Raed Jarrar and Joshua Holland AlterNet 2007-05-09 17:28:00
On Tuesday, without note in the U.S. media, more than half of the members of Iraq's parliament rejected the continuing occupation of their country. 144 lawmakers signed onto a legislative petition calling on the United States to set a timetable for withdrawal, according to Nassar Al-Rubaie, a spokesman for the Al Sadr movement, the nationalist Shia group that sponsored the petition.
Kurt Nimmo Another Day In The Empire 2007-05-09 07:22:00
How many of us put any credence into this stuff, let alone pay attention? "Federal authorities announced Tuesday that they had foiled a terrorist plot to attack Fort Dix. Six men were charged with planning to kill as many soldiers as they could," the Associated Press would have us believe. "One of the suspects, Serdar Tatar, had delivered pizza on the base and said he knew it like the back of his hand," according to the government, never mind the "post has had especially tight security since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks."
Lewis Seiler, Dan Hamburg San Francisco Chronicle 2007-05-09 07:17:00
"There are people in Washington ... who never intend to withdraw military forces from Iraq and they're looking for 10, 20, 50 years in the future ... the reason that we went into Iraq was to establish a permanent military base in the Gulf region, and I have never heard any of our leaders say that they would commit themselves to the Iraqi people that 10 years from now there will be no military bases of the United States in Iraq." - former President Jimmy Carter, Feb. 3, 2006
For all the talk about timetables and benchmarks, one might think that the United States will end the military occupation of Iraq within the lifetimes of the readers of this opinion editorial. Think again.
Prosecutors issued arrest warrants Tuesday for eight former prison employees accused of abusing inmates, including forcing some to clean toilets with their tongues.
He plopped down in a big chair in his sturdy old home on Main Street in this northeast Colorado town, a village nestled in a land where alfalfa grows quickly, time passes slowly and when it turns black at night, well, all kinds of things can dance across the sable sky.
Big Tim Cullen says it was a night like that so many years ago when the lights of a UFO rose over the grassy hills and settled alongside his car. He says he got a good look.
"It was 100 foot long, 20 foot wide and about 10 foot high."
The Bush administration is facing growing difficulties in filling a rising number of high-level vacancies following a recent spate of senior departures.
According to retired U.S. Marine Col. J. Tyler Ryberg, the Bible contains messages about war and capital punishment. God is a powerful soldier.
Ryberg, who served in the Marines for more than 27 years, gave a sermon Sunday morning at Good Shepherd Baptist Church's Armed Forces Day, where some of the 150 people in attendance often erupted with an "Amen!"
The colonel asked churchgoers if the global war on terrorism was a "just war" and a "God-ordained war," which he later affirmed.
A U.S. soldier who fatally shot an Italian intelligence agent at an Iraqi checkpoint two years ago filmed the scene moments after firing, an Italian television channel said, showing footage from his video.
Larnaca- Cyrpus: "His actions were motivated by a sense of duty and morality, admirable traits. But at the same we do not encourage people to turn to vigilantism."
Campaigners fighting EU plans to abolish imperial measures have claimed victory after the European Commission backed down over plans to ban imperial measurements.
Giles Chichester, the Tory MEP with responsibility for industry, said last night that compulsory metric measurements were "off the agenda".
Mr Chichester said he had received confirmation from EU trade and industry commissioner Gunter Verheugen that the marking of goods in imperial and metric would carry on indefinitely.
Mr Verheugen had agreed, said Mr Chichester, that it was good news for British and European industry to keep imperial measurements as it would make it easier for them to sell to the United States.
Tony Blair planned to divide Gordon Brown's fiefdom of the Treasury into two after the 2005 election under proposals drawn up in intense secrecy for the prime minister.
The idea was fleshed out in a 200-page document prepared for Mr Blair by his strategy adviser, Lord Birt; the head of the No 10 strategy unit at the time, David Halpern; and another senior No 10 aide, Gareth Davies.
Had the plan gone ahead, Mr Brown may have been asked to move to the Foreign Office. It was abandoned when political advisers told Mr Blair voters wanted him to cooperate with his chancellor.
France's president-elect vowed to support Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office said Tuesday that he had spoken by phone with Nicolas Sarkozy to congratulate him on his victory in Sunday's second round of voting to succeed Jacques Chirac.
