Kategorie: International news

Terror suspects all linked to NHS

Eight people arrested in connection with failed car bombings in Glasgow and London all have links with the National Health Service, the BBC has learned.

Seven are believed to be doctors or medical students, while one formerly worked as a laboratory technician.

A suspect in hospital after the Glasgow attack has been named as Khalid Ahmed, who is believed to be a doctor.

A man arrested in Liverpool on Sunday has been named as Sabeel Ahmed, 26, who trained as a doctor.

Two men were also arrested in Blackburn on an industrial estate, initially under terror laws, but are now being held under the Drugs Act after police said they were no longer being treated as terror suspects.

Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 4 has reopened after a suspect bag sparked a security alert.

BAA said the departure lounge was partially evacuated and departing passengers are being rescreened, leaving thousands of people facing delays.

Tube trains on the Piccadilly Line were not stopping at Heathrow Terminal 4, but the station serving terminals one, two and three remained open.

Seven doctors or medical students have been arrested in England, Scotland and Australia in connection with the attacks. All worked in NHS hospitals.

Australian media have identified a man arrested at Brisbane Airport as Dr Mohammed Haneef, 27, who has worked at Halton Hospital in Runcorn, Cheshire. He was detained while trying to board a plane to India.

On Wednesday morning, the Metropolitan Police said a counter-terrorism officer was travelling to Australia to liaise with authorities.

Dr Haneef worked at the Gold Coast Hospital in Southport, eastern Queensland, and was previously based in Liverpool.

A second doctor who was being questioned in Australia over the failed attacks has been released without charge.

Marwah Dana Asha, 27, who was arrested on the M6, is thought to have worked as a lab technician at an NHS hospital in Shrewsbury.

She was arrested with her husband, Dr Mohammed Asha, 26, who worked at North Staffordshire NHS Trust’s University Hospital.

Iraqi doctor Bilal Abdullah, arrested at Glasgow Airport on Saturday, and two men, aged 28 and 25, arrested at accommodation at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley on Monday have been handed over to the Metropolitan Police. Dr Abdullah was employed as a locum at the hospital.

Khalid Ahmed, detained at Glasgow Airport along with Dr Abdullah, suffered severe burns and remains in a critical condition under armed police guard at the Royal Alexandra.

The man arrested in the Lime Street area of Liverpool trained as a doctor at the Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences in Bangalore, India, the same place as Dr Haneef.

Six of the eight people arrested are now being held at London’s Paddington Green police station.

Sian Thomas, deputy director of NHS Employers, said she wanted to reassure the public there were "thorough and robust checks" in place before doctors were employed by NHS trusts.

 

 

 

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Iraq for sale

The Iraqi government has begun preparing the groundwork for what could be one of the biggest privatisations of state-owned assets.

The Sunday Telegraph has learned that officials from the government have recently held talks with banking and legal advisers in London. City sources said Iraq’s minister for industry, Fawzi Hariri, was looking to appoint advisers to draw up a memorandum of understanding to sell off the country’s non-oil assets, ranging from petrochemical plants to construction companies, hotels and airlines, as early as this month.

The privatisation proposals could also include a massive extension of foreign participation in the oil industry. Sources close to the foreign ministry said the government believed it had struck a deal on the long-awaited hydrocarbon law which could see Parliament vote the legislation through in two weeks’ time. If the legislation is passed, arrangements to allow foreign oil majors to enter into production-sharing agreements with Iraq’s national oil company could then make it into the memorandum.

An executive at one of the smaller Western oil companies operating in Iraq said: "As you would expect, most of Iraq’s non-oil assets are outdated and in pretty bad shape. But this would give people who wanted to operate in Iraq an opportunity to get in." The source added that Iraq’s nationalised cement industry could be particularly attractive because the country’s reconstruction will require a building bonanza.

However, sources cautioned that the move could simply be a sop to the American administration. The US Congress will consider a report on progress in Iraq in September and a privatisation programme could be presented as some kind of progress in lieu of any real improvement in the security situation. City sources said any instruction would be complicated by factionalism within Iraq’s fragmented government. Hariri, while not ethnically Kurdish, is a member of the Kurdish democratic party.

Experts said investor appetite for Iraqi assets was relatively limited and was likely to remain so until the country’s security improved considerably. But if attempts to privatise Iraq’s non-oil assets went hand in hand with moves to open up the country’s oil sector to foreign investment, they would have much greater appeal. The long-awaited passage of the hydrocarbon law is seen as critical to attracting foreign investment.

Smaller, maverick oil companies have already invested in Kurdish-controlled areas of Iraq, but the bulk of the oil is in the south and no oil major would consider investing without a reliable legal regime and a significant improvement in security.

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Another Great Depression?

The Bank for International Settlements issued a warning this week that the Federal Reserve’s monetary policies have created an enormous equity bubble which could lead to another “Great Depression”. The UK Telegraph says that, “The BIS–the ultimate bank of central bankers–pointed to a confluence of worrying signs", citing mass issuance of new-fangled credit instruments, soaring levels of household debt, extreme appetite for risk shown by investors, and entrenched imbalances in the world currency system.

The IMF and the UN have issued similar warnings, but they’ve all been shrugged off by the Bush administration. Neither Bush nor the Federal Reserve is interested in “course correction”. They plan to stick with the same harebrained policies until the end.

The “easy credit” which created the subprime crisis in mortgage lending has now spread to the hedge fund industry. The troubles at Bear Stearns prove that Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson’s assurance that the problem is “contained” is pure baloney. The contagion is swiftly moving through the entire system taking down home owners, mortgage lenders, banks, rating agencies, and hedge funds. We are just at the beginning of a system-wide breakdown.

The problem originated at the Federal Reserve when Fed-chief Alan Greenspan lowered the Feds Fund Rate to 1% in June 2003 and kept rates perilously low for more than 2 years. Trillions of dollars flowed into the economy through low interest loans creating a massive equity bubble in real estate which drove up housing prices and triggered a speculative frenzy.

The Feds’ “easy money” policy has disrupted the “debt-to-GDP” balance which maintains the integrity of the currency. By expanding circulation debt via low interest rates; Greenspan put the country on the path to hyperinflation and, very likely, the collapse of the monetary system.

The problems at Bear Stearns are the logical upshot of Greenspan’s policies. The over-leveraged hedge funds are a good example of what happens during a “credit boom”. Liquidity flows into the markets and raises the nominal value of all asset classes but, at the same time, GDP continues to shrink. That’s because the wages of working class people have stagnated and not kept pace with productivity. When workers have less discretionary income, consumer spending—which accounts for 70% of GDP—begins to decline. That’s why this quarters earnings reports have fallen short of expectations. The American consumer is "tapped out".

The current rise in stock prices does not indicate a healthy economy. It simply proves that the market is awash in cheap credit resulting from the Fed’s increases in the money supply. Consumer spending is a better indicator of the real state of the economy than stocks. When consumer spending drops off; it is a sign of overcapacity, which is deflationary. That means that growth will continue to shrivel because maxed-out workers can no longer purchase the things they are making.

The underlying problem is not simply the Fed’s reckless increases to the money supply, but the growing “wealth gap” which is undermining solid economic growth. If wages don’t keep pace with productivity; the middle class loses its ability to buy consumer items and the economy slows.

The reason that hasn’t happened yet in the US is because of the extraordinary opportunities to expand personal debt. The Fed’s low interest rates have created a culture of borrowing which has convinced many people that debt equals wealth. It’s not; and the collapse in the housing market will prove how lethal that theory really is.

To large extent, the housing bubble has concealed the systematic destruction of America’s industrial and manufacturing base. Low interest rates have lulled the public to sleep while millions of high-paying jobs have been outsourced. The rise in housing prices has created the illusion of prosperity but, in truth, we are only selling houses to each other and are not making anything that the rest of the world wants. The $11 trillion dollars that was pumped into the real estate market is probably the greatest waste of capital investment in the nations’ history. It hasn’t produced a single asset that will add to our collective wealth or industrial competitiveness. It’s been a total bust.

The Federal Reserve produces all the facts and figures related to the housing industry. They knew that trillions of dollars were being diverted into a speculative bubble, but they did nothing to stop it. Instead, they kept interest rates low and endorsed the lax lending standards which paved the way for millions of defaults. Now the effects of their "cheap money" policies have spread to the hedge fund industry where hundreds of billions of dollars in pensions and savings are in jeopardy.

