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Hiroshima Day: : Information Clearing House - ICH : "August 06, 2009 'Truthdig' -- It was a hot August day in Detroit. I was standing on a street corner downtown, looking at the front page of The Detroit News in a news rack. I remember a streetcar rattling by on the tracks as I read the headline: A single American bomb had destroyed a Japanese city. My first thought was that I knew exactly what that bomb was. It was the U-235 bomb we had discussed in school and written papers about, the previous fall. I thought: 'We got it first. And we used it. On a city.' I had a sense of dread, a feeling that something very ominous for humanity had just happened. A feeling, new to me as an American, at 14, that my country might have made a terrible mistake. I was glad when the war ended nine days later, but it didn't make me think that my first reaction on Aug. 6 was wrong."

Marijuana is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink? | DrugReporter | AlterNet : "A new book explains how we're steering people away from cannabis and toward the use of a very harmful and deadly substance: alcohol."

RebelReports August 5 on Countdown with Keith Olberman discussing more details from the sworn statements of former Blackwater employees about the alleged actions of company founder Erik Prince.

Hiroshima, 64 years ago - The Big Picture - Boston.com : "Tomorrow, August 6th, marks 64 years since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan by the United States at the end of World War II. Targeted for military reasons and for its terrain (flat for easier assessment of the aftermath), Hiroshima was home to approximately 250,000 people at the time of the bombing. The U.S. B-29 Superfortress bomber 'Enola Gay' took off from Tinian Island very early on the morning of August 6th, carrying a single 4,000 kg (8,900 lb) uranium bomb codenamed 'Little Boy'. At 8:15 am, Little Boy was dropped from 9,400 m (31,000 ft) above the city, freefalling for 57 seconds while a complicated series of fuse triggers looked for a target height of 600 m (2,000 ft) above the ground. At the moment of detonation, a small explosive initiated a super-critical mass in 64 kg (141 lbs) of uranium. Of that 64 kg, only .7 kg (1.5 lbs) underwent fission, and of that mass, only 600 milligrams was conv...

Clive Hamilton: Bush, God, Iraq and Gog : "The revelation this month in GQ magazine that Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary embellished top-secret wartime memos with quotations from the Bible prompts a question. Why did he believe he could influence President Bush by that means? The answer may lie in an alarming story about George Bush’s Christian millenarian beliefs that has yet to come to light. In 2003 while lobbying leaders to put together the Coalition of the Willing, President Bush spoke to France’s President Jacques Chirac. Bush wove a story about how the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Middle East and how they must be defeated. In Genesis and Ezekiel Gog and Magog are forces of the Apocalypse who are prophesied to come out of the north and destroy Israel unless stopped. The Book of Revelation took up the Old Testament prophesy: “And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nation...

Blackwater Founder Implicated in Murder : Information Clearing House - ICH : "August 05 2009 'The Nation' -- A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company's owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince 'views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe,' and that Prince's companies 'encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life.' In their testimony, both men also allege that Blackwater was smuggling weapons into Iraq. One of the men alleges that Prince turned a profit by transporting 'illegal' or 'unlawful' weapons ...

Warnings of Violence Ignored in Nigeria, Clerics Say : "MAIDUGURI, Nigeria, Aug. 2 -- Nigerian authorities ignored dozens of warnings about a violent Islamist sect until it attacked police stations and government buildings last week in a bloodbath that killed more than 700 people, Muslim clerics and an army official said. More than 50 Muslim leaders repeatedly called Nigeria's police, local authorities and state security to urge them to take action against Boko Haram sect militants but their pleas were ignored, Imam Ibrahim Ahmed Abdullahi said. He spoke Saturday to the Associated Press along with several other Muslim scholars in the battle-ravaged city of Maiduguri. 'A lot of imams tried to draw the attention of the government,' Abdullahi said, drawing nods from other scholars sitting with him in a Maiduguri slum. 'We used to call the government and security agents to say that these people must be stopped from what they are doing because it must bring a lot of tro...