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Blogs replacing blackboards

Blogs are replacing blackboards as Singapore moves high-technology into its classrooms as teaching tools, newspapers reported Wednesday.

Under the FutureSchools@Singapore programme, blogs, video-conferencing, tablet PCs, podcasts, 3-D software and interactive whiteboards will be available for learning, The Straits Times reported.

Five schools in the city state have been selected to pioneer the use of innovative teaching methods that harness info-communication technologies (ICT), the education ministry confirmed in a press release.

Tech-savvy Singapore, one of Asia’s most wired nations, aims to set up 15 such schools at primary and secondary levels by 2015.

"ICT tools such as immersive virtual environments and educational games will be used to enhance learning," the ministry statement said.

"These schools will push the frontiers of teaching and learning practices by harnessing ICT at a school-wide level," it added.

The first five schools, including a new primary that will start its student intake next year, will integrate ICT into their curriculum over four years.

Despite the new tools, the schools will stay focused on the core goals of education, planning lessons around the national curriculum and preparing students for national exams, the ministry said.

The selected schools will also study how the use of technology affects the students’ cognitive, emotional and social development, it said.

липецк режущийФільчаков Олександр Васильович

Elective genitoplasty on the rise

One of the world’s most prestigious health journals has lashed a fast-growing trend in the United States and Britain for "designer vaginas," the tabloid term for cosmetic surgery to the female genitalia.

The fashion is being driven by commercial and media pressures that exploit women’s insecurities and is fraught with unknowns, including a risk to sexual arousal, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) says.

Known as elective genitoplasty, the surgery usually entails shortening or changing the shape of the outer lips, or labia, but may also include reduction in the hood of skin covering the clitoris or shortening the vagina itself.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the practice is spreading fast in the United States as well as in Britain, but the picture is unclear, the BMJ says.

Not only is there a disturbing lack of data about the phenomenon, there has been negligible assessment about surgical after-effects — and almost zero reflexion as to whether a labial "problem" exists in the first place, the BMJ says angrily.

In 2004-5, 800 "labial reductions" were conducted by Britain’s state-run National Health Service (NHS), more than a doubling of the figure of six years earlier. Other operations were carried out by the private sector, although the full figures are unknown.

The authors of the article, London gynaecologist Sarah Creighton and clinical psychologist Lih Mei Liao, conducted their own small-scale probe into why women sought this surgery.

"Our patients sometimes cited restrictions on lifestyle as reasons for their decision," they say.

"These restrictions included inability to wear tight clothing, go to the beach, take communal showers or ride a bicycle comfortably, or avoidance of some sexual practices.

"Men, however, do not usually want the size of their genitals reduced for such reasons. Furthermore, they find alternative solutions for any discomfort arising from rubbing or chaffing of the genitals."

Patients who sought genitoplasty "uniformly" wanted their vulvas to be flat and with no protrusion, similar to the prepubescent look of girls in Western fashion ads, they found.

"Not unlike presenting for a haircut at a salon, women often brought along images to illustrate the desired appearance," say Creighton and Liao. "The illustrations, usually from advertisements or pornography, are always selective and possibly digitally altered."

Plastic surgery to the labia carries risks, for this zone carries nerve fibres that are highly sensitive and are a key pathway of sexual arousal, the article warns sternly.

"Incision to any part of the genitalia could compromise sensitivity," it says.

The BMJ piece suggests genitoplasty is a classic example of where commercial, media and social pressures artificially create a problem, fuel concern over it and then put forward a solution for it.

"There is nothing unusual about protrusion of the labia," it says.

"It is the negative meaning that makes it into a problem — meanings that can give rise to physical, emotional and behavioural reactions, such as discomfort, self-disgust, perhaps avoidance of some activities and a desire for a surgical fix."

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The Sampson Option

‘All the world’s a stage," observes Jacques in As You Like It, "and all the men and women merely players." No sphere of human life is more theatrical than politics. And seldom has the world’s political stage seemed more Shakespearean than it does today. To judge by the number of bodies that currently litter it, we appear to be nearing the end of Act V of The Tragedie of King George.

By the concluding scenes of Shakespeare’s greatest political tragedies – Hamlet, Julius Caesar, King Lear and Macbeth – nearly all the principal characters lie dead. So it is with King George, the tragic tale of a simple, unworldly fellow who ascends the throne of a great empire, responds heroically to an unprovoked attack, but then wreaks havoc by turning from retaliation to pre-emption.

The latest corpse to slump lifeless beneath the proscenium arch is that of Paul Wolfowitz, who last week finally resigned as president of the World Bank. As one of the principal architects of the Iraq War when he was United States deputy secretary of defence, Mr Wolfowitz was always going to be subjected to intense scrutiny in his new job.

His decision to award his girlfriend, Shaha Riza, promotion and a pay-rise was, to say the least, ill-judged, especially in the wake of his own vociferous campaign against Third World corruption.

Another central character has taken the political equivalent of slow-acting poison. Tony Blair, King George’s most loyal foreign ally, is not quite dead yet – indeed, he appears intent on delivering his final monologue in all the major capitals of the globe – but he is not long for the political world.

Think back to 2003, when the decision to invade Iraq was taken. One after another, the politicians who most strongly supported the decision have been ousted from office. The Spanish premier José Maria Aznar was one of the earliest casualties in March 2004. Leszek Miller, the man who took Poland into the war, did not last much longer. Their Italian counterpart Silvio Berlusconi went down this time last year.

As in Julius Caesar, the fault is not in the central characters’ stars, but in themselves. George W Bush’s dominant character traits, his decisiveness and tenacity, at first appeared to be strengths. But once he had been convinced by his advisers that the attacks of 9/11 furnished a pretext for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, these became weaknesses.

As in Macbeth, King George was soon "in blood stepp’d in so far" that turning back seemed no more attractive than wading onward. Remember: the corpses that litter this stage can already be counted in the tens, if not the hundreds, of thousands.

And, as in King Lear, the whole catastrophe has stemmed from a fatal confusion at the outset between the true and the false, enemy and friends. Lear succumbs to the flattery of the ugly sisters, Regan and Goneril, and casts out the blunt but honest Cordelia (not to mention the straight-talking Kent). The mistaken identity in the tragedy of King George was that of the real enemy in the post-9/11 War on Terror.

It is almost certain that the 19 hijackers hailed from Saudi Arabia (15), the United Arab Emirates (2), Egypt (1) and Lebanon (1). The chief architect of the plot, Osama bin Laden, was also a Saudi. Contrast this list of countries with the list of members of the "Axis of Evil" identified by President Bush in his famous speech of January 2002 as "regimes that sponsor terror [and] threaten America… with weapons of mass destruction": North Korea, Iran and Iraq. President Bush was quite right to target Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, since the Taliban regime was sheltering al-Qaeda’s leadership. But the decision to overthrow Saddam was one of history’s great non sequiturs.

The real enemy in the Global War on Terror is not the Axis of Evil but the Axis of Allies. Today, the countries most likely to produce another 9/11 are not Iran, much less North Korea, but countries long regarded as (after Israel) America’s most reliable allies in the Greater Middle East. Step forward Saudi Arabia (almost certainly still the biggest source of funding for radical Islamists) and Pakistan (very definitely their one-stop shop for nuclear weaponry).

There is, in short, a twist in this tale. Before the curtain can fall on The Tragedie of King George, we need at least three more scenes to decide the fates of three crucial characters – the only principals still left standing aside from King George himself.

First, we need a scene in Israel. Since the failure of the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s popularity has been in free fall. His current approval rating is around 2 per cent, by comparison with which King George is a pop idol. Somehow, despite the resignation of his foreign minister, Mr Olmert is still clinging to political life. But he surely cannot last much longer. What happens next will be crucial, for if Binyamin Netanyahu returns to power, the probability of a military confrontation with Iran goes up above 50 per cent.

Remember, Mr Netanyahu is on record as comparing the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with Hitler. "It is the year 1938," Netanyahu recently declared, "and Iran is Germany." I suspect his private views are not so very far removed from those of the renowned Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld, the professor of military history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Van Creveld is deeply pessimistic about Israel’s future, menaced on one side by an increasingly violent and fissiparous Palestinian population and on the other by a would-be nuclear Iran. But he expects his country at least to go down fighting.

"We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions," van Creveld declared in an interview in September 2003. "We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that this will happen before Israel goes under."

Then we need a scene in Saudi Arabia. Here the key figure is Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz al Saud who, as Saudi ambassador to the United States, was one of the leading advocates of the attack on Iraq. Since October 2005 he has been back in Riyadh as Secretary-General of the National Security Council, where he is said to be lobbying hard for another attack: this time (you guessed it) on Iran.