Alan Greenspan played a major role in the housing boondoggle. On February 26, 2004, he said, “American consumers might benefit if lenders provide greater mortgage product alternatives to the traditional fixed rate mortgage. To the degree that households are driven by fears of payment shocks but willing to manage their own interest-rate risks, the traditional fixed-rate mortgage may be an expensive method of financing a home.”

Greenspan tacitly approved the whacky financing which produced all manner of untested loans—including ARMs, piggyback loans, “no doc” loans, “interest only” loans etc. These loans are a break from traditional financing and have contributed to the increase in bankruptcies.

Millions of people who were hoodwinked into buying homes with “interest-only”, “no down” loans will now either lose their homes or be shackled to an asset of decreasing value for the next 30 years. They’ve been tricked into a life of indentured servitude.

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal revealed the extent of Greenspan’s involvement in the housing fiasco. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“Edward Gramlich, who was Fed governor from 1997 to 2005, said he proposed to Mr. Greenspan in or around 2000, when predatory lending was a growing concern, that the Fed use its discretionary authority to send examiners into the offices of consumer-finance lenders that were units of Fed-regulated bank holding companies.

"I would have liked the Fed to be a leader" in cracking down on predatory lending, Mr. Gramlich, now a scholar at the Urban Institute, said in an interview this past week. Knowing it would be controversial with Mr. Greenspan, whose deregulatory philosophy is well known, Mr. Gramlich broached it to him personally rather than take it to the full board.

"He was opposed to it, so I didn’t really pursue it," says Mr.Still, Mr. Greenspan’s views did color the regulatory environment, facilitating growing concentration in banking and a hands-off approach to derivatives and hedge funds. That approach, broadly shared by both the Clinton and Bush administrations, is coming under increased scrutiny”. (Wall Street Journal)

So, Greenspan had the chance to “crack down on predatory lending” and he refused. Now millions of low income people are saddled with payments they have no reasonable prospect of paying off. How much of the present carnage could have been avoided if he had Greenspan done the right thing?

An article appeared this week in the UK Telegraph by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard which supports the theory that Greenspan’s “loose monetary policy” fueled a huge credit bubble, which is pushing the global economy towards a “1930s-style slump.”

The article quotes from a statement made by The Bank for International Settlements:

"Virtually nobody foresaw the Great Depression of the 1930s, or the crises which affected Japan and Southeast Asia in the early and late 1990s. In fact, each downturn was preceded by a period of non-inflationary growth exuberant enough to lead many commentators to suggest that a ‘new era’ had arrived".

But today we face “worrying signs” of another economic meltdown.

The BIS said that they were “starting to doubt the wisdom of letting asset bubbles build up on the assumption that they could safely be ‘cleaned up’ afterwards”. (Greenspan’s method) and that, “while cutting interest rates in such a crisis may help, it has the effect of transferring wealth from creditors to debtors and sowing the seeds for more serious problems further ahead.’"

“The bank said it was far from clear whether the US would be able to ignore the consequences of its latest imbalances, ($800 billion per year) citing a current account deficit running at 6.5% of GDP, a rise in US external liabilities by over $4 trillion from 2001 to 2005, and an unprecedented drop in the savings rate. ‘The dollar clearly remains vulnerable to a sudden loss of private sector confidence.”’

The BIS referred to the toxic effect of the “$470 billion in collateralized debt obligations (CDO), and a further $524 billion in "synthetic" CDOs which have spread through hedge funds industry. These CDOs are the loans (many sub primes) which were bundled off to Wall Street and turned into securities which are highly leveraged in hedge funds for maximum profitability. As Bear Stearns is discovering, these CDOs are like roadside bombs; exploding without notice whenever the stock market suddenly dips.

The BIS also cautioned about the excess of “leveraged buy-outs (mergers) which touched $753bn, with an average debt/cash flow ratio hitting a record 5.4…. ‘Sooner or later the credit cycle will turn and default rates will begin to rise.’”

The central banks around the world are increasingly worried that the Bush administration’s profligate spending and irrational monetary policies will trigger a global depression. The recent volatility in the stock market suggests that the credit boom is just about over. Once the liquidity dries up—stocks will fall sharply.

Yesterday’s housing data, shows that sales are still weak while inventory continues to grow. Existing home sales dropped 3% while prices dropped another 2.1%. Falling prices mean that cash-strapped home owners will not be able to tap into their home’s equity for other expenses. Last year, mortgage equity withdrawals (MEWs) accounted for $600 billion of consumer spending. This year, the amount will be negligible at best.

The media and the Fed continue to mislead the public about the magnitude of the housing bubble. Fed chief Bernanke assures us that the sub prime calamity hasn’t “spread to other parts of the economy” (tell that to Bear Stearns) and the media keeps cheerily reiterating that a “turnaround” or “soft landing” is just ahead.

These claims are ridiculous. Apart from the 80 or more sub-prime lenders that have gone “belly-up” in the last few months, the rickety collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and mortgage backed securities (MBSs) are steamrolling their way through the stock market bowling down everything their path. Bear Stearns is just the first on the casualties list. There’ll be many more before the storm is over.

Fed-chairman Bernanke knows what’s going on. He was given a full rundown by “John Burns Real Estate Consulting that the national sales information for both new and existing homes, is “misleading and covering up a deep plunge of the housing sector.” The housing market is freefalling. Existing-home sales are down 22% in May and mortgage applications have fallen a whopping 18%….In Florida home sales are down 34%, not 28% as NAR reported; Arizona sales are down 38%, not 28%; and California’s down 37%, not 24% as NAR reports.”

Down 37% in California!?!

Gadzooks! It’s a landslide.

As the defaults continue to pile up; the hedge funds will take a bigger and bigger pounding. It can’t be avoided. That’s what happens when bankers abandon traditional lending standards and lend trillions of thousands of dollars to people who have bad credit and lie on their loan applications.

Thousands of these same shaky sub primes loans have been wrapped up like the Crown Jewels and sold off to Wall Street as CDOs. Now they are ripping through the hedge fund industry like a tornado in a trailer park. The media has tried to downplay the damage, but its not hard to see what is really going on.

According to Reuters:

“Banks doubled the amount of CDOs outstanding in the past two years to $2.6 trillion, including a record $769 billion sold last year, according to J.P. Morgan. These figures include funded and unfunded issuance. Pimco’s Bill Gross said there are hundreds of billions of dollars of subprime residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS), derivatives on subprime RMBS and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that buy subprime RMBS and/or the derivatives on the RMBS — all of which he considers "toxic waste.”’

"$2.6 trillion"! That’s enough to bring down the whole economy. And, as Bear Stearns proves, the whole mess is beginning to unwind pretty quickly.

“Foreign investors have been the dominant buyers of these exotic debt instruments in recent years, owing to their insatiable demand for yield. ‘If investors start dumping them, oh boy, watch out for some massive credit widening," said Dan Fuss, Vice Chairman at Loomis Sayles. (Reuters)

If the hedge fund industry follows the downward slide of the housing bubble, foreign investors will run for the exits. In fact, this may already being happening.

China sold $5.8 billion in US Treasuries in May; the first time they have dumped USTs on the market. This may be the first sign of “capital flight”—foreign investment fleeing the US for more promising markets in Asia and Europe. The greenback’s survival now depends on the generosity of foreign bankers. If they refuse to recycle our $800 billion current account deficit by purchasing US bonds and securities, then the dollar will sink like a stone and lose its place as the world’s reserve currency.

Last Friday, the stock market took a 185-point nosedive on the news that Bear Stearns was trying to raise $3.2 billion to rescue its battered hedge fund. According to the New York Times, however, Bear was only able to came up with "$1.6 billion in secured loans to bail out one of the 2 hedge funds".

The funds are the latest victim of the sub-prime meltdown which Bernanke and Paulson assured us was “largely contained”. In fact, Paulson even said, "We have had a major housing correction in this country," and "I do believe we are at or near the bottom."

Anyone who believes Paulson should take a look the chart linked below: http://www.belowthecrowd.com/photos/ackman.jpg?ref=patrick.net It illustrates that how loan “resets” will continue to pound the housing market for at least another year and a half getting steadily worse as inventory grows.

