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Editorial: Iran the Target of Disinformation Campaign
by Jim Lobe
May 23, 2006
A story authored by a prominent U.S. neoconservative regarding new legislation in Iran allegedly requiring Jews and other religious minorities to wear distinctive color badges circulated around the world this weekend before it was exposed as false.
The article by a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal, Iranian-American Amir Taheri, was initially published in Friday's edition of Canada's National Post, which ran alongside the story a 1935 photograph of a Jewish businessman in Berlin with a yellow, six-pointed star sewn on his overcoat, as required by Nazi legislation at the time. The Post subsequently issued a retraction.
Taheri's story, however, was reprinted by the New York Post, which is owned by media baron Rupert Murdoch, and picked up by the Jerusalem Post, which also featured a photo of a yellow star from the Nazi era over a photo of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Another neoconservative publication, the New York Sun, also noted the story Monday, claiming that the specific report that special badges were required by the legislation had been "incorrect." At the same time, however, the Sun quoted two Iranian-American foes of the Islamic Republic as suggesting that dress requirements for religious minorities were still being considered by Iran's ruling circles. It offered no evidence to support that assertion.
The story, which was also noted in the Australian press, comes at a moment of rising tensions between Iran and both Israel and the United States over Tehran's nuclear program, which, according to the latter two, is designed to produce nuclear weapons. Both the U.S. and Israel have suggested that they may take military action against nuclear-related targets in Iran unless ongoing diplomatic efforts to freeze Tehran's program bears fruit.
Juan Cole, president of the U.S. Middle East Studies Association (MESA), described the Taheri article and its appearance first in Canada's Post as "typical of black psychological operations campaigns," particularly in its origin in an "out of the way newspaper that is then picked up by the mainstream press" - in this case, the Jerusalem Post and the New York Post. A former U.S. intelligence official described the article's relatively obscure provenance as a "real sign of [a] disinformation operation."
Taheri's original article, entitled "A Color Code for Iran's 'Infidels,'" dealt primarily with new legislation that it said was designed to ensure that Iranians wear "standard Islamic garments" that removed ethnic and class distinctions and that eliminated "the influence of the infidel" - presumably meaning the West - "on the way Iranians, especially, the young dress."
But it also noted in passing that it would "envisage" separate dress codes for religious minorities - Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians - who will be required to adopt distinct color schemes to make them identifiable in public "so that [Muslims] can avoid shaking hands with them by mistake, and thus [become] najis [unclean]."
In particular, he explained, religious minorities will "have to wear special insignia, known as zonnar, to indicate their non-Islamic faiths. Jews will be marked out with a yellow strip of cloth sewn in front of their clothes, while Christians will be assigned the color red. Zoroastrians end up with Persian blue as the color of their zonnar," he wrote.
While Taheri did not evoke the Nazi precedent in his column, the National Post asked its readers at the end of the piece, "Is Iran turning into the new Nazi Germany? Share your opinion online at nationalpost.com."
That was compounded by the Post's publication of a front-page article by Chris Wattie, which quoted unidentified "human rights groups" as "raising alarms over a new law passed by the Iranian parliament that would require the country's Jews and Christians to wear colored badges to identify them and other religious minorities as non-Muslims."
"This is reminiscent of the Holocaust," Wattie quoted Rabbi Marvin Heir, the dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, as telling him. "Iran is moving closer and closer to the ideology of the Nazis."
The story also quoted one Iranian exile living in Toronto as confirming the story, as well as Canadian Jewish leaders and Prime Minister Stephen Harper as denouncing the legislation and suggesting that it was consistent with other recent moves made by Tehran.
Similarly, U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack, who, however, denied any specific knowledge about the alleged measure, called it "despicable" and reminiscent of "Germany under Hitler."
In fact, however, the legislation contained "absolutely no mention of religious minorities," according to Hadi Ghaemi, the chief Iran researcher for Human Rights Watch (HRW), who said it included "only generalities with regard to promoting a national dress code and fashion industry that should be subsidized and supported by the government."
The article - and especially its attribution to "human rights groups" - was particularly unfortunate, he told IPS, because "it plays into the hands of the Iranian government that wants to discredit human rights issues that are raised at the international level." The actual legislation was indeed "a troubling development," but not for the reasons cited by the Post, he added, because "its main target is most probably Iranian women."
Other denunciations were quick to follow. One Jewish representative in the Iranian parliament, Maurice Motamed, insisted that color requirements for ethnic minorities had "never been proposed or discussed in parliament," let alone approved. "Such news," he told the Associated Press, "is an insult to religious minorities here."
"This report is a complete fabrication and is totally false," he told The Australian newspaper. "It is a lie...."
Two Israel-based Iran experts, Menashe Amir and Meir Javedanfar, also denounced the original reports about the legislation, suggesting in a follow-up article in the Jerusalem Post Monday that they were based on outdated speculation about the impact on non-Muslims of the adoption of Islamic dress standards.
Nonetheless, the Sun, without endorsing the specific contents of the National Post articles, refused to drop the story, quoting "a leading spokesman for Iranian Jews," the secretary-general of the Iranian American Jewish Federation in Los Angeles, Sam Kermanian, as thanking "the world for its outcry" over the original reports and praising Taheri as "someone with fantastic credibility."
Taheri is a member of Benador Associates, a public relations firm that lists a large number of leading neoconservatives, including American Enterprise Institute (AEI) associates Richard Perle, David Frum, Michael Ledeen, Michael Rubin, and Joshua Muravchik, among its clients. Major boosters of the war with Iraq, Benador clients, who also include former Central Intelligence Agency chief James Woolsey and former Israeli minister Natan Sharansky, have also called for the Bush administration to take a hard line against Iran.
The newspapers that so far have run the story are similarly identified with a hard line against Tehran. The National Post, which was bought by CanWest Global Communications from Conrad Black, a close associate of Perle's, is controlled by David and Leonard Asper, who have accused the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation of being anti-Israel, according to Marsha Cohen of Florida International University, who has closely followed the badges story.
Similarly, the Sun has consistently taken positions consistent with the right-wing Likud Party in Israel on Middle East issues, while Murdoch owns the strongly pro-Israel Weekly Standard and Fox News, in addition to the New York Post.
"I think the way these stories played - particularly the references to the Holocaust - was designed to arouse and play upon concerns and accusations that Ahmadinejad is another Hitler who needs to be dealt with accordingly," noted Cohen, who added that the Iranian president's questioning of the Holocaust and aggressive statements about Israel have made such stories more credible.
(Inter Press Service)
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Editorial: Iran Zonar: "Real Sign of a Disinformation Operation"
Kurt Nimmo
Another Day in the Empire
Tuesday May 23rd 2006
Juan Cole, president of the U.S. Middle East Studies Association and thorn in the side of neocons far and wide, has nailed it-the fake news story circulated last week accusing Iran of forcing Jews and other religious minorities to wear identifying badges, thus kindling imagery of Nazis and the Holocaust, was "typical of black psychological operations campaigns." A former U.S. intelligence official, cited by journalist Jim Lobe, "described the article's relatively obscure provenance as a 'real sign of [a] disinformation operation,'" in fact a fairly transparent and crude "disinformation operation," as I noted on the day the article appeared with disgusting fanfare in the corporate media. Naturally, the neocon press, most notably the New York Sun, refused to publish a retraction after it was demonstrated, without much effort, the story was gibberish (although it did mention the Iranian Embassy in Ottawa denied the report). As Lobe reminds us, the New York Sun "has consistently taken positions consistent with the right-wing Likud Party in Israel on Middle East issues."
Meanwhile, Amir Taheri, the Iranian neocon described as "a prominent Iranian journalist under the Shah" by the Financial Times, who initially floated the story in Canada's neocon friendly National Post, stands by his story. "Regarding the dress code story it seems that my column was used as the basis for a number of reports that somehow jumped the gun. As far as my article is concerned I stand by it," Taheri writes on the Benador Associates website. "I raised the issue not as a news story, because news of the new law was already several days old, but as an opinion column to alert the outside world to this most disturbing development."
In other words, it is Mr. Taheri's opinion that the Iranian mullahs will force "followers of Judaism, Christianity and Zoroastrianism" to wear "special markers, known as zonnars" (a zonar is a belt or girdle which the Christians and Jews of the Levant were obliged to wear to distinguish them from Muslims, known as Mohammedans in the day). Taheri's opinion, however, has absolutely no basis in reality, although the corporate media treated the baseless zonar accusation as a fait accompli (as they treated the neocon lies about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction likewise).
Benador Associates is a neocon clearing house of sorts, a public relations firm that handles the likes of Frank Gaffney, Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, James Woolsey, and other members of the criminal neocon rabble. In order to put Taheri and Benador into perspective, consider the latter promoted "Khidhir Hamza, an Iraqi nuclear scientist who fled to the United States in the early 1990s, where he wrote a book claiming that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear bomb. When pressed on the issue, he denied saying that Iraq had a bomb, despite the fact that he says exactly that in his book's opening pages" (see Catherine Auer, "A View from Inside," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March-April 2001). Hamza and the neocons should be walking the line in orange jumpsuits, convicted of facilitating war crimes of Nazi caliber, but instead they are allowed to walk free, and the neocons are emboldened to pedal more nonsense about Iran in a calculated lead-up to attacking that country.
Meanwhile, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, no stranger to war crimes (under Clinton, she oversaw the murder of over 500,000 Iraqi children), has "suggested that an official high in the Bush administration should give a speech in response to a letter that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sent" to Bush, a letter our appointed ruler apparently used as toilet paper. "The last thing we need is to invade another country," Albright told an audience of 800 people during a speech earlier this month. Of course, it is not that Ms. Albright is morally opposed to mass murder and wanton slaughter, but rather that the "nation's military forces are overstretched," as the Associated Press notes.
For the Straussian neocons, breaking the U.S. military is of little concern-in fact, it can be argued this is precisely what they intend to do, and thus pitch the nation into a larger conflagration, necessitating increased militarization of society and eventually conscription, otherwise known as bullet stopper slavery. As Paul Craig Roberts wrote in late 2004, the "neoconservative godfather Norman Podhoretz.... is worried that mounting U.S. casualties in Iraq and growing public doubt about the wisdom of the failed Iraq invasion will derail the scheme to conquer the Muslim Middle East and to deracinate Islam."
Podhoretz gives his assurances that "the obstacles to a benevolent transformation of the Middle East-whether military, political or religious-are not insuperable." He writes that "there can be no question that we possess the power and the means." The only question is whether we have "the stomach to do what will be required".... To make sure that we have the stomach, Podhoretz blames the 9-11 terrorist attack on American cowardice. He argues that four U.S. presidents (Carter, Reagan, Bush I and Clinton) spent 24 years convincing Muslims that America is a wimp.... We will suffer more devastating attacks, Podhoretz says, unless we find the stomach to fight WW IV.... To pursue the insane agenda of conquering and occupying the Middle East not only requires the stomach for inhumane acts, but also demands millions of Americans taking up arms. Here come the draft and a generation of casualties.
Of course, there is nothing "benevolent" about Podhoretz's "transformation," as it will arrive in the guise of cruise missiles, bunker-busters, depleted uranium, and possibly even the use of "mini-nukes" against Iran. In fact, the neocons hate Muslims of all stripes, as do their fascist Jabotinsky mentors in Israel, and wish only to sow destruction and misery within their societies. For as the late Israel Shahak warned in the foreword to Oded Yinon's Zionist Plan for the Middle East, the "idea that all the Arab states should be broken down, by Israel, into small units, occurs again and again in Israeli strategic thinking," and this cruel and criminal idea is at the center of the Straussian neocon ideology.
Amir Taheri's propaganda ploy against Iran-once again portraying Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the mullahs as latter-day Nazis determined to shove Jews in gas chambers and crematoria-is yet another entrée in the fetid pièce de résistance of the Straussian neocon plan to demonize all Muslims and eventually decimate their society and culture. No doubt, in the weeks ahead, we will endure more of this crude propaganda as the neocons prepare for a terrible shock and awe campaign against Iran, a plan designed not only to topple the mullahocracy but also transform American society into a warrior culture the neocons plan to use in their crusade against the enemies of Israel and the Jabotinsky Zionists.
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Editorial: How Bush Brewed the Iran Crisis
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
May 23, 2006
Why did the Bush regime create a crisis over Iran?
The answer is that the Bush regime is desperate to widen the war in the Middle East.
What has Iran done? Unlike Israel, Pakistan and India, countries that developed nuclear weapons on the sly, Iran signed the non-proliferation treaty. Countries that sign this treaty have the right to develop nuclear energy. The International Atomic Energy Agency monitors their energy programs to guard against the programs being used to cloak a weapons program. Until the Bush regime provoked a crisis, Iran was cooperating with the inspection safeguards. The weapons inspectors have found no Iranian weapons programs.
There is no evidence for the Bush regime's accusation that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. What the Bush regime is trying to do is to unilaterally take away Iran's right under the non-proliferation treaty to develop nuclear energy. It is the Bush regime that is violating the treaty by attempting to deny its benefits to Iran. The Bush regime is acting illegally because of its paranoid suspicion that 5 or 10 years in the future Iran will use what it has managed to learn about uranium enrichment to develop a weapons program.
Why is the Bush regime concerned about what Iran might do in the future? Is it because the US government intends to continue its bullying in the MIddle East and is worried that Iran will get tired of it and develop nuclear weapons as a check on US hegemony over the Muslim world? Why does the Bush regime think that its interest in the Middle East takes priority over the interests of the countries that are located there?
In a CNN TV interview on Sunday May 21, the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said that it was only a matter of months before Iran would be making nuclear weapons.
Olmert's claim is absurd as every weapons expert knows, and, indeed, as he knows himself. The only possible purpose of such a nonsensical claim is propaganda. Olmert is helping the Bush regime use fear to prepare Americans to accept an attack on Iran, just as Dick Cheney and Condi Rice invoked images of mushroom clouds to prepare Americans for the illegal invasion of Iraq.
One might think that having been deceived by the Bush regime over Iraq, the American people would have their eyes open to deception this time around. But apparently not. The same public that gives Bush a mere 30% approval rating, largely because of the Iraqi fiasco, is making no demands that Bush stop his march to war with Iran.
Not a day passes without new threats and lies issuing from Dick Cheney, Bonkers Bolton, and Condi Rice, and no one holds them accountable. The US media is proud to be complicit in lies and war crimes.
Ah, but the Iranian president said that he was going to "wipe Israel off the face of the earth."
He did not. He said that Israel should be wiped off the face of the Middle East in the sense of being removed to Europe. He was making the rhetorical point that if the Europeans so favored a Jewish state, why did the Westerners not give the Jews part of Europe or North America? Why did they give the Jews Palestine, which was not theirs to give?
One may agree or disagree with the Iranian's point, but it was not a threat to kill the Jews.
The Iranians cannot kill the Jews even if they wanted, because Israel has nuclear weapons. Being somewhat paranoid--not altogether without reason--Israel is not going to sit there and be destroyed.
The US cannot forever dominate the Middle East in behalf of its interests and Israel's. The US is running out of resources. The US is heavily in debt, yet continues to hemorrhage red ink. Washington is dependent on foreigners to finance its wars. Offshoring has diminished America's ability to manufacture. The US is now dependent on China for advanced technology products and on Europe and Asia for manufactured goods. The American middle class is beginning to experience employment problems and income stagnation. The neocons' idea that the US can patrol Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and Syria in perpetuity is insane. The Bush regime has proven that the US cannot even occupy Baghdad.
Unless the US government intends nuclear genocide against Muslims, it cannot prevail in war in the MIddle East. A solution in the Middle East requires diplomacy and good will, not threats and aggression. Yet, the Bush regime refuses to even meet with Iranian leaders.
By refusing to meet, talk, and negotiate, Bush is telling Iranians that they have no choice. Either they comply and do what Bush demands, or they will be attacked.
That is the Iranian Crisis in a nutshell.
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Economic Armageddon
OECD warns rebalancing of US deficit may drive dollar down sharply
05.23.2006, 06:15 AM
LONDON (AFX) - The OECD has warned that the eventual rebalancing of the US current account gap 'looks increasingly unavoidable' and will send shock waves across the globe, starting with a slump in the dollar's exchange rate.
The OECD said in its world economic outlook that the depreciation faced by the dollar could be 'of the order of one-third to one-half.'
The adjustment in the deficit would 'need to induce a sharp slowdown in US domestic demand and that this would have adverse spill-over effects on other economies both through the trade and asset revaluation channels,' it said.
The rebalancing may be accompanied by an increase in risk premiums and a reversal of private capital flows, it added.
Countries with current account surpluses have been accumulating dollar reserves and 'their willingness to hold dollar assets on their balance sheets may diminish,' the OECD warned.
It also cautioned that a protectionist response from the US may accelerate the dollar's falls.
'The US deficit is becoming a pretext for protectionist pressures. If this were to prompt surplus countries to reduce their official US dollar reserves or raise expectations thereof, support for the US dollar could wane.'
Already, the widening of current account imbalances has been sustained far longer and with much smaller exchange rate responses than would have been judged plausible even a decade ago, it said.
So far the United States has attracted the capital needed to finance its current account deficit with relative ease. But it has also moved from being a major international creditor to a net external liability position amounting to slightly over 20 pct of GDP, and the current US external deficit is approximately twice the level that would be consistent with a stable net foreign liability position.
To facilitate the inevitable adjustment in the current account that the US is likely to face, the OECD advocates changes in the US tax system to shore up the domestic savings rate.
'Removing some well-known anti-savings biases in the tax code. Decisions to maintain the tax cuts and to reduce the incidence -- such as the income tax-deductibility of mortgage interest payments -- and moving more generally towards a consumption tax would be particularly helpful,' said.
