September 11 Digital Archive Mass psychosis in the US Has America become a nation of psychotics? You would certainly think so, based on the explosion in the use of antipsychotic medications. In 2008, with over $14 billion in sales, antipsychotics became the single top-selling therapeutic class of prescription drugs in the United States, surpassing drugs used to treat high cholesterol and acid reflux. Once upon a time, antipsychotics were reserved for a relatively small number of patients with hard-core psychiatric diagnoses - primarily schizophrenia and bipolar disorder - to treat such symptoms as delusions, hallucinations, or formal thought disorder. It is anything but a coincidence that the explosion in antipsychotic use coincides with the pharmaceutical industry's development of a new class of medications known as "atypical antipsychotics." Not just for psychotics anymore In a recent article in The New York Review of Books, Angell deconstructs what she calls an apparent "raging epidemic of mental illness" among Americans.
Selective Memri | World news For some time now, I have been receiving small gifts from a generous institute in the United States. The gifts are high-quality translations of articles from Arabic newspapers which the institute sends to me by email every few days, entirely free-of-charge. The emails also go to politicians and academics, as well as to lots of other journalists. The stories they contain are usually interesting. Whenever I get an email from the institute, several of my Guardian colleagues receive one too and regularly forward their copies to me - sometimes with a note suggesting that I might like to check out the story and write about it. If the note happens to come from a more senior colleague, I'm left feeling that I really ought to write about it. The organisation that makes these translations and sends them out is the Middle East Media Research Institute (Memri), based in Washington but with recently-opened offices in London, Berlin and Jerusalem. Mr Awadh is not exactly an independent figure.
Global Terrorism Database The updated GTD WebGL Globe is an interactive geographic visualization, currently in beta, that plots the location and frequency of yearly terrorist attacks worldwide from 1970-2014. It was developed by START using the WebGL Globe open platform created by the Google Data Arts Team. Automated geocoding from the OpenCage Geocoder supplements the geocoding available in the public dataset. Periscopic, a data visualization firm that promotes information transparency and public awareness, has produced an innovative, interactive tool that allows users to explore the impact and dynamics of GTD perpetrator groups. A World of Terror examines the 25 perpetrators that were most active between 1970 and 2013, visualizing their attack patterns across multiple dimensions including life span, recency, casualties, and geographic spread. The GTD Data Rivers 2.0 application is an interactive visualization tool that allows users to explore patterns of terrorism in the Global Terrorism Database (GTD). More
Multinational Monitor Understanding 9/11: A Television News Archive Libyan spy files document Qaddafi regime's fall This Sunday, Sept. 4, 2011 photo shows an ransacked desk in Muammar Qaddafi's intelligence headquarters in Tripoli, Libya. Hundreds intelligence documents seen by The Associated Press in Tripoli show how Qaddafi's authoritarian regime using all its means failed to quash an armed rebellion largely fueled by hatred of its tools of control. AP Photo/Ben Hubbard TRIPOLI, Libya - As the uprising grew against Muammar Qaddafi, secret reports from his vaunted intelligence service flowed back to Tripoli. Some were mundane — how agents erased anti-regime graffiti. The reports grew more desperate as the Libyan rebellion veered into civil war: Military leaders in the western mountains were disregarding orders; troops in the city of Misrata ran out of ammunition, turning the situation into "every man for himself." These reports and hundreds of other intelligence documents seen by The Associated Press in Tripoli trace how the tide shifted in the six-month uprising that ended Qaddafi's 42-year reign.
Yes, MEMRI, there is a Fatwa from Khamenei forbidding Nukes I’m told that MEMRI, which has its origins in Israeli military intelligence, has put out a statement doubting that Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei ever issued a fatwa forbidding nuclear weapons. (MEMRI claims to be a 501(c)3 non-profit but is actually an effort to cherry-pick Middle Eastern news to present the most negative face of the Arab world to Americans so as to prejudice them in favor of Israel; in this case it is just doing propaganda). A Reddit.com contributor has effectively answered this piece of disinformation. This posting points out that the official IRNA news agency said in 2005, “The Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has issued the Fatwa that the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons are forbidden under Islam and that the Islamic Republic of Iran shall never acquire these weapons.” That this old posting has gone into the deep web and isn’t at the IRNA site is irrelevant. There is another consideration.
OSNews is Exploring the Future of Computing Media Lens Loyalists enter Niger but no sign of Qaddafi Updated at 3:38 p.m. ET TARHOUNA, Libya - Armed loyalists of Muammar Qaddafi, including his security chief, fled into neighboring Niger in multiple convoys across hundreds of miles of desert on Tuesday. Libya's former rebels — now the country's de facto rulers — claimed the convoys were a major flight by Qaddafi's most hardcore backers from his final strongholds. The claims could not immediately be confirmed. But as the first group of a dozen vehicles pulled into Niger's capital Niamey on Tuesday, a customs official confirmed that it included Mansour Dao, Qaddafi's security chief and a key member of his inner circle, as well as around 12 other Qaddafi regime officials. Qaddafi himself is not in the convoys, Niger's Foreign Minister Bazoum Mohamed said, according to Al-Arabiya television. Special Section: Anger in the Arab WorldQaddafi loyalists flee, rebels eye Bani WalidLibyan spy files document Qaddafi regime's fall Still, the significance of the convoys was unclear. U.S.
Campus Watch by Daniel Pipes In response to: The Storm over the Israel Lobby from the June 8, 2006 issue To the Editors: Michael Massing [“The Storm over the Israel Lobby,” NYR, June 8] makes a factual error in his reference to Campus Watch when he writes that Campus Watch encouraged students to take notes on lectures by professors critical of Israel, with the goal of “exposing” them on the MEF Web site, but this feature was dropped after it was widely condemned as a form of McCarthyism. Had Massing done even a modicum of research, he would have seen that inviting students to submit information about abusive professors (so as to keep professors honest in the classroom) was never dropped and remains very much in place at the Campus Watch Web site at “Keep Us Informed,” www.campus-watch.org/incident.php. I can’t but comment on the odd phrase that Campus Watch “encouraged students to take notes on lectures by professors critical of Israel.” Daniel Pipes Director, Middle East Forum Philadelphia, Pennsylvania