That doesn't look like moving toward peace

Obama has developed an image of the man looking for solutions to global issues, conflicts with and between nations and a man of peace. Graet on the PR front but far from the reality as we are all witnessing on a daily basis.

From Salon - and note, in particular dot-point 3:

"I say that because here are some objective, nonpartisan, non-ideological facts:

* The 2010 Pentagon budget means "every man, woman and child in the United States will spend more than $2,700 on (defense) programs and agencies next year," reports the Cato Institute. "By way of comparison, the average Japanese spends less than $330; the average German about $520; China's per capita spending is less than $100

* "(The Pentagon budget) dwarfs the combined defense budgets of U.S. allies and potential U.S. enemies alike," reports Hearst Newspapers

* "President (Obama) is on track to spend more on defense, in real dollars, than any other president has in one term of office since World War II," reports National Journal's Government Executive magazine

* In 2000, the Pentagon admitted it has lost -- yes, lost -- $2.3 trillion. In 2003, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that a subsequent Department of Defense study said it was only $1 trillion. To put such numbers in perspective, contemplate what those sums could finance. $1 trillion, for instance, could pay the total cost of universal healthcare for the long haul. $2.3 trillion would cover universal healthcare plus the bank bailout plus the stimulus package".

Iraq War: It's official! It was illegal

Tony Blair, the chameleon and show-pony, will have a lot of explaining to do when he gives evidence at the UK's Chilcot enquiry into the Iraq War.

The Independent gives more than a graphic account of how Blair swept aside the advice of his Attorney-General to forge ahead with joining the Coalition of the Willing with his buddy George Bush:

"Tony Blair will be quizzed over a devastating official memo warning him that war on Iraq would be illegal eight months before he sent troops into Baghdad, it was claimed last night.

The Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war will consider a letter from Lord Goldsmith, then Mr Blair's top law officer, advising him that deposing Saddam would be in breach of international law, according to a report in The Mail on Sunday.

But Mr Blair refused to accept Lord Goldsmith's advice and instead issued instructions for his long-term friend to be "gagged" and barred from cabinet meetings, the newspaper claimed. Lord Goldsmith apparently lost three stone, and complained he was "more or less pinned to the wall" in a No 10 showdown with two of Mr Blair's most loyal aides, Lord Falconer and Baroness Morgan. Mr Blair also allegedly failed to inform the Cabinet of the warning, fearing an "anti-war revolt".

Lord Goldsmith allegedly threatened to resign over the issue, but was "bullied" into backing down. He eventually issued carefully drafted qualified backing for the invasion."

Oh Sarah!

Credit to Danziger in The NY Times

Dubai: What are those Sheiks up to? And then there is slave labour

"There are, however, two basic truths about Dubai which, predictably, have not found their way into market speculation or newspaper analysis. The first is that Dubai may soon find itself a satellite not of its Abu Dhabi capital but of India. The biggest merchants in Dubai are Indian – they run the gold market, even the bookshops in Sheikh Mohamed's playpen – and west India is only two hours' flying time away. In fact, until 1962 – and you have to be an oldie to understand the emirates' economic world – the Indian rupee was the currency for most of the Gulf, including even Kuwait."

Who says? None other than veteran journalist and author [30 + years living in Beirut] Robert Fisk.

Read his full analysis, in The Independent, of what is going in what seemed like unassailably rich Dubai.

In a piece in the same newspaper, Johann Hari takes a stick to the image of Dubai - and it's not a pretty picture!

"Dubai is finally financially bankrupt – but it has been morally bankrupt all along. The idea that Dubai is an oasis of freedom on the Arabian peninsular is one of the great lies of our time.

Yes, it has Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts and the Gucci styles, but beneath these accoutrements, there is a dictatorship built by slaves.

If you go there with your eyes open – as I did earlier this year – the truth is hidden in plain view. The tour books and the bragging Emiratis will tell you the city was built by Sheikh Mohammed, the country's hereditary ruler.

It is untrue. The people who really built the city can be seen in long chain-gangs by the side of the road, or toiling all day at the top of the tallest buildings in the world, in heat that Westerners are told not to stay in for more than 10 minutes. They were conned into coming, and trapped into staying.

In their home country – Bangladesh or the Philippines or India – these workers are told they can earn a fortune in Dubai if they pay a large upfront fee. When they arrive, their passports are taken from them, and they are told their wages are a tenth of the rate they were promised.

They end up working in extremely dangerous conditions for years, just to pay back their initial debt. They are ringed-off in filthy tent-cities outside Dubai, where they sleep in weeping heat, next to open sewage. They have no way to go home. And if they try to strike for better conditions, they are beaten by the police."

Those wretched settlements: Israel PM's spin

Not for the first time have the Israelis said no more settlements. It's all a fiction. The latest so-called freeze is anything of the sort.

The Age newspaper's Middle East correspondent puts the so-called freeze into context:

"For 10 months, Netanyahu says, Israel will impose a residential housing construction freeze in the West Bank.

So does that mean the hammers will fall silent immediately? Far from it.

According to Netanyahu's plan for a settlement freeze, construction on 2500 partially built housing units in the West Bank can be completed.

So can another 500 new housing units in the West Bank announced earlier this year.

This isn't even a slowdown on last year. In 2008, according to the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, there were 1647 new housing starts, and 1389 new housing starts in 2007.

In East Jerusalem, where the Palestinians hope to make their capital, Netanyahu says no limits will apply."

Over at Prospects for Peace, Daniel Levy also reflects on the spin [some would, rightly, say on- going lying] and the development of the settlements:

"Netanyahu also repeated the totally (meaningless)commitment of no new settlements or land confiscations (meaningless because since 1993, the official policy is no new settlements yet via expansion, new neighborhoods and outposts, the West Bank settler population has grown from 111,000 then to over 300,000 today, and because although the built-up area of settlements constitutes only 2% of West Bank land, double that amount is slated for growth, and a total of 40% comes under the Settlement Regional Councils, therefore land confiscation issue is a red herring)."

Soulmates.... and the Iraq deal [War] "signed in blood"

The Inquiry into the Iraq War might have just got underway in the UK, but it has already led to some "interesting" evidence.

The SMH reports this rather startling revelation:

"The personal relationship between Tony Blair and George Bush was so strong the former US President felt his British counterpart was the ''only human being he could talk to'' and other world leaders were ''like creatures from outer space''.

The details of the friendship between the leaders emerged yesterday when the former British ambassador to the US Christopher Meyer gave evidence to the inquiry into the Iraq war.

Sir Christopher, who was in the US on September 11, 2001, and before Iraq was invaded in 2003, said the two men got on extraordinarily well, and he remembered the then US secretary of state, Condoleeza Rice, telling him Mr Bush felt understood by Mr Blair.

''I remember it was after they had a very good weekend together and so did the wives, and the press conference afterwards, the Colgate moment, didn't do justice to the nature of their relationship,'' he told the inquiry.

''They met at various meetings from time to time. It was Condoleeza Rice that told me that the President said he felt the only human being he could talk to was Tony … the rest were creatures from out of space.'"

