South Asia: India says reclusive aborigines safe on remote islands

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Five tribes numbering 989 people were safe after Sunday's onslaught, including the 100-member Onge, 250 of the fiercely independent Sentinelese, 39 of the almost extinct Andamanese, 350 of the Jarawa and 250 of the hunter-gatherer Shompen.

They were located by helicopter and some were reached by boat and provided with supplies and medical treatment, Coast Guard director general Arun Kumar Singh said Thursday.

In Senegal, the government and the rebels of Casamance area in the country´s south sign a ceasefire agreement which ends 22 years of fighting that has killed 3500 people.

Fallujah residents return to a destroyed city.

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The Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN), a humanitarian information unit of the United Nations, interviewed a number of those who have returned to Fallujah. IRIN states that despite some reports to the contrary, most of those who returned “found their homes destroyed, with the remainder finding extensive damage inside their homes. Windows, television sets and other household items had been shattered by bullets.” Fadhe Kubaissey told IRIN, “Fallujah is nothing but destruction and empty areas. It’s a new desert inside Iraq. Those who have returned to their homes in the past few days lack the minimum conditions—the city is uninhabitable.” Abbas Jumaili, another Fallujah resident and father of five, said, “We are three brothers and all of us have lost our homes. I really don’t know how we will start our life again inside this city.... This city cannot offer a minimum of living conditions for a year. It’s a complete disaster.” Dr. Saleh Hussein Iswawi of the Fallujah General Hospital told the British Broadcasting Corporation, “About 60 percent to 70 percent of the homes and buildings are completely crushed and damaged, and not ready to inhabit at the moment. Of the 30 percent still left standing, I don’t think there is a single one that has not been exposed to some damage.” He reported ongoing fighting. “I was in Fallujah hospital last night [December 23] and I heard a lot of fighting and bombing, which continued for about three or four hours. I heard very loud explosions inside the city.” Another resident, Ali Mahmood, told Reuters: “I saw the city and al-Andalus destroyed. My house is completely destroyed. There is nothing left for me to stay for.” Yasser Satar said: “What do they want from Fallujah? This is the crime of the century. Is this freedom and democracy that they brought to Fallujah?” Included in the destruction are not only civilian homes, but the basic facilities necessary for providing minimal public services. The American military has apparently deliberately targeted any structures relied upon by ordinary citizens. The two main hospitals, including Fallujah General Hospital, are no longer operable. The general hospital was one of the first targets of the invasion in November because the US military wanted to cut off any reports of civilian casualties. According to IRIN, “In the city as a whole, the two main library buildings have been burned and schools and medical clinics have been all but destroyed and are unable to function.” The US military also targeted electrical and water treatment facilities, and sewage has flooded some areas. Most mosques have also been destroyed or damaged. Sheik Hareth Suliman Al-Dari told IslamOnline that Fallujah “has become uninhabitable with no water, electricity or wastewater facilities. The rotten smell of the dead is widespread and smokes of internationally banned weapons cover its sky.” There have been widespread reports that the US military has used chemical weapons—including napalm—against remaining Iraqi fighters in the city. In addition to destruction, returning residents have also encountered death on a large scale. Al Jazeera reports that according to one resident, Abd al-Rahman Slim, “Charred and half-eaten corpses littered the streets.” Stray dogs are reported to roam the streets, eating decaying bodies. Salim said that he “entered my neighbor’s house and found him, after identifying him from an identity card. His body was lying on the ground, nothing left of him but some bones. The scene was very shocking and I could not stay as the smell in the houses and the street was intolerable.” It is impossible to say how many Iraqis have been killed in Fallujah during the last month and a half. The Iraqi Red Crescent gave one estimate of 6,000 dead. Much of the evidence is being destroyed, as the US has reportedly been clearing the streets of bodies and burying them in mass graves. Most of the city, moreover, remains off limits to anyone but the US military.

Andaman aborigines' fate unclear. More about the Andaman and Nicobar islands.

Tsunamis and Death-Toll Pornography

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The bigger the number of victims, and the further away they live from us, of course, the easier it becomes to distance ourselves from what we are watching. We can accept video of hundreds of anonymous bodies washing up onto the shores of southern India, but would we accept video of the corpse of a young girl floating in a neighborhood swimming pool being shown on our local news? Through the news, we have become accustomed to seeing people in the developing world as victims: victims of war, victims of famine, victims of disease, and victims of natural disasters. In their eternal state of victim-hood, these people have had their right to individuality and dignity stripped, and thus their corpses are fair game for the evening news.

Susan Sontag´s death was announced yesterday. She died of cancer at the age of 71, after winning her first battle against cancer in the 1970s, when the doctors said that she would die. A news article of her death and an obituary from the British Guardian newspaper.

She was the kind of writer that I could stand even when her view of things was not the same as mine. As I have grown older and older, I have become less and less understanding of people whose views are not the same as mine. When I was younger, there was little that could make me angry. Nowadays I usually have no time for those views that I don´t agree with. Time´s running out, you know. And one day it stops for all of us. It stopped for Susan Sontag and it stopped for 130 000 victims of the South Asian catastrophe. And it will stop for me and you.

I gave 15 euros to UNICEF for the relief effort for the victims of the earthquake and the tsunami. Not much, not enough, but something.

Tsunami death toll is over 120 000 and 79 940 people have been reported to have died in Indonesia.

Release of children should be a priority

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Amid the fanfare surrounding Israel's 27 December release of 159 Palestinian prisoners as a "goodwill gesture" to Egypt's President Mubarak, the fate of Palestinian child detainees is all but forgotten. Some 350 Palestinian children currently remain in Israeli jails, detention centers, and interrogation centers. Under international law, their release should be a priority. As it is, not one child has released as part of this initiative.

Five Palestinians killed in Gaza

The earthquake may have shortened the day a fraction of a second by accelerating the Earth´s rotation. More.

Five million in dearth of food, water

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Up to 5 million people around the Indian Ocean are waiting for food and clean water as nations hit by one of the biggest tsunamis on record rush to bury their dead and avert the threat of disease.

Latest toll from the Indian ocean catastrophe stands at 80936.

When I think what people remember of this year in 2104, there probably will be only two things commonly known:This catastrophe and the war in Iraq.

As the death toll from the earthquake and the tsunami continue to rise, the destruction in Aceh is being revealed. In Thailand´s Khao Lak, where large part of my missing countrymen were, the death toll could reach 3000.

Two Palestinians have died in an Israeli attack on the Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza. This shows how eagerly the Israeli leadership wants peace...

Israeli government plays it old tricks and has declared that 120 000 Palestinians can´t vote in East Jerusalem and that they must travel outside the city to vote. 5367 Palestinians can vote in East Jerusalem, say the leaders of the übermensch.

I can´t put in words how much I hate these bastards, who think that they are so cunning... And who think that they have won.

So, either the Palestinians don´t arrenge the presidential elections or they give East Jerusalem on a plate to the high and mighty Jews. This is the Israeli plan. Because if the people in East Jerusalem don´t vote or travel outside the city to vote, that would in the Israeli eyes mean that the Palestinians aknowledge the illegal Israeli usurpation of the eastern part of the city.

I would just hope that the Israelis would stop their dirty tricks, their plans to steal as much land as they can, and their constant attacks against the Palestinians and would give the peace a chance. But no hope. When you head is full of piss, you are not capable of doing anything good.