The statement added that the conservative Sarkozy "thanked Prime Minister Olmert and said: 'I am a friend of Israel and Israel can always rely on my friendship.' "
Gunmen seized four American workers in Nigeria's southern oil region, and an Italian oil company said Wednesday that daily crude production had been cut by nearly 100,000 barrels a day by the worst bombing to hit the petroleum industry in months.
Militants demanding greater control over oil in the region have stepped up attacks in recent weeks in Africa's biggest oil producer.
A controversial program used by the Department of Defense to spy on gay groups has been recommended for shutdown after lawsuits exposed it, and new Pentagon officials say it doesn't merit continuing.
Stephen Lendman S J Lendman Blog 2007-05-09 12:04:00
In a post-9/11 climate, the right of free expression is under attack and endangered in the age of George Bush when dissent may be called a threat to national security, terrorism, or treason. But losing that most precious of all rights means losing our freedom that 18th century French philosopher Voltaire spoke in defense of saying "I may disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." Using it to express dissent is what noted historian Howard Zinn calls "the highest form of patriotism" exercising our constitutional right to freedom of speech, the press, to assemble, to protest publicly, and associate as we choose for any reason within the law.
An American who lost his legs in a May 16 bomb blast inside his hotel room in southern Philippines' Davao has reportedly fled to Singapore after U.S. embassy personnel spirited him out of a hospital, a report said.
Macedonian police acknowledged yesterday that the killing of seven alleged Pakistani terrorists two years ago was staged to win US support and that the victims were innocent illegal immigrants.
Startling revelations by French intelligence experts back David Shayler's alleged 'fantasy'about Gadaffi plot
British intelligence paid large sums of money to an al-Qaeda cell in Libya in a doomed attempt to assassinate Colonel Gadaffi in 1996 and thwarted early attempts to bring Osama bin Laden to justice.
Former president Abdurrahman Wahid has claimed that Indonesian police or the military may have played a role in the 2002 Bali bombings that killed 202 people, including 11 from Hong Kong.
Pakistani clerics have accused the intelligence agencies in the country of supporting ''jehadi'' organisations whose actions now cannot be checked even by religious decrees.
Katrina vanden Heuvel The Nation 2007-05-09 14:17:00
Just one day after a majority of Iraqi lawmakers rejected the continuing occupation of their country, the Washington Post reports that the Pentagon will begin deploying 35,000 soldiers in 10 Army combat brigades to Iraq in August --"making it possible to sustain the increase of US troops there until at least the end of this year."
The nurse was surprised the two soldiers were still alive.
The day before, the men were carried into the emergency room at Ibn Sina Hospital in Baghdad's fortress-like Green Zone. Both Americans had been badly injured when their Humvee was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade in a Sunni district in western Baghdad.
One soldier would have both legs amputated. The other lost one.
The infant mortality rate in Iraq has increased by a shocking 150 percent since 1990 - the highest such increase recorded for any country in the world - according to an annual report issued by the child advocacy group, Save the Children.
According to the report, in 2005, the last year for which reliable data is available, one in eight Iraqi children - 122,000 in all - died before reaching their fifth birthday. More than half of these deaths were recorded among new-born infants, with pneumonia and diarrhea claiming the greatest toll among Iraqi babies.
Israeli restrictions have divided the occupied West Bank into 10 economically isolated enclaves, severing financial links and denying Palestinians access to some 50 percent of the land, the World Bank said.
Palestinians detained by Israeli security forces are routinely tortured and ill-treated, according to a new report published by Israeli human rights groups yesterday. The ill-treatment, which includes beatings, sensory deprivation, back-bending, back-stretching and other forms of physical abuse, contravenes international law and Israeli law, the report says.
The prime minister and treasurer have hit the airwaves to sell their budget that was packed with $65 billion of voter goodies, but said it was not a pre-election spend that would worry the central bank.
Treasurer Peter Costello's 12th budget contained $31.5 billion of tax cuts over the next four years, as well as a raft of spending on child care, health, climate change, defence, education and infrastructure.
Mr Costello said the government was only able to make such investments because of the strength of the Australian economy.