Finally, the action needs to shift eastwards to Pakistan, where it is the future of General Pervez Musharraf that hangs in the balance. Eight days ago, 40 people died in rioting in Karachi, apparently as a result of attempts by pro-government forces to discourage a rally by disgruntled lawyers, who have been incensed by Musharraf’s decision to oust the head of the Supreme Court.

After eight years of his military dictatorship, Pakistan’s democratic forces are stirring. But watch out: these include the Islamist coalition known as the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal. And the recent violence also has an ethnic dimension, pitting Mohaijirs against Pashtuns.

You thought this play was nearly over. Like many an audience at Stratford, you were starting to shift in your seat. But in truth Act V has only just begun. With war looming between Iran and Israel, and Pakistan on the brink of an upheaval that could well end with Islamists in power in Islamabad, the worst bloodshed has yet to come.

I fear, in the words of the immortal Bard, that you have not yet had your fill:

"…Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,

Of accidental judgements, casual slaughters,

Of deaths put on by cunning and forc’d cause,

And, in this upshot, purposes mistook

Fall’n on the inventors’ heads

Niall Ferguson is Laurence A Tisch Professor of History at Harvard Universityалазанская долина вино белоеданильченко юрій броніславович

US named unknown Dutch company

Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen has said in a letter to parliament that Vlemmo NV does not exist as far as he knows. This company was named by US authorities as a link between Iraq and Osama bin Laden.

On or around 25 July 2002, the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (OUSDP) of the US gave a briefing entitled ‘Assessing the Relationship Between Iraq and al-Qaida’. This alternative intelligence report wrote that Osama Bin Laden’s al-Hijra Company had contacts with the Netherlands-based company Vlemmo NV, which was allegedly involved in the purchase by Iraq of military equipment, Verhagen confirmed.

But "the company Vlemmo is unknown in the Netherlands," according to the minister. "The company has never been registered with the Chamber of Commerce in the Netherlands and is also not known to the tax service. That the company may have served as a front for illegal arms trade with Iraq is equally unknown to me."

The 2002 OUSDP report was made public last month by the chairman of the US Senate’s defence committee, Carl Levin. "The contents of the intelligence report has only become known to me following the recent publication of the document," said Verhagen.

The minister had been asked to react by Socialist Party (SP) MP Harry van Bommel. Verhagen has now sent the OUSDP report to the Lower House. Parts of it have been rendered illegible by the US authorities.

Verhagen comments that apparent differences of opinion between US authorities on the possible connections between Iraq and Al Qa’ida "are an internal US matter." Apart from this, he wishes to "once again stress that the justification for intervention in Iraq for the Netherlands did not lie in the possible involvement of Iraq in terrorism, but in non-compliance with the UN Security Council resolutions."

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Iran overstates progress

Iran has continued to make further progress on its nuclear programs in defiance of UN Security Council demands. Evidence of this progress has emerged even as a May 23 deadline looms for Tehran to comply with a March Security Council resolution.

Iranian officials have continued to express a willingness to enter into negotiations with Germany and the permanent members of the Security Council. Those officials have said, however, that they will not suspend Iran’s gas centrifuge-based uranium-enrichment program despite repeated demands from the Security Council to do so.

Resolution 1747, which was adopted in March in response to Iran’s failure to comply with previous resolutions, imposed new restrictions on Tehran and expanded the scope of existing sanctions. (See ACT, April 2007.) The most recent resolution requires Iran to comply “without further delay” with Resolution 1737, which the council adopted in December. Those requirements include a demand that Iran suspend all activities related to its enrichment program, which Iran says is for peaceful purposes but that could be used to produce highly enriched uranium for bombs. (See ACT, January/February 2007.)

The March resolution requested International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei to submit a report within 60 days to the Security Council and to the IAEA Board of Governors regarding Iran’s compliance. The council could adopt additional sanctions if Iran fails to comply.

Department of State spokesperson Sean McCormack told reporters April 9 that “there is [the] potential for more resolutions of [a] similar type down the road” if Iran continues to be uncooperative.

Resolution 1747 was the council’s third regarding Iran’s nuclear program. The first was Resolution 1696, which the council adopted last July. That resolution followed a June 2006 offer of incentives from Germany and permanent Security Council members China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, that was intended to induce Iran to end its enrichment program. (See ACT, September 2006.)

Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and Tehran’s lead nuclear negotiator, met April 25-26 with Javier Solana, the European Union’s foreign policy chief.

The meeting ended without agreement, although Larijani said that “New ideas emerged during the negotiations,” Iranian radio reported April 27. He described these ideas, however, as “undeveloped,” adding that they “need more thinking and effort to reach maturity.” The two sides “will follow up the negotiations in two weeks,” he said.

Prior to the meeting, Iranian officials had offered mixed assessments of the potential for diplomacy. For example, an April 22 report by the official Islamic Republic News Agency quoted Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mohammad-Ali Hosseini as saying Tehran does not intend to comply with the council’s suspension demand.

However, Vice President Gholamreza Aghazadeh, who also heads Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, spoke positively about negotiations during an April 17 interview with the semi-official Iranian Students News Agency, arguing that “the conditions for negotiations for both sides are suitable more than ever before.”

He also indicated that Tehran believes that the UN sanctions will remain in effect for only a short time, explaining that Iran does not “see the discussion of the nuclear issue at the Security Council as a long-term issue, because everyone needs everyone in the world.”

Aghazadeh indicated that the government might at some point consider withdrawing from the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). He added, however, that Tehran currently has no plans to do so.

He also suggested that Tehran might further decrease its cooperation with the IAEA if the Security Council adopts another resolution penalizing Iran.

Iran has previously taken such measures. For example, Tehran announced the day after Resolution 1747 was adopted that it would end its compliance with a portion of the subsidiary arrangements for its IAEA safeguards agreement. That provision requires Tehran to provide design information for new nuclear facilities as soon as it authorizes construction. Previously, Iran was required to provide design information for new facilities only six months before introducing nuclear material. (See ACT, March 2003.)

IAEA safeguards agreements, which are required under the NPT, allow the agency to monitor non-nuclear-weapon states-parties’ declared nuclear activities. Subsidiary arrangements specify in detail how the procedures contained in a country’s safeguards agreement should be implemented.

Since Iran’s March decision, it has denied agency inspectors access to a heavy-water-moderated nuclear research reactor that the country is constructing at Arak. An April 13 letter from Tehran to the IAEA argued that Iran is not required to allow the inspection because the reactor’s construction is at an early stage.

An April 18 letter from IAEA Deputy Director-General Olli Heinonen criticized Tehran’s decision and stated that Iran could not refuse the inspection because the government cannot modify the subsidiary arrangements unilaterally. He also said that the relevant part of the arrangements relate “to the provision of design information,” rather than the IAEA’s verification of information already provided by Iran.

The Arak reactor has caused concern because such reactors can produce plutonium, which can also be used as fissile material in nuclear weapons. Although the IAEA has found evidence that Tehran was interested in reprocessing spent reactor fuel, Iran has said that it will not do so. Resolutions 1747 and 1737 require Iran to halt work on the reactor.

Aghazadeh said April 17 that the reactor “will be completed in the next three or four years.” A knowledgeable source told Arms Control Today the next day, however, that the reactor is five to six years from completion and would not go critical for seven to eight years.

Iran has previously said that it will complete the reactor by 2009. (See ACT, May 2006.)

Iran has moved forward with its enrichment program in recent months, although some Iranian officials have apparently overstated its progress. Tehran has a pilot facility located at Natanz that contains approximately 358 centrifuges. Iran also is constructing a larger commercial facility at the same site and has a facility for converting uranium oxide into uranium hexafluoride.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced in an April 9 speech that “Iran is among the countries which produce nuclear fuel on an industrial scale.” But this claim was met with widespread skepticism, given that Iran has only recently installed 1,312 centrifuge machines, far fewer than commercial enrichment facilities in other states.

Russia’s Atomic Energy Agency head Sergei Kiriyenko told the press that Russian government experts say Iran cannot yet produce fuel on an “industrial level,” RIA Novosti reported April 12. Kiriyenko pointed out that centrifuge cascades need to be linked together properly in order to enrich uranium on a large scale. Whether Iran is able to do this is unclear, a European diplomat told Arms Control Today April 30.

Iran’s technical claims may be aimed at bolstering Tehran’s diplomatic leverage. Indeed, Iranian officials have previously argued that it should use its technological achievements for that purpose. (See ACT, June 2006.) Similarly, Aghazadeh argued in an April 9 television interview that the success of Iran’s enrichment program has demonstrated the futility of Security Council pressure.

