NEWS SNIPPETS 31ST MAY 2012

RT News - Bilderberg 2012: Secretive summit kicks-off in Virginia 

Daily Mail - 'Machine gun nests and unprecedented security' for secretive Bilderberg meeting of captains of industry and government leaders

The Bilderberg Group, a collection of top captains of industry and western government leaders, is gathering for its annual meeting this weekend under unprecedented security. 
Reports from the Mariott Westfields Hotel in Chantilly, Virginia, indicate security officials have set up machine gun nests and are deploying satellite surveillance and other sophisticated monitoring equipment to keep guests safe. 
Conspiracy theorists say the closed-door, invitation-only gatherings of 150 of the most powerful people in North America and Western Europe are ground zero for the New World Order, the place where the influential collude to steer the course of human history. 
This year, 1,000 people are signed for an 'Occupy Bilderberg' protest, which is spurring the extra-tight security, according to right-wing journalist and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
As Guardian columnist Charlie Skelton puts it, Bilderberg isn't about the 1 percent -- it's the 0.001 percent. 
Among the attendees of recent meetings are: Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, World Bank president Robert Zoellick, European Commission head José Manuel Barroso, Queen Sofia of Spain and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands. 
The steering committee members include Marcus Agius, the chairman of Barclays; Mario Monte, the Italian Prime Minister; Craig Mundie, the Chief Research Officer for Microsoft; Peter Thiel, one of the venture capitalists behind Facebook; Kenneth Clarke, the British Secretary of Justice; and Jorma Ollila, the chairman of Royal Dutch Shell
David Rockefeller is a key adviser. 
Conspiracy theorists are floating the notion that members will 'anoint' Florida Sen Marco Rubio to become vice president on Mitt Romney's Republican ticket this year.  
Bilderberg members say their meetings are simply gatherings of important people who come together to discuss the world's problems. 
The Greek debt crisis and instability in the Eurozone are top considerations this year. 
However, Mr Jones, a radio talk show host who runs a popular news website, reports that pressure from the occupy movement has organizers stepping up security. 
Guests who had made reservations at the posh hotel in suburban Washington, DC, are being refunded and refused access. 
One guest who was being kicked out of the hotel to make room for the Bilderberg conference claimed she saw machine gun nests being set up to guard against the protestors, Mr Jones claims. 
He also claims that security officials are using sophisticated surveillance technology to tap the phones of protestors. Skelton, of the Guardian, says he witnessed hotel security staffers using iPhones to record anyone they saw in the hotel in the run-up to the conference.
See Article

The Rock River Times - Protesters to confront Bilderberg Group meeting in Virginia
CHANTILLY, Va. — A secret meeting of approximately 100-150 elite politicians, financiers and industrialists known as the Bilderberg Group is taking place in Chantilly, Va., May 31-June 3 at the Marriot Washington Dulles Hotel. 
The group has met at luxury resorts around the world annually since 1954, taking its name after the Bilderberg Hotel in Oosterbeek, Holland, where they first met to “hatch their plan for world domination,” according to their detractors. 
Popular conspiracy author and activist Mark Dice will be leading a protest in front of the hotel for four straight days, along with hundreds of others who will be joining him to raise awareness of this little-known meeting. Dice is calling the protest “Bilderbergfest.”
For decades, the American mainstream media have largely ignored the conference, but in recent years, the blackout is lifting, largely because of pressure from Dice and his supporters “flooding newsrooms with tips” about the organization, urging news outlets to cover it. 
The Bilderberg Group, once written off as the figment of the imagination of conspiracy theorists, is a real meeting, although little media attention has been given to the organization. Bilderbergers claim their meeting is nothing more than a private discussion group, while others see them as secretly dividing up the world and coordinating global policy, something that should be done by Congress out in the open for public scrutiny. 
“Each year when the G20 and G8 forums take place, it’s top news around the world,” Dice said. “But every single year, the Bilderberg Group meets, and there is barely a mention. Obviously, there is an agreement between the Bilderberg Group and the mainstream media in America to maintain a near-complete blackout.”
Last year, the Drudge Report posted several links to European newspapers covering the event when it took place in Saint Moritz, Switzerland, but coverage on the mainstream television networks, newspapers and newsmagazines in the United States has been astonishingly nonexistent. 
“When you look at the independent journalists and bloggers who have photographed and videotaped the attendees at the Bilderberg Group, it’s quite shocking that the major news networks have never even touched the issue,” Dice said.
“How could this not be news?” Dice continued. “How is it that, year after year, 120 of the world’s most powerful men meet in secret for three days, and yet there isn’t a word of it mentioned in the American media?”
Dice recently obtained some of the group’s tax records, which include lists of donors who help fund the meetings and pay for the hotel and security. They operate under the business entity “American Friends of Bilderberg” as a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt foundation. 
Documents show that in 2008, they received $645,000 in contributions, with money coming from Goldman Sachs, The Washington Post, Microsoft, Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller and others. Dice has published the records from 2007 to 2010 on his website, www.markdice.com.
Dice is a conservative libertarian and the author of several books about conspiracies and secret societies, including The Illuminati: Facts and Fiction, which analyzes the various conspiracy theories surrounding elite secret societies and private organizations such as the Bilderberg Group, the Federal Reserve and Bohemian Grove. He has been featured in various conspiracy television shows, documentary films and is a frequent guest on conspiracy talk radio shows.  See Article