Meanwhile, The Telegraph/UK reports on this evidence from the former UK Ambassador to the US:

"The two men were alone in the ranch so I'm not entirely clear to this day what degree of convergence (on Iraq policy) was signed in blood, if you like, at the Crawford ranch.

"But there are clues in the speech Tony Blair gave the next day, which was the first time he had said in public ‘regime change'. He was trying to draw the lessons of 9/11 and apply them to the situation in Iraq which led - I think not inadvertently but deliberately - to a conflation of the threat posed by Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

"When I read that I thought ‘this represents a tightening of the UK/US alliance and a degree of convergence on the danger Saddam Hussein presented'."

Good for you....good for the planet

Now here is a way to help yourself and the planet - at the same time.

The Montreal Gazette reveals all:

"Pedestrians and cyclists should be made king of the urban jungle, according to an international study showing the big benefits of "mass active travel."

It suggests money should be diverted way from roads to make walking and cycling "the most direct, convenient, and pleasant options for most urban trips." Pedestrians and bikers should also get "priority" over cars and trucks at intersections.

The study is one of six reports on the "health dividend" of combating climate change published in the medical journal Lancet Wednesday.

The reports say that enormous changes are needed to slow global warming, but show that reducing carbon dioxide emissions will be good for people's health. Millions of deaths could be averted by getting people out of cars, breathing cleaner air and eating healthier food."

Post that Cairo speech? Zip!

From on a piece on FP "Fulfilling the Promises of Cairo":

"On June 4, U.S. President Barack Obama traveled to Cairo's distinguished Cairo University to deliver an historic address to the Muslim world.

According to a Pew Research Center public opinion poll released this summer, the euphoria that initially accompanied his speech has mostly dissipated in the region. There is a clear improvement in public opinion of the United States in certain influential Muslim countries, including Obama's former home, Indonesia, and confidence in the president himself is high. However, Obama's personal popularity has not translated into major improvement across the board in attitudes toward the United States.

Given that it may take much longer for the administration to offer up major foreign breakthroughs that will mitigate Muslim resentment against America, the White House should consider a policy of diplomatic, economic and social engagement to protect the president's down payment with the Muslim world."

Is she really the one?

Credit to Mike Lukevich

Talk - with Hamas!!!

Who would have thought it? No lesser person than the one-time head of Israel's Mossad, says that his country ought to be talking with Hamas.

In an interview on Australia's ABC program PM, Efraim Halevy said:

"Well as you know I am on record for the last six years saying that Hamas should be part of the solution not part of the problem.

In the last two weeks two developments have taken place, a, the former minister of defence and chief of staff General Mofaz has come out openly and said that in certain circumstances people should talk to Hamas. And in a recent poll which was carried out last week, at the end of last week in Israel, a majority of Israelis believe that Israel should talk to Hamas.

So I am no longer a lone voice on this. The timing of such an event of course is contingent on when it would be of interest to both sides. I think that it will be in the end in the interest of both sides and I think in the end Mr Netanyahu will talk to Hamas in one form or another."

Read the full interview here.

Now its Blackwater in Pakistan

Veteran and well-respected journalist Jeremy Scahill, writing in The Nation, reveals in "Blackwater's Secret War in Pakistan" that the infamous Blackwater [of Iraq "fame"] is now up to no good in Pakistan:

"At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, "snatch and grabs" of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan, an investigation by The Nation has found. The Blackwater operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and help run a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the US military intelligence apparatus.

The source, who has worked on covert US military programs for years, including in Afghanistan and Pakistan, has direct knowledge of Blackwater's involvement. He spoke to The Nation on condition of anonymity because the program is classified. The source said that the program is so "compartmentalized" that senior figures within the Obama administration and the US military chain of command may not be aware of its existence."

The Guantanamo Lawyers: Shipwrecked

truthdig has an extract from a new book "The Guantanamo Lawyers" about the lawyers who have been acting for those imprisoned at Gitmo.

As the intro to the truthdig piece says:

"This important new book tells the story of the world’s most famous prison from the perspective of the lawyers who toiled under notoriously difficult conditions on behalf of the detainees. In this excerpt, Baher Azmy tells the story of his client, who was held for years despite having been found by his captors to have no connection with terrorism."

Part of the article:

"The United States knows that Murat Kurnaz has no connection to terrorism and logged this fact no less than five times in his classified “file.” According to his file, the U.S. military itself concluded that “Kurnaz has no connection to al Qaeda, the Taliban or any terrorist threat,” and “the Germans have confirmed he has no connection to al Qaeda.” The government resisted for years permitting disclosure of this information, but as a result of a Freedom of Information Act litigation we brought on his behalf, it is now public and indisputable that as early as 2002, the United States recognized that Murat had nothing to do with terrorism. Yet it suppressed this information and continued to imprison him."

A photo [worth more than 1000 words] that says it all!

Anna Baltzer, author, and Haithem El-Zabri, founder of the Palestine Online Store in Texas

What? This is 2009?

Al Jazeera reports:

"The UN children's agency says one billion children around the world are still deprived of food, shelter, clean water and healthcare 20 years after the adoption of a treaty guaranteeing children's rights."

But wait! It's even worse than that as the article reveals:

"Veneman [UN's Executice Director] said it was unacceptable that more than 24,000 children under the age of five die every day from preventable causes such as pneumonia, malaria, measles and malnutrition.

About 200 million children are chronically malnourished, more than 140 million are forced to work, and millions of girls and boys of all ages are subjected to sexual violence, the report says.

It also estimates that up to 1.5 billion children experience violence annually."

Is this the sort of world we are prepared to accept? - where defenceless children face a life as detailed above.

Blindness to history

Whilst Obama still considers what do to in Afghanistan - that is, how many military to commit to the ever-growing disaster there - he might do well to read and reflect on this piece in Harper's Magazine "History Promises Disaster in Afghanistan for Blind America" by John R. MacArthur, publisher of the magazine.

"But first let’s restate the burning question: Why are we in Afghanistan? To start, we can dismiss the preposterous argument advanced by Obama’s most aggressive advisers about defending our country against “terrorism” in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda is nothing if not decentralized, and its adherents are still perfectly capable of attacking the United States from Canada, Boston, Hamburg, or Fort Hood. Anyway, terrorism, as Timothy McVeigh demonstrated in Oklahoma City, can originate with the nice young white man next door who shops at the gun store around the corner. “Fighting terrorism” in Afghanistan “to prevent another 9/11” simply isn’t a serious argument, and I suspect that even the deluded Gen. Stanley McChrystal understands that his men are shooting at indigenous Afghan rebels, not Osama bin Laden or his followers.

No, the more likely reason for killing all those people and wasting nearly $3.4 billion a month is an ugly mixture of vanity, misplaced pride, crass politics, and liberal self-righteousness. The Army still wants to prove it can defeat a guerrilla army and erase the shame of Vietnam. The politicians, Obama included, want to look warlike and tough, so they can’t be accused of being “soft on terror” in 2010. And then there are the civil servants and think-tank denizens known as “humanitarian interventionists”— now led by Hillary Clinton, who think that America’s “civilizing” mission in the world includes not only establishing “democracy” but also “freeing” Afghan women from being required to wear the burqa."

