- Signs of the Times for Thu, 21 Dec 2006 -

• Signs Editorials
• Rabid Zionist Entity
• Rabid Zionist Entity: US Division
• Inside the Reich
• Global Chaos
• Mid-East Madness
• Iranian Scapegoat
• The Earth Strikes Back
• One With the Cosmos
• Science Korner

This is our poisonous version of democracy: a few days ago a woman walked through the markets of Nuseirat, Gaza. Throwing her hands up in the air she yelled, "I don't have even one shekel!"

"I have no bread in my home!"

"Is there anybody who will help me?"

Like all Palestinians, this woman has two options to respond to her desperate reality, neither of them is good.

Her first choice, counter to any democratic logic, is to join Abu Mazen in calling for early elections in the hope of Hamas losing its majority in the parliament.

This would return Palestinians to the previous status quo, submission to any and all demands of Israel in return for dire but more manageable living conditions. In this case Israel will continue to be in command of all Palestinian borders, Israel will continue to single-handedly control the Palestinian economy, Israel will continue illegal assassinations of whomever may be on her wanted list, Israel will carry on shelling areas in the Gaza Strip if it is deemed necessary for her own security and Israel will continue expanding its settlements and deepen its reach into the West Bank at the cost of Palestinian villages and cities.

The upside?

The current international embargo of Palestine would be dropped, meaning government employees, making up a third of the workforce in Gaza, would once again be paid. Driven by such international aid the Palestinian economy, fueled by renewed government wages, would return to its previous state of hibernation with its absurd cycle of charity.

The woman would stop yelling in the market.

The second choice is this, she can vote for Hamas which will not accept Israel to be in command of all Palestinian borders, nor for Israel to single-handedly continue to control the Palestinian economy, nor for Israel to continue illegal assassinations of whomever may be on her wanted list, nor for Israel to carry on shelling areas in the Gaza Strip if it is deemed necessary for her own security nor for Israel to continue expanding its settlements and deepen its reach into the West Bank at the cost of Palestinian villages and cities.

If she votes for Hamas she will have chosen to continue yelling in the market for bread to eat today but there may be a chance that she will still have a home to live in tomorrow, she may still be called a Palestinian in coming years and she will have better chances of not being controlled by the likes of Israel's Avigdor Lieberman's vices.

In the meantime the Palestinian street is battling to the death whether this decision should be made at all.

This is our poisonous version of democracy.

-Philip Rizk is an Egyptian-German free-lance writer living in Gaza City. You can access his blog at tabulagaza.blogspot.com
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Did "the Arabs" force Israel to target ambulances ferrying wounded civilians, convoys of Lebanese civilian refugees attempting to escape the Israeli destruction of their towns and villages, U.N. observers, water pumping stations, water treatment plants, supermarkets, milk, food, and pharmaceutical factories, 25 agricultural workers loading produce onto trucks, and entire civilian neighborhoods in Beirut and other northern parts of Lebanon too far from the Lebanese/Israeli border to be launching sites for Hezbollah rockets targeting Israel?

Did "the Arabs" force Israeli military leaders to declare that anyone remaining in southern Lebanon, whether sick and wheelchair-bound elderly, disabled children, those with no vehicles or no gas, or those too terrified to try to escape on already bombed out roads and bridges were all "Hezbollah terrorists" and legitimate military targets? Did "the Arabs" force Israel to bomb oil storage tanks and spill thousands of gallons of oil into the Mediterranean? Did "the Arabs" force Israel to maintain a naval blockade that prevented for weeks any attempt to clean up the worst environmental disaster ever in the Eastern Mediterranean?

Did "the Arabs" force Israeli children to write messages on missiles that Israeli troops were preparing to fire on Lebanese targets?

Did "the Arabs" force well known Israeli poet Ilan Shenfeld to pen these lines exhorting Israeli troops: "March on Lebanon and also on Gaza with ploughs and salt. Destroy them to the last inhabitant ... Save your people and make bombs, and rain them on villages and towns and houses till they collapse. Kill them, shed their blood, terrify their lives, lest they try again to destroy us, until we hear from tops of exploding mountains, Ridden down by your heels, sounds of supplication and lamentation. And your pits will cover them. Whoever scorns a day of bloodshed, He should be scorned. Save your people, and make war."

The Israeli armed forces carried out Shenfield's exhortations. They dropped at least 177,000 bombs over a territory smaller than the state of Rhode Island. The result was that more than 90 percent of the still climbing Lebanese death toll was civilian, while some two thirds of the 116 Israelis killed were soldiers killed fighting in Lebanon.

Was all of this death and destruction mere collateral damage incurred because Hezbollah used the Lebanese population as "human shields?" The CRC letter's claim that Israel was bombing sites from which Hezbollah fighters were firing rockets at Israel is unsustainable for the vast majority of the targets of Israeli strikes. As Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have pointed out, the human shields argument cannot justify mass terror directed at a civilian population and the infrastructure that sustains their survival in society. To do so is to legitimate genocidal collective punishment.

The CRC letter also makes the false claim that Lebanese Christians staunchly oppose Hezbollah. That was true in the past, but after the Israeli invasion, polls found that a large majority of Christians and every other group in Lebanon supported Hezbollah. That support grew further when Hezbollah energetically began the work of cleanup and reconstruction as soon as the ceasefire went into effect, which prompted writer and cartoonist Ted Rall to observe, tongue in cheek, that we need Hezbollah in New Orleans.

But the CRC letter is making an even more insidious accusation. It is the argument that the enemies Israel and the US face in Lebanon (and Palestine and Iraq and Afghanistan and Iran) are so evil that all methods of "self-defense" are ultimately justifiable. This claim relies upon a combination of virulent anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism and a massive and willful distortion and misrepresentation of historical facts, to which the last two-thirds of the CRC letter are devoted. I will therefore attempt to lay out a more accurate historical record.

I begin with some very recent history. This war did not take place because Hezbollah kidnapped two Israeli soldiers and Hamas kidnapped an Israeli soldier in Gaza. As Seymour Hersh revealed in The New Yorker, Israel had been planning this war for at least a year, had consulted closely with top U.S. officials in these plans, and was merely waiting for a suitable pretext to launch an assault.

V.P. Cheney and others encouraged Israel to attack Lebanon, expecting that the anticipated destruction of Hezbollah would pave the way for a U.S. attack on Hezbollah's supporter Iran. Prior to the kidnapping of the Israeli soldiers, Israel had regularly violated Lebanese territory and air space and frequently kidnapped Lebanese citizens. Just prior to the Hamas kidnapping of an Israeli soldier, Israel had killed 20 Palestinian civilians, most of them women and children, during three attempted assassinations of Palestinian leaders in Gaza. During this same period Israel arrested more than one-quarter of the elected Palestinian Parliamentary leaders. Do you show respect for democratic elections by jailing the winners? This summer Israel has killed more than 200 Palestinians, nearly all of them civilians, in Gaza alone.

The CRC letter follows the time worn device of claiming that every Israeli military action is a response to or retaliation for something that Arabs did. According to this propaganda, Arabs always attack and are the aggressor, and Israel is always merely defending itself. It is like the kid on the playground who always declares, "He hit me first!" Mainstream U.S. news media constantly use language that conditions us to view the conflict in the Middle East this way: Israeli is always attempting to defend itself from Arab terrorist attacks. Arabs are never defending themselves from Israeli attacks. If we accept this twisted perspective, then Israel is always the good guy, the wronged party, and, even if they kill 10 or 20 or 30 times as many civilians, we must accept at face value their mantra that they never deliberately target civilians.

Unlike the authors of the CRC letter, I - as a member of Amnesty International - oppose all attacks intended to terrorize civilian populations, whether by Arab or Israeli forces, whether by armed groups such as Hezbollah or by states such as Israel or the U.S. I also oppose all political ideologies that dehumanize and demonize the targets of such attacks, including the anti-Jewish Islamic Arab nationalism of Hezbollah, the anti-Arab Zionist nationalism of the Israeli state, and the Christian American nationalism of the U.S.A. The combination of nationalism and religion is a toxic mix that is used over and over again to manipulate populations into supporting unjust wars.

Going back a few months helps us see the recent Israeli attack on Lebanon more clearly, but going back a century is necessary to see the entire picture. Zionist colonization in Palestine began after World War I, decades before the Holocaust, as the British built an imperial outpost in the recently dismantled Ottoman Empire. Israel, like the U.S., was established as a colonial settler state, created through the violent expulsion of the vast majority of the indigenous population. In 1948 the state of Israel was created on more than three-fourths of the land of Palestine. In 1967, Israel attacked its neighboring countries and seized the remaining part of Palestine (the West Bank and Gaza), as well as the Egyptian Sinai and the Syrian and Lebanese Golan Heights.

U.N. Resolution 242 called upon Israel to return the territories it occupied in 1967 and accept the creation of a Palestinian state in those territories, in exchange for peace with its neighbors. But Israel and the U.S. have rejected U.N. 242 and pursued a path of aggression and expansion since 1967. Since then the U.S. and Israel have slandered the memory of the Holocaust by transforming it into a weapon to brand any criticism of Israel - and any criticism of unconditional U.S. support for Israel - as anti-Semitism.

