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"You get America out of Iraq and
Israel out of Palestine and you'll stop the terrorism."
- Cindy Sheehan |
P I C T U R E
O F T H E D A Y |
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© BBC News
60 years ago, Nazi Scientists received a warm welcome from Uncle Sam
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By Bill Gertz,
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
21 Nov 2005
The United States is highly vulnerable to attack from electronic pulses caused by a nuclear blast in space, according to a new book on threats to U.S. security.
A single nuclear weapon carried by a ballistic missile and detonated a few hundred miles over the United States would cause "catastrophe for the nation" by damaging electricity-based networks and infrastructure, including computers and telecommunications, according to "War Footing: 10 Steps America Must Take to Prevail in the War for the Free World."
"This is the single most serious national-security challenge and certainly the least known," said Frank J. Gaffney Jr. of the Center for Security Policy, a former Pentagon official and lead author of the book, which includes contributions by 34 security and intelligence specialists.
An electromagnetic-pulse (EMP) attack uses X-rays and gamma rays produced in a nuclear blast in three separate waves of pulses, each with more damaging effects, and would take months or years to repair, the book states. The damage to unshielded electronics would be irreversible.
The EMP danger was highlighted recently by a special congressional commission that has received little public attention and is considered a unique way for rogue states such as North Korea and Iran, or other enemies such as al Qaeda, to use nuclear weapons in the future.
Al Qaeda is known to be seeking nuclear weapons, according to documents uncovered at the terrorist group's facilities in Afghanistan.
The group could use a freighter equipped with a short-range ballistic missile to fire a nuclear missile over the United States, the book said, noting that North Korea sells its own version of the Scud for around $100,000.
North Korea, in recent nuclear talks in Beijing, threatened to export its nuclear weapons, and Iran already has tested a Scud-missile launch from a ship.
An EMP attack would damage the national power grid, unprotected computers and all devices containing microchips, from medical instruments to military communications, and knock out electronic systems in cars, airplanes and those used in banking and finance and emergency services.
"An EMP attack potentially represents a high-tech means for terrorists to kill millions of Americans the old-fashioned way, through starvation and disease," the book said.
"Although the direct physical effects of EMP are harmless to people, a well-designed and well-executed EMP attack could kill indirectly far more Americans than a nuclear weapon detonated in our most populous city."
North Korea has been learning about EMP weapons from Russia, which is believed to have worked on EMPs for decades. China is also working on EMP arms, according to a recent Pentagon report.
The book calls for taking 10 actions to protect the free world from an array of 21st-century threats, including hardening U.S. infrastructures against an EMP attack and countering Islamist fascism through ideological counterproposals.
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Ynetnews
22/11/2005
Residents report hearing loud blasts in different parts of country, claim their homes shook as result; IDF says in response no unusual military activity that may have caused blasts detected, Seismology Institute says no earthquakes recorded; Rita from Herzliya: I don’t buy it. They should just tell us what is causing these shockwaves and blasts
Raanan Ben-Zur
Just three weeks after dozens of readers from across Israel told Ynet about unusually loud “booms” and tremors throughout the night, residents again reported hearing loud boom-like sounds in different parts of the country Tuesday, mainly in coastal regions, claiming their homes shook as a result.
Police officials confirmed people reported they heard “explosions,” but added that the source remains unknown. The IDF said in response that no unusual military activity that may have caused the “explosions” was detected, and the Seismology Institute said no earthquakes were recorded
Rita, a resident of Herzliya in central Israel, said, “Suddenly the entire house began to shake; even our cat felt it and began to act in a peculiar manner. It lasted for a few seconds. It was as if someone was forcefully rattling the home’s windows and doors.”
'I don't buy it'
However, she said she did not hear any explosions.
“The rumbling was similar to last month’s incident, but then it took place at nighttime and we were able to hear the blasts, which were strong,” she said
“Last time they said it was ultra-sonic booms from planes that flew over the Gaza Strip. I don’t buy it. They should just tell us what is causing these shockwaves and blasts. It is getting a bit scary because we do not know what the source is.”
Most of those who reported of the blasts reside in the Sharon region, in central Israel; they said the shockwaves came from the direction of the sea.
Last month Ynet readers offered several explanations for the mysterious blasts - from an alien invasion to underground nuclear tests.
The IDF said at the time the blasts may have resulted from a rare combination of IAF activity over Gaza and a unique weather conditions.
An Israel Air Force officer said at the time, “this is an unusual phenomenon in which cold and warm layers are alternately formed in the air, and the sound waves move like a ping pong ball between the ground and layers. |
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11/1/05
10NBC
It sounded and felt like an earthquake, but what exactly caused houses in Ontario, Wayne County to shake Monday night. People in several neighborhoods say they felt the ground moving and think an earthquake hit their town. New York State does have fault lines but there are none in Wayne County. Around 7:00 p.m. Monday, some people in Wayne County say they thought they were in the twilight zone. “I think I walked down the hallway over here and I heard bah-boom and the house shook. The house actually shook in the front,” Joan Sharpstene of Ontario said. She was handing out candy to trick-or-treaters when this phenomenon happened. “It felt like a tremor like the whole house actually shook in the front,” Sharpstene said.
Bill Maier also lives in Ontario. He says it reminded him of a gas explosion in Ontario back in 1992. That explosion killed two people. People felt its effects for several miles. Wayne County Sheriff’s Deputies and firefighters investigated the situation Monday night but have found the cause. NEWS 10NBC asked geologist and RIT Professor Joshua Goldowitz to help us figure it out. “The loud boom and then shaking sounds like an earthquake,” Goldowitz said. He also went on to US Geological Survey website. It records any seismic activity in the US. Goldowitz found nothing recorded for Wayne County.
“For someone to feel an earthquake it has to be a magnitude over about two and the U.S. Geologist Survey site doesn’t even show anything magnitude one,” Goldowitz said. He also said “It could be a sonic boom from a really fast aircraft going over, which can cause shaking and the sound. Not totally natural but we do have mines where explosives are used to blast bedrock.” |
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Express News Service
September 2
Jamnagar: EVEN as mysterious blasts and tremors continue to rock villages in Lalpur and Jamnagar talukas, the IMD team camping in the region has not been able to draw any conclusion. Declaring that the blasts are not related to seismic activity, the IMD team said that from now on geologists should observe the disturbances. Senior IMD team member K C Kondal said, ‘‘Our observation suggests that the blast and jerks experienced in the region are not related to any earthquake.’’ Elaborating further, Kondal said, "An earthquake produces waves from which its epicentre and intensity can be measured. But here, the phenomenon is localised and superficial. Jerks observed here are limited to small areas and often not recorded."
Most of these shocks are in the range of 1 to 1.5 intensity on the Richter scale. Though they have subsided in some villages, they continue in Jamnagar taluka, said the official. |
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Tue Nov 22, 2005
By Deborah Charles
ALEXANDRIA, Virginia (Reuters) - A federal jury on Tuesday found a U.S. man guilty of conspiring with al Qaeda and plotting to assassinate President George W. Bush, rejecting his claims of torture by Saudi police.
The 12-member jury found Ahmed Abu Ali, 24, guilty of all charges in a nine-count indictment. He had been charged with conspiracy to assassinate Bush, conspiring to support and supporting al Qaeda, and conspiracy to hijack aircraft. U.S. District Judge Gerald Bruce Lee set a February 17, 2006, date to sentence Abu Ali, who faces life in prison.
U.S. Attorney Paul McNulty, whose office prosecuted the case, said the ruling firmly established Abu Ali as a terrorist who posed a grave threat to U.S. national security.
The conviction "serves as a clear warning to all that terrorists can and will be brought to the bar of justice," McNulty said in a statement.
Abu Ali, who lived in Falls Church, Virginia, close to Washington, was arrested in June 2003 while studying at a Saudi university and was held in Saudi custody for 20 months before returning to the United States after being indicted.
In Saudi Arabia, he signed confessions and made statements admitting to the plot against Bush and to having ties to an al Qaeda cell.