However, the OECD said that it is not immediately obvious what would trigger a rebalancing and when it would occur.
And, a case can be made that a correction of the US current account deficit, once it occurs, could be 'orderly and gradual',it added.
Firstly, as the bulk of US international financial liabilities are denominated in dollars, their burden to the US economy does not rise with a depreciation in the currency. At the same time, US external assets are largely denominated in foreign currency, which means that they benefit from positive valuation adjustments if the dollar depreciates.
Additionally, the central banks which have piled on dollar reserves may prove to be reluctant sellers.
And, the US currency does not appear to be overvalued in purchasing power parity terms. Its position as an international reserve currency as well as the attractiveness of the comparatively liquid US asset markets also make it less vulnerable to confidence crises.
Despite these factors, however, the risk of a 'costly unwinding remains,' the OECD cautioned.
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Report: Fannie Mae Manipulated Accounting
By MARCY GORDON
AP Business Writer
May 23, 2006
WASHINGTON - Senior executives at Fannie Mae manipulated accounting to collect millions of dollars in undeserved bonuses and to deceive investors, a federal report charged Tuesday. The government-sponsored mortgage company was fined $400 million.
The blistering report by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, the result of an extensive three-year investigation, was issued as Fannie Mae struggled to emerge from an $11 billion accounting scandal. Also Tuesday, the housing oversight agency and the Securities and Exchange Commission announced a $400 million civil penalty against Fannie Mae in a settlement over the alleged accounting manipulation.
Of that amount, the $350 million assessed by the SEC - one of the largest penalties ever in an accounting fraud case - will go to compensate Fannie Mae investors damaged by the alleged violations.
The company also agreed to limit the growth of its multibillion-dollar mortgage holdings, capping them at $727 billion, and to make top-to bottom changes in its corporate culture, accounting procedures and ways of managing risk. Thirty executives and employees at the company as well as others who have left - including Daniel Mudd, the current president and CEO - will be reviewed for possible disciplinary action or termination.
Washington-based Fannie Mae neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing under the settlement but did agree to refrain from future violations of securities laws.
"The image of Fannie Mae as one of the lowest-risk and 'best in class' institutions was a facade," James B. Lockhart, the acting director of OFHEO, said in a statement as the report was released. "Our examination found an environment where the ends justified the means. Senior management manipulated accounting, reaped maximum, undeserved bonuses, and prevented the rest of the world from knowing."
The report also faulted Fannie Mae's board of directors for failing to discover "a wide variety of unsafe and unsound practices" at the largest buyer and guarantor of home mortgages in the country.
The OFHEO review, involving nearly 8 million pages of documents, details what the agency calls an arrogant and unethical corporate culture. From 1998 to mid-2004, the smooth growth in profits and precisely-hit earnings targets each quarter reported by Fannie Mae were "illusions" deliberately created by senior management using faulty accounting, the report says.
The Bush administration has been pushing for legislation to reduce the massive mortgage portfolios of Fannie Mae and its smaller government-sponsored sibling, Freddie Mac.
The report "shows that Fannie Mae's faults were not limited to violating accounting and corporate governance standards, but included excessive risk-taking and poor risk management as well," Randal Quarles, Treasury undersecretary for domestic finance, said in a statement. "OFHEO's findings are a clear warning about the very real risk the improperly-managed investment portfolios of (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) pose to the greater financial system."
Fannie Mae said its board has read the report and is committed to making the changes required under the deal with the regulators.
"We are glad to resolve these matters. We have all learned some powerful lessons here about getting things right and about hubris and humility," Mudd said in a statement. "We are a much different company than before. But we also recognize that we have a long road ahead of us."
The accounting manipulation tied to executives' bonuses occurred from 1998 to 2004, according to the report, a much longer period than was previously known.
Regulators had earlier said that Fannie Mae in 1998 improperly put off accounting for $200 million in expenses to future periods so executives could collect $27 million in bonuses.
The manipulation "made a significant contribution" to the compensation of former chairman and chief executive Franklin Raines, which totaled more than $90 million from 1998 to 2003, the report says, including some $52 million directly tied to the company hitting earnings targets.
The agency first discovered in 2004 the accounting-rule violations and alleged earnings manipulation to meet Wall Street targets - disclosures that stunned the financial markets.
In December 2004, the SEC ordered Fannie Mae to restate its earnings back to 2001 - a correction expected to reach an estimated $11 billion. The Justice Department has been pursuing a criminal investigation.
Raines and former chief financial officer Timothy Howard were swept out of office by Fannie Mae's board in December 2004.
OFHEO levied a record $125 million fine in 2003 against Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae's smaller rival in the multitrillion-dollar home mortgage market, for misstating earnings - mostly underreporting them - by $5 billion for 2000-2002.
On Friday, Fannie Mae said it was replacing the chairman of its board's audit committee, a key position as the second-largest U.S. financial institution reworks its accounting and struggles to emerge from the scandal. The company said the board had named accounting professor Dennis Beresford to replace audit committee chairman Thomas Gerrity.
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For telecoms, a storm of lawsuits awaits
By Peter Grier | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
WASHINGTON - The forecast for major US phone companies this spring: continued heat, with a 100 percent chance of gathering lawsuits.
From New York to Kentucky to Texas, lawyers specializing in class-action litigation are lining up to sue phone firms alleged to have handed over customer records to the National Security Agency without a court order. On Monday, for instance, the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois filed suit against AT&T, charging that its actions in the NSA program violated customer privacy.
"Having been blacklisted from working in television during the McCarthy era, I know the harm of government using private corporations to intrude into the lives of innocent Americans," says author Studs Terkel, a Windy City icon and a plaintiff in the ACLU suit.
Despite this rush to the courthouse, it isn't yet clear which phone firms handed over what records to whom. Some companies have denied involvement - while critics note that those denials are carefully worded.
Further scrutiny by Congress or the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is needed to resolve this issue for the public, say some.
"The accounts that have been provided by some of the phone companies regarding their involvement in the NSA program have hardly resolved the matter," wrote Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), in a letter to the FCC requesting an investigation.
Earlier this month, USA Today reported that AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth had turned over the call records of millions of Americans to the US government in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.
These records didn't include names or the contents of calls, according to the newspaper. But they did list which numbers called which other numbers, both internationally and domestically, and how those calls were routed.
This information was then sifted by powerful computers in an attempt to discover a pattern that might reveal the presence of terrorists in the US. On Tuesday, USA Today reported that the NSA had used the phone records of the known 9/11 conspirators to try to establish a model of how terrorists communicate.
The companies named in the USA Today stories have all, to varying degrees, disputed the newspaper's account.
AT&T hasn't denied it - but it hasn't confirmed it, either. And it has said that no information was released illegally.
Verizon has flatly denied involvement in the NSA program. But it has left open the issue of whether MCI, the long-distance subsidiary it acquired in January, has turned over records to the government.
BellSouth, for its part, issued a statement earlier this month that said "based on our review to date, we have confirmed no such contract exists and we have not provided bulk customer calling records to the NSA."
The use of the word "contract" in this denial appears to be a hedge, noted the EPIC in its letter to the FCC.
"With more questions being raised each day about the scope of participation by the telephone companies in the NSA's domestic surveillance program, the need for the FCC to undertake a comprehensive investigation has become clear," wrote Mr. Rotenberg.
USA Today has said it stands by its reporting on this issue, but it will review its actions in light of a call by BellSouth for a retraction.
For the phone companies, the stakes in this dispute could be enormous. If the legal claims gain traction, the case might equal in scope such past actions as litigation against the major tobacco companies.
A successful series of suits could cost the phone companies billions of dollars.
But the cases might be difficult for plaintiffs to win. Given the scope of the government's regulatory power over phone companies, the communications behemoths might be able to argue that they were coerced to turn over phone records - if, in fact, that is what they did.
Meanwhile, Qwest, another of the so-called Baby Bell phone companies, has emerged as an unlikely hero in the case given that its former chief executive has said he rebuffed the NSA's request for call records.
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Behind global stock setback
By Mark Trumbull | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
Worries about inflation have made the investing climate suddenly riskier around the world, but a widespread bear market is being kept at bay.
That's because the global economy continues to show solid growth, analysts say. Yet recent stock market turmoil, particularly in hot emerging markets such as India and Brazil, signal an environment that can bring quick penalties for investors.
Emerging markets, soaring for several years as they lured a torrent of global cash, have reversed course the past two weeks. In the US, the Dow Jones Industrial Average began the week down 4 percent from its six-year high of 11,642.65, which the index reached on May 10. European exchanges have also fallen in the past two weeks.
"The markets have woken up to the fact that interest rates are going to go up more than they were expecting - especially in the US," says Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at Global Insight, an economic consulting firm in Lexington, Mass. That, in turn, could mean slower economic growth from Hamburg to Hong Kong.
Although the impact is global, he says, it is magnified in emerging markets such as those in Asia and Latin America. Because they had been the locus of investor enthusiasm, they face the prospect of the sharpest pullback. "It's the emerging markets that are a little dicey."
That pattern was evident Tuesday. Many Asian markets fell further, extending a string of recent losses, while investors found firmer footing in the US and Europe. Exchanges in France, Germany, and Britain all rebounded with gains of more than 2 percent, and shares rose in New York during morning trading.
Commodity prices have joined interest rates as a driving force in recent days. Declines in the price of metals and other raw materials - a possible harbinger of slowing economic growth - pose a particu- lar threat to the resource-based economies of many developing nations.
Tuesday, firmer prices for commodities including oil helped some emerging markets stem their losses.
Although the mood on world markets is more sober, analysts say it's still a long way from a bear market, typically defined as a 20 percent loss of value that can last for a long or short time.
"Emerging markets and the commodities markets will continue to be very volatile" for several months, predicts Michael Cosgrove, who publishes a capital-markets newsletter, The Econoclast, in Dallas. But for long-term investors, he says, the best strategy may be simply to ride out the storm.
"You're probably better off just sticking it out," rather than selling on the hunch that deeper declines may be coming.
That's because, in the long run, the so-called emerging markets still promise strong growth, based on rapid development and globalization. And in the short run, they are financially much more stable than they were in 1997, when a Russian debt default triggered a severe sell-off in developing nations.
Today those nations have less debt owed to foreigners, a greater cushion of currency reserves such as US dollars, and better exchange-rate policies.
But the recent turmoil is putting these new realities to a severe test nonetheless. India is a case in point, where Finance Minister P. Chidambaram fended off calls for his resignation and appealed for calm.
"Ordinary investors need not worry as fundamentals of the economy are strong," Mr. Chidambaram told lawmakers.
In both emerging markets and in the world's major economies, what's happened in the past two weeks is a reappraisal of risk. That reappraisal, naturally, is most punishing in the places where euphoria had most abounded.
India's boom, for example, began to resemble America's dotcom bubble of the late 1990s, with a construction boom in India's high-tech hubs.
"It was like a casino market. I've felt for a while that the market was overstretched," says Ramesh Damani, a stock broker in India.
For several years, low interest rates globally have provided cheap credit and spurred a quest for higher-yielding investments. From hedge funds to shares of Brazilian banks, investors have taken on more risks in the hopes of higher returns. And often they have borrowed in places such as Japan to do it.
The cycle has turned toward tighter monetary policies in Japan, Europe, and the US. It's unclear how far the tightening will go, but as long as it persists it will exert a slowing force on the global economy. World output could grow by nearly 4 percent this year, forecasters predict.
In the US, the Federal Reserve under new Chairman Ben Bernanke is feeling pressed to show it is squelching inflationary pressures. Some fear that could mean more interest-rate hikes than are really needed.
"We may be nearer the point where the Fed might induce a significant slowdown," says Dr. Cosgrove. He sees global stock markets entering an uncertain "sideways" phase for several months.
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China's GDP grows 10.3% in 1st quarter
www.chinaview.cn 2006-05-23 22:48:16
BEIJING, May 23 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese economy grew 10.3 percent in the first quarter of this year, a tenth of a percentage point higher than earlier reported by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).
A circular released by the NBS on Tuesday said that China's gross domestic product (GDP) in the first three months of 2006 reached 4.339 trillion yuan (542 billion US dollars), 7.7 billion yuan more than data released last month showed.
The preliminary check was made according to GDP accounting and releasing process of the NBS, said the circular.
Of the total, primary industries scored 324.2 billion yuan in value added, 4.2 billion yuan more than the earlier data with year-on-year growth dropping by 0.1 percentage point to 4.5 percent.
Secondary industries reaped 2.1614 trillion yuan, 0.1 billion yuan less previously reported with the growth unchanced at 12.5 percent; while tertiary industries reported 1.8534 trillion yuan in value added, 3.6 billion yuan more than earlier data revealed with the growth rate increasing by 0.2 percentage points to 8.9 percent.
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Same Old BS
US Senate committee confirms Hayden as CIA chief
www.chinaview.cn 2006-05-24 03:54:05
WASHINGTON, May 23 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee approved on Tuesday the nomination of Michael Hayden as director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
The nomination was passed by a vote of 12-3 in the 15-member committee.
If confirmed by the full Senate, which is expected to vote on the nomination later this week, Hayden, an Air Force General and currently the deputy director of National Intelligence, would replace Porter Goss as the CIA's new chief.
Goss resigned early this month after less than two years in office, and Bush nominated Hayden, 61, to head the CIA on May 8.
Hayden, born in Pennsylvania, earned a B.A. in history in 1967 and an M.A. in modern American history in 1969, both from Duquesne University.
He entered active military service in 1969, was appointed director of the National Security Agency in 1999, and became deputy director of National Intelligence in April 2005.
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Bin Laden denies Moussaoui's role in 9/11 attacks
www.chinaview.cn 2006-05-24 08:55:36
BEIJING, May 24 (Xinhuanet) -- In a new audiotape, a speaker believed to be Osama bin Laden said Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person convicted in a U.S. court for the Sept. 11 attacks, had nothing to do with the operations.
He reasserted that he had personally plotted the Sept. 11 attacks on U.S. cities which killed about 3,000 people, according to a Washington Post report Tuesday.
"The truth is that he has no connection whatsoever with the events of September 11. I am certain of what I say because I was responsible for entrusting the 19 brothers ... with the raids," said the speaker who appeared to be bin Laden in the four-and-a-half-minute tape posted on a Web site often used by Al Qaeda. The authenticity of the tape could not be verified.
The speakers also listed others who he said had no role in the acctacks, including prisoners held by the United States in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and several individuals he described as working for relief agencies and the media.
Moussaoui, 37, was sentenced on May 4 to life in prison with no chance of release. He pleaded guilty last year to conspiracy in connection with the attacks, in which hijacked airliners were flown into buildings in New York City and Washington D.C..
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Muhammad planned to train children in terrorism at Canadian camp: Malvo
02:14:33 EDT May 24, 2006
STEPHEN MANNING
ROCKVILLE, Md. (AP) - John Allen Muhammad had grand plans to extort millions of dollars from authorities in the 2002 Washington-area sniper shootings so he could set up a camp in Canada to train children how to terrorize cities and "shut things down," accomplice Lee Boyd Malvo testified Tuesday.
Asked whether he believed Muhammad's plans, Malvo said yes. "He's a man of his word. If he tells you he is going to do something, it is done," Malvo said. "If he says it, it is legit."
Malvo, who had never before taken the witness stand against his fellow sniper, gave the most detailed account yet of the planning that went into the three-week shooting spree that left 10 people dead at gas stations and parking lots.
Malvo also said Muhammad devised a two-phase plan to shoot as many as six random people each day for 30 days in the Washington area and then target children and police officers with explosives.
They planned to place explosives on school buses in Baltimore, kill a Baltimore police officer and then set off explosives packed with ball bearings at the officer's funeral.
When Malvo asked Muhammad why, he said, "For the sheer terror of it - the worst thing you can do to people is aim at their children."
Midway through the spree, Malvo said, Muhammad described the plans to take money they would extort from authorities to end the sniper shootings and establish a Canadian commune to train 140 homeless children in terrorist shooting and bombings to "continue the mission" in other cities.
After the Oct. 9, 2002, shooting of Dean Myers in Manassas, Va., Muhammad was upset that the two were not meeting their self-imposed quota of six shootings a day. Malvo said he became upset and refused to talk to Muhammad. At one point, Malvo said he put on headphones, listened to music and refused to acknowledge Muhammad.
Muhammad responded angrily, and told Malvo, "I'm not going to deal with it. When people have doubts is when they get caught."
Muhammad, 45, and Malvo, now 21, were arrested Oct. 24, 2002, at a western Maryland rest stop.
They have already been convicted in Virginia for a sniper murder there. Muhammad received a death sentence while Malvo was given a life term.
Prosecutors in Maryland have said they are pursuing a second trial in case the Virginia conviction is overturned on appeal and to seek justice in Montgomery County, where six of the 10 killings occurred.
The last time the two came face-to-face was in October 2003, when Malvo was brought in at Muhammad's first trial. Malvo refused to testify, invoking his constitutional right against self-incrimination.
Before testifying, Malvo told the judge that he intends to plead guilty to murder charges against him in Montgomery County for six life sentences.
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Al-Zarqawi's top aide arrested in Jordan
www.chinaview.cn 2006-05-24 02:56:33
AMMAN, May 23 (Xinhua) -- A senior member of the al-Qaida's wing in Iraq, who was arrested by Jordanian intelligence agents, made confession of abducting and killing Arabs on Jordanian state television on Tuesday.
