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Editorial: Italian Probe: Israel Used New Weapon Prototype in Gaza Strip
By Meron Rapoport
Haaretz Correspondent
The investigative team is the same one that exposed, several months ago, the
use by U.S. forces in Iraq of phosphorous bombs, against Iraqi rebels in Faluja.
An investigative report to be aired on Italian television Wednesday raises
the possibility that Israel has used an experimental weapon in the Gaza Strip
in recent months, causing especially serious physical injuries, such as amputated
limbs and severe burns.
The weapon is similar to one developed by the U.S. military, known as DIME,
which causes a powerful and lethal blast, but only within a relatively small
radius.
 |
| Wounds inflicted by the experimental weapons used in strike on the Gaza
Strip |
The Italian report is based on the eyewitness accounts of medical doctors
in the Strip, as well as tests carried out in an Italian laboratory. The investigative
team is the same one that exposed, several months ago, the use by U.S. forces
in Iraq of phosphorous bombs, against Iraqi rebels in Faluja.
Israel Air Force Maj.-Gen (res.) Yitzhak Ben-Israel, formerly head of the
IDF's weapons-development program, told the Italian reporters that "one
of the ideas [behind the weapon] is to allow those targeted to be hit without
causing damage to bystanders or other persons."
The investigation, by Rai24news, follows reports by Gaza-based doctors of
inexplicably serious injuries. The doctors reported an exceptionally large
number of wounded who lost legs, of completely burned bodies and injuries unaccompanied
by metal shrapnel. Some of the doctors also claimed that they removed particles
from wounds that could not be seen in an x-ray machine.
According to those who testified, the wounded were hit by munitions launched
from drones, most of them in July.
Dr. Habas al-Wahid, head of the emergency room at the Shuhada al-Aqsa hospital,
in Deir el-Balah, told the reporters that the legs of the injured were sliced
from their bodies "as if a saw was used to cut through the bone." There
were signs of heat and burns near the point of the amputation, but no signs
that the dismemberment was caused by metal fragments.
Dr. Juma Saka, of Shifa Hospital, in Gaza City, said the doctors found small
entry wounds on the bodies of the wounded and the dead. According to Saka,
a powder was found on the victims' bodies and in their internal organs.
"The powder was like microscopic shrapnel, and these are what likely
caused the injuries," Saka said.
The Italian investigative team raised the possibility that the IDF is making
use of a weapon similar in character to DIME - Dense Inert Metal Explosive
- developed for the U.S. military. According to the official website of a U.S.
air force laboratory, it is a "focused lethality" weapon, which aims
to accurately destroy the target while causing minimum damage to the surrounding.
According to the site, the projectile comprises a carbon-fiber casing filled
with tungsten powder and explosives. In the explosion, tungsten particles -
a metal capable of conducting very high temperatures - spread over a radius
of four meters and cause death.
According to the U.S.-based website Defense-Tech, "the result is an incredibly
destructive blast in a small area" and "the destructive power of
the mixture causes far more damage than pure explosive." It adds that "the
impact of the micro-shrapnel seems to cause a similar but more powerful effect
than a shockwave."
The weapon is supposed to still be in the testing phase and has not been used
on the battlefield.
The Italian reporters sent samples of the particles found in wounds of injured
in the Gaza Strip to a laboratory at the University of Parma. Dr. Carmela Vaccaio
said that in analyzing the samples, she found "a very high concentration
of carbon and the presence of unusual materials," such as copper, aluminum
and tungsten. Dr. Vaccaio says these findings "could be in line with the
hypothesis" that the weapon in question is DIME.
On the matter of DIME, Ben-Israel told the Italian reporters that "this
is a technology that allows the striking of very small targets."
The report says that the weapon is not banned by international law, especially
since it has not been officially tested.
It is believed that the weapon is highly carcinogenic and harmful to the environment.
The non-governmental organization Physicians for Human Rights has written
to Defense Minister Amir Peretz requesting explanations for the aforementioned
injuries to Palestinians. Amos Gilad, a senior adviser to the minister, is
supposed to meet with the group on the matter in the near future.
Original
Comment on this Editorial
Editorial: The Dumbing Down of America
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
Manuel Valenzuela
Valenzuela's Veritas
Something is amiss in the great nation called America. Ominous sirens warning this reality can be heard emanating loudly through invisible winds of change circulating our towns and cities. The American people are being strangulated; unbeknownst to the masses they are being transformed and conditioned, becoming the entity the elite have long sought, the culmination of decades of social engineering designed to make of hundreds of millions the slaves of times past and the automatons of the future.
Yet in this present day we find ourselves in, struggling to comprehend a world gone mad, unable to discern neither the direction we are headed nor the inevitable course time is guiding us on. It is because of what has been done to us, and is presently being done to our children, that we fail to comprehend the severity of the road that lies ahead. Quite successful have the elite become in shifting the balance of power from the masses to themselves. How, one might wonder, has this been accomplished, especially when we are the many and they the few?
It is through the dumbing down of America, the methodical destruction and purposeful elimination of the means by which a society educates and enlightens itself. The evisceration of a system that extols accountability and dialogue, opens up the gates of opportunity with the keys of ability, questions authority and seeks debate, creates a wealth of knowledge and illuminates talent and that births an informed citizenry and creates free thinking, analytical minds has been slowly implemented for the last several decades. The dumbing down of America continues into the present, unrelenting and unhindered, squashing the masses for the benefit of the elite.
A giant threat to the system is being disposed of, systematically and without remorse, making of America and its citizens yet one more cog in the engine called capitalistic exploitation of humanity.
What has happened to the Pax Americana?
Here stands the Pax Americana, the most imposing Empire that ever rose from the short reign of human civilization, responsible for placing the entire manifestation of world citizens at the threshold of perilous danger. It is the Pax Americana that has unwound the stitches holding a volatile world together, the nation that has over the last fifty years caused so much damage to the peoples of the globe. The karma of ceaseless negative energy is coming back to haunt an empire whose actions, while helping enrich its own belly and those residing in its entrails, have decimated untold millions whose only crime was being born in lands destined to suffer the harsh exploitation of America and its capitalistic pandemic.
How has a once admired and loved leader of nations fallen from grace in such a short period of time? What has happened to a populace living in the wealthiest nation in human civilization? Why has the United States transformed itself into the malicious beast the world sees through frightful eyes?
Gluttony and materialism have enveloped all corners of the United States, from Pacific to Atlantic Oceans, from the border with Canada to the one with Mexico. The principles of consumerism and greed are all-encompassing, years ago having replaced virtues long since gone. The clandestine enslavement hidden in mass production and ever-longer working hours has in the last few decades become the value by which we measure one's worth to society.
The ability to question authority has vanished in a haze of indifference, even as the evaporation of the American mind continues unabated. Government has been transformed right in front of our eyes, becoming not democracy but corporatism, the marriage between the corporate and government elite. Our freedoms and liberties are in shambles, now fragile porcelain being decimated by the thundering herd of bulls in Washington.
The government of, by and for the people is now comprised of leaches flourishing in rotten swamps, prostitutes roaming bordellos masquerading as palaces of governance and fecal matter prospering in the nation's sewers. Corporations and their minions we help elect dominate and transform society, leading us into the black holes they easily maneuver us into. We are being used and abused, yet with the dumbing down of America easily controlled beings we have turned into, comatose to the danger we have embraced and oblivious to the strings attached to our appendages.
Something eerie seems to have engulfed us in the land of the free and the home of the brave. From the land where all men are created equal has equality disappeared; from a nation espousing freedom has freedom been eviscerated. Once brave dissenters and seekers of accountability have gone missing, allowing free reign to those endowed with power. Free-thinking and analytical minds are as rare as the great apes humanity is making extinct. Rare is the citizen not captive to fear, insecurity and intimidation. The ability to question authority or to seek accountability has collapsed along with the towers of the World Trade Center. A world existing beyond the borders and shores of America, containing six billion fellow humans, has been forgotten and disregarded as ignorance to cultures, nations, beliefs and ethnicities is conditioned into our minds practically from birth.
Something is amiss in a nation where one would expect the plenitudes of Empire to trickle down into every man, woman and child. To bestow upon its citizens the tools needed to seek true freedom of thought and a path towards enlightenment would be expected of an American utopia that is more often preached rather than practiced. Yet the question arises as to the cause of why hundreds of millions continue to fall downwards into empty wells of promises unkept instead of reaching for the zenith of those fulfilled.
What mechanisms left to erode the citizenry of free thought and freedom of mind have been allowed to linger in American society, and how have they been allowed to remain when the reality of what has occurred continues to degrade the Pax Americana from the inside out?
Conditioned Producers and Consumers
Spawned from the assembly line called human procreation we open our eyes to a world ready to transform our life energies into expendable disseminators of the patterns of production and consumption that will mark our time on Earth, in essence becoming the reason for our existence. To the system called capitalism we become nothing more than a number which will in time be exploited to the full extent envisaged by man. We are given social security numbers, digits that will follow us through the journey from newborn to cadaver. To the system we are this number, easily traceable, easily conditioned.
Television begins to inculcate us with rampant bombardments of advertisements, thereby beginning to condition the young, innocent mind to a life trained for consumption. The foods we eat and the products we buy begin establishing the tastes we will forever enjoy. Associations of pleasure, ingrained tastes and smells, nostalgia of fantasy and perfection enter the young brain. It is because of this that corporations want to hook us from the first moments of infancy so loyal lifelong consumers we become. To the innocent and pure mind television thus becomes the window to a world that is neither real nor easy. The virgin brain sees in the shows it is blitzkrieged with a fiction that in reality does not exist. It sees perfection, fantasy, beauty, consumption and loyal acquiescence, and, with the passage of time, seeks to emulate this world in a false belief that it can be attained. Ingrained in this principle is the belief, channeled by corporations, that to achieve what can never be a person must consume and produce, be obedient to authority, friendly to her corporate masters and eager to embrace what society dictates. The dumbing down of America thus begins.
As television becomes parent, teacher, role model, babysitter and entertainer to the child, given the abandonment of historical parental roles thanks to society's pressure to produce and consume, everything shown becomes everything learned, thus habituating a child to the role corporations have decided to bestow onto him. When everything seen on the screen is created, controlled, manipulated and disseminated by the corporate world the child's perception of what reality encompasses will indeed also conform to the corporate vision. After image after image, fantasy after fantasy, conditioning after conditioning, the young human mind has no choice but to accept the commands of the brainwashing taking place right in front of his or her baby eyes.
It follows that children learn every behavior from their parents as well. From the very beginning entrenched behaviors to produce and consume become ingrained in the young brain. The long hours at work, the short amount of time spent with the child, the abandonment of parental roles and supervision, the incessant drive for consumption, the wasting of money and pursuit of material possessions, the behaviors of stress, depression, unhappiness, anger and frustration are all absorbed by a mind that in infancy acts like a sponge, learning human society from those closest to its environment, whether it is family or television.
In adulthood, these same behaviors will be manifested, thereby helping fulfill the role of producer and consumer the corporate world has reserved for yet one more human energy sprouting from the conveyor belt of procreation. Thanks to the television and parental subservience to the same system of their youth, one's progeny will become the bogged down producer of the same products he or she will later voraciously and seemingly without conscious consume.
The vicious circle that is the virus of American capitalism infects seemingly from birth, inoculating children to the vices of exploitation from which they will forever derive their existence. It is at the height of innocence that the forces of capitalism attack, attaching themselves in the depths of a human brain, dissolving precepts not in tune with its compulsive and exploitive self. Once attached the virus is not easily displaced, thereby becoming personality as well as behavior. From the cradle to the grave, destiny in today's America is guided by the corporate world and its sinister virus, helping not its host but its disseminator, unleashing wave after wave of unhappy and exploited producer and easily conditioned and controlled consumer.
Consequences of a Controlled Populace
Education in the United States has become an exercise in government and corporate brainwashing, used to achieve a citizenry devoid of analytical and free-thinking minds. The purpose, quite simply, is to retain the class warfare structure that has marked American society for decades. Education has become a tool used to make the wealthy richer and the poor more indigent. It is now a mechanism to separate the have nots from the haves, the higher castes from the untouchables. As it stands today, though certainly being eviscerated more and more daily, education is making of the masses impotent creatures of indifference, happily droned into complacency and deprived of a knowledge that once served to curtail the power of the elite that run the nation.
The result is the age of corporatism, the age of unfettered and unaccountable power and the control of the masses through media manipulation, societal fabrication and education eradication. As the world slowly passes through the sands of time the people of the United States, those living inside what has become a most hated geopolitical entity, are seeing the result of being dumbed down and of letting incompetents, warmongers, profiteers and deranged zealots run unfettered and unopposed, ransacking the globe, its people and land in the process.
Today we see the ramifications of a citizenry that has allowed itself to be made ignorant through its submission to those in power whose purposeful malfeasance continues to destroy the very essence of knowledge that grants freedom to enslaved minds. Iraq and the coming disaster in the Middle East are a consequence to the decimation of education in the United States. George W. Bush is a consequence of the dumbing down of America, to which he owes his very position perched like the vulture he is atop the dying tree of America that has been contaminated by his inept and infected claws smeared in human blood.
Those in power have succeeded in making the masses a herd of sheep following the shepherd straight into the slaughterhouse, unaware of the destiny that awaits them nor of their role in the furthering of death, destruction and violence now gripping the world. Like a deer caught in headlights, the masses are hypnotized, unable to see beyond the sight of their own meeting with a fate conditioned into our brains from infancy that is destroying freedom, knowledge and our ability to question the evils being done in our name. America today and the world tomorrow are a manifestation of this truth.
Ignorance has replaced knowledge, resulting in power running amok, incapable of being restrained, mutating and growing, feeding off our inability to escape the debacle currently gripping our collective mind.
Brainwash Education
The education system in America has been carefully eroded over the course of time, altered in such a way as to make creative and curious children barren and submissive adults indifferent to the world around them. The system now in place begins robbing a child's ability to think for himself or herself from the very start of the education process. The class structure itself eliminates individuality, personality and energetic ability, as one teacher must educate many students competing for attention. It is here when talents that need to be discovered get ambushed instead. Yet with a class structure that has endured for decades, the child must become part of the whole, learning from books laced with government and/or corporate propaganda.
In many school districts, mostly poor ones strapped for cash, books can be dozens of years old, lacking modern thought or progress. Many books are tools created by entities with special interests that have as a purpose the teaching of their ideology or the furthering of their goals. The absurd teaching of creationism is one such example. Many corporations now create and donate books to school districts that contain references and examples to their brand names and product descriptions. Even in school children cannot escape the growing omnipresence of the corporate Leviathan which thirsts to program the innocent the way it sees fit.
Indeed, the young mind is needlessly brainwashed with a history of a nation that in many instances contradicts and even subverts the true historical reality of the United States. Only the 'good' that America has fostered during its rapid and short rise is taught, without ever dealing with the requisite bad inherent in an Empire that has laid claim to land and man during years of brutal conquest, both militarily and economically. Glossing over national heroes, mythifying them into deities and transforming them into perfect human beings is the role of the school book, brainwashing the young to a fictional perfection when reality begs to differ. Yet humanity must be balanced and its reality etched in stone so that future generations learn the human condition as well as its civilization.
The genocide of indigenous Americans is whitewashed; the slavery of blacks that lasted hundreds of years, oftentimes suffering barbaric treatment at the hands of their white masters is easily covered up in a few paragraphs, deceiving readers to the true horrors their ancestors committed or suffered. The subservient role women were placed under for centuries is hardly mentioned, and the great civil rights movement that helped change history for the better never gets the coverage it deserves.
The war crimes and crimes against humanity America has perpetrated worldwide to millions of anonymous people under the rubric of freedom and democracy is never mentioned, rather, they are sugarcoated and glamorized, serving as examples of America's 'great history.' Also, the corrosive and damaging effects of American capitalism disguised as democracy that has condemned untold millions to the dustbins of history is manipulated to look like a chivalrous attempt to save lives and free nations.
Brainwashing unquestioned patriotism into our young one's minds government controlled education furthers the squashing of dissent and the questioning of our sovereign's motives. We are conditioned that our elected leaders are gods walking among men, to be trusted and never to be questioned. Their intentions are always noble, their reasoning pure. Dissent and debate, protest and curiosity are seen not as patriotic manifestations of an informed citizenry but rather as an alien afterthought not worthy of nationalistic pride.
The ingraining of loyalty to flag and country, even when committing evil worldwide, is to be allowed to continue, eventually becoming the means by which the state is allowed to declare war, economic genocide and market colonialism, without so much as a whisper from its constituency. The elite therefore bask in the glow of the radiant bean called patriotic fervor, indoctrinated from childhood, lasting until death.
Preaching the noble deeds yet hiding or disguising the evil ingrained in empire building serves only to alter history and manipulate the young, eroding our future in the process. To understand humanity in past, present and future an entire history must be taught, both good and bad, thereby creating in our future citizens the ability to grow wise to the mistakes of times past in order to comprehend the ever-changing and oftentimes complex conditions of the present. To not teach the truth of what has come before is to leave behind the keys to unlocking the door of the human condition, essentially condemning our children into repeating the errors that continue to bear witness to unnecessary suffering, death, destruction, violence and war.
The fruits of our past mistakes can be seen in our history; the essence of the human condition lies written for all to see. American education serves no purpose if the result of its actions leads to a replay of years gone by; it becomes an exercise in futility when our future repeats the blunders of their ancestors and the follies of those who once led.
Brainwash education is the means to an end, a device that entraps rather than make free. It is a valuable tool to exert hegemony over the populace. When begun from the first years of youth, becoming attached and most difficult to extract, brainwashing to suit the state and the elite's goals is a dangerous device. When combined with the 9/11's of history, it takes on a life of its own, becoming a Molotov cocktail ready to explode in seething rage. The system would not have it any other way.
