 1,300 words, contains revealing details about how keen Britain was to do deals with Gaddafi. It also suggests that:
• the UK made it a key objective for Libya to invest its £80  billion sovereign wealth fund through the City of London
• the UK was privately critical of then President George Bush for “shooting the US in the foot” by continuing to put a block on Libyan assets in America, in the process scuppering business deals
• the Department for International Development was eager to use another Libyan fund worth £130 million to pay for schemes in Sierra Leone and other poverty-stricken countries.
The release of Megrahi in August 2009 caused a huge furore, with the Government insisting he had been released on compassionate grounds because he was suffering from terminal cancer, and that the decision was taken solely by the Scottish government.
Megrahi had been convicted in 2001 of the murder of 270 people when PanAm flight 103 from London to New York blew up over Lockerbie in Scotland in 1988. It remains Britain’s single worst terrorist atrocity.
Libya had been putting pressure on the UK to release Megrahi and in May 2007, just before he left Downing Street, Mr Blair travelled to Sirte to meet Gaddafi and Al-Baghdadi Ali al-Mahmoudi, Libya’s then prime minister.
At that meeting, according to Sir Vincent’s email, Mr Blair and Mr Baghdadi agreed that Libya would buy the missile defence system from MBDA, a weapons manufacturer part-owned by BAE Systems. The pair also signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) for a prisoner transfer agreement (PTA), which the Libyans believed would pave the way for Megrahi’s release.
The British government initially intended the agreement to explicitly exclude Megrahi. However, ministers relented under pressure from Libya.
In December 2007, Jack Straw, then justice secretary, told his Scottish counterpart that he had been unable to secure an exclusion, but said any application to transfer Megrahi under the agreement would still have to be signed off by Scottish ministers.
With Mr Blair returning in June 2008 — as a guest of Gaddafi on his private jet — the government appears to have used the chance to press its case for the arms deal to be sealed. At the time, Britain was on the brink of an economic and banking crisis, and Libya, through the Libyan Investment Authority, had billions of pounds in reserves.
Sir Vincent gave Mr Blair’s office a briefing on the state of relations with Libya. The email suggests that Mr Blair was being used as a conduit.

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The Coming Shortage Of Physical Gold That Will Change Everything -


The Coming Shortage Of Physical Gold That Will Change Everything - 



Is the paper gold scam about to be brutally crushed by a crippling shortage of physical gold?  If so, what will that do to global financial markets?  According to the Reserve Bank of India, “the traded amount of ‘paper linked to gold’ exceeds by far the actual supply of physical gold: the volume on the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) OTC market and the major Futures and Options Exchanges was OVER 92 TIMES that of the underlying Physical Market.”  In other words, there is a massive amount of paper out there, but very little actual physical gold to back it up.  And right now, we are witnessing voracious hoarding of physical gold all over the globe.  This is especially true in Asia.  Just see this article and this article.  All of this hoarding is putting a tremendous amount of pressure on those that have made all of these “paper promises”, because the truth is that there really isn’t all that much physical gold on the planet.  In fact, Warren Buffett once estimated that if all of the gold in the entire world was brought into one place, it could be formed into a cube that would only be 69 feet long by 69 feet high by 69 feet wide.

As the emerging shortage of physical gold becomes increasingly apparent, the massive Ponzi scheme that the bullion banks have been running for decades is going to completely fall apart.  The following is what Egon von Greyerz told King World News the other day…

Governments and central banks have, for decades, leased or sold their gold to the bullion banks.  So they are very likely to own very little of the 23,000 tons that Western central banks are said to hold.

But now bullion banks also have a problem:  They tried to replenish their (physical gold) coffers during the massive manipulative selling that we’ve seen over the last few months in the paper market.  Although they took the price down, most of the physical (gold) that was released by selling from ETFs and hedge funds was absorbed by Asia.

 So the bullion banks are still massively short of physical gold.

Right now there simply is not enough physical gold out there and the bullion banks and the central planners are starting to panic.  One of the individuals that really has his hand on the pulse of what is going on is billionaire Eric Sprott…

We have seen the COMEX inventories decline rapidly. We know that all of the dealer inventory on the COMEX has already been spoken for by delivery notices, so essentially there will be zero (inventory) if they ever make the delivery.