Abu Ali pleaded not guilty to the charges, saying he made up the confessions after being tortured by Saudi police. His lawyers had urged the jury to acquit him because all the evidence against him was obtained through coercion.
But after nearly three full days of deliberation, the jury found Abu Ali guilty.
Dressed in a gray suit, the bearded Abu Ali stared straight ahead at the judge as a court clerk read out the nine counts and the jury's verdict of guilty in each.
Abu Ali's family, which had often said prayers in court and offered words of encouragement during the trial, showed little emotion as the verdict was read.
APPEAL EXPECTED
Khurrum Wahid, Abu Ali's lead attorney, said his client would appeal.
"He is disappointed that the jury didn't see the truth," Wahid told reporters outside the courthouse. "He wants us to continue to fight."
In his statements to Saudi officials, Abu Ali said he and senior members of an al Qaeda cell in Medina, Saudi Arabia, discussed how he could kill Bush. He said they also talked about other types of attacks, including September 11-like hijackings that could be carried out in the United States.
Prosecutors never said when Abu Ali was planning to kill Bush. They said he had discussed various tactics for conducting the assassination, including an operation with multiple snipers and a suicide bombing operation.
Assistant U.S. Attorney David Laufman said Abu Ali had said he was interested in "killing the leader of the infidels -- Bush."
Prosecutors said Abu Ali also wanted to become a planner of terrorist operations like Mohamed Atta -- believed to be the ringleader of the September 11, 2001, hijackers.
Abu Ali said he made the confessions after members of the Saudi domestic security police chained his hands to the ground and repeatedly whipped him on the back.
Saudi officials deny the accusations of mistreatment. U.S. prosecutors, who based most of their case against Abu Ali on statements made in Saudi Arabia, said there was no evidence to prove Abu Ali had been tortured.
"I hope this verdict does not give the government the green light to send citizens to other countries that practice torture to circumvent the constitution," said Wahid. |
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Wednesday, November 23, 2005
Left I On The News
The headline in today's papers are variations on a theme: "Justice Department charges 'dirty bomb' suspect," with leads like this: "After holding accused 'dirty bomber' Jose Padilla without charges for 3 1/2 years, the Justice Department Tuesday gave the one-time Chicago gang member a day in court by charging him with conspiracy to commit terrorist acts overseas." Although it is true that John Ashcroft did make that accusation, he backed it up with not the slightest evidence, and in fact, that accusation was retracted long ago in favor of another entirely unsubstantiated charge that Padilla was planning to blow up apartment buildings with natural gas.
But now, as you probably know by now, Padilla has finally been charged (basically to avoid a potentially unfavorable Supreme Court ruling) with something entirely different (and quite ethereal, as far as one can tell from what has been revealed). From Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez may have come the quote of the day: "[Padilla's indictment] demonstrates that we will use every tool at our disposal in fighting the war on terrorism." Let's see, there's lying, torturing, violating national and international law... Oh yeah, they'll use "every tool" all right.
What did Padilla actually do, if anything? I have no idea, but this may be a clue: "Much of the alleged conspiracy involves money transfers among Muslim charities." Translation: he gave money to some charities he may not have even known were allegedly linked to terrorist groups. Which makes him a terrorist in the eyes of the U.S. government. But in the eyes of the U.S. press, he's still an "accused dirty bomber."
I wonder when we'll see the press referring to George Bush et al. as "accused war criminals"? There's a lot more evidence to support that accusation. |
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Kurt Nimmo
22/11/05
According to retired U.S. Army Col. Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s chief of staff, the “philosophical guidance” of Dick Cheney is behind Bush’s rape and torture gulag. “There’s no question in my mind where the philosophical guidance and the flexibility in order to do so originated—in the vice president of the United States’ office. His implementer in this case was Donald Rumsfeld and the defense department,” Wilkerson told the Times of India. Porter Goss, current Reichmarshall of the CIA ( an appropriate designation for Goss, since the CIA was created by sadistic war criminals such as Klaus Barbie and Reinhard Gehlen), said Bush’s medieval interrogators used “unique” methods to obtain “vital” information from abductees (one such “unique” method, passed down to Iraq’s puppet police by British intelligence, consists of torturing civilians to death with electric drills, according to the Independent on Sunday).
In 1983, the CIA spelled out “unique” methods of torture in its Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual, a how-to guide passed on to security goons in Latin America, who previously used beatings, false imprisonment, executions under Project X, a program run by Army Foreign Intelligence unit in the 1960s (see Improper Material in Spanish-Language Intelligence Manuals, declassified in March, 1992). “This ‘report of investigation’ was sent to then Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney in March 1992, nine months after the Defense Department began an internal investigation into how seven counterintelligence and interrogation manuals used for years by the Southern Command throughout Latin America had come to contain ‘objectionable’ and prohibited material,” notes the National Security Archive (see previous link). Apparently, Cheney disagreed with the report’s conclusions since torture has taken on new and startling dimensions in the second Bush administration. Tomgram writes in an introduction to Alfred McCoy’s The Hidden History of CIA Torture: America’s Road to Abu Ghraib:
In 2001, these CIA torture techniques were let loose again by a Bush administration intent on creating an offshore mini-gulag of “information extraction” in its zeal to pursue its “war on terror.” Overlapping CIA and Pentagon detention systems were set up worldwide where, beyond the oversight of anyone, the “arts of interrogation” could be practiced (and in which they could spread like some malign virus). Unfortunately, what we now call “Abu Ghraib” is but the tip of the iceberg and has largely proved a tale of Bush administration damage control. There have been or are now underway eight investigations of Abu Ghraib (and sometimes of detention practices in Afghanistan as well). All are Pentagon appointed and almost all are military staffed.
It should be noted that in 1983 the CIA realized that pain “inflicted upon the subject from outside himself may actually intensify his will to resist” (see Excerpts from the CIA Torture Manual, reprinted in Harper’s Magazine, April 1997). Instead of “hand-son” torture (for instance with drills), the CIA devised “no touch” torture methods. “Although seemingly less brutal, ‘no touch’ torture leaves deep psychological scars on both victims and interrogators,” writes Alfred W. McCoy, professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The victims often need long treatment to recover from trauma far more crippling than physical pain. The perpetrators can suffer a dangerous expansion of ego, leading to escalating cruelty and lasting emotional problems.” As Abu Ghraib vividly demonstrates, the “no touch” methods were abandoned, ostensibly at Cheney’s behest, for the “escalating cruelty” of rape and the Black and Decker technique.
Finally, it is obvious Cheney’s rape, torture, and murder minions are not interested in “information extraction” through torture (admitted by the CIA not to work). Indeed, their real motivation appears more sinister and perverse—they obviously relish the act of torturing Arabs, especially those innocent of any crime or direct collaboration with the resistance (it can be assumed the vast majority of Iraqis passively support the resistance at minimum). As the Red Cross reported in early 2004, a full 70 to 90 percent of “detainees” in Iraq are innocent of any crime and were “arrested by mistake.” In fact, they were not “arrested by mistake” but deliberately under Cheney’s “philosophical guidance” and tortured because the Bush neocons hate and fear Arabs and Muslims, primarily because Cheney’s perverse minions in the Pentagon are either Zionist neocons or are influenced by the neocon philosophy, and as we know the foundation of Zionism, including the Straussian flavor of neoconism, is a visceral hatred and fear of Arabs and Islam. If we need a further example of what the neocons plan to do to the Iraqis (and Syrians and Iranians when they get the chance), we need look no further than occupied Palestine and the brutality and violent perversity of the IDF. |
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Last Updated: Monday, 21 November 2005, 11:13 GMT
By Andrew Walker
BBC News
Sixty years ago the US hired Nazi scientists to lead pioneering projects, such as the race to conquer space. These men provided the US with cutting-edge technology which still leads the way today, but at a cost. The end of World War II saw an intense scramble for Nazi Germany's many technological secrets. The Allies vied to plunder as much equipment and expertise as possible from the rubble of the Thousand Year Reich for themselves, while preventing others from doing the same.