Here is a current example that attests to this practice: The leading Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz reported that the head of Germany's Jewish community, Charlotte Knobloch, president of the Central Council of German Jews, accused a minister in Angela Merkel's German government of "anti-Semitism" because the minister, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, had asked for a United Nations probe into Israel's use of cluster bombs in civilian areas of Lebanon.

The U.S. fully embraced Israel in 1967 as its "cop on the beat," as President Nixon put it. Rushing advanced weapons to Israel during the recent war in Lebanon was nothing new. The U.S. has granted Israel more than one hundred billion dollars of military assistance since 1967. It has pledged to guarantee Israel a decisive military advantage over any combination of neighboring Arab states. The U.S. has looked the other way while Israel developed the fifth largest nuclear arsenal in the world, in defiance of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and U.S. laws which prohibit states receiving U.S. military aid from developing nuclear weapons. The U.S. has provided Israel, a state with six million people, more foreign assistance than all of Africa and Latin America, with nearly one billion people. The U.S. has allowed Israel to construct illegal permanent settlements for over 400,000 Israelis in the occupied West Bank, to monopolize scarce water resources, to demolish Palestinian houses and olive orchards, to build Israeli-only roads slicing up Palestinian areas, and to take over the Jordan River valley, reducing Palestinians to living in what most people around the world compare to Indian reservations or South African apartheid-style Bantustans.

Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, killing an estimated 20,000 Lebanese, cultivating right-wing Maronite Christian allies in order to instigate a devastating sectarian civil war. Under the command of Ariel Sharon, Israel surrounded the perimeter of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps near Beirut and watched as its Lebanese allies massacred nearly two thousand Palestinians. Israel remained as an occupying force in southern Lebanon until it withdrew in 2000. In that same year, at the end of a lengthy "peace process," Israel and the U.S. offered the Palestinians a deal which would have legalized and made permanent these increasingly oppressive and unjust conditions, but Arafat and the Palestinians rejected this so-called "generous" offer.

Since then, Israel has-with full U.S. backing-made the establishment of a viable Palestinian state impossible. It has now undertaken to transform the West Bank and Gaza into walled prisons. It is building a wall inside the West Bank to annex the Israeli settlements as a permanent part of Israel, cutting tens of thousands of Palestinians off from their farms, jobs, schools, health clinics, and family members. It has destroyed the only power plant in Gaza and regularly launches military assaults in both Gaza and the West Bank, with the same result of high civilian casualties as in Lebanon.

Why has the U.S. supported Israeli occupation and repression of Palestinians and aggression against neighboring states? Some have argued that the "Israeli Lobby" has hijacked U.S. policy in the Middle East, but this explanation is false, scapegoats Jews, exonerates U.S. leaders and their imperialistic goals in the Middle East, and overlooks the fact that U.S. policies in the Middle East are scarcely different from U.S. policies throughout the rest of the world. Moreover, the great majority of ardent Zionist supporters in the U.S. are not Jews but right wing Christian fundamentalists, whose religious beliefs are manipulated to gain their support for U.S./Israeli aggression. The Israeli tail does not wag the U.S. dog. Israel carries out tasks that serve the economic, political, and military interests of U.S. corporate and political elites. Israel helps shore up anti-democratic rulers in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan who suppress their own people while collaborating with the U.S. Israel provides weapons and training to pariah regimes that the U.S. wants to support, allowing the U.S. to pretend to object to those outlaw governments. Israel's attack on Hezbollah is just the latest act of aggression that the U.S. out-sourced to willing and eager Israeli leaders.

I stand with Amira Haas and Uri Avnery and thousands of other Israeli Jews who spoke out and marched in Israel against the invasion of Lebanon. I stand with Jews in New York, San Francisco, and other cities who publicly demonstrated against the invasion. I stand with more than 1,000 U.S. Jews who have signed a petition that includes the following insights: "There is no Jewish safety in allowing the history of Jewish persecution to be leveraged in support of U.S. political and economic interests as these entail amassing funding for Israel's military industry. Finally, there is no Jewish safety, nor Jewish claims to justice, reason, or equity, beyond Jewish commitment to the unconditional safety and liberation of the peoples of Palestine, Lebanon and the other Arab and Muslim countries currently under assault by Israel, the U.S. and its allies." www.jewishsolidarity.info/petition.php

At this point in history, Israeli Jews and Americans Jews-and all Israelis and all Americans-have something new in common. We both have governments that launched aggressive wars on false pretexts and wasted the lives of thousands of people. We both must speak out or be dragged by our governments into even bigger and more deadly wars, which do not make us more secure and safe. We both must recognize that terrorists will be defeated not by deploying greater terror ourselves, but by embracing policies and values that enable people of all nationalities and religions to live together in equality.

-This article was first published by Port Folio Weekly of Norfolk; reprinted with permi



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Comment: Amazing, the Mr Magoo of the phony terror world "al-Zawahiri" joins with the Zionists and the Neocons in condemning Hamas. Wonder will never cease! What does it all mean?

Bin-Laden (RIP) and Mr Magoo pose for the Mossad

Nat Hentoff, one of our great champions of civil liberties, uncovers the ugly truths behind the Bush Regime's plans for a Nuremberg-in-reverse at the American concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay: war crimes show trials being conducted by war criminals. Hentoff also cites the remarkable reports by the Seton Hall University School of Law which - drawing solely on official Pentagon documents - detail the shameful and criminal system that Bush and his lawless gang of legal perverts have established. As the Seton Hall reports note:

"Only 8 percent of the detainees were characterized as al Qaeda fighters. Of the remaining detainees, 40 percent have no definitive connection with al Qaeda at all and 18 percent have no definitive affiliation with either al Qaeda or the Taliban...."The Government has detained numerous persons based on mere affiliations with a large number of groups that are, in fact, not on the Department of Homeland Security terrorist watchlist . . . A large majority - 60 percent - are detained merely because they are 'associated with' a group or groups the Government asserts are terrorist organizations. (And members of almost 72 percent of those groups are allowed into the U.S.)....

"Only 5 percent of the detainees were captured by United States forces. Eighty-six percent of the detainees were arrested by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and turned over to United States custody. This 86 percent of the detainees captured by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance were handed over to the United States at a time when the United States offered large bounties for capture of suspected enemies."

Hentoff adds: "Remember, these findings are based entirely on Department of Defense records. (Robert Gates can fact-check them.)...Remember, too, that in the 2006 Military Commissions Act, Congress stripped from all these prisoners any meaningful right to utilize our federal courts, thereby defying our own Supreme Court."

(For more on the MCA and Bush's larger web of arbitrary rule, see Presidential Tyranny Untamed by Election Defeat and Fatal Vision: The Deeper Evil Behind the Detainee Bill.)

This issue must now be brought to the crisis. When the new Congress convenes, it should pass a law repealing the Military Commissions Act and firmly re-establishing Constitutional principles of jurisprudence and civil liberties. Then let Bush veto it if he will, so that it will be plain at last where we stand: Constitutionalists on one side, Authoritarians on the other. These poles are fast becoming the true political divide in this country, a split that runs through all parties. To echo George Washington, "Let us have [a government] by which our lives, liberties and properties will be secured; or let us know the worst at once."

It is folly to wait upon the Supreme Court to sort out the matter. There is little indication that the current Court will strike down the MCA; at best, it may seek to mitigate some of its most egregious excesses. But allowing the law to stand in any form represents an acceptance of the principle of unconstitutional presidential authority, of arbitrary action by the executive. And of course the MCA is not the sole building block of the vast edifice of tinpot tyranny that Bush and his anti-American minions have constructed over the years. That's why any move to repeal the Act must be accompanied by further legislation to roll back all of Bush's encroachments on our Constitutional system.

Will such a law be vetoed? Yes. But let it be so. Let it come down. Force all those who represent us in government declare which side they are on. Let all the pundits and opinion-slingers declare which side they are on. Let the people themselves see clearly and openly the choice that is before them: Do you want a republic of free citizens, or a bastardized autocracy?

Excerpts from Our Own Nuremberg Trials (Village Voice): During the mutual-admiration hearing before the Senate Committee on Armed Services - which led to the unanimous confirmation of former CIA chief Robert Gates to be Donald Rumsfeld's successor - no senator asked Gates if he approves of the Pentagon's "extreme . . . emergency" insistence on a $125 million appropriation to construct a permanent compound for a war-crimes court at Guantánamo. There, in 2007, war-crimes trials will be held for dozens of Guantánamo "detainees." The facilities will accommodate simultaneous proceedings.

Unlike the Nuremberg war-crimes trials of the Nazis, there will be no government officials in the dock, but rather - as detailed in my last column - prisoners against whom the United States has itself committed war crimes under the Geneva Conventions and our own War Crimes act. These crimes include their conditions of confinement and a total lack of the due process that the Supreme Court ordered in Rasul v. Bush (2004) and Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006).

Each of the defendants will have already been designated as an "enemy combatant" by previous "administrative" Combatant Status Review Tribunals at Guantánamo. At these sham hearings they were presumed guilty before any of the "evidence" against them (which they were not permitted to see) was aired. That means the presumption of guilt will continue at the war-crimes trials. The world will watch the total transmogrification of America's much self-praised "rule of law."