The disaster is so bad that even the realtors are beginning to tell the truth. As one agent noted, “It’s a bloodbath.”

But the debacle in housing is only the first part of a much larger problem—a global liquidity crisis. Banks and mortgage lenders have already begun to tighten up their lending practices and many have abandoned sub prime loans altogether. (20% of the housing market in 2006 was sub prime) Now the focus has shifted to the stock market, where banks are beginning to see that “risk” has not been properly calculated. That means that if more hedge funds collapse, the banks may not be able to cover the losses.

The Bear Stearns fiasco has had a chilling affect on lending. In fact, the New York Times reported on 6-26-07 that “After years of supersize private equity deals…the buyout boom may be about to hit a bump…Rising interest rates and tougher terms from investors may signal that private equity players will soon be struggling to continue reaping the outsize returns that have made the buyout business so lucrative.” (Private Equity Investors Hint at Cool Down” NY Times)

Liquidity is drying up in the private equity business. The troubles at Bear Stearns has changed the credit-landscape overnight. Bankers are nervous, money is getting tighter, and liquidity is vanishing.

"We know that these holdings are not unique to Bear Stearns," said Professor Joseph R. Mason, co-author of a recent study warning of dangers in securities backed by home loans to high-risk borrowers. "It would be hard to find a Wall Street firm that hasn’t created similar funds."

That’s right; the industry is waist-deep in these sub-prime time-bombs. Shaky loans and rising foreclosures threaten to knock the foundation blocks out from under the stock market and set off a wave of panic selling.

Could it have been avoided?

Perhaps, if there were better regulations on rating bonds and restricting leverage.

Consider this: one of Bear Stearns hedge funds took a $600 million investment and leveraged it 10 times its value to $7 billion. Their portfolio was chock-full of dicey CDOs and “illiquid assets” such as timber holdings in foreign countries and toll roads. These assets are difficult to price and nearly impossible to quickly auction off if the market suddenly takes a downturn.

It looked like Merrill Lynch & Co., was going to auction off $850 million of Bear Stearns CDOs this week, but backed off at the last minute. (They were reportedly only offered 30 cents on the dollar!) Once the hedge funds start selling these CDOs, then everyone will know how little they’re worth. That could trigger a wave of selling that could bring down the stock market. Even if that scenario doesn’t play out, the Bear Stearns incident ensures that CDOs in other hedge funds will be face a substantial downgrading that could take a big chunk out of their bottom line.

And, there’s a bigger fear on Wall Street than the fact that 2 hedge funds are headed into bankruptcy, that is, that a sudden tightening of credit will send the over-leveraged stock market into a downward spiral.

The market is particularly sensitive to any rise in interest rates or tougher lending standards. It’s become addicted to cheap credit and any break in the chain will cause equities to plummet.

Economist Henry C K Liu sums it up like this:

“The liquidity boom has been delivering strong growth through asset inflation without adding commensurate substantive expansion of the real economy. …. Unlike real physical assets, virtual financial mirages that arise out of thin air can evaporate again into thin air without warning. As inflation picks up, the liquidity boom and asset inflation will draw to a close, leaving a hollowed economy devoid of substance. …A global financial crisis is inevitable”. (Henry C K Liu “Liquidity boom and looming crisis” Asia Times)

In other words, the “virtual” wealth of Wall Street is a chimera which was created by the Fed’s inexorable expansion of debt. It can vanish in a flash if the sources of liquidity are cut off.

Puru Saxena draws the same conclusion in his article “A Gradual Transition”:

“Thanks to the Federal Reserve’s expansionary monetary policies over the past 5 years, US asset-prices have risen considerably; also known as the “wealth effect”. At the end of last year, the market capitalization of the US stock market rose to a record-high of US$20.6 trillion, matching the value of household real-estate, which also rose to a record-high at the same time. On the surface, this may seem like brilliant news, however you must realize that this “wealth illusion” achieved by an ocean of money and record-high indebtedness is only a consequence of inflation."

We expect that the mounting losses in CDOs and the continuing defaults in the housing industry will precipitate a “severe credit crunch” which will end in a stock market crash. A report which appeared yesterday in the UK Telegraph appears to agree with this analysis. Lombard Street Research predicted that:

“Excess liquidity in the global system will be slashed. Banks Capital is about to be decimated, which will require calling in a swathe of loans. This is going to aggravate the US ‘hard landing”’ (“Banks set to call in swathe of loans” UK Telegraph 6-26-07)

Three of the main hoses which provide liquidity for the market, have either been cut off or severely damaged. These are "securatized" subprime CDOs, corporate mega-mergers and hedge fund leveraging. Without these instruments for expanding debt; liquidity will dry up and stocks will fall. The period of "easy credit" will end in disaster.

We should now be able to see the straight line that connects the Fed’s low interest rates to the impending stock market meltdown. The problems began at the central bank.

Presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) summed it up best when he said:

“From the Great Depression, to the stagflation of the seventies, to the burst of the dot.com bubble; every economic downturn suffered by the country over the last 80 years can be traced to Federal Reserve policy. The Fed has followed a consistent policy of flooding the economy with easy money, leading to a misallocation of resources and artificial “boom” followed by recession or depression when the Fed-created bubble bursts”.

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Sarkozy wants to run secret sevices

President Nicolas Sarkozy’s drive to stamp his personal authority on all aspects of French government has been extended to the country’s famously quarrelsome security services.

The President has appointed a close ally to head the counter-espionage service, the DST (Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire), which is broadly the equivalent of MI5 in Britain. Bernard Squarcini, 51, who is known as le Squale – "the Shark" – has been given a potentially explosive mandate to absorb the other main internal security agency, the RG (Renseignements Généraux).

The two agencies, although both part of the Police Nationale, are tribally suspicious of one another and detest the idea of a merger. The unification is also strongly opposed by the Interior Minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie. This is one of several issues in which Mme Alliot-Marie is said to be determined to resist interference by the President in the day-to-day management of her ministry (which used to be run by M. Sarkozy).

In his six weeks in office, the President has already moved to appoint close allies as head of the national police service and as the police chief in Paris. One of his principal campaign managers has also been parachuted into the leading job in the most-watched French TV station, TF1.

As a result, the satirical newspaper Le Canard Enchainé has dubbed the all-controlling President "Le Tsarkozy".

M. Squarcini, the man who has been given a "licence to merge", is a Corsican-born career police officer and anti-terrorism expert. He was once deputy head of the Renseignment Généraux, which covers some of the functions of the Special Branch in Britain but also monitors horse-racing and betting. The RG’s tasks are mostly repression of internal subversion and home-grown terrorism. M. Squarcini will now be expected to merge this agency with the DST, which is the main anti-foreign terrorism agency and counter-intelligence service.

Traditionally, the DST has largely spied on foreigners. The RG has mostly spied on the French (including on the DST).

The two agencies are already being brought under one roof in a modern building in Levallois-Perret, just outside the Paris city boundary.

President Sarkozy argues that uniting the agencies would end rivalries, reduce overlap and make French action against terrorism more efficient. It would also make the agencies easier for the government, and President, to control.

Both agencies have been accused in the past of being manipulated by presidents and prime ministers to damage rival politicians. M. Sarkozy is said to have been suspicious of the role of the DST in the murky "Clearstream" affair, which was an attempt to smear him as financially corrupt.

The outgoing DST head, Pierre de Bousquet de Florian, 53, was regarded as close to the former president, Jacques Chirac. He has been moved to the low profile job of prefect (chief government official) in M. Sarkozy’s own power base, the départment of Hauts-de-Seine, just west of Paris.

The talents of the new DST head are recognised by all. He is said to be one of France’s most effective and subtle counter-terrorism experts. However, his personal allegiance to the President will reinforce the impression of the creation of a Sarkozy State. The idea of merging the DST and RG is said to have been suggested to M. Sarkozy by M. Squarcini himself. President Chirac resisted the idea when he was still President.

The Interior Minister, Mme Alliot-Marie, in a rare example of public dissidence within the Sarkozy government, told Le Monde earlier this month that a DST-RG merger would be "premature, to say the least".

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Russia lays claim to North Pole

It is already the world’s biggest country, spanning 11 time zones and stretching from Europe to the far east. But yesterday Russia signalled its intention to get even bigger by announcing an audacious plan to annex a vast 460,000 square mile chunk of the frozen and ice-encrusted Arctic.