Iranian nuclear officials have not publicly specified the number of centrifuges that the country is operating. But in his letter, Heinonen said that Iran reports it has “put into operation” eight 164-centrifuge cascades at the commercial facility.

Iran is feeding an unspecified amount of uranium hexafluoride into the cascades, according to the letter. Tehran is not actually enriching uranium, a knowledgeable source told Arms Control Today April 18. Instead, Iran is injecting small amounts of feedstock into the centrifuges to ready them for operation. This process produces trace amount of uranium enriched to very low levels. The European diplomat said that Iran is being “cautious” by introducing small amounts of feedstock. Previously, the centrifuges would spin properly but would break when uranium hexafluoride was introduced into them, the diplomat explained.

Earlier, Iranian officials told agency inspectors that Iran had installed two 164-centrifuge cascades at the commercial facility and that two more such cascades “were in the final stages of installation,” according to a late February report from ElBaradei.

Based on information obtained April 7 from a diplomatic source in Vienna close to the IAEA, Iran also has two additional cascades that are near completion.

Iran told the IAEA that it intends to “continue progressively with the installation of…18 cascades” into the commercial facility and “bring them gradually into operation by May,” ElBaradei reported.

Whether Tehran can meet this target date is unclear. ElBaradei told the Financial Times in February that he did not know how long Iran would take to get 3,000 centrifuges to function properly. “It could be a year, it could be six months,” he said.

Aghazadeh said April 17 that it would take Iran up to four years to install the remaining centrifuges envisaged for the facility. Tehran has said that it eventually plans to install more than 50,000 centrifuges.

Iran has no plans to build additional centrifuge facilities “at the moment,” Aghazadeh said. However, he indicated in an April 9 television interview that the country is developing a “new generation” of centrifuges.

Tehran previously told the IAEA that it is conducting research on “different types” of centrifuges, without using nuclear material. (See ACT, October 2006.) The IAEA has long been concerned that Iran, which currently uses P-1 centrifuges, has been conducting research on more advanced centrifuges.

In the April 17 interview, Aghazadeh seemed to acknowledge that Iran’s nuclear program faces limitations, saying that Tehran “undoubtedly needs the help of other countries in order to pursue its nuclear activities.” He further explained that it cannot meet the entirety of its projected nuclear fuel demands. Aghazadeh said in the April 9 interview that Iran is planning to explore for additional uranium deposits inside the country.

The United States has argued that Iran does not have enough indigenous uranium to meet its projected fuel needs. (See ACT, September 2005.)

Similarly, the managing director of Iran’s uranium-conversion facility acknowledged in February that it is not “economically viable” for Iran to produce some equipment for its nuclear program.

Iran and the IAEA have apparently reached agreement on appropriate safeguards arrangements for the commercial centrifuge facility. The agreement, which “includes unannounced inspections and containment and surveillance…has been tested,” an IAEA official told Arms Control Today April 27. The agency is currently conducting discussions with Iran “on some of the practical implementation modalities,” the official added.

The completion date for a light-water reactor that a Russian contractor is building near the Iranian city of Bushehr has again been delayed. Moscow and Tehran agreed last fall that the reactor was to start operating in September 2007 and begin providing energy two months later. Russia was scheduled to start delivering fuel to the plant in March 2007. (See ACT, November 2006.)

The two countries are currently negotiating a revised schedule for the project, which has at least in part been delayed by a financial dispute. Atomstroyexport, the Russian contractor for the project, says that Iran has failed to make its payments on time.

But Iran and Russia appear to have made some progress in recent days. According to RIA Novosti, Atomstroyexport spokesperson Irina Yesipova said April 22 that the two sides concluded “a protocol defining a set of measures to provide stable financing” for the project. If implemented, the new agreement should resolve some but not all of the project’s financial issues, she said.

The project faces another obstacle. Kiriyenko said April 23 that third-party countries have delayed supplying some equipment for the project, RIA Novosti reported. He did not elaborate, but deputy spokesperson for the Kremlin Dmitry Peskov said that these delays were caused by Tehran’s failure to comply with the Security Council resolutions, the Financial Times reported March 21.

Iran also plans to construct additional reactors. For example, Aghazadeh reiterated that Iran is planning to construct a 360-megawatt nuclear power plant. In addition, the deputy head of the Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, Ahmad Fayaz Bakhsh, told reporters April 15 that Tehran is issuing tenders for the construction of one more 1,000-megawatt light-water reactor and another 1,600-megawatt reactor near Bushehr, according to Agence France-Presse. Construction of the plants is expected to take “between nine and 11 years,” he said.

 

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Swiss question counterfeiting charges

Swiss police who closely monitor the circulation of counterfeit currency have challenged the Bush administration’s assertions that North Korea is manufacturing fake American $100 bills.

President Bush has accused North Korea of making and circulating the false bills, so perfect they’re called supernotes, and in late 2005 the U.S. Treasury took measures to block that country’s access to international banking. North Korea subsequently halted negotiations over dismantling its nuclear weapons program, a process that remains in limbo because of the dispute.

The Swiss federal criminal police, in a report released Monday, expresses serious doubt that North Korea is capable of manufacturing the fake bills, which it said were superior to real ones.

The Swiss report includes color enlargements that show the differences between genuine bills and counterfeit supernotes. The supernotes are identical to U.S. banknotes except for added distinguishing marks, which can be detected only with a magnifying glass. In addition, under ultraviolet or infrared light, stripes appear or the serial numbers disappear on the supernotes.

The Bundeskriminalpolizei didn’t hazard a guess as to who’s been manufacturing the supernotes, but said experts agreed that the counterfeits weren’t the work of an individual but of a government or governmental organization.

The U.S. Secret Service, the lead federal agency in combating counterfeiters, declined to provide details or respond to the Swiss report. But spokesman Eric Zahren said the agency stood by its allegations against Pyongyang.

"Our investigation has identified definitive connections between these highly deceptive counterfeit notes and the North Koreans," Zahren said. "Our investigation has revealed that the supernotes continue to be produced and distributed by sources operating out of North Korea."

The Swiss report says the Secret Service has refused to provide any information about its investigations. It notes that if the United States produced concrete evidence to back up its allegations, "it would have a basis for going to war." Under international law, counterfeiting another country’s currency is considered a cause for war.

But if the U.S. has a reason to go to war, against whom?

The Swiss police noted that before charging North Korea with counterfeiting, U.S. officials had mentioned Iran, Syria and East Germany as possible manufacturers. North Korea’s capacity for printing banknotes is extremely limited, because its banknote printing press dates from the 1970s. Its own currency is of "such poor quality that one automatically wonders whether this country would even be in a position to manufacture the high-quality `supernotes,’ " the report says.

For years, analysts have wondered why the supernotes – which are detectable only with sophisticated, expensive technology – appear to have been produced in quantities less than it would cost to acquire the sophisticated machinery needed to make them. The paper and ink used to make U.S. currency are made through exclusive contract and aren’t available on the open marketplace. The machinery involved is highly regulated.

In theory, if North Korea were producing the notes, it could print $50 million worth of them within a few hours – as much as has been seized in nearly two decades, the report said.

"What defies logic is the limited, or even controlled, amount of `exclusive’ fakes that have appeared over the years. The organization could easily circulate tenfold that amount without raising suspicions," says the Swiss police report, which also says Switzerland has seized 5 percent of all known supernotes.

Moreover, it noted that the manufacturer of the supernotes had issued 19 different versions, an "enormous effort" that only a criminal organization or state could undertake. The updates closely tracked the changes in U.S. currency issued by the Federal Reserve Bank.

The fact that the Swiss are questioning the veracity of the U.S. allegations against North Korea carries special weight in the insular world of banknote printing.

"The producers of the most sophisticated products used in banknote printing are Swiss or at least of Swiss origin. That goes for the (specialty) inks and that goes for the machines," said Klaus Bender, a German foreign correspondent and the author of "Moneymakers: The Secret World of Banknote Printing."

"Can the North Koreans do it, are they doing it? The answer is couched in diplomatic language, (but) the answer is clearly no," Bender said.

—

EXCERPT FROM THE REPORT:

"According to the US Secret Service, $50 million worth of `super-fakes’ were confiscated worldwide over the past 16 years, only a small portion of them within the United States. Measured against the US annual counterfeit damage of $200 million, the damage from $50 million worth of `super-fakes’ is not that significant. The Federal Reserve Bank produces genuine $100 dollar bills mainly for the foreign market. On their return to the U.S., the issuing bank after examination can easily distinguish the `supernotes’ from originals using banknote testing equipment, due to altered infrared characteristics. For this reason, the United States over the years has hardly suffered economic damage due to the `super dollar.’

