By: Ewan Robertson, 10/20/2013

How should the healthcare needs of a society be met? Conspicuously absent from international media coverage and under fire from conservative critics at home, Venezuela is developing a public healthcare system distinct from both U.S. market-driven and European welfare-state models. Perhaps nothing makes this system more unique than the kind of doctors being trained to run it.

The first remarkable thing to note about Venezuela’s comprehensive community medicine program is how little is known about it outside of Venezuela. The attempt to train tens of thousands of aspiring doctors in Cuban-style preventative community medicine, the majority of these new physicians from lower-income backgrounds, has merited next to no attention from the international mass media. Compared to issues of crime, inflation and sporadic shortages in the economy, for these outlets the effort to create an “army of white jackets” to make the vision of a free, universal healthcare service with clinics in every neighbourhood a reality is seemingly not of importance for understanding Venezuela today.

Alternet, By: Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers, 10/18/2013

This week may be seen as a turning point in the fight back against NSA spying by creating new systems to overcome the surveillance state. There have been protests against the NSA’s spying program but they focus only on legislative solutions. While legislation is needed, many of the solutions lie within our own power and often merely require the government to get out of the way.  Technological solutions to government surveillance may be more important than legislation.

President Obama’s independent commission is anything but independent; it is filled with members of the surveillance state and organized under the auspices of the NSA.  We are not going to get a “Church Committee” in the current Congress.  The leadership of both parties and President Obama are too tied to the surveillance state – or, perhaps too afraid of it – to challenge it. The director of National Intelligence, James Clapper was not even reprimanded or forced to resign when he committed perjury before Congress about surveillance on Americans – something for which he should be criminally prosecuted. Protests against the surveillance state continue to grow. There is a mass protest planned for October 26th in Washington, DC against NSA surveillance

Rt.com - 10/19/13

Activists from 26 countries are taking to the streets on Saturday to protest fracking technologies that extract hydrocarbons by pumping pressurized chemicals underground. They say fracking contaminates groundwater and hastens climate change.

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NYtimes, By: James Risen, 10/17/2013

WASHINGTON — Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, said in an extensive interview this month that he did not take any secret N.S.A. documents with him to Russia when he fled there in June, assuring that Russian intelligence officials could not get access to them. Mr. Snowden said he gave all of the classified documents he had obtained to journalists he met in Hong Kong, before flying to Moscow, and did not keep any copies for himself. He did not take the files to Russia “because it wouldn’t serve the public interest,” he said.

For more on this story visit www.nytimes.com

GFP Note: DUH! Finally, scientists! They are Fifth Dimensional Beings and there have been sightings of them in Mt.Shasta and Appalachian Mountains too.

Oxford University’s Bryan Sykes is already well-known for his scientific research on human ancestry. But now professor Sykes says there is real evidence that the legendary “Yeti” – the Russian “Bigfoot” – is actually real.

After a yearlong investigation, the British geneticist claims to have matched the DNA collected from hairs purportedly from  Himalayan Yetis. These mythic creatures, also known as the “Abominable Snowmen,” is in the opinion of Sykes a breed of Arctic bear that lived tens of thousands of years ago that is some sort of hybrid of polar bears and brown bears. Interestingly, the term “Yeti” itself comes from the Tibetan compound word Ya-che-tre meaning “rocky dreaded bear”.

“All my colleagues think I’m taking a risk in doing this, but I’m curious, and I am in a position to actually do something to answer the questions,” Sykes said.

One sample that Sykes uses was a cluster of hairs claimed to be from a mummified Yeti in the northern Indian region of Ladakh. The sample was taken by a French mountaineer who claims to have been shown the body some 40 years ago. Another sample is from a hair found 800 miles to the east, in Bhutan.