...The Seton Hall revelations have reached beyond the metropolitan press to, for example, the Anniston Star in Alabama. A December 1 editorial, "The Gitmo Games," quotes from the Seton Hall findings, and concludes:

"The military is holding something less than a kangaroo court that results in putting people away - without charging them with any specific wrongdoing - for an indefinite period of time . . . History will be very unkind to the rulers who constructed this very unjust, un-American system. Those un-American rulers, of course, include George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales, a coven of lawyers at the Defense Department and the White House, and Donald Rumsfeld. Will Robert Gates take his place among them?"

The Anniston Star's indictment-editorial ends: "[History] also will be unkind to people who tolerated [this un-American system.]" That means us.



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President Bush does not believe in democracy

Tehran, Dec 11, IRNA
Islamic Republic News Agency


US President George W.Bush is presenting himself as chief executive of great American nation who does not believe in democracy and proved that he only believes in gunboat policy dating to the cold war era.

In his latest overture to Iran, he said, "Iranians can do better than President Ahmadinejad who wants to produce nuclear bomb." It is a clear example that President Bush does not believe in democracy, because, in Iran, the president is being elected democratically whose authority has been defined by the Constitution.
But, it seems the constitutional authority of the president is not the case for the US president in light of his negligence of losing seats to the Democrats in the mid-term Congressional election, because the message of the November election for Mr. Bush was that he should shift gear in Iraq from military approach and give a go-ahead to democratic means.

Regardless of the reality that there is no a military solution to Iraqi crisis taking tolls on civilians every day and the US troops as well, he has planned to a surge in numbers of troops.

But, in Iran, democracy is being respected by Iranian chief executive and he lacks the power to exceed his Constitutional authority.

There are several Constitutional Offices monitoring performance of the president in Iran and the president cannot produce nuclear bomb.
Is it the case in the United States?

Constitutionally, the Supreme Leader's Office is in charge of administration of the state affairs and in case of Iranian nuclear program, the Supreme Leader has made it clear that production of nuclear bomb and weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in forbidden in Islam.

Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei has said in one of his private speech on prohibition of nuclear bomb in Islam that when Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein sprayed Iranian soldiers in frontier areas with chemical weapons, Iranian government never contemplated using such weapons, because WMDs is forbidden in Islam.

Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran has emanated from Islamic principles so that producing weapons of mass destruction will never have a place in Iran.

President Bush is escaping from debate with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The logic requires Mr. Bush to hold a TV debate with Ahmadinejad.

The Iranian president believes that Hitler of Germany also killed several million non-Jews in the World War and why the US is magnifying deaths of the Jewish community of the European states?

It is a concept Ahmadinejad has got from his studies and is it logic to accuse him of producing nuclear arms for expressing such a concept?



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Talk Host Gallagher: 'Round Up' Olbermann, Damon, And 'Put Them In A Detention Camp'

Think Progress
21/12/2006

Yesterday on Fox News, talk radio host Mike Gallagher said the U.S. government should "round up" actor Matt Damon, "The View" host Joy Behar, and MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann and "put them in a detention camp until this war is over because they're a bunch of traitors."

Gallagher was upset over Behar's comment that Time magazine should have chosen a controversial "Hitler-type" like Donald Rumsfeld as its Person of the Year. Gallagher said Damon should also be incarcerated because he "attacked George Bush and Dick Cheney"; he didn't explain why he wanted to imprison Olbermann.

Earlier this year, Gallagher was one of five conservative talk radio hosts invited to the White House to meet with President Bush.

Full transcript:

GALLAGHER: You know, it's a little bit ridiculous that we continue to watch these TV stars and movie stars who smear our leaders. I just wonder, Rob, if you'll think for a moment what our enemies think of seeing TV personalities compare the outgoing defense secretary to Adolph Hitler. I mean, you know, conservatives never get a pass. Strom Thurmond is wished a happy birthday by Trent Lott and the sky falls in on Trent Lott. But Joy Behar goes on national TV and compares a good man like Rumsfeld to the evilest man in the world and nobody, you know, there's no repercussions for Joy Behar. I think we should round up all of these folks. Round up Joy Behar. Round up Matt Damon, who last night on MSNBC attacked George Bush and Dick Cheney. Round up Olbermann. Take the whole bunch of them and put them in a detention camp until this war is over because they're a bunch of traitors.

THOMPSON: They're not traitors, they're Americans. And you know what the great thing about America is you get to say what you like and you don't get thrown into detention camps.

GALLAGHER: No, you don't.

THOMPSON: And that's what the rest of the world sees. They see free Americans say what they like without having any fear of going to jail. So, if I wanted to compare someone to Hitler or anybody else, Pol Pot, whatever it might be, I have no fear of going to jail because that is what an America is.

GALLAGHER: There's such a thing as treason, Rob.

THOMPSON: That's not treason. That's just political talk and satire and it might be funny at the best, at the least.

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With Recession Looming, Bush Tells America To 'Go Shopping More'

Think Progress
21/12/2006

Today, President Bush held a news conference where he discussed the "way forward" for the economy in 2007. Renowned Morgan Stanley economist Steven Roach says the the "odds of the U.S. economy tipping into recession are about 40 to 45 per cent." New York Times columnist Paul Krugman notes that "the odds are very good - maybe 2 to 1," that the U.S. will teeter toward a recession in 2007. Bush's solution? "Go shopping more."
Similarly, after the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush simply asked Americans for their "continued participation and confidence in the American economy." From the Internationald Herald Tribune, 1/14/03:

Bush did nothing to mobilize public opinion to accept the sacrifices that war implies - the first thing a leader would do. Tax cuts could go ahead as planned, and energy saving was dismissed out of hand. "Go shopping" was the administration's message.

Bush added today that 2007 will "require difficult choices and additional sacrifices" from the American people.

Transcript:

As we work with Congress in the coming year to chart a new course in Iraq and strengthen our military to meet the challenges of the 21st century, we must also work together to achieve important goals for the American people here at home. This work begins with keeping our economy growing. ... And I encourage you all to go shopping more.

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Iraq Vets Falling Through Health-Care Cracks

12.20.06, 12:00 AM ET

WEDNESDAY, Dec. 20 (HealthDay News) -- Sergeant Jason Pepper returned from the conflict in Iraq with a traumatic brain injury, symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, and a desperate need for help in navigating the U.S. health-care system.

But, like many of his peers, Pepper, who was also blinded in a blast from an improvised explosive device, is now largely invisible in a system ill-equipped to deal with the type and magnitude of injuries showing up in veterans returning from Iraq, according to a report published in the Dec. 21 issue of New England Journal of Medicine.
"He has sort of fallen through the cracks as far as medical care goes," said Dr. Susan Okie, contributing editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. "He has made, physically, a fairly remarkable recovery considering how badly he was wounded, but he has significant residual medical problems and symptoms."

Pepper, along with Sergeant David Emme, were first profiled in the pages of the journal last year while undergoing treatment and rehabilitation at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, in Washington, D.C.

Emme also has a traumatic brain injury (TBI) and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a result of his service in Iraq.

Okie revisited the two men, this time in their homes -- Pepper, an hour outside Nashville, Tenn., and Emme, north of Allentown, Pa.

Pepper and Emme are among some 22,600 U.S. soldiers who have been wounded in the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and other locations, most commonly by blasts. Fifty-nine percent of those injured by blasts have been found to have a TBI, which has been called the signature wound of this war. This and other features of the conflicts may be overwhelming the veterans' health-care system.

"There are probably more people like these two guys who have a combination of PTSD and TBI, and that's probably something the VA has not seen in such numbers before," Okie said. "Because of the body armor, there is a higher survivor rate of those with multiple wounds, so a bigger influx of those with severe injuries and maybe head injury as well as amputations or wounds to the limbs. The VA's obviously got a big burden of people recovering from severe injuries, more than in previous conflicts."

"The nature of the wounds is completely different because of the improvised explosive devices," added Phil Kraft, program director for the National Veterans Services Fund, in Darien, Conn. "The guys who were injured to this extent in Vietnam are dead. These guys are being saved when, ordinarily, they wouldn't have made it. The VA system is designed for soldiers who took a bullet, stuff like that. These aren't your traditional wounds."

The VA's plans for a "seamless transition" from military to civilian health care are largely unrealized. About 80 percent of soldiers recently discharged after serving in Iraq have not even enrolled as patients in the VA system.

Pepper, a former Army combat engineer, hasn't seen a doctor since he left Walter Reed in September 2005. He did enroll with Tricare, an agency that administers a national health-care plan for military personnel, veterans and their families, but said he was unable to contact the civilian primary-care physician that Tricare referred him to.

Pepper takes escalating doses of a barbiturate-containing pain medication left over from Walter Reed, along with medications to reduce his anxiety and help him sleep. At the same time, he has cut his daily antidepressant dose in half and has gained 50 or so pounds since his discharge from Walter Reed. He feels he can't exercise safely because he can't see.

Emme also has not seen a doctor since his discharge. His headaches have largely disappeared since his skull was reconstructed, but he still has muscle twitching (a result of his brain injury), sleep apnea and anxiety, which may be a symptom of PTSD. Emme also enrolled in Tricare but has yet to follow up with a civilian neurologist.

Neither Pepper nor Emme has a case manager to ensure continuity of care.

"Everybody has tried to come up with a system that involves case managers to try to help them stay on top, but they're not using them," Okie said. "Theoretically, they could both get them simply by arranging it."

And it's hard to say precisely where or how people are slipping through the cracks.

