Feds move to seize 4 mosques, tower linked to Iran - Yahoo! News

Feds move to seize 4 mosques, tower linked to Iran

NEW YORK – Federal prosecutors took steps Thursday to seize four U.S. mosques and a Fifth Avenue skyscraper owned by a nonprofit Muslim organization long suspected of being secretly controlled by the Iranian government.

In what could prove to be one of the biggest counterterrorism seizures in U.S. history, prosecutors filed a civil complaint in federal court against the Alavi Foundation, seeking the forfeiture of more than $500 million in assets.

The assets include bank accounts; Islamic centers consisting of schools and mosques in New York City, Maryland, California and Houston; more than 100 acres in Virginia; and a 36-story glass office tower in New York.

Confiscating the properties would be a sharp blow against Iran, which has been accused by the U.S. government of bankrolling terrorism and trying to build a nuclear bomb.

A telephone call and e-mail to Iran’s U.N. Mission seeking comment were not immediately answered. Nor was a call to the Alavi Foundation.

It is extremely rare for U.S. law enforcement authorities to seize a house of worship, a step fraught with questions about the First Amendment right to freedom of religion.

The action against the Shiite Muslim mosques is sure to inflame relations between the U.S. government and American Muslims, many of whom are fearful of a backlash after last week’s Fort Hood shooting rampage, blamed on a Muslim American major.

The mosques and the skyscraper will remain open while the forfeiture case works its way through court in what could be a long process. What will happen to them if the government ultimately prevails is unclear. But the government typically sells properties it has seized through forfeiture, and the proceeds are sometimes distributed to crime victims.

Prosecutors said the Alavi Foundation managed the office tower on behalf of the Iranian government and, working with a front company known as Assa Corp., illegally funneled millions in rental income to Iran’s state-owned Bank Melli. Bank Melli has been accused by a U.S. Treasury official of providing support for Iran’s nuclear program, and it is illegal in the United States to do business with the bank.

The U.S. has long suspected the foundation was an arm of the Iranian government; a 97-page complaint details involvement in foundation business by several top Iranian officials, including the deputy prime minister and ambassadors to the United Nations.

“For two decades, the Alavi Foundation’s affairs have been directed by various Iranian officials, including Iranian ambassadors to the United Nations, in violation of a series of American laws,” U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement.

There were no raids Thursday as part of the forfeiture action. The government is simply required to post notices of the civil complaint on the property.

As prosecutors outlined their allegations against Alavi, the Islamic centers and the schools they run carried on with normal activity. The mosques’ leaders had no immediate comment.

Parents lined up in their cars to pick up their children at the schools within the Islamic Education Center of Greater Houston and the Islamic Education Center in Rockville, Md. No notices of the forfeiture action were posted at either place as of late Thursday.

At the Islamic Institute of New York, a mosque and school in Queens, two U.S. marshals came to the door and rang the bell repeatedly. The marshals taped a forfeiture notice to the window and left a large document sitting on the ground. After they left a group of men came out of the building and took the document.

The fourth Islamic center marked for seizure is in Carmichael, Calif.

The skyscraper, known as the Piaget building, was erected in the 1970s under the shah of Iran, who was overthrown in 1979. The tenants include law and investment firms and other businesses.

The sleek, modern building, last valued at $570 million to $650 million in 2007, has served as an important source of income for the foundation over the past 36 years. The most recent tax records show the foundation earned $4.5 million from rents in 2007.

Rents collected from the building help fund the centers and other ventures, such as sending educational literature to imprisoned Muslims in the U.S. The foundation has also invested in dozens of mosques around the country and supported Iranian academics at prominent universities.

If federal prosecutors seize the skyscraper, the Alavi Foundation would have almost no way to continue supporting the Islamic centers, which house schools and mosques. That could leave a major void in Shiite communities, and hard feelings toward the FBI, which played a big role in the investigation.

The forfeiture action comes at a tense moment in U.S.-Iranian relations, with the two sides at odds over Iran’s nuclear program and its arrest of three American hikers.

But Michael Rubin, an expert on Iran at the American Enterprise Institute, said the timing of the forfeiture action was probably a coincidence, not an effort to influence Iran on those issues.

“Suspicion about the Alavi Foundation transcends three administrations,” Rubin said. “It’s taken ages dealing with the nuts and bolts of the investigation. It’s not the type of investigation which is part of any larger strategy.”

Legal scholars said they know of only a few cases in U.S. history in which law enforcement authorities have seized a house of worship. Marc Stern, a religious-liberty expert with the American Jewish Congress, called such cases extremely rare.