And the western countries stand by - or, more precisely, are on their knees before Israel - pretending that everything is going well or that if they happen to admit that things are not looking good, they claim that they can´t do nothing to force Israel to stop it´s illegal actions. There´s no Yasser Arafat to be blamed anymore, so they are now chosen the denial of reality as their new reason not to intervene in Palestine.

"New Iraq´s" National Guard has been defeated by the insurgents and it´s remnants will be merged with the "army" - which is pretty much nonexistent at this point - on 6 January 2005.

Red Cross estimates the death toll could be over 100 000. In Indonesia alone, there could be 80 000 dead. Children are overpresented among those that have died.

Genetic 'overdrive' that made the human brain special is discovered. More.

The lost generation

Up to half the 60,000 victims of the tsunami are children, says UN. Tens of thousands more are orphaned, and face threat of disease.

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The walls of water sent crashing onto the coasts of south Asia by the biggest earthquake in 40 years took a disproportionate number of young lives. It may have been as many as half of the victims - the toll stood at 60,000 last night. As the calmer waters return a steady flow of bodies, communities are coming to terms with a lost generation.

Mike Kiernan, a spokesman for Save the Children in Washington, said: "The death toll among children in these disasters is always high, especially in the poorest parts of the world - that is one of the tragedies. In villages such as Cuddalore in India we know that more than half of the 400 victims were children. There will also likely be many thousands of children orphaned." Waterborne diseases such as typhoid and cholera, as well as malaria, would take their toll on the youngest and weakest survivors, he warned.

A spokesman for the United Nations children's fund Unicef said that up to half of those killed could have been children. Communities were suffering a double loss: dead children, and orphaned boys and girls. He said: "Our major concern is that the kids who survived, now survive the aftermath. Children are the most vulnerable to disease and lack of proper nutrition and water.

Earth's permafrost starts to squelch

An article about local survivors from the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and a pessimistic view of future aid.

The earthquake and the tidal waves in Indian ocean have killed at least 68 000 people and left millions homeless. The number of dead will likely continue to rise, as the remotest areas are reached by rescue workers. At least 14 of my countrymen have died and over 200 are missing. There seems little chance that many of them are alive, as most of them were in the heaviest hitten areas in Thailand. Terrible end for a terrible year.

Quake rattles earth orbit, alters Asia's map, say US geophysicists. More.

Andaman tragedy. More.

As the biggest Sunni party withdraws from the planned January elections, problems mount for Iraqi vote.

Tidal wave brings death and destruction throughout Sri Lanka.

US dollar continues to tumble down against the other major currencies, making a new record against the euro. I just hope that it fall continues so that the weak dollar don´t help US economy but instead works against it and drives foreign investors away from the US. At least as far the weak dollar has done nothing to help US exports according to statistics.

Zionists arrest Mustafa Barghouti again. One wonders are they trying to ensure the victory to Abbas - even when Mustafa Barghouti is no danger to him, according to polls - or are they trying to make Abbas look like a collaborator. Or maybe they are just being themselves, aka bastards.

It´s a curious thing otherwise. The Zionists and their pet westerners have been shouting about the claimed corruption in the Palestinian authority, and when Mustafa Barghouti is saying the same, he ends twice arrested and beaten by the Zionists.

At least 25 000 people have died in Southern Asia and the coast of East Africa as a result of the earthquake and the tidal waves it caused, but the number of death in Sri Lanka could be twice as high as the now known number of 12 000 casualties, in Indonesia 25 000 people may have died and in the Andaman and Nicobar islands, that belong to India, 30 000 people are missing.

Terrible, terrible cataclysm. The sad thing is, that part of these deaths were not unavoidable . If the information of the tidal waves would have reached the governments of those countries that were not near the earthquake, and if they would have put warning to television and radio, the coastal regions in countries like India and Sri Lanka could have been at least partly emptied.

Yanukovitsh refuses to accept election defeat, even when he lost by 8% to Yutschenko.

Yushchenko claims Ukraine victory.

In Uzbekistan, parlamentary elections were held, and only those parties that declared their loyalty to the US backed dictator Islam Karimov - famous for boiling dissidents alive - were allowed to take part. It´s a curious thing that US says it´s fighting for democracy in Iraq and it´s demanding democratic reforms from Arab regimes and declares that the Palestinians must make democratic reforms if they will have any chance of ending the cruel Israeli occupation, but in Central Asia US is happily training Islam Karimov´s troops....

Asia wakes to tidal catastrophe.

Over 12 000 people have died as a result of the earthquake in Indonesia and the tidal waves that reached as far as the east coast of Africa. 4500 have died in both Sri Lanka and Indonesia, over 3000 in India, 400 in Thailand etc.

Yesterday was the first anniversary of the earthquake that destroyed the historic city of Bam in Iran and killed over 41 000 people.

The great earthquake, 8.9 on the Richter scale, at Indonesia and the deadly tidal waves - that have reached India, Sri Lanka, Malesia and Thailand - have been reported to have killed hundreds and hundreds are missing, but reading the reports it seems that the number of the dead are more likely to be in the tens of thousands than in the thousand or so that the numbers of dead and missing stand now.

Undeniable Global Warming.

How few noisy skeptics are putting all of us in danger.

Viktor Yushchenko:Not Quite Ready for Sainthood.

A former banker? When would they be? But seriously, he may not be squeaky clean, but he´s better than Yanukovitsh, who would steer Ukraine to the tight embrace of Czar Vladimir, the autocrat of all Russia, so his victory is to be hoped for. And that´s enough for me now.

New galaxies were still forming 2-4 billion years ago, billions of years after the highest point of star formation in the universe has been thought to have occurred.

Blair's peace talks take back seat.
PM tones down efforts after warning not to interfere by US and Israelis shun plan.

Blair bowed to Israel, say Palestinians.

I knew quite well before that Tony Blair would be humiliated by the Israeli fascists during his visit and that he would then claim this humiliation as a great achievement. And so it did happen and Tony Blair thanked Ariel Sharon of destroying his proposal of a peace conference and declared how happy he was that Sharon had demanded and that he had submitted on changing it to a one more conference where western countries would demand "reforms" from the Palestinians.

Tony Blair´s great problem is his lack of spine in foreign affairs. He acts tough only towards oppressed peoples and the homefront. He doesn´t care if tens of millions citizens of the United Kingdom oppose him, but if a fat war criminal opposes him, he cracks instantly and crawls at his feet. He´s a pitiful bastard.

Huygens ready to go.

As a pessimist I think that the likeliest scenario is that Huygens will be separated succesfully and then nothing more is of heard of it á la Beagle 2. 21 days without contact is quite a huge number of days in a relatively unknown place like the Saturnian system.

It´s a sad thing that a Titan orbiter will be on orbit no earlier than the 2020´s. Hopefully some day in the future we could have a web of satellites around all the planets and the major moons of the solar system. After all, we have thousands of nuclear weapons ready to annihilate higher life forms from Earth and flotillas of spy satellites, so a hundred or so spacecrafts around distant planets and moons wouldn´t really be asking too much... New telescopes with adaptive optics and space telescopes are good in monitoring changes in the giant planets, but the closer the better, and specialized missions beat occasional peeks.

War crimes.

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For now the appalling truth is that there has been no remedy for the documented torture and killing of foreign prisoners by this American government.

US 'blocking Arab freedom report'

Putin backs state grab for Yukos

Pictures from Mars Express show possible remnants of glacial ice on the slopes of Olympus Mons and crater count implies the volcano was active as late as 2 million years ago.