"Just the sheer size of the caseload is unbearable for any health-care organization," Kraft said. "I couldn't with any conscience point my finger at the VA, and say they're doing this on purpose. They're trying. They really are, but they're not being given any money. How the hell are you going to take care of these people if there's no money to do it? They're always willing to send young men and women over there, it's just they don't think it all the way through."

More information

For more on issues facing returning veterans, visit the National Veterans Services Fund Inc..



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Arar on agenda for MacKay-Rice meeting

Last Updated: Thursday, December 21, 2006 | 7:39 AM ET
CBC News

Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay is expected to ask his U.S. counterpart later Thursday why Canadian Maher Arar is still on a U.S. terrorist watch list.

MacKay is to meet Condoleezza Rice in Washington.
Arar, a Canadian citizen born in Syria, was seized at a New York airport in 2002, and sent to Syria, where he was tortured. A judicial inquiry into his case was set up after he returned to Canada more than a year later.

It concluded that Arar had no terror links, and the RCMP had given misleading information to U.S. authorities, which may have been the reason he was sent to Syria.

Parliament apologized to Arar, and the government has been asking Washington to remove him from a watch list, which means he can't travel to the U.S. and is a marked man, despite being cleared in Canada.

However, the U.S. has refused, and has not explained why.

Questioned about Arar on Dec. 18, a State Department spokesman said: "It was a conscious decision to keep him on this watch list ... people tell us that there is good reason for his being on the watch list. I can't get into those reasons."

Harper frustrated

Prime Minister Stephen Harper told Sun Media that "as near as I can see, we simply have a U.S. government that won't admit it's wrong."

He said he can't compel the U.S. to explain why it stills views Arar with suspicion.

"I'm not aware of the U.S. violating any law by not sharing it with us, but I'm obviously disappointed that they don't seem at this point to have responded fully to the conclusions of our own inquiry, and I have no explanation for why they're taking the position that they are."

MacKay and Rice are expected to meet reporters after their talk.

Arar's lawsuit against the U.S. has been cited as one reason American authorities won't talk about the case.



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Global Chaos

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Poll: Venezuelans Have Highest Regard for Their Democracy

Wednesday, Dec 20, 2006
By: Gregory Wilpert - Venezuelanalysis.com

Venezuelans view their democracy more favorably than the citizens of all other Latin American countries view their own democracies, except Uruguay, according to a new survey released by the Chilean NGO Latinbarometro last Saturday. Also, Venezuela is in first place in several measures of political participation, compared to all other Latin American countries.
According to the Latinobarometro survey, Venezuelans rank their democracy as being more fully realized than the citizens of all other surveyed countries do except Uruguay. On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 means a country that is not democratic and 10 is a country that is completely democratic, Venezuelans, on average, gave their own democracy a score of 7.0. The Latin American average was 5.8, with Uruguay having the highest score, of 7.2, and Paraguay the lowest, at 3.9.

Similarly, Venezuelans say more often than the citizens all other countries except Uruguayans that they are satisfied with their democracy. 57% of Venezuelans are happy with Venezuelan democracy, which is the second highest percentage, with 66% of Uruguayans expressing satisfaction. The average for all countries surveyed was 38%, with citizens of Peru, Ecuador, and Paraguay, expressing the least satisfaction, of 23%, 22%, and 12% respectively.

For Venezuela, the percentage of citizens surveyed who indicated satisfaction increased more since 1998, the year Chavez was elected, than any other country. The percentage expressing satisfaction increased from 32% to 57% in those eight years.

In terms of political participation, Venezuelans indicate that they are more politically active than the citizens of any other surveyed country. Venezuelans have the highest percentage of citizens that say they discuss politics regularly (47%, average is 26%), who say that they try to convince others on political matters (32%, average is 16%), who participate in demonstrations (26%, average is 12%), and who say they are active in a political party (25%, average is 9%).

With regard to whether they believe that elections in their country are "clean," Venezuelans answer in the affirmative 56% of the time, which puts them in third place, after Uruguay (83%) and Chile (69%). These were the only three where over half said they believed elections were clean. On average, only 41% of Latin Americans expressed confidence in elections in their country. Paraguayans (20%) and Ecuadorians (21%) expressed the least confidence in their elections.

According to Latinobarometro, Venezuelans and Uruguayans expressed the highest percentage of confidence that elections were the most effective means to promote change in their country (both 71%), compared to 57% for all of Latin America.

Latinobarometro has been conducting an annual poll in Latin American countries for the past 13 years. The polls are financed by a variety of multilateral agencies, such as the European Union, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the World Bank. The 2006 poll was conducted in 18 countries in the month of October 2006 and involved interviews with over 20,000 people. Its margin of error is about 3% (varies from country to country).

The Latinobarometro report contradicted the common perception that Latin America was heading towards more authoritarian regimes with the recent political shift towards the left. "It is clear that there is no authoritarian regression [in Latin America], which is demonstrated by the fact that 14 presidents were substituted, for various reasons and due to popular pressure prior to the end of their mandate and within the valid legal framework in each of the countries," said the report.

According to Latinobarometro, "An important part of the errors of perception about the evolution and development of the region are produced by the false expectations that international elites have about what the region should be doing."

Countries included in the survey were Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Dominican Republic, Uruguay, and Venezuela.



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Raúl will not imitate 'irreplaceable' Fidel

Staff and agencies
Thursday December 21, 2006
Guardian Unlimited

Fidel Castro's brother has signalled he will take a different approach to leadership if he takes over permanently from the ailing Cuban dictator.

However, Raúl Castro, who has been standing in for his older sibling for the past five months, insisted that Cuba's one party communist system would continue with or without the figurehead that has led it for almost half a century.

"Fidel is irreplaceable and I don't intend to imitate him. Those who imitate fail," Raul Castro, 75, told student federation members during a speech yesterday in Havana.
He did not mention the health of his 80-year-old brother, who has not been seen in public since emergency intestinal surgery forced him to relinquish power at the end of July for the first time since Cuba's 1959 revolution.
There has been widespread speculation that the dictator is gravely ill, perhaps with cancer. However, a group of US politicians visiting Cuba said yesterday they had been told he would return.

"All the officials have told us that his illness is not cancer, nor is it terminal, and he will be back," Arizona congressman, Jeff Flake, the head of the US delegation, said.

Nonetheless, Raúl Castro hinted at a series of changes in approach should he take over, saying he would be more open to debate.

"Sometimes people fear the word 'disagree', but I say the more debate and the more disagreement you have, the better the decisions will be," he told the students.

And in a move that will delight audiences used to sitting through the elder Castro's sometimes interminable speeches - he holds the record for the longest ever address to the UN, a four hour 29 minute marathon - Raúl Castro hinted he would not follow suit.

"From the first moment it was established that I would not be giving all the speeches," he said.

He also practised what he preached, keeping his address to the 800 students brief and littering it with humorous stories from his childhood, such as how he was thrown from a horse after trying to copy a peasant and ride bareback.

Since the younger Castro took over in July, there have already been some small changes, for example newspapers now occasionally publish stories exposing theft and corruption. He is also said to favour relaxing state controls over the economy.

However, he is not thought to harbour ambitions to run the country indefinitely, and is more likely to govern for a few years before handing over to a younger successor.



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UN Gags Cuba in Terror Debates

United Nations, Dec 21 (Prensa Latina)

Cuba condemned the UN Security Council refusal to allow its participation in a debate on terrorism, and affirmed that decision confirms the need for an urgent, profound reform of that body.

A letter to the Council, signed by Cuban ambassador to the UN Rodrigo Malmierca, says his country considers all issues linked to terrorism very important, and recalls Cuba has been participating in all related meetings held every three months.
However, the letter reads, it has been informed this meeting has a new format and only the presidents of the committees will be able to speak.

That decision, "made due to the capricious action characterizing that body," once again proves the need for reform of the Security Council.

"Such decisions do not contribute to promote the clear, representative nature that should characterize the work of the Council," Malmierca stated.

The participation of Cuba and other countries interested in the meeting would have allowed the Council to take into consideration other viewpoints on terrorism which are of the interest of all member countries, the letter stressed.

The Cuban ambassador asked the Security Council to distribute the letter and an attachment of the speech he was to deliver at the meeting as an official document.

That text contains detailed information on terrorist acts against Cuba by several people and organizations, as well as US protection of terror perpetrators.



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Spanish government holds 'first official meeting' with Eta

Giles Tremlett in Madrid
Thursday December 21, 2006
The Guardian


Spain's socialist government has had its first formal meeting with the armed Basque separatist group Eta to ensure a nine-month ceasefire holds, media reports said yesterday. Newspapers and radio stations in the Basque country and Madrid said they had confirmation from different sources that the meeting took place in an unnamed European country last Thursday.

Political leaders were privately informed by the government that "an exploratory meeting" had been held, and that this was expected to lead to formal peace talks.
Spain's interior minister, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, refused to confirm or deny the formal meeting, but said: "The process is in its preliminary phase and I am confident that it will move forward." This was taken by many as tacit confirmation that a meeting had taken place and that worries of an imminent breakdown of the ceasefire could now be discarded.

The reports of talks with Eta came two days before a rare meeting between the prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, and the opposition leader, Mariano Rajoy, of the conservative People's party (PP). Mr Zapatero has failed to win the PP's support for future peace talks, which have become the focus of street protests. But this week the prime minister said he was ready to go it alone.

