"I knew they were one big gang. I saw no difference between our officers and the gangsters...the criminal organizations we had to fight against. The difference is that the gangsters had no official power, but the officers did. So I knew I was in a gang. I soon realized that. But even in the West you can’t just leave a gang." –Alexander Litvinenko

It started as a possible case of food poisoning but within weeks turned into a grim spectacle of enormous political proportions: Aleksander Litvinenko, former member of the Russian secret service, died in his place of residence London last November, after having been poisoned with a radioactive substance.

The search for the possible perpetrators lead to a political difficult situation that reminded us of the dark days of the Cold War.

Three years ago Aleksander Litvinenko told his life story to documentary maker Jos De Putter. It is a wild tale full of conspiracies, assassination attempts and imputations. Litvinenko talks about his time with the secret service, about his experience in Chechnya, and in particular about the series of bomb attacks on Russian territory that led to the seizure of power by Vladimir Putin. According to Litvinenko those attacks were the work of the secret service.

After Litvinenko’s funeral in December 2006, Backlight spoke to Litvinenko’s widow. Marina Litvinenko is writing a book about her husband. The book will be published in May 2007 and the film rights have already been sold to Columbia Pictures. In this unique interview, she speaks about how they first met, how they fled to England and she speaks about Aleksander´s death agony.

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http://www.vpro.nl

"Trapped now inside the school were over 1200 people, mostly women and children, some no more than babies. Their only hope of survival was that somehow someone would strike a bargain between the ruthless men who would seize them and an uncompromising Russian state."

The school siege at Beslan was the bloodiest act of terrorism ever to take place on Russian soil. Yet beyond this horrible truth remain many unanswered questions. There is no agreement on who the terrorists were. How many they numbered? Where they came from? How they got to Beslan? What they wanted? Whether they were all killed or captured? And just how the siege which began on September 1 2004, ended so catastrophically?

This Dispatches special uses testimony from eyewitnesses, survivors and security services. This is combined with video and audio archive footage presents the fullest account of what happened at Beslan.

The film examines the background to the events of Beslan. It also looks at the Russian state’s reaction to the atrocity and the motivation of the hostage-takers. Beslan School Siege also documents how a small town is coming to terms with the loss of its children. (Excerpt from main website)

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http://www.channel4.com

"The military conflict in Chechnya has now been dragging on for more than ten years. During this war Moscow has tried every means possible to prevent it being reported in the press. And so all contacts with members of Chechen resistance are considered illegal. According to the latest report to the human rights organization Human Rights Watch, in 2004 1,700 disappeared in the republic without trace, and illegal killings became commonplace."

Reporters Mariusz Pilis and Marcin Mamon travel to neighbouring Chechnya, one of the most dangerous places on earth, to report on what life is like after more than a decade of Chechen terrorism and Russian repression. Filmed over the course of nine months, the film reveals that what started as a separatist movement in 1994 has now become synonymous with terrorism. (Excerpt from main website)

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http://www.channel4.com

"These women have been torn from their lives, taken from their families and sold into slavery. They are victims of a multi-billion-dollar international business that traffics hundreds of thousands of women a year."

"Sex Slaves" is a gripping documentary expose inside the global sex trade in women from the former Soviet Bloc. The film takes viewers into the shadowy, multi-billion dollar world of sex trafficking. Part cinema verité, part investigation, Sex Slaves puts a human face on this most inhuman of contemporary issues. From the villages of Moldova and Ukraine, to underground brothels and discotheques in Turkey where many women are trafficked and forced into prostitution, we witness first-hand the brutal world of white sex slavery. (Excerpt from video.google.com)

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http://www.pbs.org

"Nobody was prepared for such a crisis. For the next seven months, 500,000 men will wage hand-to-hand combat with an invisible enemy – a ruthless battle that has gone unsung, which claimed thousands of unnamed and now almost forgotten heroes. Yet, it is thanks to these men that the worst was avoided; a second explosion, ten times more powerful than Hiroshima which would have wiped out more than half of Europe. This was kept secret for twenty years by the Soviets and the West alike.”

Thursday 26th April 1986 became a momentous date in modern history, when one of the reactors at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in northern Ukraine, exploded. It was the most significant reactor failure in the history of nuclear power, a Maximum Credible Accident (MCA).

The plant, just 20 km away from the town centre, was made up of four reactor units each generating an output of 1,000 megawatts. The reactor in question exploded due to operational errors and inadequate safety measures and the meltdown was directly linked to routine testing on the reactor unit’s turbine generators. The test required reactor activity and the thermal reactor output to be run down to a lower level. During the procedure, however, the reactor plummeted to an unexpectedly low and unstable level of activity. At this point, it should have been shut down; as the operators chose to continue with the test, the events subsequently proved to be catastrophic.