The range of Germany's technical achievement astounded Allied scientific intelligence experts accompanying the invading forces in 1945.
Supersonic rockets, nerve gas, jet aircraft, guided missiles, stealth technology and hardened armour were just some of the groundbreaking technologies developed in Nazi laboratories, workshops and factories, even as Germany was losing the war.
And it was the US and the Soviet Union which, in the first days of the Cold War, found themselves in a race against time to uncover Hitler's scientific secrets.
In May 1945, Stalin's legions secured the atomic research labs at the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in the suburbs of Berlin, giving their master the kernel of what would become the vast Soviet nuclear arsenal.
US forces removed V-2 missiles from the vast Nordhausen complex, built under the Harz Mountains in central Germany, just before the Soviets took over the factory, in what would become their area of occupation. And the team which had built the V-2, led by Wernher von Braun, also fell into American hands.
Crimes
Shortly afterwards Major-General Hugh Knerr, deputy commander of the US Air Force in Europe, wrote: "Occupation of German scientific and industrial establishments has revealed the fact that we have been alarmingly backward in many fields of research.
"If we do not take the opportunity to seize the apparatus and the brains that developed it and put the combination back to work promptly, we will remain several years behind while we attempt to cover a field already exploited."
Thus began Project Paperclip, the US operation which saw von Braun and more than 700 others spirited out of Germany from under the noses of the US's allies. Its aim was simple: "To exploit German scientists for American research and to deny these intellectual resources to the Soviet Union."
Events moved rapidly. President Truman authorised Paperclip in August 1945 and, on 18 November, the first Germans reached America.
There was, though, one major problem. Truman had expressly ordered that anyone found "to have been a member of the Nazi party and more than a nominal participant in its activities, or an active supporter of Nazism militarism" would be excluded.
Under this criterion even von Braun himself, the man who masterminded the Moon shots, would have been ineligible to serve the US. A member of numerous Nazi organisations, he also held rank in the SS. His initial intelligence file described him as "a security risk".
And von Braun's associates included:
* Arthur Rudolph, chief operations director at Nordhausen, where 20,000 slave labourers died producing V-2 missiles. Led the team which built the Saturn V rocket. Described as "100 per cent Nazi, dangerous type".
* Kurt Debus, rocket launch specialist, another SS officer. His report stated: "He should be interned as a menace to the security of the Allied Forces."
* Hubertus Strughold, later called "the father of space medicine", designed Nasa's on-board life-support systems. Some of his subordinates conducted human "experiments" at Dachau and Auschwitz, where inmates were frozen and put into low-pressure chambers, often dying in the process.
All of these men were cleared to work for the US, their alleged crimes covered up and their backgrounds bleached by a military which saw winning the Cold War, and not upholding justice, as its first priority.
And the paperclip which secured their new details in their personnel files gave the whole operation its name. Sixty years on, the legacy of Paperclip remains as vital as ever.
With its radar-absorbing carbon impregnated plywood skin and swept-back single wing, the 1944 Horten Ho 229 was arguably the first stealth aircraft.
The US military made one available to Northrop Aviation, the company which would produce the $2bn B-2 Stealth bomber - to all intents and purposes a modern clone of the Horten - a generation later.
Cruise missiles are still based on the design of the V-1 missile and the scramjets powering Nasa's state-of-the-art X-43 hypersonic aircraft owe much to German jet pioneers.
Added to this, the large number of still-secret Paperclip documents has led many people, including Nick Cook, Aerospace Consultant at Jane's Defence Weekly, to speculate that the US may have developed even more advanced Nazi technology, including anti-gravity devices, a potential source of vast amounts of free energy.
Cook says that such technology "could be so destructive that it would endanger world peace and the US decided to keep it secret for a long time".
But, while celebrating the undoubted success of Project Paperclip, many will prefer to remember the thousands who died to send mankind into space. |
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Wednesday 23 November 2005, 12:01 Makka Time, 9:01 GMT
Al Jazeera
Britain's Daily Mirror newspaper has been ordered to cease publishing further details from an allegedly top secret memo revealing that US President George Bush wanted to bomb Aljazeera. The gag order from Attorney-General Lord Goldsmith came nearly 24 hours after the paper published details of what it said was a transcript of talks between Bush and the British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
In those talks, which took place during the prime minister's April 2004 visit to Washington, Blair is said to have talked Bush out of launching "military action" on the television channel's headquarters in Doha, Qatar.
"No 10 did nothing to stop us publishing our front page exclusive yesterday (Tuesday)," the Daily Mirror said on Wednesday, referring to the British prime minister's office.
But the attorney-general warned that publication of any further details from the document would be a breach of the Official Secrets Act.
He threatened an immediate High Court injunction unless the newspaper confirmed it would not publish further details.
"We have essentially agreed to comply," the paper reported.
"We made No 10 fully aware of the intention to publish and were given 'no comment' officially or unofficially, Daily Mirror Editor Richard Wallace was quoted as saying.
"Suddenly 24 hours later we are threatened under Section 5 [of the Official Secrets Act]."
According to Britain's Guardian newspaper, it is the first time that the Blair government has threatened to prosecute a newspaper for publishing the contents of leaked government documents.
'Inconceivable'
The White House has dismissed the Daily Mirror report, calling it "outlandish".
"We are not going to dignify something so outlandish and inconceivable with a response," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said on Tuesday.
Aljazeera itself, whose coverage of the war in Iraq has been criticised by the US, says it is also investigating the report.
"If the report is correct then this would be both shocking and worrisome not only to Aljazeera but to media organisations across the world," the station said in a statement.
Following the Mirror's report there have been calls to release the transcript.
"If true, then this underlines the desperation of the Bush administration," said Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Sir Menzies Campbell.
"On this occasion, the prime minister may have been successful in averting political disaster, but it shows how dangerous his relationship with President Bush has been."
The Mirror on Tuesday quoted a source as saying: "The memo is explosive and hugely damaging to Bush.
"He made clear he wanted to bomb Aljazeera in Qatar and elsewhere. Blair replied that would cause a big problem.
"There's no doubt what Bush wanted to do - and no doubt Blair didn't want him to do it."
Previous attacks
The threat by Bush also "casts fresh doubt on claims that other attacks on Aljazeera were accidents", the Mirror said in its report on Tuesday.
It cited the 2001 direct hit on the channel's Kabul office in Afghanistan.
In November 2001, Aljazeera's office in Kabul was destroyed by a US missile. None of the crew was at the office at the time.
US officials said they believed the target was a "terrorist" site and did not know it was Aljazeera's office.
In April 2003, an Aljazeera journalist, Tariq Ayub, died when its Baghdad office was struck during a US bombing campaign.
In its statement on Tuesday, Aljazeera said that if the Mirror's report was true, it would "cast serious doubts in regard to the US administration's version of previous incidents involving Aljazeera's journalists and offices."
Charges
A British civil servant has been charged under the Official Secrets Act for allegedly leaking the government memo.
The Daily Mirror said the memo, stamped "Top Secret", turned up last year at the Northampton office of then Labour MP Tony Clarke.
Civil servant David Keogh, 49, is now accused of passing the memo to Leo O'Connor, who once worked for Clarke.
Both Keogh and O'Connor are due to appear in court next week on charges under the Act.
Clarke, who opposed the invasion of Iraq and who lost his seat at the last election, returned the memo to Downing Street. |
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By Murray Waas, special to National Journal
National Journal Group Inc.
Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2005
Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.
The information was provided to Bush on September 21, 2001 during the "President's Daily Brief," a 30- to 45-minute early-morning national security briefing. Information for PDBs has routinely been derived from electronic intercepts, human agents, and reports from foreign intelligence services, as well as more mundane sources such as news reports and public statements by foreign leaders.
One of the more intriguing things that Bush was told during the briefing was that the few credible reports of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda involved attempts by Saddam Hussein to monitor the terrorist group. Saddam viewed Al Qaeda as well as other theocratic radical Islamist organizations as a potential threat to his secular regime. At one point, analysts believed, Saddam considered infiltrating the ranks of Al Qaeda with Iraqi nationals or even Iraqi intelligence operatives to learn more about its inner workings, according to records and sources.