"My objective is not to convince the PP, but to make sure it all works out well," he said. "You will never hear me say this has failed because of the PP. The responsibility is entirely mine."

Mr Rajoy, however, opposes talks with a group that has killed 850 people in the past 30 years and which is considered a terrorist organisation by the EU and US.

Although Eta has not killed since May 2003, the theft of 350 pistols from a private arms depot near Nîmes, France, in October led to speculation that it was preparing to return to terrorism. French police later arrested several suspected Eta members for their role in the robbery, but the pistols were not recovered.

A recent increase in street violence by separatist youths in the Basque country was seen as another sign that the accident-prone peace process was in the doldrums.

Rumours were circulating that Eta would suspend the ceasefire over Christmas and carry out a spectacular attack in a bid to improve its bargaining position.

Two Eta members escaped from a police checkpoint in the early hours of yesterday morning after pulling a pistol on gendarmes near the town of Nogaro in south-west France. The Eta members abandoned their vehicle and one later held up a car at gunpoint, forcing the driver to take him to a nearby town.



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Russia's Putin Praises Spies' Work at Secret Police Anniversary

Created: 21.12.2006 09:40 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 17:39 MSK, 47 minutes ago
MosNews

Russia's President Vladimir Putin has saluted Russia's resurgent secret services for their role in guarding national interests.

"The personnel of the security services firmly stand guard for Russia's national interests," Putin said in a statement released as he threw a lavish party to mark the anniversary of the founding of the Soviet secret police.

Putin, who served as a KGB spy in East Germany, has promoted former security officers to high posts in the Kremlin, where they have formed one of the most powerful clans under the leadership of deputy chief-of-staff Igor Sechin, analysts say.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Boris Yeltsin split up the KGB to sap the power of the secret services. But Putin has brought spying back into fashion at the very highest levels in the Kremlin.

Spy chiefs, top politicians and former agents were shown on state television sitting in a packed hall in the Kremlin as Putin sang their praises.

State television showed a lavish party with an orchestra playing classical music and large buffet with champagne and vodka, said to be Russian spies' favourite tipples.

Spy scares are back in vogue in Moscow with Kremlin controlled television showing romantic serials about the exploits of Russia's domestic and foreign security agents.

"Their best workers have always shown patriotism, competency, a high degree of personal and professional decency, and an understanding of the importance of their work for the good of their fatherland," Putin said.

First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov, both tipped as possible Putin successors, attended the Kremlin reception.

Putin, who has tried to restore prestige to the secret services, saluted the "glorious pages" in the history of Russia's secret services, the successors of the Soviet-era KGB.

"There are many glorious pages, bright examples of true heroism and courage in the history of national state security organisations," Putin said in the statement, which was posted on the Kremlin's web page, www.kremlin.ru.

Historians still argue about how many tens of millions of people died at the hands of the Soviet secret service under the rule of Josef Stalin. Millions were executed or sent to perish in labour camps run by Stalin's secret police.

Stalin's death in 1953 ended massive purges, but left intact a system of blanket control over the population exercised by the KGB. Political dissidents were imprisoned on criminal charges or locked up in mental hospitals.

On December 20, Russian agents celebrate Chekist day, the date the Soviet secret police, the Cheka, was founded.

"It is a profession who love our motherland," Putin told agents and senior politicians who attended the Kremlin bash.

Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) chief Sergei Lebedev, Federal Security Service (FSB) head Nikolai Patrushev and Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov attended the Kremlin banquet.



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Mid-East Madness

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Top general in Mideast to retire in March 2007

LA Times
December 20, 2006

Abizaid opposed calls for more troops in Iraq. His departure could clear way for a more aggressive strategy.

WASHINGTON - Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, has submitted plans to retire and will leave his post in March, a step likely to make way for a change in military strategy at a time the Bush administration is seeking a new plan for Iraq.
Abizaid has been the primary architect of U.S. military strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan since becoming head of the U.S. Central Command more than three years ago. He has strenuously resisted calls to increase troop levels to quell rising violence in Baghdad, arguing it would increase Iraqi dependence on Americans.

But a growing number of current and former officers have embraced the idea, some of whom have briefed President Bush as part of his monthlong review of Iraq policy, and the White House is believed to be considering the move.

"If you're going to change the strategy, in fairness to [Abizaid], let him go," said a former senior Pentagon official who has worked closely with the general. "He's given it all he's got, in terms of personal sacrifice."

Abizaid's planned departure clears the way for new Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to recommend his own commander, a decision current and former Defense officials say is nearly as important as the new administration strategy expected to be unveiled by Bush in January.

These officials said Gates faces a clear choice between generals who have agreed with Abizaid's push to quickly hand over security responsibilities to Iraqi forces and a small but increasingly influential coterie of officers backing a more aggressive U.S.-led counterinsurgency campaign.

According to Defense officials, Abizaid submitted his retirement documents just over a month ago, shortly before Donald H. Rumsfeld was pushed out as Defense secretary. One recently retired Army general said Abizaid had wanted to retire earlier but that Rumsfeld blocked the move, insisting his war commanders stay in place.

"Going to war isn't like having a regular job," said the retired general, who, like the others, spoke on condition of anonymity because Abizaid's plans had not been made public. "It's extremely stressful, it's heavily responsible. I can understand why he'd want to retire."

Abizaid's four-year term as chief of the Central Command, or Centcom, was to end in July. But some close to the Army have speculated in recent weeks that his term might be extended to see through implementation of the administration's new Iraq strategy. However, a Centcom spokesman said that earlier this year, Rumsfeld asked Abizaid to stay only until "early 2007."

"He does not intend to extend beyond that period," the spokesman said. "Gen. Abizaid became commander in July 2003 and has served longer in this position than any previous commander."

In Gates' search for a successor, the candidate most closely associated with Abizaid's strategy is Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, who is also expected to leave his current assignment early next year. Although Casey was considered the favorite to become the next Army chief of staff under Rumsfeld, Gates could decide to move him to the Central Command for continuity, officials said.

Critics of the current war effort say making Casey either chief of staff or Centcom commander would send the wrong signal - essentially endorsing a strategy that the president acknowledges has failed.

"It would be a terrible thing," said one military analyst with close ties to the Pentagon. "He's the guy who's losing the war."

The leading candidate from the counterinsurgency advocates is Army Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, a highly respected military thinker who led the 101st Airborne Division during the Iraq invasion in March 2003.

In his current job as head of the Army's leading military schools, Petraeus oversaw the rewriting of the Army and Marine counterinsurgency field manual, which was issued last week and argues that while killing insurgents is often important, the most vital task in a counterinsurgency is winning the support of the population.

The manual also argues for moving soldiers out of large bases into smaller outposts among the local population. Such manpower-intensive tactics run counter to those now used by Abizaid and Casey. Currently, troops clear dangerous Baghdad neighborhoods with regularity but, because of their limited numbers, must quickly turn over long-term security responsibilities to unprepared Iraqi units, which frequently results in backsliding.

Army Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, who last week left Iraq as the head of day-to-day military operations, is also closely associated with such tactics, having implemented them when he was commander of the 1st Cavalry Division in Baghdad's Shiite slums. He is also seen as a top counterinsurgency candidate if Petraeus is chosen for another job in Iraq, such as replacing Casey.

"I do think there are two camps," said the military analyst. "I think there is a Petraeus camp, and Chiarelli has been in it, and there is definitely an Abizaid-Casey camp."

Both Chiarelli and Petraeus have gained key backing from the Army's influential alumni, such as retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who recently briefed Bush on his views of Iraq policy, and former Army Secretary Thomas White.

"Chiarelli seems to be the voice of broadening the strategy, [that] this is more than just a shoot-'em-up war," White said in an interview. "If we're going to redo this thing, and he seems to be the advocate of change, I'd put him in charge."

Comment: Hmmm... we wonder what they are planning for April. More "Shock and Awe" perhaps? But this time for a much larger and more racially diverse audience?

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French soldiers allegedly had bin Laden in the crosshairs

PARIS, Dec 21, 2006 (AFP)

French soldiers in Afghanistan had Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in their crosshairs - twice - but did not receive the order from their US commander to open fire, a French documentary reported.

The filmed report, by journalists Eric de Lavarene and Emmanuel Razavi, asserts that the French troops had bin Laden in their rifle scopes in 2003 and then again six months later in 2004.
Four French soldiers assigned to a 200-strong special forces unit in Afghanistan under US military control all confirmed - "at different times and in different places" - that they could have killed bin Laden but that the order to shoot was not forthcoming, the report claims.

The documentary, entitled 'Bin Laden: Failings of a Manhunt' and set to be shown on French cable television channel Planete at an unspecified date, relies on the accounts given by the four soldiers.

"We have the original voice recordings of the soldiers," Razavi told AFP. "But their anonymity has to be guaranteed."

However the French defence ministry said the story was "pure fabrication".

"There is absolutely no basis of truth in what is being said," said spokesman Jean-François Bureau.



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Iranian Scapegoat

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Europeans push for vote on Iran resolution by weekend

www.chinaview.cn 2006-12-21 05:51:15


UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 20 (Xinhua) -- Britain, France and Germany agreed on Wednesday to water down their draft resolution imposing sanctions on Iran for its unyielding nuclear program, trying to push for a vote on Friday.