According to Russian scientists, there is new evidence backing Russia’s claim that its northern Arctic region is directly linked to the North Pole via an underwater shelf.

Under international law, no country owns the North Pole. Instead, the five surrounding Arctic states, Russia, the US, Canada, Norway and Denmark (via Greenland), are limited to a 200-mile economic zone around their coasts.

On Monday, however, a group of Russian geologists returned from a six-week voyage on a nuclear icebreaker. They had travelled to the Lomonosov ridge, an underwater shelf in Russia’s remote and inhospitable eastern Arctic Ocean.

According to Russia’s media, the geologists returned with the "sensational news" that the Lomonosov ridge was linked to Russian Federation territory, boosting Russia’s claim over the oil-and-gas rich triangle. The territory contained 10bn tonnes of gas and oil deposits, the scientists said.

Russia’s Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper celebrated the discovery by printing a large map of the North Pole. It showed the new "addition" to Russia – the size of France, Germany and Italy combined – under a white, blue and red Russian flag.

Yesterday, however, some scientists doubted whether Russia’s latest Arctic grab stood up to scrutiny.

To extend a zone, a state has to prove that the structure of the continental shelf is similar to the geological structure within its territory. Under the current UN convention on the laws of the sea, no country’s shelf extends to the North Pole. Instead, the International Seabed Authority administers the area around the pole as an international area.

"Frankly I think it’s a little bit strange," Sergey Priamikov, the international co-operation director of Russia’s Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute in St Petersburg, told the Guardian. "Canada could make exactly the same claim. The Canadians could say that the Lomonosov ridge is part of the Canadian shelf, which means Russia should in fact belong to Canada, together with the whole of Eurasia."

Mr Priamikov said the area was one of breathtaking natural beauty. It was much drier, colder and quieter than the western Arctic, he added. "I’ve been there many times. It’s an oasis for marine life," he said. Asked whether it would be feasible to drill for oil, he said: "Yes".

The shelf was 200 metres deep and oil and gas would be easy to extract, especially with ice melting because of global warming, he said.

Russia has the world’s largest gas reserves. It is the second largest exporter of oil after Saudi Arabia. The Kremlin is keen to secure Russia’s long-term hegemony over global energy markets, and to find new sources of fuel.

Russia first made a submission in 2001 to the UN commission on the limits of the continental shelf, seeking to push Russia’s maritime borders beyond the existing 200-mile zone. It was rejected.

But the latest scientific findings are likely to prompt Russia to lodge another confident bid – and will alarm the US, which is mired in a 13-year debate over ratification of a UN treaty governing international maritime rights.

The Law of the Sea Treaty is the world’s primary means of settling disputes over exploitation rights and navigational routes in international waters. Russia and 152 other countries have ratified it.

But the US has refused, arguing it gives too much power to the UN. If the US does not ratify it, Russia’s bid for the Arctic’s energy wealth will go unchallenged, proponents believe.

 

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Japan may shoot down missiles

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Friday Japan should find legal leeway to allow its armed forces to shoot down a ballistic missile fired at its key ally the United States.

Abe made the remarks before a panel of advisers which he set up in April to lay the legal groundwork for Japan to fight for allies under attack without breaching its post-World War II pacifist constitution.

The constitution bans the use of force in settling international disputes, a constraint interpreted by successive governments to mean that Japan can resort to force for its own defense but not for "collective defense" of allies.

"If our ally, the United States, is seriously damaged by a ballistic missile, it will undoubtedly have a severe impact on our country’s own defense," Abe told the advisers at the outset of a meeting.

"In this sense, this (missile defense) is an important issue from the viewpoint that the Japan-US alliance should function more effectively," he said.

Japan and the United States have been building an armed shield against missile attacks since North Korea lobbed a suspected long-range missile over Japan’s main island and into the Pacific in 1998.

On Thursday, Prime Minister Abe called for a "severe" international response to North Korea’s launch of several short-range missiles into the Sea of Japan (East Sea) a day earlier.

It was the third meeting of the 13-member panel of former officials and academics led by ex-ambassador to Washington Shunji Yanai.

The members are widely seen as close to Abe who has also been seeking to revise the constitution itself as part of his drive to build an assertive nation proud of its history despite its militarist past.

The panel was tasked to draw up a report to Abe before the end of the year.

"There was no objection to the idea that we should intercept (missiles)," Shinichi Kitaoka, a Tokyo University professor on the panel, told reporters after the meeting, according to Kyodo News.

Many panel members agreed that if Japan failed to intercept such missiles, despite having the capability to do so, it would undermine the foundation of the Japan-US security alliance, ex-ambassador Yanai said, according to Kyodo.

Some members said that missile interceptions over international waters did not constitute an exercise of force in foreign territory, Yanai said, adding that North Korea was one area discussed.

There were also suggestions that missiles targeted at Australia and other allies should also be intercepted, Yanai was quoted as saying.

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Thousands of Indians look to Poland

When Poland’s president, Lech Kaczynski, quipped recently that he was having trouble finding a decorator, the joke was not lost on a nation that has waved goodbye to hundreds of thousands of westward-bound handymen in the past three years.
 
But for those in his government responsible for building a network of football stadiums fit to stage a major championships, this is no laughing matter. Poland has five years to regenerate its tired communist-era grounds ready for the 2012 European football championships. But in a country already clattering along with growth rates of around 7%, you just can’t get the staff. London’s 2012 Olympic headaches look trivial by comparison.

And so Poland has started to look elsewhere for the bricklayers, roofers, fitters, crane operators and bulldozer drivers who can throw up three stadiums, hotels, airports and hundreds of miles of motorway in quick time. It has found the answer: India.

"There are severe discrepancies in our labour market," said Poland’s labour minister, Anna Kalata, who recently travelled to New Delhi to sign a memorandum of understanding with India to entice workers to come to the former eastern bloc country to fill the gaping hole. "The need for labour is particularly acute in the construction sector in the run-up to Euro 2012, and we need you," she told Indians. "The fact that the Polish economy is growing at a rate of over 7% is making the problem even more acute."

Hundreds of thousands are expected to take up the challenge, even though many will have only a tenuous grasp on where Poland is. One Indian newspaper has predicted: "Poland is to be the next hot destination for Indian workers."

Order book

It’s not the first case of Poland sucking in overseas labour to fill glaring domestic shortages. Up in the port city of Gdansk, 200 Azeris and Tajiks have been taken on by Poland’s largest developer to keep on top of a formidable order book. "It’s a brilliant idea," said Jacek Bazan, of JW Construction, referring to the overture to India. "The situation here will only get worse as more skilled workers go to work in western Europe, and who do they expect to build the infrastructure, roads, hotels and stadiums in time for 2012? Once we have more people we’ll be able to forge ahead with new projects and create a few hundred jobs at least," he said.

Indian construction workers have a history of proven flexibility, with thousands heading to the Middle East in the late 1970s and 1980s to service a construction boom. But demand for them has slackened since countries there started giving preference to workers from within the region, such as Yemen.

In the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, 31-year-old master mason Mekulal Kachwaha, whose family have worked in construction for at least three generations, welcomed the news of the new opportunity. Although he had never heard of Poland, he would gladly go to work there. He would be the first member of his family to achieve the Indian worker’s dream: a job abroad.

"Only one worker in our village has so far made it abroad – to Saudi Arabia," Mr Kachwaha said. "He’s doing very well, and comes back regularly to see his family."

Better future

"If the money is good, I’ll definitely go. By doing that, I’ll be able to ensure a better future for my children. Moreover, it’ll be an opportunity to see the world, something that a poor man like me cannot otherwise dream of," he added.

He said he hoped to at least double his current monthly wage of 10,000 rupees (£125) which he earns working as a foreman in Delhi. In fact, in Poland he would have the opportunity to earn several times his present salary, Polish wages in the sector having doubled in the past year in response to the shortage and a building boom.

Between 800,000 and 2 million Poles are estimated to have left the country since it joined the EU three years ago, including perhaps 400,000 who came to Britain. So when the country won the race to host the 2012 European championship along with Ukraine, joy was tempered with concern at the enormous task ahead.

A key adviser to the 2012 bid says structural preparation is "grossly behind schedule". The country needs to build 600 miles of motorway, five airports, new hotels – there are only 11 five-star hotels in the whole country – and three new stadiums, as well as modernising another three.