Iran: Protest with a spray-can

From France24:

"The most famous piece of Iranian graffiti is probably the deathly Statue of Liberty painted on the wall of the former US Embassy in Tehran. There's far more to street art than anti-American paintings however, and in the past two years, it's become more popular than ever."

Farhad Roozbeh (not his real name) is a graffiti artist from Tehran. He wishes to remain anonymous. He writes [and go here to view more graffiti]

"They are no legal surfaces to graffiti on in Tehran. Even if the owner of a house wanted an artist to paint the outdoor wall of his property, the police would be sent round to warn them that it's forbidden and the city council would then remove the painting. It's not about making the city look clean, it's about controlling it.

The police don't pay any more attention to street artists than they do other artists. Besides there are very few of us and we draw in secluded places; we're not in it for the fame. They haven't found a particular way to catch us yet. However, like other cultural ‘crimes', graffiti is considered a dissident activity. A graffiti artist caught by the police is sentenced in the same way as a political activist. Journalists, graphic designers; we all risk being imprisoned for what they call ‘the security of the nation'.

Many people here have taken up graffiti in the past two years. There are street artists as young as 12 in Tehran. I think that Farsi websites like irangraffiti.blogspot.com and kolahstudio.com are helping to promote graffiti and advise budding artists. We are influenced a lot by foreign styles - especially from the West. But we also try to inject a bit of eastern flare into our design".

Rogue or rouge woman?

Leaving to one side the 2 books to have hit the US bookstores these last days - Sarah Palin's Going Rogue and The Nation's Going Rouge: An American Nightmare - by all accounts the hype surrounding the woman has been extra-ordinary. She is being touted as the leader of the GOP and 2012 presidential candidate.

Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish on The Atlantic says this:

"This is only the second time in its nearly ten-year history that the Dish has gone silent. The reason now is the same as the reason then. When dealing with a delusional fantasist like Sarah Palin, it takes time to absorb and make sense of the various competing narratives that she tells about her life. There are so many fabrications and delusions in the book, mixed in with facts, that just making sense of it - and comparing it with objective reality as we know it, and the subjective reality she has previously provided - is a bewildering task. She is a deeply disturbed person which makes this work of fiction and fact all the more challenging to read. And the fact that she is now the leader of the Republican party and a potential presidential candidate, makes this process of deconstruction an important civil responsibility. We take this seriously as we always have. We want to be fair to her, and to her family, and to the innocent people she has brought into the spotlight. And we are not reporters. We are merely analysts trying to make sense of evidence already in the public domain, evidence that points in all sorts of directions, only one of which can be true.

Since the Dish has tried to be rigorous and careful in analyzing Palin's unhinged grip on reality from the very beginning - specifically her fantastic story of her fifth pregnancy - we feel it's vital that we grapple with this new data as fairly and as rigorously as possible. That takes time to get right. And it is so complicated we simply cannot focus on anything else."

Contrast this with The Guardian's report of Palin's attendance at a book-signing:

"In launching one of the most remarkable book tours in American political and publishing history, Palin is becoming a dizzying mix of celebrity and politician. Her folksy blend of right-wing rhetoric, uber-patriotism and winning smile is as heady a brew as ever for those millions – and they do number in the millions – of Americans for whom she is a hero.

For them Palin is not a liberal media joke or a stumbling backwoods politician who fluffed her chance at the big time. She is a truth-teller and their last best hope against the encroaching horrors of socialism. She is St Sarah of American Capitalism.

Nothing else could explain the utter devotion and enthusiasm of the thousands of people (almost all of them white) who showed up at the first stop of Palin's 14-state, three-week tour of the American heartland.

They queued for 24 hours just to be first in line, bringing tents and camp chairs to a gigantic mall on Grand Rapids' outskirts.

They braved rain and cold for Palin's signature on a book and an estimated 5 seconds each of face-time with their idol."

"Final nail in the coffin"

The talk of "settlements" in Israel and the West Bank conjures up a picture of an outpost of a few houses, perhaps even shacks, and an odd collection of caravans in the like.

Well, the above is a so-called "settlement" - Gilo, now the centre of controversy as Israel announces that a further 900 homes will be built in Gilo.

The Israeli PM snubs his nose at the world and says the plans will proceed. Well they might - who is going to stop Israel? - but the peace process now seems dead and buried, as Press TV reports:

"Former Palestinian prime minister Ahmed Qureia calls Israel's plan to build more housing units in Gilo the “final nail in the peace process' coffin”.

"This proves that the international community must realize that our statements regarding the collapse of the two-state solution are not slogans," Qureia urged.

On Tuesday, Israel announced plans to construct 900 homes in Gilo, one of a dozen settlements in the illegally annexed East Jerusalem (Al-Quds) in the occupied West Bank.

Qureia, a member of the Palestinian Liberation Organization's Executive Committee, warned the failed peace process would bring about "an eternal conflict that will lead the region and the entire world towards instability."

The Israeli move came under fire from the international community for complicating the already stalled Middle East peace negotiations and putting a kibosh on international peace efforts.

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said the controversial decision clearly illustrated "why hopes for salvaging two-state solution and restarting genuine negotiations are rapidly fading, and why Israel is not a partner for peace."

Now it's cyberware to contend with

Be scared.....for if this report in the SMH is correct, then we are confronted with a new dimension of conflict between nations.

"Warning of a "cyber arms race," top web security firm McAfee says that China, France, Israel, Russia and the United States have developed cyber weapons.

"McAfee began to warn of the global cyber arms race more than two years ago, but now we're seeing increasing evidence that it's become real," said Dave DeWalt, president and chief executive of McAfee on Tuesday.

"Several nations around the world are actively engaged in cyber-war-like preparations and attacks," he said. "Today, the weapons are not nuclear, but virtual, and everyone must adapt to these threats."

The Santa Clara, California-based McAfee, in its fifth annual Virtual Criminology Report, said China, France, Israel, Russia and the United States were countries that have developed "advanced offensive cyber capabilities."

McAfee said cyber attacks were on the rise and "cyber warfare is a reality."

The warning couldn't be more dire

A Spanish reservoir suffers from drought

All the signs are that the upcoming Climate Change conference in Copenhagen isn't going to achieve any positive outcomes - other than be one big talk-fest and photo op for the politicians attending. Looks like they are "doing" something when precisely the opposite is the case!

The attendees need to read the dire state in which the world finds itself - as The Independent reports in "World on course for catastrophic 6° rise, reveal scientists":

"The world is now firmly on course for the worst-case scenario in terms of climate change, with average global temperatures rising by up to 6C by the end of the century, leading scientists said yesterday. Such a rise – which would be much higher nearer the poles – would have cataclysmic and irreversible consequences for the Earth, making large parts of the planet uninhabitable and threatening the basis of human civilisation.

We are headed for it, the scientists said, because the carbon dioxide emissions from industry, transport and deforestation which are responsible for warming the atmosphere have increased dramatically since 2002, in a way which no one anticipated, and are now running at treble the annual rate of the 1990s.