The arrested Iraqi man was identified as Ziad Khalaf Raja al-Karbouly and a top aide to the terror group's leader Jordanian-born Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
He admitted that he had carried out attacks on Jordanian citizens, including truck drivers on the highway between Iraq and the kingdom.
The al-Qaida suspect added that he abducted two Moroccans working at Moroccan embassy in Baghdad last October. Last November, al-Qaida said the two men were sentenced to death.
The state prosecutor has started legal procedures to bring him to court for trial but the date has not been revealed. The al-Qaida in Iraq has claimed responsibility for several terror attacks against Jordan, including the triple hotel bombing attacks in Amman on Nov. 9, 2005, which killed at least 60 people, including three Iraqi suicide bombers.
A Jordanian military court has sentenced al-Zarqawi to death three times for terror attacks in his absence.
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War of Terror
Police launch major anti-terror operation
Wed May 24, 2006 9:02 AM BST164
LONDON (Reuters) - Around 500 police officers raided houses across the country on Wednesday in a major operation targeting people suspected of planning terrorist attacks overseas.
They arrested eight people, seven in Manchester and one on Merseyside.
"An extensive operation targeting individuals suspected of facilitating terrorism abroad is under way," a police spokesman in Manchester said, without giving further details.
Britain has been on high alert since four suicide bombers killed 52 people in coordinated attacks on London's transport network on July 7 last year.
The government has tightened its anti-terrorism legislation since then and police can now detain suspects for up to 14 days before charging them.
Police are also on the alert for Britons they suspect of planning terrorist attacks abroad.
With a Muslim population of around 1.7 million, many angered by British foreign policy in the Middle East, Britain has been cited as a fertile recruiting ground for Islamist extremists.
In December 2001, Briton Richard Reid was arrested for trying to blow up a passenger plane with explosives hidden in his shoes.
He was sentenced to life in jail in January 2003 after a trial in which he described himself as an Islamic fundamentalist working in league with al Qaeda.
In 2003, two British Muslims attacked a bar in Tel Aviv, killing three Israelis. One of them, Asif Mohammed Hanif, blew himself up at the scene while the other, Omar Sharif, fled, and was later found drowned in the sea nearby.
U.S. authorities arrested nine Britons abroad in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, and imprisoned them at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba.
None was ever charged with any offence and all have since been freed.
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US embassy in Japan warns of possible threat
Wed May 24, 2006 04:24 AM ET
TOKYO (Reuters) - The United States embassy said on Wednesday it had received a possible threat against U.S. facilities in Japan and urged U.S. citizens to exercise caution.
"The U.S. Embassy has learned of a possible threat against American facilities in Japan, the credibility of which has yet to be determined," the U.S. embassy in Tokyo said in a statement.
"Given the upcoming Memorial Day holiday, we advise American citizens to exercise caution and report any suspicious activities to authorities."
America's Memorial Day holiday is on Monday, May 29.
Japan's top government spokesman, Shinzo Abe, said he had no information that suggested there would be an attack in Japan.
"We do not have any concrete information that a terrorist attack will be carried out in Japan," he told reporters.
Since the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, security has been tight around the U.S. embassy and other facilities related to the United States in Japan.
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Cavuto teaser: "Are Democratic leaders who criticize the war in Iraq actually aiding the terrorists?"
Tue, May 23, 2006 11:44am EST
On the May 22 edition of Fox News' Your World, host Neil Cavuto ended the show with the following teaser for the next edition of the program: "Are Democratic leaders who criticize the war in Iraq actually aiding the terrorists? Why Nevada Senator John Ensign [R] says, 'You bet they are.' "
From the May 22 edition of Fox News' Your World with Neil Cavuto:
CAVUTO: Tomorrow: Are Democratic leaders who criticize the war in Iraq actually aiding the terrorists? Why Nevada Senator John Ensign says, "You bet they are." And that's just the tip of the iceberg. You'll be surprised at what else he has to say. He's tomorrow on Your World.
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Amnesty slams world powers on rights abuses
May 24, 2006. 01:00 AM
OLIVIA WARD
STAFF REPORTER
The tide has turned against countries that abuse human rights in the name of anti-terrorism policies, says the head of Amnesty International, Irene Khan.
"Over the past year, some of the world's most powerful governments have received an uncomfortable wake-up call about the dangers of undervaluing the human rights dimension of their actions at home and abroad," Khan told reporters yesterday as the London-based organization released its annual report for 2006 on the state of the world's human rights.
Courts and public institutions in the United States, Britain and Europe called their governments to account for permitting torture and other abuses of terrorism suspects, she said, and the public has shown growing distaste for attempts to justify violations of rights.
"Powerful governments are playing a dangerous game with human rights. Those with power and influence - the United States, European Union members, China and Russia - have been either complicit or compromised by human rights violations."
The large powers' disregard for rights "paralyzed international institutions and squandered public resources in pursuit of narrow security interests," Khan said. As a result, "the world has paid a heavy price in terms of erosion of fundamental principles and the enormous damage done to the lives and livelihoods of ordinary people."
Both the United States and Britain have come in for sharp criticism by Amnesty since 2001 when new counter-terrorism laws opened the way for violations of rights.
Amnesty is one of many advocacy groups calling for closure of the U.S. detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, which has been attacked for overriding international conventions and individual human rights. Amnesty has asked for publication of the names and locations of terrorism suspects captured by American forces.
Calling Guantanamo "a powder keg waiting to explode," Khan said that "some 460 people of around 40 nationalities" remain there in spite of international protests, some of them going on hunger strikes or attempting suicide.
But, she said, while "there is evidence of widespread torture in U.S. detention centres, the United States (also) outsources torture to countries like Morocco, Jordan and Syria."
Washington has denied that it condones torture at Guantanamo or elsewhere, and insists that any abuses are isolated cases.
Khan also accused Britain of signing deals with Jordan, Libya and Lebanon to deport terror suspects, if it was confident they would not come to harm there. She urged Britain to examine the countries' human rights records and decide "whether those diplomatic assurances are worth the paper they are written on."
Citing the "duplicity and doublespeak" of the war against terror, Khan said European Union countries have not done enough to investigate claims that the CIA is using their airspace to transport terror suspects to countries where they might be tortured.
Western countries are also guilty of inaction on Sudan's wartorn Darfur region, she added, saying that "intermittent attention and feeble action by the United Nations and the African Union fell pathetically short of what was needed in Darfur."
Ending abuses in Darfur topped Amnesty's 2006 list of key human rights issues. It also called for negotiation of a new international arms trade treaty to halt the flow of weapons that promote human rights violations.
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Amnesty International slams 'racism' of French police
PARIS, May 23, 2006 (AFP)
The human rights group Amnesty International on Tuesday accused French police of acts of brutality and murder against ethnic minorities.
"Ill treatment and racist murders attributable to the (French) police over the last 10 years are not isolated cases," according to the organisation's 2006 world report.
"The suspected perpetrators of these acts are not always made to account for them in court," said Geneviève Sevrin, president of Amnesty France.
"The racism of police officers and other state officials is aimed at persons of the Muslim faith or of ethnic minorities," Amnesty said.
The organisation also criticised a 2005 terrorism law which it said "authorises longer periods of secret detention and thus eliminates guarantees against the use of torture and ill-treatment and reinforces the impunity of the forces of law and order".
Amnesty also attacked the country's decision to place Albania and Georgia on the 'safe' list of countries whose nationals do not qualify for asylum.
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Spaced Out
UFO 'probably a small meteorite or something'
Johannesburg, South Africa
23 May 06
The search for an unidentified object that apparently crashed into the sea at Port Shepstone on Saturday will resume at the weekend as there were no bodies to search for, the National Sea Rescue Institute said on Tuesday.
"It is unlikely that we will go out to search before the weekend. The NSRI's core business is rescuing people and here there is no loss of life involved," said NSRI Shelley Beach Station Commander Eddie Noyons.
The search for the unidentified object began on Saturday after witnesses reported that an object, possibly an aircraft, had crashed into the sea behind the breaker line off-shore of the Port Shepstone High School.
Police, rescue craft and a fixed wing aircraft were alerted to the scene to investigate.
"Following a full-scale search of the area covering 12 square nautical miles nothing had been found.
"There are no reports of activity in the area that may be related to this incident and there are no aircraft reported to be overdue or missing," said Noyons.
He said numerous witnesses -- including teachers and pupils attending a sports event at the high school, and other bystanders including local fishermen -- were convinced they had seen an aircraft go into the water, including seeing smoke and a water plume.
Interviews with the witnesses revealed that some also reported seeing flames.
"Some reported seeing something, an unidentified object, splash into the sea causing a ripple effect of waves," Noyons said.
Due to the number of witnesses with similar reports, it was presumed that weather activity might have given the impression of something falling into the sea.
Noyons said rescue workers were unable to find oil slicks, petrol spillage or any signs or wreckage during the search on Saturday.
"We are not sure what it was as we are still unaware of any missing aircraft, but will continue the search at the weekend. It's probably a small meteorite or something. The weekend will be a nice time for diving," said Noyons. - Sapa
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Couple seeks to crack Brigantine ice fall mystery: A type of Meteor?
By MICHAEL PRITCHARD Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
The Press, Atlantic City
BRIGANTINE - It was a pretty typical Saturday evening for Dan and Jean Ciechanowski as they worked the barbecue and chatted with neighbors this past weekend.
Then it happened.
Dan Ciechanowski heard a noise that he described as the sound a missile makes and saw something moving across the sky at a 45-degree angle.
It smashed into a vacant lot next to his property with a crash that shook the foundation of his house.
That crash was pretty close to where Jean Ciechanowski was grilling. Though there is a fence between her property and the vacant yard, she too heard the missile-like sound and felt the impact.
In the end, the object - a large chunk of ice - had landed just a few feet away.
"First I heard the noise of it coming down," she said. "Then there's this crash and it shook the ground all around me. It was a pretty scary thing to go through."
In fact, the Ciechanowskis described the impact as surreal. What they found afterward was a one-foot-deep crater in the adjacent yard with a hunk of ice two feet around sitting in the middle.
The ice fell at about 7:30 p.m. Saturday. When investigated by city police, it was assumed that the ice had fallen from a plane. Police called the Federal Aviation Administration to see if any planes in the area had inadvertently dropped the ice from one of their holding tanks. Or it could be a form of "blue ice," a euphemism used in the airline industry for ice that falls from leaking airplane lavatories.
There were too many planes in the area to find a culprit, police said, but Ciechanowski isn't so sure that the ice came from a plane.
"That was my first thought," he said. "We are on an approach for Atlantic City International Airport. But my neighbor and I were out talking when it happened. We looked around and didn't see a single plane in the area."
Ciechanowski did some quick Internet research and found some other problems with a blue ice theory. The ice in question was clear, did not have a foul odor and seemed to have some minerals in it.
"I'm not saying what it is," Ciechanowski said. "But it doesn't fit what I was reading in the Internet. It made me think it could be something else, like a type of meteor."
A spokesman for the FAA said that despite the lack of color and odor, the ice still could have come from a plane. The FAA intends to investigate the incident.
When they get to the site, they'll be able to see the ice first-hand. Ciechanowski kept a piece in the freezer. And he is handling it with care in case the blue ice theory holds up.
"It's in a freezer we don't use too much and it's in plastic," he said.
For the Ciechanowskis, the mystery ice will provide for some interesting conversations this summer, but they are aware it could have been a lot worse.
"If this had hit something like our house it would have smashed right through it," Dan Ciechanowski said. "If it hit somebody it would be terrible. We're very lucky that nobody got hurt by this thing. I'm still a little paranoid about planes flying overhead right now."
To e-mail Michael Pritchard at The Press:
mpritchard@pressofac.com
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Fatal rendezvous: Pentagon loses Satellite
From New Scientist Print Edition
20 May 2006
NASA's automated DART spacecraft crashed into the very satellite that it was supposed to dock with on 15 April 2005, according to a NASA report released on Monday. A faulty guidance system caused DART to slam into the Pentagon satellite, and it shut itself down 3 minutes later.
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Voyager 2 Detects Odd Shape of Solar System's Edge
Ker Than
SPACE.com
May 23, 2006
Voyager 2 could pass beyond the outermost layer of our solar system, called the "termination shock," sometime within the next year, NASA scientists announced at a media teleconference today.
The milestone, which comes about a year after Voyager 1's crossing, comes earlier than expected and suggests to scientists that the edge of the shock is about one billion miles closer to the Sun in the southern region of the solar system than in the north.
This implies that the heliosphere, a spherical bubble of charged low-energy particles created by our Sun's solar wind, is irregularly shaped, bulging in the northern hemisphere and pressed inward in the south.
Scientists determined that Voyager 1 was approaching the termination shock when it began detecting charged particles that were being pushed back toward the Sun by charged particles coming from outside our solar system. This occurred when Voyager 1 was about 85 AU from the Sun.
One AU is the distance between the Earth and the Sun, or 93 million miles.
In contrast, Voyager 2 began detecting returning particles while only 76 AU from the Sun.
"This tells us that the shock down where Voyager 2 is must be closer the sun than where Voyager 1 is," said Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
The researchers think that the heliosphere's asymmetry might be due to a weak interstellar magnetic field pressing inward on the southern hemisphere.
"The [magnetic] field is only 1/100,000 of the field on the Earth's surface, but it's over such a large area and pushing on such a faint gas that it can actually push the shock about a billion miles in," Stone explained.
Both Voyager spacecrafts were launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida: Voyager 2 headed out on Aug. 20, 1977, Voyager 1 on Sept. 5, 1977.
Currently, Voyager 1 is about 8.7 billion miles from the Sun and traveling at a speed of 3.6 AU per year while Voyager 2 is about 6.5 billion miles away and moving at about 3.3 AU per year.
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Big Blue Marble
Monsoon gloom strikes South Asia
From New Scientist Print Edition
20 May 2006
"A POPULATION of a billion and a half depends on this rain," says Veerabhadran Ramanathan. Unfortunately, the South Asia monsoon that brings this rain may be losing strength thanks to global warming and the brown haze of pollution that hangs over the Indian Ocean.
This wasn't supposed to happen. If global warming was heating the Indian Ocean uniformly, then the result ought to be increased evaporation and higher monsoon rainfall over south Asia. Instead, rainfall over India has decreased by 5 to 8 per cent since the 1950s.
Now, Ramanathan and colleague Chul Eddy Chung of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California have an explanation for the anomaly. By combining measurements of sea surface temperatures and pollution in their regional climate models, they found that while sea surface temperatures near the equator have increased around 0.6 °C over the last 50 years, the northern Indian Ocean has not warmed.
In fact, it may even have cooled because sunlight is being absorbed by the "brown cloud" above it. Without the normal summer temperature gradients over the region, the monsoon cycle is suppressed (Journal of Climate, vol 19, p 2036). "It's causing a tendency for the rain systems to move south and not to hit land," Ramanathan says.
From issue 2552 of New Scientist magazine, 20 May 2006, page 6
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Himalayan forests are quietly vanishing: Indian Government Oblivious
NewScientist.com news service
Emma Young
18 May 2006
THE Himalayas may never be the same again. The forests growing on the roof of the world are disappearing, and the rate of deforestation is so rapid that a quarter of animal and plant species native to this biodiversity hotspot, including tigers and leopards, could be gone by the end of the century.
Worse, the Indian government is oblivious to the problem because official figures erroneously suggest that forest cover will rise rather than fall. This mistake has led to the approval of new schemes, such as hydroelectric dams, that will exacerbate the devastation.
The Himalayan region has long been recognised as extremely rich in animal and especially plant diversity. For instance, a paper published last year in Science (vol 308, p 405) concluded that Himalayan watersheds harbour more diverse ecosystems than the Amazon. "Himalaya's importance as a biodiversity-rich area and its need for conservation cannot be overemphasised," says Maharaj Pandit of the University of Delhi, India.
Now a team of researchers led by Pandit have revealed evidence of widespread deforestation in the Indian Himalaya region, which threatens tigers, black bears, musk deer, leopards, golden eagles and bearded vultures that depend on the forests. Large-scale conservation efforts are urgently needed to avoid the disappearance of these animals from the region, they say.
Pandit's team analysed high-resolution satellite images of the region dating from 1972-1974, 1980-1983 and 1999-2001. The team also went out into the field to verify ground features that could not easily be identified in the images. They classed regions with more than 40 per cent forest cover as dense forests, and those with between 10 and 40 per cent of cover as open forests.
By 2000, the region had lost 15 per cent of its forest cover compared with the early 1970s. By 2100, it will have lost almost half its forests, the team predicts. Less than one-third of the dense forest on which many native species depend will survive in the western Himalaya, while less than three-quarters in the eastern Himalaya will remain (Biodiversity & Conservation, DOI: 10.1007/s10531-006-9038-5). What's more, the researchers consider these conservative estimates, as they think increases in population and agriculture will increase the deforestation rate.
However, official Indian government statistics from the ministry of agriculture and the Forest Survey of India imply that total forest cover across the Indian Himalaya will expand by more than 40 per cent between 1970 and 2100. The researchers suspect the discrepancy between the official figures and their satellite data may stem from poor sampling, a lack of technical expertise and a lack of resources in the government institutes. The government might also attach too much weight to projects aimed at stopping commercial logging and at replanting trees in more remote regions, while the more serious threat is deforestation by villagers, they suggest.
These "miscalculations" in land-use decisions could have severe repercussions. "More than 80 per cent of proposed hydro-projects in India are located in the Himalaya," says Pandit. "Diversion of forest lands for hydro-irrigation projects is second only to agriculture in India."
