The 13 most under-reported news stories of 2013

Image: rt.com

From Aaron Swartz to Assange, Monsanto to Manning, fracking fears, Iraq carnage and more, here are RT’s "Top 13 of 2013." These vastly underreported stories are some of the biggest ones to fly under the mainstream media’s radar this year.

The persecution and death of Aaron Swartz

The visionary cofounder of Reddit and open access advocate who played a key role in how we navigate the web today, Aaron Swartz was young, precocious and determined to change the world. But with “the trial” looming large over his head, the tech genius succumbed to the pressure on January 11, hanging himself with his own belt in the Brooklyn apartment he shared with his girlfriend.

Gitmo hunger strike

In February, many of the men being held at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility launched a hunger strike against camp conditions. It was sparked by a disrespectful treatment of Quran. One month into the strike, attorneys for the men, many housed at the facilities infamous Camp 6, said the number refusing food had already reached 100.

Mayflower Oil Spill

On March 29, ExxonMobil’s Pegasus pipeline burst near the town of Mayflower, Arkansas, flooding the town with the equivalent of over 10,000 barrels of crude oil. Nearly two dozen homes were evacuated following the accident, which the US Environmental Protection Agency categorized as a “major spill”.

‘Million Mask March’

‘Remember, remember the Fifth of November’, when protesters donning white-faced Guy Fawkes masks gathered in an estimated 450 locations worldwide to protest corporate greed, corrupt governance, and the ever expanding surveillance state.

The event, dubbed the “Million Mask March,” was associated with the hacktivist collective Anonymous and the horizontally organized Occupy movement. Originally growing out of the image board 4chan, Anonymous became increasingly political following the 2011 Arab Spring, targeting governments and corporations like the internet’s answer to white blood cells.

No Fracking way!

On October 19, Fracktivists’ from over 26 countries organized the Global Frackdown protest to demand an end to “dangerous” shale gas drilling.

FBI kills Todashev, friend of Boston Marathon bombing suspect

FBI agents shot an unarmed Chechen man in the head during questioning over his suspected ties to the Boston Marathon bombings of May 2013. The FBI has since aimed to sweep the incident under the rug, blocking the release of Ibragim Todashev’s autopsy and intimidating those associated with him.

The world marches against Monsanto and GMO

Public anger against GMO food products and GMO giant, Monsanto, erupted in massive global protests in May and October against the company’s stranglehold on global food production. Millions went out in 50 countries, with signs reading ‘Hell no GMO’.

War on Anonymous

This year was a busy one for hacktivist group Anonymous, as well as for attorneys representing alleged members of the collective.

Online operations waged over the past year by the internationally-dispersed band of hackers and activists attracted the attention of people across the globe. But it wasn’t just ordinary citizens keeping an eye on the group; governments and prosecutors were doing the same. In fact, 2013 witnessed numerous global efforts aimed at taking the group down.

The Trial of Chelsea Manning

If you’re looking for proof that the mainstream media failed Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning, look no further than statements made by the imprisoned WikiLeaks source herself.

Not only was the three-month military court martial of Manning largely ignored by established media outlets, but the former private first class said while on the stand that her own efforts to attract the attention of the press years earlier - before she turned to anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks - were ignored as well.

WikiLeaks victories as Assange incarceration in Ecuador embassy reaches 3rd anniversary

WikiLeaks won a court case in April that landed Visa with million-dollar fines for its financial blockade of the site. Julian Assange, still holed up in Ecuador’s London Embassy, said it was a victory over Washington's attempt to silence WikiLeaks.

December 7 marked the third year of his detention, despite no charges being filed against him in the country. Assange remains under threat of extradition to Sweden, with the journalist being wanted for questioning in connection with a sexual misconduct investigation, which he labels as politically motivated. He believes Sweden will, in turn, extradite him to the US, where he could face espionage charges, which could carry the death penalty.

Syrian Christians persecuted and forced to flee Maaloula

Maaloula, an ancient Christian town where the locals speak western Aramaic - a language spoken by Christ - has seen some of the fiercest fighting in the Syrian civil war, with attacks on Christians who were eventually forced to make desperate escapes.

Christians and Muslims used to coexist in Maaloula peacefully and despite the civil war raging around them had agreed that their town must remain one of peace. But when Maaloula was taken over in early September by the Islamist fighters from jabat al-Nusra, a group with links to Al-Qaeda, not one of the town’s 5,000 Christian residents or virtually a single member of the 2,000 strong Muslim community remained. All have now fled, fearing for their lives. Maaloula has become a ghost town.

Libya mired in spiral of violence and ongoing chaos

Two years after the NATO-backed deposition of Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi, the country is in chaos. 2013 has witnessed the siege of Libya’s Foreign ministry, the Russian embassy falling under attack, high-ranking officials kidnapped, as well as repeated and deadly clashes between the Libyan army and Islamist militia.