Alan Whyte World Socialist Web Site 2007-05-08 23:28:00
New York City's major electrical company, Consolidated Edison, has asked state regulators to increase rates 17 percent for city residents and 10.7 percent for businesses. The hikes would take effect over the next three years, with the first and largest installment - 11.6 percent, for an annual increase of $1.2 billion - beginning next April. Con Ed would further increase its revenue by $335 million in 2009 and $390 million in 2010.
In case you're wondering why crude oil prices are down from last year, hanging around at about $60 a barrel, while gasoline prices have soared past $3.10/gallon nationwide, just check out the latest profit reports from the oil companies. They are at record levels.
The answer for this seeming contradiction is simple: Americans are being robbed blind by the oil industry.
Cheryl Winkelman Inside Bay Area 2007-05-08 13:08:00
Its a hot one.
San Franciscans sizzled on Monday in 88-degree heat. At SFO, temperatures came in at 93 degrees, almost 30 degrees warmer than the average high temperature for this time of year, said George Cline, a forecaster with the National Weather Service.
The state Department of Natural Resources destroyed 20,000 hatchery trout today, bringing to at least 156,000 the number of fish the agency has destroyed this year in hopes of curbing the spread of whirling disease, an illness fatal to trout.
There is an above-average chance that a major hurricane will hit the U.S. Gulf Coast this year, marking a possible return to the destructive seasons of 2004 and 2005, leading storm forecasters predicted on Tuesday.
An earthquake measuring 5.1 on the Richter scale shook the Ionian island of Zakynthos early yesterday, according to the Athens Observatory, but there were no reports of injuries or damage.
Rong-Gong Lin II and Paul Pringle Seattle Times 2007-05-09 03:57:00
Firefighters struggled Tuesday night to contain wind-whipped flames that scorched hundreds of acres in Griffith Park, forced the evacuation of some of Los Angeles' best-known landmarks and raced toward hillside homes in Los Feliz, prompting a hasty evacuation.
A wall of flames raced across ridges and jumped fire lines late in the evening as the fire drew closer to homes and the Griffith Observatory.
Hundreds of firefighters and five water-dropping helicopters rushed to Los Angeles' landmark park - a mix of wilderness, cultural venues, horse and hiking trails and recreational facilities set on more than 4,000 acres on the hills between Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley.
Three months of intense training in a form of meditation known as "insight" in Sanskrit can sharpen a person's brain enough to help them notice details they might otherwise miss.
Rescue workers and firefighters in New York City contracted a serious lung-scarring disease called sarcoidosis at a much higher rate after the Sept. 11 attacks than before, said a study that is the first to link the disease to exposure to toxic dust at Ground Zero.
The study, published by nine doctors including the medical officer monitoring city firefighters, Dr. David Prezant, found that firefighters and rescue workers contracted sarcoidosis in the year after Sept. 11, 2001, at a rate more than five times higher than the years before the attacks.
Felicity Lawrence The Guardian 2007-05-09 09:34:00
Potential link to behaviour problems prompts advice to parents over diet Food safety experts have advised parents to eliminate a series of additives from their children's diet while they await the publication of a new study that is understood to link these ingredients to behaviour problems in youngsters.
Rates of abuse and neglect of young children in military families in Texas has doubled since October 2002, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill study shows, raising concerns about the impact of deployment on military personnel and their families across the country.
The study, published in the May 15, 2007 issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology, was designed by UNC School of Public Health researchers to measure the impact of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on military and non-military families. The researchers chose to study Texas because of the large military population there and the availability of data.
Researchers found that prior to October 2002, rate of abuse and neglect - called maltreatment - was slightly higher among non-military families compared to military families. However, after the U.S. started sending larger numbers of troops to Afghanistan and Iraq in 2003, rates of abuse and neglect in military families far outpaced the rates among non-military families. Military files indicate more troops were deployed and fewer returned home in 2003.
In addition, the rate of occurrence of substantiated maltreatment in military families was twice as high in the period after October 2002 compared with the period prior to that date. During the same period, the rate of substantiated child abuse and neglect was relatively stable for non-military families, said Danielle Rentz, Ph.D., lead author of the study, which was part of her doctoral dissertation at the UNC School of Public Health.
