War: The Lie Goes On...

The lack of arms controls allows some to profit from the misery of others.

•While international attention is focused on the need to control weapons of mass destruction, the trade in conventional weapons continues to operate in a legal and moral vacuum.
•More and more countries are starting to produce small arms, many with little ability or will to regulate their use.
•Permanent UN Security Council members—the USA, UK, France, Russia, and China—dominate the world trade in arms.
•Most national arms controls are riddled with loopholes or barely enforced.
•Key weaknesses are lax controls on the brokering, licensed production, and 'end use' of arms.
•Arms get into the wrong hands through weak controls on firearm ownership, weapons management, and misuse by authorised users of weapons. http://www.globalissues.org/article/74/the-arms-trade-is-big-business

Noam Chomsky: On Israel´s Security Problems and the US Democratic Deficit (Amnesty Magazine, Sept. 2009)

Israel´s invasion of Gaza in January hadn´t the slightest pretext. They claim they had to defend themselves against rockets and that´s accepted by human rights groups and fairly generally, but it´s perfect nonsense ... You don´t have a right to use force in self-defense unless you´ve exhausted peaceful means. They refused even to try the peaceful means, which were easy enough. They could have accepted a ceasefire for the first time ever. When they partially accepted one for a few months in 2008 there were no Hamas rockets ...

They do not have a security problem, except for what they are creating ... Israel made a fateful decision in 1971: president Sadat of Egypt offered Israel a full peace treaty which would have ended the security problems - Egypt´s the only significant Arab military force - in return for a withdrawal from the Occupied territories. And all he cared about was the Sinai - there was nothing in the proposal about the Palestinians. Well Israel refused. They were settling the northeast Sinai, expelling thousands of Bedouins, destroying their villages, planning to build a huge seaport. They in fact chose expansion over security, and that continues to the present day. The one exception is the Taba, Egypt, negotiations in 2001, which they called off. OK, so long as they choose expansion over security, they´re going to a have a security problem.

The irrelevance of popular opinion in the US is quite dramatic. take the leading domestic issue right now, which is health care; it´s a catastrophe. The debate that´s going on is in fact surreal in many ways, not just Sarah Palin and the death panels, but there was a front-page story in the New York Times, reporting that the Obama administration had made a secret deal with the pharmaceutical industry in which it promised not to allow the government to use its purchasing power to negotiate drug prices, as is done in every other country and as, for example, the Pentagon can do for buying paper clips. But it´s legally barred in the United States and that´s the major reason why drug prices are twice as high as in most of the world. Obama promised secretly that we´re not going to tamper with this. About 85 percent of the population think we should negotiate drug prices - but they´re not even mentioned, inf act I don´t think you can even find a report of the polls. As long as you have this democratic deficit, it´s going to be hard to deal with the problems ... The US has some of the worst health outcomes in the industrial world, with twice the per capita expenditure. It´s pretty well understood how to relieve them ...but it´s not going to happen until the democratic deficit is overcome. The public wants it, but Congress and the White House don´t. AMNESTY MAGAZINE, SEPTEMBER 2009

Herschel Views Deep-space Pearls On A Cosmic String (ScienceDaily, Oct. 2, 2009; and ESA)

On Sept. 3, Herschel aimed its telescope at a reservoir of cold gas in the constellation of the Southern Cross near the Galactic Plane. As the telescope scanned the sky, the spacecraft’s Spectral and Photometric Imaging REceiver, SPIRE, and Photoconductor Array Camera and Spectrometer, PACS instruments snapped the pictures. The region is located about 60° from the Galactic Centre, thousands of light-years from Earth.

The five original infrared wavelengths have been colour-coded to allow scientists to differentiate extremely cold material (red) from the surrounding, slightly warmer stuff (blue).

The images reveal structure in cold material in our Galaxy, as we have never seen it before, and even before a detailed analysis, scientists have gleaned information on the quantity of the material, its mass, temperature, composition and whether it is collapsing to form new stars. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091002093801.htm

http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Herschel/SEMUABGNA0G_0.html

Charles Darwin film 'too controversial for religious America' (Telegraph.co.uk, 11.09.09)

By Anita Singh, Showbusiness Editor
Published: 4:53PM BST 11 Sep 2009

Creation, starring Paul Bettany, details Darwin's "struggle between faith and reason" as he wrote On The Origin of Species. It depicts him as a man who loses faith in God following the death of his beloved 10-year-old daughter, Annie.

The film was chosen to open the Toronto Film Festival and has its British premiere on Sunday. It has been sold in almost every territory around the world, from Australia to Scandinavia.

However, US distributors have resolutely passed on a film which will prove hugely divisive in a country where, according to a Gallup poll conducted in February, only 39 per cent of Americans believe in the theory of evolution.

The film has sparked fierce debate on US Christian websites, with a typical comment dismissing evolution as "a silly theory with a serious lack of evidence to support it despite over a century of trying".

Jeremy Thomas, the Oscar-winning producer of Creation, said he was astonished that such attitudes exist 150 years after On The Origin of Species was published.

"That's what we're up against. In 2009. It's amazing," he said.

"The film has no distributor in America. It has got a deal everywhere else in the world but in the US, and it's because of what the film is about. People have been saying this is the best film they've seen all year, yet nobody in the US has picked it up.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/6173399/Charles-Darwin-film-too-controversial-for-religious-America.html

HUMAN RIGHTS AND FREEDOM OF SPEECH: 1921 - Pankhurst freedom celebrated with tea (A Century in Photographs;Times Books 1999)

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Suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst and her supporters enjoy a celebratory cup of tea following her release after six months in prison. She was a radical figure in the movement to gain votes for women and was sent to prison a total of 15 times. In 1920 she visited Russia, where she met Lenin, and on her return was associated with Britain´s most prominent Communists. The sentence was for the publication of subversive matter in The Women´s Dreadnought, a weekly paper she produced for working-class women.

Sylvia´s political career centred around the suffragette movement. Her mother. Emmeline Pankhurst, and her sister, Christabel, were founding members of the Women´s Social and Political union, established in 1903. Sylvia became honorary secretary. Using the slogan "Votes for Women and Chastity for Men", the suffragettes set fire to churches, blew up stations, threw bricks through windows, cut telegraph wires and tied themselves to railings. As the radical branch of feminism, the Pankhursts and their supporters were frequently the butt of music hall jokes and were sometimes physically attacked. While in prison many went on hunger strike and were subjected to force-feeding, a practice previously restricted to lunatic asylums.

Sylvia parted company from her mother and sister when war broke out in 1914. Her relatives believed their demonstrations should stop in the interests of the war effort but Sylvia promoted pacifist and socialist ideas, forming a breakaway group, the Women´s Peace Army, which demanded a negotiated peace. By the time Sylvia emerged from yet another stretch in prison in 1921, the women´s movement had made some progress: women over 30 and conforming to certain property qualifications were given the vote in 1918, and in 1921 Dr. Marie Stopes opened the first birth-control clinic, in north London. In 1927 Sylvia went on to outrage the British public further when she became an unmarried mother.
(Extract from The Times: A Century in Photographs; London 1999)
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