The September 21, 2001, briefing was prepared at the request of the president, who was eager in the days following the terrorist attacks to learn all that he could about any possible connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
Much of the contents of the September 21 PDB were later incorporated, albeit in a slightly different form, into a lengthier CIA analysis examining not only Al Qaeda's contacts with Iraq, but also Iraq's support for international terrorism. Although the CIA found scant evidence of collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda, the agency reported that it had long since established that Iraq had previously supported the notorious Abu Nidal terrorist organization, and had provided tens of millions of dollars and logistical support to Palestinian groups, including payments to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.
The highly classified CIA assessment was distributed to President Bush, Vice President Cheney, the president's national security adviser and deputy national security adviser, the secretaries and undersecretaries of State and Defense, and various other senior Bush administration policy makers, according to government records. [...] |
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By Francis Elliott, Raymond Whitaker and Kim Sengupta
UK Independent
19 Nov 2005
British-trained police operating in Basra have tortured at least two civilians to death with electric drills, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.
John Reid, the Secretary of State for Defence, admits that he knows of "alleged deaths in custody" and other "serious prisoner abuse" at al-Jamiyat police station, which was reopened by Britain after the war.
Militia-dominated police, who were recruited by Britain, are believed to have tortured at least two men to death in the station. Their bodies were later found with drill holes to their arms, legs and skulls.The victims were suspected of collaborating with coalition forces, according to intelligence reports. Despite being pressed "very hard" by Britain, however, the Iraqi authorities in Basra are failing to even investigate incidents of torture and murder by police, ministers admit.
The disclosure drags Britain firmly into the growing scandal of officially condoned killings, torture and disappearances in Iraq. More than 170 starving and tortured prisoners were discovered last week in an Interior Ministry bunker in Baghdad.
American troops who uncovered the secret torture chamber are also said to have discovered mutilated corpses, several bearing drill marks.
Adam Price, the Plaid Cymru MP for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr, who uncovered the death at al-Jamiyat police station, called for an immediate UN investigation into police torture. "The Government keeps on saying that respect for human rights is a pre-condition of withdrawal. Well, it should be a pre-condition for UK soldiers to continue risking their lives in Iraq," he said.
Mr Reid said: "I am aware of serious allegations of prisoner abuse at the Jamiyat, including two deaths in custody. We take this very seriously. We have been pressing the Iraqi authorities very hard to investigate these allegations thoroughly and then to take the appropriate action."
Ministry of Defence sources privately confirm that the two SAS soldiers seized and held in Jamiyat in September were investigating allegations of police torture prompted by the discovery of the bodies.
British forces in armoured vehicles smashed their way into the station to rescue them, but officers have admitted they are powerless to protect civilians in southern Iraq from militias, and military patrols have been withdrawn from central Basra in the wake of the September clashes.
In the US-controlled districts of Iraq, some senior military and intelligence officials have been accused of giving tacit approval to the extra-judicial actions of counter-insurgency forces.
Critics claim the situation echoes American collaboration with military regimes in Latin America and south-east Asia during the Cold War, particularly in Vietnam, where US-trained paramilitaries were used to kill opponents of the South Vietnamese government. |
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www.chinaview.cn
2005-11-24 02:39:24
PARIS, Nov. 23 (Xinhuanet) -- The director of French domestic intelligence agency (DST) warned Wednesday that some terrorist networks are preparing hostile projects against France. The terrorism threat in France is "unfortunately a real concern," Pierre de Bousquet de Florian told RTL radio.
According to him, part of the current threat could be traced to Iraq.
"For the past two years, at a fairly regular pace, we have seen young French nationals and French residents leaving for Iraq," he said.
"When they return, if they return, they are experienced and determined enough to represent a threat on our territory. We do not want France to become a land of jihad," he said.
He said the French intelligence services were aware of, and were monitoring some of the channels used to recruit young Islamic warriors in France and tried to prevent youths from leaving for Iraq whenever possible.
The intelligence leader ruled out any involvement by Islamic extremists in the recent wave of rioting in high-immigration French suburbs, saying that although some extremists were thought to have supported the rioters, "it is not their fight".
France's parliament on Wednesday started debating a new anti-terrorism law bill sponsored by Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy.
The new legislation, drawn up in the wake of London bombings inJuly and approved by the French cabinet last month, aims to give the authorities greater access to modern technological tools in investigating terrorism cases. |
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Tue Nov 22, 2005
Reuters
LONDON - Big oil firms may rob Iraq of billions and grab control of its oilfields unless ordinary Iraqis can have a greater say in how their country's riches are tapped, U.S. and British campaigners said on Tuesday.
Big oil is being lured by the Production Sharing Agreement (PSA), promoted by Washington and London, which gives them huge returns on investment, but deprives Iraq of up to $194 billion (113 billion pounds), according to "Crude Designs: The rip-off of Iraq's oil wealth".
"Under the influence of the U.S. and UK, powerful politicians and technocrats in the Iraqi oil ministry are pushing to hand all Iraq's undeveloped fields to multinational oil companies, to be developed under production sharing agreements," said Greg Muttitt, the report's author. Muttitt is an analyst with PLATFORM, a London-based charity focused on the social and environmental impact of oil.
A push for "energy security" by the United States and Britain is a driver behind this commercial approach, said the report, backed by charities and thinktanks including War on Want, Global Policy Forum and Institute for Policy Studies.
But many argue PSAs, the most sought-after contract in the oil industry, will ensure swift development of Iraq's reserves, the world's third biggest after Saudi Arabia and Iran, speed up reconstruction and hasten the return of cash to the country.
They say contracts of this nature are the only way to attract foreign expertise in view of the country's instability.
"In order to make major quantum increases in oil, we need to have production-sharing agreements, but that has to wait until after the formation of parliament," Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi said recently.
A new parliament is due to be voted on in December.
Iraq's most valued oilfields will require some $20 billion to expand their capacity towards a six million barrels per day (bpd) target.
But repeated sabotage has prevented Iraq meeting its immediate aim of three million bpd, last seen in 1990. Output has been stuck near two million bpd.
For international oilmen, deprived access to vast Iraqi reserves for decades, long-term PSAs offer the ability to book reserves, protection from future adverse legislation and healthy profits during low oil prices.
If only the contracts were as lucrative for average Iraqis, still suspicious that the oil was the motive behind the U.S.-led war in 2003, said the report.
The massive loss from PSAs would amount to $2,800 to $7,400 per Iraqi adult over the 30-year lifespan of a typical deal, it said. By comparison, Iraqi GDP is now only $2,100 per person
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Amal Kashf Al Ghitta
Daily Times
November 23, 2005
Dr. Amal Kashif al-Ghita, a parliamentarian from Iraq, argues that the big problem facing the country is not sectarian splits but the growing divide between the wealthy and the poor. The government must spare no effort in convincing poor Iraqis of the value of democracy and freedom. This will not be easy to achieve in a country where many people consider breaking the law an act of heroism. But we Iraqis have also learnt that power should not be concentrated in a few hands
Everyone who looks at Iraq sees a nation divided between Shia, Sunni, and Kurd communities. But an equally fundamental division — one that has contributed as much to the ongoing insurrection as sectarian strife and opposition to the American-led military occupation — is the widening gap between Iraq’s rich and poor.
When Iraq was liberated, most people, especially the poor, began to hope for a charismatic leader who would save them from the bitter reality of daily life. Raised in fear, they had no idea how democracy could apply to their society, or how human rights groups and other civic organisations could help shape the future.
Soon enough, Iraq was faced with a new social divide. On one side stood people who understood how to operate in a democracy, attain power, and realise their ambitions. They learnt to speak the language of democracy, gaining money and influence in the process and enlisting independent organisations to defend their rights and privileges.