Made Ignorant to a World Beyond our Borders
American education makes no attempt to expose the wonders of a world existing beyond its borders to its children. The outside world and its plethora of diverse people are hardly mentioned, easily summarized in brief mentions of world history. The ignorance of cultures, religions, ethnicities, nationalities and beliefs that has ensued has made America a nation neither curious to a grand spectrum of peoples nor understanding to the vast complexities of an ever-changing world. Failing to understand what exists beyond our oceans, American children, through the damaging effects of the nation's dilapidated educational system, become isolated from the world community and the fraternity of peoples.
It is understanding the world and becoming part of it that prevents the Iraq's and Vietnam's of history from ever arising. It is knowledge of a world and its people that creates peace and good-will. Ignorance, on the other hand, fosters only exploitation, indifference and arrogance. Iraq today is the result of this failure in American education. Abu Ghraib and its war crimes is the result of a system that isolates, indoctrinates and makes ignorant to the lives and realities of six billion people whose world is larger than that of our own borders. The debacle in Iraq is a manifestation of American ignorance to a world and its diverse peoples; Iraq's daily explosions are testament to its failure to understand the people it is occupying and the anger emanating from the arrogance and ignorance of its soldiers.
The failure of American education to teach about a world existing beyond the confines of its own grandeur is exemplified today by an Iraq that is the catalyst to a most dangerous era in American history. Societies that are ignorant to the greater world around them suffer a dereliction of humanity and the far reaching implications their actions tend to unsettle. From the actions of ignorance rise the reactions of those ignored.
America's failure to educate its children to a world beyond its shores, in a world coming closer together is a travesty, and an error, especially for an Empire whose grip is all-encompassing, its power circulating around the globe. A leader of nations and an Empire such as America must learn and understand the world it dominates and the people it controls. For it to govern wisely its citizens must be brought into the sphere of a world community that is both heterogeneous and aware of the dangers the Pax Americana is capable of releasing. For it to avoid the wrath seen today its ambassadors and representatives must be educated to the songs of the world and the tunes of human civilization.
In order to prevent the never-before seen levels of hatred, animosity and anger directed at the United States and the blowback that is now being manifested the American education system must open itself up to the outside world. If it remains isolationist and ignorant, preferring to enclose itself in the bubble it continues to lock itself into, the karma we are witnessing will be but the tip of the iceberg. Ignorance leading to exploitation can only go so far; a world beyond our borders exists, and must be taught, learned and understood.
For if the Empire's people fail to grasp the lands and peoples beyond their borders, preferring instead to live in the comfort of their own existence and the ignorance of their upbringing a world that was never known will be once more forgotten, and the blowback birthed by our ancestors will be made that much more difficult to comprehend.
Separate and Unequal
The purposeful inequality inherent in American education is created by design, fostered by an elite that manipulates in society a separation between rich and working class. It is abundantly clear that education systems in America are nowhere near to being equal. On the contrary, their inequality stems from a government and the elite that control it that seek to maintain the status quo of preventing millions of children from ever advancing beyond the caste they are born into. Without opportunity, ability is wasted and those capable of threatening the power structure as it exists at present are left to rot in the cesspool created by those social engineers sealing the destiny of millions of Americans.
Maintaining separate and unequal education systems assures the elite, government and corporations of millions of exploitable slaves that through no fault of their own are condemned to a life stuck in the working class, living off low wages, surviving on a day to day basis, uneducated and ignorant to the exploitation they are subjected to. The millions that fate has placed in corrosive school districts starving for pennies from the government are subjected to an education that is shameful at best and a crime against humanity at worst. Unequal distribution of tax schemes makes it impossible for children born into poor neighborhoods from ever getting the education the few elite children of privilege are guaranteed.
With rotting school districts that cannot afford good teachers, books, buildings, administrators and a semblance of hope children receive substandard education levels that forever alter their ability to learn and advance in society. When this is compounded year after year the ramifications are severe, serving to quash all ability and potential opportunity. It is this level of education most American children, both urban and rural, are subjected to, forced to endure the worst inequality of teaching found in the developed world.
When the elite that run the nation are deciding futures, however, this is to be expected. Their corporations need low-class workers; their armies need soldiers; their government needs slaves. By maintaining separate and unequal education systems, in essence two completely different systems, one reserved for privilege, the other for future serfs, the elite are assured of control, exploitation, power and growing wealth, mostly at the hands of the slaves they have created. The masses, having been trained from birth to become the slaves of the nation's capitalists, are subjected to years of subservient education mechanisms that encourage and indeed guide us toward exploitation. The dreams and hopes of childhood are thus eviscerated as the reality of the environment and education we are born into collides with once creative talents and utopian goals.
Born into environments offering the worst in American education creates in the masses ignorance to the plight our government is subjecting us to. We are made unaware and become indifferent to the massive crime being perpetrated by government officials who help foster separate and unequal education and even encourage it by their unwillingness to make right what has been made wrong. The continued apathy of our government to the vastly different levels of education is proof that it is complicit in the manufacturing of an entire class of slaves produced to be exploited by the powerful few. To continue a system that is so dastardly in its scope and so damaging to millions is to acknowledge the purposeful disregard our government has in alleviating a reality that in this nation at least does not need to exist. It is shameful, it is wrong, it is a crime.
An assembly line of slaves has been created, socially engineered through years of manipulations and exploitations, breeding ignorance, robbing opportunity, erasing talent and harvesting entire generations of worker bees. For America the beautiful needs slaves to work and enrich the elite, it needs soldiers to wage war in the name of capitalism, it needs ignorance to continue its sovereignty and castes from which to maintain the balance that has kept those in power at the top for generations.
Separate and unequal, the secret ingredients to the American juggernaut; separate and unequal, the oil that assures the mighty engine of capitalism from ever corroding and malfunctioning. Through the backs of the masses the elite survive; through the exploitation of the many the few thrive.
Leaving all Working and Middle Class Children Behind
The dumbing down of America continues its injurious path through the policies of George Bush, who is quietly decimating the talents and energies of the nation's youth. Wishing all children to become the bumbling idiot that characterizes his existence, his policies have washed away what remained of viable education. The dumbing down of America has only picked up its pace as children today are being deprived of the tools necessary to think for themselves. Forced by the government to teach to standardized tests, school districts are erasing the arts and other important classes from curriculum. Instead, teachers are being forced to prepare their students to passing the test that determines financial reward or punishment.
This form of education is leveling critical thinking, analytical skills and free-thinking minds. It is destroying education as we know it, along with the futures of millions of children who are being made automatons lacking a mind to question the world around them. This sinister mechanism is purposefully being implemented to dumb down American children. It is yet another tool those in power are using to create a nation devoid of free thought.
Teaching to the test entails sacrificing all subject matter not included in the test itself. As a result, vital tools such as music, art, languages, social sciences, philosophy, health and other liberal arts are being ignored, thrown away into dark closets of indifference. Worthy teachers now have their hands tied down, unable to bring out the blossoms of talent from their students. Instead, they must partake in the manipulation of America's children, becoming the instructors to a new generation of students those in power want desperately to transform into unthinking sentinels easily manipulated and controlled.
America's teachers, already underpaid and under funded, battling a system eager to destroy youth, must now see the seeds they sow become homogenous crops succumbing to ignorance, eroding all semblance of individuality and wasting away once fruitful and talented lives. All children are being left behind, and American society will pay the ultimate and most severe price.
Fostering Ignorance, Creating Sheep, Cementing Decline
Children are brainwashed at a very early age to follow the dictates of the state, to become the obedient drones the state needs in order to survive. Curriculum programs prevent the free-thinking mind from ever emerging even as such paramount subject matter such as art, foreign language, music and philosophy are being eliminated or never implemented. It is at a very early age when these classes can make a such a vital difference in children, in essence granting an enormous head start towards a long lasting, happy life. It is at early youth that the human brain absorbs everything that is taught, it is at this stage in development when positive and all-inclusive education bears fruit. Yet American children, living in the wealthiest nation on the planet, are being denied the essential tools needed for human progress to move forward, individuals to prosper and for a nation to thrive.
Becoming an exercise in futility, education has become a weapon to militarize millions of children to the tune of the government, robbing them of the free-thinking and analytical mind whose questioning of government and individual thought the elite want eliminated. In today's America, no child must be allowed to think or understand what is being done to them and the society they inhabit. Every child being taught must march in lock-step with millions more, becoming benign drones made ignorant to a process robbing them of their existence, neither challenging those in power or absorbing the ingredients necessary to develop a mind that may one day become the ultimate weapon for freedom and salvation.
As in all state systems, in order to have subservient citizens, the young must be programmed early on to the dictates of those in power. In America, these entities are the elite capitalists that have transformed democracy into corporatism. Entire generations of people have become an enormous herd of sheep, unaware of the slavery that grips them and the exploitation that befalls every waking hour. The corporatist state has accomplished the ignorance of its citizens, now ruling unobstructed and unaccountable, free to unleash wave after wave of crimes, both upon those it rules and those it conquers.
The majority of the American people now fail to question authority, debate policy, seek accountability or demand answers. Indifferent we have become to the dangerous ways of our government or to our own plight. Every generation has seen its ability to understand, question and analyze dwindle with each subsequent decade that passes. Soon the day will arrive when complete drones our descendants become, completely subservient to the will of the rulers, shackled in chains of ignorance, transformed into exploitable energies deficient of free-thinking minds.
The only vestige of freedom left is that of the mind, a realm never before touched by the claws of the state and the powerful. Yet this freedom is disappearing, for the state has found a way to annihilate a freedom once thought untouchable. Free-thought is fading fast from an American psyche that once espoused the belief in the power of the individual. In its wake lie hundreds of millions of energies whose minds have been captured in a war we failed to realize we were being subjected to. Free-thinking minds are being made extinct, suffering from years of social engineering and artificial conditioning.
More and more we are failing to understand what is being done to us and our children. With each passing day the corporate Leviathan absorbs more of our collective brain, inculcating us with garbage, conditioning us to its version of what American society should be. The wretched symptoms of capitalism are devouring our very existence, making us the sheeple the system feeds off of. We are being herded to the slaughterhouse, ready to be gutted and mass produced, sold to the hungry wolves and vultures concomitantly ready to feast off our once vibrant energies.
Tell the Children the Truth
The time has come to tell the children the truth. The time has come to tell them that most are condemned to castes, unable to escape, destined to be exploited, destined for modern man's version of slavery. The time has come to tell the children of privilege that they are being trained to become the exploiters of the masses, becoming condoners of subservience, inequality, injustice, corruption and thievery.
We must awaken from this lethargy catapulting us into a future missing freedom and individuality, happiness and a worthy existence. The dumbing down of America cannot be allowed to continue, for if it does, George Bush's vision will become George Orwell's reality. It is time to tell the children the truth. It is time to liberate ourselves from a system that is making us all automatons. Freedom of thought, freedom of mind and freedom to live are our goals. The elimination of the virus inflicting ignorance and enslavement upon us and our children should be our mission.
The time to retake the American mind is upon us, and this starts with telling our children the truth of what our indifference, subservience and inability to act is condemning them to. For knowledge is power, the kryptonite that weakens the energy leading us to nothingness. They know this, which is why the dumbing down of America is taking place. Knowledge is a threat to their existence and continued control, which is why they want it destroyed. Education is liberation, something they want desperately to avoid. An enlightened populace is their nightmare; an ignorant citizenry their wet dream.
It is through the awakening of the masses that mountains are moved and canyons crossed. It is through the slumber of the masses that evil awakens. It is through our collective energy that those in power have no future and no place left to hide. The future of America is in our hands: either the dumbing down continues or the awakening commences.
Essay originally published June 2004
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Editorial: BBC Guilty of Venality in Its Misreporting on Venezuela
by Stephen Lendman
Listeners and viewers expecting to find a safe alternative to the corporate-controlled media by turning to the BBC better reconsider their choice based on the vaunted news organization's reporting on Venezuela and specifically on the misinformation it put out in an online piece on October 8 titled - "Mass Venezuela opposition rally." It claims "Tens of thousands of people have marched through the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, in support of the main opposition candidate, Manuel Rosales."
If readers of this piece just went to VHeadline.com, they'd have gotten a much different picture - from the actual photo of those "tens of thousands" that, in fact, may have been all of a single ten thousand or so in the streets in a show of tepid support at best and not what anyone would call "mass." Shame on BBC and its reporter in Caracas Greg Morsbach for lying for the power interests he serves, so he reports what they want put out even if it's not true.
Based in Caracas for the BBC, correspondent Morsbach must knows a massive crowd when he sees one as Hugo Chavez draws them every time he addresses a rally that routinely turns out en masse in a tsunami of red-shirted supporters to see, hear and cheer him. He surely can tell the difference between a huge Chavez crowd and the puny one for Mr. Rosales on October 8, many of whom were likely just on the Caracas streets and curious to see what was going on. BBC must think this kind of misreporting is the way to maintain a gilt-edged reputation as a reliable news service. The sad truth is that reputation got tarnished many years ago and went to pieces in the shameless reporting the UK-based news organization did in the run-up to the Iraq war when it's entire news operation went into overdrive functioning as a state propaganda service for our government and theirs.
But back to the Morsbach report in which he claims the so-called mass rally "filled the main avenues of the city centre (and) was the biggest opposition rally Venezuela has seen since early 2004." It may have been about the only one of any size seen, and it may have partially filled a single avenue, but as the actual photo on VHeadline.com's site shows, it thinned out fast after moving away from its small core center. Correspondent Morsbach may be nearsighted and failed to notice. Surely on BBC pay he can afford to correct that impediment so he can see more clearly and report more accurately in the future.
Morsback shamelessly continues: "Young and old (how could he tell even in a smallish-sized crowd) took to the streets to throw their weight behind the campaign of Mr. Rosales.....Many claim they were seeking liberty and democracy (did he wade into the "crowd" and interview large numbers them) and that made Mr. Rosales their only option." Mr. Morsback needs a reawakening to reality. All reliable opinion polls show Hugo Chavez's popularity is overwhelming making him unbeatable in the upcoming December presidential election short of another US-directed coup against him which is very possible. Zulia Governor Rosales, on the other hand, is a US picked oligarch stooge whose role in the election isn't to win but to cause enough mischief in an attempt to discredit Chavez and create a staged uprising to unseat him. Correspondent Morsback doesn't explain this because if he dares to BBC will replace him with someone else who'll suppress this ugly truth and stick to the black propaganda party line.
BBC does let Morsback report something factual at the end of his article though it's hardly newsworthy: "For some (maybe most) it was simply a day out to enjoy the sunshine...." But he quickly reverted to his assigned role as a propagandist claiming: "If Mr. Rosales can keep up this kind of pressure against his rival, the election results may not necessarily be a foregone conclusion." Pressure? The only kind he cites in his piece is Rosales' weak-kneed comments that Venezuela was "at (an unexplained) crossroads," and Mr. Chavez was "giving away Venezuela's oil wealth to foreign powers (absurd and false as anyone understanding Chavez's enlightened ALBA initiative knows.)"
Morsback ends his piece on a high note though as he may have had a pang of conscience (and BBC's permission) in his otherwise shameless piece of black journalism. It forces him to admit that "Mr. Chavez still enjoys a clear lead in opinion polls because of a sense of loyalty that poor and working class voters feel toward him." But Morsback's conscience pangs weren't strong enough to get him to try explaining why.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
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Neocons Fomenting War for Fun and Profit
Neo-cons come out guns blazing
By Jim Lobe Oct 12, 2006
WASHINGTON - Encouraging Japan to build nuclear weapons, shipping food aid via submarines and running secret sabotage operations inside North Korea's borders are among a raft of policy prescriptions pushed by prominent US neo-conservatives in the wake of Pyongyang's reported testing of an atomic bomb.
Writing in publications ranging from National Review Online (NRO) to the New York Times, neo-conservatives claim, contrary to the lessons drawn by "realists" and other critics of the George W Bush administration, that Monday's supposed test vindicates their long-held view that negotiations with "rogue" states such as North Korea are useless and that "regime change" - by military means, if necessary - is the only answer.
"With our intelligence on North Korea so uneven, the doctrine of preemption must return to the fore," wrote Dan Blumenthal, an Asia specialist at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) who worked for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld during President Bush's first term, in the NRO on Tuesday. "Any talk of renewed six-party talks [involving China, Japan, Russia, the US and the two Koreas] must be resisted."
The North Korean test "has stripped any plausibility to arguments that engaging dictators works", according to Michael Rubin, a Middle East specialist at AEI, who added that the Bush administration now faced a "watershed" in its relations with other states that have defied Washington in recent years.
"This crisis is not just about North Korea, but about Iran, Syria, Venezuela and Cuba as well," said Rubin. "Bush now has two choices: to respond forcefully and show that defiance has consequence, or affirm that defiance pays and that international will is illusionary."
Bush "must now choose whether his legacy will be one of inaction or leadership, Chamberlain or Churchill", Rubin said in a reference to the pre-World War II debate between the "appeasement" of British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and the war policy of his successor, Winston Churchill.
The neo-conservatives, whose influence on the Bush administration has generally been on the wane since late 2003 when it became clear that the Iraq war they had done so much to champion was going badly, nonetheless retain some clout, particularly through the offices of Vice President Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld.
They are opposed by the "realists" who are concentrated in the State Department and also include former secretary of state Colin Powell; his chief deputy, Richard Armacost; and a number of top national-security officials in the administration of former president George H W Bush, such as former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft and former secretary of state James Baker, who just last weekend publicly called for Washington to engage its "enemies" directly, including North Korea, Syria and Iran.
That stance is anathema to the neo-conservatives and their right-wing allies, such as Cheney, who, at one National Security Council meeting on North Korea several years ago, was reported to have said, "We don't negotiate with evil; we defeat it."
The neo-conservatives' main area of concern has historically been the Middle East - indeed, their central focus in recent months has been publicizing the threats to the United States and Israel allegedly posed by Iran and Hezbollah and opposing any realist appeals to engage Tehran and Damascus in direct talks. But they have also been warning for some time against "the appeasement" of North Korea and its chief source of material aid and support, China.
In their view, Beijing has always had the power to force Pyongyang to give up its nuclear-arms programs, and the fact that it has not done so demonstrates that China sees itself as a "strategic rival" of Washington, a phrase much favored by administration hawks during Bush's first year in office.