The Alavi Foundation is the successor organization to the Pahlavi Foundation, a nonprofit group used by the shah to advance Iran’s charitable interests in America. But authorities said its agenda changed after the fall of the shah.

In 2007, the United States accused Bank Melli of providing services to Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs and put the bank on its list of companies whose assets must be frozen. Washington has imposed sanctions against various other Iranian businesses.

___

Associated Press writers Samantha Gross in New York City, Juan A. Lozano in Houston, investigative researcher Randy Herschaft in New York City and AP photographer Jacquelyn Martin in Maryland contributed to this report.

‘Hooligan’ satirists jailed in Azerbaijan

Clip taken from YouTube shows the bloggers interviewing a donkey in their government satire.

(CNN) — Two satirical bloggers who staged an interview with a donkey were sent to prison in Azerbaijan Wednesday, following a two-month trial for assault, the father of one told CNN.

Adnan Hadjizadeh 26, and Emin Milli, 30, were accused of hooliganism after an altercation in a cafe in July.

Hadjizadeh was imprisoned for two years and Milli was sentenced to two and a half, Hadjizadeh’s father, Hikmet, told CNN by phone from Baku, the capital of the oil-rich former Soviet republic.

Azerbaijani authorities did not respond to repeated CNN questions about the case.

“Emin Milli and Adnan Hadjizadeh were physically attacked, apparently unprovoked, in a Baku restaurant. Witnesses reported that the two had been discussing their youth movement activities when two strangers approached them, demanded that they stop discussing such matters, and attacked them,” Human Rights Watch and other organizations wrote in an open letter to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev when the trial opened in September.

“Milli and Hadjizadeh were later charged with ‘hooliganism,’ under Article 221 of the Azerbaijani Criminal Code, and detained. Their alleged attackers were set free,” the groups wrote, urging they be given a fair trial.

Hikmet Hadjizadeh believes their real crime was “fighting for democracy, fighting for European values” in the authoritarian nation sandwiched by Russia, Turkey and Iran.

Hadjizadeh and Milli satirized Azerbaijan’s government in a popular YouTube video shortly before they were arrested.

“There was a report by the government statistics bureau that the government bought two donkeys from Germany” for an exorbitant sum, Hikmet Hadjizadeh said. “Of course this is money-laundering.”

So Hadjizadeh and Milli staged a press conference and interviewed a donkey, he said.

In the video, which is posted on YouTube, journalists ask a man in a donkey suit if he had a good trip from Germany (he complains his luggage was stolen, but says it probably would not have been if the thieves knew he was a donkey) and if he would like to be reincarnated as a donkey again after his death (yes, if he was going to live in Azerbaijan “where donkeys are truly loved”).

But the questioning then gets more pointed, as a journalist asks the donkey why he is so much more expensive than local donkeys.

“I’m better than them,” the donkey replies confidently. “I have a European education, I know three languages: German, English, and, as you can see, Azeri. And I can play the violin.”

The donkey goes on to give an impressive demonstration of his musical talent before he, too, implicitly criticizes the government of Azerbaijan for restrictions on non-governmental organizations.

“There will be someone to protect donkey civil rights. But who will protect human civil rights?” the filmmakers ask on screen as the video ends.

The U.S. State Department criticized the verdict as “a step backwards for Azerbaijan’s progress towards democratic reform.

“The non-transparent investigation, closed court hearings, disproportionate legal charges, and failure to detain and charge the assailants have raised concerns about the independence of the police and the judiciary as well as about restrictions on freedom of expression in Azerbaijan,” spokesman Ian Kelly said in a written statement.

Human Rights Watch said the bloggers did not have a fair trial.

“This is going to send some very chilling messages to those who are critical of the government,” said the group’s Caucasus researcher Giorgi Gogia.

“They were not part of the conventional media, they were civil activists in the blogosphere,” he said by phone from neighboring Georgia, where he is based.

“It is particularly alarming that after certain media outlets have been closed down, even the blogosphere is not a forum where free views can be expressed,” he said.

Azerbaijanis are due to elect a new parliament next year, but there is little chance the voting will be fair, Gogia said.

“It’s hard to talk about competitive elections when there is no free media,” he said.

Hadjizadeh and Milli will appeal their conviction, Hadjizadeh’s father said. They remain in prison pending the appeal, he added.

U.S. Budget Priorities

I developed the pie chart from calculations made by the Office of Management and Budget.

Outlays for discretionary programs are on page 154 of this document (PDF, 3MB). The numbers for fiscal year 2008 are projections.