On the other side, however, remains the vast population of powerless Iraqis, including widows and divorced or abandoned women with no one to provide for them and their children. For these people, democracy and human rights mean nothing. They are ignorant, poor, and sick. Victimised by an educational system that collapsed over a decade ago, they have few skills that can help them find employment in Iraq’s blighted economy.
During Saddam’s reign, no effort was made to raise living standards for the poor. I have visited the huge slums of Iraq and found families living in homes with barely a roof to cover them, with insect infestations everywhere, and with raw sewage seeping under their doors. Day or night, they live in darkness. Needing nothing more than food, decent housing, and the possibility of a job, these families wait for death, dreading the cries of their starving children.
When I met the women who live in those houses, they showered me with questions: will democracy give us food and houses? Will democracy stop men from beating their wives? Will it give citizenship to our children? Will it give us the right to divorce the husbands who abandon us?
My answer to all of these questions was “yes”. Yes, democracy will give you the right to live in a decent house, the right to learn and work, and it will give citizenship to your children and make you equal with your men. But you have to work hard and make every possible effort in demanding your rights. They replied: “Saddam taught us for 35 years how to be jobless, silent, and fearful. What can we do now?”
In these destitute areas, where most Iraqis live, people are prey to bitter temptations. Many are beyond the reach of political or government leaders. They fall easily into violence, theft, and sabotage. Poverty drives some to take money in exchange for acts of violence, abetted by the lure of a false heroism that they were not able to act upon during Saddam’s long reign. Poverty has exacerbated the trauma of Iraq’s violent history of wars and atrocities, which has desensitised people to killing.
Though conditions in Iraq today are drawing many young men towards violence, I am convinced that we need only to provide decent jobs and housing to save them. Jobs, in particular, will help young people to create new lives through serious work. We must not use no-work jobs to disguise an army of the unemployed. We must give people jobs that allow them to make a contribution to rebuilding the country.
By nature, every individual seeks to prove himself as a useful person in his or her society. But the culture that Saddam created convinced Iraqis that political connections are the only way to gain authority, money, and knowledge. Overcoming such sentiments will take time and a vibrant economy, which means that a new Iraqi government must have limited power, allowing the private sector to grow while encouraging widespread understanding of democracy and human rights.
Religious groups are ready to contribute to this process. We can also rehabilitate the technocrats who served under Saddam, so that they, too, have a chance to serve their country. Last but not least, we must provide loans to poor families to help them build a respectable life.
Above all, the government must spare no effort in convincing poor Iraqis of the value of democracy and freedom, and how important the constitution is in realising their aspirations for a better life. This will not be easy to achieve in a country where many people consider breaking the law an act of heroism.
But we Iraqis have also learnt that power should not be concentrated in a few hands, and that establishing justice requires fighting all forms of corruption. If the constitution is to operate as the guarantee of democracy, freedom, and security, poor Iraqis must learn to make that fight their own. |
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Published on Tuesday, November 8, 2005 by the Philadelphia Inquirer
by Gwynne Dyer
'Scum," French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy called the rioters who have seized control of many working-class "suburbs" around Paris every night since Oct. 27, when two teenagers died in an accident that many blame on the police. Sarkozy plans to run for the presidency next year, and he wants to seem even tougher on crime and on immigrants (two separate issues that he regularly conflates) than his main rival, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin. But his conviction that the policy of multiculturalism has failed has become the new popular wisdom in France, where right-wing commentators refer to the riots as the "Paris intifada" - as if the rioters were all Muslims.
Meanwhile, right-wing American commentators gloat that the French, who refused to follow the Bush administration on its crusade against alleged Islamic extremists in the Middle East (you know, like Saddam Hussein), now face a Muslim uprising at home. Multiculturalism, as an alternative to the U.S. "melting pot" approach in which second- or third- generation immigrants eventually lose their old identities and merge into the majority, is now under attack everywhere.
Even William Pfaff, the best informed of American commentators, no longer believes that people of profoundly different traditions can live side by side in the same country. After the July terror bombings in London, he wrote in the Observer that "a half-century of well-intentioned but catastrophically mistaken policy of multiculturalism, indifferent or even hostile to social and cultural integration, has produced in Britain and much of Europe a technologically educated but culturally and morally unassimilated immigrant demi-intelligentsia."
He was in effect arguing that the London bombs would not have happened if British immigration policy over the last 50 years had extinguished any sense of solidarity between the descendants of Muslim immigrants to Britain and Muslims elsewhere. True - but not invading Iraq would have prevented the London bombs at much less cost.
The real problem is not the failure of multiculturalism. The Paris riots are actually a splendid demonstration of the successful integration of immigrants into French culture (which has, after all, a long tradition of insurrection and revolution). The Paris riots are not a Muslim uprising. They are not even race riots. They are outbursts of resentment and frustration by the marginalized and the unemployed of every ethnic group.
The low-income housing estates that ring Paris and other big French cities are dumping grounds for everybody that hasn't made it in the cool 21st-century France of the urban centers, the old white working class as well as immigrants from France's former colonies in Arabic-speaking North Africa and sub-Saharan black Africa and from all the poorer countries of Europe. Unemployment there is often twice the national average of 10 percent. But they are not Muslim- or even nonwhite-majority communities.
Ethnic groups live jumbled together in apartment towers. The kid gangs that dominate the estates steal from strangers and residents alike and fight among themselves for control of the drug trade. But these are models of racial and cultural integration. What is happening now is neither an intifada nor a race riot - small comfort to the owners of the 28,000 vehicles burned on those estates so far this year.
This is an incoherent revolt by kids, many of them gang members, who would once have formed the next generation of the French working class. No longer needed in that role, they have no future, so they are very angry. But they are not politically organized, so after a few more nights the violence will die down again for a while.
These are neither American-style race riots nor a Muslim rebellion. About half the kids burning cars and buildings are white, working- class, post-Christian French, and they get along with the black and Muslim kids just fine. |
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Last Updated: Wednesday, 23 November 2005, 15:51 GMT
BBC
Former Chilean military ruler Gen Augusto Pinochet has been placed under house arrest and charged with tax evasion and passport fraud He is also accused of using forged government documents and misleading officials over his assets.
The charges relate to $27m (£15.6m) allegedly hidden in secret overseas bank accounts under false names.
Gen Pinochet, 89, faced charges in two human rights cases in recent years, but both collapsed due to his ill health.
He was told of the fresh charges while at his home in the Chilean capital, Santiago.
Judge Carlos Cerda ordered Gen Pinochet's detention after investigations into alleged secret funds in Riggs Bank in the US and in other accounts abroad.
Bail was set at $23,000 (£13,400).
US tip-off
The judge decided to bring charges after questioning Gen Pinochet several times earlier this month.
According to Judge Cerda's indictment, Gen Pinochet evaded $2.4m (£1.4m) in taxes between 1980 and 2004.
He is also accused of using a selection of forged passports and documents to help open more than a hundred bank accounts.
The bank accounts were first revealed by a US Senate investigation last year. More were discovered during probes by Chilean authorities.
Discovery of the cash prompted fresh investigations into whether Gen Pinochet made money out of illegal arms sales - a separate issue not included in the charges.
No immunity
Last week prosecutors declared him fit to stand trial after examinations by psychiatrists.
In October he lost his state immunity against the fraud charges.
A month earlier he was stripped of protection in relation to more alleged human rights abuses.
In Chile, immunity can be lifted only on a case-by-case basis.
Gen Pinochet, who will be 90 on Friday, may now also face prosecution by some of the families of 119 dissidents allegedly killed, or "disappeared" under his regime.
More than 3,000 people died in political violence during his 1973-1990 regime, an official inquiry has concluded.  |
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Posted on Wed, Nov. 23, 2005
Associated Press
ST. LOUIS - No major damage was reported after a minor earthquake shook the St. Louis region. The tiny quake, centered 10 miles southeast of St. Louis, struck around 11 p.m. Tuesday in East St. Louis, Ill., said Waverly Person, a geophysicist at the National Earthquake Information Center in Denver.
It had a magnitude of 2.5 and probably doesn't signify a larger quake to come, Person said.