Indeed, in the most prominent neo-conservative reaction to the North Korean test to date, former Bush speechwriter David Frum called in a column published by the New York Times for the administration to take a series of measures designed to "punish China" for its failure to bring Pyongyang to heel.
Among them, Frum, who is also based at AEI and is credited with inventing the phrase "axis of evil", in which North Korea, Iran and Iraq were lumped together for Bush's 2002 State of the Union address, urged the administration to cut off all humanitarian aid to North Korea, pressure South Korea to do the same and thus force China to "shoulder the cost of helping to avert" North Korea's economic collapse.
He urged that Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore be invited to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and that Taiwan, which Beijing regards as a renegade province of China, send observers to NATO meetings.
Frum, who in 2003 co-authored An End to Evil with former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, also suggested that Washington "encourage Japan to renounce the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and create its own nuclear deterrent".
"A nuclear Japan is the thing China and North Korea dread most, after, perhaps, a nuclear South Korea or Taiwan," he asserted. "Not only would the nuclearization of Japan be a punishment of China and North Korea, but it would also go far to meet our goal of dissuading Iran [from trying to obtain a nuclear weapon] ... The analogue for Iran, of course, would be the threat of American aid to improve Israel's capacity to hit targets with nuclear weapons."
Other neo-conservatives echoed Blumenthal's position that the six-party talks should be abandoned and called for the US administration to resist any further appeals for bilateral talks between Washington and Pyongyang - repeatedly made by China, South Korea and Russia, as well as by realists in Washington, over the past several years.
"There will be renewed calls for bilateral talks between Washington and Pyongyang. That would be a mistake," said the lead editorial in the neo-conservative Wall Street Journal, which also urged the US to "make clear that a military response is not off the table".
Other commentators called for strong efforts to achieve regime change. James Robbins, senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, called for covert action, including "sabotage, espionage, information operations, subversion, deception - the works. A highly paranoid totalitarian regime like Kim [Jong-il's] will be highly susceptible to these methods," he predicted.
At the same time, former House of Representatives Speaker and Defense Policy Board member Newt Gingrich, who is also based at the AEI, said he favored continuing shipments of US food aid, but through a covert delivery system "consciously designed to undermine the dictatorship".
"Food might be parachuted into the country, delivered from submarines and small boats by clandestine services, shipped in from China and Russia through anti-regime middlemen and delivered in every way possible to divert energy and authority away from the government and toward an alternative organizing system of individuals dedicated to a better more prosperous life," he wrote.
Like his fellow-neo-conservatives, Frank Gaffney, the president of the Center for Security Policy, called for accelerated development and deployment of Washington's embryonic but extraordinarily costly missile defense system, including a ship-launched system that can shoot down ballistic missiles of various ranges "whether launched from places like North Korea or from tramp steamers off our coasts".
He also urged Washington to resume periodic underground nuclear tests of its own, ending a moratorium on such testing announced by former president George H W Bush in 1992.
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Nigeria: Israeli charged with espionage
Associated Press
10.10.06
Israeli, Irishman, Romanian charged with spying on Nigeria's Defense Ministry, face 14 years in prison
Six people, including men from Ireland, Israel and Romania, were charged Tuesday with illegally obtaining classified defense documents.
Court papers allege the men worked with three Nigerian Defense Ministry officials to obtain information "related to a protected place."
The information was to be passed on to the defense attache at the Russian Embassy in Nigeria, according to the court papers. Calls to the embassy Tuesday afternoon went unanswered.
The three foreigners and three Nigerians were brought to court in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, under tight security.
Each pleaded innocent. Judge Binta Murtala-Nyarko set the next hearing for Nov. 21 before returning the suspects to prison.
The six face up to 14 years in jail if convicted. Prosecutors said the alleged offenses were committed with a Russian and another Irish man now at large.
Israel's Foreign Ministry confirmed to Ynet that the Israeli citizen was indeed arrested several days ago. According to officials, "The issue is being looked into by the Israeli embassy in Abuja, and is giving the appropriate consular service."
Israel was caught up in a similar affair about two years ago, when two Israelis suspected of counterfeiting passports were arrested in New Zealand.
The country claimed the two were Mossad agents, and an ensuing diplomatic crisis erupted between Israel and New Zealand.
The two suspected Israelis, Uri Kelman and Eli Cara, were arrested under suspicion of fraudulently obtaining a New Zealand passport by impersonating a local handicapped man in a wheel chair.
They pleaded guilty and were sentenced to a six months in prison and received a fine of USD 32 thousand to be paid to the local handicapped association.
Kelman and Cara left New Zealand after having served less than half of their six-month sentence.
Despite the suspects' and the Israeli government's denial, many in New Zealand, relying on government sources, were convinced that the two were Mossad agents.
New Zealand's Prime Minister, Helen Clark, made several remarks to the press referring to the two as "Israeli intelligence agents". Following the scandal, New Zealand announced a number of diplomatic sanctions against Israel.
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Israeli Evangelicals Brought 100,000 Russian Jews To Israel And Occupied Palestinian Territories
Jpost
11/10/2006
A Jerusalem-based Evangelical Christian organization announced Tuesday that it had assisted 100,000 Jewish immigrants to move to Israel over the last decade and a half. The International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem said that it had invested $40 million in the immigration project, which has focused on Jews from the former Soviet Union, since its inception in 1989. [..]
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Israel urges Security Council action on Iran
12 October 2006
JERUSALEM (AFP)
JERUSALEM (AFP) - Israel has called for UN Security Council action to stop arch-foe Iran from developing its controversial nuclear activities after a top-level meeting chaired by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
"The diplomatic effort to thwart the Iranian nuclear programme is being led by the international community," the prime minister's office said Thursday after Olmert met cabinet ministers and secret service chiefs to discuss Iran.
"Israel supports the steps taken by the Security Council, which include sanctions on Iran and refusal to accept compromises that would allow Iran to continue to develop its nuclear project," it added in a statement.
Israel earlier this week urged that economic sanctions be slapped on Iran, warning of possible atomic cooperation between Tehran and North Korea after Pyongyang's claimed nuclear weapons test.
"The prime minister reiterated that the test carried out recently by North Korea only underlines the need for urgent, determined and united efforts by the international community," Olmert's office said.
Israel and the United States have spearheaded international claims that Iranian nuclear activities are a cover for an atomic weapons programme although Tehran insists it wants only to generate energy.
Among those at Thursday's meeting were Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres and Defence Minister Amir Peretz.
Also in attendence were Mossad chief Meir Dagan, Yuval Diskin, head of the Shin Beth internal security service, military intelligence chief General Amos Yadlin and the head of the nuclear energy commission Gideon Frank.
The five permanent UN Security Council members, Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States, plus Germany, are expected this week to begin discussing a resolution imposing sanctions on Tehran if it does not halt its atomic programme.
Olmert is expected to discuss Iran when he visits Moscow next week.
Israel views the Islamic republic as its chief enemy, alarmed by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's call for the Jewish state to be wiped off the map and his dismissal of the Nazi Holocaust as a myth.
Israel is widely believed to be the only country in the Middle East to have a nuclear arsenal, estimated at 200 warheads, although it has never formally confirmed or denied it holds such weapons.
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Israel's Plan for a Military Strike on Iran
By JONATHAN COOK
October 11, 2006
The Middle East, and possibly the world, stands on the brink of a terrible conflagration as Israel and the United States prepare to deal with Iran's alleged ambition to acquire nuclear weapons. Israel, it becomes clearer by the day, wants to use its air force to deliver a knock-out blow against Tehran. It is not known whether it will use conventional weapons or a nuclear warhead in such a strike.
At this potentially cataclysmic moment in global politics, it is good to see that one of the world's leading broadcasters, the BBC, decided this week that it should air a documentary entitled "Will Israel bomb Iran?". It is the question on everyone's lips and doubtless, with the imprimatur of the BBC, the programme will sell around the world.
The good news ends there, however. Because the programme addresses none of the important issues raised by Israel's increasingly belligerent posture towards Tehran.
It does not explain that, without a United Nations resolution, a military strike on Iran to destroy its nuclear research programme would be a gross violation of international law.
It does not clarify that Israel's own large nuclear arsenal was secretly developed and is entirely unmonitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency, or that it is perceived as a threat by its neighbours and may be fuelling a Middle East arms race.
Nor does the programme detail the consequences of an Israeli strike on instability and violence across the Middle East, including in Iraq, where British and American troops are stationed as an occupying force.
And there is no consideration of how in the longer term unilateral action by Israel, with implicit sanction by the international community, is certain to provoke a steep rise in global jihad against the West.
Instead the programme dedicates 40 minutes to footage of Top Gun heroics by the Israeli air force, and the recollections of pilots who carried out a similar, "daring" attack on Iraq's nuclear reactor in the early 1980s; menacing long shots of Iran's nuclear research facilities; and interviews with three former Israeli prime ministers, a former Israeli military chief of staff, various officials in Israeli military intelligence and a professor who designs Israel's military arsenal.
All of them speak with one voice: Israel, they claim, is about to be "wiped out" by Iranian nuclear weapons and must defend itself "whatever the consequences".
They are given plenty of airtime to repeat unchallenged well-worn propaganda Israel has been peddling through its own media, and which has been credulously amplified by the international media: that Iran is led by a fanatical anti-Semite who, like Adolf Hitler, believes he can commit genocide against the Jewish people, this time through a nuclear holocaust.
Other Israeli misinformation, none of it believed by serious analysts, is also uncritically spread by the film-makers: that Hizbullah in Lebanon is a puppet of Iran, waiting to aid its master in Israel's destruction; that Iran is only months away from creating nuclear weapons, a "point of no return", as the programme warns; and that a "fragile" Israel is under constant threat of annihilation from all its Arab neighbours.
But the programme's unequivocal main theme -- echoing precisely Israel's own agenda -- is that Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is hellbent on destroying Israel. The film-makers treat seriously, bordering on reverentially, preposterous comments from Israel's leaders about this threat.
Shimon Peres, the Israeli government's veteran roving ambassador, claims, for example, that Iran has made "a call for genocide" against Israel, compares an Iranian nuclear bomb to a "flying concentration camp", and warns that "no one would like to see a comeback to the times of the Nazis".
Cabinet minister Avi Dichter, a former head of the Shin Bet domestic security service, believes Israel faces "an existential threat" from Iran. And Zvi Stauber, a former senior figure in military intelligence, compares Israel's situation to a man whose neighbour "has a gun and he declares every day he is going to kill you".
But pride of place goes to Binyamin Netanyahu, a former prime minister and the current leader of the opposition. He claims repeatedly that the only possible reason Iran and its president could want a nuclear arsenal is for Israel's "extermination". "If he can get away with it, he'll do it." "Ayatollahs with atombic bombs are a powerful threat to all of us." A nuclear Iran "is a threat unlike anything we have seen before. It's beyond politics" -- apparently worse than the nuclear states of North Korea and Pakistan, the latter a military dictatorship and friend of the US barely containing within its borders some of the most fanatical jihadist movements in the world.
Apart from a brief appearance by an Iranian diplomat, no countervailing opinions are entertained in the BBC programme; only Israel's military and political leadership is allowed to speak.
The documentary gives added credence to the views of Israel's security establishment by making great play of a speech by Ahmadinejad -- one with which the Israeli authorities and their allies in Washington have made endless mischief -- in which the Iranian president repeats a statement by Iran's late spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, that went unnoticed when first uttered.
In the BBC programme, Ahmadenijad is quoted as saying: "The regime occupying Jerusalem should be eliminated from the page of history". This is at least an improvement on the original translation, much repeated in the programme by Netanyahu and others, that "Israel must be wiped off the map".
But for some strange reason, the programme makers infer from their more accurate translation the same diabolical intent on Ahmadinejad's part as suggested by Netanyahu's fabricated version. Iran's nuclear weapons, we are told by the programme as if they are already in existence, have "presented Israel's leaders with a new order of threat". In making his speech, the BBC film argues, Ahmadinejad "issued a death sentence against Israel".
But, as has now been pointed out on numerous occasions (though clearly not often enough for the BBC to have noticed), Khomeini and Ahmadinejad were referring to the need for regime change, the ending of the regime occupying the Palestinians in violation of international law. They were not talking, as Netanyahu and co claim, about the destruction of the state of Israel or the Jewish people. The implication of the speech is that the current Israeli regime will end because occupying powers are illegitimate and unsustainable, not because Iran plans to fire nuclear missiles at the Jewish state or commit genocide.
Overlooked by the programme makers is the fact that "fragile" Israel is currently the only country in the Middle East armed with nuclear warheads, several hundred of them, as well as one of the most powerful armies in the world, which presumably make most of its neighbours feel "fragile" too, with far more reason.
And, as we are being persuaded how "fragile" Israel really is, another former prime minister, Ehud Barak, is interviewed. "Ultimately we are standing alone," he says, in apparent justification for an illegal, unilateral strike. Iran's nuclear reasearch facilities, Barak warns, are hidden deep underground, so deep that "no conventional weapon can penetrate", leaving us to infer that in such circumstances Israel will have no choice but use a tactical nuclear strike in its "self-defence". And, getting into his stride, Barak adds that some facilities are in crowded urban areas "where any attack could end up in civilian collateral damage".
But despite the terrifying scenario laid out by Israel's leaders, the BBC website cheerleads for Israel in the same manner as the programme-makers, suggesting that Israel has the right to engineer a clash of civilisations: "With America unlikely to take military action, the pressure is growing on Israel's leaders to launch a raid."
As should be clear by now, the Israeli government's fingerprints are all over this BBC "documentary". And that is hardly surprising because the man behind this "independent" production is Israel's leading film-maker: Noam Shalev.
Shalev, a graduate of a New York film school, has been making a spate of documentaries through his production company Highlight Films, based in Herzliya, near Tel Aviv, that have been lapped up by the BBC and other foreign broadcasters. With the BBC's stamp of approval, it is easy for Shalev to sell his films around the world.
Shalev, who claims that he doesn't "espouse a political view", started his career by making documentaries on less controversial subjects. He has produced films on Ethiopian immigrants arriving in Israel, and on the Zaka organisation, Jewish religious fundamentalists who arrive at the scene of suicide attacks quite literally to pick up the pieces, of human remains.
In the past his films managed to bypass the reticence of broadcasters like the BBC to broach the combustible subject of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict outside their news programmes by touching on the topic obliquely. Importantly, however, Shalev's films always humanise his Israeli subjects, showing them as complex, emotional and caring beings, while largely ignoring the millions of Palestinians the Israeli government and army are oppressing.
According to a profile of Shalev published in the Israeli media in 2004, his success derives from the fact that he has developed a "soft-sell approach", showing Israel in a good light without "the straightforward 'hasbara' [propaganda] efforts which explain Israel's case that Israel's Foreign Ministry is required to disseminate to European and American news outlets."
In the words of an Israeli public relations executive, Shalev has a skill in telling Israel's story in ways that international broadcasters appreciate: "[Shalev] also shows the Israeli side, he is not one of those traitors who sell their ideology for money. He has the skill to market it in such a way that overseas they want to see it, and this is very important."
But recently Shalev has grown more confident to try the hard sell for Israel, apparently sure that the BBC and other foreign broadcasters will still buy his films. And that is because Shalev offers them something that other film-makers cannot: intimate access to Israel's security forces, an area off-limits to his rivals.
Before the disengagement from Gaza last year, for example, Shalev made a sympathetic documentary, shown by the BBC, about a day in the life of one Israeli soldier serving there. The film largely concealed the context that might have alerted viewers to the fact that the soldier was enforcing a four-decade illegal occupation of Gaza, or that the Strip is an open-air prison in which thousands of Palestinian have been killed by the Israeli army and in which a majority of Gazans live in abject poverty.
Interviewed about the documentary, Shalev observed: "The army really is very, very careful. There is no indiscriminate firing. I saw, and this was not a show put on just for us, that before any shot is fired there is confirmation that there is nobody behind or in front of the objective. The army is very sensitive to non-deliberate fire."
In other words, Shalev's film for the BBC shed no light on why Israel's "deliberate" fire has killed hundreds of Palestinian children during the second intifada or why a large number of civilians have died from Israeli gunfire and missile strikes inside the Gaza Strip.
Earlier this year Shalev made another film for the BBC, "The Hunt for Black October", to coincide with the release of Stephen Spielberg's movie Munich. "The BBC gains exclusive access to the undercover Mossad agents assigned to track down the Palestinian group responsible for the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics," the BBC was able to glow in its promotional material.
Shalev's latest film, "Will Israel bomb Iran?", follows this well-trodden path. Arabs and Muslims are again deprived of a voice, as are non-Israeli experts.
So why did the BBC buy this blatant piece of propaganda?
Here are a few clues. Shalev's film includes:
* footage taken from inside Hizbullah bunkers under the supervision of the Israeli army as it occupied south Lebanon.
* a "rare view" of the inside of the Israeli army's satellite control room, which spies on Israel's Arab neighbours and Iran and which, according to programme, is "incredibly guarded about its security arrangements".
* an exclusive appearance by Israel's former military chief of staff, Moshe Yaalon, who we are told is "rarely interviewed".
* a glimpse inside a Rafael weapons factory, which the programme tells us is "rarely filmed".
In other words, the BBC, and the other broadcasters who will air this "documentary" in the coming weeks and months, has been dazzled by Shalev's ability to show us the secret world of the Israeli army. So dazzled, it seems, that it has forgotten to check -- or worse, simply doesn't care -- what message Shalev is inserting between his exclusive footage.
It might have occurred to someone at the BBC to wonder why Shalev gets these chances to show things no one else is allowed to. Could it be that the "hasbara" division of the Israeli Foreign Ministry has got far more sophisticated than it once was?