The latest text, a copy of which was obtained by Xinhua, urging nations to notify the sanction committee of the Security Council of the travel of Iranian officials on a list.
"All states shall notify the committee of the entry into or transit through their territories of the persons designated in the annex to this resolution," the resolution said.

Instead of preventing persons concerned with Iran nuclear program from traveling abroad, the new text just called upon states to exercise vigilance regarding the travel.

"The new text has a number of changes which go quite a long way to meet Russian concerns," German Ambassador Thomas Matussek told reporters after a closed meeting with his counterparts from the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France.

According to some UN diplomat, who said on condition of anonymity, Europeans offered the compromises in an effort to get Russian support, trying to vote by the end of this week.

Britain, France and Germany circulated two weeks ago to UN Security Council members a revised draft resolution which imposed sanctions on Iran for its refusal to suspend its uranium enrichment activities.

It urges Iran to suspend all enrichment activities as well as all heavy water related projects, and bars Iran from importing or exporting key materials and technology related to its nuclear and ballistic missile programs, but leaves a slot for dual-use items.

However, some articles of the text were objected by Russia, who insisted that the travel ban as well as the financial sanctions are unnecessary.

Comment: Remember, Iran is completely within its rights to develop its nuclear programme. It has signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, something that Israel has never done. The pressure put on Iran has nothing to do with legality, it is simply politics, Zionist politics. Israel wants to remain the only nuclear power in the region.

And remember, as well, that the non-proliferation treaty had two aspects: that no other countries would get nuclear weapons AND that the existing nuclear powers would get rid of their own nukes. Obviously the current nuclear powers have not upheld their side of the treaty, but who is talking about that in the media?

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Holy Warriors Set Sights on Iran

12/20/06 "IPS
Bill Berkowitz

OAKLAND, California, Dec 19 (IPS) - Over the past 20 years, the U.S. Christian right has evolved into one of the most powerful grassroots organising forces within the Republican Party, and a host of Christian Zionists have taken a well-earned seat at the foreign policy table.

At the same time, their support for Israel is not only growing -- it is also becoming an influential political factor.
Several prominent Christian right and conservative Jewish leaders have teamed up to found organisations that have provided millions of dollars to Israeli charities, lobbied in support of policies advanced by right wing leaders in Israel, opposed President George W. Bush's so-called "Road Map" to peace in the Middle East, and have helped defray the costs of the immigration of Russian Jews to Israel, among other activities.

While the Reverends Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell have been longtime supporters of Israel, the founding earlier this year of Christians United for Israel by John Hagee, the pastor of the 18,000-member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, drew a great deal of media attention.

As Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's popularity has plummeted since the end of the Israel-Hezbollah conflict, Christian Zionists in the United States view the outcome not only as a defeat for Israel, but also as a prelude to a much wider war. In fact, they think the conflict might be a sign of impending Armageddon.

"The end of the world as we know it is rapidly approaching," Hagee wrote in his most recent book, "Jerusalem Countdown: A Warning to the World". "Just before us is a nuclear countdown with Iran," he wrote, "followed by Ezekiel's war (as described in Ezekiel, chapters 38 and 39), and then the final battle -- the battle of Armageddon."

For Hagee, bestselling author Joel Rosenberg and other Christian Zionists, Israel plays the critical role in End Time scenarios. Their books, commentaries, and public statements reflect their beliefs that serial conflicts in the Middle East are a sign of the biblical prophesy presaging Armageddon, the return of Jesus Christ, and the final battle for the souls of mankind.

And some have started to train their sights on Tehran. In a recent blog post datelined Jerusalem, Rosenberg wrote: "The buzz here in the last few days is that Israel is seriously considering a preemptive strike against Iran's nuclear facilities and ballistic missile sites."

Given Israel's less than sterling performance against Hezbollah this past summer, Rosenberg was not convinced that Israel "has the capacity -- or the will -- at the moment to neutralise the Iranian nuclear and ballistic missile threat."

However, with "a new Hitler rising in Iran", it is up to U.S. President George W. Bush, who met with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in Washington in mid-November, to deal with the Iranian threat: "If President Bush believes Iran needs to be neutralised (and I believe he does), and he is convinced that military action is the only way (I don't believe he is there right now), then the U.S. should take the lead."

After all, wrote Rosenberg, "If anyone is going to stop Iran from threatening the world with nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them, it has to be soon, perhaps no later than the end of 2007. After all, 2008 is an American election year. 2009 will be the start of a new administration. By then it may be too late. The thermonuclear genie may be out of the bottle."

The Israeli/Hezbollah war led several U.S. cable television news networks to raise questions about whether the crisis in the Middle East was a signal that the "End Times" were approaching. Rosenberg, author of such apocalyptic political thrillers as "The Copper Scroll," "The Ezekiel Option," and "The Last Jihad," was invited to appear on CNN and the Fox News Channel.

In one recent appearance, Rosenberg said that he had made several visits to "speak at a White House Bible study" and had conversations with "a number of congressional leaders and Homeland Security, Pentagon [officials] about my novels, which are based on Bible prophecy."

Rosenberg said that "the question that's been most interesting among these various administration and congressional officials is, 'Are you saying that the Bible talks about an alliance between Iran, Russia, and a group of Middle Eastern countries to attack Israel at some point?' And the answer is yes."

Some critics charge that Rosenberg is a self-promoter with little real understanding of Judaism.

"Rosenberg chooses to trade in his private salvation narrative as way of winning readers, exploiting contacts, and most dangerously -- political ventriloquism," said Rabbi Haim Dov Beliak, the co-founder of JewsOnFirst.org, a website devoted to protecting free speech, and the rabbi of Beth Shalom Temple in Whittier, California.

"In this case, political ventriloquism is using the 'voice' of Jews to their eventual detriment -- while claiming it is for their benefit -- and seeking, what I as a believing Jew, must describe as apostasy against Judaism and God," he told IPS. "Rooting for war with Iran and lobbying for world destruction using Israel, as catalytic agent, is no longer 'entertainment' -- it is obscene."

Rosenberg was an important but mostly behind-the-scenes figure in the conservative movement until his first novel "The Last Jihad" became a bestseller. A Jew who converted to Christianity more than 30 years ago, he had worked for former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli politician and author Natan Sharansky, U.S. business magazine magnate Steve Forbes, and right-wing radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh. He is also a former Heritage Foundation staffer.

"The Last Jihad," completed before the 9/11 Trade Centre and Pentagon attacks, propelled Rosenberg into the spotlight. The novel featured a hijacked jet making a kamikaze-like attack against the president of the United States, simultaneous terrorist strikes on the U.S., London, Paris and Saudi Arabia, an oil deal between Israel and the Palestinians that threatened to unleash a war with Iraq, and a possible preemptive nuclear strike.

In a late-October interview with the Washington Times, Rosenberg told reporter Chrissie Thompson that he didn't think that his novels "were going to predict the future... I was basing them on a series of Bible prophecies, but when [they] started to come true... that has been striking for all of us, myself included."

Another of his novels, "The Ezekiel Option," is described by Rosenberg as "a political thriller about the threat of a Russian-Iranian alliance to destroy Israel based on the Biblical prophecies found in the Book of Ezekiel, chapters 38 and 39."

These prophecies, according to Rosenberg, "describe what Bible scholars call the war of Gog and Magog. Russia and Iran form a military alliance with Lebanon, Syria and a group of other Middle East countries to destroy Israel in what Ezekiel described as the last days."

In recent months Rosenberg has suggested that Russia be added to the Bush administration's "axis of evil".

Recently, Rosenberg, and his wife Lynn, co-founded the Joshua Fund, which "partner[s] with evangelical ministries in the Middle East to provide desperately needed resources to Christians in the region to bless their neighbours in need in the name of Jesus.."

According to Richard Bartholomew, the Fund's two "humanitarian aid" efforts are called the "Project to Bless Israel" and the "Project to Bless Lebanon."

"Lebanese refugees will get 'Bags of Blessing', to be distributed by Campus Crusade for Christ and local evangelicals," Bartholomew reported.

The bags will include food and other basic items like soap and aspirin, he said, as well as a Jesus film DVD in Arabic.

However, Bartholomew clarified that while the Lebanese refugees will receive the Jesus DVD, the Israelis "will be spared a similar Jesus DVD in Hebrew, for obvious political reasons."

Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. His WorkingForChange column "Conservative Watch" documents the strategies, players, institutions, victories and defeats of the U.S. Right



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The Earth Strikes Back

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Spate of quakes prompts El Salvador evacuation

AFP
20/12/2006

Authorities in El Salvador said today they had evacuated 90 people near the Guatemalan border after 193 small earthquakes caused minor damage to homes and widespread panic.

The earthquakes ranged between magnitude 2.3 and 4.3, according to the National Service of Territorial Studies. At least 90 of the tremors were felt by the population.

The department of Ahuachapan has been hit by 324 small earthquakes since Sunday, according to seismologists.

At least 90 people put up makeshift tents and mattresses in the central park of Atiquizaya city, 50 miles west of San Salvador, and Red Cross officials were on hand to help.




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Geologists warn of tsunamis in Israel

Dec. 21, 2006 0:30
By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH

When the massive tsunami hit the Indian Ocean two years ago and killed nearly a quarter of a million people, Israelis said that was one problem that wouldn't hit them.