This means that the most extreme scenario envisaged in the last report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published in 2007, is now the one for which society is set, according to the 31 researchers from seven countries involved in the Global Carbon Project."




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Not as rich as some would have us believe

The US is often touted as the richest country in the world. Of course it ignores the realities. For instance, the US is mightily indebted to the Chinese. So when Obama sits down with the Chinese during his present visit there, it is they who can, and doubtlessly will, call the shots.

And then there are America's hungry. An indictment on a a country with such abundance of wealth. Crikey explains in this piece:

"For all the talk of a recovery in the US economy, the rebounding financial markets (with Wall Street at 13-month highs overnight), gold at record highs, and a rise in October retail sales, a grim reality has been outlined in Washington for all the world to see.

America can't feed all its 303 million people, with one in seven going short at some stage in a week.

The country's agricultural department reckons 49 million Americans struggle to get enough to eat, the highest reading in an annual survey in the 14 years it has been conducted.

And the figure probably understates the problem because the survey was done at the end of 2008 when unemployment was starting to accelerate and was a long way from the current reading of 10.2% (about 15.7 million) out of work.

America's underemployment rate is a nasty 17.5%, or more than 25 million people.

About 36 million people are estimated to be on food stamps, and yet there looks like there's another 13 million or more who are unable to get enough food to eat and who are beyond government help.

Details of the survey were in the USDA's annual report was based on a survey conducted in December 2008, soon after financial markets slumped.

The report said that about 14.6% of US households, equal to 49.1 million people, "had difficulty obtaining food for all their members due to a lack of resources" during 2008, up 3.5 percentage points from 2007 when 11.1% of households were classified as food insecure.

About 5.7% of households, or 17.3 million people, had "very low food security," meaning some members of the household had to eat less. Typically, food runs short in those households for a few days in seven or eight months of the year, USDA said.

During a briefing last week, a senior Wal-Mart executive said his company had noticed people lining up at some of its stores at midnight on the night before federal food aid or state unemployment benefits were due to be paid into their bank accounts. He said these people entered the stores soon after midnight and started buying food and other goods in bulk when they had confirmed the money was in their accounts.

The executive said that anecdotally, the company had discovered that many of its poorer customers went without meals in the days approaching the payment of benefits to make their meagre resources last.

The department said this year's report also revealed "that one third of food-insecure households had very low food security (food intake of some household members was reduced and their eating patterns disrupted at times during the year). This is 5.7% of all US households or about 6.7 million. This is up from 4.7 million households (4.1%) in 2007, and the highest level observed since nationally representative food security surveys were initiated in 1995.

"Even when resources are inadequate to provide food for the entire family, children are usually shielded from the disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake that characterise very low food security. However, children as well as adults experienced instances of very low food security in 506,000 households (1.3% of households with children) in 2008, up from 323,000 households (0.8% of households with children) in 2007."

She's [that's Sarah Palin] back

There is no denying that the woman has guts - even if little evident brain! Now on the circuit promoting a book of hers to be released this week, Sarah Palin has been hard at it making her usual uninformed and inflammatory statements.

Max Blumental, writing on TomDispatch in " The Palin Effect: How Sarah Palin Made Herself Indispensable While Destroying the Republican Party" provides a background to the woman and her re-emergence on the American political scene:

"Sarah Palin's heavily publicized book tour begins in earnest this Monday, but weeks before, her ghostwritten memoir, Going Rogue: An American Life, had already vaulted into the number one position at Amazon. Warming up for a tour that will take her across Middle America in a bus, Palin tested her lines in a November 7th speech before a crowd of 5,000 anti-abortion activists in Wisconsin. She promptly cited an urban legend as a "disturbing trend," claiming the Treasury Department had moved the phrase "In God We Trust" from presidential dollar coins. (The rumor most likely originated with a 2006 story on the far-right website WorldNetDaily.)

In fact, a suggested alteration in its position on the coin was shot down in 2007 after pressure from Democratic Senator Robert Byrd. Nonetheless, Palin did not hesitate to take up this "controversy," however false, since it conveniently pits a tyrannical, God-destroying, secular big government against humble God-fearing folk. In doing so, of course, she presented herself as this nation's leading defender of the faith.

In a Republican Party hoping to rebound in 2010 on the strength of a newly energized and ideologically aroused conservative grassroots, Palin's influence is now unparalleled. Through her Facebook page, she was the one who pushed the rumor of "death panels" into the national healthcare debate, prompting the White House to issue a series of defensive responses. Unfazed by its absurdity, she repeated the charge in her recent speech in Wisconsin. In a special congressional election in New York's 23rd congressional district, Palin's endorsement of Doug Hoffman, an unknown far-right third-party candidate, helped force a popular moderate Republican politician, Dede Scozzafava, from the race. In the end, Palin's ideological purge in upstate New York led to an improbable Democratic victory, the first in that GOP-heavy district in more than 100 years."

Justice? Not so fast!

The US Attorney-General has attracted both praise and severe criticism for his decision to prosecute the 9/11 offenders in New York rather than at Gitmo. Open justice you might think! Yes, but there is a fly in the ointment in all of this - as Glenn Greenwald, lawyer and blogger for Salon explains in his piece "Detainees to get the "state-always-wins" system of "justice":

"The problem is that this decision does not stand alone. Instead, it is accompanied by this:

'Holder will also announce that a major suspect in the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, will face justice before a military commission, as will a handful of other detainees to be identified at the same announcement, the official said.

It was not immediately clear where commission-bound detainees like al-Nashiri might be sent, but a military brig in South Carolina has been high on the list of considered sites.'

So what we have here is not an announcement that all terrorism suspects are entitled to real trials in a real American court. Instead, what we have is a multi-tiered justice system, where only certain individuals are entitled to real trials: namely, those whom the Government is convinced ahead of time it can convict. Others for whom conviction is less certain will be accorded lesser due process: put in military commissions, to which most leading Democrats vehemently objected when created under Bush. Presumably, others still -- those who the Government believes cannot be convicted in either forum, will simply be held indefinitely with no charges, a power the administration recently announced it intends to preserve based on the same theories used by Bush/Cheney to claim that power.

A system of justice which accords you varying levels of due process based on the certainty that you'll get just enough to be convicted isn't a justice system at all. It's a rigged game of show trials."

Peace process? - and meaningless gestures

Stephen Walt, professor of international relations at Harvard, writing on his blog on FP, reflects on the ever-growing stalemate which is said to be the peace-process in the Middle East. Indeed, the so-called two-State solution may also be dead in the water!

"The second problem, I fear, is that it is too little, too late. Having dithered, delayed and dissembled ever since the Oslo Accords -- while the number of settlers more than doubled -- we are about to face an entirely different problem. The sun is now setting on the "two-state solution" -- if it is not already well below the horizon -- and pretty soon everyone will have to admit that they are sitting around in the dark and pretending they see daylight.