The estimates for the 2007-2008 Budget year are as follows:

* After OMB created this summary, Congress passed House Resolution 3222 by a vote of 395 to 13. This law appropriates the Department of Defense budget for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2008. I replaced the OMB’s $602 Billion estimate with the actual amount of $459.6 Billion.

* President Bush has never included war in the national budget, prefering instead to request “emergency funding,” every year for 5 years in row. On October 22, 2007, he transmitted to Congress his 2008 War Funding Request. It says that his “funding requirements in 2008 to continue the Global War on Terror” total $196.4 Billion.

Veterans

We must fulfill our commitment to the men and women who have served, so why is the veterans slice of the pie chart colored red?

Because this war is not necessary, the casualties are not necessary, the suffering is not necessary and the cost is not necessary.

Nuclear Weapons

Long Term Cost of War

Professor Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University won the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics. Linda Bilmes is Professor of public finance at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. According to their new book, the Iraq War has become the second-most expensive in US history, after World War II. They say that even if we withdraw all our troops tomorrow, the war will still keep costing us money for many years to come.

Direct costs, already spent Future operational costs Military equipment and reset Recruitment Long term medical Long term disability Opportunity cost for lives lost Higher oil prices Interest on the war debt

$500 Billion $521 - $669 Billion $100 - $250 Billion $25 - $30 Billion $120 - $285 Billion $276 - $340 Billion $30 Billion $230 - $800 Billion $600 - $800 Billion

Click to watch Paul Solman’s examination of costs as broadcast on PBS’s NewsHour.

Simon Brown has been working on aid projects for the last six years

A broken fridge in Belfast is an inconvenience, in a bush hospital on the Central African Republic’s border with Chad it can mean ruined medicines and tragedy for patients.

Simon Brown, 34, has been in the aid industry as a logistician for the last six years and keeping things running is what he does best.

He left his native Belfast in 1999 to study International Disaster Engineering and Management at Coventry and since graduating has spent most of his time working on aid projects in Africa.

For the last 18 months he has been working with the medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) most recently in the Central African Republic and before that Chad.

Simon works to make sure that the medical teams have electricity, equipment and somewhere to rest after dispensing medical treatment.

MSF, which has had a Dublin office for the last three years, has been sending healthcare teams around the world since 1971, with the aim of giving treatment when and where it is needed most. But there has been a cost and there are risks.

“I think maybe 28 MSF staff were killed since 2008,” Simon said.

“Most of them would be local staff rather than ex-pats and there are dangers in places like Somalia where there are MSF projects.

“It is local staff that still face the most danger, there can be consequences for killing a European that may not be there if a local is killed.”

While in the Congo his compound was robbed twice by armed gangs and base security can be a concern.

However, the risks have not stopped the charity’s workers going into areas which have experienced conflict, trusting that their independence from governments will help protect them.

“Most people understand that we are there to help,” Simon said.

Sometimes there can be an existing health infrastructure to work with and other times not.

In a well established project things can be simpler but Simon’s most recent posting to Maitikulu was more basic.

“It was starting from scratch, installing electricity, constructing storage facilities, fixing generators which were old and tired and broken… all the very basic things you would normally take for granted,” he said.

“When you go to the Ulster Hospital you walk in and are treated so you have no idea about the other things, waste management and disposal and hygiene, but they are all important and need done.”

The digital age and email has made it easier to order supplies across a multi-language supply chain. But there are still low tech answers to some problems.

In his Northern Ireland homeland sucking diesel is a term used when things are going well, for Simon it became part of the ritual of siphoning fuel from drums into the tanks of the medical vehicles.

Aid workers tend not to get into that line of business to make a fortune and Simon’s next move is to buy some land and set up home in Burundi, where the prices match his income.

“Hopefully it will be a good base for me to work around Africa from. There will certainly be much less of a commute, though I will still be coming back. Belfast will always be home,” he said.

He has had malaria five times, but fortunately his proximity to medical treatment has meant it was simply dealt with. What he does means that other people will have the same chance of treatment.

Simon blogs from his projects and on it he explains why he chose humanitarian work.

“It’s not selfless really. At the end of the day I want to sit back and know I’ve done something worthwhile,” he wrote.

Why smells from childhood mean so much

• 17:05 10 November 2009 by Helen Thomson

Why does the hint of certain smells instantly transport you back to childhood? It may be because the first smell you associate with an object is given privileged status in the brain

Yaara Yeshurun and colleagues at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, showed volunteers an object such as a chair or pencil that was unlikely to already be associated with a smell at the same time as exposing them to an odour or sound. An hour-and-a-half later, they showed them the same object with a different odour or sound.