But research conducted by Dr. Amos Salamon of the Geological Survey of Israel and colleagues in Italy and the US will report on Thursday that since before the Common Era, there have been two dozen tsunamis documented in the region and 11 on Israel's (illegal) coasts.
The research will be presented in a lecture at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot to mark the annual Planet Earth Day sponsored by the nonprofit Israel Geological Society.

Salamon and researchers at the University of California-Santa Cruz and Storia Geofisica Ambiente in Bologna said that even though Israel faces the Mediterranean Sea and not a major ocean, tsunamis do occur.

The Talmud itself mentions a tsunami between Caesarea and Yavne on December 12 in the year 115 CE after a major earthquake hit northwest Syria.
The term tsunami was created by Japanese fishermen who returned to port to find the area surrounding their harbor devastated, although they had not been aware of any wave in the open water. Tsunamis (from the Japanese word "tsu" meaning harbor and "nami" meaning wave) are common throughout Japanese history, with nearly 200 events recorded there.

The researchers said a tsunami caused by an earthquake in the region could cause waves of one to three meters in height, and if the seabed shifted, it could reach six meters. The waves could reach the coast in only a few minutes if the seabed shifted, but it could take between half an hour and an hour if the source is Cyprus or the Aegean Sea.

A tsunami early-warning system, if and when it is installed, has to take into account a variety of mechanisms that can cause tidal waves and the various distances from Israel where the geological shocks originate.

In most cases, the researchers said, when the shock was close, the best early-warning system would be the earthquake itself. In those cases when the sea actually recedes, this is an additional warning of a coming tsunami. The team agreed that more research must be conducted into the phenomenon.

Salamon and colleagues carried out a historical survey of tsunamis in the eastern Mediterranean based on scientific and historical reports. They said some of the reported tsunamis were entered into catalogues "apparently in error for all sorts of reasons, and thus there may be an impression that the danger is more serious than it really is."

At the request of the inter-ministerial steering committee in preparation for an earthquake in Israel and after the devastating damage caused in the Indian Ocean in December 2004, the team decided to reassess the dangers of tsunamis on the coast of Israel.

They looked both at reports of tsunamis in the eastern Mediterranean and of earthquakes as far west as southern Turkey, Cyprus, Greece and Italy.
The first recorded tsunami in the region was in Egypt in the 14th century BCE, documented by archeological findings, the team said. A tsunami hit Israel's coast on the average of once every 200 years, with the last recorded once on November 25, 1759; this affected the coast of Israel and the Nile Delta and was caused by an earthquake on the border between Syria and Lebanon.

Seismic gushes of water have also been documented in the Kinneret, the Dead Sea and the Gulf of Eilat.



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Colorado reels under blizzard

Last Updated: Thursday, December 21, 2006 | 8:35 AM ET
CBC News

A storm Wednesday dumped more than half a metre of snow on Colorado, bringing much of the state to a halt.

Schools, malls and offices were closed Thursday, the governor declared a state of emergency and 4,700 travellers spent the night at Denver International Airport after flights were cancelled.
The Colorado National Guard was rescuing stranded drivers, who were flooding into shelters.

Mail deliveries were cancelled in the eastern part of the state. Avalanche warnings were issued in the mountains.

A notice on the airport website Thursday morning said it was not likely to open until the evening. More than 1,000 flights were cancelled on Wednesday and Thursday.

The snow is forecast to stop during the day after adding up to five more centimetres, but winds have formed drifts and a major cleanup looms.

The U.S. National Weather Service has a blizzard warning in effect for eastern Colorado and parts of adjacent states - western Nebraska and southern Wyoming. Kansas, to the east of Colorado, is under a storm warning.

Colorado Gov. Bill Owens said declaring an emergency and activating the National Guard would help drivers. The guard also delivered supplies to the Denver airport.

Hundreds of kilometres of highways are closed. Accidents and stalled cars made the mess worse, though there were no traffic deaths, police reported.

About 210 kilometres from Denver in a truckstop in Walsenburg on Interstate 25, the main highway south from Denver, manager Leon Medina described the scene: "Cars are all around the building. Trucks are all over, trucks and cars pulled into ditches."



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Lewiston residents unnerved by dead crows

19/12/2006
Maine News

LEWISTON - Residents unnerved by the unexplained deaths of dozens of crows in a neighborhood next to the Promenade Mall hope tests by the U.S. Department of Agriculture will provide some answers.

To residents, it seems almost as though dead crows were falling from the sky. Damien Perreault, 71, said he disposed of 10 dead crows he found on a walk Monday. That didn't count crows dead in the trees.
Ray Beaudoin, a resident of Summit Avenue, called animal control officials when the dead crows started appearing a couple of weeks ago.

State environmental control officials were not interested in testing them because the season for West Nile virus is over. But the U.S. Department of Agriculture accepted a couple of the birds last week and will run tests.

For now, residents have no answers but plenty of theories involving pollution, bird illnesses - or intentional poisoning. Dan Marquis of the Stanton Bird Club said the notion of intentional poisoning is worth looking into.

For now, Beaudoin said there's no noisy cawing.

Hundreds used to roost in a tree line that separates the parking lot of the Promenade Mall and Summit Avenue. "In the last three or four days, the crows are nowhere to be found," he said. "It's quite eerie," he said.




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One With the Cosmos

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Meteor Shoots Across Scottish Skies?

Scotsman
21/12/2006

AT first he froze with fear as what appeared to be a burning aeroplane dropped from the sky towards a Midlothian field.

But when he realised he wasn't witnessing an aviation disaster unfold as he took his daughter to school, David Carson reached for his camera.

For the next ten minutes, the 40-year-old took dozens of pictures of a strange streak of light across the Lothians sky that eventually broke into an orange glow and then appeared to hit the ground.
A frantic call to police confirmed to Mr Carson that it wasn't a downed aircraft, but astronomers today were at odds about what the phenomenon actually could have been.

Professor John Peacock, of the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh, said it had probably been a meteor fireball.

But acclaimed astronomer Alan Pickup was adamant the strange streak of glowing cloud was simply a condensation trial from a passing aircraft.

Mr Carson was just getting into his van to take his 14-year-old daughter Jane to school when a peculiar flash of light in the sky to the east caught his eye.

"I saw a vapour trail that looked like it belonged to a plane then below it was this really strange streak of light," explained the furniture restorer and amateur photographer, who had taken his camera out with him to capture the frosty sunrise on Monday morning.

"I honestly thought a plane had been blown out the sky at first and just panicked.

"I was shouting at Jane, 'What do I do? What do I do?'.

"I grabbed the camera and started taking pictures of the streak as it got nearer to the ground.

"A bit at the front appeared to break off and turned bright orange before looking like it crashed into the ground.

"I was really all over the place because I didn't know if it was the end of the world or what, it was such a strange sight."

The incident, which took place about one mile south of Penicuik near to Ravensneuk Farm, lasted about ten minutes from 8.30am on Monday morning.

The fireball - if that is indeed what it was - would have crashed to Earth about a couple of miles east of the A701 Peebles Road.

If the rock hit the earth it would be classed as a meteorite rather than a meteor.

Professor John Peacock, of the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh, said: "It is probably a meteor fireball - quite a rare and spectacular example, and well worth publishing."

However, a spokesman for the British Geological Survey said that there had been no seismic activity that could have been caused by a meteorite strike in the Penicuik area during the time of the incident.

Astronomy writer Alan Pickup said he thought the streak was simply a vapour condensation trail from an overhead aircraft. He said: "Condensation streaks in the direction of the rising sun can look very odd but there is no way this was a meteor.

"There are a lot of false sightings because of conditions like this but if it had been a meteor then it would occurred a lot quicker than this and would have been much brighter."

A police spokeswoman confirmed officers attended Mr Carson's home and made inquiries with the British Geological Survey and British Airport Authority.



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Gravity pull of moon, sun affect Antarctic ice

www.chinaview.cn 2006-12-21 19:51:38

BEIJING, Dec. 21 (Xinhuanet) -- Not only do the moon and sun affect Earth's ocean tides, a new study by scientists has found the two heavenly bodies also affect the slippage of an Antarctic ice sheet larger than the Netherlands.

The Rutford Ice Stream of western Antarctica slips about 3 feet a day toward the sea but the rate changes 20 percent in tandem with two-week tidal cycles, according to the report.
"We've known that (twice-daily) tides affect the motion of ice streams but we didn't know it happened on this two-weekly time scale," said Hilmar Gudmundsson, an Icelandic glaciologist at the British Antarctic Survey. "For such a large mass of ice to respond to ocean tides like this illustrates how sensitively the Antarctic Ice Sheet reacts to environmental changes."

Tides rise and fall about twice a day but also vary in a two-week cycle of high "spring" tides, when the sun and the moon are aligned with the Earth, and low "neap" tides, when they are at right angles to the planet.

These new findings mean computer models will now have to factor in tides, as well as rising seas and global warming, to predict the affect on the ice shelf.

"We have to be careful when we make measurements that we know that an ice stream can speed up or slow down -- that's just part of its dynamics and natural variability," Gudmundsson told Reuters.

Some past scientific reports have incorrectly interpreted changes in the rate of the ice slide as part of longer-term shifts, he said.

Gudmundsson said the speed of the Rutford ice when it left solid ground to become part of the floating Ronne Ice Shelf in the Weddell Sea was fastest just before spring tides at 1.2 meters a day and slowest before neap tides at 0.9 meters.