From issue 2552 of New Scientist magazine, 18 May 2006, page 20
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Eye in sky monitors ice cap changes
Last Updated Tue, 23 May 2006 11:17:22 EDT
CBC News
Scientists with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration are flying over the shrinking Arctic ice cap this summer in an effort to determine just how much the melting ice is contributing to the rise of sea level worldwide.
NASA is using a Twin Otter plane to study ice caps including the Penny and Barnes caps on Baffin Island, the Devon Island ice cap and Agassiz on Ellesmere Island.
"The Canadian Arctic actually has the largest amount of ice on the planet outside of Greenland and Antarctica, so it's an obvious place to try and understand how much water is going from there," said Martin Sharpe, a professor at the University of Alberta.
Scientists are beginning to realize more attention needs to be paid to glaciers and ice sheets in the Canadian Arctic in calculating the global rise in sea level.
The plane is equipped with an ice-penetrating radar to measure its thickness, and a laser altimeter that determines whether the elevation of the ice surface is changing.
"A large amount of our attention is focused on Greenland but the Canadian work was something I got very interested in," said Waleed Abdalati of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
"Because these smaller ice masses are a little more sensitive to climate in the near term, they're no less important."
A study released earlier this year showed the amount of ice dumped into the ocean by glaciers in Greenland has almost doubled in the last five years.
Greenland contains enough ice to raise the world's oceans by seven metres, Abdalati says. But in the short term, he added, smaller ice masses could actually send more water into the ocean.
"The goal is really to figure out how much these ice masses are contributing to sea-level change," he said.
"Sea level has been going up about 1.8 millimetres a year for the last 50 to 100 years, and it's been going up about three millimetres a year for the last 12 or so years. "While that doesn't sound like much, over time it's quite significant."
Change occurring rapidly
NASA will compare this study with other airborne surveys done in 1995 and 2000.
Sharpe said both aerial surveys and research on the ground are needed to find out how much Canada's ice is contributing to the rise in sea level.
He said it's becoming clearer that when it comes to ice sheets and glaciers, things are changing more rapidly than previously believed.
The first half of the field season will be spent in Canada repeating the measurements from the two earlier surveys.
They will then go to Greenland to set up weather stations and global positioning equipment to see how fast ice is moving and to monitor weather conditions.
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For Your Health
Thousands quarantined in Bucharest
22/05/2006
News24.com
Bucharest - About 13 000 people were quarantined in the Romanian capital on Monday as troops and police sealed off streets in response to the city's second bird-flu outbreak, said officials.
The mayor of the southern fourth district, Adrian Inimaroiu, said residents would be cut off and all businesses in the area would be closed during the quarantine period of up to three weeks.
The move came after the agriculture ministry earlier on Monday confirmed the presence of the H5 bird-flu virus in dead chickens found in the neighbourhood, the latest of dozens of outbreaks of avian flu in Romania this spring.
Inimaroiu said, urging residents to stay calm, that "about 40 streets have been blocked" in the Luica quarter.
He said the quarantine would last for "a period of a week to 21 days and all the institutions in this quarter will be closed".
"About 2 500 birds from this area will be slaughtered as rapidly as possible," said the mayor.
A neighbourhood on the northern outskirts of the capital was put under quarantine on Sunday evening with fences blocking a dozen streets and police preventing anyone from going in or out, except for medical emergencies.
Comment: Nothing to see here folks, move along...
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WHO expresses concern about large human bird flu cluster in Indonesia
04:30:36 EDT May 24, 2006
JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) - The United Nations health agency described the deaths of six Indonesian family members from bird flu as the most important development in the spread of the virus since 2003, saying the size of the cluster and difficulties in determining the source were real reasons for concern.
"This is the first time that we've been completely stumped about possible single-source infection," Peter Cordingley, spokesman for the West Pacific region of the World Health Organization, said Wednesday.
Six of the seven people in an extended family in northern Sumatra who caught the disease have died, the most recent on Monday.
Cordingley described the cases as the most important development in the virus since it began ravaging Asian poultry in late 2003.
The large cluster of human cases of H5N1 avian flu being investigated in Indonesia may represent the first time the virus has been seen to ignite two successive waves of human-to-human spread, the WHO said.
The agency has not yet started the process of reviewing whether the global pandemic alert level should be raised to Phase 4 from the current Phase 3, a spokesperson said Tuesday.
According to the WHO's six-level pandemic staging plan, Phase 3 is no human-to-human spread, or only on rare occasions after close contact with a sick individual. Phase 4 is a small cluster or clusters of limited and localized human-to-human spread, a pattern suggesting the virus had not yet become fully efficient at infecting people. Phase 6 is a pandemic.
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Never use police, army, US pandemic expert says
23 May 2006
Retuers
Dr. D.A. Henderson, who helped wipe out smallpox around the world, has advice for governments fighting bird flu -- don't use the military or police to enforce public health. Henderson is critical of parts of the U.S. national pandemic plan that call for the use of quarantine and other imposed types of enforcement [such as KBR's detention centres] should influenza or any other infectious disease bring on a pandemic.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Dr. D.A. Henderson, who helped wipe out smallpox around the world, has a little piece of advice for governments fighting bird flu -- don't use the military or police to enforce public health.
Henderson, who likes to describe how he was vaccinated thousands of times against smallpox to demonstrate the immunization's safety to wary villagers, says it is much easier to halt epidemics by winning the trust of community leaders and making use of gossipy schoolchildren.
He is critical of parts of the U.S. national pandemic plan that call for the use of quarantine and other imposed types of enforcement should influenza or any other infectious disease bring on a pandemic.
"Never use the police or the military," Henderson told a meeting organized by the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's Center for Biosecurity, where he works.
"Once we brought military or police in, we found many citizens retired to the woods," Henderson told the meeting on Tuesday.
And when the health teams tried to quarantine families, they found a similar response. "People hid," he said. "They didn't want to be quarantined so they hid cases."
As H5N1 avian influenza spreads in birds across Asia, Europe and into Africa, global health officials are trying to switch into high gear to control it. But they are running into problems with local residents in many places, including most recently the village of Kubu Simbelang on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, where six people died from H5N1 infection.
"They are not angry, just unfriendly. They are unfriendly to the people from the central government, the provincial government," said Sidharta Pinem, head of animal husbandry in the region.
WINNING TRUST
Henderson said the drive to eradicate smallpox, which was eliminated in 1979, relied heavily on winning the trust of just such people.
"What was the most effective was the support from religious leaders and village leaders," he said.
For instance, they found they could train villagers to administer the vaccine, which is given using a fork-like needle that scratches the vaccine fluid into the skin.
"How responsive and enthusiastic and reliable these people were," Henderson said. "The only thing we could pay these people with was a thank you."
And an unexpected resource came from the youngest citizens.
"For detection of cases we relied on schoolchildren," Henderson said. "What is remarkable is how much 9- to 12-year-olds know about what is going on in their communities, and how willing they are to tell you."
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The reality of chronic fatigue syndrome
NewScientist.com news service
Rowan Hooper
20 May 2006
IT AFFECTS around one in every 1000 people in the UK, yet it attracts only a fraction of the cash spent on other diseases such as HIV. Once derided as "yuppie flu", the symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), which include cramps, sleeplessness, weakness and headaches, often go unrelieved. That could be about to change as physical evidence for CFS, otherwise known as myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), begins to stack up.
Last week, a meeting in London of CFS specialists heard from Jonathan Kerr of St George's, University of London. Kerr and his team used two techniques to look at differences in the expression of 47,000 genes and their variants in people with CFS and a group of unaffected people.
They used a DNA microarray chip to examine gene expression in 27 people with CFS and 54 controls. They also used "massive parallel signature sequencing" to assess gene activity in 20 people with CFS and 20 without by measuring the amount of mRNA each gene produces. The team ended up with about 100 genes where differences in expression between CFS patients and controls were most striking. Last year a pilot study identified 35 faulty genes (New Scientist, 21 July 2005, p 9).
"Most of the abnormally expressed genes are involved in the immune system," says Kerr, although he points out that the exact pattern of gene expression varies between sufferers.
Both over and underactive immune expression have been blamed for the symptoms of CFS in the past, but the lack of a single marker has hampered diagnosis. Kerr's work, though preliminary, could herald two breakthroughs: a treatment for the illness based on immune therapy, and a diagnostic test based on a broad spectrum of proteins.
Kerr is in the process of setting up clinical trials using beta interferon, a treatment for multiple sclerosis. It boosts the immune system by enhancing the activity of natural killer cells, which fight viruses. Since viruses are believed to play a role in triggering CFS in many people, beta interferon might clear the infection and help them to shake off CFS.
A test for a disease as misunderstood as CFS would also be invaluable. Kerr's team has developed one that uses mass spectrometry to find proteins that are present in people with CFS but not healthy controls. A pilot study, currently being repeated, shows clear differences between the two groups.
Meanwhile, Raymond Perrin, an osteopath from Manchester, who also attended the meeting, says he has identified other physical manifestations of the disease. Perrin thinks overloading of the lymph ducts can be a factor leading to CFS in some people. Postural problems, damage to the brain from a bang to the head, for example, or chemical or emotional trauma, can place extra stress on the sympathetic nervous system, he says. This can cause the lymph ducts to become overloaded or engorged, contributing to the fatigue and pain suffered by CFS patients. In more than 1000 cases of CFS he has seen, all patients appeared to have problems with their lymphatic glands. "You can't always see the swollen lymph vessels, but you can feel them under the surface of the skin," he says.
Perrin uses soft tissue massage to treat CFS, which encourages lymph to drain back into the bloodstream, and has submitted the results of clinical trials demonstrating the success of the technique to the journal Clinical Rehabilitation. "Every little helps," says Kerr. "There is a rationale for why it works. It's non-specific, but manual lymphatic drainage is a good thing."
Other "complementary" techniques may also be helpful, says Basant Puri, a CFS specialist at Hammersmith Hospital, London. In some sufferers, a deficiency of fatty acids such as omega-3 and omega-6 has been implicated in the disease. A poor diet can lead to deficiencies, but crucially, so can viral infection, which can also depress the immune system. Puri says many patients respond well to a combination of the fatty acids EPA and evening primrose oil. "Fatty acid supplements should be available on the National Health Service," he says.
Yet one of the biggest challenges facing those involved in CFS research is that the underlying causes may vary from person to person and one solution is unlikely to fit them all.
What is needed is more funding for further research into the condition, says Ian Gibson MP, who chairs the UK parliamentary group for scientific research into CFS/ME. The group is encouraging people who have had CFS to write in with their stories. "We hope to form a true picture of ME sufferers' hopes and concerns over the current work being undertaken in the treatment and research of ME," says Gibson.
From issue 2552 of New Scientist magazine, 20 May 2006, page 10
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Iran
Iran accuses U.S. of provoking tension
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI, Associated Press Writer
TEHRAN, Iran -Iran's president accused the United States and its allies on Wednesday of "hatching plots" to provoke ethnic tensions and destabilize Iran, a day after the government closed a state-run newspaper for publishing a cartoon that sparked riots by an ethnic minority.
"They (the U.S. and its allies) must know that they will not be able to provoke divisions and differences, through desperate attempts, among the dear Iranian nation," Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in a speech broadcast live on state-run television.
Iran closed the state-run Farsi language newspaper Iran and detained its chief editor and cartoonist on Tuesday for publishing a cartoon that showed a cockroach speaking Azeri and suggested that ethnic Azeris are stupid.
It was the first closure of a newspaper since Ahmadinejad came to office last year - and the heavy response, along with public apologies by Iranian officials, suggested the government is concerned the United States may try to stir up trouble among Iran's ethnic minorities.
"Today, they (the U.S. and its allies) are hatching plots. They want to provoke differences, divisions, disappointment ... to prevent the Iranian nation from achieving all of its rights," Ahmadinejad told thousands of people in Khorramshahr in southwestern Iran.
Other Iranian officials were also quick to stress the nation's unity in the standoff with Washington, which accuses Iran of seeking to develop nuclear weapons.
"It is clear that the evil hands of foreigners are making efforts to provoke tribal, ethnic, and religious differences under the present circumstances," State Public Prosecutor Ghorban Ali Dorri Najafabadi was quoted Tuesday as saying by state-run media.
Hundreds of Azeris marched on Monday in the northwestern city of Tabriz to protest the cartoon. Some broke windows at the governor's office, and police had to use tear gas to disperse the crowd, witnesses said. The violence was also reported by an independent news agency, ILNA.
Azeris, a Turkic ethnic group, are Iran's largest minority, making up about a quarter of Iran's 70 million people, dominated by ethnic Persians. Azeris speak a Turkic language shared by their brethren in neighboring Azerbaijan.
The cartoon, which ran May 12, showed people from different walks of life - including an athlete and a tradesman - trying to teach the cockroach and he always answers, in Azeri, "What do you mean?" There was no explanation why the protests broke out more than a week after the cartoon.
State television said the daily, one of the country's top three newspapers, had been closed "due to its publication of divisive and provocative materials." Tehran prosecutor Saeed Mortazavi said the paper's cartoonist and editor-in-chief had been taken to Evin prison.
Iran saw a wave of newspaper closures in past years amid the confrontation between reformers and hard-liners during the 1997-2005 presidency of reformist
Mohammad Khatami. The hard-line judiciary shut more than 100 pro-reform newspapers and jailed dozens of editors and writers.
But the government of Ahmadinejad, an ultra-conservative, has taken no steps against the remaining two moderate newspapers that still publish - though they make few of the sharp criticisms of the cleric-led leadership that reformers did.
Instead, Tuesday's closure aimed to ensure national unity at a time when Iran takes seriously the possibility of U.S. military action over the nuclear issue.
A January article in The New Yorker magazine reported that U.S. military operatives were already working in Iran, making contacts with anti-government ethnic minorities and gathering intelligence. Defense Department officials said the article was filled with mistakes but did not deny its basic point. Iran denied that any U.S. agents had entered its territory.
Iran is a patchwork of many ethnic groups, but its numerous minorities have generally been quiet in past decades with little overt show of opposition to the government.
But there have been worrisome signs.
A series of bomb attacks have occurred in the past year in Khuzestan, the center of Iran's Arab minority, where Ahmadinejad spoke Wednesday. An Iranian Arab insurgent group claimed responsibility for a Jan. 24 blast that killed six people and wounded 46. The Iranian government blamed the bombings on Britain and United States, which denied any involvement.
In April, Iranian troops fired artillery and rockets at Iranian Kurdish guerrillas in
Iraq amid reports they were crossing the border to infiltrate Iran's Kurdish minority.
On Tuesday, Interior Minister Mostaf Pourmohammadi warned that opportunists were working in Iran to inflame trouble.
"Some are misusing the situation. Others outside (Iran's) borders are trying to propagate protests through their satellite channels," he said in reference to U.S.-based Iranian opposition television channels.
"We should preserve our vigilance, especially the media ... and not allow, under the current very important situation the country is in now, others who pursue certain intentions to misuse the situation," he said.
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European nations draw up Iran compromise
By GEORGE JAHN, Associated Press Writer Wed May 24, 2:21 AM ET
LONDON - Key European nations put finishing touches Tuesday on a proposal meant to enlist the support of Russia and China for possible U.N. Security Council sanctions against
Iran should Tehran refuse to abandon uranium enrichment, diplomats said.
The compromise - which would drop the automatic threat of military action if Iran remains defiant - is part of a proposed basket of incentives meant to entice Iran to give up enrichment, a possible pathway to nuclear arms. It also spells out the penalties if it does not.
France, Britain and Germany discussed the final form of the package Tuesday ahead of submission for hoped-for approval Wednesday at a formal meeting of the five permanent Security Council members and Germany.
If accepted, the compromise would resolve wrangling within the Security Council since it became actively involved in March, two months after Iran's file was referred to it by the 35-nation board of the
International Atomic Energy Agency.
Russia and China have opposed calls by America, Britain and France for a resolution threatening sanctions and enforceable by military action.
The compromise proposal is meant to break that deadlock, said the diplomats, who demanded anonymity in exchange for discussing the package with The Associated Press.
If Iran remains defiant, the proposal calls for a Security Council resolution imposing sanctions under Chapter VII, Article 41 of the U.N. Charter. But it avoids any reference to Article 42 - which is the trigger for possible military action to enforce any such resolution.
And in an additional reassurance to Moscow and Beijing, it specifically calls for new consultations among the five permanent Security Council members on any further steps against Iran. That is meant to dispel past complaints by the Russians and Chinese that once the screws on Iran are tightened, it would automatically start a process leading to military involvement.
The proposed language represents compromise by the United States, Britain and France, which for weeks had called for a full Chapter VII resolution automatically carrying the threat of military action if ignored by Iran.
Still, it was unclear whether the changes would be enough to satisfy Russia and China at the six-nation meeting Wednesday because any such resolution would still declare Iran a threat to international peace - something also opposed by both Moscow and Beijing. Russia and China also have until recently spoken out against possible sanctions on Tehran, their economic and strategic partner.
On the eve of the meeting, Russian news agencies cited Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov as again calling for political and diplomatic means to solve the Iranian nuclear impasse.
Still, Lavrov also said Moscow favors the approach of the three
European Union countries in handling the crisis - a possible suggestion that it was ready to accept the modified proposal for a council resolution as part of the package of carrots if Iran cooperated - and sticks if it didn't.
The draft European proposal, shared in part with The Associated Press, listed among possible sanctions to imposed by the council banning travel visas for government officials; freezing assets; banning financial transactions of key government figures and those involved in Iran's nuclear program; an arms embargo, and an embargo on shipping refined oil products to Iran. While Iran is a major exporter of crude it has a shortage of gasoline and other oil derivatives.