Is the Israeli government using Shalev, wittingly or not, and is he in turn using the BBC, to spread Israeli propaganda? Propaganda that may soon propel us towards the "clash of civilisations" so longed for by Israel's leadership.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the author of the forthcoming "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State" published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States from the University of Michigan Press. His website is www.jkcook.net
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CIA Spins Spider's Web vs. Cuba, Venezuela
W.T. Whitney
September 23
U.S. intelligence head John Negroponte announced Aug. 18 the creation of a new Central Intelligence Agency mission to oversee intelligence operations in Venezuela and Cuba at the strategic level. J. Patrick Maher, a 32-year CIA veteran with supervisory experience in Colombia and the Caribbean, was named as acting mission manager.
According to Negroponte, "Policymakers have increasingly focused on the challenges that Cuba and Venezuela pose to American foreign policy." He noted Washington's concern about the close ties between the two countries and failure on Venezuela's part to cooperate with Washington's "anti-terrorist campaign."
The change comes in the wake of Raul Castro's temporary accession to the presidency of Cuba on July 31 and coincides with reparations in Venezuela for presidential elections set for Dec. 3.
As a measure of the seriousness with which the U.S. government regards Cuba and Venezuela, the new post is one of only six agencies operating at the strategic level within the intelligence bureaucracy. One of them covers Iran and North Korea -- the only other countries with a mission manager - and four others deal with counter-proliferation, counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and weapons of mass destruction.
Negroponte gave Maher responsibility "for ensuring that policymakers have a full range of timely and accurate intelligence on which to base their decisions." That objective, analysts suggest, portends a buildup of agents and field officers in both countries.
Stepped-up U.S. intelligence attention to Cuba comes five weeks after the Bush administration released an update of its plans for returning Cuba to capitalism. Fidel Castro's departure from power was supposed to have signaled the time for implementation to begin, facilitated by $80 million set-aside for Cuban government opponents. That clock, of course, has started.
Intelligence operations in Venezuela are intensifying just as new
indications of massive U.S. spending to get rid of President Hugo Chavez are in the limelight. According to an Associated Press report on Aug. 26, the U.S. Agency for International Development since 2002 has distributed $26 million via 220 grants to Venezuelan recipients under a "Venezuela Confidence Building Initiative." The data emerged from a survey of 132 contracts detailed on 1,600 pages made accessible under the Freedom of Information Act.
Within USAID, an "Office of Transition Initiatives" sees to spending in Venezuela and other "priority countries" such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Bolivia and Haiti. Reportedly, OTI funding is free of stipulations applied to other USAID grants, and funds are available on short notice because they originate from "disaster assistance" appropriations.
As a parallel program poised to complement U.S. intelligence activities in Venezuela, the National Endowment for Democracy has distributed some $2.9 million over a four-year period for technical training in organizing of political parties and for voter education.
If other Latin American experience holds true, U.S. undercover work will try to influence the media in Venezuela, a fertile field inasmuch as opposition newspapers and television stations there are far from silent.
On Aug. 25, for example, a few newspapers throughout Latin America, among them La Nacion of Buenos Aires, carried an article by Simon Romero of Caracas claiming that Venezuela has collaborated with Iran in a uranium enrichment program.
Journalists working with that paper and others told the Association of Media Professionals in Argentina that the CIA had fostered that line. They alleged that U.S. "diplomats" had offered them bribes to present the U.S. side in stories covering Venezuela's admission into the Mercosur trade group and Brazilian President Lula da Silva's bid for re-election in October.
The exposé by Victor Ego Ducrotto, appearing on the Rebelion web site on Aug. 25, claimed that CIA personnel worked "elbow to elbow" with the representatives of the right-wing Inter American Press Society, based in Miami.
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Zionism is Death
Palestinian newborns, even the dead, hit by strike
Reuters
11/10/2006
RAMALLAH, West Bank - Even in death there is no escape from a crippling strike by Palestinian government workers over unpaid wages.
University professor Ali Jarbawi said he was unable to sort out the estate of his brother, who died nearly two months ago, because he could not get a death certificate from the Interior Ministry in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
Staff there have been on strike since early September over the Hamas government's inability to pay full wages.
"I cannot get any detail about my brother's accounts or stocks and official paperwork without the death certificate," Jarbawi told Reuters.
Backed by President Mahmoud Abbas's rival Fatah movement, tens of thousands of workers have paralysed the Palestinian Authority across the occupied West Bank.
Government services have been affected in Gaza, a bastion of the Hamas Islamist movement.
Hamas has accused Fatah of orchestrating the strike to topple its six-month-old government, struggling under Western sanctions aimed at forcing the group to recognize Israel. Strikers argue their actions are not politically motivated.
In Ramallah, home to many government departments, newly imported cars cruise the streets without number plates. Motorists cannot renew driving licences. With teachers not showing up for work, school children roam the streets.
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Gaza sliding into civil war
Rory McCarthy in Gaza City
Thursday October 12, 2006
The Guardian
When they buried Rafiq Siam, the traffic stopped and hundreds of armed men, some firing into the air, gathered at the Gaza mosque. Eight men wearing red berets and black combat uniforms lifted his body wrapped in a white shroud and Palestinian flag and carried it inside with as much ceremony as the pressing crowd would allow.
Mr Siam, 40, a father of seven, was the victim of a single bullet to the base of his skull. He died on Sunday a week after he was shot, the latest victim in the worst outbreak of factional violence in Gaza for more than 10 years. Years of rivalry between the Islamic Hamas movement, which now dominates the government, and the more secular Fatah, which was ousted from power in January elections, is spilling over into a struggle for power.
Protests
A few hours after the funeral, Mr Siam's father sat with a dozen mourners outside the family home. His son, he explained, had worked at the office of the Palestinian president and Fatah leader, Mahmoud Abbas. The morning he was shot, armed men from a new Hamas unit, the Executive Force, clashed with Fatah protesters who were demonstrating about unpaid government salaries. "He was hit by a bullet on the back of his head," said his father, Yusuf, 74. At least 15 people were killed in the clashes last week.
"This is no small thing that is happening. There is no nationalism here. It's just a competition between two forces. I'm sick of both sides because they can't control the situation. We are the victims. The victims are my son and the sons of others."
There have been clashes between Palestinian factions before, particularly in Gaza where clan rivalries are frequently the rule of law. But what distinguishes the troubles this time is the power of Hamas and a worsening economic crisis.
As soon as Hamas formed a government after winning January's elections, Israel withheld $60m (£32m) in monthly tax revenues and the international community halted direct financial aid to the Palestinian Authority. That, combined with frequent Israeli closures of the crossing points into Gaza, has prompted a severe economic crisis and left hundreds of young men, who have ready access to weapons, without salaries.
The funding freeze came because Hamas refused to meet Israeli and international demands to recognise Israel's right to exist, to renounce violence, and to accept all past peace agreements. Despite the crisis, there is no sign that Hamas is ready to meet those criteria and fading hope that they might agree to a coalition government with Fatah.
Feuding
A year after Israel's withdrawal of settlers from Gaza promised a new future for Palestinians here, the coastal strip is being swallowed up in an internal feud.
As Yusuf Siam stood to greet mourners, a boy arrived with a handful of papers marked from the al-Aqsa Brigade, a Fatah-affiliated militant group, and handed them out. The letter offered condolences to the family and then vowed revenge. "For the families of the people who lost their sons at the hands of Hamas we swear that their blood will not be spilt for nothing," it said. "We will give a lesson to Hamas."
There are signs that this is more serious than rhetorical rivalry between militants. "The Palestinian situation is marred by sharp divisions and battling; it is a misery and shameful for any Arab and any Palestinian," Egypt's foreign minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit, who has tried to mediate in this crisis, told the Al-Ahram newspaper this week. Some senior Palestinians are openly warning now of the danger of civil war.
In the offices of Palestinian politicians some try to downplay the crisis. "We are not worried about this ... I am confident we will not reach the point of war," said Yehya Mousa, a Hamas MP from Khan Yunis in southern Gaza.
But in the rival camp, aides to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, are suggesting that he assert his authority, dissolve the Hamas government, and set up an emergency interim administration. This, Mr Mousa said, would be tantamount to a "coup". Hamas leaders see this as Fatah smarting from its election loss and trying to take back power.
Alaa Edin Yaghi, a Fatah MP, said he believed a coalition government was now out of reach and favoured, eventually, replacing the current government with an emergency administration. He wanted Fatah to reinforce its strength on the ground before it takes action.
"We are not ready for a civil war or a hard fight with Hamas," said Mr Yaghi. "It is not reasonable to go into a battle you will lose. But maybe if Hamas starts to feel Fatah is organising itself and getting stronger and seriously thinking of attacking them then they will withdraw and back down."
Fatah and Hamas have been here before. Mr Yaghi once ran a Fatah committee that controlled the Jabiliya refugee camp and rounded up dozens of Hamas militants in a crackdown in the late 1980s. Then in the 1990s there was an official crackdown on Hamas. But now the Islamic movement has gone from being a militant opposition group to running the government. At the same time, Fatah's power has ebbed.
"I think the situation was never worse than this," said Mahmoud Ajrami, a Palestinian foreign ministry official. He argues that any attempt by Mr Abbas to dissolve the Hamas government could trigger a much more serious escalation of violence. "We are running towards a catastrophic end," he said. "I don't see anything but a civil war."
Divided loyalties
- Presidential security An armed force loyal to Mahmoud Abbas of around 4,000, reported to get training and equipment from the west
- Executive force A new police force controlled by interior ministry with 3,000 Hamas members on payroll
- Other armed forces There are dozens of smaller armed units, including the national security force and the civil police and civil defence
- Unofficial armed groups:
Izzadin al-Qassam Brigades The main Hamas armed wing
Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade Largest Fatah militant group
Popular Resistance Committees Made up of members of Hamas, al-Aqsa Martyrs and Islamic Jihad
Al-Quds Brigade Armed wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad
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Israel willfully kills two civilians at Nablus checkpoints
EI
10/10/2006
Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) positioned at military checkpoints in Nablus killed two Palestinian civilians in less than 24 hours in two separate crimes. These latest crimes prove IOF's disregard for the lives of Palestinian civilians. PCHR condemns these crimes and asserts that the failure of the international community, particularly the High Contracting Parties to the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War of 1949 to hold Israel accountable for crimes committed against Palestinian civilians serves to encourage IOF to commit more of such crimes.
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Israeli authorities impose additional restrictions on Palestinian farmers
IMEMC
11/10/2006
Residents of Azoun 'Atma live behind the Wall in southern Qalqilia. The village became entirely isolated from the rest of the northwestern West Bank district when the Wall was imposed, and now the Israeli authorities have placed additional restrictions on them. The Israeli administration decided that this season Israeli soldiers will accompany farmers to the olive harvest in order to protect them. Therefore, farmers have only three days. Any additional harvesting in prohibited. A farmer with 86 Dunams of planted land said this will result in huge losses.
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Israeli forces shot Jenin child four years ago; medical problems persist
Palestine Network News
11/10/2006
In the year 2002 Israeli forces invaded Jenin Refugee Camp. Tanks began firing down alleyways. Thirteen year old Jihad Mousa stood near his house on the edge of the northern West Bank camp. From four meters away an Israeli soldier shot the child. He fell to the ground, soaked in blood from the 250mm bullet that pierced his young body. The child is now 17 and is suffering kidney failure. His health has deteriorated since the day Israeli forces shot him in several places
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Illegal Israeli Settlers Attack Palestinian Residents in Hebron
IMEMC
11/10/2006
The settlers, who live in the illegal Israeli settlement of Ramatiashai, near the Tell Al Rumida area, attacked residents' houses with stones while giving death threats. These attacks are becoming daily events in the area, residents say, with the attacks even being carried out under the protection of the Israeli army.
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A rerun of Lebanon war in Palestine?
MENA
11/10/2006
The reality is that the Palestinian Authority is not and has never been a government for the Palestinian people. The Palestinian Authority receives Western backing only to the extent that it directly and exclusively serves Israeli interests. It was designed to protect the Israeli occupation against its victims; no one will be permitted to turn it into a representative body that fights for the rights and interests of Palestinians. To avoid the trap that is being set, Hamas will either have to sell out or get out. [...]
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Israeli missile hits deputy's house
10/12/2006 12:00 AM (UAE)
Gaza/Geneva: An Israeli missile hit the Gaza Strip home of a well known woman lawmaker from the governing Islamist group Hamas yesterday in what the army said was an attack on a weapons factory.
Israeli forces also shot dead two Palestinians in separate incidents at the border with Gaza and in the occupied West Bank. Residents said the man killed in the raid on the city of Nablus was a civilian. The army said he was planting a bomb.
There were no reports of casualties in the strike in Gaza on the building of Mariam Farhat, better known as Umm Nidal, who has often voiced pride at the death of three of her six sons during a Palestinian uprising.
In Geneva, UN humanitarian chief Jan Egeland said yesterday the Gaza Strip is on the brink of a "social explosion" that could drive it even deeper into violence.
Egeland said the on-off closure of the Palestinian territory by Israeli authorities due to security concerns was stifling the livelihoods of about 1.5 million mainly young people who live there.
"We are particularly concerned by the situation in Gaza, which is by all accounts a ticking time bomb," the UN Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs told journalists.
"When I call it a time bomb, it means that sooner or later there will be a social explosion which is even worse than the one we have today," he added.
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Israel warned: Lebanon war could start again
Clancy Chassay in Beirut
Wednesday October 11, 2006
The Guardian
Hizbullah will resume its military campaign unless Israel withdraws from the disputed Shebaa farms area and other pockets of territory occupied during this summer's 34-day war, Nabih Berri, the speaker of the Lebanese parliament, has warned. "If Israel does not pull out we will have to drive them out," Mr Berri, who acted as a link to the militant organisation during this summer's war with Israel, said in an interview with the Guardian.
Shebaa farms has been occupied by Israel since 1967, but both Syria and Lebanon claim ownership of the land.
Hizbullah will remain armed and fully operational in south Lebanon, despite the newly deployed UN forces, until Israel withdraws from all Lebanese territory and ceases its air, sea and land violations, Mr Berri said. "The Unifil presence will not hinder Hizbullah's defensive operations. The resistance doesn't need to fly its flags high to operate. It's a guerrilla movement; it operates among the people," he said.
But Fouad Siniora, the Lebanese prime minister, told journalists last week that the Lebanese army had clear instructions to seize any weapons found in the south. "We reiterate our respect for all those who struggled and fought in the south, but there will be no weapons in the south apart from the army's," he said.
Mr Berri also expressed concern that UN forces could be involved in gathering information that could fall into the hands of Israel's intelligence agency, Mossad. "We don't want to interfere in their work, but we will be watching closely. We have to be careful, but we have a very effective intelligence service and we are used to watching for Israeli spies."
He added: "We will help them and give them everything they need to complete their mission but we will not accept the force if its presence is to secure Israel. They are on our land, so that means they have to work in the interests of Lebanon, not Israel."
Lebanon would be "the last of the last Arab nations to sign a peace treaty with Israel", he said, echoing the position of the prime minister.
Mr Berri holds the highest position attainable by a Shia in Lebanon's power-sharing system, made up of a Sunni Muslim prime minister, a Maronite Christian president and a Shia Muslim speaker. He has held the position since 1992 and has been the head of the Amal movement, a Shia party, for more than 26 years.
He said there was concern the foreign troops may stay indefinitely, as security council resolution 1701 does not specify a time frame for the mission. "We hope that when they have done their duty, when Israel has stopped their aggressions and withdrawn from all Lebanese territory, Unifil will go on their way."
Resolution 1701 calls for "security arrangements to prevent the resumption of hostilities, including the establishment ... of an area free of any armed personnel, assets and weapons other than those of the government of Lebanon and of Unifil".
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Rights group: Shin Bet denies vital treatment to Palestinians
By Amos Harel, Haaretz Correspondent
04:00 12/10/2006
The Shin Bet security service is systematically preventing Palestinians who need medical treatment unavailable in the territories from entering Israel, a new report by the nonprofit organization Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) charges.
According to the organization, in many cases, patients have been denied urgent, life-saving treatment.
The report says that the Shin Bet automatically refuses entry permits, and reconsiders its decisions only if legal action is begun.
In response, the Shin Bet said that it has to balance security considerations against human rights, and noted that terrorist groups have tried to take advantage of Palestinian patients with entry permits in order to carry out attacks inside Israel.
The report, a copy of which was given to Haaretz, claims that the Shin Bet has veto power over all requests by Palestinian patients seeking to enter Israel for medical purposes or to travel from the territories abroad. Many of the requests are turned down on the grounds that the individual is "forbidden entry." That is a classification for Palestinians whom the Shin Bet considers potential threats to national security.
However, it is rare for someone to be tagged as "forbidden entry" because of specific information about that individual. In most cases, the label is based on general profiles of potential terrorists.
The human rights group carried out an analysis of refused entry requests and concluded that the Shin Bet applies very general criteria in its decisions. According to the analysis, those between the ages of 16 and 35, and sometimes 18 and 40, are considered "dangerous." Single men and women, or those who are married but childless, are usually turned down. Anyone with a record of security offenses, even minor ones (i.e. former
prisoners), or with possible motives for revenge (a family member hurt by the Israel Defense Forces), is also turned down, as are students, because universities are described as "hotbeds of terrorism," and AIDS patients (the stigma that the disease carries in Palestinian society opens the patient to blackmail: attack in order to cleanse the family name).
The organization decribes the use of these profiles as collective punishment, and emphasizes that denying medical treatment to Palestinian patients violates their human rights. For some patients, no medical treatment is tantamount to a death sentence.
Even though responsibility for medical services in the territories were transferred to the Palestinian Authority under the Gaza and Jericho agreement of 1994, in practice, the PA cannot meet its population's medical needs, and therefore sends many patients to Israel and Arab countries for treatment.
According to PHR, international law and agreements to which Israel is party require it to provide for the medical needs of the population in the territories. Israel refuses to acknowledge any such legal obligation, but responds to some requests out of "humanitarian concerns." In those cases, Israel charges the Palestinians for the medical treatment.
The report's authors say that the Shin Bet refuses to invest the funds and manpower necessary for more detailed evaluations of Palestinian requests to enter Israel for medical purposes, and as a result, most are automatically turned down. The applicant, who receives a response to his request through the Civil Administration, is never told why the request was turned down, nor is there an easy method of appealing the decision. Many applicants are not even aware that there is a possibility of appealing.