US press review: Mosul blast.
The US press reacts with shock and anguish to one of the deadliest attacks on American troops in Iraq after a bomb killed 18 soldiers in a mess hall near the northern city of Mosul.

Did the Yankees think that they wouldn´t suffer any casualties? They start a war and then whine that they soldiers get killed? One would think that their attitude would be a little bit more realistic.... Of course, they model themselves in Iraq on the Israeli model in Palestine, where when Israeli soldiers from the occupying troops get killed the Israeli military openly talks of revenge when it then attacks civilians... Proving that they are not soldiers, but terrorists. Armies don´t exact revenges. When soldier dies in his or her duty in combat, how can there then be "revenge"? And the Americans should just accept these casualties without whining. They started this war, they support this war, they don´t care about Iraqi casualties, so they should just stop whining and accept their own casualties or else withdraw from Iraq.

Amid the smoke and screaming, soldiers turned their lunch tables over to be used as stretchers.

Now they were in the receiving end of a "shock and awe" attack.

Ten more years?

Senior MPs warn British troops will be in Iraq for a decade, as Blair in Baghdad proclaims: 'We are not a nation of quitters'.

Considering that the British lost the world´s largest empire in the last century, I would say that they are a nation of quitters... British troops retreating for some country was quite a common sight.

Fallujah assault still exacting heavy toll on mental health of US marines

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The US-backed government put rebel losses at more than 2,000, although unit commanders later revealed their troops had orders to shoot all males of fighting age seen on the streets, armed or unarmed, and ruined homes across the city attest to a strategy of overwhelming force.

I wouldn´t be overly concerned by the the mental health of modern Nazis. These US bastards... First they commit war crimes, then they whine.

Yesterday saw a good attack against an US base in Mosul. 24-26 dead, of which 19 are US soldiers. That teaches them to invade other countries. Good that some guerillas do what they ought to do - killing foreign occupiers - instead of cowardly attacking Iraqi civilians. Analysis.

Paradise is paper, vellum and dust
Libraries will survive the digital revolution because they are places of sensuality and power

Settlers 'to resist' Gaza pullout

No doubt they will, remembering Israeli army´s defeats in the hands of settlers in the West Bank.

Israel to "shun" Middle East conference.

America's war on itself .
Bush's wrecking tactics over climate change follow an established pattern of self-destruction.

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The Kyoto protocol is flawed, the Bush team says, because countries such as China and India are currently exempted from cutting their emissions. But instead of helping to design a treaty that would eventually bring them in, the US teamed up with them in Buenos Aires to try to sink all international cooperation. It even supported Saudi Arabia's demand that oil-producing countries should be compensated for any decline in the market caused by carbon cuts.The result is that the talks very nearly collapsed. On Saturday, 36 hours after they were due to have ended, and while workmen were dismantling the rooms in which the delegates were sitting, the other countries managed to salvage the barest ghost of an agreement. The US permitted them to hold an informal meeting in May, during which "any negotiation leading to new commitments" is forbidden. According to the head of the US delegation, the time to decide what happens after 2012 is "in 2012". It's like saying that the time to decide what to do about homeland security is when the plane is flying into the tower. Wrecking these talks is pretty good work for a country which, as it refuses to ratify the protocol, doesn't even have negotiating rights... The US has every right to beat itself up. But unfortunately, while chasing itself around the world, it tramples everyone else.

How Iran will fight back.

Why Blair's trip will not succeed
The US is too partisan to see that the Palestinians cannot give more

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If the Palestinians were to secure the redress that other colonised peoples have, there would either be no Israel - as there is no Algérie Française - or a bi-national state, like South Africa, in which it would lose its exclusively Jewish character.

But the Palestinians are not demanding that. They have committed themselves, via Oslo, to the loss of 78% of their original homeland. If there ever is a settlement, this concession will rank as the greatest single contribution to it. It was under Arafat's auspices that they made it. Yet the US called him an "obstacle" to peace who had to be replaced by a "moderate" leadership that would persuade its people to give yet more.

But a new Palestinian leadership won't do that, least of all if it is clean and democratic, because, reflecting the popular will, it simply couldn't. That Sharon is no less an obstacle to peace than Arafat ever was, and Israeli "moderation" as necessary as Palestinian, is a thought that might occur to Bush, but it isn't one which, as similar thoughts in his first term taught him, he will find politic to act upon. US Middle East policies have always been shaped more by domestic politics than realities on the ground, and never more distortingly than today.

To the Americans, the Israeli Jews are the victims, after all, according to the view of mainstream US: Jews = Victims, so the Jews must be the real victims in Palestine too, whatever their actions. This cult of the eternal victimhood of the Jews, which is now cherished by the religious right of the Christians and liberal bleeding hearts and also part of the Jews themselves, who are not neither dicriminated nor oppressed more than the average minorities in the west, and usually less because antisemitism simply is for historical reasons far less easy to swallow for most of the people in the western countries, even if they then held racist views of other peoples.

(One could wonder why Christians in the western countries couldn´t show as much love for the Jews when they really were the victims. Why people have to be first the victims of a genocide AND then find other people to oppress before they get the backing of the West? What has this changed?)

Add this to the fact that the usual American state of knowledge on Palestine´s current situation and history is distorted, to put it mildly, and the worship of Israel´s arrogance and it´s cruel policies which are seen by the neoconservatives as a model which the US should follow - typically fascist worship of the righteousness of power - and the growing religious fanaticism in the US, which sees the state of Israel as a sign of the end of the world as we know it, when Americans drive their SUVs straight through the Gates of Heaven.

And now the Americans believe that Mahmoud Abbas is the man who will give Israel all land west side of the wall, including East Jerusalem, forfeit the rights of the refugees and in the end kneel before His Highness Ariel Sharon and praise him for his kindness and mercy, or something like that. The Jews and Israel simply are too big taboos for the Americans. They might not know that much about them, but they worship them the more intensely. In the US mainstream media, critising Israel is about as frequent as criticism of the Soviet Union was in the countries of the Soviet bloc. Pretty rare and when it exists, it has to be made more acceptable by long tirades against the Palestinians and the Arab countries and positive praises of Israel on other accounts and sad claims that we help Israel if we don´t let it do whatever it wants to do to the Palestinians. Sad because this tells much what the writers think of their audience. Just doing the right thing isn´t the right thing to do, if it isn´t done for Israel.

Fresh quest to find lost heroine of US aviation

How many lives would be saved if these people making these searches for famous people, who vanished long ago, would have donated the monies spent on these searches for the Red Cross or other humanitarian organization? After all, if they find the plane from the bottom of the ocean or a piece of bone and the DNA test would prove it´s Earthart´s, what would that change? Nothing. Finding the plane from the ocean would just show that what has been thought to have happened was true.

What reason there is for these kind of searches except fame for the searchers? To become famous because they would find the remains of two people that vanished 67 years ago, and of which one was world famous. Kind a odd way to get famous yourself if one thinks about it.

U.S. Waters Down Global Commitment to Curb Greenhouse Gases

Bomb strikes in Karbala and Najaf kill 61 people and wound 120.

Israel once again humiliates the United Kingdom.