A recent study evaluating the fine motor skills and perceived self esteem of children with amblyopia (or "lazy eye") compared with age-matched children will be presented during the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) 2007 Annual Meeting in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The presentation will be made on Wednesday, May 9 from 3:00 to 4:45 p.m., in Hall B/C of the Greater Fort Lauderdale/Broward County Convention Center.
The study, led by Ann Louise Webber of the Queensland University of Technology in Australia, utilized Visual-Motor Control and Upper Limb Speed and Dexterity subtests of the Brunicks-Oseretsky Test of Motor Proficiency to measure fine motor skills, and perceived self esteem was assessed using the Harter Self Perception Profile for Children. Results shows that fine motor skills were significantly worse and perception of social acceptance was lower in amblyopic children. Performance on the fine motor skill tasks could not predicted by level of stereoposis or inter-ocular visual acuity difference in the amblyopic group.
The rare, animal-borne Nipah virus has killed five people in an eastern Indian state, prompting authorities to declare a state of alert, officials said Tuesday.
A health official and four members of a family have died from the illness since early April, said Mohan Basu, a doctor in West Bengal state's Nadia district.
The Nipah virus is usually spread by fruit bats or pigs. There have been no known cases of human-to-human infection, according to the World Health Organization.
The last major Nipah outbreak occurred in Malaysia, where 265 people were infected in 1998-99. The virus was then blamed for 105 human deaths.
Nearly a million pigs, believed to have spread the disease, were slaughtered before the Malaysian outbreak was controlled.
Saul Hansell The New York Times 2007-05-07 15:19:00
Sometimes a particular piece of plastic is just what you need. You have lost the battery cover to your cellphone, perhaps. Or your daughter needs to have the golden princess doll she saw on television. Now.
In a few years, it will be possible to make these items yourself. You will be able to download three-dimensional plans online, then push Print. Hours later, a solid object will be ready to remove from your printer.
A certain form of a protein called neuropsin, which plays a role in learning and memory, is expressed only in the central nervous system of humans, concludes a Chinese study that compared the DNA of humans to several species of monkeys and apes.
Scientists say they now believe rotating storms are driving Saturn's jet stream winds, and not the other way around.
The new view is based on images taken by the orbiting international Cassini spacecraft, which tracked the movement of cloud features on the ringed planet's southern hemisphere. Scientists initially believed eddies, or giant rotating storms, sapped energy out of the jets.
"Instead, what we find is that they are pumping energy into the jets," Cassini scientist Andrew Ingersoll of the California Institute of Technology said in a statement Tuesday.
The findings will appear in a future issue of the journal Icarus.
The queen honey bee is genetically identical to the workers in her hive, but she lives 10 times longer and - unlike her sterile sisters - remains reproductively viable throughout life. A study from the University of Illinois sheds new light on the molecular mechanisms that account for this divergence. The study appears in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The research centers on the interplay of three factors known to have a role in reproduction, growth and/or longevity. The first, vitellogenin (Vg), is a yolk protein important to reproduction but which also has been found to contribute to longevity in worker bees. The second, juvenile hormone, contributes to growth and maturation. The third, an insulin-IGF-1 signaling pathway, regulates aging, fertility and other important biological processes in invertebrates and vertebrates.
The study explores these factors in queen honey bees. How, the researchers wanted to know, could the queen achieve such a long life compared with her sisters while also devoting so much energy to reproduction?
Experts of the "Kosmopoisk" all-Russia scientific research association are now checking the recent reports on a bolide, which had allegedly dropped to the earth in Altai Territory on Monday, Vadim Chernobrov, leader of the expedition, which is now searching for the meteorite that struck the earth there in January, told Itar-Tass on Tuesday.
He said local people had notified the expedition members that a new celestial object had hit the earth on Wednesday evening.
"They said a bright celestial body flew from west to east over Klyuchevsky and Rodinsky districts at 22.23 local time (19.23 Moscow time). It is difficult to say whether the object struck the earth or not," Chernobrov said.
However, local people claim that they saw how the "celestial guest" had descended and dropped east of Rodinsky District, setting the forest on fire.
Remember, we need your help to collect information on what is going on in your part of the world!
Send your article suggestions to: sott(at)signs-of-the-times.org
Click here to return to the Signs of the Times Archive