Although hundreds of Palestinian applicants are turned down, the vast majority of those who appeal with the help of PHR are allowed entry into Israel. According to the organization, out of 138 requests it handled last year on behalf of patients who were denied entry permits, 116, or 84 percent, were ultimately approved.
However, whenever the group turns to the High Court of Justice, the state asks the court to treat the case as an exception and avoid making a precedent-setting ruling. And in cases where the state insists on its refusal to allow the petitioner to enter Israel, the court usually upholds this position, on the basis of intelligence that the petitioner is not allowed to see.
The report's authors recommend that the entire method of granting permits be reformed.
According to PHR, "the Shin Bet enjoys secure anonymity that gives it infinite control, which even the High Court has trouble limiting. Denying patients care constitutes torture." The group therefore suggests doing away with the Shin Bet's veto power over requests for entry permits, arguing that the decision in disputed cases should be placed in the hands of an authorized medical professional.
The report also accuses the Shin Bet of trying to exploit Palestinian patients' difficult situations in order to recruit family members as informers, by conditioning permits for medical treatment on a promise to supply information.
The Shin Bet responded that its sole goal is to limit terrorism, and that is the sole criterion for approving or refusing Palestinian requests for entry into Israel. It also maintained that its policies undergo legal scrutiny.
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U.N. notes increase in Israel roadblocks
By KARIN LAUB, Associated Press Writer Wed Oct 11, 4:20 PM ET
JERUSALEM - Israel's network of military checkpoints and road barriers in the West Bank has grown by 40 percent in the past year, part of an increasingly sophisticated system of controls that disrupts all aspects of Palestinian life, a U.N. agency said Wednesday.
These physical obstacles are carving up the West Bank into separate parts, with travel between them becoming more and more difficult, said David Shearer, head of the U.N.'s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Jerusalem.
U.N. officials in Geneva, meanwhile, expressed concern about the ongoing closure of the Gaza Strip, including the crossing between Gaza and Egypt.
"It cannot continue like it is now without a social explosion that will hurt everybody, including Israeli security," said Jan Egeland, the U.N. humanitarian chief.
The tightened travel restrictions come at a time of continued deadlock - both in efforts to restart an Israeli-Palestinian dialogue and a bid by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to form a more a pragmatic government that is acceptable to the international community.
The Hamas-led Palestinian Authority has reiterated in recent days that it will not recognize Israel or renounce violence - key conditions for the lifting of an international aid boycott.
In Brussels, Belgium, the EU said Wednesday it had given $816 million in aid to the Palestinians this year, bypassing the Hamas government.
EU spokeswoman Emma Udwin said a two-day meeting of European experts agreed to expand the aid to cover 60,000 additional people in the Palestinian territories, from the 100,000 currently receiving help through the international fund overseen by the World Bank.
Jacob Walles, the U.S. consul general in Jerusalem, said the United States is prepared to work with any Palestinian government that meets the international demands.
With Hamas refusing to compromise, it should make room for others, Walles said. "They should let another government come in, in some way, and accept the conditions," Walles told Palestinian reporters.
In the current climate, a meeting between Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert also appeared increasingly unlikely, despite pledges by both a month ago that they are ready to meet without preconditions.
Abbas confidant Saeb Erekat said the Palestinian leader wants concrete achievements in such a meeting, including the release of some of the thousands of Palestinian prisoners Israel holds.
However, Israeli government spokeswoman Miri Eisin said Wednesday that she expects Olmert and Abbas to meet "toward the end of November" despite the current difficulties.
In Jerusalem, the U.N. agency, OCHA, said it has seen an increase of nearly 40 percent in the number of army checkpoints and physical barriers in the West Bank, from 376 in August 2005 to 528 in September of this year.
The West Bank's Jordan Valley is now entirely off limits to Palestinians who are not residents of that area, except for those with permits to work in the valley's Jewish settlements, Shearer said.
Israel is also pushing ahead with the construction of its separation barrier along, and in many areas inside the West Bank. The barrier eventually will run for 437 miles; 252 miles have been completed, including 27 miles in the past five months, Shearer said.
Some 50,000 Palestinians have found themselves on the wrong side of the barrier, meaning they are separated from the rest of the West Bank, Shearer said.
"We are seeing a continuing closing down, locking down of Palestinian areas," he said.
Tight travel restrictions also were in place during the height of the Palestinian uprising from 2000 to 2003, when dozens of suicide bombers carried out attacks in Israel.
"Since then it's become much more systematic, much more sophisticated in terms of monitoring Palestinian movement and closing Palestinian movement," he said.
"The West Bank, for example, is effectively being chopped up into three big areas ... and there are pockets within those areas where people also can't move."
Capt. Adam Avidan, spokesman for the military's civil administration in the West Bank, said in a statement that Israel tries "as much as possible to preserve the Palestinians' way of life and to avoid hurting innocent civilians in its war against terrorism."
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Terror
FBI Agents Still Lacking Arabic Skills
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
33 of 12,000 Have Some Proficiency
Five years after Arab terrorists attacked the United States, only 33 FBI agents have even a limited proficiency in Arabic, and none of them work in the sections of the bureau that coordinate investigations of international terrorism, according to new FBI statistics.
Counting agents who know only a handful of Arabic words -- including those who scored zero on a standard proficiency test -- just 1 percent of the FBI's 12,000 agents have any familiarity with the language, the statistics show.
The numbers reflect the FBI's continued struggle to attract employees who speak Arabic, Urdu, Farsi and other languages of the Middle East and South Asia, even as the bureau leads a fight against terrorist groups primarily centered in those parts of the world. The same challenge is facing the CIA and other agencies as the government competes with the private sector for a limited number of applicants with foreign-language proficiency, according to U.S. officials and experts.
The shortage of agents with foreign-language skills also shows the extent to which the FBI has focused on translators since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, in part because officials believe it is more valuable to have specially trained linguists.
In a recent deposition filed in an employee lawsuit, a senior FBI official testified that the bureau's two International Terrorism Operations Sections (ITOS) do not require any agents to know Arabic, even though the sections coordinate all foreign terrorism investigations. Only four agents in ITOS have any familiarity with Arabic, and none of them are ranked above elementary proficiency, documents show.
"There are no agent positions, at any level, in either ITOS I or II that utilize the Arabic language as part of their ITOS duties or responsibilities," Michael J. Heimbach, head of ITOS I, testified in his deposition. ". . . As such, knowledge of the Arabic language is not a skill set utilized by either ITOS I or II."
FBI officials said it is not crucial for agents working in the ITOS sections to know Arabic or other foreign languages, because they rely primarily on documents or interviews already translated by FBI linguists. As for agents in the field in the United States or overseas, FBI officials say translators are readily available when needed by investigators, usually within 24 hours.
But Daniel Byman, a Georgetown University associate professor who heads the school's Security Studies Program, said the FBI's continuing failure to attract Arabic-speaking agents is "a serious problem" that hurts the bureau's relations with immigrant communities and makes it more difficult to gather intelligence on extremist groups.
"With any new immigrant communities, they need these language skills, whether it's Vietnamese or Pakistani or Arabic," Byman said. "It also often gives you extra cultural knowledge and sensitivity. It makes you more sensitive to nuance, which is what investigations are often all about."
Margaret Gulotta, chief of the FBI's language services section, said in an interview that the bureau has made significant progress since 9/11 in increasing the number of translators who speak Arabic and other foreign languages. The number of translators proficient in Arabic has grown from 70 in September 2001 to 269 as of July -- an increase of nearly 300 percent -- while the overall number of linguists has nearly doubled.
The FBI also has a "very aggressive training program" of foreign-language instruction for agents and other programs that make it easier to hire candidates with foreign-language ability, Gulotta said. In fiscal 2005, she said, more than 1,600 agents took classes.
"Do we need more Arabic-speaking agents? By all means we want more Arabic-speaking agents," Gulotta said. "But admittedly it's a very difficult group of people to recruit and hire. . . . We've been a lot more successful in recruiting and hiring contract linguists and language specialists."
More than 1,400 agents have at least a limited working proficiency in a foreign language, including nearly 900 who speak Spanish. Other languages include Russian, Farsi, Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin and Cantonese, the FBI said.
Gulotta and other officials said several factors limit the number of foreign speakers who can become agents at the FBI. Special agents, for example, must be U.S. citizens. They also must undergo background checks that are much more difficult to pass if the candidate has relatives or friends overseas.
"It is easier to get a security clearance if you don't have any interaction with foreigners, which is not what you want if you want better interaction with foreigners," Byman said.
Some of the new information about language abilities at the FBI has emerged in connection with a lawsuit by one of the FBI's highest-ranking Arabic speakers, Special Agent Bassem Youssef, who sued the Justice Department and the bureau alleging retaliation after he complained that he was cut out of terrorism cases after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Youssef, a naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in Egypt, is one of only six FBI agents who scored a 4 for "advanced professional proficiency" in Arabic on standardized speaking tests administered by the Interagency Language Roundtable for federal agencies.
Youssef's attorney, Stephen M. Kohn, said the statistics indicate that most FBI agents have no way to gauge the accuracy of translated materials and must rely on linguists or other third parties for their information.
"How do you fight a war with that kind of disadvantage?" Kohn asked.
Gulotta and other experts note that the FBI is not alone in its struggle to attract qualified job candidates who speak Arabic or other foreign languages.
A study released last week, for example, found that three terrorists housed at a federal prison in Colorado were able to send more than 90 letters to fellow extremists overseas, in part because the prison did not have enough qualified language translators to understand what was happening.
The Bush administration early this year unveiled a "National Security Language Initiative" aimed at encouraging more instruction in "critical" languages in elementary schools, secondary schools and universities.
The lack of such programs hurts "national security, diplomacy, law enforcement [and] intelligence communities," said a fact sheet accompanying the initiative's launch.
Steve Ackley, director of communications for the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages in Alexandria, said the FBI and other agencies are faced with a serious challenge, because language instruction is so undervalued in U.S. schools.
"American society in general does not put a huge premium or value on multilingualism," Ackley said. "Until the general public . . . recognizes that this is an area that the government in general and agencies like the FBI and CIA have to invest in, this is not a problem that's going to get better."
Arabic-Speaking Agents
The FBI has made little progress since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in attracting Arabic-speaking FBI agents. Only 129 out of more than 12,000 agents are listed as having some familiarity with Arabic, and only 33 of those are ranked as having at least a limited working proficiency with the language. . .
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American charged with treason for aiding al-Qaida
www.chinaview.cn 2006-10-12 06:16:03
WASHINGTON, Oct. 11 (Xinhua) -- A U.S. citizen was officially charged with treason on Wednesday by a federal grand jury in California, the first person to be charged with treason against the United States since the World War II era, the Justice Department announced.
Adam Gadahn, also known as Azzam Al-Amriki, was indicted on federal charges of treason and providing material support to al Qaida, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty told a news conference.
"A charge of treason is exceptionally severe and it is not one we bring lightly," he said.
According to the indictment, Gadahn appeared in a series of al Qaida videos broadcast in the United States and elsewhere between October 2004 and September 2006.
In the videos, Gadahn acknowledged that he had joined al Qaida and declared "the streets of America shall run red with blood, casualties will be too many to count, and the next wave of attacks may come at any moment," McNulty said.
Gadahn, 28, "is an American citizen who made a choice; he chose to join our enemy and to provide it with aid and comfort by acting as a propagandist for al Qaida," he said.
The videotape messages praised the Sept. 11 attacks, threatened violence against the families of American soldiers and other civilians, and called on American soldiers to join al Qaida, McNulty noted.
Gadahn's last known address was Orange County, California, and was now a fugitive and believed to be living overseas, he said
The FBI has been seeking Gadahn since 2004, and added him to its most wanted terrorist list on Wednesday.
The State Department would pay 1 million U.S. dollars for information leading to Gadahn's arrest, said Joe D. Morton, director of the department's Diplomatic Security Service.
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Professor says U.S. gov't behind 9/11 attacks
www.chinaview.cn 2006-10-11 20:10:58
BEIJING, Oct. 11 (Xinhuanet) -- An American professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who believes the U.S. government organized the Sept. 11 attacks has included his essay comparing President Bush to Adolf Hitler in a book of essays students are required to purchase for his course.
"Interpreting the Unspeakable: The Myth of 9/11" by Kevin Barrett is part of a book of essays by 15 authors in an unedited copy obtained first by WKOW-TV in Madison, Wisc. and later by The Associated Press. Only three of the essays are required reading, excluding Barrett's.
The book's title is "9/11 and American Empire: Muslims, Jews, and Christians Speak Out." It is on the syllabus for Barrett's course at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Moira Megargee, publicity director for the Northampton, Mass., publisher Interlink, said the book is due out at the end of November and the editing isn't finished.
"It is not final and for all we know that essay may not be in the book or may be edited," she said.
Barrett is a part-time instructor who holds a doctorate in African languages and literature and folklore from UW-Madison. He is an active member of a group called Scholars for 9/11 Truth. The group's members claim U.S. officials, not al-Qaida terrorists, were behind the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.
"Like Bush and the neocons, Hitler and the Nazis inaugurated their new era by destroying an architectural monument and blaming its destruction on their designated enemies," he wrote.
Barrett said Tuesday he was comparing the attacks to the burning of the German parliament building, the Reichstag, in 1933, a key event in the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship.
"That's not comparing them as people, that's comparing the Reichstag fire to the demolition of the World Trade Center, and that's an accurate comparison that I would stand by," Barrett said.
"Hitler had a good 20 to 30 IQ points on Bush," he added, "so comparing Bush to Hitler would in many ways be an insult to Hitler."
The university's decision to allow Barrett to teach the course sparked a controversy over the summer once his views became widely known.
Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle and his Republican challenger, Mark Green, have both said they believe Barrett should be fired.
The university's chief academic officer, Provost Patrick Farrell, decided to retain Barrett for the course after reviewing his plans and qualifications. He said Barrett could present his ideas during one week of the course as long as students were allowed to challenge them.
He later warned Barrett to stop seeking publicity for his personal political views.
Farrell said he has not seen the essay, but faculty can assign readings that may not be popular to everyone.
"I think part of the role of any challenging course here is going to encourage students to think of things from a variety of perspectives," he said.
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US Squad to Tighten Cuba Blockade
Havana, Oct 11 (Prensa Latina)
The creation of a special group to toughen the blockade against Cuba, announced by the US government Wednesday, has been Washington s reaction to the imminent UN condemnation of the siege against the island.
The announcement, made by the federal attorney of southern Florida, added new measures are being taken involving numerous governmental agencies and other instances "to punish lawbreakers."
The group is formed by the Office of Foreign Assets Control, the Department of the Treasury, the FBI, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Commerce, the Coastguard, and border protection units.
That huge mobilization of resources, to stiffen the anti-Cuba blockade and include threats of substantial fines and up to ten-year imprisonment sentences, is taking place less than a month before the UN General Assembly will once again pronounce on the issue.
The new US move demonstrates that for the Bush administration, the rejection of the anti-Cuba blockade expressed by the international community at the UN clearly has little value.
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The enemies within
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Dave Neiwert
Orcinus
The whole "treasonous liberals" meme has been bubbling along for some time now, starting probably with Ann Coulter and Michael Savage. It's significant for many reasons, not the least of which is the trend toward eliminationist rhetoric it deeply reflects.
But it's reaching new heights, so to speak, with the pending publication this January of Dinesh D'Souza's new book, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11. This is not just another Regnery mass-sales job, the publisher is Doubleday. D'Souza, despite a career built on some dubious racial theories, is nonetheless a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institute and a frequent guest on the cable gabfests.
James Wolcott regales us with some appropriate samples from the manuscript, including this capper:
- "There is no way to restore the culture without winning the war on terror. Conversely, the only way to win the war on terror is to win the culture war. Thus we arrive at a sobering truth. In order to crush the Islamic radicals abroad, we must defeat the enemy at home."
As Wolcott says:
- We're not the enemy, and if you engage us as the enemy, all you'll be doing is starting yet another war you can't win.
D'Souza's is something of a fresh variation on the standard theme against liberals, one voiced unmistakably a little while ago by Michael Barone:
- Our covert enemies are harder to identify, for they live in large numbers within our midst. And in terms of intentions, they are not enemies in the sense that they consciously wish to destroy our society. On the contrary, they enjoy our freedoms and often call for their expansion. But they have also been working, over many years, to undermine faith in our society and confidence in its goodness. These covert enemies are those among our elites who have promoted the ideas labeled as multiculturalism, moral relativism and (the term is Professor Samuel Huntington's) transnationalism.
We have always had our covert enemies, but their numbers were few until the 1960s. But then the elite young men who declined to serve in the military during the Vietnam War set out to write a narrative in which they, rather than those who obeyed the call to duty, were the heroes. They have propagated their ideas through the universities, the schools and mainstream media to the point that they are the default assumptions of millions. Our covert enemies don't want the Islamo-fascists to win. But in some corner of their hearts, they would like us to lose.
But D'Souza expands on this theme to suggest that the very source of Muslim radicals' hostility is the same liberalism to which he and his fellows on the right are nearly as hostile themselves.
Michael Berube earlier gave us a heads-up about this book, and quotes from the press release:
- D'Souza shows that liberals-people like Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Barney Frank, Bill Moyers, and Michael Moore -- are responsible for fostering a culture that angers and repulses not just Muslim countries but also traditional and religious societies around the world. Their outspoken opposition to American foreign policy -- including the way the Bush administration is conducting the war on terror-contributes to the growing hostility, encouraging people both at home and abroad to blame America for the problems of the world. He argues that it is not our exercise of freedom that enrages our enemies, but our abuse of that freedom-from the sexual liberty of women to the support of gay marriage, birth control, and no-fault divorce, to the aggressive exportation of our vulgar, licentious popular culture.
The cultural wars at home and the global war on terror are usually viewed as separate problems. In this groundbreaking book, D'Souza shows that they are one and the same. It is only by curtailing the left's attacks on religion, family, and traditional values that we can persuade moderate Muslims and others around the world to cooperate with us and begin to shun the extremists in their own countries.