Four people called the center and said they felt the quake, Person said. Such quakes happen about two or three times a year in the area, which sits near the New Madrid Fault. |
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Last Updated Wed, 23 Nov 2005 07:35:31 EST
CBC News
Thousands of people in Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick were without electricity Wednesday morning as winds of up to 100 km/h swept through through Atlantic Canada. Nova Scotia Power said electricity was restored to about 100,000 customers overnight, but roughly 25,000 were still without service.
As many as 11,000 P.E.I. residents also lost power, Maritime Electric reported. Another 8,500 homes and businesses were in the dark in southeastern New Brunswick, but only 650 remained without power by late Wednesday morning.
High winds and up to 70 mm of rain knocked out power across mainland Nova Scotia overnight. Winds were still gusting at 77 km/h in parts of Cape Breton Wednesday morning.
Margaret Murphy, a spokesperson for Nova Scotia Power, said the winds were especially severe in the Windsor and Bridgewater areas.
The power outages and high winds had an impact at Halifax International Airport. Several flights into and out of the province were delayed or cancelled. Travellers were being told to check with their airlines before heading to the airport.
The high wind was also keeping Marine Atlantic ferries in port. The Caribou was docked in North Sydney, with passengers on board and ready to go as soon as the winds abated.
High-sided vehicles such as trucks were still being barred from the Confederation Bridge linking New Brunswick to P.E.I. early Wednesday morning. Wind speeds at the bridge peaked overnight at 99 km/h, with gusts up to 121 km/h.
Northumberland Ferries, which transports vehicles between Nova Scotia and P.E.I., was able to resume its regular schedule Wednesday morning.
Hundreds of basements were flooded and many roads had to be closed as 70 mm of rain fell on the New Brunswick cities of Fredericton and Saint John.
Meanwhile, gusts of wind up to 150 km/h were hitting parts of southwestern Newfoundland, with power outages reported in the Corner Brook area.
A Coast Guard ship and a number of fishing boats had to stop their search for a small boat off the province's south coast due to stormy weather Wednesday.
A search and rescue plane and a helicopter are still searching for the 7.5-metre fishing boat, which did not return to Belleoram as expected Tuesday. A man in his 40s and two teenage boys are onboard. |
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David Fickling and agencies
Wednesday November 23, 2005
Panic was today spreading in Harbin, with officials preparing to cut off water supplies as heavily polluted river water flowed towards the Chinese city.
Stockpiling began afresh at midnight when the local government switched taps on again for 12 hours after having cut off supplies to almost four million people yesterday. The temporary switch-on came after revised calculations showed the pollution would not reach Harbin until early tomorrow morning.
"As the exact time of the pollutants flowing to the city's drinking water intake spot has been confirmed, we hoped that citizens could take time to hoard as much water as possible ahead of the water cut-off," an executive from the Harbin water company said.
Article continues
Residents were storing water supplies in bathtubs and buckets ahead of the expected three-day drought. Supermarkets reported panic buying of water, milk and soft drinks, while Harbin's airport and railway station were jammed with people fleeing the area.
The provincial government was also trucking in water from neighbouring areas, testing little-used local wells and demanding 1,400 tonnes of activated charcoal to purify the water intake after the pollution had passed through the city.
Harbin's authorities warned residents not to even approach the Songhua river because of the risk of pollutants escaping into the atmosphere when the polluted water hits the city around 5am tomorrow. The 50 mile-long stretch of pollution is not expected to flow out of the city until Saturday.
Rumours of terrorist attacks and an impending earthquake increased public alarm, although seismologists said there was no reason to expect a tremor.
The city, in China's icy north-eastern Heilongjiang province, has a population of 3.8 million and draws most of its water from the Songhua. The river has been contaminated with more than 30 times the usual levels of benzene after an explosion at a chemical plant on its banks.
The blast, in the neighbouring Jilin province, happened on November 13, killing five people and causing 10,000 to be evacuated from the area, officials said.
Benzene, a component of petrol, is highly flammable and toxic. Short-term exposure to the chemical in drinking water can cause long-term damage to the nervous system, while long-term exposure can result in cancer and leukaemia.
The state Xinhua news agency said nobody had yet been taken ill, but 15 hospitals were on standby to deal with pollution victims. "There is sufficient water.
Residents have all stored a lot and we have been rushing in water from other places. We also have safe underground water," a government spokesman told Reuters.
An official at the Heilongjiang United Petrochemical Corporation told the Interfax news agency that people were relying entirely on mineral water. "We are not going to take a bath these days. Fortunately, it's not summer," he said.
Water supplies were also reported to have been cut in at least one district of Songyuan city, around 90 miles southwest of Harbin, although local officials denied the reports.
A doctor from the Ningjiang District Central Hospital and a teacher from Ningjiang No. 1 Middle School said water had already been cut off for between five and seven days already. Both refused to give their names.
Russia's environmental protection agency today said it feared the pollution could reach the border city of Khabarovsk, 435 miles downstream from Harbin on the Songhua.
However, Chinese officials said the pollution would have become more diluted by the time it reached Russia because several major tributaries flowed into the river.
A government-sponsored conference in China's eastern Jiangxi province today heard that 70% of China's lakes and rivers are polluted, and the country loses 20 lakes a year due to human activity. |
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Last Updated: Sunday, 20 November 2005, 13:59 GMT
BBC
The UK is unlikely to meet its 2010 target of reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 20%, the government's chief scientific adviser has admitted. Sir David King told the BBC the target was perhaps a "bit optimistic" but said the government had not given up and long-term plans were in place.
The "green light" should be given for more nuclear reactors, he added.
Environmental groups accused Prime Minister Tony Blair of backtracking on the issue of setting targets.
Longer term
Sir David told the BBC's Sunday AM programme that the 2010 target on reducing emissions was a "very tough target to hit at the moment".
He admitted the UK could miss it but said one reason was that long-term plans took time to pay off.
"The longer term targets are actually the critical ones. These things like building a new power station take many, many years to come through.
"I think perhaps we were being a bit optimistic, but the government has not given up on its target for 2010."
Sir David said Mr Blair should "give the green light" to a new generation of nuclear reactors.
Nuclear power met almost a quarter of Britain's electricity needs in recent years but that will fall to just 4% by 2020 if reactors were not replaced.
Stiff opposition
"All of that is coming from a CO2-free source. I think we need every tool in the bag to tackle this problem," he said.
Mr Blair faces stiff opposition from green groups and some in his Labour Party if he sanctions new reactors.
Environment minister Margaret Beckett said there was "nothing extra" nuclear power could do to help meet the Government's target to reduce CO2 by 2010.
Speaking on the BBC's Politics Show, she said: "There's just no way you could get new nuclear power stations in time to contribute to that."
She denied she was anti-nuclear but said there were "lots of concerns" about its use.
'Tricky'
Earlier this month, the prime minister caused fury by suggesting that a "child-of-Kyoto" agreement, with firm targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, could be tricky.
"People fear some external force is going to impose some internal target on you which is going to restrict your economic growth," he said.
"I think in the world after 2012 we need to find a better, more sensitive set of mechanisms to deal with this problem."
Greenpeace director Stephen Tindale, a former environment adviser to Labour, told Sunday AM that Mr Blair realised he could not persuade United States President George Bush over the issue.
'Disaster'
President Bush refused to ratify the Kyoto treaty when 141 countries signed up to it this year.
"I think Tony Blair has realised that he is not going to shift George Bush and he is therefore trying to move the rest of the world to George Bush's position, which is a disaster," Mr Tindale said.
He insisted that it would be impossible to "get a handle" on the future without emissions targets.
Sir David said he believed Mr Blair's comments on targets had been misunderstood and that Mr Blair had been talking about involving China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa in discussions.
"I believe what he was discussing was... how do we extend that to include these five countries? Of course we're also concerned about the United States' position.
"The US emits 25% of the world's carbon dioxide. How do we bring them on board?"