If Tehran agrees to suspend enrichment, enter new negotiations on its nuclear program and lift a ban on intrusive inspections by the IAEA, they would be offered rewards including agreement by the international community to "suspend discussion of Iran's file at the Security Council."
The package also promised help in "the building of new light-water reactors in Iran," offered an assured supply of nuclear fuel for up to five years, and asked Tehran to accept a plan that would move its enrichment program to Russia.
A European official said Washington was unlikely to compromise beyond giving up insistence that any council resolution be automatically militarily enforceable.
Concern has been building since 2002 when Iran was found to be working on large-scale plans to enrich uranium. Iran insists it is only interested in generating electricity, but the international community increasingly fears it plans to build a nuclear bomb.
A series of IAEA reports since then have revealed worrying secret activities and documents, including drawings of how to mold weapons-grade uranium metal into the shape of a warhead.
Iran heightened international worries by announcing on April 11 that it had enriched uranium with 164 centrifuges. Experts estimate that Iran could produce enough nuclear material for one bomb if it had at least 1,000 centrifuges working for more than a year.
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Kuwait, Russia seek peaceful means to solve Iran's nuclear issue
www.chinaview.cn 2006-05-24 13:15:41
KUWAIT CITY, May 23 (Xinhua) -- Kuwait's Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammad Sabah Al-Salem Al-Sabah said on Tuesday that Kuwait supported Russia's efforts to find political and diplomatic means to solve Iran's nuclear issue.
Both Kuwait and Russia called on the international community to make joint efforts to resolve the crisis and urged Iran to cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the minister told a joint news conference with Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
Sheikh Mohammad said it was very important for Iran's nuclear issue to be resolved in a peaceful, political and diplomatic manner.
The visiting Russian foreign minister said "we both thought that Iran's nuclear issue should be solved through peaceful means and we supported the desire of Kuwait and most countries in the region to solve the crisis through peaceful and diplomatic means."
Lavrov said that Russia did not believe that the use of force in international relations was a means of resolving crises.
"What is important ... is that Iran takes a positive stance and we hope Tehran accepts the negotiated initiatives and that it accepts total cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency," Lavrov said.
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Chavez, Ahmadinejad offer mutual support
www.chinaview.cn 2006-05-24 11:39:42
CARACAS, May 23 (Xinhua) -- Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad offered their mutual support in a phone conference on Monday night, Venezuela's Communications Ministry said in a statement on Tuesday.
Their conversation included the topic of Iran's nuclear ambitions, which Chavez has publicly supported several times, according to the statement.
Ahmadinejad thanked Chavez for endorsing Iran's right to developing nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, and said the two countries shared many "ideals and goals" which "have formed strong bonds between our two nations."
He said that independent-minded governments could, with harmony, unity and wisdom, preserve and strengthen their natural resources.
"As part of the vindication of our inalienable right to develop nuclear energy for peaceful means, we will continue to act in the framework of legality and with civilized logic," he said.
Chavez reiterated his support for Iran's civil use of nuclear power, saying he was sure that Iran would proceed with its nuclear program with wisdom and that Iran's people would succeed in the field.
He also called for the advancement of the joint projects Iran and Venezuela were planning.
The U.S. government accuses Iran of trying to develop nuclear weapons, an accusation which Iran denies, insisting that it wants nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.
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Demonstrations rock Tehran universities
AFP
Wed May 24, 2006
TEHRAN - Two of the Iranian capital's main universities have been rocked by overnight protests and clashes between students and police, press reports said.
Some 40 police were lightly injured by stone throwing in front of the Tehran University dormitories, Tehran's police chief, General Morteza Talaie, told the official news agency IRNA.
Sources contacted by AFP said the protests were against the changing of university heads and the forced retirement of some professors.
But General Talaie said Tuesday night's unrest was "provoked by 20 or 30 supposed students joined by thugs from outside the university". He said police responded with "tolerance and restraint" and arrested no students.
"These people had their faces covered, but some of them have been identified," the general said.
Tehran University was the scene of violent clashes in 1999, when students protested over the closure of a pro-reform newspaper and the subsequent intervention by Islamist militiamen from the Basij force.
Another university in Tehran was also reported to have seen protests late on Tuesday.
Students at the Amir Kabir University, one of the country's most prestigious technical colleges, demostrated against "the intervention of Basij in elections" for members of the Islamic Student Association -- one of the few remaining pro-reform groups still operating on campus.
The student news agency ISNA said protestors shouted slogans including "we don't want the Islam of the Taliban" and "death to reactionaries and dictatorship."
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Iraq
US to make new assessment of Iraq's need
www.chinaview.cn 2006-05-24 07:46:11
WASHINGTON, May 23 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President George W. Bush said here on Tuesday that he will make a new assessment of Iraq's need for U.S. military help after the formation of Iraq's new government.
Speaking to reporters after meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Bush said that Americans should not judge what is happening in Iraq solely on the basis of the unrelenting violence, insisting that "we're making good progress" in Iraq.
"We're now able to take a new assessment about the needs necessary for the Iraqis," Bush said, citing the establishment of Iraq's permanent unity government, even though some of its most important ministries have not been filled.
However, with the reign of Iraq's new government, the Bush administration remains reluctant to talk about military withdrawal from Iraq.
"We're not going to sort of look at our watches and say, oop, time to go," Snow said of the issue of troop withdrawals from Iraq at a news briefing on Tuesday.
"We'll stay only as long as the Iraqi government wants us to stay there. But at this point, we are not going to harness ourselves to an artificial timetable."
Bush, who has never offered timetable for American troops withdrawal from Iraq, said in a speech in Chicago on Monday: "As the new Iraqi government grows in confidence and capability, America will play an increasingly supporting role."
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Boeing unveils new light-weight bomb fit for urban combat
May 23, 2006
ST. CHARLES, Mo. (AP) - Boeing Co. on Monday unveiled a line of small, lightweight bombs that the U.S. Air Force will use in urban combat situations like the war in Iraq.
The small-diameter bombs weigh 250 pounds and can be used by all Air Force bombers, according to Boeing. By using the smaller bombs, planes can carry about four times as many of these weapons and fire them from farther away. A B-2 Stealth bomber can carry as many as 80 of the small-diameter bombs.
The bombs will also help limit civilian casualties during airstrikes in urban areas, according to the military news Web site GlobalSecurity.org. Boeing said its own tests show the bombs hit within 4 feet of their target.
"Our crews will be at less risk while defeating more targets with less collateral damage," Air Force Col. Richard Justice said.
At an unveiling ceremony Monday, Justice said Boeing's development of the bomb was one of the speediest and most successful weapons development in Air Force history. He said the bomb should be used in combat as early as this summer.
Boeing, based in Chicago but whose defense operations are based in the St. Louis area, said it will make 24,000 small-diameter bombs for the Air Force, which has contracted to buy them through 2015.
The small-diameter bomb contract is valued at about $2.5 billion, but Boeing has only won the first phase of the whole project.
Last year, the Government Accountability Office - the investigative arm of Congress - found that Boeing's contract for the bombs had been influenced by an Air Force official who was sentenced to nine months in prison for giving Boeing preferential treatment.
Boeing tried to recruit Darleen Druyun for a job while she still oversaw military contracts with the company. Lockheed Martin Corp., Boeing's biggest competitor, complained that Druyun influenced the small-diameter bomb contact.
The GAO upheld that complaint and recommended the second phase of the contract should be opened up to bidding.
Winning the first phase of the contract has been good news for Boeing, which hasn't always benefited from changing war plans at the Pentagon. The company makes some military equipment that could get the ax as Pentagon planners shift priorities.
Boeing spokesman Steve Miller said the company might have to cut back production of its C-17 Globemaster III, a large transport plane. Miller said there is risk that Congress won't approve funding for more Globemasters in the 2007 budget.
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Which is the Real Iraq?
By PATRICK COCKBURN
May 23, 2006
Arbil, Iraq.
Blair's view: 'We have a government of national unity that crosses all boundaries. Iraqi people are able to write the next chapter of their history themselves.'
Another view: Two car bombs explode in Baghdad, killing nine. At least 23 more die in attacks elsewhere, bringing the death toll in May to 848 as sectarian violence spreads.
A frustrating aspect of writing about Iraq since the invasion is that the worse the situation becomes, the easier it is for Tony Blair or George Bush to pretend it is improving. That is because as Baghdad and Iraq, aside from the three Kurdish provinces, become the stalking ground for death squads and assassins, it is impossible to report the collapse of security without being killed doing so.
There was a ghastly absurdity about Tony Blair's optimism as he stood beside the new Iraqi Prime Minister, Nuri al-Maliki, in Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone yesterday. As usual, Mr Blair arrived by helicopter. Anybody entering the zone on foot has to negotiate eight checkpoints defended by heavily armed troops and guards surrounded by sandbags, razor wire, sniffer dogs and X-ray machines.
Mr Blair said the establishment of a national unity government meant there was no longer any justification for the insurgency. He announced that now at last the "Iraqi people [are] able to take charge of their own destiny and write the next chapter of Iraqi history themselves".
But Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador, played a crucial role in getting rid of the last duly elected prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari. His officials do not conceal that the envoy has been what The New York Times described as "a tireless midwife in the birthing of the new government" . That is hardly the sign of a sovereign and independent Iraqi administration.
Mr Blair said "we have a government of national unity that crosses all boundaries". Unfortunately that is exactly what we do not have. The five months it has taken to form a government since the election for the Iraqi parliament on December 15 shows the depth of existing divisions. This government has a Minister of Tourism but, as yet, no Minister of the Interior or Defense, the two crucial jobs in a country torn apart by war.
In the two parliamentary elections and a referendum on the constitution in 2005, Iraqis voted along strictly sectarian or ethnic lines. The Shia and Sunni religious parties and the Kurdish coalition triumphed; secular and nationalist candidates performed dismally. The new constitution shifting power to Kurdish and Shia super-regions with control over new oil discoveries means that, in future, Iraq will be largely a geographical expression.
So divided is the new government that each ministry becomes the fief of the party that holds it. The ministries are, in practice, patronage machines employing only party loyalists. They are milked for money, jobs and contracts. Ministers cannot be dismissed for incompetence or corruption, however gross, because it would lead to the deal between the parties and communities unravelling. The government has become a sort of bureaucratic feudalism with each ministry presided over by an independent chieftain.
Mr Blair claimed yesterday that one of the strengths of the new government was that it was "directly elected by the votes of millions of Iraqi people". But the US and British embassies in Baghdad have spent much of the past five months trying to foist figures such as the former prime minister Iyad Allawi into the government, despite the poor performance of his party at the polls.
The problem for the US and Britain in Iraq is at one level quite simple. " If you have democracy in Iraq it will be in the interests of Iran, religious organizations and the Shia," said Sami Shoresh, a commentator on Iraqi affairs.
All these things the US and Britain want to avoid, but it is proving impossible to do so.
The Sunnis, the heart of the uprising against the occupation, are now waiting to see who will be appointed to run the Interior and Defence ministries. Terrified of Shia death squads run by the Interior Ministry, the militiamen of the Badr Organisation or the Mehdi Army, the Sunnis are looking to greater protection from the US. But it is unlikely that their community, having fought the occupation for three years, will now support it.
One of the strengths of Mr Maliki's government should be that it includes Sunni members whose parties did well in the election in December. But the five million Sunni Arabs do not have a leadership as coherent as that of the Shia and the Kurds. The elected politicians cannot deliver the armed resistance. In any case, these parliamentary leaders of the Sunnis, only 20 per cent of the Iraqi population, know that the only reason the Americans take them seriously is because of the guerrilla war that has so far killed or wounded 20,000 US troops.
The Shias, for their part, having used the invasion and overthrow of Saddam Hussein to gain power, have no intention of seeing it taken away from them by Ambassador Khalilzad or anybody else. The end of foreign military occupation will come when they decide it is no longer in their interests.
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Easily Dispensable: Iraq's Children
By Dahr Jamail
05/22/06 "t r u t h o u t"
Cherishing children is the mark of a civilized society.
- Joan Ganz Cooney
If, as I would like to believe, the above quote suggests all children and not merely those born in Western democracies, I am no longer certain that we live in a civilized society.
That women and children suffer the most during times of war is not a new phenomenon. It is a reality as old as war itself. What Rumsfeld, Rice and other war criminals of the Cheney administration prefer to call "collateral damage" translates in English as the inexcusable murder of and other irreparable harm done to women, children and the elderly during any military offensive.
US foreign policy in the Middle East manifests itself most starkly in its impact on the children of Iraq. It is they who continue to pay with their lives and futures for the brutal follies of our administration. Starvation under sanctions, and death and suffering during war and occupation are their lot. Since the beginning of the occupation, Iraqi children have been affected worst by the violence generated by the occupying forces and the freedom fighters.
While I had witnessed several instances of this from the time of my first trip to Iraq in November 2003, I was shaken by a close encounter with it, a year later, in November 2004.
In a major Baghdad hospital, 12-year-old Fatima Harouz lay in her bed, dazed, amidst a crowded hospital room. She limply waved her bruised arm at the flies that buzzed over the bed. Her shins, shattered by bullets when American soldiers fired through the front door of her house, were both covered in casts. Small plastic drainage bags filled with red fluid sat upon her abdomen, where she had taken shrapnel from another bullet.
She was from Latifiya, a city just south of Baghdad. Three days before I saw her, soldiers had attacked her home. Her mother, standing with us in the hospital, said, "They attacked our home and there weren't even any resistance fighters in our area." Her brother had been shot and killed, his wife wounded, and their home ransacked by soldiers. "Before they left, they killed all of our chickens," added Fatima's mother, her eyes a mixture of fear, shock and rage. A doctor who was with us as Fatima's mother narrated the story looked at me and sternly asked, "This is the freedom ... in their Disney Land are there kids just like this?"
The doctors' anger was mild if we consider the magnitude of suffering that has been inflicted upon the children of Iraq as a direct result of first the US-backed sanctions and then the failed US occupation.
In a report released by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) on May 2nd of this year, one out of three Iraqi children is malnourished and underweight.
The report states that 25% of Iraqi children between the ages of six months and five years old suffer from either acute or chronic malnutrition. In addition, the Integrated Regional Information Network (IRIN) press release on the matter added, "A 2004 Living Conditions Survey indicated a decrease in mortality rates among children under five years old since 1999. However, the results of a September 2005 Food Security and Vulnerability Analysis - commissioned by Iraq's Central Organization for Statistics and Information Technology, the World Food Program and UNICEF - showed worsening conditions since the April 2003 US-led invasion of the country."
Also this month, on May 15th , a news story about the same UN-backed government survey highlighted that "people are struggling to cope three years after US-forces overthrew Saddam Hussein." The report added that "Children are ... major victims of food insecurity," and described the situation as "alarming." The story continued, "A total of four million Iraqis, roughly 15 percent of the population, were in dire need of humanitarian aid including food, up from 11 percent in a 2003 report, the survey of more than 20,000 Iraqi households found.... Decades of conflict and economic sanctions have had serious effects on Iraqis. Their consequences have been rising unemployment, illiteracy and, for some families, the loss of wage earners."
But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes.
- Carson McCullers
Iraq's ministries of Health and Planning carried out the survey with support from the UN World Food Program and UNICEF. A spokesman for UNICEF's Iraq Support Center in Amman, Jordan, David Singh, told Reuters that the number of acutely malnourished children in Iraq had more than doubled, from 4% during the last year of Saddam's rule to at least 9% in 2005. He also said, "Until there is a period of relative stability in Iraq we are going to continue to face these kinds of problems." UNICEF's special representative for Iraq, Roger Wright, commenting on the dire effects of the situation, said, "This can irreversibly hamper the young child's optimal mental/cognitive development, not just their physical development."
This past March, an article titled "Garbage Dump Second Home for Iraqi Children" addressed the appalling situation in the northern, Kurdish-controlled Iraqi city of Sulaimaniyah where young children assist their families in searching the city garbage dumps. It said that children as young as seven often accompany their parents to the dumps before school, in order to look for reusable items such as shoes, clothing and electrical equipment which is then resold in order to augment the family income.
This disturbing news is not really news in Baghdad. Back in December 2004 I saw children living with their families in the main dump of the capital city.
Poverty in Iraq has plummeted acutely during the invasion and occupation. Those who were already surviving on the margins due to years of deprivation have sunk further, and the children of such families have recourse to no nutrition, no health care, no education, no present and no future. Those from less unfortunate backgrounds are now suffering because the family wage earner has been killed, detained, or lost employment. Or the source of the family's income, a shop, factory or farm have been destroyed, or simply because it is impossible to feed a family under the existing economic conditions of high costs and low to nil income in Iraq.
As execrable as the current situation is for Iraqi children, most of the world media, appallingly, does not see it as a story to be covered. Even back in November 2004, surveys conducted by the UN, aid agencies and the interim Iraqi government showed that acute malnutrition among young children had nearly doubled since the US-led invasion took place in the spring of 2004.
A Washington Post story, "Children Pay Cost of Iraq's Chaos," read, "After the rate of acute malnutrition among children younger than 5 steadily declined to 4 percent two years ago, it shot up to 7.7 percent this year, according to a study conducted by Iraq's Health Ministry in cooperation with Norway's Institute for Applied International Studies and the U.N. Development Program. The new figure translates to roughly 400,000 Iraqi children suffering from "wasting," a condition characterized by chronic diarrhea and dangerous deficiencies of protein."
Not only is the US occupation starving Iraq's children, but occupation forces regularly detain them as well. It is common knowledge in Iraq that there have been child prisoners in the most odious prisons, such as Abu Ghraib, since early on in the occupation. While most, if not all, corporate media outlets in the US have been loath to visit the subject, the Sunday Herald in Scotland reported back in August 2004 that "coalition forces are holding more than 100 children in jails such as Abu Ghraib. Witnesses claim that the detainees - some as young as 10 - are also being subjected to rape and torture."