OK, suppose we take for granted D'Souza's logic: We liberals are the source of the cultural animus to which the jihadis are violently opposed.
Doesn't that, by the same logic, place right-wingers like D'Souza and the whole range of conservative ideologues on the side of Al Qaeda?
Isn't he essentially saying that the terrorists are right to have this animus?
Isn't his solution -- suppressing liberalism -- essentially a capitulation to the anti-democratic "Islamofascism" everyone else on the right has been steadily denouncing?
I'm looking forward to reading the book so I can figure this out for myself. Though, knowing D'Souza, I'm guessing there will be some handy bits of sophistry that let him leap over the hard rocks of logic.
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Air passengers 'could be tagged'
By Rebecca Morelle
BBC NewsThursday, 12 October 2006, 13:36 GMT 14:36 UK
Electronically tagging passengers at airports could help the fight against terrorism, scientists have said.
The prototype technology is to be tested at an airport in Hungary, and could, if successful, become a reality "in two years".
The work is being carried out at a new research centre, based at University College London, set up to find technological solutions to crime.
Other projects include scanners for explosives and dirty bomb radiation.
Dr Paul Brennan, an electrical engineer, is leading the tagging project, known as Optag.
He said: "The basic idea is that airports could be fitted with a network of combined panoramic cameras and RFID (radio frequency ID) tag readers, which would monitor the movements of people around the various terminal buildings."
The plan, he said, would be for each passenger to be issued with a tag at check-in.
He said: "In our system, the location can be detected to an accuracy of 1m, and video and tag data could be merged to give a powerful surveillance capability."
Civil liberties
The tags do not store any data, but emit a signal containing a unique ID which could be cross-referenced with passenger identification information. In the future, added Dr Brennan, this could incorporate biometric data.
The project still needs to overcome some hurdles, such as finding a way of ensuring the tags cannot be switched between passengers or removed without notification.
The issue of infringement of civil liberties will also be key.
But potentially, said Dr Brennan, the tags could aid security by allowing airports to track the movement patterns of passengers deemed to be suspicious and prevent them from entering restricted areas.
It could also aid airports by helping evacuation in case of a fire, rapidly locating children, and finding passengers who are late to arrive at the gate.
The "proof of concept" of the system is about to be tested at Debrecen airport in Hungary. If successful, claimed Dr Brennan, it could be available elsewhere within two years.
The new centre will also be investigating a range of other airport security tools.
Professor Robert Speller has been developing scanners to detect explosives and drugs. The devices could be used at airports or other ports of entry.
Scattered photons
The scanners work by firing an x-ray at an item and then detecting how light particles called photons are scattered.
Tag reader (Paul Brennan)
A reader would detect where the passengers were located
Different materials, he said, produce unique patterns of photon scattering, and this can be used to identify whether an explosive or type of drug is present. The scanners, he said, could be incorporated into the machines being used by airports to scan bags.
He is also developing a prototype "Compton camera".
This portable device, he said, could be used if a suspected dirty bomb had been exploded. It is able to detect if any radiation is present, and if so, its precise location.
He said it would help the emergency services identify dangerous areas, and would aid the possible clear-up operation.
The UCL Centre for Security and Crime Science, which opens on Friday, works across many different areas in science and is investigating a number of security and crime issues.
Professor Gloria Laycock, director of the centre, said: "Security is a major issue in today's society and can take many forms.
"We've got rising crime across the developing world, and that has been linked to rising opportunities for crime. The most effective means of tackling this is by tackling those opportunities. Science and technology can help us to do this."
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As the World Burns
Ignatieff's 'war crime' remarks cost him key supporter
Last Updated: Wednesday, October 11, 2006 | 10:04 PM ET
CBC News
Federal Liberal leadership hopeful Michael Ignatieff's latest comments on the Israeli air strike in Qana have cost him a key campaign member.
Susan Kadis, a Thornhill MP and his Toronto campaign co-chair, withdrew her support Wednesday after Ignatieff accused Israel in a televised interview on Sunday of committing a "war crime" in the July 30 bombing in Lebanon.
"Michael is an intelligent person and I would think that he would have a better handle on the Middle East given his years of experience on human rights and international law," Kadis said in a written statement.
Ignatieff was trying to clarify previous controversial remarks about Qana on Radio-Canada program Tout le monde en parle on Sunday.
After the air strike that killed more than two dozen people, Ignatieff told the Toronto Star in August that civilian deaths were inevitable in the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.
"This is the kind of dirty war you're in when you have to do this and I'm not losing sleep about that," he said.
Ignatieff soon expressed regret over those remarks and sought to explain what he should have said on Sunday.
"I was a professor of human rights and I am also a professor of the laws of war and what happened in Qana was a war crime and I should have said that," he said.
'Very troubling' comments
Kadis called the latest comments "very troubling"
Ignatieff released a statement indicating he regretted the decision Kadis made.
The statement also included assertions that "the denial of Israel's right to exist is unconscionable and must stop" and that the country where he said he has lived and taught has "the unequivocal right to defend itself against unprovoked attacks."
He stopped short of calling the Qana attack a war crime.
"Qana was a terrible human tragedy where innocent civilians died in a conflict that saw unjustified tragedies on all sides," he said.
Ignatieff said at a late afternoon news conference he still considered Kadis a close friend and respected colleague.
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DPRK reiterates willingness to realize denuclearization
www.chinaview.cn 2006-10-12 07:27:23
PYONGYANG, Oct. 11 (Xinhua) -- A spokesman for the DPRK Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday that the country remained unchanged in its will to denuclearize the peninsula through dialogue and negotiation, despite this week testing a nuclear weapon.
He said that the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula was late President Kim Il Sung's last instruction and an ultimate goal of the DPRK.
"The DPRK has exerted every possible effort to settle the nuclear issue through dialogue and negotiations, prompted by its sincere desire to realize the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula," he said.
The DPRK would "feel no need" to possess a single nuclear weapon if the United States "dropped its hostile policy toward the DPRK" and "confidence" was built between the two countries, said the spokesman.
As the DPRK had already pulled out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), it was no longer bound by international law, he said, adding that it was "an indication of the disturbing moves" by the United States to "impose collective sanctions" on the DPRK through the U.N. Security Council.
The DPRK was ready for dialogue and consultation, the spokesman said. But the DPRK would continue to "take physical countermeasures" if the United States increased pressure upon it.
The DPRK's official Korean Central News Agency announced on Monday that the country had conducted a successful underground nuclear test, which has drawn the universal opposition of the international community.
The issue of the DPRK's reported nuclear test is still under discussion in the U.N. Security Council.
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S.Korea Finds No Abnormal Radioactivity
AP
Oct 12, 2006
SEOUL, South Korea -- South Korea said Thursday it had detected no abnormal radioactivity levels within its borders after a declared North Korea nuclear test blast this week.
Lee Moon-ki, the director general for nuclear energy at South Korea's Science and Technology Ministry, said in an interview before an announcement by his ministry that his country had also detected no increases of radioactivity at the suspected test site in North Korea. He later retracted that statement, saying he misspoke.
Both his ministry and the government-affiliated Korea Institute of Nuclear Safety announced Thursday that tests of air samples in South Korea since Monday's declared nuclear test by the North have shown no signs of increased radiation.
"So far, we have not detected any abnormal level of radioactivity," said Han Seung-jae, an official at the nuclear safety institute.
Han cautioned, however, that the finding doesn't indicate that the North didn't conduct a nuclear test or that a test may have failed.
"There had been little chance of radioactivity being blown southward as the wind had been blowing toward north or east for the past few days," he said.
After Monday's underground test, North Korea announced that there had been no radioactivity leaks from the site.
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Heavy casualties in Sri Lanka fighting
AFP
Thursday October 12, 2006
Sri Lanka's government says 44 of its soldiers have been killed and 430 wounded in fighting with Tamil Tigers in the north of the island, while claiming 200 rebels were also killed.
The heavy casualty figures came the day after Tamil Tiger rebels, in ferocious battles lasting over six hours, stalled a government offensive in the northern peninsula of Jaffna.
The Sri Lankan military also said an unspecified number of its troops were still missing after the fighting.
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) said only 10 of its fighters had been killed, and said the bodies of 75 government troops had been recovered.
A rebel spokesman said Tiger casualties were low because they knew the military was launching an attack and had been ready in well-defended positions to take on the advancing army columns with artillery.
"The LTTE recovered more than 75 bodies of Sri Lankan soldiers," the Tigers said in a statement. "Efforts are now underway to hand over the bodies to the Sri Lankan military through the International Committee of the Red Cross."
As more than 100 troops were evacuated to hospitals in Colombo, 400 kilometres (250 miles) south of the Jaffna peninsula, President Mahinda Rajapakse ordered his ministers to attend to the welfare of the victims.
"The president sent ministers to all the hospitals to attend to the needs of the soldiers," a spokesman said.
The military said its ground offensive, supported by warplanes, was a "defensive act" as a result of Tamil Tiger attacks. Naval gun ships were deployed to prevent rebels sending reinforcements by sea to the peninsula.
"There is no doubt that the army suffered a bloody nose," a top defence source said. "It was a big mistake."
The renewed fighting has come as a blow to efforts by peace broker Norway to bring the two sides back to the negotiating table. Before the latest fighting, the warring parties had voiced willingness to meet in Switzerland later this month.
The LTTE had warned it would reconsider its decision to go to Switzerland for talks if the military launched fresh attacks. The government had said it agreed to talks on the basis that it could defend itself from rebel attacks.
Norway has been working to save a 2002 truce and end spiralling violence, which has claimed over 2,200 lives since December, according to an official tally.
Some 60,000 people have been killed overall in the three-decades-old conflict between minority Tamils seeking an independent homeland and government forces.
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Thai junta unveils new parliament
AFP
Thursday October 12, 2006
Thailand's ruling junta has unveiled a new parliament dominated by military officials, retired bureaucrats and academics.
Thailand's King Bhumibol Adulyadej approved the list of 242 names chosen by the military following last month's bloodless coup, which ousted former premier Thaksin Shinawatra.
Under the interim constitution, the 250-strong interim National Assembly will act as both the House of Representatives and Senate for one year. The junta is expected to fill the remaining eight seats later.
The new members will not be able to vote on government matters, but will be able to question the kingdom's new cabinet on policy.
Military officials took 35 seats, with retired government officials filling 43 seats, coup leader General Sonthi Boonyaratglin announced.
Former soldier and politician Chamlong Srimuang, who led the months of anti-Thaksin street protest that led up to the coup, will also join the parliament.
Chamlong, Thaksin's former mentor, led the bloody demonstrations in Bangkok in 1992 that helped topple a military dictatorship and restore democratic rule.
Some 29 academics joined the assembly, which will also include 13 people from non-governmental organizations, 20 from the media and six bankers. Only four are politicians.
Although all the members of the new parliament were chosen by the military, the coup leader insisted the junta would not interfere.
Sonthi said the Senate would "oversee and set directions for drafting a new constitution".
The interim charter grants wide-ranging powers to the leaders of the September 19 coup, formalizing their role in government and giving them the power to sack the new prime minister.
The military leadership has promised a new constitution and a general election by October 2007.
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Libel ruling heralds new era for British journalism
By Frances Gibb, Legal Editor
The Sunday Times
October 12, 2006
THE freedom to publish allegations about public figures free from the "chilling" threat of libel laws was won by the British media in a landmark House of Lords ruling yesterday.
In a judgment that lawyers predict will usher in a new era of journalism, five law lords unanimously ruled in favour of a public interest defence that brings English law close to the freedom enjoyed by US media.
Journalists will be able to publish material if they act responsibly and in the public interest, and be free from the risk of libel damages, even if allegations later prove untrue.
The judges, who constitute Britain's highest court, said that the media were entitled to publish defamatory allegations as part of its duty of neutral reporting, or if it believed them to be of substance, and to raise matters of public interest.
The ruling came in an appeal by The Wall Street Journal Europe against a High Court decision, backed by the Court of Appeal, that it should pay £40,000 damages to Mohammad Jameel, a billionaire Saudi car dealer, whose family owns Harwell Motors in Oxford.
The story, published in February 2002, said that bank accounts associated with a number of prominent Saudi citizens, including Mr Jameel's family and their businesses, had been monitored by the Saudi Government at the request of United States authorities to ensure that no money was provided intentionally or knowingly to support terrorists. The ruling clarifies and simplifies the right of the media to plead the "Reynolds defence" to libel claims, namely that what they published was in the public interest.
Lord Hoffmann, giving the lead judgment, said that the article was a perfect example of journalism for which the public interest defence should be available. It was for judges to apply the public interest test, but the article in the Journal easily passed that test, he said.
Its thrust was to inform the public that the Saudis were co-operating with the US Treasury. "It was a serious contribution in measured tone to a subject of very considerable importance."
It could not be proved true because the existence of covert surveillance would be impossible to prove by evidence in open court. But that did not mean it did not happen.
The newspaper was entitled to report even serious defamations against individuals, so long as they "made a real contribution to the public interest element in the article".
Lord Hoffmann also said that judges, with "leisure and hindsight", should not second-guess editorial decisions made in busy newsrooms. "That would make the publication of articles which are . . . in the public interest too risky and would discourage investigative reporting," he added.
The key test was whether a media organisation or newspaper acted fairly and responsibly in gathering and publishing the information. If the reporter and editor did so, and the information was of public importance, then the fact that it contained relevant but defamatory allegations against prominent people would not permit them to recover libel damages.
Lord Bingham of Cornhill, the senior law lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, Lord Scott of Foscote and Baroness Hale of Richmond agreed. Lady Hale said: "We need more such serious journalism in this country and our defamation law should encourage rather than discourage it."
Geoffrey Robertson, QC, who argued the case for the paper, said the decision gave British media more freedom to publish newsworthy stories.
Caroline Kean, litigation partner at the media law firm Wiggin, said: "This ruling is extremely important because it makes clear it is not appropriate for 'responsible journalism' to be interpreted narrowly."
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Taiwan rocked by earthquake, no reports of damage
Thu 12 Oct 2006
Reuters
TAIPEI - An earthquake measuring 5.9 on the Richter scale rattled Taiwan late on Thursday, the Central Weather Bureau said, with tremors felt in the capital Taipei where buildings shook.
There were no immediate reports of damage, according to cable television news channel TVBS.
A spokesman for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd, the world's top contract chip manufacturer, told Reuters by telephone operations were unaffected.
The epicentre of the quake, which struck at 10:46 p.m. (1446 GMT) was about 90 km (58 miles) southeast of Ilan county on the eastern coast, at a depth of 3.5 km, the Central Weather Bureau said in a statement on its Web site (www.cwb.gov.tw).
Earthquakes occur frequently in Taiwan, which lies on a seismically active stretch of the Pacific basin.
One of Taiwan's worst-recorded quakes occurred in September 1999. Measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale, it killed more than 2,400 people and destroyed or damaged 50,000 buildings.
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Moderate earthquake hits Turkey
Kuna News Agency
12/10/2006
ISTANBUL -- A moderate earthquake, measuring a four degrees on the Richter Scale, hit the Turkish city of Denizli, the Bogazigi University earthquake observation center reported on Thursday.
No damage or casualties were reported, however people living near Denizli felt its tremor, the center reported.
The quake's epicenter was at Honaz area and it occurred at 6:20 local time, the center added.
Turkey sits on the North Anatolian Fault. In August and November of the year 1999, two massive quakes struck the northwestern city of Anatolia and generated a local tsunami within the enclosed Sea of Marmara killing about 20.
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Science Stuff
Damaged Alaska highway traps residents
By RACHEL D'ORO
Associated Press
Wed Oct 11, 2006
ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Floodwaters damaged a 66-mile stretch of highway so severely that the road could be closed as long as a week, blocking Valdez from the rest of Alaska, state officials said Wednesday.
"There are huge washouts in the roadway and approaches to bridges," said Shannon McCarthy, a spokeswoman for the Alaska Department of Transportation. "We have debris on the road. We have mudslides. We have asphalt that's literally missing, that just washed away."
The heavy rain that poured over Valdez and other southern Alaska communities this week had eased to lighter showers by Wednesday, National Weather Service forecasters said. Conditions were expected to improve by the weekend in southern and eastern parts of the state.
The break in the weather gave affected residents a chance to assess the damage or return to homes following evacuations Tuesday in some communities, including Valdez, 97 miles east of Anchorage and the terminus of the 800-mile trans-Alaska oil pipeline. No injuries were reported.
At least one home, a trailer, disappeared under a mudslide when no one was home, said Lee Revis, a Valdez newspaper editor who was among 100 people who fled their homes when a river breached a nearby levee and flooded the area.
Floodwaters from various rivers left mangled piles of mud, rock and tree branches along the Richardson Highway, damaged bridges and crumbled pavement. In one section, debris was six feet high over a 200-foot stretch, McCarthy said.
The road is the only way out of Valdez by vehicle. Until it's passable again, the only other ways in or out of town are by plane, boat or state ferry. With much of the incoming freight carried by vehicles, local merchants such as the two grocery stores were ordering supplies to be ferried in, said city spokeswoman Sheri Pierce.
Meanwhile, residents were stocking up on supplies.
"The bread shelf was very bare when I went," Pierce said. "Everything else looked OK."
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NASA: Jupiter's Little Red Spot growing stronger
www.chinaview.cn 2006-10-12 10:52:08
WASHINGTON, Oct. 11 (Xinhua) -- The highest wind speeds in Jupiter's Little Red Spot have increased and are now equal to those in its older and larger sibling, the Great Red Spot, according to observations with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.
The Little Red Spot's winds, now raging up to approximately 400 miles per hour (about 645 km per hour), signal that the storm is growing stronger, said the NASA-led team that made the Hubble observations.
The increased intensity of the storm probably caused it to change color from its original white in late 2005 to red, the findings published by the team claimed on NASA's website on Wednesday.