Curious coincidences: First yesterday Argentine military claimed that Jorge Rafael Videla, former leader of the junta(that ruled Argentina 1975-85) from 1976 to 1981 , had suffered a stroke. Then today, the former dictator of Chile from 1973 to 1990, Augusto Pinochet, is claimed to have suffered a stroke. The Argentine junta killed between 10 000 - 30 000 people, Pinochet from 3200-3300.

This is were the calls from Abbas to stop armed resistance leads: 11 dead and over 30 wounded during the last day and a half.

Curious comment from the Israeli military, whose spokesman declares that they will continue their murderous attacks under the colonial settlements in Gaza are left in peace. These being the same settlements of which Israel´s government claims that it will start emptying them in the next summer and that all should be empty to the end of next year. But even in the late autumn some of them were still being enlargened. And what reason is there to kill people for illegal settlements you yourself will be soon abandoning?

Israel´s army claims that it will have to be seen tough and that Hamas and Jihad shouldn´t be able to claim that they drove it away from Gaza with it´s tail between it´s legs, but certainly even Israel´s army knows that whatever how many freedom fighters and civilians Israel kills, in the end Hamas and Jihad will claim the withdrawal as a victory and especially a victory for their armed resistance.

Inimitable imitations

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Reviled in some quarters for his outspoken criticism of the people and the state of Israel - his alleged jibes in the Egyptian paper al-Ahram, for example, about "Brooklyn-born" settlers, for whom he apparently feels nothing but hatred and believes deserve to be shot; which is a shame, because they speak very highly of his appearances on Late Review and his books about Hazlitt and Hardy - he has faced the various hazards of his considerable influence and fame with varying degrees of success.

I hope that the reviewer has at least two of these magnificent wonders of nature ready to back up his claim...

Hothouse flowers

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Art picture books are hardly ever worth reading as opposed to flicking through. They are pseudo-books, not real books. They seem to be written by people to whom nothing has ever happened directly.

Typically American ignorance of facts from the PBS. As everyone should know, Teotihuacan was established over a thousand years before the legendary founding of Tenochtitlan, traditionally placed in the year 1325.

It´s a funny thing how seriously some of the more negative views about Turkey´s possible membership in the European Union has been taken. When Jacques Chirac talks about a possible French referendum of whether France would support Turkey´s membership when the negotiations are finished, the analysts doesn´t seem to understand that when we get as far, it maybe the year 2015 or 2020. Jacques Chirac is either dead or a frail, very old man then. Nicholas Sarkozy, the young star of the French right, could be a revered (or loathed) old ex-president, busily writing his memoirs. The current politicians are gone. What they say now is of no consequence when the time comes to decide whether Turkey will become a member of EU or not. Jacques Chirac is talking propaganda and his audience is the people back home, just now. Same goes with the Austrians.

I support the negotiations, because they are a way of making Turkey more democratic and less autocratic, and getting the government to stop the discrimination of the Kurds, to stop the use of torture and making officials accountable for their crimes, and of course raising eastern Turkey from the deep poverty in which it is.

Some articles and columns:

Turkey's date with destiny
Turkey moves closer to EU
EU Membership Offers Hope for Turkey's Kurds
EU Door Finally Opens for Turkey
How European is Europe?
Outside View: Turkey's questions and answers

Fundamentalism begins at home.

People are talking about religious revival, especially in the Anglo-Saxon states, but what the new religious fervor in parts of the "Christendom" and "Islamic world" isn´t, is new found belief in god and a victory of the spirit over the materialistic, secular values. No, what comes clear is that in both cases is that the average "reborn" believer is simply scared. The world is changing, there´s no certainty in life, you can´t plan your life to the grave as you parents could have done. These are not optimistic times. There are real, imagined and exaggarated threats aplenty and as their ancestors did, in these cases part of the populations seek firm ground, stability and a new direction to their lifes from religion. There´s absolutely nothing new in this. Religions have always flourished in times of peril and change. And if we win the real threats, if we can find new stability in the world, a new era of materialistic, secular non-religiousness will begin.

Titan clouds seen to come and go. More.

That picture of Dione against Saturn is as good as the famous one of Io against Jupiter that Cassini took as it flew past Jupiter. Not just science, not just a pretty picture, but art.

Sudan 'plans huge Darfur attack'.

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Following a "build-up of forces in the past two weeks", Darfur is a "time-bomb which could explode at any moment," said General Festus Okonkwo... "The quantity of arms and ammunition brought into Darfur to meet the present build-up of troops in the region is [so] astronomical that the issue is no longer whether there will be fighting or not, but when fighting will start," he said. He also blamed the rebel Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) for the killing of two aid-workers in South Darfur. "SLA was involved in the attack as two Land Rovers belonging to Save the Children (UK) were recovered from SLA camp in Jurof," Gen Okonkwo said.

This Haaretz editorial, unlike the column quoted before, is commendable.

Israel can't count on Europe - yet.

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The Europeans are willing to recognize Israel's right to exist, but generally do not take the trouble to learn the details and intricacies of the conflict in the Middle East. They prefer not to dirty their hands in this quagmire - unlike the Americans.

The Americans are not neutral, they are not impartial. They are on Israel´s side, nowadays largely publicly and unashamedly so, giving only the lightest excuses otherwise. Even to American politicians this is a religious mission: To save the Jews from another Holocaust and prepare way for the Second Coming of the Christ! Or at least that is what they say to their voters... And of course, to "protect Israel´s democracy". Yes, Israel´s democracy would be awfully threatened if they would be forced to withdraw behind the Green line, no doubt about - at least so the thinking goes in shallow American minds. At the same time these Americans boast about Israel´s military and claim that if some nasty Muslim country would threaten Israel, then it´s cities would be destroyed by Israeli nukes and then these same folks go on declaring that without the United States´ support for Israel´s illegal occupation of the remaining Palestinian lands and the Golan Heights, the helpless Jews would be slaughtered.

The Europeans nowadays don´t want to be Israel´s cheerleaders, like several major European countries were in the past. And on the other hand, the past being what it is, there´s reluctance to act because cries of "antisemitism" would ensue - not only from Israel and the US, but from back home too - as being engaged but impartial would mean being against Israel´s actions and policies - as the current situation is the result of Israel´s actions, made worse by the American meddling - which to many Israelis is not impartiality, but being unjustly against them, as they are not customed to being treated so: "We are right and everyone who doesn´t support us is against us." This is their view of the world.

And then the lame excuses like that the Europeans "don´t understand" the Middle East situation or that the Europeans "don´t understand Israel, but if they would, they would support us." First of all, the Israelis may have not noticed, but they are not the only ones making the same kind of claims, nor are they first. Everybody makes these claims when faced with criticism. These claims fit every circumstance, whether one is accused of human rights violations, ethnic cleansings, genocides, religious intolerance, discrimination against women, money laundering or hunting endangered species for fun and profit.

Do the Israelis understand totally North Korea, it´s inhabitants and politics in the Korean peninsula? Do they understand the civil war in DR of Congo and all it´s participants? Do they understand those in Sudan? If not, does that mean that they have no right to say a word of these places nor have any policies towards them on the national level?

And what comes to the part about terrorism, there´s only one simple way to answer: Who does most of the killing? Which side has killed 600 children during the last three years and which has killed 100?

But there´s one funny thing in the article. First those claims above, and then this:

They prefer not to dirty their hands in this quagmire - unlike the Americans.