"A (banknote) printing press like the one in North Korea can produce $50 million worth of bills in a few hours. Using its printing presses dating back to the 1970’s, North Korea is today printing its own currency in such poor quality that one automatically wonders whether this country would even be in a position to manufacture the high-quality `supernotes.’ The enormous effort put into the making of the 19 different `super-fakes’ that we know of is unusual. Only a (criminal) governmental organization can afford such an effort. What defies logic is the limited or even controlled amount of `exclusive’ fakes that have appeared over the years. The organization could easily circulate tenfold that amount without raising suspicions."

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DRC: UN traded gold for guns

Pakistani UN peacekeeping troops have traded in gold and sold weapons to Congolese militia groups they were meant to disarm, the BBC has learnt.

These militia groups were guilty of some of the worst human rights abuses during the Democratic Republic of Congo’s long civil war.

The trading went on in 2005. A UN investigative team sent to gather evidence was obstructed and threatened.

The team’s report was buried by the UN itself to "avoid political fallout".

These events took place in and around the mining town of Mongbwalu, in north-eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

The Pakistani battalion of the UN peacekeeping mission deployed there in 2005 and helped bring peace to an area that had previously seen bitter fighting between the Lendu and Hema ethnic groups.

Locals welcomed them, but the lure of the rich alluvial gold mines proved too much to resist for some, recalls the head of the miners’ association, Liki Likambo.

"I saw a UN Pakistani soldier who came to buy gold in one of the gold negotiators here in Mongbwalu. I was there in the shop. I saw it with my own eyes."

Soon the Pakistani officers were doing deals directly with the FNI militia.

Evarista Anjasubu – a local businessman said he had known of transactions between Pakistani officers and two of the most notorious militia leaders called Kung Fu and Dragon who controlled the gold mines.

"They were already friends. I knew well. It was gold that was the basis of their friendship. So the gold extracted from the mines went directly to the Pakistanis. They used to meet in the UN camp in Mongbwalu, in a thatched house."

As the trade developed the Pakistani officers brought in the Congolese army and then Indian traders from Kenya.

Richard Ndilu, in charge of immigration at Mongbwalu airstrip, became suspicious in late 2005 when an Indian businessman arrived there and went to stay at the camp of the Pakistani peacekeepers.

Alerted to this illegal trade by her officials, the District Commissioner of Ituri, Petronille Vaweka, went to Bunia airport to intercept a plane from Mongbwalu.

She said her way was blocked by Congolese army officers, who refused to allow her to inspect the cargo.

"I knew they had gold because the price of gold increased when the Indians went to Mongwalu," she said.

"When we wanted to verify what was inside the plane the pilot refused to allow us to enter the plane – me who was the chief, he refused! It was a big scandal."

When the UN was alerted to the allegations of gold trading by Human Rights Watch in late 2005, they instituted a major investigation by the Office for Internal Oversight Services.

What they uncovered was even more explosive.

This is from a witness statement given to the UN by a Congolese officer engaged in the disarming of the militia in the nearby town of Nizi:

"The officer expressed his regrets over the malpractices of a Pakistani battalion under the auspices of Major Zanfar. He revealed the arms surrendered by ex-combatants were secretly returned to them by Major Zanfar thereby compromising the work they had collectively done earlier.

"Repeatedly he saw militia who had been disarmed one day, but the next day would become re-armed again. The information he could obtain was always the same, that it would be the Pakistani battalion giving arms back to the militia."

This evidence was backed up by an interpreter working with the Pakistani battalion at Mongbwalu.

On arriving at the Officer’s Mess, the interpreter found two militia leaders – known as Kung Fu and Dragon.

The interpreter said that the first question from Major Ali was to Kung Fu – asking him: ‘What about the weapons I gave you? What about the weapons Monuc gave you?’

A UN investigation team arrived in Mongbwalu in August 2006.

At first the Pakistani battalion there cooperated with them. But when they attempted to seize a computer with apparently incriminating documents on it a stand-off ensued.

The Pakistanis surrounded the UN police accompanying the investigators with barbed wire and put two armoured personnel carriers outside their living quarters at a nearby Christian mission.

Thoroughly intimidated, the investigators were airlifted out of Mongbwalu.

The Pakistani troops are replaced every six months and the BBC investigation concerns events that took place prior to the deployment of the current Pakistani battalion.

When we put the allegations of weapons trading to the head of the UN in Congo, Ambassador William Swing, he denied emphatically that any weapons have been handed by his troops to the militia.

"This I can categorically deny. What we have done is just the opposite. We have demobilised more than 20,000. We have taken in caches of arms. We have destroyed arms. We have done public burnings of these arms. And there is absolutely nothing to that allegation."

He says that the investigation into gold trading has yet to be completed.

The UN in New York has refused to explain what took place or why, nearly two years after the allegations first surfaced, the Congolese people have no idea what action – if any – has been taken to discipline the Pakistani soldiers concerned.

нужна справка из наркологического диспансератопкарго отзыв

Communists keep grip on Vietnam

Vietnam elects a new National Assembly on Sunday, although since only the Communist Party is allowed to field candidates the outcome is not in much doubt.

The election follows a crackdown on activists who had been calling for free elections. The BBC’s Bill Hayton, who in March was told to leave Vietnam by the government, has been investigating the prospects for democracy there.

The sight of a secret policeman forcing his hand over the mouth of a Catholic priest, Nguyen Van Ly, to prevent him shouting out an anti-communist poem during his trial seemed to sum up Vietnam’s attitude towards political dissent.

But at the same time as the country’s security forces are engaged in what Human Rights Watch has called "one of the worst crackdowns on peaceful dissent in 20 years", the Communist Party is experimenting with a degree of openness.

So what are the prospects for democracy in Vietnam?

At first sight Vietnam’s National Assembly looks like little more than a rubber-stamping body.

Ninety per cent of the members in the last session were members of the Communist Party and the 10% that were not all had to be approved by the party in order to stand for election.

The party maintains close control over what the assembly discusses and decides.

For example, although in theory the assembly elects the president and prime minister there is only ever one candidate on the ballot – the candidate previously chosen by the party.

But that is not the whole story, because the assembly is beginning to show some signs of independent thinking in the way it scrutinise laws and holds ministers to account.

In the past few sessions the grilling of officials seen to have failed in their jobs, live on television, has gripped the country.

Poor performances by the scandal-hit former minister of transport and the seemingly complacent head of the Supreme Court caused them to later lose their jobs.

However, some members believe that the current situation is not enough. Those such as Do Trong Ngoan want more.

"The vision and the knowledge of the National Assembly have to be developed," he says, "or the assembly will be left behind and if that happens we won’t be able to take the right decisions and that would lead to long-lasting backwardness of the country.

But while some parts of the communist system want greater openness – others do not.

The trials of dissidents in the past few months, including the priest Father Ly in March, was vivid proof.

Their crimes were to call for multi-party elections.

The Communist Party believes its role is to lead the country – and not necessarily to follow the wishes of the people.

This position is expertly articulated by the woman who is the assembly’s leading diplomat – often leading delegations to Washington and other countries – Madame Ton Nu Thi Ninh.

"I resist the idea that voters are always right," she says.

"I know that there are in any country enclaves of conservatism, look at what happened in South Africa with apartheid. What is right does not always coincide with majority rule."

Although any citizen can, in theory, stand for election to the National Assembly, they first have to be approved by the Communist Party.

There are two selection processes, both organised by the party’s umbrella organisation called the Vietnam Fatherland Front.

In the first hearing the prospective candidate must convince their work colleagues of their good character and in the second they must do the same with the people living in their neighbourhood.

This micro-control means that anyone with views outside what the party views as acceptable will not even get the chance to stand.

However, some parts of the party are keen to get more independents elected to widen the pool of talent in the assembly.

These would not be dissidents but something like a "loyal opposition". But even this, like other areas of political reform, is opposed by others.

No Vietnamese political analysts will comment on divisions within the party directly, but Martin Gainsborough, of Bristol University in the UK, keeps a close eye on the evolution of Vietnamese politics.

"Within Vietnam – both official Vietnam and unofficially – there’s a wide range of differing views about the speed of political change," he says.

"Some people within the system think the National Assembly should go further in asserting its role in the country. Others think that change is fast enough already and want to proceed more carefully. Part of the challenge, part of the ongoing debate in Vietnam is about working out those issues."

Political reform in Vietnam is slow but it is happening and so long as it does not challenge the supremacy of the Communist Party it is likely to continue.

Vietnam’s communist rulers are happy to experiment with openness to make the current system more efficient but any transition to a new system, a truly open and democratic system, is still a long way off.

детские палаткиДанильченко

US urges complaint against IAEA

The United States wants its allies to join in a formal protest against the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency for suggesting that Iran be allowed to keep some elements of its uranium enrichment program, diplomats said Tuesday.