"No one has ever seen a storm on Jupiter grow stronger and turn red before," said Amy Simon-Miller of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "We hope continued observations of the Little Red Spot will shed light on the many mysteries of the Great Red Spot, including the composition of its clouds and the chemistry that gives it its red color."
Although it seems small when viewed against Jupiter's vast size, the Little Red Spot is actually about the size of Earth, and the Great Red Spot is around three times Earth's diameter across. Both are giant storms in Jupiter's southern hemisphere, powered by warm air rising in their centers.
The Little Red Spot is the only survivor among three white-colored storms that merged together. In the 1940s, the three storms were seen forming in a band slightly below the Great Red Spot. In 1998, two of the storms merged into one, which then merged with the third storm in 2000.
In 2005, amateur astronomers noticed that this merged, larger storm was changing color, and it became known as the Little Red Spot after becoming noticeably red in early 2006.
Scientists are not sure why the Little Red Spot is growing stronger. One possibility is a change in size. These storms naturally fluctuate in size, and their winds spin around their central core of rising air. If the storm were to become smaller, its spiraling winds would increase the same way spinning ice skaters turn faster by pulling their arms closer to their bodies.
Another possibility is that it's the only survivor. "The lack of other large storms in the same latitude on Jupiter leaves more energy to feed the Little Red Spot," said Simon-Miller.
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Pumpkin power dawns for African cell phone networks
By Lucas van Grinsven
Reuters European Technology Correspondent
Wed Oct 11, 2006
AMSTERDAM - Palm and pumpkin seed oil could soon be generating electricity to help power cell phone networks across Africa under a plan to replace fossil fuels with sustainable biofuels made from crops grown by local farmers.
Swedish telecoms networks group Ericsson and South African cell phone operator MTN said on Wednesday they want to start replacing diesel with biofuels in electricity generating stations powering mobile phone base stations in rural Africa.
Supported by the GSM Association's development fund, they will start with a project in Nigeria to use biofuels for power generators supplying mobile base stations located beyond the reach of the electricity grid.
"We're planning to replicate this in Uganda, Rwanda and Kenya. India and Bangladesh have also expressed interest," said Ben Soppitt, program manager emerging markets at the GSM Association (GSMA).
Starting in Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation, fuel will be processed from palm, groundnut, pumpkin seeds and jatropha.
The crops to generate the biofuel will be cultivated close to the base stations, helping local farmers, cutting dependency on fossil fuels and reducing fuel transportation needs. The cost of fuel, including security to protect transport and storage, can be 80 percent of the cost of a rural phone network.
MTN operates in 21 countries in Africa and the Middle East and had 31 million subscribers, while Ericsson is the world's biggest cell phone networks company with around 30 percent market share.
AFRICA TAKES THE LEAD
"The early adoption of biofuel-powered mobile networks would place Africa at the forefront of a new wave of innovation," said Karel Pienaar, chief technology officer at MTN.
Soppitt said the cell phone industry could be the world's first to put alternative energy at the core of its operations.
"Ericsson has been working on this for a while, and with their significant market share the entire market will move with them," he said.
Rural areas in emerging economies where most new cell phone subscribers come from are often not connected to the electricity grid, which means that the base stations to connect cell phone users to the network are powered by generators.
In Nigeria, 75 percent of the country is not grid-connected.
Fuel consumption by these base stations can be significant. Ericsson estimates 25,000 liters of fuel are needed every year to power a base station. The same amount would power close to 20 cars, each driving 20,000 kilometers, for a year.
Worldwide, tens of thousands of new base stations are erected every year, most of them in rural areas as operators aim to expand the coverage of their networks. There are currently close to 2.5 billion cell phone users on the planet.
The GSMA hopes that the introduction of biofuels will be significantly cheaper than using diesel, and hopes for total cost reductions of 30 percent or more.
"You need to achieve a 30 percent improvement to create sufficient momentum for change," Soppitt said.
Ericsson estimates around 0.5 square kilometers of palm oil crops are needed to generate the fuel for 20 base stations, the equivalent of 83 football fields.
The crops will be processed into fuel at local facilities.
Ericsson will control farming methods, making sure crops are not genetically manipulated, are grown sustainably and do not require fresh clearing of land by cutting forests.
Solar and wind energy are also being investigated as alternative power sources for remote base stations.
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New type of mouse discovered in Cyprus
By THOMAS WAGNER
Associated Press
October 12, 2006
LONDON - A previously unknown type of mouse has been discovered on the island of Cyprus, apparently the first new terrestrial mammal species discovered in Europe in decades.
The "living fossil" mouse has a bigger head, ears, eyes and teeth than other European mice and is found only on Cyprus, Thomas Cucchi, a research fellow at Durham University in northeast England, said Thursday. Genetic tests confirmed that the new mouse was a new species and it was named Mus cypriacus, or the Cypriot mouse, he said.
His findings appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Zootaxa, an international journal for animal taxonomists.
The biodiversity of Europe has been combed through so extensively since Victorian times that new mammal species are rarely found there, and few scientists had expected new creatures as large as mice to be discovered on the continent.
"New mammal species are mainly discovered in hot spots of biodiversity like Southeast Asia, and it was generally believed that every species of mammal in Europe had been identified," Cucchi said. "This is why the discovery of a new species of mouse on Cyprus was so unexpected and exciting."
Cucchi said a bat discovered in Hungary and Greece in 2001 was the last new living mammal found in Europe. No new terrestrial mammal has been found in Europe for decades, he said.
Cucchi compared the new mouse's teeth with those from mouse fossils collected by paleontologists. The comparison showed the new mouse had colonized and adapted to the Cypriot environment several thousand years before the arrival of man, the university said in a statement.
The discovery indicated that the mouse survived man's arrival on the island and now lived alongside common European house mice, whose ancestors had arrived with man during the Neolithic period, the university said.
"All other endemic mammals of Mediterranean islands died out following the arrival of man, with the exception of two species of shrew. The new mouse of Cyprus is the only endemic rodent still alive, and as such can be considered as a living fossil," Cucchi, a Frenchman, said in a telephone interview.
Shrews are small mammals that resemble mice but have a long, pointed snout and eat insects.
Cucchi, an archaeologist and expert on the origin and human dispersal of house mice, found the new species of mouse while working in Cyprus in 2004. He was examining the archaeological remains of mice teeth from the Neolithic period and comparing them with those of four known modern-day European mice species, to determine if the house mouse was the unwelcome byproduct of human colonization of the island 10,000 years ago, the university said.
"The discovery of this new species and the riddle behind its survival offers a new area of study for scientists studying the evolutionary process of mammals and the ecological consequences of human activities on island biodiversity," Cucchi said.
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Africa warned over locust swarms
Thursday, 12 October 2006, 08:23 GMT 09:23 UK
Countries in north and west Africa have been warned to be on alert for an outbreak of locusts, which devastated Mauritania two years ago.
Locusts had been found in Mauritania, and were laying eggs that were expected to hatch in the next 10 days, said the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.
It warned Algeria, Mali, Morocco and Senegal to step up monitoring and to prepare to treat any outbreaks quickly.
"We are taking it very seriously," FAO official Keith Cressman told the BBC.
He said that while locust infestations were not uncommon in the area at this time of year, they must be dealt with or they could develop into the devastating swarms seen in 2004.
They swept across north and west Africa, leaving 60% of Mauritania's population - 400,000 people - needing food aid.
The FAO said the outbreak would offer the chance to test a new environmentally friendly pesticide which uses a natural fungus which kills locusts within one to three weeks.
Desert locusts breed rapidly, maturing in just three weeks, and are capable of travelling up to 100km (60 miles) a day.
Locusts can eat their own weight in food every day, which means a single swarm can consume as much food as several thousand people.
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Drill hole begins Homeric quest
By Jonathan Amos
Science reporter, BBC News
A UK-led team is challenging cherished ideas on Greek mythology by proposing an alternative site for Ithaca.
The island was said to be the home of Odysseus, whose 10-year journey back from the Trojan War is chronicled in Homer's epic poem the Odyssey.
Most people think the modern-day Ionian island of Ithaki is the location.
But geologists are this week sinking a borehole on nearby Kefalonia in an attempt to test whether its western peninsula of Paliki is the real site.
The scientists hope to find evidence that the peninsula once stood proud, separated from Kefalonia by a narrow, navigable marine channel. It is only in the last 2,500-3,000 years - and after Homer's time - that the channel has been filled in, the team contends.
"We can't prove the story of the Odyssey is true, but we can test whether Homer got his geography right," said Edinburgh University geologist Professor John Underhill, who is supervising the drilling operation.
'Leading' candidate
At issue are a few lines of hotly debated text, in which Homer describes Odysseus' native land.
He talks of low-lying terrain, furthest out to sea and facing dusk.
The team, which includes geologists, classicists and archaeologists, argues that modern-day Ithaki does not fit this description.
It is dominated by high ground and, being on the eastern side of the Ionian arc of islands, actually looks - if anywhere - towards "dawn and sun".
"This has always been a contentious issue since antiquity," said James Diggle, a professor of Greek and Latin and fellow of Queens' College, Cambridge.
"Many different candidates have been suggested and the general feeling has been that the island that has the same name now - Ithaki - must be Ithaca, but it simply doesn't square with all the geographical information we have about the original Ithaca.
"The suggestion we advocate, and are now testing with the geology, is a radically new one; involving as it does splitting the island of Kefalonia into two," he told BBC News.
Catastrophic collapse
The Paliki solution was first proposed in Robert Bittlestone's 2005 book, Odysseus Unbound: The Search for Homer's Ithaca. Paliki is certainly flatter than Ithaki, and the most westerly point in the Ionian arc.
But to prove its hypothesis, the team will have to show - at the very least - that the sea once flowed through a tight channel that is now the Thinia isthmus joining Paliki to the main part of Kefalonia.
Homer and his poems have been placed in the 8th Century BC
On the face of it, this a tall order - literally: the highest point on the isthmus is some 180m above sea level.
To suggest the Mycenaean landscape could have changed so radically in so short a time seems extraordinary, especially since modern seismic surveys in the area indicate the amount of uplift experienced by Kefalonia over the past 3,000-5,000 years is perhaps 6m at most.
The team's argument is that the channel has been covered by a colossal infall of rock from the surrounding hills, particularly those on the eastern side of the Thinia valley.
"The bedding planes all dip very steeply towards the valley, and they are natural planes along which landslip and rockfall can occur - and do, periodically," explained Professor Underhill.
"This happens in winter, never mind in the frequent earthquakes they experience there. There are very interesting Pathe news pictures taken after the devastating earthquake of 1953 which demonstrate that whole hillside degraded significantly; huge volumes of rock came off the slopes."
Trojan echoes
This week's investigations involve sinking a 100m-plus borehole at the southern end of the valley. If the Paliki solution stands up, it should find a loose aggregation of rock and debris through the core's entire length.
"If we hit hard rock, the theory will not fly," said Professor Underhill.
Archaeological investigations have put Troy in Turkey
But assuming the borehole is successful, then the team will apply for funding to carry out a more extensive programme of drilling. Ground-penetrating radar, gravity and seismic surveys have already been conducted; carbon-14 and other dating techniques would need to be brought in to prove the infall occurred in the right timescale.
The team is encouraged by the writings of the 1st-Century-BC Greek geographer Strabo, who mentions the existence of a channel many years after Homer is presumed to have lived in the Ionian region.
And, of course, this is by no means the first time that science has sought to match current features on the landscape with Homeric descriptions.
The city of Troy featured in the Iliad is now widely recognised to have been in north-western Turkey. A study of river sediments in the region would even seem to fit with aspects of the military campaign that Homer's story says eventually led to the destruction of the city.
If the existence of a Bronze Age channel on Kefalonia is proven, it is quite likely to set off anew heated arguments about specifics and meaning in the Odyssey.
And some will continue to contest Ithaca's location. Sarantis Symeonoglou is professor of art history and archaeology at Washington University in St Louis, US. He has spent years trying to tie locations on Ithaki to details in the poem.
"I have been digging [there] longer than anyone, since 1984. I already have solid evidence that the site of the city of Odysseus is where Homer says, on the saddle of Aetos, at modern (and ancient) Ithaca. The palace is in a terrible ruined condition, but identifiable! I found a corner of it," he told BBC News in an e-mail.
John Bennet, a professor of Aegean archaeology at Sheffield University, UK, commented that any new discovery of a channel should be viewed in a wider context.
"For the archaeological world, what is very interesting is the possibility that there has been major geographical, geomorphological change on the island of Kefalonia, which means the way people have lived on the island has changed significantly from the Bronze Age into the broadly Classical period.
"As a result of that there will be a new phase of general archaeological data that will benefit all of us."
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International Influence
Chechen strongman denies killing Russian reporter
Wed Oct 11, 2006
Reuters
Chechnya's Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov said on Wednesday he did not order the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist who wrote articles alleging he was behind brutal rights abuses.
"Chechens do not go in for violently settling scores, certainly not with women. And she was a woman ... I do not kill women and I have never killed women," Kadyrov, 30, said in comments broadcast by NTV television.
"As for Anna Politkovskaya, at the end of the day she did not get in my way ... I think the people who ordered her killing did it once again to blacken my name."
The contract-style murder of Politkovskaya on the staircase of her Moscow apartment on Saturday drew international condemnation. Police say her killing was probably linked to her work. Critics accused the Kremlin of failing to protect freedom of speech.
Politkovskaya was scathingly critical of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin's conduct of an anti-separatist war in Chechnya. Kadyrov's pro-Moscow militia -- known as the 'Kadyrovtsy' -- was a regular target of her writing.
The Novaya Gazeta newspaper, where mother-of-two Politkovskaya worked, said it believed her murder was linked to Kadyrov: either an attempt to silence his most vocal critic or a ploy by his rivals to discredit him.
In a September 11 article, Politkovskaya wrote: "In Chechnya the 'Kadyrovtsy' beat men and women ... and cut the throats of their enemies."
Human rights groups say Kadyrov's forces effectively run Chechnya on the Kremlin's behalf and are behind frequent abductions and killings. Kadyrov has denied the accusations.
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French MPs vote to adopt Armenia genocide bill
AFP
October 12, 2006
PARIS - French MPs have adopted a bill that would make it a crime to deny that the 1915-1917 massacres of Armenians by the Ottomans was genocide.
The draft law -- which has provoked the fury of Turkey, the modern state that emerged from the Ottoman Empire -- will now be sent to the Senate, or upper house of parliament, for another vote.
The MPs in the lower house, the National Assembly, passed the bill, introduced by the opposition Socialist Party, by 106 votes to 19.
If it is subsequently passed by the Senate, and then again by the National Assembly, and signed into law by President Jacques Chirac, it would make it a crime in France to deny that the killings of the Armenians were genocide.
Those violating the law would face up to one year in prison and a fine of up to 45,000 euros (57,000 dollars).
Turkey has threatened economic reprisals against France if it becomes law, warning that French firms could be excluded from public tenders and that a boycott of French goods might be imposed.
Ankara contests the term "genocide" for the killings and strongly opposes the bill's provisions.
It says 300,000 Armenians, and at least as many Turks, died in civil strife when Armenians took up arms for independence and sided with invading Russian troops as the Ottoman Empire fell apart during World War I.
Armenians claim up to 1.5 million of their ancestors were slaughtered in orchestrated killings and that it can only be seen as genocide.
Around 400,000 people of Armenian origin are estimated to live in France, the most famous being the singer Charles Aznavour, born Chahnour Varinag Aznavourian to immigrant parents.
France in 2001 already adopted a law officially calling the massacres a genocide.
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U.S. Not Competing With Russia for Influence in Central Asia - Official
Created: 12.10.2006 10:00 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 11:25 MSK
MosNews
A senior U.S. official rejected the idea that Washington is vying with Moscow for influence in ex-Soviet Central Asia, telling the Vremya Novostei newspaper that the U.S. goal was to enhance regional cooperation, AFP reports.
Richard Boucher, assistant secretary for South and Central Asian affairs, said there was no question of a repeat of the 19th century "Great Game", when Britain and Russia engaged in a cloak-and-dagger contest for influence in Central Asia.
"This isn't about us. We're not interfering. There isn't a repetition of history, as huge changes have taken place," Boucher said.
Washington has long courted the countries of the region as potential security partners and alternative suppliers of oil and gas. However, Boucher said this did not mean there was any power struggle.
"We need to help the countries of Central Asia to become responsible states able to protect their borders from drug-trafficking, to develop democratic institutions and to use their economic potential to develop external links in all directions," Boucher said.
"Our task is to advance regional cooperation, to create conditions in which countries can take independent decisions," Boucher said.
The comments came amid continued Russian criticism of U.S. involvement in ex-Soviet Central Asia as well as the Caucasus state of Georgia.
Last year a security group led by Beijing and Moscow, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, called for the shut-down of two U.S. military bases in ex-Soviet Central Asia, one of which, in Uzbekistan, later closed.
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Moldova's Breakaway Region Asks Russia, Ukraine to Acknowledge its Sovereignty
Created: 11.10.2006 18:55 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 21:00 MSK
MosNews
Transdnestr's Supreme Council has asked Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and the CIS Interparliamentary Assembly to acknowledge the unrecognized republic as a sovereign independent state, RIA Novosti news agency reports.
In a September 17 plebiscite, more than 97% of Transdnestr's population voted in favor of independence, and to subsequently join the Russian Federation.
"We ask the deputies of Russia's State Duma, Ukraine's Supreme Rada, Belarus' National Assembly and the CIS Interparliamentary Assembly to initiate the acknowledgement of the Transdnestr Moldovan Republic as a sovereign independent state," the address of the republic's parliament said.
"In conditions of political uncertainty and continuing economic pressure, Transdnestr used the institution of direct democracy, which is what a referendum is, to express ways Transdnestr can develop," the document said.
Transdnestr proclaimed its independence from Moldova in the early 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Armed clashes between Moldova and Transdnestr ensued, and Russia has retained a military presence in the breakaway region ever since.
Ukraine and Russia are mediating negotiations on the status of the predominantly Russian-speaking region.