World leaders are due to discuss the issue at a United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change meeting in Montreal, Canada, from 28 November. |
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Last Updated: Monday, 21 November 2005, 10:38 GMT
BBC
The number of people living with HIV is at its highest yet, a report shows. UNAids says there are an estimated 40.3m people currently living with the virus across the world, with almost 5m infected in 2005.
And it warns there are growing epidemics in Eastern Europe and Central and East Asia.
But the report says falls in HIV incidence have been seen in certain groups, including sex workers and their clients in Thailand and Cambodia.
Other groups in which education and prevention efforts have helped reduce HIV infection rates are young people in Uganda, injecting drug users in Spain and Brazil and men who have sex with men, across Western countries.
Overall, the report says more than 3m people died of Aids-related illnesses in 2005. Of these, more than 500,000 were children.
The report says Sub-Saharan Africa is still hardest hit by HIV/Aids.
Two thirds of the people living with HIV - 25.8m - are in this area.
In 2005, 2.4m people in Sub-Saharan Africa died of an HIV-related illness, and a further 3.2m were infected with the virus.
Resolve
The report says access to antiretroviral treatments for HIV have improved dramatically, with many more people across the world able to access the drugs.
It says: "It is no longer only in the wealthy countries of North America and Western Europe that persons in need of treatment have a reasonable chance of receiving it.
"Treatment coverage in countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Cuba now exceeds 80%."
But UNAids says the situation is still difficult for people in the poorest countries of the world.
"At best, one in 10 Africans and one in seven Asians in need of anti-retroviral treatment were receiving it in mid-2005.
Dr Peter Piot, UNAids executive director, said: "The reality is that the Aids epidemic continues to outstrip global and national efforts to contain it.
"It is clear that a rapid increase in the scale and scope of HIV prevention programmes is urgently needed.
"We must move from small projects with short-term horizons to long-term, comprehensive strategies."
Nick Partridge, Chief Executive of Terrence Higgins Trust said: "We're still not containing the HIV epidemic.
"The downturn in new infections in some communities shows we can win this fight but we need resources, public pressure and political action."
He added: "We need to do more to see figures decrease around the world.
"At home we need greater investment in safer sex campaigns for gay men and African people.
"This report reminds us yet again that these campaigns really work."
More funds needed
Anton Kerr, of Christian Aid, called on governments to contribute more to the Global Fund for HIV/Aids, TB and Malaria.
A Global Fund replenishment conference in September heard that double the £2.1bn donated to that point was needed to fund new prevention, treatment and care programmes in 2006 and 2007.
Mr Kerr said: " Millions of people are relying on the promises made by the most powerful and rich countries in the world.
"However, the scandal of their failure to fully fund the Global Fund shows that they are not acting quickly enough to save the lives they have committed to saving. Empty promises mean death sentences."
Yusef Azad, of the National Aids Trust said many people were dying unnecessarily.
"Fewer than a fifth of those at risk of HIV have access even to the most basic prevention services; only one in ten of those living with HIV have been tested and know they are infected and only 15% of those who need life-saving HIV drugs in low and middle-income countries actually receive them.
"What is needed is the political will to end this global health injustice and a determination to roll out what works rather than be tempted by dogma or prejudice."
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Last Updated: Sunday, 20 November 2005, 23:59 GMT
BBC
Sharing government-held personal information could bring huge medical and social benefits, a government group has said. The new Council for Science and Technology has recommended pooling data to deliver better targeted public services and improve policymaking.
But it said safeguards needed to be in place to protect people's privacy.
The government also needed to start a dialogue with the public on what was being proposed, it said.
Information is frequently shared between medical researchers and the private sector.
Health research
Report author Dr Mark Walport, who heads medical charity the Wellcome Trust, said he had seen the benefit of using databases for researching links between diseases and social conditions.
Studies can also monitor the effectiveness of treatments or of the impact of adopting certain policies.
However, the owner of the biggest collection of datasets in the country - the UK government - uses the information at its disposal at a fraction of its potential, according to Dr Walport.
Personal data is guarded by government departments because of concern about misuse and invasions of privacy.
But Dr Walport argued that with more creative thinking the government could improve medical and other social policy-making while at the same time protecting the privacy of individuals.
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15 November 2005
NewScientist.com news service
Maggie McKee
Scattered starlight may soon reveal the presence of extrasolar planets that cannot be detected by any other means, according to a pair of scientists in India. But some other experts say the method is best suited to studying the properties of known exoplanets – not turning up new discoveries. Astronomers have already discovered about 155 extrasolar planets by watching how they make their host stars wobble or dim as they circle around them. But these methods are best suited to detecting so-called "hot Jupiters" – giant planets that orbit close to their stars, leaving any smaller or more distant planets unseen.
Now, Sujan Sengupta and Malay Maiti of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics in Bangalore say astronomers may soon be able to detect these elusive worlds too – providing they have atmospheres. Light bouncing off particles in their atmospheres should become linearly polarised, with its electric field aligned in one plane, they say.
Other researchers have modelled the polarisation signal expected from large, spherical planets travelling in tight circles around their host stars. But Sengupta and Maiti have now expanded these calculations to include planets that are slightly squashed at their poles because of their own spin – like Jupiter – as well as planets that are travelling in elliptical orbits around their host stars, which are less likely to make their stars wobble or blink by passing in front of them.
Size isn’t important
They found that non-spherical planets should actually produce a stronger signal because the polarisation averaged over the surface of a perfectly round object tends to cancel itself out.
Because the polarisation signal depends strongly on the angle between the star and planet, the researchers also argue that detecting any periodic change in polarisation implies the presence of a planet.
"It's not the amount of polarisation but the systematic time variation that will be important in detecting exoplanets," Sengupta told New Scientist. He says the method should work regardless of the planet's size, mass and distance from the star – and even with relatively imprecise polarisation measurements.
"According to my proposal, polarisation can detect exoplanets even if they cannot be detected by any other method," he says, adding that it should even pick up signs from Earth-like planets.
Doubts over detection
But other researchers say the method may not be as robust as Sengupta believes. "I think there's a good chance to make a detection, but it's only the hot Jupiters that are going to be detected easily," says Sara Seager of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Washington DC, US. She says the nearness of these large planets to their host stars means they will scatter more photons of starlight.
She also cautions starlight is likely to scatter multiple times inside a planet's atmosphere, potentially "washing out" the polarisation signal. "But beyond making a detection, polarisation is a powerful method for determining what is in a planet's atmosphere," she says, adding that such measurements of Venus from Earth revealed it to have sulphuric acid clouds.
Jim Hough, an astronomer at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, agrees. "I think the method is very important not for finding planets but for determining the inclination of their orbit, radius, surface reflectivity and properties of their atmospheres," he told New Scientist.
He has been searching for the polarisation of a known hot Jupiter around the star Tau Bootis but has so far not been able to find it. The planet is probably so massive and so close to the star that it is "stirring up the stellar surface and producing additional polarisation," he says. |
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Last Updated: Wednesday, 23 November 2005, 12:19 GMT
BBC
The Hayabusa space probe landed successfully on its asteroid target despite the initial announcement of a failure, Japan's space agency says. But it apparently failed to drop equipment to collect material from the surface of asteroid Itokawa.
The Japanese spacecraft is on a mission to return these samples from Itokawa to Earth for the summer of 2007.
Controllers lost contact with the probe after it manoeuvred to within several metres of the space rock.
However, data confirmed Hayabusa landed on Itokawa on Sunday for half an hour, Japan's space agency (Jaxa) has said.
On Sunday, Jaxa spokesman Toshihisa Horiguchi told Associated Press: "Hayabusa reached extremely close, but could not make the landing."
He added that the reason for the failure was unknown.
However, the agency said in an update on Wednesday that the spacecraft in fact managed to touch down on the potato-shaped Itokawa asteroid located 290 million km (180 million miles) from Earth for about 30 minutes, the AFP news agency reported.
It was the first landing by a Japanese space vehicle on another Solar System object, the agency said.