You have to be either joking, utter fanatic or licking the American asses to be able to write this kind of thing. The Americans get their "hands dirty", because the poor arrogant bastards are ignorant troglodytes who don´t understand that their actions will end them in a quagmire and create misery for untold millions! They are on a divine mission, God is on their side, and so they can´t fail, even if their strategy is based on the faith that everything will end well. Their president didn´t know that there are different branches of Islam in Iraq as his government was planning the war! He had to be explained, that there are these Sunnis and Shiias...

Another funny reminiscence of the Americans, this about a person who should have known far more about the Middle East than your average European:

I read once a book about the Kurds that was written by an American journalist who had worked in Lebanon during the war there and had met Kurds there and eventually got interested about them and finally decided to write a book about them. After deciding this, the journalist realised that there was problem: He didn´t know where Kurdistan was and how he could get there.

The real story of Jasser Arafat´s illness and death.

Scientists find new Indian monkey.

Hysterical Australian government plans to hijack ships in international waters if the cabinet believes them to be a "threat". And when they call this plan a creation of "terror exclusion zone", it becomes clear that like so many times before, when the Australians try to show that they are tough and firm, they only end looking ridiculous.

The Quiet Tragedy of Iraq's Assyrians

First of all, everybody who lives in the Middle East is most likely a direct descendant of all the different peoples that build the great civilizations of the past. People have mixed throughout the area´s history. Secondly, the claims of direct cultural continuation between today´s peoples with the peoples of the past is a rather problematic, because of lack of evidence. Yes, we can be pretty sure that the current Assyrians have ancestors who formed the Assyrian state(c.2000 BCE - 609 BCE, the main cities of the Empire fell in 612 BCE, but the remnants of the army were destroyed only three years later), the Kurds are likely descendants from the Medes(the Medean Empire flourished between c.625-550 BCE and later Medea was a kingdom under the Iranian dynasties, often ruled by lesser members of the dynasties), the Armenians are descendants of the inhabitants of the kingdom of Urartu(c.900-c.600 BCE) etc, but what about cultural continuation? Have the people through all this time identified themselves with their now claimed ancestors, or is their more later identity being projected past in the time? For example, the Kurds have existed for 2000 years as an identiable group in the records that survive under various names, but even if they are direct descendants of the Medes, how much of their culture, way of live etc comes from their predecessors?

In the past, the inhabitants of the Hurrian kingdom of Mitanni(c.1550-c.1330 BCE) - mainly in what is now Syria - where thought to be descendants of Aryan warriors from somewhere in Iran who would have overrun the area in about 1600 BCE. New findings of seals that contain Hurrian writing in the Syrian-Turkish border have shown that the Hurrians were on the area at least in 2500 BCE. So, they were native to the area, not foreign conquerors, but between 2500 BCE and about 1550 BCE there´s no evidence that they existed. Their culture and language continued, but at least from the areas that have been excavated, they didn´t leave any marks that could be claimed to be distinctly Hurrian. The same problems go with later peoples.

In c. 1330 BCE the Hurrian kingdom of Mitanni, which had acted as a kind of buffer state between the big powers of the time, was conquered by no others than the Assyrians. Egyptian and Hittite Empires were at war, plague that had devastated Egypt infected the Hittite troops, the king of the Hittite Empire and his heir died, like large part of their army, and the Assyrians used the weakening of the other major powers to their advantage and attacked and conquered Mitanni.

Anyway, this article has the mistake of identifying Arab presence in Iraq with the coming of Islam. The current Arabs in the Middle East are the assimilated descendants of the peoples that lived in the area before Islam, they are descendants of Arabs who had lived over a thousand years in the area and they are descendants of Arabs that after the birth of Islam moved out from the Arabian peninsula. The first mention of the Arabs in what is now Iraq comes from Babylonian records from about 750 BCE. 34 years later, in 716 BCE, the Assyrian Empire transferred Arabic tribes it had defeated to current Palestine, where it had in 721 BCE defeated - as they called it - the kingdom of Samaria, known better as the kingdom of Israel. And before the Arabs there had been other movements of people out from the Arabian peninsula to Mesopotamia and Syria under different names during the previous centuries. What happened with Islam´s victory during the middle of the 7th century wasn´t hordes of Arabs from the Arabian peninsula overrunning the older populations. The highest percentage of people with Arabic names a century later in the area is to be found from Syria - then an administrative center of the Caliphate - in which they formed about 10% of the populace.

According to a New York Times reporter, fascist Russia is a much better thing than a Communist Russia.

That´s what the European right was saying in the 1930s of Germany and Italy.

And whatever Mr Kristof thinks, demonstrations didn´t brought down those governments and they hardly will bring down Russia´s new order, which has on it´s side the long Russian tradition of state opression running well into the czarist times - and the failure of free market economical policies and democracy of making life better, not worse, for the average Russian.

Seems that the remaining members of Queen have sucked their back accounts dry.

Too harsh towards them, but it feels like cheating. Of course, it seems that everybody does it; there are bands touring under old famous names with only one original member around nowadays.

Mahmoud Abbas, who readies for his coronation after Marwan Barghouti´s forced withdrawal from the election, calls for the end of armed resistance. To the current leaders of the Israel this is only a sign of weakness which they think that shows that their current murderous tactics and stealing of land pays off, so that no chance of tactics is needed. The thing is, that the only language the Likudniks understand is the language of force. And what the Palestinians should do, is not to surrender meakly or kill civilians outside the Occupied areas, but to show that the wall used for landgrabbing doesn´t work. If they can blow up an Israeli base in the Gaza, they can certainly try to destroy even a small part of the wall - and the new zionist settlements in the West Bank.

If there would be new elections in Israel and if there would be a new government led by people who want peace and not more land, then it would be apropriate for Abbas to call for the end of armed resistance, but then make sure that he also can deliver what he promises.

Cambodian government supports sex slavery.

Hobbit wielded big tools, clay model shows.

Could have been the species which wielded those big tools would probably be the more correct way of saying it.

Pinochet and the victims of "operation Condor". More.

The hypocrisy of the US judicial system.

In the past, similar idiotic decisions have been made against PLO, Iran etc.

If Israel would have to pay the same amount for the family of each Palestinian that it has killed - let´s say after the beginning of the first intifada in 1987 - it would have to pay about 780 000 MILLION dollars.

A deadly reversal
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, yesterday's victims have become today's aggressors. More.

This seems always a hard thing for many people to understand. Once a victim, always a victim, is the more common understanding of things. And lots of dead people - some 3,8 million in DR of Congo - ensue, as the victims-turned-aggressors aren´t dealt with.

Another mistake that is related to that to above is the "once a good guy, always a good guy" way of thinking, that has - for example - blinded many African leaders so that they don´t see or don´t want to see how cr*p Robert Mugabe´s regime in Zimbabwe is. But over twenty years in power is enough to turn a freedom fighter into a poor man´s Mobutu Sese Seko.

France shows off tallest bridge.

Mars rover Spirit - or, more precisely, the scientific team behind the rover - finds compelling evidence of a watery past for a rock in the Gusev crater´s "Columbia" hills.

Europe's heatwaves 'soon routine' - if the warming climate doesn´t affect the Golf Stream.

Israelis hasten land grab in shadow of wall Bulldozers go in as expansion of settlements continues.

Quote:

Last week the US national security council adviser on the Middle East, Elliott Abrams, told a closed meeting of Jewish leaders that Washington saw settlements to the east of the barrier as ultimately intended for removal. But he said Israel would be allowed to hold on those to the west, which include Zufim.