Be careful what you wish for. Israel is going to get what it has long sought: permanent control of the West Bank (along with de facto control over Gaza). The Palestinian Authority is increasingly irrelevant and may soon collapse, General Keith Dayton's mission to train reliable and professional Palestinian security forces will end, and Israel will once again have full responsibility for some 5.2 million Palestinian Arabs under its control. And the issue will gradually shift from the creation of a viable Palestinian state -- which was the central idea behind the Oslo process and the subsequent "Road Map" -- to a struggle for civil and political rights within an Israel that controls all of mandate Palestine. And on what basis could the United States oppose such a campaign, without explicitly betraying its own core values?"

Another devastating [and disgraceful] Wall

From The Electronic Intafada's piece "Palestinians symbolically dismantle sections of the wall" :

"Tear down this wall!" then US President Ronald Reagan told Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987, demanding he tear down the infamous Berlin wall. Two years later, on 9 November 1989, media around the world broadcast images of crowds of Germans from both the east and the west climbing atop the barrier and tearing down large sections of the wall. For many, the event was highly symbolic as it was perceived as the end of the Cold War and the start of a period when the world was headed in a more just and peaceful direction, free of walls keeping peoples apart.

However, two decades later, walls of separation still exist throughout the world. Israel's wall in the West Bank is much bigger than the Berlin wall ever was, as it encloses more than two million Palestinians inside the occupied West Bank. This wall separates Palestinians from their families, land, natural resources and communities.

In a symbolic action, the protestors in Nilin on 6 November were able to knock down a section of the wall before the Israeli army arrived and fired tear gas at the crowd."

As Obama considers......

Credited to cartoonist Mike Luckovich

Who's calling the shots here?

Who says there isn't an Israel Lobby? - or at the very least a very well-organised group of Jews who exert significant influence and power far in excess of their numbers.

Paul Craig Roberts takes up the issue - including asking who calls the shots between the US and Israel - in a piece in Information Clearing House:

"It did not take the Israel Lobby long to make mincemeat out of the Obama administration’s “no new settlements” position. Israeli prime minister Netanyahu is bragging about Israel’s latest victory over the US government as Israel continues to build illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land.

In May President Obama read the Israelis the riot act, telling the Israeli government that he was serious about ending the Israeli conflict with the Palestinians and that a lasting peace agreement required the Israeli government to abandon all construction of new settlements in the occupied West Bank.

On November 10 Obama’s White House chief of staff, Rahm Israel Emanuel, surrendered for his boss at the annual conference of the United Jewish Communities. The ongoing Israeli settlements, he said, should not be a “distraction” to a peace agreement.

Allegedly, the US is a superpower and Israel is a client state whose very existence depends entirely on US military and economic aid and diplomatic protection. Yet, in the real world it works the other way. Israel is the superpower and the US is its client state."

All too true.....

Credit to Larry Wright in The Detroit News

What an Indictment of the World!

CommonDreams republishes a piece from AP which is astounding. That in this day and age some 200 children in the world have stunted growth because they don't have enough to eat. And this in a world in which many, many countries spend untold billions just on military hardware alone.

"Nearly 200 million children in poor countries have stunted growth because they don't get enough to eat, according to a new report published Wednesday by UNICEF.

The vast majority are in Asia and Africa: more than 90 percent of children with stunted growth live on those two continents.

"Unless attention is paid to addressing the causes of child and maternal undernutrition today, the costs will be considerably higher tomorrow," said UNICEF executive director Ann M. Veneman in a statement.

More than a third of all deaths in children under five are linked to undernutrition, according to UNICEF. Children with nutritional deficiencies often lack the strength to fight off diseases and complications.

But little money has gone into ensuring kids in the developing world get enough food, compared to high-profile problems like AIDS. Though AIDS causes about 2 percent of all child deaths, it gets more than 20 cents of every dollar spent on public health."

Juveniles in jail...never to be released

The American justice "system" is quite astonishing.....

AlterNet, in a piece "Hard to Believe: 73 U.S. Kids Sentenced to Life Without Parole at 14 or Younger, and All Are Black" lays out some difficult facts to accept - in a country which prides itself as civilised.

"Today, Sullivan is one of some 109 prisoners in the country whose non-homicide crimes have condemned them to leave prison only in a coffin. No fewer than 76 of those prisoners are behind bars in Florida. (Until last month there were 77, but 29-year-old Travis Underhill, sentenced to life in 1999 for armed robbery, "collapsed while playing basketball at a Palm Beach County prison on Oct. 8 and died," according to the Miami Herald.) The vast majority -- 84 percent, in Florida -- are African American. On a national level, according to Human Rights Watch, African American youths are serving life without parole at a rate of about 10 times that of white youths."

Read the complete piece here - especially the facts surrounding the jailed Sullivan referred to above.

Stalled Justice

One can only continue to shake one's head at certain aspects of the so-called American justice system. The prosecutors ambitions as against the injustice of a person, seemingly innocent, who has spent 31 years in jail.

Read this editorial from The Nation, in full. The beginning of the piece sets the scene:

"In Texas and Illinois, recent controversies have exposed our broken criminal justice system. Mounting evidence indicates that Texas Governor Rick Perry ordered the wrongful execution of Cameron Todd Willingham in 2004 and has subsequently tried to cover up the details of the case, recently dismissing three experts on the state's Forensic Science Commission forty-eight hours before they were set to examine the evidence. Willingham's case has rightly generated national headlines, and another case of prosecutorial overreach is unfolding in Illinois.

On the evening of September 15, 1978, a white security guard named Donald Lundahl was murdered in a robbery gone awry in a racially fraught southern suburb of Chicago. Police fingered Anthony McKinney, an 18-year-old African-American with no criminal record, as the killer. The prosecution sought death by lethal injection; the judge sentenced McKinney to life in prison.

McKinney has long maintained his innocence. Based on newly uncovered evidence, there's strong reason to believe that he has spent thirty-one years in prison for a crime he did not commit.

When it comes to capital punishment, Illinois differs from Texas in one important respect: in 2000 the Land of Lincoln's Republican governor, George Ryan, issued a moratorium on the death penalty, and in 2003 he granted clemency to all death-row inmates. Ryan announced his decision at Northwestern University, citing the work of Northwestern journalism professor David Protess and his students at the Medill School of Journalism, who had uncovered evidence that helped free five wrongly convicted men from death row.

In 2003 Protess and his students began examining McKinney's case. Over three years of painstaking reporting, they unearthed startling new evidence: the prosecution's two main witnesses, 15 and 18 at the time of the trial, recanted their testimony during interviews with the students, claiming they were beaten by the police and intimidated into doctoring the facts; McKinney alleged that he was beaten with a pipe by a detective with a history of police brutality before signing a sham confession; TV logs proved that both witnesses were watching a boxing match at the time of the shooting and thus could not have seen the murder; an ex-gang member, Anthony Drake, confessed on tape to being at the murder scene, named two perpetrators and said McKinney was not involved; current and former residents of the neighborhood confirmed they heard Drake and two other suspects confess to Lundahl's murder."

From here onwards things went downhill......and read it here.

So that is where the scammers are?