The shortage is so dire that the authorities are even reportedly considering using up to 20,000 convicts, under armed guard, to kick-start the construction. The problems are manifest in Warsaw, where construction projects dot the landscape but work proceeds at a ponderous pace.

Some still hold out hope that at least some of the emigrants will return, enticed by the ever-increasing wages, so that the country can avoid turning – for the first time in its history – into a land of immigration. "But these hopes won’t be fulfilled as long as the west remains more attractive," said Emil Szwezda, an analyst.

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Arabic now Sydney’s No. 2 language

The face of immigration is changing. English and New Zealanders still make up the largest groups of overseas-born residents – but the new focus, especially in Sydney, is among people with Arabic-speaking and Chinese backgrounds.

In Sydney, the most common language spoken at home, after English, is now Arabic (3.9 per cent) followed by Cantonese (3 per cent) and Mandarin (2.3 per cent). Only then do Greek (1.9 per cent) and Italian (1.7 per cent) feature.

The president of the Australian Chinese Community Association, Lucilla Leung, said despite the economic revolution in China, "it can never feed all the Chinese people" and "no matter how open it has become, it is still a command economy".

Ms Leung, who came to Australia more than 40 years ago, said the networks of Chinese Australians already living here attracted new migrants. "Like the Italians and the Greeks, the Chinese have networks, so when they land they can ask [other Chinese] where they can get help," she said.

The association was set up in 1974 after a group of Chinese migrants saw the 1972 census results, realised how many of them were already here and grouped together to help one another.

Sydney’s ethnic mix is at odds with the rest of the country and reflects the preference of migrants to settle in Australia’s biggest city. It has significantly more overseas-born citizens and reflects the changing points of origin of Australian immigration. Almost one in three Sydneysiders (32 per cent) was born overseas, compared with the national average of 22 per cent, according to the 2006 census figures released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics yesterday.

The largest group of Australians born overseas is still English (19 per cent) followed by New Zealanders (8 per cent) but, in Sydney, they represent 11 per cent and 6 per cent respectively.

For the first time, Chinese (8.3 per cent) have overtaken the New Zealanders in Sydney to become the second largest overseas born group.

Nationally, the most commonly spoken languages after English are Italian, Greek and Cantonese but, of these, the Chinese dialect was the only one to increase its number of speakers, up 21 per cent, since 1996.

The census shows a continuing decline in the use of European languages at home. Greek and Italian usage fell but German suffered the biggest drop, 24 per cent.

In contrast, the numbers of Mandarin and Hindi speakers have doubled since 1996.

In Sydney, 29 per cent of households (1.2 million people) use a language other than English at home. In Hobart, only 5.1 per cent (10,000 people) speak another language at home.

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The fire this time

Sara Mampane has been waiting for the African National Congress to fulfil its promise of a new home – what she calls a "proper house", where the only corrugated iron is on the roof and the walls are made of brick – since the party came to power with the collapse of apartheid 13 years ago.

The 43-year-old mother of three watched from her rickety two-room shack with no electricity in a squatter camp on the edge of Mamelodi township as others moved to one of the new box houses built by the government. She was content to wait her turn and be grateful for what did arrive, principally access to clean water and a health clinic for her children. But her patience snapped last month when men in red boiler suits came to demolish her home.

The feared "red ants" descended on the camp to remove the thousands of illegally built corrugated iron shacks that have spread out from the edge of the township in recent years. The residents were so incensed that they stoned one of the men to death and injured others, and set fire to four trucks.

"They promised me a house but they say wait, wait, wait," said Ms Mampane. "So I am waiting. But it is not right to come and knock down the house I have before they build me a new one. This is what we expected from apartheid, not from our own government. I think they have forgotten us."

Weeks of on and off rioting in Mamelodi over the demolitions and lack of services have rekindled memories of the township as a hotbed of protest against the apartheid regime two decades ago. Last week hundreds of angry protesters threw up barricades and burned tyres in clashes with police. Last month the residents set fire to local council offices.

The disturbances are not limited to Mamelodi. Hundreds of similar protests have spread across South Africa, fuelled by anger at the slow pace of change.

Thirteen years after the end of apartheid, the poverty gap in South Africa remains among the largest in the world – second only to Brazil by some measurements. More than 40% of South Africans live on less than eight rand (59p) a day. More than one third of the working-age population is unemployed.

But it is the evident wealth of others, mostly white but including a small newly enriched black elite, that has contributed to bitter divisions within the ANC over the government’s economic strategy. The issue is expected to dominate a party conference this week.

Time bomb

Some in the ANC are warning that the wealth gap is a time bomb for the country and the party, which is losing touch with the mass of its voters and "betraying the national democratic revolution" with too much focus on creating a liberal business climate.

Trade unions are leading the attack on economic priorities they say have principally benefited the emerging black elite, and the old white one, at the expense of the poor. "It’s like a doctor saying an operation has been successful when the patient is dead," Zwelinzima Vavi, secretary general of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, a partner in the ruling alliance with the ANC, told a rally in the Free State this month.

Few deny that the ANC has taken significant strides toward reducing poverty. According to figures released last week, the government has built more than 2m new homes since 1994, although the numbers of people living in squatter camps has risen by half over the same period.

About 85% of households have access to fresh water, up from 61% when the ANC came to power. More than 71% have inside toilets attached to the sewage system, up from about 50%. More than 4m homes have been connected to mains electricity over the same period, although the price of power has quadrupled and many people have been cut off because they cannot pay the bills.

South Africa’s minister of provincial and local government, Sydney Mufamadi, has said the protests reflect the government’s successes. "As we make progress in some municipalities, the residents in other municipalities become impatient: they expect their public representatives to deliver in the same way as progress is made in other municipalities," he told a UN news agency.

Unshared growth

The government’s latest strategy, the accelerated and shared growth initiative, seeks to halve poverty and unemployment by 2014 by continuing the significant economic growth of recent years and creating millions of new jobs.

Charles Meth, a respected researcher on poverty at Cape Town university, says the government is working on "over-optimistic" predictions, and that though economic growth is crucial it will take decades to eradicate endemic poverty. "The treasury is driving an agenda that says growth is going to rescue us," he says. "It’s nonsense.

"Within the state there’s a huge amount of tension over poverty policy. On the one hand you’ve got the minister of social development, Zola Skweyiya, very sensibly saying this is not going to be enough and we have to have some kind of basic grant for those people who are going to be left out by these anti-poverty policies and growth policies that you’re looking at. The cabinet rounds on him and says ‘bollocks’."

The government concedes that though poverty has decreased since 2000, the gap between rich and poor has not narrowed.

The poor can see it only too well. Where the fault line between the haves and the have nots once ran almost exclusively along racial lines, the ANC’s policy of black economic empowerment has created a new class of super-rich blacks driving the most expensive cars and living in mansions with servants and swimming pools. Many of the new elite have links to the ruling party.

The policy’s defenders say that it is forcing a shift in economic power to the black majority that will trickle down to the poor. Some of its critics say that all too often blacks have merely become the public face of white interests.

Smuts Ngonyama, a former spokesman for President Thabo Mbeki asked to explain why he received shares in a private company while working for the government, said he did not join the struggle against apartheid to remain poor. Tokyo Sexwale, one of the few ANC leaders to have declared he is running to succeed Mr Mbeki, has also been forced to defend his extraordinary accumulation of wealth.

The unions and ANC left have an uphill struggle to change the policy at this week’s party conference. The leadership wants an endorsement of a document that Johannesburg’s Centre for Policy Studies has described as so "bland, uncritical and vague" that it leaves the impression that the ANC "just doesn’t care for the poor and socially marginalised groups".

But Max Sisulu, one of the party’s economic policy strategists, says the ANC is not disturbed by the criticism.

"We are not worried about differences. We welcome them," he says. "We can only benefit from differences."

BEE bumbling: The rise of the new elite

The Black Economic Empowerment affirmative action policy to break the white stranglehold on the economy is either the fast track to addressing past wrongs or another get-rich-quick scheme in a country where a greed-is-good culture pervades.

BEE’s supporters say the shift in political power after apartheid is compromised by continued white control of the economy. Companies with a significant black stake control just 5% of the Johannesburg stock exchange. Empowerment laws require larger white-owned businesses to sell a 25% stake to black partners.