The fact is, that these self-proclaimed fascist "Jewish leaders" of US - who say that they support Israel´s crimes "because Jews should hold together" (the worst excuse of them all, useable by all groups of people and used by many) - have more importance in the eyes of the US government than the entire rest of the world when it comes to Palestine.

I have to say that I hate passionately the US, Israel and frankly all of those that think because of their history the Jews should have special privilege to be utter and total bastards in the Middle East. They should all be ripped to pieces alive.

French foreign minister to ask Turkey to admit the Armenian genocide in 1915, but stops calling it genocide - as the French parlament has done in the past - and will ask instead the Turkish government to accept it as a "tragedy".

Turkey speaks officially of 800 000 dead - and claims the victims didn´t die as a victims of organized violence whose goal was the extermination of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire - the Armenians speak of up to 1,7 million dead and others usually put the number of dead between 1,2-1,5 million with the latter number used most often.

Pinochet, US backed dictator of Chile between 1973-1990, charged in Chile with human rights violations.

String Theory, at 20, Explains It All (or Not)

I am not quite sure that I would really want to know if the universe really is like this:

Our own universe, some theorists suggest, may be a four-dimensional brane floating in some higher-dimensional space, like a bubble in a fish tank, perhaps with other branes - parallel universes - nearby. Collisions or other interactions between the branes might have touched off the Big Bang that started our own cosmic clock ticking or could produce the dark energy that now seems to be accelerating the expansion of the universe, they say.

But if that would be the truth, then it would be. The next question would be that what we would do with this knowledge?

Pakistan and the True WMD Threat

Terrorists with secular ambitions which they think they will achieve will hardly "take out" Manhattan with nuclear weapons; that kind of thing would thwart their own ambitions. Remember that al-Qaida and it´s affiliates are not hoping for an Armageddon nor for the destruction of the US; what they want is to make US leave the Middle East and stop it´s support for regimes they oppose, which would make tumbling them easier and would make their own rise to power possible.

They don´t want to kill as many people as they can. They are not humanitarians, but they have clear goals and more or less realistic plans how to achieve them. And blowing up a city in the US will hardly make US flee in terror from the Middle East and the Central Asia, whereas a long war of attrition that bin Laden has spoken of could make both the US populace and political leadership weary of their presence in the area, especially if it´s importance for US economy will diminish in the future.

Opera music is often good, but the singing, the singing... Horrible!

After Shakespeare, it´s Richard Wagner´s turn.

I have nothing to say on his behalf. Not that there would be much to say.

When it comes to opera as an art form, I don´t rate it highly. In fact, I can´t take opera seriously. People scream insanities and usually so that you can´t make out the words, and quite often they are even on a language which most of the audience doesn´t understand. But who cares? Opera is really a social occasion for those who have wealth - sadly backed often by the society, as the companies are not ready to put the ticket prices as high as they should if they would be after commercial success. So the average tax payer pays so that the elite can meet in a glamorous environment.

There are two great sins that will always stain the memory of the republic of Venice. The first is the sacking of Constantinople in 1204. The second is the invention of the opera during the baroque.

Guantánamo torture and humiliation still going on, says shackled Briton

Doctors say that the Ukrainian opposition candidate Yutschenko was poisoned by dioxin. More.

At the same time, there´s still doubs whether that Jerusalem Post´s article that claimed that Yasser Arafat was poisoned could be true.

HOLY SMOKE.
What were the Crusades really about?

Quote:

But there was another call to arms: Alexius I Comnenus, the emperor of Byzantium—that is, of Catholic Europe’s Eastern brother—had asked the Pope for help against Muslim forces threatening his borders. Again, however, this was something less than an emergency. Byzantium and Islam did fight, but no more frequently than most neighboring powers of the time.

No, this call wasn´t "business as usual". Ten years before Alexios became emperor in 1081, the Byzantine forces lost to the Turkish Seljuks - rather new actors in the area, having taken control of what is now Iraq only in 1055 - in the battle of Manzikert in 1071, after which Anatolya, the heart of the Empire, was never again to be truly under the rule of Byzantine Empire (alias Eastern Roman Empire) - who had just, in 1061, lost their last possessions in Italy to another group of aggressive newcomers, the Normans. It was one of the defining moments in the history of the Empire - after the Muslim forces had gained a foothold in Anatolya, they never left. The most important and the which doomed the Empire was the sacking of Constantinople and the establishment of the Latin Empire(1204-1261). One of the states that gained from this was the Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm(Rome) in eastern Anatolya(the main Seljuk state was already in deep decline).

Most of these territories were under the jurisdiction of the Byzantine Empire and hence of the Greek Orthodox Church, which, to Rome’s abiding fury, had broken with the Western Church in 1054.

The two branches of Christianity broke apart from each other in 1054, after drifting away from each other for centuries - for example, the last eastern popes ruled in the 8th century(before that, popes from Asia Minor, Greece or North Africa were quite common).

This Shylock thing broughts to my mind Caliban in "The Tempest". There are those who see in him an portrayal of the enslaved populations of the New World and those who think that he´s just a monster and nothing more. I would go with the latter interpretation. Much of the depth that people think that exists in Shakespeare´s plays are because of the ambiguity that gives room to different ways to interpret them. But how much of this is intentional? I think that very little. But that doesn´t mean that we have to stick with the original portrayal of Caliban or Shylock; you can make a play based on "The Tempest" where Caliban is not a mere monster, and you could do a play or movie that concentrates on Shylock´s character and sheds the antisemitism and makes him a true, tragic hero. After all, Shakespeare has been dead for almost 400 years. He ain´t coming to complain if you meddle with his works - even if a huge mob of literary scholars would... And frankly, many of the movie adaptations suffer because they stick too close to the plays and carry on with them subplots that are there for just comical effect, have little or no artistic value and should just be dropped.

A very Jewish villain

Of course, people in Shakespeare´s plays are stereotypical. All his tragic heroes are of noble blood and the ordinary people are there to be laughed at. And Jews can only be villains, if they don´t convert. That doesn´t mean that Shakespeare himself had to be a hater of Jews, no more than it means that he thought that people of his own background couldn´t be heroes or have tragic ends. It´s just that he worked in a context where there could be no people of "low" birth starring plays as tragic heroes and there could be no Jewish characters who could stay Jewish and still be prortrayed well. It´s the same thing with Molieré(1622-73). He was of bourgeois birth and in his plays bourgeois people, who don´t understand how much above them the aristoracts are, are cruelly mocked. Shakespare and Molieré both lived in a rigid class system (more in theory than in reality, but theory was what mattered in portrayal of class) that was totally Christian.

In today´s United States you can´t make a Hollywood movie whose tragic hero would be a Muslim terrorist that hates the United States and who in the end succesfully kills the US president. In Shakespeare´s time you couldn´t make Shylock a nice, good guy or write a play where he wins his lawsuit - that would not have never, ever happened in real life - and ends keeping his daughter. As there was no Jews in England, most of his audience would not have likely met a Jewish person, but would still have a very negative view of Jews - even if they wouldn´t know much about Judaism or Jews - and wouldn´t have understood nor accepted what we would now call a politically correct portrayal of a Jewish merchant of Venice. Which doesn´t mean that Shakespeare himself really wasn´t what would later be called an antisemite. He probably was, as most Christians were, like most Europeans and people of European background in other parts of the globe were racists in the 19th century.