In April, Libya’s foreign ministry was besieged by some 200 men armed with AK-47 assault guns and sniper rifles. Demands were made to sack key foreign service officers in Libya’s embassies and consulates abroad. Intense negotiations followed.

Iraq 2013: A year of carnage

Iraq has been embroiled in a bloodbath this year, with over 9,000 killed in total, according to Iraq Body Count - making it the most violent year the country has seen since 2008. RT’s timeline of the annihilation was set up to keep track of its escalation.

Nearly two years after US troops withdrew from Iraq, security forces are struggling to combat the violence. Iraq has been plunging deeper into inter-ethnic violence, prompted by ever-growing tensions mostly between the country’s majority Shiite community and the Sunni minority.

Source: rt.com

Fox News Shockingly Reports The Truth On GMOs

Who would have ever thought Fox news would admit the dangers of GMOs? After all, the mainstream media (MSM) have all but done a complete shut-out concerning activist concerns and anti-GMO marches that have happened around the globe.

Why the Latest Attack on Multivitamins is Nothing More than Big Pharma Propaganda

Image: wikimedia.org

Mike Adams | Natural News

Today the mainstream media is gleefully reporting findings they mistakenly believe show all multivitamins to be worthless at preventing disease. "Case Closed: Multivitamins Should Not Be Used," declares Forbes. "New studies dispel multivitamin myths," reports NBC News. And CBS News shouts, "case is closed" after studies find no health benefits."

The problem with all these headlines is they're based on an editorial published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, a pro-pharma publication almost entirely funded by pharmaceuticals which compete with multivitamins. When I visited the study publication page on Annals.org, I was immediately greeted with a pop-up advertisement trying to hawk a pharmaceutical drug.

It's almost as if the pharma-funded publication is saying, "Here, while we trash the reputation of vitamins, why don't you buy some drugs from our sponsors?"

Why pharmaceuticals are never subjected to the same scrutiny as multivitamins

What the media doesn't report, of course, is that if pharmaceuticals were subjected to the same basic questions covered in this study -- do multivitamins enhance cognitive function? Do they prevent heart disease? -- pharmaceuticals would prove to be disastrous. They not only don't work; they also might kill you in the process of not working.

So why isn't the media reporting that the "case is closed" on how drugs and medications fail to prevent chronic degenerative disease?

The answer is because this scrutiny is reserved solely for nutritional supplements. In today's distorted system of quack medicine, junk science and pro-pharma propaganda, medications never have to be proven effective to be promoted and hyped. There is no scientific evidence whatsoever, for example, that chemotherapy prevents the progression of cancer (chemo actually causes more cancer), or that statin drugs enhance lifespan. There is no evidence whatsoever that ADHD drugs create healthy children or that antidepressants cure depression. Yet all these drugs are heavily hyped by medical journal (i.e. "drug journals") and the mainstream media without regard for their disastrous lack of efficacy and safety.

So there's a dangerous double standard in all this. Nobody asks whether drugs actually create health, but multivitamins are routinely subjected to intense scrutiny on this very question.

Studies were contrived through the use of synthetic vitamins

To make sure these multivitamin studies fail to produce positive results, these studies are universally structured so that they are based on cheap, low-grade, synthetic vitamins and inorganic minerals. Not coincidentally, these brands of low-grade multivitamins are actually manufactured by companies owned by pharmaceutical interests. They really do have a financial incentive to make multivitamins look bad, and so their multivitamin formulations are intentionally designed to fail.

The vitamin E studied in this science review, for example, was synthetic, isolated vitamin E which already has a long history of being toxic for human consumption. Note carefully that these researchers never looked at full-spectrum vitamin E, including the tocopherols, nor did they bother to study a food concentrate form of vitamin E (because it would have been amazingly beneficial to heart health).

If I wanted to make all cars look dangerous, I could buy a dozen old Ford Pinto cars, line them up bumper to bumper, fill them with gasoline and ram them together in a mock road accident that caused them all to explode. From that, I could declare, "All cars are unsafe!" even though I only tested the Pinto. That's the same as what's happening with these multivitamin studies. They intentionally choose the most toxic forms of synthetic nutrients, then they use the negative results to declare that all multivitamins are dangerous.

Beta carotene, too, was studied as a synthetic chemical in isolation, not as a food-sourced nutrient like you might find in carrots or squash. So what these studies really prove is only that synthetic chemical vitamins are toxic to human health.

Guess who makes all these synthetic chemical vitamins? Companies like Bayer and BASF, the same companies that also manufacture raw materials for pharmaceutical manufacturing.

How the media uses "nutritional misdirection" to trick the public into thinking nutrition is bad

The mainstream media, of course, is all too happy to use journalist tricks of misdirection and false implication to misinform the public about nutrition. In claiming that "multivitamins are worthless," they are utterly failing to differentiate between cheap, pharma-manufactured synthetic multivitamins versus high-quality food-based multivitamins that really do work to enhance human health and prevent disease.