But BEE is also seen as just jobs for some of the ANC boys (and girls). Critics say the policy has encouraged black people to set up companies that serve no other purpose than to help white-owned firms meet their obligations. There have been a number of scandals, perhaps most notably that involving the woman known as the "Queen of BEE", Danisa Baloyi, who had to resign from more than a dozen company boards after two people were arrested on fraud allegations at one of the companies .

 

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Czech town rejects US radar

Residents of Mirosov, a small Czech town of some 2,000 near the Brdy military zone where the United States seeks to place a missile shield radar base, have rejected the US facility in a local referendum. On Sunday, the CTK news agency said all but 30 of the 897 valid votes cast were against erecting the radar base.

The referendum is not politically binding in Prague so it’s up to the town’s council to try and halt the base’s construction. Another 13 municipalities in the region have received the same mandate from their residents. Several other towns in the military zone’s vicinity have rejected the base in opinion polls.

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Psychopaths and History

For months I had three objections to seeing the film Apocalypto all defanged by the film itself:

One, although a former Marine, I detest anything that sounds like a "horror film," and a film about human sacrifice sounds appalling.

In fact, the violence in this film, which does show human sacrifice and those escaping it and fighting back, is not gratuitous but at the core essence of the story, and Gibson shows only half the gruesome Mayan-Aztec reality which the Spanish terminated after 1502. It may make professional anti-racists uncomfortable, but Apocalypto cleaves tightly to reality in details both large and small, right down to the colors of the plant dyes used in native clothing, the jade used by different classes of women and the feather headdress of the great king.

(Using artistic license, Gibson does blend different periods of Mayan architecture and decor, and by the time the Spanish came, as shown in the film, the jungle Mayan cities already had been mysteriously abandoned. It was actually further north, in the very similar and neighboring Aztec culture with its own human sacrifices, that the Spanish would find the same psychopathic atrocities, which caused them to eradicate the Aztec regime root and branch with the aid of oppressed local tribes.)

Two, I detest our national tendency to mindless action movies. Methinks Americans should break with their hyperactive national character by doing less and thinking more, perhaps precluding further Ritalin kid-faux cowboys in the White House.

What Apocalypto represents, however, is a mindful action movie. It is done by a storyteller worthy of Homer, a director worthy of Cecil B. DeMille (Gibson’s movie has 700 extras, all in differing accurate costumes), and a deeply spiritual man (when not off the wagon; Mel in Australia used to drink two scotches in beer, which he called "liquid violence").

Apocalypto transmits via entertainment a tremendous message, one that reflects the values of his father, Hutton Gibson, a courageous Holocaust revisionist, a Traditional Catholic–and an honored speaker at the 2003 conference held by this very magazine.

Not many Hollywood "action flicks" start with a quote from historian Will Durant (1885-1981), author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning, eleven-volume The Story of Civilization: "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within."

Third, I wondered how much relevance Mayan Indios in 1502 had to me, a white man in 2007, except for the possible fact that my Washington, DC area is now being flooded by illegal alien descendants of the Mayans and Aztecs. (The greater DC area is now only 54% white.)

Actually, plenty of relevance: The entire movie delineates how a tiny psychopathic ruling class misrules, lies to, entertains with mass festivals, impoverishes and oppresses an entire nation–and how God and man ultimately thwart them.

The title "Apocalypto" comes from one of the very many utterly unique scenes in this revolutionary piece of film making. Mayan manhunters pass through an orphan girl’s smoldering shell of a village, not unlike the pulverized Ramadi or Fallujah in Iraq, or Dresden in 1945 Germany or Gaza in Palestine. They take along their captives destined for human sacrifice, neck-tied to a wooden rail, heading for their torture and death. The psychopaths prod her aside;-they have no time for starving orphans; the clock is ticking for show time in the Yucatan.

She dries her little-girl tears and thanks to Gibson, from somewhere real, inside the character, come two riveting eyeballs trained on them and a voice of doom that "spooks" even the hardened enslavers. She then "reveals the end" of all that they represent; in Greek, she "apocalyptizes" the final things.

The official Apocalypto poster from Icon Productions (Gibson’s own film company that also did Braveheart), depicts a Mayan high priest, with an obsidian knife in hand, striding forth from his ziggurat where for years he has been sacrificing trembling humans.

In 1486, in fact, during an Aztec temple dedication before huge and roaring crowds (just 16 years before Columbus’s fourth expedition, which landed in Central America), in a four-day festival twenty thousand live captives, knowing in advance what was going to happen to them, consciously saw and felt their hearts, hands and feet being surgically sliced away by the glass-like but razor-sharp obsidian knives, this before their heads were cut off and flung, followed by the torsos, bouncing and flipping down the pyramid steps–naturally "as the crowd roared."

Other Mayans were used as target practice for various elite weapons. Raids to small villages, as depicted in Apocalypto in an unforgettable 15-minute sequence, brought a never-ending supply of fright-sickened new victims.

But the Mayans also fought wars and humiliated captured foreign leaders; as Gibson relates in the fascinating "Director’s Commentary" on the DVD, they spent nine interminable years degrading, humiliating–and amputating various parts off–a captured head of state. As Gibson related, in the end the captives were just "balls of nerve endings." It would appear that the sociopathic priests enjoyed making fools even of their own kings; the Mayan heads of state were persuaded to try accessing the gods by driving a stingray spine through their penis. (See sidebar: "Mel didn’t show half of it.")

It reminds one of George Orwell’s description in the novel 1984 of the ultimate psychopathic regime. Big Brother’s spokesman explains with chutzpah to the captured Winston Smith: "Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship [or Mayan priestly rule] in order to safeguard a revolution [or new order]; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.

"The object of persecution is persecution.

The object of torture is torture.

The object of power is power."

–Part III, chapter three

Here speaks pure sociopathy from the summit of the State.

Vast swaths of forest were also cut down for fuel by the Mayan ruling class, heedless of devastation to the environment (especially of the top soil), all this to bake the clay bricks used for these ever-higher ziggurats.[However, the Mayan and Aztec cultures (and those of the Incas, Apaches, and other Amerindians) never even invented the wheel–except as a child’s toy!–despite all those round logs they cut down and rolled and despite the vast distances encountered in the Americas. Nor did they possess horses in pre-Columbian America. So everybody trudged along, carried or pushed something with human power until Spain came in 1502.

Nor did the Mayans and Aztecs, canoers, invent the sail in a hundred generations of feeling the wind blow their canoe sideways. Perhaps they were waiting for the "white gods" to return.

Ethnographer-adventurer Thor Heyerdahl of "Kon Tiki" fame wrote in 2000 a book called Ingen Grenser–Norwegian for "No Boundaries"–where he renews his thesis, shared by many Indians 500 years ago, that ancient whites, the "white gods," had very long before founded their pre-Columbian civilizations before vanishing, along with their influence.)

All film dialogue is spoken entirely in the authentic Mayan of the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico where the film was made, and all actors, including the star, Rudy Youngblood of Texas, are Amerindians from North and Central America. (As a young man awakened by horror to his destiny and abilities, Youngblood’s performance at the hands of producer-writer-director Gibson is superlative.)

It is said that in his 2004 The Passion of the Christ, the "antisemitic" (in reality "New Testament"!) remarks are left only in the Aramaic language and are not even printed in the subtitles. Interestingly, in the French subtitles to his most recent movie, Apocalypto, even more so than in the English or Spanish subtitles, the murderous high priest makes many Talmudic-sounding statements during the human sacrifice scene.

"These are the days of our great lament," the high priest intones to the crowds from atop his pyramid. Then he asserts to the overawed mob (again, this is in the French subtitles translating the Mayan): "Notre peuple a été choisi." That means: "Our people has been chosen." (French, because of the Norman conquest of England, is often similar in vocabulary to modern English.)

In the English and Spanish subtitles, this is prudently rephrased as "We are a people of destiny" (perhaps in dishonor of Franklin Roosevelt’s inaugural address: "This generation has a rendezvous with destiny.")[footnote2: Hutton Gibson was strongly opposed to Roosevelt and his war, albeit he was wounded in 1944 in the Pacific as an Army officer.]