Have you, like everyone else with a computer, received spam and lots of scam emails? More importantly, have you wondered where the scammers got your email from? Think no longer, for all is revealed in this piece "Digital Dumping and the Global ‘E-Cycling’ Scam" on truthdig:

"The next time you get a scam mail from Nigeria, don’t ask me how the scammer got your information, especially if you don’t know where your old PC is. Yes, the one you gave to a recycler or dropped off with a charity for a tax deduction after “erasing” your data. It turns out that erasing data or reformatting your hard disk does not completely eliminate data.

The Basel Action Network (BAN), a group that monitors the movement of electronic waste around the world, gathered hard-drive memory devices from old computers exported to Nigeria and had them analyzed by forensic data recovery experts. What did it find? It found personal e-mail correspondence, country reports, business letters, banking information, databases, personal letters discussing private legal matters, resumés, disciplinary letters and other cans of worms—all from computers that have been discarded by their owners.

BAN attests that “while many people assume that recyclers will clean their hard drives of data before sending them to reuse facilities, many of the hard drives recovered from computers in Lagos contained a great deal of confidential information.”

About 20 million computers are discarded in the United States annually. The federal government alone disposes of 10,000 computers weekly. The advent of flat-screen monitors and digital technology in televisions and advancements in practically every type of consumer electronics device certainly translates into an increase in e-waste generation.

And have you ever wondered where the discarded equipment goes? “We may think we are doing the right thing by giving our old electronics to a recycler or a free collection event,” says Sarah Westerville, BAN’s e-Stewardship program director. “But many of those businesses calling themselves recyclers are little more than international waste distributors. They take your electronic items for free, or pocket your recycling fee, and then simply load them onto a sea-going container, and ship them to China, India or Nigeria.”

All power to the 'netizens

They is no denying that the internet can be a force for good. Yes, there are regimes which clamp down, severely, on bloggers [read an excellent book on the subject, The Blogging Revolution, by Antony Loewenstein (MUP)] but those committed to harness the power of the internet find ways around restrictions on them.

The Washington Post reports in "China's 'netizens' hold authorities to new standard"

"A severed finger sparked an online uproar that went viral. And very quickly, rattled authorities here took note.

The story of Sun Zhongjie, a 19-year-old driver who chopped off his finger to decry police entrapment, shows how the Internet has become an effective tool of public protest in this tightly controlled country.

Almost every form of open dissent is outlawed in China, but mass protests organized online are increasingly putting pressure on police, judges and other officials -- and getting results.

Last June in Hubei province, an online campaign by netizens, as they are popularly called here, helped free a 22-year-old waitress arrested for killing a local official in what appeared to be a clear case of self-defense. In Nanjing, a top official was expelled from the Communist Party and jailed after angry netizens posted photos online of him smoking expensive cigarettes, sporting a pricey watch and driving a Cadillac.

Across the country, online petition drives and surveys have prompted police to reopen closed cases, authorities to cancel unpopular development projects and the party's national leadership to fire corrupt local officials.

In the view of academic experts, lawyers, bloggers and others here, the Internet is introducing a new measure of public accountability and civic action into China's closed and opaque political system."

What about Afghanistan's women

When the Taliban ruled in Afghanistan, the position of the country's women was dire, to say the least.

And now? Improved but not looking all that good as things go from bad to worse in the war-torn country. truthout reports:

"If we abandon the country, or even the countryside, don't we abandon those girls who have gone to school even when risking acid thrown in their eyes? If we prop up the deeply corrupt government of President Hamid Karzai, are we just supporting warlord fundamentalists instead of Taliban fundamentalists?

The options are so chilling that even Afghan women's groups are divided. RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, wants us out. WAW, the Women for Afghan Women, "deeply regrets having a position in favor of maintaining, even increasing troops" rather than "abandoning 15 million women and children to madmen."

And:

"We barely noticed when Karzai signed a law that would have, among other things, allowed Shiite men to withhold food from wives who refused sex. It didn't take a rigged election to show a shallow respect for democracy. If by democracy, that is, you include half the population that is female.

Today, one-third of the students are girls. Women now get health care once denied them. Is that enough? How much are we willing to pay in lives and treasure for hope? How much are we willing to lose in moral suasion, in our own eyes and those of the world, if we abandon these women?

I find this a bleak and demoralizing set of choices. The least unbearable may be to protect the population centers while rebuilding Afghan civil society, one city, one school, one health center at a time. But this works only if we include women in a debate that has been as militarized as war itself.

Afghan women are not the "add-on," the incidentals in this process. Women are civil society. We've learned all over the world that the only way to develop a stable society and economy is with the education and inclusion of women. There is no democracy without women.

So, here we go. This is our last chance. And theirs."

Hilary speaks.....and the actions are the opposite

"We owe it to ourselves and to those who yearn for the same freedoms that are enjoyed and even taken for granted in Berlin today. And we need to form an even stronger partnership to bring down the walls of the 21st century and to confront those who hide behind them - the suicide bombers, those who murder and maim girls whose only wish is to go to school, leaders who chose their own fortunes over the fortunes of their people."

And:

"European countries have been leaders in addressing the economic and social development challenges of the world. We need to continue our work on an economic recovery. And we need to continue to promote democracy and human rights beyond freedom's current frontiers, so that citizens everywhere are afforded the opportunity to pursue their dreams and live up to their own God-given potential".

The words of Hilary Clinton speaking at a NATO commemoration of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Reflect on Clinton's words and how hollow they are when considering US foreign policy and lack of action to protect and advance the human rights of people around the world. Exhibit #1! The failure of the Americans to see to the welfare of Gazans or the rights of Palestinians in the West Bank. And then there is the dividing wall between the two Koreas.......

Say no more!

Credit to Pat Oliphant in The New York Times

And you call this decent or civilised?

How this is to be seen as civilised, humane or even sensible is hard to fathom. As for Israel's conduct in all of this, the less said..........

It is "interesting" to reflect on the previous posting - in relation to the Berlin Wall - and how 20 years on we still witness a wall, this one even worse than the Berlin one.

The Berlin Wall: 20 Years Later

The New York Times, here, has an interesting collection of articles and montages, via photos, of the fall of the Berlin Wall, what it was like at the time it came down and how it has all played out since.

Over at Spiegel OnLine International, here, a different perspective on the significant event, including an interview with Lech Wasela.

Reality as against image

Israel is forever promoting its army as the "most moral in the world". It also pushes a line of being a democratic - indeed, the only one in the Middle East - nation for all its citizens. Why, look, we even have Arab members of the Knesset!

Not so quick! No lesser entity than the US State Department has found that Israel is not, in fact, a tolerant country. Haaretz reports:

"Israel dismally fails the requirements of a tolerant pluralistic society, according to a new report from the U.S. State Department.

Despite boasting religious freedom and protection of all holy sites, Israel falls short in tolerance toward minorities, equal treatment of ethnic groups, openness toward various streams within society, and respect for holy and other sites.

The comprehensive report, written by the State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, says Israel discriminates against groups including Muslims, Jehova's Witnesses, Reform Jews, Christians, women and Bedouin."