They said Washington fears the comments from the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency could undermine U.N. Security Council’s effort to pressure Tehran into fully scrapping enrichment.

The Americans apparently are concerned Mohamed ElBaradei’s statements could exacerbate traditional splits between Russia and China and the United States, Britain and France, the three other permanent Security Council members.

While the Western council members have traditionally pushed for tough sanctions on Iran, opposition by Moscow and Beijing has led them to settle for watered-down sanctions less rigid than they originally proposed since the first set was agreed on Dec. 23.

The U.S. mission to the IAEA had no immediate comment beyond confirming that mission head Gregory L. Schulte was in Washington for “consultations.”

Diplomats, who insisted on anonymity because of the delicate nature of the issue, spoke to The Associated Press before the release of a report from ElBaradei that could act as a trigger for a third set of Security Council sanctions on Iran.

Their revelations exposed a hardening of positions on how to deal with Iran’s enrichment program, which potentially could produce material for nuclear bombs. Iran denies that is its goal, saying it wants only to produce fuel for nuclear reactors that generate electricity.

In public remarks over the past two weeks, ElBaradei said he feels it is too late to force Tehran to scrap its enrichment program as demanded by the Security Council and argued instead for implementing inspection safeguards to prevent an expansion of the program.

“I believe that (U.N.) demand has been superseded by events,” ElBaradei told the Spanish newspaper ABC. Instead, he said, “the important thing now is to concentrate on Iran not taking it to industrial scale.”

Iran’s ultimate stated goal is running 54,000 centrifuges to churn out enriched uranium – enough for dozens of nuclear warheads a year.

Some members of the IAEA’s decision-making 35-nation board share ElBaradei’s view. But the U.S. and its closest board allies, including Britain, France, Australia, Canada and Japan, fear such comments could weaken Security Council resolve on punishing Iran for defying the U.N. demand.

Agency officials refused to comment on details of the report ahead of its release to board members and the Security Council. But it was expected to confirm information leaked over the past weeks that Iran has demanded the demand for a suspension of enrichment and expanded that work.

With the council’s deadline for Iranian compliance coming Thursday, the report could set the stage for further sanctions against the Islamic republic.

Despite Iranian insistence its nuclear program has only peaceful intentions, it has been hit with two sets of U.N. sanctions because of suspicions bred by nearly two decades of Tehran’s clandestine nuclear activities, including questionable black-market acquisitions of equipment and blueprints that appear linked to weapons plans.

The diplomats said Tuesday that the IAEA’s report would likely confirm that Iran has assembled more than 1,600 centrifuges at its underground facility at Natanz and is running about 1,300 of them, producing small amounts of uranium enriched to about 5 percent.

While that level is far below the 90 percent needed to produce weapons, the number of centrifuges running – and producing enriched material – is grounds for concern for the Security Council because it documents an expanding and functioning program.

The last report from ElBaradei three months ago put the number of connected centrifuges at around 1,000 and said no enrichment had begun.

One of the diplomats said the report would additionally likely suggest that Iranian experts had ironed out many of the glitches hamstringing enrichment efforts only a few months ago that had caused breakdowns in experimental, smaller-scale centrifuge operations.

“This is a program that is well on its way to full development,” he said. “And if they can enrich to 5 percent, there is no potential limit to how high they can enrich.”

машины на пульте управленииОлександр Фільчаков прокурор

Viewers disappear

Maybe they’re outside in the garden. They could be playing softball. Or perhaps they’re just plain bored.

In TV’s worst spring in recent memory, a startling number of Americans drifted away from television the past two months: More than 2.5 million fewer people were watching ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox than at the same time last year, statistics show.

Everyone has a theory to explain the plummeting ratings: early Daylight Savings Time, more reruns, bad shows, more shows being recorded or downloaded or streamed.

[…]

Scariest of all for the networks, however, is the idea that many people are now making their own television schedules. The industry isn’t fully equipped to keep track of them, and as a result the networks are scrambling to hold on to the nearly $8.8 billion they collected during last spring’s ad-buying season.

"This may be the spring where we see a radical shift in the way the culture thinks of watching TV," said Sarah Bunting, co-founder of the Web site Television Without Pity.

The viewer plunge couldn’t have come at a worse time for the networks — next week they will showcase their fall schedules to advertisers in the annual "up front" presentations.

The networks argue that viewership is changing, not necessarily declining. Some advertisers respond that they are no longer willing to pay full price up front to reach viewers that may not tune in later.

This fall, both sides will be watching what happens with families like Tony Cort’s. During prime-time, Cort, his wife and four kids tend to scatter to computers or other activities in different parts of their New Jersey home. (Not during "American Idol" or "Lost," though.) They’re definitely watching less TV, said Cort, who runs a Web site for martial arts aficionados.

"I remember when ’24’ was on, that was something there was a lot of interest and excitement about," he said.

News flash: "24" is still on. Its ratings are down, too, amid a critically savaged season.

More bad news abounds. NBC set a record last month for its least-watched week during the past 20 years, and maybe ever — then broke it a week later. This is the least popular season ever for CBS’ "Survivor." ABC’s "Lost" has lost nearly half its live audience — more than 10 million people — from the days it was a sensation. "The Sopranos" (a show that has earned broadcast-network-like ratings in the past) is ending on HBO, and the response is a collective yawn.

Events like "American Idol" on Fox (which is owned by News Corp.) and "Dancing With the Stars" on ABC (owned by The Walt Disney Co.) are doing the most to prop up the industry. But still, in the six weeks after Daylight Savings Time started in early March, prime-time viewership for the four biggest broadcast networks was down to 37.6 million people, from 40.3 million during the same period in 2006, according to Nielsen Media Research.
Missing money

Millions of missing viewers could translate into millions of missing dollars for the networks heading into the up-front sales season.

Advertisers don’t believe that the drop in viewership is as dramatic as the numbers suggest, but they’re no longer willing to spend what they once did in the spring market, said Brad Adgate of Horizon Media, an ad buying firm. Johnson & Johnson and Coca-Cola sat out the spring market last year — betting they could get lower prices later — and it’s likely other companies will do the same this year, he said.

The early start to Daylight Savings Time has hurt ratings. Prime-time viewership traditionally dips then as people do more things outside, and this year folks had a three-week head start to get into the habit of doing something else. More network reruns during March and April dampened interest, too.

"We let them get out of the habit of watching television a little bit, and it’s going to take some time to get these people back in front of their television sets," said David Poltrack, chief researcher for CBS (owned by CBS Corp.).

Strategic decisions to send some popular serial dramas on long hiatuses appeared to backfire. NBC’s "Heroes," CBS’ "Jericho" and "Lost" lost significant momentum when they returned. Besides HBO’s "The Sopranos," there are no lengthy countdowns toward the end of very popular series, unless you count "The King of Queens."

[…]

This year, for the first time, Nielsen is measuring viewership in the estimated 17 percent of homes with digital video recorders _ but it only counts them in the ratings of a specific show if they watch it within 24 hours of the original air time.

If you recorded "Desperate Housewives" this spring and watched it two days later, you’re not counted in the show’s ratings. And you’re not counted by Nielsen under any circumstances if you downloaded a show on iTunes and watched it on your iPod or cell phone, or streamed an episode from a network Web site.

Since last year’s Nielsen sample contained no DVR homes and this year’s sample does, logic dictates that fewer Nielsen families are watching TV live this year, deflating ratings.

"People are not consuming less television, they’re watching it in different ways, and the measurements haven’t caught up," said Alan Wurtzel, chief research executive at NBC (owned by General Electric Co.).

The numbers can be significant. When "The Office" aired on NBC on April 5, Nielsen said there were 5.8 million people watching. Add in the people who recorded the episode and watched it within the next week, and viewership swelled to 7.6 million, a 32 percent increase, Nielsen said.

"The Sopranos" is another interesting case study. For its first four episodes this season, the show averaged 7.4 million viewers for its weekly Sunday night premiere, down from 8.9 million at the same point its last season.

But HBO shows each new episode eight times a week. Between the multiple plays and DVR viewing, each episode this spring gets 11.1 million viewers, down from 13 million last year. And these figures don’t count people who watch on demand.

Numbers for "The Sopranos" may be down because people can watch whenever they want. They may not be as interested in the show as they used to be — or it could be a combination of both.

Television has made billions based on how many people watch a show at its regular time. That idea may already be obsolete. So should the industry use DVR viewing when setting ad rates? If so, how quickly must people watch the shows — within two days? A week? What about people who watch shows on their cell phones or on network Web sites, which Nielsen doesn’t measure yet? Later this month Nielsen will begin measuring how many people watch commercials. Should those be used to compute advertising costs?