One thing to be remembered is that a real Jewish merchant of Venice at Shakespeare´s time wouldn´t have had good view or warm feelings toward his fellow Christian inhabitants of Venice. The Christians largely hated and oppressed Jews and the Jews hated them back. It´s like in today´s Palestine. In Western media there are claims that Palestinian children are "taught" to hate Israel and Jews, like they otherwise wouldn´t. The thing is that they have good and real reasons to hate Israel and a real life Shylock would have had lots of good reasons to hate Christians in 16th century Venice. We have this view in the western countries that to be a rightfully called a victim you have to be a real f*cking saint, a meek person who forgives all and hopes the best for all. Of course these kind of people exist, but Shylocks exist too.

Israeli movement restrictions threaten Palestinian democratic elections.

Another threat are the new Israeli attacks that have killed about ten Palestinians during the last week and have been targetting leading members of resistance groups, including those that support the Western countries favorite Abbas, in a clear attempt to lure the resistance groups to commit attacks against Israeli civilians, attacks which could then be used by Israel as a reason not to negotiate with Palestinians and go on with the creation of a Greater Israel by stealing large part of the remaining lands of Palestinians.

At the same time, Israel´s prime murderer hopes to lure the currently weak Labour to form a coalition government. The Labour party would be wise to press for new elections and hope that the progressive parties would fair better than last time as now Labour would be just a short time sidekick for Likud, not an equal partner.

This kind of news make me really angry. And of course, there are millions and millions of people like those Cambodian girls that never got to see even this kind of cruel climpse of freedom.

Dusty discs girdle distant solar systems.

Spain’s foreign minister claims Aznar government supported Venezuela coup.

Child sex accusations hit Pakistan´s religious schools. 2500 alleged cases in 2003-04 but no convictions.

The Economist´s view of Vladimir Putin. Not so long ago his human rights violations, destruction of opposition and bloody actions in Chechnya were cast aside by the western democracies, who wanted to believe that under his autocratic outer appearance was a liberal heart that loved democracy and free market economy, and now he seems to be transforming in to a new boogey man. Will Vladimir Putin to be in the future as reviled as Saddam Hussein was by the West? No, Russia is still too big and has too much of the world´s natural resources. Relationship may be quite frosty at time, but probably polite. The servants may bark at each other, but the masters will make strained smiles in press conferences and declare that all is well.

Another story about bonobo´s plight.

Ukraine's 'orange' capital. More about Ukraine´s current situation.

Congo poachers leave bonobo at risk

Study finds that bonobo population is only 20% of the excepted.

Ukraine's Yushchenko hails reform.

Memo Ordered Silence in Iraqi Abuse Case.

Barrier in the way to peace.

Palestinian presidential candidate Mustafa Barghouti has been beaten by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank.

He gets about 10% of support in the polls and is third after Abbas and Marwan Barghouti.

US forces 'hid Iraq prison abuse'

'No progress' on Darfur disaster

Israeli Army Conduct Under Scrutiny.

Quote:

In the Palestinian uprising of the 1980s, military police investigated every Palestinian death. But in the latest uprising, the army has killed more than 1,600 Palestinian civilians while opening only 92 formal investigations, the Israeli human rights group B'tselem says. The army says it has indicted 27 people and convicted four.

The disappearing dollar.

Recession ahead!

Israeli jailed for role in terror group that attacked Arab schools

I got pretty angry when I read this. But what else would you except from a court in an Apartheid state? Israeli courts have been sentencing Palestinians to life imprisonment for every person the court claims they very guilty of killing. Marwan Barghouti was sentenced for 5 terms of life imprisonment; a little fish of Islamic Jihad - if I remember correctly - got this autumn 35 life sentences. But when a member of the Master Race kills, he gots a single year, one(1) year of every person HE has killed - and walks free after serving half of his sentence. Jewish justice, it seems, is still medieval.

When just peace comes, all persons convicted in either Israeli or Palestinian courts (or in other countries) for their actions during the occupation should be - whatever their nationalities, ethnic backgrounds and religious persuasions - released and a special court á la former Yugoslavia, Ruanda and Western Africa should be formed, which would then convict those that are truly guilty on BOTH SIDES. It would take a long time, but this occupation has been going for a long time too. And the victims deserve justice, as do the accused, not this kind of mockery of justice.

These kind of news give "Biblical" archaeology it´s bad name. At least they don´t anymore carry a shovel in one hand and the Bible in another...

'We will not boycott elections and are willing to declare a truce with Israel'

Quote:

Hamas will not ask Palestinians to boycott the presidential elections and will react "responsibly" to any official call for a ceasefire from the Palestinian Authority leadership, one of the faction's leaders said yesterday.

Talks look for new climate effort.

Fatah threat to expel Barghouti.

Hopefully the Fatah leadership doesn´t succeed in which Israel has failed and end up breaking the movement in two and striking so a huge blow against the Palestinian aspirations. These kinds of threats can only bring more support for Barghouti from those that resent the current Palestinian leadership; which means that these threats coming from the Fatah are dum, as it seems that the movement´s official candidate Abbas probably would win if the elections would be held now. And if Barghouti would withdraw, it would embitter his supporters. Even a tight election would be a far better solution and that whoever wins the other main candidate would back him, as there are no real differences in their policies.

Pakistani president denounces war on terror.

Didn´t had the guts to say this in the US - he´s now safely in Britain, you see, and so feels brave enough to speak like this.

Under the volcanoes.

Art photography from the Virunga national park in Ruanda.

Ruanda´s national parks have been devastated this year; people have moved in after land inside had been "sold" to them by swindlers.

Pressed between the Barghoutis.

70 die as Iraq violence escalates.

This number doesn´t include the guerillas - maybe 40 of them have died at the same time span, most in Mosul - and the occupiers, of whom at least 17 have died.

Mainstream view of Lord Dunsany from New Yorker. Not a single word about his novels - or the fact that even before that Penguin collection most of his work had been republished in the last few years.

Short praise of Raphael(1483-1520).

Israel's new road plans condemned as 'apartheid'. Quote: Israel has released plans for the upgrade of roads and construction of 16 tunnels which would create an 'apartheid' road network for Palestinians in the West Bank. Existing roads would be reserved for Jews, linking their settlements to each other and to Israel.

Baltimore Sun opposes democracy in Palestine.

The Americans whine when in Arab elections there´s only one candidate á la Hosni Mubarak in Egypt etc, and when there´s something from which to choose, they demand that the voters to be given only one real candidate and that his challenger must be forced to withdraw his candidacy. Yep, that´s an American stance on democracy: When there´s none, it´s a bad thing according to them, but when there´s some, that´s also a bad thing - as the voters could make the "wrong" decision, and that can´t be allowed to happen...

Mayhem in Iraq Is Starting to Look Like a Civil War.

Bin Laden trail has 'gone cold' claims the Pakistani dictator and dear US ally Musharraf.

Rather convenient for Musharraf; the dim one praised him for his efforts during the visit to the White House, so no problem with current situation there, and back home things could get hot for him if Osama would get caught, so in that front too the current situation is the best for him.

Kuchma offered get-out clause. Ukraine President to get immunity - if he pushes through vote reform.

Australia accused in E Timor oil wrangle.

Widow of Opportunity?