Meanwhile, Jimmy Carter, writing in The NY Times, calls on Israel to show humanity towards the ever-continuing suffering people of Gaza:

".....it is important to examine present circumstances and the need to prevent further suffering. The rocket fire from Gaza is now being severely restrained, perhaps because of the certainty of Israeli retaliation, but the punishment of the 1.5 million Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza continues. Now and for the past 10 months, Israel has not permitted cement, lumber, panes of glass, or other building materials to pass their entry points into Gaza. Several hundred thousand homeless people suffered through last winter in a few tents, under plastic sheets, or huddled in caves dug into the debris of their former homes. The weather was warmer when I was there several months later, but the description of suffering through the winter cold was heartbreaking."

Robert Fisk: America is performing its familiar role of propping up a dictator

Almost to a man, those in know - principally commentators and even military people - are writing Afghanistan off. It's a disaster, on many levels, now often compared to what ended up as the debacle in Vietnam.

Veteran Middle East observer, commentator, author and journalist Robert Fisk, in his latest piece for The Independent, comments on the "election" of President Karzei:

"Could there be a more accurate description of the Obama-Brown message of congratulations to the fraudulently elected Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan? First the Palestinians held fair elections in 2006, voted for Hamas and were brutally punished for it – they still are – and then the Iranians held fraudulent elections in June which put back the weird Mahmoud Ahmadinejad whom everyone outside Iran (and a lot inside) regard as a dictator. But now we have the venal, corrupt, sectarian Karzai in power after a poll far more ambitiously rigged than the Iranian version, and – yup, we love him dearly and accept his totally fraudulent election."

Over at FP John Mearsheimer writes about the position the US finds itself in relation to Afghanistan:

"The real tragedy of Vietnam is not that the United States lost, but that it became involved in the first place. It pains me to say this as someone who served in the American military from 1965 to 1975, but the anti-war movement was right: It did not matter to U.S. security whether North Vietnam conquered the south and unified that country under communist rule. More than 58,000 American soldiers and more than 2 million Vietnamese died in an unnecessary and foolish war.

A similar logic applies today with regard to Afghanistan. The Republicans and General McChrystal claim that it is absolutely necessary to win the war in Afghanistan for the simple reason that a Taliban victory will allow al Qaeda to re-establish a sanctuary in Afghanistan. And we all know what happened the last time Osama bin Laden was free to scheme and plot against the United States from Afghanistan: September 11. The fatal flaw in this argument is that al Qaeda has a sanctuary next door in Pakistan from which it has been operating since it was driven out of Afghanistan in Dec. 2001. It does not need a sanctuary in Afghanistan. Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who helped General McChrystal formulate his strategy for Afghanistan, recently told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Pakistan is "superior in important ways to Afghanistan" because it is "richer and far better connected to the outside world than is primitive, land-locked Afghanistan with its minimal communications and transportation systems."

Losing goodwill....fast!

On assuming office Obama seemed to offer hope of a US open to viewing the world differently to that of George Bush. The much heralded so-called Cairo speech also offered a perspective on the ever-current Middle East crisis welcomed in Arab countries.

All too sadly Obama is doing a great job in evaporating that goodwill. Exhibit #1 is Secretary of State's absurd statement in Jerusalem the other day lauding the Israelis for taking unprecedented limits on building settlements.

Writing in FP Mark Lynch puts the ever-diminishing US opportunities in the Arab world this way:

"Obama’s window is closing. Arab audiences see Guantanamo still open (including in an endlessly repeating al-Jazeera promo), US troops escalating in Afghanistan, Gaza still blockaded, and no settlement freeze or peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. They have seen little follow-up on the ground on the Cairo address (regardless of what’s been cooking secretly in Washington). A narrative is clearly hardening that Obama has not delivered on his promises, and that he hasn’t really changed American policies despite his personal appeal. U.S. officials may complain that this is unfair, that it’s only been four months since Cairo, that they are preparing a lot of programs… but the world isn’t fair. This window isn’t closed yet, but it’s closing fast and opinions appear to be hardening. I don’t think that the risk here is that al-Qaeda will take advantage of it, given its weakened state — in fact, Secretary Gates made an uncharacteristic mistake when he lapsed back to the Bush-era argument that we had to win in Afghanistan because otherwise al-Qaeda would capitalize. It’s more that the mobilized Arab and Muslim publics which Obama hoped to win over will be lost."

Opium, Rape and the American Way

"The warlords we champion in Afghanistan are as venal, as opposed to the rights of women and basic democratic freedoms, and as heavily involved in opium trafficking as the Taliban. The moral lines we draw between us and our adversaries are fictional. The uplifting narratives used to justify the war in Afghanistan are pathetic attempts to redeem acts of senseless brutality. War cannot be waged to instill any virtue, including democracy or the liberation of women. War always empowers those who have a penchant for violence and access to weapons. War turns the moral order upside down and abolishes all discussions of human rights. War banishes the just and the decent to the margins of society. And the weapons of war do not separate the innocent and the damned. An aerial drone is our version of an improvised explosive device. An iron fragmentation bomb is our answer to a suicide bomb. A burst from a belt-fed machine gun causes the same terror and bloodshed among civilians no matter who pulls the trigger."

So begins what can only be described as a depressing and troubling piece "Opium, Rape and the American Way" by Chris Hedges on truthdig. Read the full piece here.

It was more than a Wall

Next week sees the 20th anniversary of the downfall of the Berlin Wall. It's more than ironic that 9th November is not only the anniversary of the Wall coming down but also the 61st anniversary of Germany's infamous Kristalnacht.

Mary Dejevsky, writing an op-ed piece "Remember the Berlin Wall – and not only how it fell" in The Independent, rightly reflects on that was more than just the Wall coming down:

"This time next week Berlin will be suffering a hangover second only to the one that followed the collapse of the Wall 20 years ago. Even though a whole generation has now grown up across Europe with no first-hand memory of the dismembered city and the divided country that surrounded it, the scenes from 9 November, 1989, are lived and relived as the defining images of the end of the Cold War.

It is not just that this was one of the first events to be broadcast worldwide, in the earliest days of live 24-hour television, from anywhere – although it was. It was the sheer, undiluted ecstasy of the occasion. The Berlin Wall was demolished euphorically, spontaneously, almost by accident. A barrier that had taken years to build was torn down in hours with pick-axes brought from home, and bare hands. And the spell was broken that had kept 17 million Germans, and much of the eastern part of Europe, in thrall for almost half a century.

While there is no risk that the memory of this euphoric night will soon fade – especially not while the successive anniversaries of 1989 are still celebrated – the memory of the strange and cruel years that preceded it is vanishing all too fast. Not just in Germany, east and west, but right across what used to be called the Eastern bloc, the experience of repression and occupation is being consigned to an artistic world of fiction and film that is becoming unreal even to those who endured it.

Three years ago, the German film The Lives of Others came close to capturing the claustrophobia and paranoia of those years, while drawing criticism for the narrowness of the social milieu it depicted. A year later, the Romanian film 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days drew in harrowing detail a small picture of Ceausescu's Romania, through the experience of a student seeking a banned abortion. And last year Andrzej Wajda's epic, Katyn, exposed what happens when a country is forced by the dominating power to live a lie, and how that lie determines everything."