Even 40 km inland, at a height of almost 200 meters above sea level, the ice's daily speed varied between 1.07 to 0.95 meters.

"That was the furthest inland measurement but I expect the tidal effect could be felt 75 kilometers inland," he said.

Gudmundsson said it was unclear whether a projected long-term rise in world sea levels, like a rising tide in slow motion, might accelerate a run-off of ice from Antarctica.

"The next thing to do is to follow up and to measure this on other ice streams," he said. "If the sea level changes ... we want to know how sensitive the system is."

Climate scientists who advise the United Nations project that seas will rise by 9 centimeters and 88 centimeters by 2100 because of a warming they say will also spur more droughts, heat waves, desertification and floods.

The report was published in the scientific journal Nature.



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Science Korner

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NASA Provides New Perspectives On The Earth's Changing Ice Sheets

December 21, 2006
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
Science Daily

It's widely documented that climate change is causing the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to shrink. Air temperatures in many parts of the polar regions have increased and waters that surround parts of the ice sheets have warmed up. What most do not know is that until just six years ago, we had no real way of measuring whether the ice sheets were shrinking or growing, or at what rate.
Today, advances in remote sensing, the use of highly sensitive instruments aboard satellites and aircraft, have enabled scientists to examine the mass balance of the ice sheets and to determine just where and how quickly the ice is growing or shrinking. Of particular importance is the mass balance of the ice sheet, which is the difference between how much ice it has lost versus gained over a period of time, and is a direct measure of an ice sheet's contribution to sea level rise.

With increases in the number of ways researchers can now measure changes in the landscape and rate of change of the ice sheets, have also come some variations in scientific results that some may find confusing. However, a closer look tells a fairly consistent story.

"The media has reported a lot about how ice is changing, particularly in Greenland, but the numbers vary depending on the time period examined and the technique used. As a result, there may be some confusion out there about what's really happening," said Waleed Abdalati, a glacier expert and head of the Cryospheric Sciences Branch at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. "We have all these techniques and some are giving different answers than others. But what's significant is that we have the ability to even debate ice sheet measurement results at all when we could not have a few years ago. Now, we're talking about how much ice sheet shrinkage there is and how rapidly it's taking place."

Researchers now use aircraft altimetry, satellite radar and laser altimetry, radar interferometry, gravity measurements from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission and precise elevation change measurements from NASA's Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation (ICESat) satellite. Each tool has its own strengths, and when used together, these technologies produce a comprehensive look into the ice sheets' behavior that have changed the way the world thinks of climate change and its impact on ice sheets and glaciers.

Each of these provides important information for unraveling the behavior of the ice sheets, and collectively they tell a story. In Greenland, they reveal an ice sheet that is shrinking dramatically at the edges and growing at its higher interior elevations, such that there is a net loss of ice that is far greater than it was in the last decade. These losses are a result of increased melting, and faster flow at the edges, as the floating ice that surrounds parts of Greenland and buttresses some of the outlet glaciers melts.

In Antarctica, these observations tell us that the West Antarctic ice sheet is currently shrinking substantially, and has been for the last decade. They also tell a story of a second much larger ice sheet in East Antarctica that has been growing slowly. The net result in Antarctica is that the ice sheet as a whole has been shrinking, contributing to rising sea levels, and probably much more so in recent years.

"We did not appreciate in the past how the changes in ice sheets respond so quickly to changes in climate. The story these measurement techniques are all telling is that the ice sheets are shrinking more than they were 10 years ago," said Abdalati. "The borders of the ice sheets are melting in waters that are warming."

"Of the techniques for measuring ice sheet change, the laser altimetry approach of the ICESat mission is the most effective because it provides a detailed look at the overall integrated changes in the ice sheets," offered Abdalati. "And continuous observations like those by ICESat would greatly enhance our ability to understand what's really happening to the Earth's dramatically changing ice cover. The most telling comprehensive picture, however, is created when all the techniques are used together."



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Controlling Confusion: Researchers Make Insight Into Memory, Forgetting

University of Wisconsin-Madison
December 21, 2006

Why do we forget? Do memories decay on their own, or are they harmed by interference from similar memories? Using a technique called "transcranial magnetic stimulation" (TMS), brain researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison may have found the answer.
Although the notion of decay makes sense, Brad Postle, assistant professor of psychology at UW-Madison, says it may be inaccurate.

"Psychologists have known for decades that the intuitive notion of decay is probably less of a factor in forgetting than is interference," he says. Interference occurs, he says, when "other remembered information disrupts, competes with or confuses the information that you want to remember."
Interference is always present, Postle says, but we don't always notice it.
"An obvious case is like yesterday, when a friend was telling me his cell phone number but actually gave me his home phone number," he says. Another scenario is equally familiar: we get most details of the story right, but misidentify the source. Or we remember that the quotation comes from Shakespeare, but we name the wrong play.

"Interference is also often to blame," says Postle, "in cases when we simply can't remember something."

If blocking interference is so important to a good memory, where - and how - does that blocking occur" In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on the week of Dec. 4, 2006, Postle - together with Guilio Tononi of the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, and Eva Federoes, a researcher in the UW-Madison department of psychology - studied how part of the brain's prefrontal cortex can reduce the disruptive effects of interference. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for complex thought.

From brain scans, scientists already knew that the sub-region under study, called the inferior frontal gyrus, or IFG, is active when volunteers take memory tests while confronting interference. But was the IFG essential to controlling interference, or was it just contributing more brain horsepower to complex memory tasks" To answer that question, the researchers temporarily disrupted the IFG using TMS, a noninvasive technique that shows potential for treating depression and other disorders.

"TMS is a technique that allows the induction of a current in the brain using a magnetic field that passes through the scalp and the skull safely and painlessly," says Tononi, a pioneer in refining the technique for brain research. "TMS can be used to briefly 'scramble' neural activity in the underlying brain area for a short time, typically a second or so. This scrambling is fully reversible, and after the pulsing, the targeted brain area becomes fully functional again."

Neuroscientists have traditionally identified the roles of particular parts of the brain by studying people with brain injury. TMS allows them to do a similar study on healthy volunteers, Tononi says.

"The great advantage for researchers," he says, "is that one can test whether a given brain area is causally involved in producing a given behavior, but as soon as the current is turned off, the brain returns to normal."

In the current study, volunteers read a group of letters ("F, B, P, X"), and were asked a few seconds later whether a particular letter had appeared in the most recent group ("Did you just see a 'Z'""). In this type of test, having seen a "Z" in the string-before-last causes interference that makes the task more difficult. The subjects take longer to respond, and are more likely to incorrectly say "yes."

The research set-up was designed to be a simplified version of many everyday memory challenges, says Postle. Without a good sorting mechanism, our brains would be utterly confused by the vast amount of observations, ideas and memories that we have stored away. We might, for example, dial the phone number of the friend we just called rather than the one we intended to call.

In previous studies of interference, the IFG consistently lit up in brain scans, showing that it does something when the memory tries to deal with interference. But the IFG could simply be contributing some type of generic processing power to the task, says Postle.

However, the new study proved that the IFG is essential to blocking interference, he says, because accuracy plummeted when the IFG got a brief jolt of magnetic stimulation at the exact moment when the subject was confronting confusion.

Eventually, Postle hopes that locating the site of specific memory operations in the brain may help the millions of people with declining memories. "Understanding how the brain controls interference may be a first step to helping people with memory problems," he says.

The precise system used to target the magnetic pulse has many other applications in neuroscience research and treatment, Tononi adds. "TMS can be used not only to disrupt brain activity, but also to change it. If applied repeatedly, TMS can strengthen certain circuits that have become pathologically weak," he says.

TMS is already being tested to treat severe depression, one of the most serious psychiatric illnesses. In studying this treatment, he adds, "It is important to be able to target TMS exactly to the right area for each individual brain, just as we did in this study."



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Head-butt by horse restores man's sight

Scotsman
21/12/2006

A SECOND World War veteran who was blinded in his right eye when he was hit by shrapnel can see again after being head-butted by a pedigree racehorse.

Doctors tried in vain for 64 years to restore Don Karkos's sight, until My Buddy Chimo stepped in.

Hours after the horse smacked the 82-year-old paddock security guard in exactly the same spot as the shrapnel gashed his forehead in combat in 1942, he realised his vision was returning.

"I was putting a collar around his chest, and he whacked me real hard with his head," Mr Karkos told the New York Daily News.
"Being kicked is part of the job, but I've never been hit that hard.

"I was pretty shaken up, kind of dazed. Then, later that night, I started to get the vision back in my right eye.

"It was unbelievable. I've been seeing doctors all my life, and they've always told me there is nothing can be done."

Although his vision is still not perfect, Mr Karkos has been able to see about 15ft with his damaged eye since the incident at the Monticello Raceway racecourse in New York state two months ago.

"What happened is still a mystery to me," he said.

"But I do know I had got used to not seeing things and bumping into walls, and I don't do that anymore."

Dr Douglas Lozzaro, the head of ophthalmology at Long Island College Hospital, said the blow could have knocked a dislocated lens into place.

Mr Karkos said he was eager to show his gratitude to My Buddy Chimo.

"I'm on very good terms with that horse now, and he gets special care from me," he said.



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