Right now, none of those questions have answers.

However, "if we continue to do business assuming people will watch television as they always have," said NBC’s Wurtzel, "it’s a dead-end game."

 

воронеж ящикипрокурор Фильчаков

Contractor deaths in Iraq soar

Casualties among private contractors in Iraq have soared to record levels this year, setting a pace that seems certain to turn 2007 into the bloodiest year yet for the civilians who work alongside the American military in the war zone, according to new government numbers.

At least 146 contract workers were killed in Iraq in the first three months of the year, by far the highest number for any quarter since the war began in March 2003, according to the Labor Department, which processes death and injury claims for those working as United States government contractors in Iraq.

That brings the total number of contractors killed in Iraq to at least 917, along with more than 12,000 wounded in battle or injured on the job, according to government figures and dozens of interviews.

The numbers, which have not been previously reported, disclose the extent to which contractors — Americans, Iraqis and workers from more than three dozen other countries — are largely hidden casualties of the war, and now are facing increased risks alongside American soldiers and marines as President Bush’s plan to increase troop levels in Baghdad takes hold.

As troops patrol more aggressively in and around the capital, both soldiers and the contractors who support them, often at small outposts, are at greater peril. The contractor deaths earlier this year, for example, came closer to the number of American military deaths during the same period — 244 — than during any other quarter since the war began, according to official figures.

“The insurgents are going after the softest targets, and the contractors are softer targets than the military,” said Lawrence J. Korb, a former assistant secretary of defense for manpower during the Reagan administration. “The U.S. is being more aggressive over there, and these contractor deaths go right along with it.”

Truck drivers and translators account for a significant share of the casualties, but the recent death toll includes others who make up what amounts to a private army.

Among them were four American security guards who died in a helicopter crash in January, 28 Turkish construction workers whose plane crashed north of Baghdad the same month, a Massachusetts man who was blown up as he dismantled munitions for an American company in March and a Georgia woman killed in a missile attack in March while working as a coordinator for KBR, the contracting company.

Donald E. Tolfree Jr., a trucker from Michigan, was fatally shot in the cab of his vehicle while returning to Camp Anaconda, north of Baghdad, in early February. His daughter, Kristen Martin, 23, said Army officials told her he was shot by an American military guard confused about her father’s assignment. The Army confirms the death is under investigation as a possible friendly-fire episode.

Ms. Martin said she waited three weeks for her father’s body to be returned home, and expressed resentment that dead contractors were treated differently from soldiers who fall in battle.

“If anything happens to the military people, you hear about it right away,” she said in a telephone interview. “Flags get lowered, they get their respect. You don’t hear anything about the contractors.”

Military officials in Washington and Baghdad said that no Pentagon office tracked contractor casualties and that they had no way to confirm or explain the sharp rise in deaths this year.

Army Lt. Col. Joseph M. Yoswa, a spokesman for the military in Iraq, said in an e-mail statement, “the responsibilities for tracking deaths, injuries, locations and any other essential requirements lie with the contractor. Unless there is something specifically stated in the contract about accounting for personnel, there is no requirement for the U.S. government to track these numbers.”

Companies that have lost workers in Iraq were generally unresponsive to questions about the numbers of deaths and the circumstances that led to casualties. None acknowledged that they had seen an increase this year.

But a spokesman for American International Group, the insurance company that covers about 80 percent of the contractor work force in Iraq, said it had seen a sharp increase in death and injury claims in recent months. The Labor Department records show that in addition to the 146 dead in the first three months this year, another 3,430 contractors filed claims for wounds or injuries suffered in Iraq, also a quarterly record. The number of casualties, though, may be much higher because the government’s statistical database is not complete.

The Labor numbers were provided in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from The New York Times. Other figures came from a variety of government agencies, private contractors and insurers handling casualty claims.

American military casualties in Iraq have mounted to almost 3,400 dead. The new contractor statistics suggest that for every four American soldiers or marines who die in Iraq, a contractor is killed.

Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who pushed for the buildup of military forces in Iraq, said the contractor casualties were a symptom of a larger failure to send enough troops earlier to provide security throughout Iraq.

“We’re now putting these people in danger that I never thought they’d be under because we cannot secure the country,” he said.

Other lawmakers also expressed concern about the numbers. Representative John P. Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat who is chairman of the defense subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, said that he was shocked at the extent of casualties among contractors and that he planned to hold hearings this fall on the use of private workers in Iraq.

Representative Jan Schakowsky, an Illinois Democrat, has introduced legislation to force the government to release detailed records on the use of contractors in Iraq and the names and job descriptions of all those killed and injured, information that is virtually impossible to get right now. The military releases names and biographical information about its wartime casualties, but businesses are not required to provide such information, and the Labor Department refuses to do so, citing privacy laws.

“By keeping the knowledge of this force hidden, it changes one’s perception and one’s evaluation of the war,” Ms. Schakowsky said. “There are almost a thousand dead and a large number of injuries. I think it masks the fact that we are privatizing the military in this country.”

Contract workers say that as the tempo of military operations has increased in recent months, so have the attacks on contractors. Convoys of trucks operated by companies are often not as well armored or protected as military units, they say.

A top security industry official said he was told recently by American military and contracting officials that 50 to 60 percent of all truck convoys in Iraq were coming under attack. Previously, he said, only about 10 percent had been hit.

“There is a definite spike in convoy attacks,” said the official, who would speak only on condition of anonymity because the information was confidential. Gordon Dreher, 48, who drove a fuel truck supplying American troops in Iraq, said he and other drivers faced almost constant attacks from insurgents.

“I’ve been shot at, had my truck blown out from under me, had an I.E.D. hit about six feet away from me, and lost part of my hearing,” he said, referring to an improvised explosive device. “I’m used to getting shot at now, having tracer rounds hit off my truck. I got ambushed twice on one convoy run.”

Mr. Dreher broke his back in January from driving fast on rough roads, and is back home in Brick, N.J., awaiting surgery. “When they do a surge, they need more fuel for choppers and tanks,” he said. “My buddies who are still there tell me that they have been getting spanked pretty good lately.”

Mark Griffin, a 53-year-old truck driver from Georgia who left Iraq last November, said even then attacks were accelerating. “It got progressively worse pretty much every month I was there.”

He worked for KBR driving trucks in Anbar Province to supply Marine bases with ammunition, water and other essentials. He said that by late 2006 truck drivers and their Marine convoy escorts were finding 20 to 30 roadside bombs on each convoy trip through Anbar, the restive Sunni heartland. “The number of I.E.D.’s got worse, and the size and damage got worse, progressively, over time,” he said.

Labor Department statistics show that deaths and injuries among contractors have risen during times of heightened American military activity. For example, the number of contractors killed from January through March tops the previous quarterly record of 112 killed at the end of 2004, during the American military offensive in Falluja and related operations nearby.

 The worsening casualty trends appear to be continuing into the second quarter of this year, as insurgents launch a wave of mortar and rocket attacks on Baghdad’s Green Zone, the heavily fortified government center. Earlier this month, for example, two Indians, a Filipino and a Nepalese working for the American Embassy in Baghdad were killed by rocket fire in the Green Zone.

Nearly 300 companies from the United States and around the world supply workers who are a shadow force in Iraq almost as large as the uniformed military. About 126,000 men and women working for contractors serve alongside about 150,000 American troops, the Pentagon has reported. Never before has the United States gone to war with so many civilians on the battlefield doing jobs — armed guards, military trainers, translators, interrogators, cooks and maintenance workers — once done only by those in uniform.

In the Persian Gulf war of 1991, for example, only 9,200 contractors — mostly operating advanced weapons systems — served alongside 540,000 military personnel. But at the end of the cold war, Congress and the Pentagon were eager to seize on the so-called peace dividend and drastically scale back the standing Army. The Bush administration expanded the outsourcing strategy to unprecedented levels after the invasion of Iraq.

Many contractors in the battle zone say they lack the basic security measures afforded uniformed troops and receive benefits that not only differ from those provided to troops, but also vary by employer. Weekly pay ranges from $60 for Iraqi translators and laborers to $1,800 for truck drivers to as much as $6,000 for private security guards employed by companies like Blackwater. Medical and insurance benefits also vary widely, from excellent to minimal.

Conditions in Iraq are harsh, and many civilians who arrive there, drawn by patriotism, a sense of adventure or the lure of money, are overwhelmed by the environment. If they raise questions about the 12-hour workdays, the lack of armor plating on trucks or the periodic shelling of bases, supervisors often tell them to pack up and go home.