The talks stalled last March after Ukraine, which supports Moldova in the dispute, toughened its customs regulations for the breakaway province, demanding that Transdnestr exports pass customs clearance in Moldova before they are allowed across the Ukrainian border.
Officials in Ukraine and Moldova presented the new rule as an anti-smuggling measure. But Transdnestr's leadership said it effectively amounted to a trade blockade, and responded by calling a referendum on the self-proclaimed republic's independence - a move Chisinau and Western mediators refused to recognize as legitimate.
Moldovan authorities said they were willing to extend autonomy for the separatist region, which still has no international recognition, but brushed away the idea of granting it independence.
According to the RIA Novosti, the West has consistently refused to recognize Transdnestr's independence. In response, Russia claims that recognizing the sovereignty of Kosovo - actively sought by the predominant Albanian population in the historically Serbian region - would serve as a precedent for legalizing the status of other separatist regions in former Soviet republics.
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Asian Poll Foresees US Losing Superpower Status To China
AFP
Oct 12, 2006
Washington - Asians see the United States losing its undisputed superpower status in 50 years to possibly China amid waning trust in Washington to act responsibly in the world, a poll showed Wednesday. But most Asians felt the growth of Chinese military power would be a potential source of conflict between major powers in the region, according to the study by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (CCGA), an independent US think tank.
In the immediate term, US power in the eyes of Asians remains secure.
US influence today is "substantially above any other country" even as others have gained clout, and Asians do not predict much of decline in US influence over the next decade, according to the survey in partnership with US-based Asia Society.
In half a century, however, a majority in all countries covered by the poll -- China, India, South Korea and the United States -- believed "another nation" will become as powerful or surpass the United States in power.
"There is a clear agreement across the board that over the next half century Asians see the United States no more the sole superpower that it is or considered to be today," CCGA president Marshall Bouton told a news conference in Washington.
The survey did not specify in its questions which nation people believe will match or overtake the United States.
"We can only infer what nation people had in mind when they answered that question," Bouton said. When asked whether it was China, he said "I guess so."
China has become a global manufacturing power and is already displacing the United States as the primary trading partner for many nations.
"It is utilizing increased East Asian economic interdependence and skillful diplomacy to co-opt the interests of its neighbours and assert its influence throughout Asia," Bouton said.
China has also amassed the world's largest trade surplus and world's largest foreign exchange reserves. Its current account surplus has already surpassed that of Japan, the world's second richest economy after the United States.
According to the survey, the Chinese see themselves as the second greatest power in the world today and becoming the equal of the United States within ten years.
While Asians, according to the survey, were quite comfortable with the rise of China, there seems to be some concern that the rise of Chinese military power will be destabilizing for the region.
Eighty-eight percent of South Koreans and 77 percent of Indians said it was likely that the growth of Chinese military power would be a potential source of conflict between major powers in Asia.
Interestingly, more Americans see this potential source of conflict in Asia as "very likely" than Asians themselves.
The poll also found Asians, including the Chinese, still wanting the United States to remain engaged in the region though they express low trust in the United States to act responsibly.
On the prolonged Iraq war, Asians agreed with Americans that the conflict has not reduced the threat of terrorism, will not lead to the spread of democracy in the Middle East and has worsened relations with the Muslim world.
Trust in the United States to act responsibly in the world is "low," according to the poll.
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Less in Your Pocket
Unexpected drop in US fiscal 2006 deficit
Mercosur
Wednesday, 11 October
The United Status federal budget dropped to 247 billion US dollars in fiscal 2006, the lowest level in the last four years, announced the Treasury Department. The figure is 22% below the 318.7 billion US dollars of the previous year.
The data comes at a crucial moment for the Republican Party, which according to the latest public opinion polls with just four weeks to the midterm elections when the whole House of Representatives and a third of the Senate seats are at stake, the party figures loosing to the Democrats.
Both expenditure and revenue marked new maximums in the fiscal year ended September 30: revenue increased 11.7% and outlays 7.3%.
The deficit is also far lower that the originally announced by the federal government last February and lower that the estimate of last July. Fiscal 2006 is also the best year since fiscal 2002 when the accumulated deficit reached 159 billion US dollars after four years running of surpluses, a legacy of the Bill Clinton administration.
Since then the US has recorded the three largest deficits in its history including the 413 billion US dollars of fiscal 2004, the highest ever.
However Republican President George Bush argues that the massive tax cuts decided by his administration have helped to cut public debt, stimulate the economy and as a consequence increase fiscal revenue.
Comment: Uh, can the manipulation get any more obvious than this? Could it more any more blatant?! This 'good news' just happens to come right before the election. It is even announced in the article. And in spite of the clear manipulation, there will still be people who take this as evidence that the Republicans are doing a good job. Not that the Democrats would have been or will be any better....
Such is the dire situation in the US today.
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Oil prices slip further below $58/barrel
By MAZIN ELFEHAID
Associated Press
October 12, 2006
VIENNA, Austria - Oil prices slipped Thursday after settling at their lowest level this year in the previous session as markets awaited the release of a weekly U.S. petroleum supply snapshot.
Light sweet crude for November delivery dropped 8 cents to $57.51 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange by midday in Europe. The contract had fallen $1.12 Wednesday to settle at $57.59, the lowest since Dec. 19, as doubts grew that there is a consensus within
OPEC for an immediate output cut.
November Brent crude on the ICE Futures exchange fell 24 cents to $58.41 a barrel.
Since July, the cost of crude oil has dropped by more than 25 percent amid rising global inventories, concerns about slowing economic growth and a milder-than-anticipated hurricane season. Adding to downward pressure, the International Energy Agency once again lowered this year's global demand forecast in a report issued Wednesday.
Vienna's PVM Oil Associates suggested that more downward revisions to demand could be forthcoming.
"Since the beginning of the year, the agency has been continuously correcting its demand growth expectation for 2006," it said, in a research note. "The total (downward) correction now already sums up to a differential of 810,000" barrels per day.
Against this backdrop, the president of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, Nigerian oil minister Edmund Daukoru, said Wednesday that a new OPEC cut has been agreed to and that members were "nearing consensus" on how to apportion the cuts.
But Saudi Arabia, the country whose participation is necessary to make any significant output reduction, has not publicly confirmed this.
The last time OPEC trimmed its output - by 1 million barrels a day - was December 2004, when oil traded slightly above $40 a barrel. That caused an immediate spike in prices.
Market participants awaited a weekly fuel inventories report to be released Thursday by the U.S. Energy Department, expected to show gains in domestic crude oil and distillate stocks.
Crude oil inventories are expected to gain by about 500,000 barrels, while stocks of distillates, which include heating oil, are forecast to gain by about 400,000 barrels a day, according to a Dow Jones Newswires survey of analysts.
Gasoline inventories are seen falling by about 600,000 barrels, according to the analysts' average.
In Nymex trading Thursday, heating oil futures were down 0.28 cent at $1.6692 a gallon while gasoline prices edged 0.43 cent lower to $1.4460 a gallon. Natural gas prices fell 30 cents to $6.120 per 1,000 cubic feet.
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Cuba oil prospects cloud US horizon
By Laura Smith-Spark
Republished from BBC
Wed, 11 Oct 2006
The discovery of potential deep-water oil and gas reserves off Cuba's northern coast has caught the eye of the world's energy-hungry nations.
India's state-run oil firm ONGC, already signed up to exploration in the area, has just upped its stake - the latest to place its bets on a Cuban oil rush.
The 44-year-old US trade embargo, meanwhile, continues to bar American companies from doing business with the Caribbean island.
But, some observers are asking, can the US really afford to risk losing out on valuable energy resources only 50 miles (80km) off Key West?
The prospect of nations such as China, Venezuela or India lining up to exploit Cuban oil has already led some politicians to call for the embargo to be relaxed.
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Bush: The Criminal
Baghdad bombed as US faces prospect of long war; US Troops may stay in Iraq until 2010
by Dave Clark
AFP
October 12, 2006
BAGHDAD - Gunmen killed nine staff at a television studio and bomb attacks rocked Baghdad as Pentagon officials said plans had been laid to allow US forces to stay in Iraq until 2010 if needed.
This latest sign that the Iraqi crisis is far from over came as a gang stormed the offices of Al-Shaabiya TV and slaughtered staff on Thursday, including the general manager Abdul-Rahim al-Nasrawi, a minor Shiite politician.
"We came in this morning and we saw the massacre. All were killed. We think gunmen broke into the house and killed them," said a journalist from the private satellite network, who asked not to be identified.
Iraqi security officials confirmed that there had been an attack on the station's premises, a converted house in downtown Baghdad.
Nasrawi runs a small and little-known political party and his satellite channel has not yet started broadcasting. There was no word from staff or authorities as to why it should have been attacked.
A coordinated pair of bomb attacks killed at least five people and injured 10 more in a busy square in central Baghdad, security sources said.
The blasts rattled windows a kilometre (half-a-mile) away and a plume of dust and smoke rose from the city skyline from Tayaran Square.
One police officer was killed and three wounded in the attack, security officials said, suggesting that the blasts had targeted security forces working for Iraq's US-backed government.
The attackers first triggered a car bomb then detonated a roadside booby trap in the immediate aftermath of the first blast, in a bid to maximise casualties, security officials said.
Three more people, including another policeman, died when a booby-trapped motorcycle exploded as officers examined it. Ten bystanders and five police were injured, a security official said.
Meanwhile, police continued to collect the bodies of murder victims slain in Baghdad's sectarian dirty war between rival Sunni and Shiite death squads. A US military spokeswoman said that 16 corpses had been found so far on Thursday.
The military also announced the death of another US soldier, bringing the number killed since the start of the month to 41 and since the US-led invasion of March 2003 to 2,750, according to an AFP count based on Pentagon figures.
The US military has 142,000 soldiers deployed in Iraq, supporting the coalition government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and battling the Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias pushing the country towards civil war.
In Washington, army chief of staff General Peter Schoomaker confirmed that contingency plans were being drawn up to have enough troops ready to maintain current force levels in Iraq until 2010.
Schoomaker said the army had scheduled troop rotations "at exactly what we have today" through the next four years, but said the actual number deployed will depend on conditions on the ground.
"This is not a prediction that things are going poorly or better," he told reporters. "It's just that I have to have enough ammo in the magazine that I can continue to shoot as long as they want us to shoot."
A few months ago US officials predicted that some of the 15 combat brigades deployed in Iraq would be able to come home by the end of the year, but since then mounting sectarian violence seems to have forced a rethink.
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U.S. Army plans to keep troops level in Iraq till 2010
www.chinaview.cn 2006-10-12 02:09:23
WASHINGTON, Oct. 11 (Xinhua) -- The chief of the U.S. Army said Wednesday that he plans to keep current American troops level in Iraq through 2010.
The chief of staff, General Peter Schoomaker, told a Pentagon press briefing that he aimed to have enough troops at the ready in Iraq through 2010.
U.S. troops levels in Iraq could be adjusted to actual conditions, and it was easier to hold back forces scheduled to go there than to prepare and deploy units at the last minute, he said.
He cautioned however that was "not a prediction that things are going poorly or better."
Currently there were about 141,000 American soldiers in Iraq, including 120,000 troops from the Army.
U.S. officials had hoped last year to reduce American troops in Iraq to below 100,000 by the end of this year, but the number of forces was raised with escalating violence and sectarian tensions in the war-ravaged country.
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Arrest over Cheney barb triggers lawsuit
Rocky Mountain News
October 3, 2006
A Denver-area man filed a lawsuit today against a member of the Secret Service for causing him to be arrested after he approached Vice President Dick Cheney in Beaver Creek this summer and criticized him for his policies concerning Iraq.
Attorney David Lane said that on June 16, Steve Howards was walking his 7-year-old son to a piano practice, when he saw Cheney surrounded by a group of people in an outdoor mall area, shaking hands and posing for pictures with several people.
According to the lawsuit filed at U.S. District Court in Denver, Howards and his son walked to about two-to-three feet from where Cheney was standing, and said to the vice president, "I think your policies in Iraq are reprehensible," or words to that effect, then walked on.
Ten minutes later, according to Howards' lawsuit, he and his son were walking back through the same area, when they were approached by Secret Service agent Virgil D. "Gus" Reichle Jr., who asked Howards if he had "assaulted" the vice president. Howards denied doing so, but was nonetheless placed in handcuffs and taken to the Eagle County Jail.
The lawsuit states that the Secret Service agent instructed that Howards should be issued a summons for harassment, but that on July 6 the Eagle County District Attorney's Office dismissed all charges against Howards.
The lawsuit filed today alleges that Howards was arrested in retaliation for having exercised his First Amendment right of free speech, and that his arrest violated his Fourth Amendment protection against unlawful seizure.
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It's a Man's World
Earth wobbles linked to mammal extinctions: study
Reuters
11/10/2006
Wobbles or variations in the Earth's orbit and tilt are associated with extinctions of rodent and mammalian species, Dutch scientists said on Wednesday.
They studied rodent fossil records in central Spain dating back 22 million years and found that the rise and fall of mammal species was linked to changes in the Earth's behavior which caused cooling periods.
"Extinctions in rodent species occur in pulses which are spaced by intervals controlled by astronomical variations and their effects on climate change," Dr Jan van Dam, of the Utrecht University in the Netherlands, said.
The researchers found two cycles corresponding to the disappearance of rodent species. One lasts 2.4 million years and is linked to variations in the Earth's orbit. The other is a 1.2 million year cycle relating to shifts in the tilt on the Earth on its axis.
The cycles are associated with lower temperatures, changes in precipitation, habitats, vegetation and food availability which are the main factors influencing the extinction peaks, the study published in the journal Nature said.
"Rodents are very sensitive to seasonal changes because they have such a short lifespan," said Van Dam, adding that they represent one of the best mammal fossil records.
At the moment, the Earth is at the beginning of a cycle but the planet's climate system has changed so much in the past 3 million years that it is difficult to predict what will happen in the future.
"The environment is responsible to what happens to species," said Van Dam. "Biological factors are secondary, according to our results."
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Cat Parasite Aiming For Global Male Domination
12 October 2006
Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite usually found in cats that can also infect humans, has been getting more than its fair share of the limelight lately. Fresh on the heels of speculation about T. gondii manipulating human behavior on a massive scale to advance its own survival, comes news that the parasite also appears to be exerting a very strong gender selection function in human pregnancies.
Infection by T. gondii is usually facilitated through the consumption of raw or undercooked meat, or, food or water contaminated with soil containing cat feces. Infection results in toxoplasmosis, which can lie dormant and go undetected in humans. Human infection by T. gondii is common. Worldwide, rates vary between 20 - 80 percent of the population, with under-developed nations being the worst affected.
The new gender-bending findings, published this week in the journal Naturwissenschaften, show that women harboring dormant toxoplasmosis are much more likely to give birth to boys than women who are toxoplasma negative.
The researchers, from the Czech Republic, analyzed the effect of dormant toxoplasmosis on the probability of a male birth using clinical records of babies born between 1996 and 2004 in private maternity clinics. The records included information on the mother's age, the concentration of toxoplasma antibodies in the mother's blood, previous deliveries and the sex of the newborn. They found that the presence of the parasite in the mother's blood greatly increased the likelihood that these women would give birth to a boy - in some cases by as much as two boys for every three births.
Interestingly, the probability of a male birth increased with higher levels of toxoplasma antibodies. The researchers speculate that the increased survival of male embryos in infected women may be explained by toxoplasmosis' modulating and suppressing effects on the immune system.
Could T. gondii be stealthily engineering a male gender-preferenced world made up of schizophrenics and neuroticshttp://www.aphroditewomenshealth.com/news/20050926235940_health_news.shtml
? Perhaps, but the researchers caution that while toxoplasmosis appears to be the cause of the increase in male births, they cannot establish cause and effect. "An independent confirmation of this conclusion by a manipulative experiment [by experimental infection of animals] is necessary," they suggest.
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Severely troubled boys 'soothed by fish oils'
Felicity Lawrence
Thursday October 12, 2006
The Guardian
Experts on omega-3 fatty acids said yesterday there was an urgent need for properly conducted scientific research on the impact of diet on the brain, amid claims that fish oils have dramatically improved the behaviour of boys with some of the UK's most severe emotional and social problems.
The Cotswold community school in Wiltshire, a residential school for boys who cannot be handled in mainstream care homes and schools, has treated its children with fish oil supplements for 20 weeks and measured changes in their behaviour. A nutritionist, Jackie Stordy, analysed records of the boys' behaviour, using school logs of the number of times the children had to be restrained.
The children's scores for hyperactivity, impulsiveness and oppositional behaviour were also compared before and after.
After 20 weeks the number of times staff had to restrain the boys had dropped by 46%. The length of time they had to be restrained dropped by 42% and their scores for impulsiveness and hyperactivity improved by 20%, said Dr Stordy.
For nearly all the boys there was a small but significant improvement, except two who did not take the fish oil and showed no improvement. Three showed dramatic improvements. "Their scores moved into the normal range for the population, which is remarkable," Dr Stordy said.
The claims being made for fish oil's effect on children's learning and behaviour have become controversial, with experts criticising supplement manufacturers for overstating the evidence from unscientific research.
But it was the Cotswold community school that approached manufacturers Efamol for supplies of its fish oil-based essential fatty acid supplement Efalex. Dr Stordy said the work made no claim to be a proper trial - only 19 boys were involved. There was no placebo.
Michael Crawford, an expert on essential fatty acids and the brain at the London Metropolitan University, said this sort of evidence was little more than anecdotal. "What we need is serious research." John Stein, professor of physiology at Oxford University, where much of the UK research on omega-3 fatty acids and learning and behavioural difficulties is based, said: "Some of these studies are little more than an advertising exercise. But our own research has shown a link between nutritional deficiencies and behaviour. It all cries out for a large, properly designed trial but people won't stump up the money because you can't patent nutrition."
The school head, Andrew Thomas, said the fish oils were just one of a range of techniques used to help the children, including improving their diets. "Fish oil supplements seem to be making a genuine difference to the rollercoaster of emotions they face every day." NCH, the charity that runs the school, may extend use of supplements to its other homes.
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