Global Research ca - Germany’s six-point plan for sweatshop Europe - by Peter Schwarz
It is now common practice to smash up wages and workers’ rights by initiating bankruptcy proceedings. The best known case is the American auto giant General Motors, which laid off 30,000 workers, slashed wages in half for new-hires, and cut retiree benefits. If the German government gets its way, this procedure will be applied to entire countries.
According to a report in the news magazine Der Spiegel, the chancellery in Berlin has drawn up a six-point plan for far-reaching “structural reforms” in Greece and other highly indebted European Union countries. The plan includes the sale of state enterprises, the gutting of employment protection rights, the promotion of a low-wage labor sector, the removal of constraints on businesses, and the establishment of special economic zones and privatization agencies modeled on the German Treuhand.
German government spokesman Steffen Seibert has not confirmed the plan, but neither has he denied it. According to Der Spiegel, it will form the basis for negotiations at the European Union’s so-called “growth summit” in late June. Der Spiegel writes that Chancellor Angela Merkel will seize on the call for a growth policy by newly elected French President Francois Hollande, “applying the principle of judo fighters: employing the momentum of the opponent to mount one’s own attack.”
If Merkel gets her way, “growth” will be achieved entirely through the intensified exploitation of workers and not through any plan for economic revival or increased social expenditures. She assumes Hollande will be open to these proposals since the EU summit will take place after the June 17 French parliamentary elections and the new French president will no longer be constrained by voters’ opinions or his own campaign promises.
The German government is striving to impose levels of exploitation similar to those currently existing only in Eastern Europe and Asian cheap-labor havens such as China and Vietnam. Special economic zones have played a crucial role in the emergence of China as the world’s biggest sweatshop. These zones free companies from paying taxes or adhering to environmental regulations and labor standards, reducing workers to the status of impoverished industrial slaves.
The model for the privatization agencies recommended by the experts in the chancellor’s office is the Treuhand, which obliterated the industrial landscape of East Germany following the collapse of the Stalinist regime in 1989. Run by hand-picked confidants of big business and the banks and not answerable to any democratic bodies, the Treuhand decided the fate of millions. It sold off 8,500 companies with 45,000 facilities at fire-sale prices or simply shut them down. Only a small fraction of the original 4 million industrial jobs remained.
The six-point plan drawn up by the chancellery is incompatible with national sovereignty or democracy. The newspaper Tagesspiegel interviewed several German economic experts who were brutally frank in expressing their views on the future prospects for Greece.
See Article

Daily Express - NOW ONLY THE GERMANS STILL LIKE THE EU 
SUPPORT for the European Union has slumped across the continent after the eurozone crisis, an international poll revealed yesterday.
A survey by US public attitude experts showed growing opposition in Britain, France, Spain, Italy, the Czech Republic, Poland and Greece to wider European integration and disillusionment with Brussels.
It found that 61 per cent of Britons and Italians, 63 per cent of the French and 70 per cent of Greeks were opposed to further integration.
Across the EU, support for Brussels had fallen in every country apart from Germany.
Researchers from the Pew Research Centre in Washington found that 54 per cent of Spaniards were doubtful about their country’s membership of the EU. The only country where enthusiasm for the EU was growing was Germany, which many critics claim is profiting from the debt crisis.
Sixty-five per cent of Germans were keen on membership of the EU, up two per cent since 2009.
But despite the negative attitudes towards Brussels, there was still little enthusiasm for scrapping the euro in eurozone countries.
Only 23 per cent of Greeks wanted a return to the drachma.
In the UK, 73 per cent of voters said being outside the euro was a good thing for the country.
Bruce Stokes, director of Pew’s global economic attitudes project, said: “The irony here is that people who have the euro still want to keep it.” 
The Pew Centre interviewed around 1,000 people in eight EU countries for the poll. See Article

Daily Express - EX-MEDIA TYCOON EDDIE SHAH FACES CHILD RAPE CHARGE 
FORMER media tycoon Eddie Shah was last night charged with repeatedly raping a child.
He is suspected of being part of a sex abuse ring dating back to the early 1990s. 
Shah, from Chippenham, Wilts, was arrested along with a 52-year-old woman from Kent, who cannot be named, and Anthony Pallant, from West Malling in Kent.
Pallant 52, and Shah, 68, are accused of raping the girl over a period of two years with the woman aiding and abetting Shah. 
At the time of the alleged assaults, between 1993 and 1995, the victim was aged between 12 and 15 years old.
The three were released on bail to appear at Westminster Magistrates’ Court next Thursday.
Shah, who founded the Today newspaper in 1986 and later became a property developer, also faces two counts of gross indecency on a girl under 14 involving the same youngster. See Article

Daily Express - EU BEING RIPPED APART AS NATIONS TURN ON BRUSSELS, SAYS DAMNING REPORT
THE eurozone crisis is ripping Europe apart by exposing "sharp differences" in attitudes on the continent, says a damning report.
The current debt storm has "triggered a full-blown crisis of public confidence" as Europeans develop a more negative view of the EU.
The report states that "doubts about European integration have led many Europeans to second guess their own country’s EU membership."
The euro also came under fire as, in France and Italy, under a third believe that the single currency has had a positive impact on their economy.
In Germany, less than half were pleased with the creation of the eurozone.
But, surprisingly, a majority in all those eurozone nations asked want to keep the euro rather than return to their previous currencies.
The report revealed that in most areas, Germany stands alone from the rest of Europe in its support for the EU. See Article