Cynthia I. Morgan, a Tennessee trucker who spent more than a year in Iraq as a convoy commander, said that the common answer from her bosses to such complaints was, “Aisle or window, chicken or pasta” — meaning “Get on the next plane out of here.”

круиз по морю ценыОлександр Фільчаков прокурор

New claims of UK Army war crimes

The British Army is facing new allegations that it was involved in "forced disappearances", hostage-taking and torture of Iraqi civilians after the fall of the regime of Saddam Hussein.

One of the claims is made by the former chairman of the Red Crescent in Basra, who alleges he was beaten unconscious by British soldiers after they accused him of being a senior official in Saddam’s Baath party.

The family of another Iraqi civilian claims he was arrested and kidnapped by the British in order to secure the surrender of his brother, who was also accused of being a high-ranking member of the party. He was later found shot dead, still handcuffed and wearing a UK prisoner name tag.

Both cases are being prepared for hearings in the High Court in which the Government will be accused of war crimes while carrying out the arrest and detention of alleged senior members of the Baath party.

Last month, the first British soldier to be convicted of a war crime was jailed for a year and dismissed from the Army after being convicted of mistreating Iraqi civilians, including the hotel worker Baha Mousa, who died of his injuries at the hands of British soldiers. Six other soldiers, including Col Jorge Mendonca, were cleared of all charges.

Lawyers and rights groups say the worrying aspect of these latest allegations is that they show evidence of systemic abuse by British soldiers soon after the fall of Saddam.

Fouad Awdah Al-Saadoon, 67, chairman of the Iraqi Red Crescent in Basra, alleges he was visited by British soldiers at his offices in the city on 12 April 2003 and was taken to the British base at the former Mukhabarat [intelligence] building. In his witness statement, Mr Saadoon said he was accused of being a member of the Baath party and of using his organisation’s ambulances secretly to transport Iraqi militia.

In a detailed account of the abuse that he alleges he suffered, Mr Saadoon recalls: "As soon as I went inside they started beating me. They used electric cables and wooden batons and they harshly punched me with their hands and boots. I had a heart problem, I was a diabetic and had high blood pressure. I was hit repeatedly on my eyes which made me collapse unconscious."

Mr Saadoon was later transferred to the joint American/British-run detention centre called Camp Bucca, in southern Iraq, which the British had set up to process prisoners at the start of the war. He was interrogated for five days. Because of the injuries sustained during the beatings his condition worsened and he claims the British flew him to Kuwait for a heart operation. There he claims he was visited by the International Federation of the Red Crescent whose representatives expressed concern at his alleged treatment by the British.

In the second case, a 26-year-old Iraqi civilian, Tarek Hassan, was arrested in a dawn raid by British troops involved in the rounding up of Baath party officials on 24 April 2003. His family allege he was held hostage by the British in exchange for the surrender of his brother, Kadhim Hassan, a member of the Baath party.

Five months after his arrest, his family received a phone call to say his body had been found dumped in Samarra, north of Baghdad and 550 miles from the detention centre where he had been held. Kadhim Hassan, 37, has spent the past three years trying to establish the circumstances that led to the death of his brother. Now Iraqi human rights workers and British lawyers have uncovered vital witnesses to his arrest and detention. They have also recovered Tarek’s UK identity tag, which indicates he was a British prisoner.

In his witness statement, Kadhim recalls the night his bother was arrested. "The British were looking for me as I was a high-ranking member of the Baath party," he said. "I suspect that a financial dispute with one of my neighbours made him inform the British of my rank and he possibly told them some lies which made them look for me." Kadhim had left the family a few hours before the armoured vehicles carrying the soldiers arrived. When his sisters contacted the British to find out where the British had taken Tarek, they were told that he would only be released if Kadhim gave himself up. That was the last they heard of him until five months later.

"He was found," said Kadhim, "by locals in the countryside … We went to collect him from the morgue in Samarra, where we found him with eight bullet wounds to his chest. They were Kalashnikov bullets. His hands were tied with plastic wire and had many bruises."

Now it emerges that Mr Saadoon, who has left Iraq and is working as a businessman in Dubai, met Tarek shortly after he was flown back to Camp Bucca from Kuwait, where he had been receiving medical care.

"I was brought back to Camp Bucca in a van on 21 April and placed in a tent, which held 400 prisoners. On 24 April Tarek Hassan was brought to our tent. He was very scared and confused. He told me British troops had raided his house and were looking for his brother who left the house before the soldiers had arrived. As I was in bad health, Tarek used to bring me food and care for me. Tarek was never interrogated while I was at Camp Bucca."

On 27 April the International Federation of the Red Crescent requested the British to free Mr Saadoon and that night he and all 200 others were released in the middle of the night on the highway between Basra and Zubai. "We had to walk 25 miles to reach the nearest place where we could hire cars," remembers Mr Saadoon.

The Government denies being involved in the injuries suffered by Mr Saadoon or responsibility for Tarek’s death. In letters to the family, the Ministry of Defence makes the point that the bullets that may have killed him were fired from a Kalashnikov weapon and that the area where his body was found was not an area of operations associated with British forces.

But the Hassan family’s solicitor, Phil Shiner, of Public Interest Lawyers, said the evidence showed Tarek disappeared at the hands of UK forces and that the circumstances of his release "significantly increased the risk to his life".

In recent correspondence, the MoD has admitted to the Hassan family that Tarek was held at Camp Bucca but claims that it is a US-run camp and so not the responsibility of the British.

Mr Shiner, who is acting in both cases, said: "The Government deny any responsibility in a case where a man has been kidnapped by UK forces and killed. It is a matter of public record that our agents were torturing Iraqis at Camp Bucca and continued to hand over detainees to the Iraqi criminal system even though there was a serious risk of torture or death in detention. This case is important because if the UK have jurisdiction it cannot allow these incidents to continue and must properly investigate previous incidents".

Mazin Younis, chair of the Iraqi League, a UK-based rights group, said: "The cases we have reported so far may only be the tip of an iceberg of systematic abuse procedures devised high up the command chain in the Army. The scale of such cases greatly necessitates the need for the Government to start a public inquiry."

[…]

The secure holding facility in the desert near the city of Umm Qasr, close to the Kuwaiti border, was originally called Camp Freddy and used by British forces to hold Iraqi prisoners of war.

But in April 2003 control of the camp was transferred to the Americans, although there was a "secure and discrete" unit within the camp that remained exclusively British. In 2003 the British had control of two tent compounds, holding roughly 400 prisoners each. The Americans had six similar compounds.

The camp is designed to hold between 2,000 and 2,500 prisoners but figures released in March 2006 estimated that it held 8,500 Iraqi detainees.

There have been a number of inquiries into alleged abusive treatment at the camp, mostly related to the Americans.

In February 2005 American soldiers killed four detainees and injured six others to quell a riot in which prisoners were armed with stones.

But the British have also been accused of abuse, specifically the hooding of prisoners, which led to concerns being raised with the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Six of the men detained with Baha Mousa were later taken to Camp Bucca. Conditions in the camp are known to be primitive, with open trenches used as lavatories.

The prisoners were forced to sleep on the desert floor, at risk from scorpions and snakes, and were only given one blanket at night when temperatures can fall below zero.

Since May 2003, 27 prisoners have escaped from Camp Bucca, 18 of whom have been recaptured. A number of attempts at mass escape have been foiled.

The Ministry of Defence says that apart from two spells in 2003, Camp Bucca has been run by the Americans.

[…]

On 15 May 2003 the 1st Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers captured Iraqis looting an aid camp in Operation Ali-Baba. They were detained for a brief period during which they were beaten, forced to simulate oral and anal sex and suspended from a forklift truck. Later that month, Fusilier Gary Bartlam, 20, of Tamworth, Staffordshire, took a film to be developed containing 22 photographs of abuse taking place. This triggered a lengthy court martial at a British Army barracks in Osnabruck, Germany. Bartlam pleaded guilty to three charges of ill treatment of Iraqi prisoners. Cpl Daniel Kenyon, 33, from Newcastle, denied six charges of abuse. He was convicted of three, cleared of two charges and the remaining charge was dropped. L/Cpl Mark Cooley, 25, from Newcastle, denied two charges of abuse but was found guilty of both. L/Cpl Darren Larkin, 30, from Oldham, Greater Manchester, admitted to one charge of assault but denied another. The second charge was dropped.

[…]

The hotel worker and son of an Iraqi police colonel died on 16 September 2003 while in custody of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment at a detention centre near Basra. The building had formerly been the secret service headquarters of Ali Majid (Chemical Ali). Cpl Donald Payne, 36, became Britain’s first convicted war criminal when he admitted inhumanely treating civilian detainees. Six other soldiers were cleared by a military court in Bulford, Wiltshire, of abusing Mr Mousa and other detainees.

