Mahler's Prodigal Son

The arrest of Faisal Shahzad for planting the Times Square car bomb has forced America to confront the bloody conflict in Pakistan that inspired his actions. The West has ignored this war for too long , writes Patrick Cockburn in The Independent : "It has been a hidden war ignored by the outside world. Up to last week nobody paid much attention to the fighting in north-west Pakistan, though more soldiers and civilians have probably been dying there over the last year than in Iraq or Afghanistan. In reality, this corner of Pakistan along the Afghan border is the latest in a series of wars originally generated by the US response to 9/11. The first was the war in Afghanistan when the Taliban were overthrown in 2001, the second in Iraq after the invasion of 2003, and the third the renewed war in Afghanistan from about 2006. The fourth conflict is the present one in Pakistan and is as vicious as any of its predecessors, though so far the intensity of the violence has not been appreciat...

One might be forgiven in thinking that post Copenhagen - remember, the conference at the end of last year which seems to have ended up being a debacle? - that climate change is no longer an issue. What seems to have been a press problem, well-covered by the media, is now almost forgotten. Not so, amongst scientists and Salon . "On Friday the journal Science published a remarkable Lead Letter supporting the accuracy of climate science. The must-read statement, "Climate Change and the Integrity of Science," is signed by 255 of the world's leading scientists. It begins: We are deeply disturbed by the recent escalation of political assaults on scientists in general and on climate scientists in particular. The lead signer, Pacific Institute president Peter Gleick, notes in a HuffPost piece: It is hard to get 255 members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences to agree on pretty much anything, making the import of this letter even more substantial. The letter unders...

The Guardian reports on what, if true, reflects on the hollowness of Obama's seemingly feigned serious response to the disastrous BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico : "The Obama administration waived environmental reviews for 26 new offshore drilling projects even as the BP oil disaster spewed hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, environmental activists said today. The charge came as hopes for a quick fix to the Deepwater Horizon spill were dashed when a build-up of crystallised gas blocked pipes in a huge metal containment box that had been built to cap the well. Engineers are now considering a "junk shot", shooting a mix of debris – including shredded tires and golf balls – into the well at high pressure to clog it, said Thad Allen, a US coast guard commander. With the spill still unchecked and spreading to Alabama's beaches, there was renewed focus on oversight procedures that allowed BP and Transocean to drill without bac...

The parallels between the way Israel treats the Palestinians and Sri Lanka its Tamil community is uncanny. Then again, Israel has been "teaching" the Sri Lankans how to go about things. But, the world cannot allow the continuing denials and abrogation of rights meted out to Tamils to continue and their plight must be reported - as Roma Tearne writes in a piece in The Independent : "On the island of Sri Lanka, an important anniversary will soon be celebrated. 18 May is the day last year on which the war ended in a government "victory" over the Tamil forces of the LTTE. In a token gesture, to coincide with World Press Freedom Day, President Mahinda Rajapaksa has pardoned Tissainayagam, the journalist sentenced unlawfully to 20 years in jail. Although many other journalists languish in prison and 80,000 civilians in camps, the bloody years appear to be a memory – a memory discarded and ignored among the land mines, and the mass graves. There is another anni...

One can't be left with an impression other than Obama being really no different to George Shrub. But, Obama is supposed to be a lawyer, and law teacher, to boot. It is therefore more than troubling to read this report from Huffington Post how the Pentagon seeks to have at least some reporters barred from trials relating to Gitmo: "Jack Newfield, the legendary investigative reporter, once wrote that if government officials had their way, journalists would be "stenographers with amnesia." The "amnesia" part, at least, was generally considered a bit of an exaggeration. But now, the Pentagon has banned four reporters from covering the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, because they refused to forget something that had already been reported to the world. The four reporters were covering military commission hearings at which defense attorneys for Canadian detainee Omar Khadr argued that confessions he made as a gravely wounded 15-year-old shouldn...

Credited to Steve Nease, Ottawa