The story read, "It was early last October that Kasim Mehaddi Hilas says he witnessed the rape of a boy prisoner aged about 15 in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. 'The kid was hurting very bad and they covered all the doors with sheets,' he said in a statement given to investigators probing prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib. 'Then, when I heard the screaming I climbed the door ... and I saw [the soldier's name is deleted] who was wearing a military uniform." Hilas, who was himself threatened with being sexually assaulted in Abu Ghraib, then described in horrific detail how the soldier raped 'the little kid.'"
The newspaper's investigation at that time concluded that there were as many as 107 children being held by occupation forces, although their names were not known, nor their location or the length of their detention.
In June 2004 an internal UNICEF report, which was not made public, noted widespread arrest and detention of Iraqi children by US and UK forces. A section of the report titled "Children in Conflict with the Law or with Coalition Forces," stated, "In July and August 2003, several meetings were conducted with CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority) ... and Ministry of Justice to address issues related to juvenile justice and the situation of children detained by the coalition forces ... UNICEF is working through a variety of channels to try and learn more about conditions for children who are imprisoned or detained, and to ensure that their rights are respected."
Another section of the report added, "Information on the number, age, gender and conditions of incarceration is limited. In Basra and Karbala children arrested for alleged activities targeting the occupying forces are reported to be routinely transferred to an internee facility in Um Qasr. The categorization of these children as 'internees' is worrying since it implies indefinite holding without contact with family, expectation of trial or due process." The report went on to add, "A detention centre for children was established in Baghdad, where according to ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) a significant number of children were detained. UNICEF was informed that the coalition forces were planning to transfer all children in adult facilities to this 'specialized' child detention centre. In July 2003, UNICEF requested a visit to the centre but access was denied. Poor security in the area of the detention centre has prevented visits by independent observers like the ICRC since last December [2003]."
A section of the report which I found very pertinent, as I'd already witnessed this occurring in Iraq, stated, "The perceived unjust detention of Iraqi males, including youths, for suspected activities against the occupying forces has become one of the leading causes for the mounting frustration among Iraqi youth and the potential for radicalization of this population group."
On December 17, 2003, at the al-Shahid Adnan Kherala secondary school in Baghdad, I witnessed US forces detain 16 children who had held a mock, non-violent, pro-Saddam Hussein the previous day. While forces from the First Armored Division sealed the school with two large tanks, helicopters, several Bradley fighting vehicles and at least 10 Humvees, soldiers loaded the children into a covered truck and drove them to their base. Meanwhile, the rest of the students remained locked inside the school until the US military began to exit the area.
Shortly thereafter the doors were unlocked, releasing the frightened students who flocked out the doors. The youngest were 12 years old, and none of the students were older than 18. They ran out, many in tears, while others were enraged as they kicked and shook the front gate. My interpreter and I were surrounded by frenzied students who yelled, "This is the democracy? This is the freedom? You see what the Americans are doing to us here?"
Another student cried out to us, "They took several of my friends! Why are they taking them to prison? For throwing rocks?" A few blocks away we spoke with a smaller group of students who had run from the school (in panic). One student who was crying yelled to me, "Why are they doing this to us? We are only kids!"
The tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles that were guarding the perimeter of the school began to rumble down the street beside us, on their passage out. Several young boys with tears streaming down their faces picked up stones and hurled them at the tanks as they drove by. Imagine my horror when I saw the US soldiers on top of the Bradleys begin firing their M-16's above our heads as we ducked inside a taxi. A soldier on another Bradley, behind the first, passed and fired randomly above our heads as well. Kids and pedestrians ran for cover into the shops and wherever possible.
I remember a little boy, not more than 13 years old, holding a stone and standing at the edge of the street glaring at the Bradleys as they rumbled past. Another soldier riding atop another passing Bradley pulled out his pistol and aimed it at the boy's head and kept him in his sights until the vehicle rolled out of sight.
One of the students hiding behind our taxi screamed to me, "Who are the terrorists here now? You have seen this yourself! We are school kids!"
The very next month, in January 2004, I was in an area on the outskirts of Baghdad that had been pulverized by "Operation Iron Grip." I spoke with a man at his small farm house. His three year old boy, Halaf Ziad Halaf, walked up to me and with a worried look on his face said, "I have seen the Americans here with their tanks. They want to attack us."
His uncle, who had joined us for tea, leaned over to me and said, "The Americans are creating the terrorists here by hurting people and causing their relatives to fight against them. Even this little boy will grow up hating the Americans because of their policy here."
The slaughter, starvation, detention, torture and sexual assault of Iraq's children at the hands of US soldiers or by proxy via US foreign policy, is not a recent phenomenon. It is true that the present US administration has been brazen and blatant in its crimes in Iraq, but those willing to bear witness must not forget that Bill Clinton and his minions played an equally, if not even more devastating role in the assault on the children of Iraq.
On May 12, 1996, Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked by Lesley Stahl on "60 Minutes" about the effects of US sanctions against Iraq, "We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?"
In a response which has now become notorious, Albright replied, "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price - we think the price is worth it."
We are guilty of many errors and many faults but our worst crime is abandoning the children, neglecting the fountain of life. Many of the things we need can wait. The child cannot. Right now is the time his bones are being formed, his blood is being made, and his senses are being developed. To him we cannot answer "Tomorrow." His name is "Today."
- Gabriela Mistral
To all Americans who, despite voluminous evidence to the contrary, continue to believe that they are supporting a war for democracy in Iraq, I would like to say, the way Iraq is headed it will have little use for democracy and freedom. We must find ways to stop the immoral, soulless, repugnant occupation if we want the children of Iraq to see any future at all.
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Tariq Aziz testifies as defence witness in Saddam Hussein trial
04:03:25 EDT May 24, 2006
SINAN SALAHEDDIN
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Tariq Aziz, once a close member of Saddam Hussein's inner circle, took the stand Wednesday as a defence witness in the trial of the former Iraqi leader.
Aziz, a former foreign minister and deputy prime minister, sat on the stand wearing checkered pyjamas and looked pale. Aziz, who is in U.S. custody, has complained of health problems and his family has been pressing for him to be let out temporarily for medical treatment.
Chief judge Raouf Abdel-Rahman opened the session with a sharp warning to the defence lawyers and the eight defendants that he would not allow insults to the court. In the previous session, Abdel-Rahman threw out a woman defence lawyer when she tried to speak after he warned he not to.
"From the beginning, we have said that this court is a transparent one and the defence team and defendants are allowed to express their attitude in a democratic way. No one is allowed, who whoever he is and under any name, to attack the court, its employees and Iraqi people." he said.
Abdel-Rahman has shown increasing frustration with the defendants' constant accusations that the court was formed by Americans and is illegitimate. The lawyer he ejected, Bushra al-Khalil, has made that argument in past sessions, though she didn't on Monday when she was forced out.
The judge's comments sparked an argument with Saddam and his fellow defendant, former intelligence chief Barzan Ibrahim, who stood and chided Abdel-Rahman for being too harsh.
"Your honour, you are before a big case, and we all have to control ourselves and deal with each other in a calm way. You insulted a woman last time," he said.
"Sit down. If you continue with this I'll throw you out," Abdel-Rahmamn shouted. At first Ibrahim tried to argue with him, but a guard entered the defendants' pen, and Ibrahim sat down.
"Do you want to shut people's mouth this way?" Saddam spoke up from him seat.
"Quiet. You are a defendant," Abdel-Rahman yelled.
"I am Saddam Hussein, your president, and you did elect me," Saddam shouted back.
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Euronews
President Bush no hero in US films at Cannes
CANNES, France, May 21, 2006 (AFP)
US directors are using this year's Cannes Film Festival to pummel President George W. Bush, showing movies that take the US leader to task for everything ranging from sexual repression, Iraq, corporate collusion and climate change.
Sunday saw one of the most egregious attacks in the form of 'Southland Tales' by Richard Kelly, the director behind 2001's cult movie 'Donnie Darko'.
In his new film, a satire set in a dystopian future Los Angeles, broad parallels are drawn between fascist pre-WWII Germany and the United States under a Bush government that holds onto power well into 2008.
A star-heavy cast moves the story along as it takes scattershot aim at a range of targets, particularly the war in Iraq, Big Brother-style spying on US citizens, the US dependence on energy and the fusion between celebrity and politics.
Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson plays a big-name actor tied to a political family who tries to unravel a plot involving him travelling into the future and back and trying to stop Armageddon. And any resemblance to a certain California governor who starred in 'The Terminator' is coincidental.
Red-carpet time in Cannes
Also spotted is 'Buffy' star Sarah Michelle Gellar, putting in a delightful turn as a marketing-savvy porn star, and pop singer Justin Timberlake who treats the sometimes befuddled audience to a music clip underlining the damage the US military has taken in Iraq.
"The film is meant to be a tapestry of ideas all related to the biggest issues we're facing right now," Kelly told a media conference.
Although it depicts "the very sad situation that we find ourselves as a country," he stressed. "I love our country and I'm a very patriotic person and the movie is meant to be a patriotic piece to say 'Let's solve these problems'."
'Southland Tales' covered some of the same ground as another, edgier US film, 'Shortbus', which is filled provocatively with scenes of real sex in what director John Cameron Mitchell said was "a call to arms" against the Bush administration.
Both films had scenes where renditions of the US national anthem were played as a way for the left-wing directors to reclaim the flag from America's ruling right.
Only 'Shortbus' did it in a memorable way that surely has to be a first on celluloid: bellowed into the anus of a man during a three-way gay sex romp.
Mitchell said his offensive against the fears surrounding sex had much to do with living in "the era of Bush, which is about clamping down, being scared".
He added by way of justification of his movie: "If you can't do elections you might as well do erections."
More stitched up than either of those two movies was a documentary also seen in Cannes' official line-up featuring former US vice president Al Gore Saturday and his personal crusade against global warming.
'An Inconvienent Truth', fronted by Gore, explains the dangerous path which the planet is pursuing, and presents statistics confirming the place of the United States as the principal energy-guzzler and principal polluter.
In it, the man who almost was president, admits that his defeat by Bush was "a hard blow" - made all the harder because it made it tougher for him to get his environmental campaign on to the political agenda.
"The key to solving this crisis depends upon the people demanding action and not just of a president, but of the Congress as well," Gore told journalists Saturday.
'Fast Food Nation', a pointed jab at the creeping consumerism of US society and the power of corporations to dehumanise workers, also earned applause for its director, Richard Linklater, especially during a scene where characters proclaimed it their patriotic duty to violate the US Patriot Act.
Other films being screened out of the official selection are taking further pot shots at the US leader, who has been a favourite punching bag with the mainly independent filmmaking crowd at Cannes since he first came to power in 2001.
But for all the fairly predictable shows of support the films are getting during their screenings, there is also a feeling that the blows are landing wide - ineffective against a president who has already survived the onslaught behind the Cannes 2003 winner, 'Fahrenheit 9/11'.
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France joins joint nuclear proliferation training
ANKARA, May 23, 2006 (AFP)
Land, air and naval forces from Turkey, the United States, France and Portugal will hold a joint military exercise aimed at preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction, officials said Tuesday.
The May 24-26 exercise is part of the Proliferation Security Initiative, a three-year-old US-led effort that aims to stop shipments of biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons, missiles and goods used to produce weapons of mass destruction, to terrorists and suspect countries.
The drills come at a time of deadlock in the international dispute over the nuclear programme of Iran, Turkey's eastern neighbour, which the US claims hides the secret development of atomic weapons.
The Turkish foreign ministry, however, underlined in a statement that the games, which were decided on last year, did not target any country.
The first phase of the event, codenamed Anatolian Sun 2006, will consist of a computer-simulated exercise and a naval exercise in the Mediterranean Sea off Turkey's southern coast, the Turkish general staff said in a statement.
The scenario for the second phase involves measures to stop a commercial vessel suspected of carrying goods that could be used to manufacture weapons of mass destruction, it said.
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Poland to send 50 troops to Afghanistan
www.chinaview.cn 2006-05-24 11:13:50
WARSAW, May 23 (Xinhua) -- The Polish government decided to send 46 soldiers and four auxiliary members to Afghanistan in September to support the NATO-led peacekeeping forces, a local news agency said on Tuesday.
At present Poland has deployed about 100 soldiers in Afghanistan since its presence began in the post-Taliban nation in 2002.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has decided to increase International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) from about 10,000 at present to 15,000 by this summer, making Afghanistan the biggest NATO operation in history.
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EU constitution needs 'second chance': Giscard
LONDON, May 23, 2006 (AFP)
France should give the European Union constitutional treaty a "second chance" after its voters rejected it last year, former French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing said in an interview published Tuesday.
Giscard told the Financial Times that the treaty, whose drafting he oversaw as president of the European Convention, should be reconsidered after next year's presidential elections in France.
"I wish that we will have a new chance, a second chance, for the constitutional project," following its rejection in a referendum in May last year, said Giscard, 80.
"There are 16 out of 25 countries that have ratified the European constitution. That's to say there's a qualified majority. There is an agreed text," he told the British daily.
"The concern now is the modalities of adopting it," said Giscard, leaving open the possibility of another referendum or a vote in parliament.
Giscard said voters rejected the constitution - which Brussels argues is needed to prevent decision-making gridlock in the expanding bloc - because of the French government's unpopularity and a poor campaign to sell it to voters.
"If we had chosen to have a parliamentary vote last year the constitution would have been easily adopted. It is the method that has provoked the rejection," he said.
"Legally, we could vote again," he said.
Nor would it be "anti-democratic" to hold another referendum, he added. "People have the right to change their opinion. The people might consider they made a mistake."
Giscard said he believed that British voters would never approve the constitutional treaty and proposed instead "a special arrangement resembling that which applied to the euro."
To come into force, the constitutional treaty, hammered out by EU governments ahead of the bloc's 2004 expansion, must be ratified by all 25 member states.
European Commission President José Manuel Barroso has said any decision on the future of the constitution should be delayed until 2008, calling for the best to be made of existing treaties in the meantime.
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Estonia, Luxembourg urge EU consititution ratification
www.chinaview.cn 2006-05-24 12:41:28
RIGA, May 23 (Xinhua) -- Estonia and Luxembourg on Tuesday called on the European Union to continue with the ratification of the EU constitution, said reports from Tallinn, capital of Estonia.
The two countries made the appeal during the meeting between Estonian Prime Minister Urmas Paet and visiting Luxembourg Deputy Prime Minister Jean Asselborn.
Those countries which have not started the process of ratification should take actions to push the process forward, although France and The Netherlands vetoed the constitution, said Asselborn, noting Finland is very likely to adopt the constitution in its upcoming referendum.
Paet also expressed his support for the process.
The EU constitution was designed to streamline EU institutions and improve the efficiency of the bloc's decision-making after the group expanded from its original 15 members to 25.
Fifteen EU members have approved the charter, while France and The Netherlands rejected the charter in 2005. Following the two rejections, Britain, Portugal, Denmark, Sweden and Poland said the ratification process should be postponed.
On June 16, 2005, the EU leaders decided during a summit to extend the ratification deadline beyond the scheduled November 2006.
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Armaments Found in Batches of Potatoes
Monday, 22 May 2006, 18:00 CDT
LONDON - Workers at a french fries factory in northern England had to be evacuated on two consecutive days last week when armaments suspected to date back to World Wars I and II were discovered in batches of imported European potatoes, the company said Monday.
Canadian-based McCain Foods - the world's largest producer of frozen french fries - said employees at its plant in Scarborough, 250 miles north of London, discovered a suspected hand grenade on Saturday, a day after a shell tip was found among a batch of potatoes.
On both occasions, police and bomb squad officials set up an exclusion zone and the devices were detonated in a controlled explosion, a statement from the company said.
"There was no danger to the general public on either days," it added.
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Around the World
Bolivia rebuts Bush's accusations of undermining democracy
www.chinaview.cn 2006-05-24 10:06:14
LIMA, May 23 (Xinhua) -- The Bolivian government on Tuesday rebutted U.S. President George W. Bush's criticism that Bolivia is eroding democracy, according to reports from La Paz, capital of Bolivia.
Bush's criticism was "barely credible," said Alex Contreras, spokesman for the Bolivian government. He called on Bush to respect Bolivia's dignity and sovereignty.
"The administration of President Evo Morales is promoting and strengthening democracy," said Contreras, noting the Bolivia-U.S. diplomatic ties should be without interference."
He said no nations can force Bolivia to take a direction which it does not want to.
"It would be truer to say that the United States is eroding democracy," said the spokesman, accusing Washington of supporting dictatorship and interfering in other countries' internal affairs.
Bush on Monday criticized Bolivia's nationalization of its natural gas industry, saying he was "concerned about of erosion of democracy" in Bolivia.
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Karzai orders probe of Afghan village bombardment
Last Updated Tue, 23 May 2006 14:35:02 EDT
CBC News
Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai has requested an investigation into a series of U.S. air military strikes aimed at Taliban militants that also killed at least 16 villagers.
Karzai also wants to meet with the top American military commander in his country, the president's office said Tuesday.
The coalition attacks late Sunday and early Monday targeted the village of Azizi, located in Kandahar province.
No Canadian forces were involved in the attack, which reportedly killed as many as 80 Taliban militants.
The Associated Press said Karzai voiced "concern at the coalition forces' decision to bomb civilian areas" while condemning what he called the "terrorists' act of cowardice" in sheltering themselves in the houses of innocent villagers.