You won't find these scientists testing high-quality supplements from Life Extension, for example. Those supplements would produce positive results, and that's not what the pro-pharma scientists running these contrived studies want to show.

You also won't find them studying superfood powders, whole food concentrates or food-based supplements like the ones produced by MegaFood. Those supplements contain food-based nutrients and organic minerals -- the kind of nutrients the human body expects to see in food intake. Those supplements produce phenomenal results for enhanced human health. Researchers who publish in pharma-funded science journals will never study high-end multivitamins and nutritional supplements for the simple reason that the results would be too positive!

Synthetic drugs are even more harmful to human health than synthetic vitamins

The bigger question in all this, however, is just how harmful synthetic drugs are to human health. If synthetic vitamins produce negative health outcomes, then synthetic drugs produce truly disastrous results. Many drugs can simply kill you outright.

Synthetic drugs -- including PPIs, blood pressure medications, diabetes drugs, statin drugs, Alzheimer's drugs, osteoporosis drugs and so on -- are specifically designed to interfere with human physiology. Their entire intent is to "block" some chemical process in the body and thereby attempt to control symptoms of disease (without actually addressing the root cause of disease).

High-quality supplements and superfoods, on the other hand, are designed to prevent the causes of disease before they ever become symptomatic. They treat the root causes, in other words, rather than the mere symptoms.

This is why high-end food-based supplements, superfoods, medicinal herbs and other food concentrates are so effective at preventing disease. Conversely, this is also why isolated chemical drugs are so terrible at the same thing. No drug actually reverses any disease. They merely mask symptoms while allowing the underlying causes of disease to worsen. This is easily demonstrated: if a person taking blood pressure medications stops taking those medications, their blood pressure suddenly rises. The medication never addressed the cause of high blood pressure; it merely artificially interfered with physiology in a way that created a contrived, temporary lowering of measurable blood pressure.

These drug-pushing scientists and science journals want you to take pharmaceuticals, not nutrition

Let's get down to the real motivation in all this, however. The Annals of Internal Medicine and the scientists behind this extremely deceptive junk science all share the same intention: they want you to trust in drugs, not multivitamins.

Their job is to discredit multivitamins while simultaneously brainwashing consumers into believing that drugs are somehow "vital nutrients" that they need to survive. That's the foundation of modern medicine, after all: you are an incomplete human being unless and until you undergo medical intervention with a vaccine, a psychiatric drug, a cancer treatment or some other chemical that thereby makes you "whole."

Modern reductionist medical science wants to push drugs as the new multivitamins, but to do that, they first have to discredit multivitamins. Once multivitamins have been destroyed, they can convince the public (with yet more quack science) that everybody needs a statin pill every day. Everyone needs to drink toxic fluoride to have healthy teeth. Everyone needs to be injected with mercury, aluminum and MSG in order to be immune to the flu.

That's the real con in all this: The attack on multivitamins sets the stage for the unveiling of a new wave of "daily drug vitamins" the industry will push on everyone: adults, children, senior citizens and even unborn babies.

The population, you see, is never sufficiently medicated (from the point of view of Big Pharma). Drug companies must find new ways to convince people they need more drugs even when they aren't sick! The way to accomplish this is to position medications as essential nutrients. That's what you are seeing unfold right now.

Remember, too, that these scientists also insist that food can't prevent disease. All food is worthless for medical purposes, they insist. Only patented pharmaceuticals can treat, cure or prevent any disease, they ridiculously claim.

That's their worldview: Nutrition is bad, organic food is bad and herbs are bad. What's good? Vaccines, GMOs, medications and chemotherapy. To these science quacks, everyone in America should stop consuming good nutrition and start popping more medications and lining up for vaccine injections. That's the pathway to good health, didn't you know?

Take the Health Ranger's advice

Want some real advice on all this? Here's my take:

• Avoid cheap, synthetic multivitamins and supplements. Don't swallow pills made by pharma companies. Avoid cheap minerals like calcium carbonate or magnesium oxide.

• EAT REAL FOOD. Whole food. Organic, non-GMO food. Your No. 1 best source of nutrition should always be food. Grow your own sprouts or garden and eat those foods. Buy foods from CSAs or local farmers' markets. Eating real food should always be your foundation for nutritional health.

• If you want to take supplements, invest in high-end, quality supplements based on food concentrates or food extracts. Nutrients derived from real food tend to be far healthier than synthetic nutrients.

• Consume superfoods daily for full-spectrum high-density nutrition. Each morning, I drink a blend of superfood powders with avocado, coconut water and hemp protein.

• Don't believe anything the mainstream media reports about nutrition. Mainstream media reporters are, by and large, outrageously ignorant about nutrition, isolated nutrients, whole foods, the games Big Pharma plays, the corruption of the science journals and so on. If you want to listen to someone who really knows nutrition, you need to find people who specialize in it (and who haven't sold out to the failed medical institutions of modern society).

Source: naturalnews.com