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