Jaxa will decide on Thursday whether to make a second attempt to land Hayabusa, originally scheduled for Friday 25 November.
Although the body of the probe has not suffered any major damage, some of its sensors need to be checked, the agency said. |
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By SANDRA BLAKESLEE
Published: November 22, 2005
New York Times
Hypnosis, with its long and checkered history in medicine and entertainment, is receiving some new respect from neuroscientists. Recent brain studies of people who are susceptible to suggestion indicate that when they act on the suggestions their brains show profound changes in how they process information. The suggestions, researchers report, literally change what people see, hear, feel and believe to be true. The new experiments, which used brain imaging, found that people who were hypnotized "saw" colors where there were none. Others lost the ability to make simple decisions. Some people looked at common English words and thought that they were gibberish.
"The idea that perceptions can be manipulated by expectations" is fundamental to the study of cognition, said Michael I. Posner, an emeritus professor of neuroscience at the University of Oregon and expert on attention. "But now we're really getting at the mechanisms."
Even with little understanding of how it works, hypnosis has been used in medicine since the 1950's to treat pain and, more recently, as a treatment for anxiety, depression, trauma, irritable bowel syndrome and eating disorders.
There is, however, still disagreement about what exactly the hypnotic state is or, indeed, whether it is anything more than an effort to please the hypnotist or a natural form of extreme concentration where people become oblivious to their surroundings while lost in thought.
Hypnosis had a false start in the 18th century when a German physician, Dr. Franz Mesmer, devised a miraculous cure for people suffering all manner of unexplained medical problems. Amid dim lights and ethereal music played on a glass harmonica, he infused them with an invisible "magnetic fluid" that only he was able to muster. Thus mesmerized, clients were cured.
Although Dr. Mesmer was eventually discredited, he was the first person to show that the mind could be manipulated by suggestion to affect the body, historians say. This central finding was resurrected by Dr. James Braid, an English ophthalmologist who in 1842 coined the word hypnosis after the Greek word for sleep.
Braid reportedly put people into trances by staring at them intently, but he did not have a clue as to how it worked. In this vacuum, hypnosis was adopted by spiritualists and stage magicians who used dangling gold watches to induce hypnotic states in volunteers from the audience, and make them dance, sing or pretend to be someone else, only to awaken at a hand clap and laughter from the crowd.
In medical hands, hypnosis was no laughing matter. In the 19th century, physicians in India successfully used hypnosis as anesthesia, even for limb amputations. The practice fell from favor only when ether was discovered.
Now, Dr. Posner and others said, new research on hypnosis and suggestion is providing a new view into the cogs and wheels of normal brain function.
One area that it may have illuminated is the processing of sensory data. Information from the eyes, ears and body is carried to primary sensory regions in the brain. From there, it is carried to so-called higher regions where interpretation occurs.
For example, photons bouncing off a flower first reach the eye, where they are turned into a pattern that is sent to the primary visual cortex. There, the rough shape of the flower is recognized. The pattern is next sent to a higher - in terms of function - region, where color is recognized, and then to a higher region, where the flower's identity is encoded along with other knowledge about the particular bloom.
The same processing stream, from lower to higher regions, exists for sounds, touch and other sensory information. Researchers call this direction of flow feedforward. As raw sensory data is carried to a part of the brain that creates a comprehensible, conscious impression, the data is moving from bottom to top.
Bundles of nerve cells dedicated to each sense carry sensory information. The surprise is the amount of traffic the other way, from top to bottom, called feedback. There are 10 times as many nerve fibers carrying information down as there are carrying it up.
These extensive feedback circuits mean that consciousness, what people see, hear, feel and believe, is based on what neuroscientists call "top down processing." What you see is not always what you get, because what you see depends on a framework built by experience that stands ready to interpret the raw information - as a flower or a hammer or a face.
The top-down structure explains a lot. If the construction of reality has so much top-down processing, that would make sense of the powers of placebos (a sugar pill will make you feel better), nocebos (a witch doctor will make you ill), talk therapy and meditation. If the top is convinced, the bottom level of data will be overruled.
This brain structure would also explain hypnosis, which is all about creating such formidable top-down processing that suggestions overcome reality.
According to decades of research, 10 to 15 percent of adults are highly hypnotizable, said Dr. David Spiegel, a psychiatrist at Stanford who studies the clinical uses of hypnosis. Up to age 12, however, before top-down circuits mature, 80 to 85 percent of children are highly hypnotizable.
One adult in five is flat out resistant to hypnosis, Dr. Spiegel said. The rest are in between, he said.
In some of the most recent work, Dr. Amir Raz, an assistant professor of clinical neuroscience at Columbia, chose to study highly hypnotizable people with the help of a standard psychological test that probes conflict in the brain. As a professional magician who became a scientist to understand better the slippery nature of attention, Dr. Raz said that he "wanted to do something really impressive" that other neuroscientists could not ignore.
The probe, called the Stroop test, presents words in block letters in the colors red, blue, green and yellow. The subject has to press a button identifying the color of the letters. The difficulty is that sometimes the word RED is colored green. Or the word YELLOW is colored blue.
For people who are literate, reading is so deeply ingrained that it invariably takes them a little bit longer to override the automatic reading of a word like RED and press a button that says green. This is called the Stroop effect.
Sixteen people, half highly hypnotizable and half resistant, went into Dr. Raz's lab after having been covertly tested for hypnotizability. The purpose of the study, they were told, was to investigate the effects of suggestion on cognitive performance. After each person underwent a hypnotic induction, Dr. Raz said:
"Very soon you will be playing a computer game inside a brain scanner. Every time you hear my voice over the intercom, you will immediately realize that meaningless symbols are going to appear in the middle of the screen. They will feel like characters in a foreign language that you do not know, and you will not attempt to attribute any meaning to them.
"This gibberish will be printed in one of four ink colors: red, blue, green or yellow. Although you will only attend to color, you will see all the scrambled signs crisply. Your job is to quickly and accurately depress the key that corresponds to the color shown. You can play this game effortlessly. As soon as the scanning noise stops, you will relax back to your regular reading self."
Dr. Raz then ended the hypnosis session, leaving each person with what is called a posthypnotic suggestion, an instruction to carry out an action while not hypnotized.
Days later, the subjects entered the brain scanner.
In highly hypnotizables, when Dr. Raz's instructions came over the intercom, the Stroop effect was obliterated, he said. The subjects saw English words as gibberish and named colors instantly. But for those who were resistant to hypnosis, the Stroop effect prevailed, rendering them significantly slower in naming the colors.
When the brain scans of the two groups were compared, a distinct pattern appeared. Among the hypnotizables, Dr. Raz said, the visual area of the brain that usually decodes written words did not become active. And a region in the front of the brain that usually detects conflict was similarly dampened.
Top-down processes overrode brain circuits devoted to reading and detecting conflict, Dr. Raz said, although he did not know exactly how that happened. Those results appeared in July in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
A number of other recent studies of brain imaging point to similar top-down brain mechanisms under the influence of suggestion. Highly hypnotizable people were able to "drain" color from a colorful abstract drawing or "add" color to the same drawing rendered in gray tones. In each case, the parts of their brains involved in color perception were differently activated.
Brain scans show that the control mechanisms for deciding what to do in the face of conflict become uncoupled when people are hypnotized. Top-down processes override sensory, or bottom-up information, said Dr. Stephen M. Kosslyn, a neuroscientist at Harvard. People think that sights, sounds and touch from the outside world constitute reality. But the brain constructs what it perceives based on past experience, Dr. Kosslyn said.
Most of the time bottom-up information matches top-down expectation, Dr. Spiegel said. But hypnosis is interesting because it creates a mismatch. "We imagine something different, so it is different," he said. |
On the fourth
anniversary of the September 11th attacks, Laura Knight-Jadczyk
announced the availability of her latest book:
In the years since the 9/11 attacks, dozens of books
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Drawing on historical and genealogical sources, Knight-Jadczyk
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For its no nonsense style in cutting to the core
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Published by Red Pill Press
Order the book today at our bookstore. |
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