And the central planners (also) went to India and said, ‘Look, you’ve got to do something about all of this gold buying in India.’ So we’ve had ten different steps by the Indian government to try to curb demand — a 2% tax, a 4% tax, a 6% tax, an 8% tax, and a ruling that banks couldn’t lend money for people to buy gold.

They also convinced the Jewelers Association that as of July 1st they couldn’t sell gold bars and coins. Just last week there was a new rule implemented that if you are importing gold you have to prove that a certain amount is being re-exported. We’ve probably had ten or twelve things (restrictions) happen in six months, all of which is a huge attempt to get the second biggest buyer of gold in the world, after China, to decrease consumption because the gold isn’t around.

The central planners have arranged all of these things. I think it’s just been one big scheme to try to get people dissuaded from owning gold and to cause supply to come out. As you mentioned, because of it (central planner actions) we have the gold forward rates (for gold) being negative, backwardation, and inventories plunging, all of which have been manifested because there is a shortage of gold.

Already the emerging shortage of physical gold is starting to cause some very unusual things to happen in the financial markets.  A recent article by Reg Howe did a good job of explaining what we have been witnessing lately…

By undercutting normal gold lease rates, these super low interest rates have forced central banks to reduce their lease rates to nonsensical levels in order to prevent gold futures from going into overt backwardation. Recall that GOFO, the gold forward rate, is the interest rate for a given maturity less the lease rate for that maturity, and that a negative GOFO represents backwardation. See Gold Derivatives: GLD and Ass Backwardation (5/24/2010); Gold Derivatives: The Tide Turns (5/25/2009). Passing the argument that widely reported premiums for spot physical delivery represent a form of backwardation, figures from the LBMA have now shown a negative GOFO at the shorter maturities for almost three weeks (July 8 through July 25) due to a surge in lease rates, which still remain below more normal historical levels.

Indeed, this unusual event has attracted considerable attention even from those outside the narrow world of gold. See, e.g., J. Skoyles, Backwardation, negative GOFO and the gold price, The Real Asset Co. (July 24, 2013); M. Kentz, Gold futures hiccup indicates demand outpacing supply, Reuters (July 19, 2013); G. Williams, What If, Things that Make You Go Hmmm, Mauldin Economics (July 15, 2013).

The bottom line is that there is a very serious shortage of physical gold, and as this becomes increasingly apparent to the rest of the world, this is likely to cause a tremendous amount of instability in the financial markets in the months ahead.

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First test tube-grown beef will be served in London restaurant this week - cost£250,000 to produce the prototype -

First test tube-grown beef will be served in London restaurant this week - cost£250,000 to produce the prototype -  



The world’s first test-tube burger will be served in London next week. It is made from meat grown in a laboratory, rather than cattle raised in pastures.
And its developers hope it will show how the soaring global demand for protein can be met without the need for vast herds of cattle.
The 5oz ‘Frankenburger’, which cost £250,000 to produce, is made from 3,000 tiny strips of meat grown from the stem cells of a cow.
The raw meat is said to be grey with a slippery texture similar to squid or scallop.

It has been created by Professor Mark Post, from the University of Maastricht in Holland.
His research has been funded by an anonymous businessman – who may be the first to try the burger.
He told The Independent on Sunday: 'Right now, we are using 70 per cent of all our agricultural capacity to grow meat through livestock. You are going to need alternatives. If we don’t do anything meat will become a luxury food and will become very expensive.’
A four-step technique is used to turn stem cells from animal flesh into a burger.
First, the stem cells are stripped from the cow’s muscle.
Next, they are incubated in a nutrient broth until they multiply many times over, creating a sticky tissue with the consistency of an undercooked egg.
This ‘wasted muscle’ is then bulked up through the laboratory equivalent of exercise - it is anchored to Velcro and stretched.

Finally, 3,000 strips of the lab-grown meat are minced, and, along with 200 pieces of lab-grown animal fat, formed into a burger.
The process is still lengthy, as well as expensive, but it could take just six weeks from stem cell to supermarket shelf.


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