More than 200 people died or were seriously injured by radiation exposure immediately after the explosion. 161,000 people had to be evacuated from a 30 kilometre radius of the reactor and 25,000 square km of land were contaminated. As time went on millions of people suffered radiation related health problems such as leukaemia and thyroid cancer and around 4,000 people have died as a result of the long-term effects of the accident. (Excerpt from main website)

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http://www.discoverychannel.com.au

"All of this brings us to the perhaps most interesting issue about intellectual property and about copyright. And that is, who really owns what? And what is the purpose of copyright?"

Good Copy Bad Copy documents the conflict between current copyright law and recent technological advances that enable the Sampling of music, as well as the distribution of copyrighted material via peer-to-peer file sharing searchengines such as The Pirate Bay. MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) CEO Dan Glickman is interviewed in connection with a raid by the Swedish police against The Pirate Bay in May 2006. Glickman concedes that piracy will never be stopped, but states that they will try to make it as difficult and tedious as possible. Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij from The Pirate Bay are also interviewed, with Neij stating that The Pirate Bay is illegal according to US law, but not Swedish law.

The interviews document attitudes towards art, culture and copyright in a number of countries, including the US, Sweden, Russia, Nigeria, and Brazil.

The situation in Nigeria and Brazil is documented in terms of innovative business models that have developed in response to new technological possibilities and changing markets. (Excerpt from Wikipedia)

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http://www.goodcopybadcopy.net

"Self-observation brings man to the realization of the necessity of self-change. And in observing himself a man notices that self-observation itself brings about certain changes in his inner processes. He begins to understand that self-observation is an instrument of self-change, a means of awakening." –Gurdjieff

In 1920, an unknown man appeared in Europe, having lived through some extraordinary experiences in the East; His name was Ivanovitch Gurdjieff. This is the story of his early years. The film was made on location in the forbidding, rarely photographed mountains and deserts of the Afghanistan, and has been widely acclaimed for its unique visual beauty. (Excerpt from main website)

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http://www.brookdvd.com

"It began with a weapon created by scientists that threatened to destroy the world. But then a group of men who were convinced they control the new danger began to gain influence in America. They would manipulate terror. To do so, they would use the methods of science."

Pandora's Box was a six part 1992 BBC documentary television series written and produced by Adam Curtis, which examines the consequences of political and technocratic rationalism. Curtis' later The Century of the Self had a similar theme. The title sequence made extensive use of clips from the short film Design for Dreaming, as well as other similar archive footage.

The Engineer's Plot

The revolutionaries who toppled the Tsar in 1917 thought science held the key to their new world. In fact, it ended up creating a bewildering world for millions of Soviet people. In this light-hearted investigation, one industrial planner tells how she decided the people wanted platform shoes, only to discover that they had gone out of fashion by the time that the factory to manufacture them had been built.

To The Brink of Eternity

Focusing on the men of the Cold War on whom Dr Strangelove was based. These were people who believed that the world could be controlled by the scientific manipulation of fear - mathematical geniuses employed by the American Rand Corporation. In the end, their visions were the stuff of science fiction fantasy.

The League of Gentlemen

Thirty years ago, a group of economists managed to convince British politicians that they had foolproof technical means to make Britain great again. Pandora's Box tells the saga of how their experiments have led the country deeper into economic decline, and asks - is their game finally up?

Goodbye Mrs Ant

A modern fable about science and society, focusing on our attitude to nature. Should we let scientists be the prime movers of social or political change when, for instance, DDT made post-war heroes of American scientists only to be put on trial by other scientists in 1968? What kind of in-fighting goes on between rival camps before one scientific truth emerges, and when it does emerge, just how true is it?

Black Power

A look at how former Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah set Africa ablaze with his vision of a new industrial and scientific age. At the heart of his dream was to be the huge Volta dam, generating enough power to transform West Africa into an advanced utopia. But as his grand experiment took shape, it brought with it dangerous forces Nkrumah couldn't control, and he slowly watched his metropolis of science sink into corruption and debt.

A is For Atom

An insight into the history of nuclear power. In the 1950s scientists and politicians thought they could create a different world with a limitless source of nuclear energy. But things began to go wrong. Scientists in America and the Soviet Union were duped into building dozens of potentially dangerous plants. Then came the disasters of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl which changed views on the safety of this new technology.

This episode was named after a 1953 General Electric propaganda film explaining nuclear power and features artfully chosen footage from this film. (Excerpt from Wikipedia)

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"But the truth is, it's a system in crisis, and the reason it's a system in crisis is it's a linear system and we live on a finite planet, and you cannot run a linear system on a finite planet indefinitely."

From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It'll teach you something, it'll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever. (Excerpt from main website)

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http://www.storyofstuff.com

"It's a sobering fact that the hidden power structure of international finance has exerted tremendous influence over public opinion in this country through its' virtual control of higher education and major segments of mass communication." –G. Edward Griffin

Conspiracy. One of the darkest words in the language of man. Yet there is hardly a single page of history that does not partially reveal the deadly eye of conspiracy at work. It was a conspiracy that directed Brutus against Caesar in the Roman Senate on the Ides of March. It was a conspiracy that plotted the betrayal of West Point by Benedict Arnold during the American Revolution. It was a conspiracy that led John Wilkes Booth to the assassination of President Lincoln on Good Friday, 1865.