The battle was one of the largest in terms of combatant and civilian casualties since coalition forces arrived in Afghanistan in 2002.
Fighting called 'very intense'
On Monday, coalition spokesman Maj. Scott Lundy called the hostilities "one of the most significant single engagements that we've had in the recent past."
Taliban insurgents who survived an initial gun battle ran into nearby homes in Azizi, continuing to shoot at coalition forces from residential rooftops and window wells.
"Coalition forces were under pressure and taking a lot of fire," Lundy said. "It was very intense."
After the commander on the ground called for air strikes, U.S. military helicopters and A-10 Warthog airplanes delivered rockets and bombs.
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Violence worsening in Darfur: reports
Last Updated Tue, 23 May 2006 08:45:44 EDT
CBC News
The violence in Sudan's Darfur region that has already killed more than 180,000 people is getting worse, two new human rights reports warn.
In the first report released Tuesday, a United Nations body said the Sudanese government is not keeping its pledge to stop attacks on black African civilians, including killings and violent sexual assaults.
"In Darfur, the government and rebels should immediately respect the governing cease-fire agreement," said the report from the UN's High Commissioner for Human Rights, referring to a May 5 deal that was supposed to bring hostilities to an end.+
"The government should also disarm the militia and protect the physical security of all Darfurians by putting in place a credible, capable and professional police force and judiciary."
In some cases, the UN report said, the Sudanese government has added to the terror of Darfur refugees - even as it tried to help them - by using military attack craft to fly in emergency relief.
"Particularly alarming is that the government reverted to using helicopter gunships on various occasions," it said of the aid flights.
In the past three years, the region in western Sudan has become a drought-plagued killing ground, forcing more than 2.5 million people to leave their homes in a desperate search for safety.
Most of the refugees are being housed in camps elsewhere in Sudan and in neighbouring Chad.
Food is in short supply, the United Nations warned earlier this month as it called for developed nations to donate more to the relief effort.
Amnesty report blasts global priorities
A separate report released Tuesday by Amnesty International said Darfur and similar crises around the world are being ignored as nations such as the United States concentrate on the so-called war against terrorism.
China and Russia were also singled out in the group's 2006 report card as countries that put their own security ahead of human rights issues.
"Governments collectively and individually paralyzed international institutions and squandered public resources in pursuit of narrow security interests, sacrificed principles in the name of the 'war on terror' and turned a blind eye to massive human rights abuses," the secretary-general of Amnesty International, Irene Khan, said in a statement linked to the report.
The report called on the UN to intervene in Darfur to stop Arab janjaweed militiamen from committing atrocities that many say are condoned - if not outright sponsored - by the Sudanese government.
"Intermittent attention and feeble action by the United Nations and the African Union fell pathetically short of what was needed in Darfur," Khan said.
The Amnesty International report also addressed other issues around the world:
* It called on the U.S. to shut down its prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where many suspected militants and al-Qaeda sympathizers have been held for years without charges, and reveal where else around the world it is holding similar prisoners.
* Describing the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq as having resulted in "a vortex of sectarian violence," it called for a change in strategy to improve the safety and prospects of ordinary Iraqis.
* It challenged the UN to insist on respect for human rights in places ranging from Colombia to Uzbekistan to Chechnya.
The report said placing greater value on "human rights and human security" around the world would naturally lead to fewer acts of terrorism.
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'Stargazer' Says He Fell Down Chimney
Monday, 22 May 2006, 18:00 CDT
BRAWLEY, Calif. - A man faces a burglary charge after police found him stuck in a chimney. Matthew Allen, 27, told police he fell down the chimney after going on to the roof of the house to look at the stars.
When he got stuck near the bottom of the chimney, he took his pants off and began waving them around to set off the home's motion detectors. Brawley police officers were dispatched to the house twice Saturday morning but saw no signs of an intruder.
Neighbors eventually heard a commotion coming from the house and called the police.
"I've read and heard of things like that before," Brawley Fire Capt. Manuel Sevilla said, "but I've never seen it. The situation, it was more funny than anything." Fire workers lowered a chain ladder to Allen, who was able to climb out from the chimney.
When transported to Pioneers Memorial Hospital in Brawley for treatment Allen tried to flee but was detained by hospital staff.
Allen, who had a warrant for his arrest for driving under the influence of alcohol, faces a count of residential burglary.
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5 Run Over at Ga. McDonald's; 3 Are Tots
By CHARLES ODUM
Associated Press
May 23, 2006
COVINGTON, Ga. - A man ran over three toddlers and two adults with his car in the parking lot of a McDonald's restaurant Tuesday, police said, and one witness described him as having a smile on his face. Lanny Barnes, 46, was in custody and charges against him were pending.
"All indications are that he intentionally hit them," Assistant Police Chief Almond Turner said.
The children - ages 2 to 4 - were airlifted to a hospital in Atlanta and were in critical condition, Turner said. The two women were taken to a Covington hospital; one was in critical condition and the other was stable, he said.
Barnes' mother, Mary, told The Associated Press her son has battled mental illness.
"He's been suffering with depression for years," she said, her voice shaking after being told by a reporter what happened. "Lord have mercy."
Ryan Boldman-Snyder, 20, an employee at the McDonald's restaurant, was on a break outside when he heard screaming, and said Barnes was "smiling the whole time."
"He came with the intent to hurt somebody," Boldman-Snyder said.
Witnesses tried to pull Barnes out of his car in the restaurant parking lot. Police officers finally pulled him out of the car from the passenger-side front door, Boldman-Snyder said.
McDonald's area franchise manager Bill Hall said the company was deeply saddened by the tragedy.
"Our prayers are with the victims, the children, and their families. We are cooperating fully with the authorities as they investigate," Hall said.
Hall said the restaurant, about 30 miles southeast of Atlanta, would remain closed for the rest of the day and counseling was being provided for employees.
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Zionism in Action
Sharon's Legacy in Action
Tanya Reinhart
The Electronic Intifada
23 May 2006
At the present, the Western world seems still under the spell of the legend of Ariel Sharon, who, so the story goes, has brought a gigantic change in Israeli policy - from expansion and occupation to moderation and concessions - a vision to be further implemented by his successor, Ehud Olmert. Since the evacuation of the Gaza Strip settlements, the dominant Western narrative has been that Israel has done its part towards ending the occupation and declared its readiness to take further steps, and that now it is the Palestinians' turn to show that they are able to live in peace with their well-intending neighbor.
How did it happen that Sharon, the most brutal, cynical, racist and manipulative leader Israel has ever had, ended his political career as a legendary peace hero? The answer, I believe, is that Sharon has not changed. Rather, the myth built around him reflects the present omnipotence of the propaganda system, which, to paraphrase a notion of Chomsky's, has reached perfection in manufacturing consciousness.
The magic that transformed Sharon in the eyes of the world has been the evacuation of the Gaza settlements. I will return to this point and argue that even this, Sharon did not do out of his own will, but because of unprecedented pressure on him by the U.S. In any case, Sharon clarified right from the start that the evacuation of the settlements does not mean letting Gaza free. The disengagement plan, published in the Israeli papers in April 16, 2004, specified in advance that "Israel will supervise and guard the external envelope on land, will maintain exclusive control in the air space of Gaza, and will continue to conduct military activities in the sea space of the Gaza Strip". [1]
Let us look briefly at Sharon's other record.
During his four years in office, Sharon stalled any chance of negotiations with the Palestinians: -In 2003 - the road map period - the Palestinians accepted the plan and declared a cease fire, but while the Western world was celebrating the new era of peace, the Israeli army, under Sharon, intensified its policy of assassinations, maintained the daily harassment of the occupied Palestinians, and eventually declared an all-out war on Hamas, killing all its first rank of military and political leaders.
Later, as the Western world was holding its breath again, in a year and a half of waiting for the planned Gaza pullout, Sharon did everything possible to fail the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, who was elected in January 2005. Sharon declared that Abbas is not a suitable partner (because he does not fight terror) and turned down all his offers of renewed negotiations. The daily reality of the Palestinians in the occupied territories was never as grim as in the period of Sharon. In the West Bank, Sharon started a massive project of ethnic cleansing in the areas bordering with Israel. His wall project robs the land of the Palestinian villages in these areas, imprisons whole towns, and leaves their residents with no means of sustenance. If the project continues, many of the 400.000 Palestinians affected by it will have to leave and seek their livelihood in the outskirts of cities in the center of the West Bank, as happened already in northern West Bank town of Qalqilia.
The Israeli settlements were evacuated from the Gaza Strip, but the Strip remains a big prison, completely sealed from the outside world, nearing starvation and terrorized from land, sea and air by the Israeli army. The question that preoccupied the Israeli political and military elites since the seizure of the Palestinian territories in 1967, was how to maintain maximum area of land with minimum number of Palestinians. The Labor party's Alon plan, which was realized in Oslo, was to keep about 40% of the West Bank, but allow the Palestinians autonomy in the other 60%. However, Barak and Sharon destroyed the Oslo arrangements. The model that Israel has developed under Sharon is a complex system of prisons. The Palestinians are being pushed into locked and sealed enclaves, fully controlled from the outside by the Israeli army, who enters the enclaves at will. As far as I know this imprisonment of a whole people is an unprecedented model of occupation, and it is being executed with frightening speed and efficiency.
At the same time, what Sharon has brought to perfection was the manufacturing of consciousness, showing that war can be always marketed as the tireless pursuit of peace. He proved that Israel can imprison the Palestinians, bombard them from the air, steal their land in the West Bank, stall any chance for peace, and still be hailed by the Western world as the peaceful side in the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Sharon has now retired from political life, but that alone does not bid any change. Sharon's legacy is well alive. It has brewed for over a decade in the Israeli military, which, in effect, is the dominant factor in Israeli politics.
The military is the most stable - and most dangerous - political factor in Israel. As an Israeli analyst stated it already in 2001, "in the last six years, since October 1995, there were five prime ministers and six defense ministers, but only two chiefs-of-staff." [2] Israeli military and political systems have always been closely intertwined, with generals moving from the army straight to the government, but the army's political status was further solidified during Sharon's cadency. It is often apparent that the real decisions are made by the military rather than the political echelon. Military seniors brief the press (they capture at least half of the news space in the Israeli media), and brief and shape the views of foreign diplomats; they go abroad on diplomatic missions, outline political plans for the government, and express their political views on any occasion.
In contrast to the military's stability, the Israeli political system is in a gradual process of disintegration. In a World Bank report of April 2005, Israel is found to be one of the most corrupt and least efficient in the Western world, second only to Italy in the government corruption index, and lowest in the index of political stability. [3] Sharon personally was associated, together with his sons, with severe bribery charges that have never reached the court. The new party that Sharon has founded, Kadima, and which now heads the government, is a hierarchical conglomeration of individuals with no party institutions or local branches. Its guidelines, published in November 22, 2005, enable its leader to bypass all standard democratic processes and to appoint the list of the party's candidates to the parliament without voting or approval of any party body. [4]
The Labor party has not been able to offer an alternative. In the last two Israeli elections, Labor elected dovish candidates for prime minister Amram Mitzna in 2003, and Amir Peretz in 2006. Both were received initially with enormous enthusiasm, but were immediately silenced by their party and campaign advisors and by self imposed censorship, aiming to situate themselves "at the center of the political map". Soon, their program became indistinguishable from that of Sharon. Peretz even declared that on "foreign and security" matters he will do exactly as Sharon, or later Olmert, and he only differs from them on social issues. Thus, these candidates helped convince the Israeli voters that Sharon's way is the right way. In recent years, there has never been a substantial left-wing opposition to the rule of Sharon and the generals, since after the elections, Labor would always join the government, providing the dovish image that the generals need for the international show.
With the collapse of the political system, the army remains the body that shapes and executes Israel's policies, and as is already obvious in the few months since Sharon left office, the army is determined to carry out his legacy, together with Sharon's successor, Ehud Olmert. For this, it is essential that whatever Israel does be packaged as painful concessions. Right now, we are at the dawn of a new "peace plan" promoted by Olmert.
Olmert may have coined the name of this plan, but the copyright belongs to Sharon. On January 2nd 2006, shortly before Sharon left office, the Israeli paper Ma'ariv disclosed the plan he intended to present for the West Bank. The plan rests on US eventual acknowledgment that the Road Map was stalemated - and that in fact it has always been a "non-starter", given that (according to Israel's official line), there has never been a genuine Palestinian partner for peace. This was still before the Palestinian elections that brought Hamas to power, but from Israel's perspective no Palestinian leadership was ever an appropriate partner. Sharon argued that the PA under Abbas failed to fulfill its obligations to combat the terror network. In the absence of a suitable partner, Israel should set its borders unilaterally - that is to say, decide for itself how much Palestinian land it needs to take, and disengage from the rest. According to this plan, negotiations with the U.S. should lead to a "signed agreement with Washington that determines the final eastern border of Israel." The American-Israeli agreement will include "fast completion of the fence [wall]... that would become a real border fence." [5]
On the eve of the Israeli elections Olmert publicly unveiled the plan, which later became the official plan of the new Israeli government, under the title consolidation, or convergence. He emphasized that Israel's new border would correspond to the route of the Wall, which would be completed before the disengagement starts. [6] To bring the plan to fruition, the wall would have to move even further east than its present route, and Olmert is explicit in outlining his views on its final location. He wants to make sure that "Israel holds on to [the settlements of] Ariel, Ma'aleh Adumim, the Jerusalem envelope and Gush Etzion," as well as establishing Israeli control in the Jordan Valley. [7] A glance at the map would reveal that the areas Israel would annex unilaterally under this plan amount to about 40% of the West Bank.
Olmert believes that circumstances are currently favorable for enforcing this "solution" on the Palestinians, because following Hamas' victory in the Palestinian election it should become even more evident to the world that there is no Palestinian partner for peace negotiations. He said: "There is now a 'window of opportunity' for reaching an international agreement on setting the border, in the wake of Hamas' rise to power and... support following the Gaza pullout." [8] At the level of declaration, the plan includes potential evacuation of settlements east of the new border. However, unlike the Gaza disengagement plan, no time table is set for this intended evacuation, and no list of the settlements to be evacuated was published. In any case, should a scenario of evacuation arise, the plan is to keep the West Bank Palestinian enclaves under full Israeli control, as happened in Gaza. Olmert was explicit about this in the public announcement of his plan. The arrangements after the disengagement will "provide the Israel Defense Forces with freedom of action in the West Bank, similar to the post-disengagement situation in the Gaza Strip." [9]
Olmert's plan, then, is to turn Sharon's legacy into reality annex to Israel 40% of the West Bank and apply the Gaza model of prison to the remaining Palestinian enclaves. But Olmert is Israel's new man of peace.
These are difficult times, when Sharon's legacy seems to be winning, with no barriers of international law or justice on its road of destruction.
Less then two years ago, on July 9 2004, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued its ruling on the "Legal Consequence of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory". The court found the current route of the wall to be a serious and egregious violation of international law. The first reactions in Israel were of worried concern. In mid August 2004, Attorney General Menachem Mazuz presented the government with a report stating: "It is hard to exaggerate the negative ramifications the International Court ruling will have on Israel on many levels, even on matters that lie beyond the separation fence. The decision creates a political reality for Israel on the international level, that may be used to expedite actions against Israel in international forums, to the point that they may result in sanctions." [10] Israel hastened to clarify that the wall is a temporary security barrier, which in no way would determine facts on the ground. But in the current political atmosphere, Israel declares it intends to make this wall its border, and no European government even blinks.
Still a year ago, the Western world was celebrating the dawn of democracy in the Middle East. Following Arafat's departure, the Palestinians were engaging in a real election campaign. Hamas declared its intention to participate in the elections, and to shift from armed struggle to working in the political arena. One would think that this would be viewed as an encouraging and positive development after years of bloodshed. Indeed, the U.S. insisted on the election taking place, despite Israel's objections. But alas, the Palestinians have elected the wrong party. How natural it seems to the Western world that the Palestinian people should be collectively punished for their wrong understanding of democracy. The U.S. dictates, and Europe agrees that all aid to Palestinians should be cut, leaving them close to starvation, with the remaining infra-structure and health system crumbling.
Nevertheless, the last few years were not just years of victory for Israel's expansion. From the long run perspective of maintaining Israel's occupation of the West Bank, the evacuation of the Gaza settlements was a defeat.
A prevailing view in critical circles is that Sharon decided to evacuate the Gaza settlements because maintaining them was too costly, and he decided to focus efforts on his central goal of keeping the West Bank and expanding its settlements. But, in fact, there is no real evidence for this view.
Of course, the occupation of Gaza has always been costly, and even from the perspective of the most committed Israeli expansionists, Israel does not need this piece of land, one of the most densely populated in the world, and lacking any natural resources. The problem is that one cannot let Gaza free, if one wants to keep the West Bank. A third of the occupied Palestinians live in the Gaza strip. If they are given freedom, they would become the center of Palestinian struggle for liberation, with free access to the Western and Arab world. To control the West Bank, Israel had to stick to Gaza. And once it is clear that Gaza needs to be occupied and controlled, the previous model of occupation was the optimal choice. The Strip was controlled from the inside by the army, and the settlements provided the support system for the army, and the moral justification for the soldiers' brutal job of occupation. It makes their presence there a mission of protecting the homeland. Control from the outside may be cheaper, but in the long run, it has no guarantee of success.
Furthermore, since the Oslo years, the settlements were conceived both locally and internationally as a tragic problem that, despite Israel's good intentions to end the occupation, cannot be solved. This useful myth was broken with the evacuation of the Gaza settlements, which showed how easy it is, in fact, to evacuate settlements, and how big the support is in Israeli society for doing that.