Mammals are facing extinction

If there was ever a wake-up call that the world needs to do something, urgently, to protect our endangered mammals, this piece from the TimesOnLine, reporting on the "Red List" of endangered species, makes for sober and compelling reading.

"A fifth of the world's known mammals, a third of amphibians and reptiles and more than two thirds of plants are threatened with extinction, according to the latest "Red List" of endangered species.

Some gorilla species are close to extinction, warns the International Union for Conservation of Nature. (Photograph: Guardian)Of the 5,490 mammal species that have been identified by scientists, 79 are extinct or extinct in the wild, 188 are critically endangered, 449 are endangered and 505 are classed as vulnerable, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) said.

The annual Red List, published today, also shows that 70 per cent of identified planets, 35 per cent of invertebrates, 37 per cent of freshwater fish, 30 per cent of amphibians, 28 per cent of reptiles and 12 per cent of birds are under threat. The survival of a total of 17,921 species is in jeopardy."

That's it! No argument!

It is hard not to be appalled at the statement below and the prospects of any sort of peace between the Palestinians and Israelis, let alone the future of Jerusalem.

Mainstream Australian television, on SBS Dateline, last Sunday night [Australian time] featured a portrait of Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in East Jerusalem. A Jewish settler summed up the attitude:

"We don’t care about what the world thinks about what our land is and what our land is not. Because we are a chosen nation and the world knows that, and God promised us Jerusalem."

The Goldstone Report: Why let facts get in the way?......

Surprise, surprise! The US Congress voted 344-36 to oppose the UN's initiated Goldstone Report on the Gaza War.

It is therefore more than heartening to read the speech of Congressman Brian Baird speaking against the resolution before the House. Read it here on Baird's web site. Baird could speak with some authority, as he points out, having been one of the few Congressmen to have actually been in Gaza:

"First, why are we bringing this resolution to the floor without ever giving former South African Constitutional Court Justice Richard Goldstone a hearing to explain his findings? Have those who will vote on H.Res. 867 actually read the resolution? Have they read the Goldstone report? Are they aware that Justice Goldstone has issued a paragraph by paragraph response, available on my Web site at www.baird.house.gov, to H.Res. 867 pointing out that many of its assertions are factually inaccurate or deeply misleading?

Since scarcely a dozen House Members have actually been to Gaza, what actual first-hand knowledge do the rest of the Members of Congress possess on which to base their judgment of the merits of H.Res. 867 or the Goldstone report?

What will it say about this Congress and our country if we so readily seek to block "any further consideration" of a human rights investigation produced by one of the most respected jurists in the world today, a man who led the investigations of abuses in South Africa, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Kosovo and worked to identify and prosecute Nazi war criminals as a member of the Panel of the Commission of Enquiry into the Activities of Nazism in Argentina?

As one of the first two American officials, along with Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), to enter Gaza shortly after the conclusion of major bombing from "Operation Cast Lead," then again several months later, I have seen firsthand the devastating destruction of hospitals, schools, homes, industries and infrastructure. Much of that devastation was wrought using U.S. manufactured and paid for weaponry. I have also spoken with health workers, average Gazans, NGO relief workers and many others."

My Father, the Terrorist

"Although I cannot simply order my heart to stop loving my father, I do not agree with his behavior. There are times that I feel my heart swell with anger at his actions, which have harmed many people, people he did not know, as well as members of his own family. As the son of Osama bin Laden, I am truly sorry for all the terrible things that have happened, the innocent lives that have been destroyed, the grief that still lingers in many hearts.

My father was not always a man who hated. My father was not always a man hated by others. There was a time when many people spoke of my father with the highest accolades. History shows that he was once loved by many people. Despite our differences, I am not ashamed to admit that I loved my father with the usual passion of a young boy for his father. In fact, when I was a young boy, I worshipped my father, whom I believed to be not only the most brilliant but also the tallest man in the world."

So writes the son of the now infamous Osama bin Laden in a piece "My Father, the Terrorist" in Vanity Fair. Read the piece, in full, here.

The disaster that is Afghanistan

The Independent's Middle East veteran reporter Patrick Cockburn reports in "Victory (for a crooked, corrupt and discredited government)" on the disaster which is Afghanistan:

"The election in Afghanistan has turned into a disaster for all who promoted it. Hamid Karzai has been declared re-elected as President of the country for the next five years though his allies inside and outside Afghanistan know that he owes his success to open fraud. Instead of increasing his government's legitimacy, the poll has further de-legitimised it.

From Mr Karzai's point of view he won through at the end and showed that nobody is strong enough to get rid of him. For the US President, Barack Obama, the election has no silver lining. It has left him poised to send tens of thousands more US troops to fight a war in defence of one of the world's most crooked, corrupt and discredited governments. "It is not that the Taliban is so strong, but the government is so weak," was a common saying among Afghans before the election. This will be even truer in future.

The US and its allies may now push for a national unity government between Mr Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah, his main rival for the presidency. This might look good on paper, or at least better than the alternative of Mr Karzai ruling alone. But enforced unity between men who detest each other will institutionalise divisions. Its value will largely be in terms of propaganda for external consumption."

Scotching the climate change sceptics / doubters

From the TimesOnLine:

"The snows of Mount Kilimanjaro will be gone within two decades, according to scientists who say that the rapid melting of its glacier cap over the past century provides dramatic physical evidence of global climate change.

If the forecast — based on 95 years of data tracking the retreat of the Kilimanjaro ice — proves correct it will be the first time in about 12,000 years that the slopes of Africa’s highest mountain have been ice-free.

Since 1912, 85 per cent of the glacier has disappeared and the melting does not appear to be slowing down. Twenty-six per cent of the ice has disappeared since 2000.

The study, published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concludes that the primary cause of the ice loss is the increase in global temperatures. Although changes in cloudiness and snowfall may also play a role, these factors appear to be less important. Even intense droughts, including one lasting about 300 years, did not cause the present degree of melting.

The study, based on terrestrial and satellite photographs, shows the shrinking contours of ice at points between 1912 and 2007. The 12 sq km (4.6 sq miles) of ice coverage in 1912 contracted to 1.9 sq km by 2007, going from two large ice fields to a collection of several smaller, isolated patches."

Six Questions for Desmond Travers on the Goldstone Report

As the US Congress is about to debate whether it ought to adopt a resolution in effect denouncing the UN initiated Goldstone Report on the Gaza War - why in heavens name the US ought to be involved in such a deplorable consideration, especially given the distortions of the report before members of Congress, God only knows! - perhaps some pertinent facts in relation to the Report are called for.

Desmond Travers was one of the four members of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, which produced the controversial Goldstone Report. Travers is a retired Colonel of the Army of the Irish Defence Forces. His last appointment was as Commandant of its Military College. He also served in command of troops with various UN and EU peace support missions.

Ken Silverstein, of Harper's Magazine, interviewed Travers with 6 important questions. Read the Q & A here.