In my view it´s a good thing that there´s at least one serious competitor for Abbas in Palestinian presidential elections. He´s earned the support of the old guard of Fatah and now he has to earn the support of the majority of the Palestinian voters. He will not be a predetermined choice put upon them by old men who haved lived most of their life in exile - fighting a good fight, but still away from the people who have lived under Israel´s occupation - but a man that the people themselves can elect to be their leader if they think him to be worthy of the honour and foremost capable of fullfilling the goal of national liberation. If he´s the right person to win that fight, then he will win the hearts of the population. If not, then somebody else will. That´s democracy.

Freedom’s front line.

Let´s not get overly romantic about this. The orange revolution should win, the elections were fraudulent, but the picture in Ukraine is not totally black and white - and the question is not about any kind of universal freedom, the battle of good and evil. The people on the streets in Kiev are fighting for a national and personal freedom: They don´t see themselves as pieces on the game board of a new Cold War. Nor should they be such.

Whining Americans are asking "Why the Europeans support democracy in Ukraine but not in Iraq?" Because a)There´s not bloody war going on in Ukraine, there´s only a fear of a possible civil war b)Ukraine is working state - totally unlike Iraq as it´s now - where parlamentary democracy has functioned - not well, but functioned it has still - for 13 years and c)Most Europeans support democracy in Iraq, but not the formation of an American client state on the ruins of a once sovereign country.

Good economical news:US economy weakens as the dollar falls. Good news indeed. And with 4 more years of George W. Bush´s misrule, the US economy is for a one hell of a ride. One paper claimed that the US economy "will sink like the Titanic". Let´s hope so.

The youngest known galaxy in the universe, I Zwicky 18.

Zwicky comes from the name of the astronomer Fritz Zwicky.

Paleontological fight gets personal.

I think that Beauvillain´s is on thin ice here, whatever his rightful piece of the fame is. The skull of Toumai, Sahelanthropus tchadensis, hasn´t been hidden from other scholars nor could as crude forgery as claimed by Beauvillain be able to pass nowadays - modern "Piltdown man" is impossible. Those that claim that the skull belong to a gorilla - no fossils of gorilla ancestors have been found from this time - are the finders of Orrorin tugenensis. An interesting specimen, which has sadly been tainted by the attempts of it´s founders to make rather farfetched claims of it´s importance and to haphazardly discredit the standard version of hominid evolution - which wouldn´t be bad, if they just would have the evidence to prove that this is the case, which they don´t have - in favor of their own find and take cheap shots against other major findings, like Toumai.

I didn´t went to watch Alexander, I went to watch another lambasted movie, Kenny Corran´s Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. I was pleasantly surprised, because it wasn´t as bad as I had expected based on the reviews or as bad as it seemed at first. But it certainly lacked depth. The plot was largely an excuse to show in the screen the director´s visions, so the characters should have been given more room, the interaction of the main characters and giving them more time to do so could have hidden the poor plot somewhat. I say poor in the terms of realistic movie making; this movie is really a comic book in the screen, so if taken so, the plot is pretty standard for comics - but it could still have been more.

There are couple of points where more could have been made of Totenkopfs disillusion with humanity and his willigness to destroy for it in exchange of a new beginning; for example, the fact that he died in 10.11.1918. Now, Corran expects everyone to know that he died a day before the Armistice that ended the the First World War - or, as it would have been known to the movie´s characters(who speak of the First World War in the movie, even if the movie´s timeline probably hasn´t got a Second World War hidden somewhere in the 1920s or 1930s; the movie is said in reviews to be placed in 1939, but the Sky Captain is said to have flown with American volunteers in China three years before the movie, so that should make it 1940):The Great War - and that the horrors of that war were the reason for his plan. But how many in the audience remember this and connect the dots correctly? It wouldn´t have taken many exchanges of lines between the characters to enlighten the audience.

Altogether, the movie has the feeling that we should already be acquinted with the previous adventures of the Sky Captain and his world, but these exists only in the mind of the director himself, which he seems to have forgotten. More world building for the Director´s Cut on the DVD, please.

Some problems:
- Those amphibious airplanes sure have odd wings. When they hit the water at that angle, the wings should just rip away from the hulls...
- How did the robot get to the spaceship?
- Why didn´t the Sky Captain´s base put the other airplanes in the air as there would have been ample time to do so? There´s not much sense having tens of airplanes when you leave them on the ground to be destroyed... They could have just been shot down in the movie etc.
- Putting Angelina Jolie´s name on the posters and in the opening credits with Law´s and Paltrow´s is really cheating the audience...

Good points:
- As a first full digital movie, this one is pretty good. Artificial to the eye almost all of the time, but it fits the "comic book on the screen" -style.
- I enjoyed it surprisingly much in the end. Could even watch it for a second time.

It´s that time of the year... New explanations of the Star of Betlehem.

The fact is, that the whole Star of Betlehem business was likely invented decades after the death of Jesus. That was not uncommon; for someone to be a really important person during the antique and the middle ages, there had to be some signs of your birth and death in the sky. If none were seen, they were invented - or someone started a rumour and when it had circulated for a decade or two it became a truth and was written down by someone who believed in it.

There´s only one difference between days in Iraq, it seems:The people who die are different. These attacks are probably just a glimpse of what goes on in Iraq. Not the tip of an iceberg, but certainly not the whole of it either.

Ukraine set for election showdown.

Yutschenko guaranteed of victory, but the natives are restless in the east...

Short, conservative account of Giotto´s life and the importance of his art. Thou should not believe everything you read from old books... Giotto the man and the myth of Giotto are hopelessly intermingled.

Tiny bones pose humanity’s big questions.

Archaeology Magazine´s review of Stone´s Alexander. I intend to watch this movie, even if after reading this review I wonder if it´s worth it. I find it hard to understand how things like the battle of Issus could have been left out... It´s like making a movie of the Eastern front during the Second World War and don´t showing or mentioning at all the battle of Kursk in 1943. But what else to except from a man who thinks that there are "incredible parallels" between Alexander the Great and George W. Bush?

Archeologists have found evidence that an agricultural society with ceremonial centers existed in current Uruguay 4800-4200 years ago.

Diyala Project brings beginnings of urban civilization to the Internet.

US family sues 'Hamas-linked' charities.

I wonder will they follow this reasoning to it´s logical end and sue also Likud, which supported Hamas financially in the 1980´s and early 90´s?

Ruanda has invaded the DR of Congo. Wouldn´t it be time for sanctions? 3-6 million Congolese have died since 1998.

What will happen to the Amazon rainforest as the human driven climate change gathers pace?

US death toll in Iraq at record level.

A good thing. A horrible thing to write? Certainly most of them, if not all of them, didn´t deserve to die, but then, who deserves? I could give few names, but... They were occupying soldiers in a foreign country that wasn´t a threat to their own country. And nobody forced them to go. Nobody put a gun on their head and said "You go or else", nobody threatened their families if their wouldn´t have gone. And we have to remember that at least 50 000, maybe over 100 000 Iraqis - civilians, soldiers, guerillas - have died. So the death of even single American soldier is a good thing, because it´s brings US defeat a little bit closer. And what the world needs is US defeat in Iraq. Not because the world is anti-American and hates the US "freedoms", whatever they may be, but because if the United States doesn´t get it´s nose bloody in Iraq, it will continue on this path that it has chosen - a path, which majority of US citizens ( according to polls) give their support - and which will make the world a more dangerous place and create the kind of war and chasm between civilizations which Samuel Hungtingdon claims already exists. You can´t stop the US without killing US soldiers. Even if they may be good and nice persons when they don´t wear the uniform.