The past record of man is burdened with accounts of assassinations, secret combines, palace plots, and betrayals in war. The tenet of conspiracy has been a dominant force in all history. But in spite of this clear record, an amazing number of people have begun to scoff at the possibility of conspiracy at work today. They dismiss such an idea merely as "a conspiratorial view of history."

The purpose of this presentation is to show that the conspiratorial view of history -particularly of recent history- is the correct view; that there is a secret and powerful combine at work today: that it constitutes the unseen government of the United States; and that it properly can be identified as The Capitalist Conspiracy. (Exceprt from film)

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http://www.realityzone.com

"In today’s value, the Nazis at the heart of the NASA Space Program were given more than 600 billion dollars. All NASA had to do was announce a new space project and the money was handed over so that the American government could save face in the Cold War."

SECRET SPACE takes you deep inside the dark occult world of NAZI Germany, where Jews and ex-French Resistance fighters were used as slave labour to develop rocket-based weapons such as the V2 and the V1 'Doodlebug' - the forerunner of today's 'Cruise' missile.

We explain how ex-SS Nazis were brought to America by the CIA under 'Project Paperclip' and given senior posts at NASA. We also see how NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasedena was set-up by Jack Parsons - a rocket engineer who was a disciple of Aleister Crowley. From the late 1940s onwards, an unholy alliance of O.T.O devotees, NAZIs and senior 33rd degree Freemasons dupe the American taxpayer of billions of dollars and fake several moon missions in order to further their work on secret 'black budget' operations - a series of secret space programmes designing space vehicles and weapons systems to thwart attacks by alien craft... For the first time on film we see the 'Baby Shuttle' - a small space shuttle which fits inside the payload of the existing space shuttle and is then released into outer space for covert operations.

...It sounds incredible - but SECRET SPACE contains a wealth of documents, photos and footage which proves that all this and more has come to pass.

SECRET SPACE exposes the fact that nearly all the first American astronauts into space were high ranking 32 and 33rd degree Freemasons. And that the brother of one of the Apollo Mission managers was appointed Sovereign Grand Commander of all Freemasons in America as a 'thankyou' for engineering the fake Apollo moonshots of 1969. (Excerpt from main website)

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http://www.secretspacedvd.com

"It’s assumed there are no truths; that everyone has their own version of truth; and everyone is overriding other people’s version of truth. You’re doing away with the credibility of expertise; you’re doing away with the notion of their being knowledge which can be at least be deemed absolute."

Google or Wikipedia? Those of us who search online -- and who doesn't? -- are getting referred more and more to Wikipedia. For the past two years, this free online "encyclopedia of the people" has been topping the lists of the world's most popular websites. But do we really know what we're using? Backlight plunges into the story behind Wikipedia and explores the wonderful world of Web 2.0. Is it a revolution, or pure hype?

Director IJsbrand van Veelen goes looking for the truth behind Wikipedia. Only five people are employed by the company, and all its activities are financed by donations and subsidies. The online encyclopedia that everyone can contribute to and revise is now even bigger than the illustrious Encyclopedia Britannica. Does this spell the end for traditional institutions of knowledge such as Britannica? And should we applaud this development as progress or mourn it as a loss? How reliable is Wikipedia? Do "the people" really hold the lease on wisdom? And since when do we believe that information should be free for all? In this film, "Wikipedians," the folks who spend their days writing and editing articles, explain how the online encyclopedia works. In addition, the parties involved discuss Wikipedia's ethics and quality of content. It quickly becomes clear that there are camps of both believers and critics. (Excerpt from main website)

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"Although geographically separate, the city-states of London, the Vatican, and the District of Colombia are one interlocking empire called "Empire of ‘The City.’” The flag of Washington’s District of Colombia has three red stars, one for each city-state in the three city empire. This Corporate Empire of three city-states controls the world economically through London’s inner-city, militarily through the District of Colombia, and spiritually through the Vatican.”

From the mystery religions of ancient Egypt to the Zionist role in 9/11, "Ring Of Power" unrevises 4000 years of revisionist human history with never - before - seen revelations. "Ring Of Power" puzzles together the pieces of a giant puzzle into one BIG PICTURE documentary series.  ABOUT THE PRODUCER: The Producer is an experienced, award winning documentary filmmaker who, as a child, learned that her father was a member of the secretive cult of Freemasonry. She recalls many arguments between her parents over her father's secret meetings and the exclusion of women from the brotherhood. The Masonic ring that her father wore had been passed down from father to son over the generations. When she asked her father about the meaning of the letter "G" and the compass and square on his ring, she got no response. As an adult, she decided to investigate. That investigation grew into four years of intensive research into the identity and history of the diabolical globalists who she calls the "Ring Of Power". Their goal is one World Empire and one world ruler.  (Excerpt from video.google.com)

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http://www.preferrednetwork.com