Although I cannot go into the details here, I argue in l'heritage de Sharon,[11] that Sharon did not evacuate the Gaza settlements out of his own will, but rather, that he was forced to do so. Sharon cooked up his disengagement plan as a means to gain time, at the peak of international pressure that followed Israel's sabotaging of the road map and its construction of the West Bank wall. Still, at every moment since then, till the very end, he was looking for ways to sneak out of this commitment, as he did with all his commitments before. But this time he was forced to actually carry it out by the Bush administration. Though it was kept fully behind the screens, the pressure was quite massive, including military sanctions. The official pretext for the sanctions was Israel's arm sale to China, but in previous occasions, the crisis was over as soon as Israel agreed to cancel the deal. This time, the sanctions were unprecedented, and lasted until the signing of the crossing agreement in November 2005.
The story of the Gaza evacuation shows that international pressure can force Israel into concessions. I argue there (l'heritage de Sharon) that he reason the U.S. exerted pressure on Israel, for the first time in recent history, was because at that time, as the U.S. was sinking in the mire of Iraq, it was impossible to ignore the widespread global discontent over Israel's policies and unswerving US support of them. (For example, in a comprehensive European poll, the majority viewed Israel as the country most threatening to world peace. [12]) The US had to yield to public opinion.
From the U.S. perspective, its goal of appeasing international pressure had been achieved with the evacuation of the Gaza settlements. Western leaders and media were euphoric over the new developments in the Middle East. As long as international calm is maintained, Palestinian suffering plays no role in US calculations. The U.S. administration has made it clear "to its friends in Europe and the Arab world that Israel has fulfilled its part of the process, and now it is time to leave Israel alone and expect the Palestinians to do their part." [13]
Nevertheless the fact that pressure was put on Israel even for a short while, also shows the limits of power and propaganda. Despite the apparent success of pro Israeli lobbies in silencing any criticism of Israeli policies in Western political discourse, the Palestinian struggle for justice has penetrated global consciousness. This begins with the Palestinian people, who have withstood years of brutal oppression and through their daily endurance, organizing and resistance, have managed to keep the Palestinian cause alive, something that not all oppressed nations have managed to do. It continues with international struggle solidarity movements that send their people to the occupied territories and stand in vigils at home, professors signing boycott petitions, subjecting themselves to daily harassment, a few courageous journalists that insist on covering the truth, against the pressure of acquiescent media and pro-Israel lobbies. Often this struggle seems futile, but still it has penetrated global consciousness. It is this collective consciousness that eventually forced the U.S. to pressure Israel into some, albeit limited, concessions. The Palestinian cause can be silenced for a while, as is happening now, but it will resurface.
Tanya Reinhartis a lecturer in linguistics, media and cultural studies at Tel Aviv University and the University of Utrecht. She is the author of several books, including Israel/Palestine: How to End the 1948 War (Seven Stories Press, 2002).
Footnotes
[1] Section III, Security reality after the evacuation, clause 1. The published plan is available at: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=416024&contrassID=1&subContrassID=1&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y.
[2] Amir Oren, Ha'aretz, October 19, 2001.
[3] Ora Coren, Israel ranks among most corrupt in West, Ha'aretz, April 8, 2005.
[4] Gil Hoffman, 'National Responsibility' name of PM's new party, Jerusalem Post ,November 23, 2005.
[5] Amnon Dankner and Ben Kaspit, The road blast Sharon's new initiative, Ma'ariv, January 2 2006 (Hebrew; www.nrg.co.il/online/1/ART1/027/938.html).
[6] Aluf Benn and Yossi Verter, "Olmert to Offer Settlers: Expand blocs, cut outposts," Ha'aretz, March 3 2006.
[7] Olmert said: "I believe that in four years' time, Israel will be disengaged from the vast majority of the Palestinian population, within new borders, with the route of the fence - which until now has been a security fence - adjusted to the new line of the permanent borders."
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Yuval Yoaz, Hague fence ruling may lead to sanctions, Ha'aretz, August 19, 2004.
[11] L'Héritage de Sharon, Détruire La Palestine, Suite, La Fabrique, Paris, April 2006. An extended version will appear in English as The Road Map to Nowhere: Israel/Palestine since 2003, Verso, July 2006.
[12] Thomas Fuller, Herald Tribune, October 31 2003.
[13] Aluf Benn, "Leaving Gaza - The Day After," Ha'aretz, September 12 2005.
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Israel gives Hamas until end of year to recognize Israel, renounce violence
02:56:54 EDT May 24, 2006
JERUSALEM (AP) - Israel will move ahead with plans to unilaterally draw its final borders by 2010 if Hamas does not recognize Israel and renounce violence within six months, a senior Israeli Cabinet minister said Wednesday.
The minister, Haim Ramon, a close associate of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, spoke just hours after U.S. President George W. Bush referred in surprisingly warm tones to the Israeli leader's plan to unilaterally withdraw from chunks of the West Bank.
In recent weeks, Israeli officials apparently suspected Bush would give the idea a cold welcome during Olmert's first meeting as prime minister with the U.S. president. As a result, they were spare on details, refusing to attach a timeline to the broad pullout.
But during his meeting with Olmert Tuesday, Bush called the idea an "important step" toward peace.
Israeli officials emphasized Wednesday that Hamas must recognize Israel, accept past peace agreements and renounce violence before peace talks can begin.
"If these things don't happen, we won't wait for years, but rather we will wait until the end of this year," Ramon told Israel Radio. "This will be a year of diplomacy."
"First negotiations, and after the negotiations, if it doesn't succeed and it becomes clear that there is no (Palestinian) partner, we will move ahead with the consolidation plan," Ramon said, calling the withdrawal by the name given to it by the Israeli government.
Backed by the international community, Israel has cut all ties with the Palestinian Authority and slapped debilitating sanctions on the Hamas-led government. Hamas has so far rejected the three conditions that are supported by the United States and other Western countries.
If the conditions are not accepted, Israel will have contacts with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas - the Fatah leader who was elected separately from Hamas - but will not hold peace talks, Dov Weisglass, one of Olmert's most senior advisers, told Israel Radio.
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Back to the Future
Head'em Off At the Past: At last, a way to test time travel
Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition.
Marcus Chown
22 May 2006
THE title of Heinrich Päs's latest paper might not mean much to you. To those who know their theoretical physics, however, "Closed timelike curves in asymmetrically warped brane universes" contains a revelation. It suggests that time machines might be far more common than we ever thought possible.
Forget trawling the universe in search of rotating black holes or exotic wormhole tunnels that could supposedly let us hop from one instant to another. According to Päs, a physicist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and his colleagues, the door to a time machine could be anywhere and everywhere in our universe. And unlike most other scenarios for time travel, we can test this one here on Earth. "I think the ideas presented are wonderful and exciting," says Bill Louis, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and co-spokesperson for the MiniBoone neutrino experiment at Fermilab, near Chicago. "The question is are they true or not."
Louis is right to be cautious. Although nothing in the laws of nature appears to rule out time travel, physicists have always been uneasy about it because it makes a mockery of causality, the idea that cause always precedes effect. Violating causality would play havoc with the universe, for instance, allowing you to travel back in time and prevent your own birth.
Such paradoxes are what led Stephen Hawking to propose his "chronology protection conjecture". This basically says that some principle of physics, perhaps as yet undiscovered, will always come to the rescue and prevent time travel from happening. Yet no one had been able to flesh out the details until three years ago when several groups of researchers claimed that string theory, physicists' best stab at a prospective "theory of everything", was beginning to close the door on time machines (New Scientist, 20 September 2003, p 28).
All very well, except theoretical physicists are notorious for never taking no for an answer. Päs and his colleagues Sandip Pakvasa of the University of Hawaii and Thomas Weiler of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, have been re-examining string theory. It views the fundamental building blocks of the universe not as point-like particles but vibrating strings of energy; the faster the vibration the greater the mass of the particle.
Such vibrating strings can account for the myriad interactions of all the known subatomic particles, such as quarks and electrons. But there is a catch - it only works if the strings vibrate in a space-time with 10 dimensions rather than the four with which we are familiar. Proponents of the idea maintain that the extra dimensions are either so fantastically small that we have not noticed them, or so large and warped in such a way that, again, they have remained hidden from view.
This has led to the suggestion that our universe may be like a four-dimensional membrane or "brane" adrift in a higher-dimensional space-time. All of the particles and forces in our universe would be trapped in our brane like flies on fly-paper, so we would have no knowledge of any dimensions other than the four we experience, even though our brane might be floating in a 10-dimensional space-time, or "bulk". "If it is, then there is the possibility of short cuts through higher-dimensional space," says Päs. "It's such short cuts that make time travel possible."
It is not too difficult to visualise such a short cut. Suppose our brane-universe is bent back on itself within a large extra dimension, making it the four-dimensional equivalent of a pancake folded in two. Then you could imagine leaving the brane at one point, travelling a short distance through the bulk and re-entering the brane at a point far away from your starting point.
There is a problem with this picture, however. Although we can visualise a universe where such a short cut is possible, it cannot be our universe. That is because the space-time of such a severely folded brane is not compatible with Einstein's special theory of relativity, which posits a "Euclidean geometry" where space is perfectly flat. Since numerous tests of special relativity have shown that its predictions in our locality are accurate to better than 1 part in a million, it is very unlikely that our universe is shaped like a folded pancake.
Instead Päs, Pakvasa and Weiler consider a space-time where our universe is a flat brane that is immersed in a bulk whose own dimensions are seriously warped. Because the brane is flat, special relativity still applies there. Yet in the bulk, Päs, Pakvasa and Weiler have found that the large dimensions can be distorted in such a way that special relativity does not apply within them. This means that anything moving through the fifth dimension can break one of the founding principles of special relativity: it can travel faster than the speed of light as we know it.
This has dramatic consequences for inhabitants stuck on the brane. To them, any entity that takes a short cut through the bulk appears to vanish and then pops up again at some point on the brane far sooner than it could have had it kept to the brane. For some inhabitants of the brane world, the entity appears to have travelled faster than the speed of light. Weirder still, to others it has also travelled backwards in time. That's because special relativity says that from certain frames of reference, faster-than-light travel is equivalent to travelling backwards in time. "Such off-brane short cuts can appear as 'closed timelike curves'," says Päs - again, that's code for time machines.
Escape from the brane
The trouble with this idea is that it assumes there is some way to escape the confines of the brane and travel out into the bulk. How could we do this? Fortunately string theory provides a way out. In the theory almost all of the building blocks of matter are represented by strings whose ends are forever anchored to the brane. This means they can never escape into the fifth dimension and take a short cut through space-time. But there are two crucial exceptions: the hypothetical carrier of the gravitational force, called the graviton, and a fourth type of neutrino called a sterile neutrino (after the three ordinary kinds of neutrino). In string theory these are represented by closed loops of string. Since they have no ends attached to the brane, they are free to leave and travel into the bulk.
String theorists have pointed to this property of gravitons to explain why gravity is tremendously weaker than nature's other fundamental forces, such as electromagnetism. The idea is that gravity is so weak because a large proportion of gravitons leak away into the extra dimensions of the bulk. More intriguingly, however, their ability to take short cuts through the bulk also means gravitons and sterile neutrinos are potential time travellers. "If we can manipulate them, we can study time travel experimentally," says Päs.
None of this will be easy. No one has ever spotted a graviton or a sterile neutrino, and the odds of detecting them are slim, to say the least (New Scientist, 18 March, p 32). Trillions of ordinary neutrinos pass through our bodies every second, yet we feel nothing because they so rarely interact with electrons and atoms. Sterile neutrinos are even less communicative because they are thought to interact only via the feeble gravitational force and the exchange of the elusive Higgs boson - an as yet undetected particle believed to endow all particles with mass.
Päs and his colleagues point out that a quirk of quantum mechanics could save the day. According to the laws of quantum physics, neutrinos can flip from one kind to another. Experiments in Japan and the US designed to detect neutrinos on the rare occasions they do interact with matter have confirmed that neutrinos spewed out by the sun and those from space do indeed change type. This phenomenon should affect sterile neutrinos too, changing them into ordinary, detectable neutrinos and back again. What's more, the odds of this happening increase whenever the density of the material the neutrinos are travelling through changes abruptly.
This has inspired Päs and his colleagues to propose an experiment that could test their ideas. They suggest sending a beam of ordinary neutrinos through the Earth, from a research station at the South Pole towards a detector located at the equator. When they enter the ground, some of the neutrinos will flip into sterile neutrinos. Capable of taking a short cut though the extra dimensions of the bulk, these sterile neutrinos will reach the other side of the Earth first, apparently having travelled faster than light. As they pass out of the ground into the air again, they will flip back into ordinary neutrinos, which can be detected. Because the Earth is rotating, these faster-than-light neutrinos can appear to have arrived before they set off.
Such an experiment is beyond our current technological capabilities but, remarkably, Päs says it is a realistic proposition within the next 50 years. Of course, it requires two things. The first is the existence of sterile neutrinos. While many physicists are keen on the idea of sterile neutrinos, they are barely beyond theoretical flights of fancy. The other is that we live in an asymmetrically warped space-time, as Päs prescribes. How plausible is this?
When Einstein's came up with his general theory of relativity, he showed us how space-time can be warped or flat, but his equations tell us nothing about the actual shape of our universe - merely that different shapes are possible. For instance, cosmologists have no way of knowing if space stretches out to infinity or curves back on itself. This opens the door to many different types of time machines, some more plausible than others.
One famous solution to Einstein's equations, formulated by mathematician Kurt Gödel, describes a universe that rotates rapidly. Instead of travelling in straight lines, light will appear to travel in a spiral. Gödel realised that this allows a traveller to outrun light and return to their starting point before they left. In other words, Gödel's rotating universe is a time machine. "But we know we don't live in such a universe," says Päs.
Another time machine exists inside rotating black holes, where space-time becomes so warped that space and time change places. The trouble is, as Päs points out, rotating black holes are inaccessible to us. Then there is the space-time surrounding an infinitely long, rapidly rotating cylinder, as proposed by physicist Frank Tipler. Päs is quick to dismiss it too. "It requires huge masses rotating unphysically fast," he says.
Among the other leading contenders are wormholes, microscopic tubes of space-time that act as tunnels from one point to another. But before you climb into one, there is a problem: wormholes snap shut in an instant unless propped open by a supply of something called exotic matter. Unlike the familiar stuff found on Earth, which always feels the pull of gravity, this exotic matter has repulsive gravity, halting the wormhole's collapse. "We don't know whether such matter exists and if it is stable," says Päs.
Päs confesses that the scenario his team has examined also requires exotic matter to warp the fifth dimension, but he still maintains that it is more plausible than the other scenarios. What sets their space-time apart from wormholes is that the hypothetical exotic matter is hidden away in the higher-dimensional bulk instead of roaming around the brane. If it exists, this might explain why we have never seen it.
Understandably, the idea is not without its critics. Sydney Deser of Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, is convinced, as was Einstein, that time machines are not possible and does not like "unphysical" exotic matter. He believes that concealing it in the bulk, as Päs's team suggests, is little better than a scenario in which it is out in the open. "It's only a matter of degree," he says.
Päs, however, points out that the kind of space-times he and his colleagues have considered can do away with a number of problems that have plagued general relativity. For instance, faster-than-light connections between far-flung parts of the cosmos would have allowed heat to flow back and forth across the early universe. This would have evened out any temperature variations, explaining the uniformity that cosmologists observe. This could provide an alternative to the theory of inflation, in which cosmologists believe space-time was stretched unimaginably fast after the big bang, and which would also account for the evenness in temperature. While the majority of cosmologists believe in inflation, no one has explained the detailed physics behind it.
Warped universe
Others do not find asymmetrically warped space-times so plausible. "I certainly think the idea is interesting, but I have some worries," says Tony Padilla of the University of Barcelona in Spain. "For a start, I think it is premature to claim that these space-times are 'natural'. One needs to examine their stability first, and in this case I would expect the solution to be unstable, although I could be wrong."
Padilla concedes that it is possible that we may one day find a stable brane universe with the properties described by Päs's team. "I'm just not convinced we are there yet," he says.
John Cramer of the University of Washington in Seattle agrees that the work outlines some interesting ideas. "The scheme, however, requires asymmetrically warped brane universes - and our universe may not be one of these," he cautions. "Nevertheless, it's a fascinating proposal."
Of course, if time travel is possible in the way Päs envisages, it may be accessible only to special particles like sterile neutrinos and gravitons, and therefore won't cause much havoc in the everyday universe. Päs takes a pragmatic view of all this. As long as the possibility of time machines remains, he believes it is worth exploring experimentally. "Even if time travel is not possible, by manipulating particles like sterile neutrinos we can explore the physics that intervenes to prevent it," he says.
The first answers might come soon courtesy of the MiniBoone neutrino experiment at Fermilab. It could confirm the existence of sterile neutrinos and short cuts in extra dimensions as early as this year. Then again, if time travel really is true, maybe the answer has already been published.
From issue 2552 of New Scientist magazine, 22 May 2006, page 34
Comment: Our Expert, Theoretical/Mathematical Physicist, Professor Arkadiusz Jadczyk tells us that this idea may have glimpses of truth, but it ignores the problems in the foundations of the quantum theory. Time loops are possible in many classical models, and there they lead to contradictions. Taking into account quantum theory may save us from these contradictions, but quantum theory is contradictory itself. So, we have one more hypothesis, but no real progress in our understanding how the universe works.
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Ark's Quantum Quirks
Ark
Signs of the Times
May 24, 2006
16 Megapixel Mouse
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