One recalls that when Apocalypto was released in December 2006, it was just four months since Gibson’s famous July 28, 2006 "antisemitic tirade." On Gibson’s website one sympathizer, a born-again Christian, probably expressed best why the movie-going public shrugged off Gibson’s “anti-semitic rant” and went to see Apocalypto:

"I’d like to see what the Jews say about us when they get drunk!"

We further learn from Gibson in the Director’s Commentary on the DVD — which he dispenses together with the film’s Iranian co-producer and co-writer, Farhad Safinia– that for authenticity they had all the actors playing Mayan rulers "wear curved nose prostheses."

The curvy-nosed priest then continues with his harangue: "We were chosen to be the masters of time; we were chosen to walk with the gods."

In the telling closeup, the Mayan king and high priest nervously exchange glances during the high point of the killings. We know from archeology and temple architecture–when beams of light would fall on certain points–that the Mayan priests knew exactly when eclipses would take place, but the point was to be seen as miracle workers. But will the solar eclipse yet again "do the trick" and, as darkness overshadows the great city, overawe the trusting crowd, striking a quasi-9/11-like fear in them? Will the public believe forever that through killings their leaders protect the nation from ecliptic terror and doom?

The whole scam behind their grand pleasure in killing victims was that in this way the peuple choisi would "save the harvests and the nation." (Writer Margaret Huffstickler has commented: "The eclipse is like 9/11, and invading Iraq and establishing Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib is the ‘necessary’ human sacrifice.")[footnote: On Columbus’s last expedition, in 1503-04, he was stranded for over a year on Jamaica with wrecked ships. In a scam designed to intimidate the Arawak Indians of Jamaica into feeding him and his men, he used his trusty Ephemeris from the German astronomer Regiomontanus to correctly predict the lunar eclipse of February 29, 1504. It worked; they kept feeding him.]

In the subtitle of the official Apocalypto poster, above, we read the slogan: "No one can outrun their destiny." This certainly applied to the psychopathic native ruling class of pre-Columbian Central America. At the very end of the movie, ominously, the Spanish arrive in power from their great, dark ships, with soldiers, priests and brandished crucifixes, to eventually overthrow and annihilate the murderous Mayan ruling class. How interesting for Mel Gibson to introduce for the movie’s final scene the Spain that exactly ten years before, in 1492, had not only sailed the ocean blue but expelled the Jews and fully unleashed the Inquisition on the the marranos, the secret Jews still in power in the background. (To this day, 515 years later, only one resident of Spain in two thousand is Jewish.)

Through DVD technology, we can first enjoy the artist’s cinematic work and then, merely pressing the remote control, consult him personally through his commentary as to what he was thinking, aiming at and enduring technically trying to achieve each shot and scene. We can also appreciate his use of costumes, history, authentic weapons, makeup for men and women of different classes, and see the scenes, such as the one with the burnt and limping deer, that he cut for brevity or distraction of the storytelling flow.

Truly, in the hand of the masters, the cinema is the premier art form of our time. In Apocalypto, after viewing the two-hour masterpiece, the viewer therefore should spend another profitable two hours on another day reliving each scene with this truly great artist, Mel Columcille Gibson, and his brilliant Iranian colleague Farhad Safinia, and a third hour with the "Special Features" on the DVD of Apocalypto to understand the secret ocean of detail that Gibson has channeled into this mighty current. It is what Wagner would have called a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total art form. Then–as my Barnes Review-reading friends actually did–see Apocalypto another four to six times. That is doable with a great work of art.

What stands out, finally, is what the father says in the jungle to Jaguar Paw: "Fear makes you weak, and fear makes you sick." This is, as the Will Durant quote at its beginning shows, a movie about now, about the psychopathic regime now, and about transcending the real fears we face now. And, as the hero says after he takes the plunge over the waterfall, "This is MY forest." See the movie.

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Freedom, not climate, is at risk

We are living in strange times. One exceptionally warm winter is enough – irrespective of the fact that in the course of the 20th century the global temperature increased only by 0.6 per cent – for the environmentalists and their followers to suggest radical measures to do something about the weather, and to do it right now.

In the past year, Al Gore’s so-called “documentary” film was shown in cinemas worldwide, Britain’s – more or less Tony Blair’s – Stern report was published, the fourth report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was put together and the Group of Eight summit announced ambitions to do something about the weather. Rational and freedom-loving people have to respond. The dictates of political correctness are strict and only one permitted truth, not for the first time in human history, is imposed on us. Everything else is denounced.

The author Michael Crichton stated it clearly: “the greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda”. I feel the same way, because global warming hysteria has become a prime example of the truth versus propaganda problem. It requires courage to oppose the “established” truth, although a lot of people – including top-class scientists – see the issue of climate change entirely differently. They protest against the arrogance of those who advocate the global warming hypothesis and relate it to human activities.

As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning.

The environmentalists ask for immediate political action because they do not believe in the long-term positive impact of economic growth and ignore both the technological progress that future generations will undoubtedly enjoy, and the proven fact that the higher the wealth of society, the higher is the quality of the environment. They are Malthusian pessimists.

The scientists should help us and take into consideration the political effects of their scientific opinions. They have an obligation to declare their political and value assumptions and how much they have affected their selection and interpretation of scientific evidence.

Does it make any sense to speak about warming of the Earth when we see it in the context of the evolution of our planet over hundreds of millions of years? Every child is taught at school about temperature variations, about the ice ages, about the much warmer climate in the Middle Ages. All of us have noticed that even during our life-time temperature changes occur (in both directions).

Due to advances in technology, increases in disposable wealth, the rationality of institutions and the ability of countries to organise themselves, the adaptability of human society has been radically increased. It will continue to increase and will solve any potential consequences of mild climate changes.

I agree with Professor Richard Lindzen from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who said: “future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age”.

The issue of global warming is more about social than natural sciences and more about man and his freedom than about tenths of a degree Celsius changes in average global temperature.

As a witness to today’s worldwide debate on climate change, I suggest the following:
■Small climate changes do not demand far-reaching restrictive measures
■Any suppression of freedom and democracy should be avoided
■Instead of organising people from above, let us allow everyone to live as he wants
■Let us resist the politicisation of science and oppose the term “scientific consensus”, which is always achieved only by a loud minority, never by a silent majority
■Instead of speaking about “the environment”, let us be attentive to it in our personal behaviour
■Let us be humble but confident in the spontaneous evolution of human society. Let us trust its rationality and not try to slow it down or divert it in any direction
■Let us not scare ourselves with catastrophic forecasts, or use them to defend and promote irrational interventions in human lives.

The writer is President of the Czech Republic

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Read the sunspots

Politicians and environmentalists these days convey the impression that climate-change research is an exceptionally dull field with little left to discover. We are assured by everyone from David Suzuki to Al Gore to Prime Minister Stephen Harper that "the science is settled." At the recent G8 summit, German Chancellor Angela Merkel even attempted to convince world leaders to play God by restricting carbon-dioxide emissions to a level that would magically limit the rise in world temperatures to 2C.

The fact that science is many years away from properly understanding global climate doesn’t seem to bother our leaders at all. Inviting testimony only from those who don’t question political orthodoxy on the issue, parliamentarians are charging ahead with the impossible and expensive goal of "stopping global climate change." Liberal MP Ralph Goodale’s June 11 House of Commons assertion that Parliament should have "a real good discussion about the potential for carbon capture and sequestration in dealing with carbon dioxide, which has tremendous potential for improving the climate, not only here in Canada but around the world," would be humorous were he, and even the current government, not deadly serious about devoting vast resources to this hopeless crusade.

Climate stability has never been a feature of planet Earth. The only constant about climate is change; it changes continually and, at times, quite rapidly. Many times in the past, temperatures were far higher than today, and occasionally, temperatures were colder. As recently as 6,000 years ago, it was about 3C warmer than now. Ten thousand years ago, while the world was coming out of the thou-sand-year-long "Younger Dryas" cold episode, temperatures rose as much as 6C in a decade — 100 times faster than the past century’s 0.6C warming that has so upset environmentalists.

Climate-change research is now literally exploding with new findings. Since the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the field has had more research than in all previous years combined and the discoveries are completely shattering the myths. For example, I and the first-class scientists I work with are consistently finding excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations in the brightness of the sun and earthly climate. This is not surprising. The sun and the stars are the ultimate source of all energy on the planet.