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Radio telescopes and electromagnetic weapons

A group of Russian scientists from Tomsk, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod and Moscow have developed a series of unique compact generators capable of producing high-energy pulses of hundreds and even thousands of megawatts.

This compares with the capacity of a major Soviet hydropower station on the Dnieper or an energy unit at a modern nuclear power plant. The new generators are sources of electromagnetic radiation rather than electricity. Their main feature is a capacity to produce enormous power in a matter of nanoseconds. The impulses can be generated with a very high frequency.

Vice President of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) Gennady Mesyats recalled that the first high-current electron accelerators were developed in the U.S.S.R. in the 1960s. Ten years later, Soviet scientists learnt to generate powerful microwave nanosecond pulses. The current generators have no counterparts in the world. In effect, Russian scientists have made a breakthrough in what is called relativist high-precision electronics.

The pulse is primarily of interest for fundamental research. Reporting these results to the RAS Presidium at the beginning of this year, scientists emphasized that sources with super radiation effects can be broadly used in long-range high-resolution impulse-based radiolocation and in studies of non-thermal impact of powerful electromagnetic fields on radio electronic components and different biological species.

Super-powerful pulse generators can test the reliability of radio electronic devices and the immunity of energy facilities to different impacts. They can imitate the interference caused by a lightning and even by a nuclear blast. Their tiny size and unique physical properties make their sphere of application extremely wide.

The electromagnetic pulse (EMP) is a product of a nuclear explosion. It puts out of action even those electronic control systems that have withstood the shockwave and reduces expensive smart weapons to scrap metal. There are different ways of generating electromagnetic pulses – for example, it can be produced by explosion-induced pressure on a magnetic field.

Physicist Andrei Sakharov was the first to propose using this principle in a bomb in the 1950s. Today, records in the size of an induced magnetic field, maximum current and properties of such "radiators" belong to Russian scientists. They surpass foreign counterparts by 10 times. Depending on what facilities the EMP is directed at, the damage radius can be from several hundred meters to kilometers. Without creating a shock wave and inflicting visible damage, it destroys all enemy electronic equipment. Moreover, unlike electronic countermeasures, electromagnetic weapons are capable of damaging radio electronic components even if they are switched off.

At present, the infrastructure and troops of many countries are stuffed with electronic equipment. It will be the main target for electromagnetic weapons. The destructive effect is produced by the high acceleration of the magnetic and electrical components of the EMP. They induce voltage changes ranging from 100 volts to 10,000 volts in circuit networks and terminals of radio electronic equipment. The ensuing massive sparking of cable jackets, their contact to frame and the ground, and breakdowns in connectors put the equipment out of action and lead to fires and explosions. To understand this effect better, it is enough to imagine what will happen to your TV-set if there is a power surge – it will simply melt.

The Americans were the first to use such weapons in combat, for instance in Yugoslavia. Some analysts believe that electromagnetic bombs would have given the United States a vital advantage in the early stages of the war in Iraq. They could have disabled not only Baghdad’s control and communications systems, but also electronic components of missiles, even those located in deep bunkers. But the U.S. command chose not to use electromagnetic bombs for fear that they might disrupt its own radio electronic equipment in the area.

Today, many countries have electromagnetic weapons. Military experts predict a victory in future wars to those who will be ahead in electromagnetic radiation. In many cases, not only the military-industrial complexes but also different civilian organizations, research institutes and universities conduct studies in this field, thereby increasing the threat of radio electronic terrorism. For example, a broadband high-energy and compact wave source is sold without any restrictions. In several fractions of a second, it can burn down all electronic equipment at an electric power station, substation or control tower.

A short intensive pulse can instantly paralyze data bases, financial centers and industrial equipment.

Yuri Zaitsev is an academic adviser at the Academy of Engineering Sciences.

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Zimbabwe: Best Performing Stock Market

CNBC and other stock market tabloids are notorious for making simplistic linkages between the stock market and gross domestic product (GDP). They tell us that any event that stimulates GDP growth inevitably drives stock prices up, and any event that hurts GDP growth pushes stocks down.
Since the largest share of GDP is consumption, consumer demand becomes the all-important figure driving growth. When the consumer gets too excited, the Fed must step in to cool them down with interest-rate hikes. When the consumer isn’t spending, Fed interest-rate cuts stimulate demand.

The tragedy currently occurring in Zimbabwe completely contradicts this sort of logic. Zimbabwe is in the middle of an economic disintegration, with GDP declining for the seventh consecutive year, half what it was in 2000. Ever since President Mugabe’s disastrous land-reform campaign (an entire article in itself), the country’s farming, tourism, and gold sectors have collapsed. Unemployment is said to be near 80%.

Yet something odd is happening.

The Zimbabwe Stock Exchange (the ZSE) is the best performing stock exchange in the world, the key Zimbabwe Industrials Index up some 595% since the beginning of the year and 12,000% over twelve months. This jump in share prices is far in excess of increases in consumer prices. While the country is crumbling, the Zimbabwean share speculator is keeping up much better than the typical Zimbabwean on the street.

CNBC logic fails to explain the coincidence of a rising ZSE and collapsing GDP because it entirely ignores the monetary side of the economy. At this point Austrian economics makes its contribution to our story. According to Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT), the peak-trough-peak pattern that economies demonstrate is not their natural state, but one created by excess growth in money supply and credit. New money is not simply parachuted to everyone equally and at the same time — it is sluiced into the economy at certain initial "entry points." From these entry points, a number of initial goods are bought by recipients of new money causing a rise in price for these initial goods relative to other goods.

Because entrepreneurs react to this observed but unjustified change in the structure of prices by investing their capital, misallocation occurs. As money-supply growth continues and prices become more contorted, more and more ventures are undertaken that would not be undertaken in a regime without money-supply growth. When, for whatever the reason, money supply finally contracts, the artificial strength in prices that encouraged unprofitable ventures is removed, prices collapse, and large numbers of ventures go bankrupt. Thus we have the recession part of the business cycle, the simultaneous failure of many firms at the same time.

If, as the Austrian theory states, money enters the economy at certain points, it is likely that a nation’s stock market will become a prime beneficiary of any monetary expansion. Fresh money enters the economy first through banks and other financial entities who may invest it in shares, or lend it to others who buy shares. Thus stock prices rise relative to prices of things like food and clothes and will outperform as long as this monetary process is allowed to continue.

This is what we are seeing in Zimbabwe. With the country suffering from Mugabe’s catastrophic policies, increasingly the only means for the government to fund itself has been money-supply growth. This has only exacerbated the economy’s problems. The flood of new money that authorities have created has caused the existing value of money in circulation to plummet, i.e., the prices of all sorts of goods to explode, some rising more than others.

As prices become more misaligned, basic decision-making abilities of normal Zimbabweans are impaired and the day-to-day functioning of the economy deteriorates. Perversely, all of this has forced the government to issue even more currency to make up for budget shortfalls and to buy support. At last measure, the country’s consumer price index was rising (i.e., the purchasing power of currency declining), at a rate of 1,729% a year.

The ZSE is growing some three times faster than consumer prices. This relative outperformance versus general prices is a result of stocks being a chief entry point for the flood of newly created money. Keep Zimbabwean dollars in your pocket, and they’ve already lost a chunk of their value by the next day. Putting money in the bank, where rates are pithy, is not much better. Investing in government bonds is the equivalent of financial suicide. Converting wealth into foreign currency is difficult; hard currency is scarce, and strict rules limit exchangeability.

As for capital improvements, there is little incentive on the part of companies to invest in their already-losing enterprises since economic prospects look so bleak. Very few havens exist for people to hide their wealth from the evils created by Mugabe’s policies. Like compressed air looking for an exit, money is pouring into shares of ZSE-listed firms like banker Old Mutual, hotel group Meikles Africa, and mobile phone firm Econet Wireless. It is the only place to go. Thus the 12,000% year over year increase in the Zimbabwe Industrials.

Our Zimbabwe example, though extreme, demonstrates how changes in stock prices can be driven by monetary conditions, and not changes in GDP. New money gets spent or invested. In Zimbabwe’s case, because there are no alternatives, it is stocks that are benefiting.

This sort of thinking can be applied to the stock markets in the Western world too. Though western central banks have not been printing nearly as fast as their Zimbabwe counterpart, they do have a long history of increasing the money supply. It forces one to ask how much of the growth in Western stock markets over the preceding twenty-five years has been created by a vastly increasing money supply, and how much is due to actual wealth creation. Perhaps stock prices have increased faster than goods prices for the last twenty-five years because, as in Zimbabwe, Western stock markets have become one of the principal entry points for newly printed currency.

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