My interest in the current climate-change debate was triggered in 1998, when I was funded by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council strategic project grant to determine if there were regular cycles in West Coast fish productivity. As a result of wide swings in the populations of anchovies, herring and other commercially important West Coast fish stock, fisheries managers were having a very difficult time establishing appropriate fishing quotas. One season there would be abundant stock and broad harvesting would be acceptable; the very next year the fisheries would collapse. No one really knew why or how to predict the future health of this crucially important resource.

Although climate was suspected to play a significant role in marine productivity, only since the beginning of the 20th century have accurate fishing and temperature records been kept in this region of the northeast Pacific. We needed indicators of fish productivity over thousands of years to see whether there were recurring cycles in populations and what phenomena may be driving the changes.

My research team began to collect and analyze core samples from the bottom of deep Western Canadian fjords. The regions in which we chose to conduct our research, Effingham Inlet on the West Coast of Vancouver Island, and in 2001, sounds in the Belize-Seymour Inlet complex on the mainland coast of British Columbia, were perfect for this sort of work. The topography of these fjords is such that they contain deep basins that are subject to little water transfer from the open ocean and so water near the bottom is relatively stagnant and very low in oxygen content. As a consequence, the floors of these basins are mostly lifeless and sediment layers build up year after year, undisturbed over millennia.

Using various coring technologies, we have been able to collect more than 5,000 years’ worth of mud in these basins, with the oldest layers coming from a depth of about 11 metres below the fjord floor. Clearly visible in our mud cores are annual changes that record the different seasons: corresponding to the cool, rainy winter seasons, we see dark layers composed mostly of dirt washed into the fjord from the land; in the warm summer months we see abundant fossilized fish scales and diatoms (the most common form of phytoplankton, or single-celled ocean plants) that have fallen to the fjord floor from nutrient-rich surface waters. In years when warm summers dominated climate in the region, we clearly see far thicker layers of diatoms and fish scales than we do in cooler years. Ours is one of the highest-quality climate records available anywhere today and in it we see obvious confirmation that natural climate change can be dramatic. For example, in the middle of a 62-year slice of the record at about 4,400 years ago, there was a shift in climate in only a couple of seasons from warm, dry and sunny conditions to one that was mostly cold and rainy for several decades.

Using computers to conduct what is referred to as a "time series analysis" on the colouration and thickness of the annual layers, we have discovered repeated cycles in marine productivity in this, a region larger than Europe. Specifically, we find a very strong and consistent 11-year cycle throughout the whole record in the sediments and diatom remains. This correlates closely to the well-known 11-year "Schwabe" sunspot cycle, during which the output of the sun varies by about 0.1%. Sunspots, violent storms on the surface of the sun, have the effect of increasing solar output, so, by counting the spots visible on the surface of our star, we have an indirect measure of its varying brightness. Such records have been kept for many centuries and match very well with the changes in marine productivity we are observing.

In the sediment, diatom and fish-scale records, we also see longer period cycles, all correlating closely with other well-known regular solar variations. In particular, we see marine productivity cycles that match well with the sun’s 75-90-year "Gleissberg Cycle," the 200-500-year "Suess Cycle" and the 1,100-1,500-year "Bond Cycle." The strength of these cycles is seen to vary over time, fading in and out over the millennia. The variation in the sun’s brightness over these longer cycles may be many times greater in magnitude than that measured over the short Schwabe cycle and so are seen to impact marine productivity even more significantly.

Our finding of a direct correlation between variations in the brightness of the sun and earthly climate indicators (called "proxies") is not unique. Hundreds of other studies, using proxies from tree rings in Russia’s Kola Peninsula to water levels of the Nile, show exactly the same thing: The sun appears to drive climate change.

However, there was a problem. Despite this clear and repeated correlation, the measured variations in incoming solar energy were, on their own, not sufficient to cause the climate changes we have observed in our proxies. In addition, even though the sun is brighter now than at any time in the past 8,000 years, the increase in direct solar input is not calculated to be sufficient to cause the past century’s modest warming on its own. There had to be an amplifier of some sort for the sun to be a primary driver of climate change.

Indeed, that is precisely what has been discovered. In a series of groundbreaking scientific papers starting in 2002, Veizer, Shaviv, Carslaw, and most recently Svensmark et al., have collectively demonstrated that as the output of the sun varies, and with it, our star’s protective solar wind, varying amounts of galactic cosmic rays from deep space are able to enter our solar system and penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere. These cosmic rays enhance cloud formation which, overall, has a cooling effect on the planet. When the sun’s energy output is greater, not only does the Earth warm slightly due to direct solar heating, but the stronger solar wind generated during these "high sun" periods blocks many of the cosmic rays from entering our atmosphere. Cloud cover decreases and the Earth warms still more.

The opposite occurs when the sun is less bright. More cosmic rays are able to get through to Earth’s atmosphere, more clouds form, and the planet cools more than would otherwise be the case due to direct solar effects alone. This is precisely what happened from the middle of the 17th century into the early 18th century, when the solar energy input to our atmosphere, as indicated by the number of sunspots, was at a minimum and the planet was stuck in the Little Ice Age. These new findings suggest that changes in the output of the sun caused the most recent climate change. By comparison, CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet’s climate on long, medium and even short time scales.

In some fields the science is indeed "settled." For example, plate tectonics, once highly controversial, is now so well-established that we rarely see papers on the subject at all. But the science of global climate change is still in its infancy, with many thousands of papers published every year. In a 2003 poll conducted by German environmental researchers Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch, two-thirds of more than 530 climate scientists from 27 countries surveyed did not believe that "the current state of scientific knowledge is developed well enough to allow for a reasonable assessment of the effects of greenhouse gases." About half of those polled stated that the science of climate change was not sufficiently settled to pass the issue over to policymakers at all.

Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe solar cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth. Beginning to plan for adaptation to such a cool period, one which may continue well beyond one 11-year cycle, as did the Little Ice Age, should be a priority for governments. It is global cooling, not warming, that is the major climate threat to the world, especially Canada. As a country at the northern limit to agriculture in the world, it would take very little cooling to destroy much of our food crops, while a warming would only require that we adopt farming techniques practiced to the south of us.

Meantime, we need to continue research into this, the most complex field of science ever tackled, and immediately halt wasted expenditures on the King Canute-like task of "stopping climate change."

 

мыльные наборыФильчаков прокуратура харьков

U.S. To Open Investigation of BAE Corruption

The U.S. Department of Justice is almost certain to open an investigation of the scandal-ridden, British-based global defense contractor BAE Systems under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, according to a report in the British-based Guardian Unlimited today.

 

[…] 

 

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, U.S. Vice president Dick Cheney, and former British Ministry of Defense procurement officer Baroness Liz Symons are tied up in the biggest bribery scandal in memory, involving at least $2 billion in payoffs to Saudi Prince Bandar over a 22-year period to secure weapons deals, and billions more in slush funds paid out elsewhere.
 

The U.S. criminal investigation, which the Guardian reports U.S. law enforcement sources say is "99% certain," will likely scuttle BAE’s plans for taking over major U.S. arms companies to become the world’s largest defense contractor. Immediately threatened is BAE’s attempted takeover of the American defense firm Armor Holdings, producer of Humvee armor, for $4.1 billion.
 

But the deeper implications of the scandal threaten to blow open the secret nexus of oil, international finance, and secret intelligence operations, which has controlled global politics since the death of Franklin Roosevelt.
 

The biggest loser in the still unfolding global "Watergate" could be Vice President Dick Cheney, whose close collusion with Prince Bandar has contributed to the slide of the entire Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia region into a state of total ungovernability and spreading civil war.
 

The governments of successive British Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair; the British Monarchy; and leading elements within the Saudi Royal Family are all highly implicated.
 

The reason for such seemingly unrelated developments as the mysterious death of British biological warfare expert David Kelly in July 2003, and the London safehousing of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, a recipient of BAE payoffs from 1997 to 2004, can be expected to surface as this massive scandal unravels.
 

Investigations of BAE and the British cover-up of the bribery scandal are also underway in Switzerland, Sweden, and by the Europe-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. An anti-fraud arm of the European Union, Euro-Just, is investigating similar bribery scandals in South Africa, the Czech Republic, Romania, Tanzania and Qatar.
 

Expect more explosive developments shortly.

купить детский рюкзак для девочкиОлександр Васильович Фільчаков