One week later, the researchers showed the volunteers the object again and asked them which odour or sound they associated with it, while scanning their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Volunteers were more likely to mention the first odour – and when they did, their brains showed a characteristic pattern of activity in the hippocampus. This pattern did not appear if volunteers plumped for the second odour, or if they had been exposed to sounds rather than smells.

Yeshurun concludes that the brain reserves a special pattern of activity for memories that represent the first time we have associated a smell with a particular thing – and that such pairings are most likely to be laid down in childhood.

The brain may have evolved to lay down these privileged memories because it enhanced our ability to sense danger. “This is especially true for unpleasant odours,” says Yeshurun.

This makes sense, says Rachel Herz, author of The Scent of Desire: Discovering our enigmatic sense of smell and visiting professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. “The evolutionary implication is that the situation in which you first encounter an odour is likely a reliable maker for its meaning, and it is highly adaptive to learn that meaning so that the odour can be responded to appropriately in the future.”

Vanished Persian army said found in desert

50,000 soldiers believed buried by a cataclysmic sandstorm in 525 B.C.

By Rossella Lorenzi

updated 11:11 a.m. ET Nov. 9, 2009

The remains of a mighty Persian army said to have drowned in the sands of the western Egyptian desert 2,500 years ago might have been finally located, solving one of archaeology’s biggest outstanding mysteries, according to Italian researchers.

Bronze weapons, a silver bracelet, an earring and hundreds of human bones found in the vast desolate wilderness of the Sahara desert have raised hopes of finally finding the lost army of Persian King Cambyses II. The 50,000 warriors were said to be buried by a cataclysmic sandstorm in 525 B.C.

“We have found the first archaeological evidence of a story reported by the Greek historian Herodotus,” Dario Del Bufalo, a member of the expedition from the University of Lecce, told Discovery News.

According to Herodotus (484-425 B.C.), Cambyses, the son of Cyrus the Great, sent 50,000 soldiers from Thebes to attack the Oasis of Siwa and destroy the oracle at the Temple of Amun after the priests there refused to legitimize his claim to Egypt.

After walking for seven days in the desert, the army got to an “oasis,” which historians believe was El-Kharga. After they left, they were never seen again.

“A wind arose from the south, strong and deadly, bringing with it vast columns of whirling sand, which entirely covered up the troops and caused them wholly to disappear,” wrote Herodotus.

A century after Herodotus wrote his account, Alexander the Great made his own pilgrimage to the oracle of Amun, and in 332 B.C. he won the oracle’s confirmation that he was the divine son of Zeus, the Greek god equated with Amun.

The tale of Cambyses’ lost army, however, faded into antiquity. As no trace of the hapless warriors was ever found, scholars began to dismiss the story as a fanciful tale.

Striking evidence
Now, two top Italian archaeologists claim to have found striking evidence that the Persian army was indeed swallowed in a sandstorm. Twin brothers Angelo and Alfredo Castiglioni are already famous for their discovery 20 years ago of the ancient Egyptian “city of gold” known as Berenike Panchrysos.

Presented recently at the archaeological film festival of Rovereto, the discovery is the result of 13 years of research and five expeditions to the desert.

“It all started in 1996, during an expedition aimed at investigating the presence of iron meteorites near Bahrin, one small oasis not far from Siwa,” Alfredo Castiglioni, director of the Eastern Desert Research Center (CeRDO)in Varese, told Discovery News.

While working in the area, the researchers noticed a half-buried pot and some human remains. Then the brothers spotted something really intriguing — what could have been a natural shelter.

It was a rock about 114.8 feet long, 5.9 feet in height and 9.8 feet deep. Such natural formations occur in the desert, but this large rock was the only one in a large area.

INTERACTIVE 7 tales of cities lost or found From Peru’s Machu Picchu to the site believed to be the mythical ancient city of Atlantis, there are several tales of cities lost or found.

“Its size and shape made it the perfect refuge in a sandstorm,” Castiglioni said.

Right there, the metal detector of Egyptian geologist Aly Barakat of Cairo University located relics of ancient warfare: a bronze dagger and several arrow tips.

“We are talking of small items, but they are extremely important as they are the first Achaemenid objects, thus dating to Cambyses’ time, which have emerged from the desert sands in a location quite close to Siwa,” Castiglioni said.

About a quarter-mile from the natural shelter, the Castiglioni team found a silver bracelet, an earring and few spheres which were likely part of a necklace.

“An analysis of the earring, based on photographs, indicate that it certainly dates to the Achaemenid period. Both the earring and the spheres appear to be made of silver. Indeed a very similar earring, dating to the fifth century B.C., has been found in a dig in Turkey,” Andrea Cagnetti, a leading expert of ancient jewelry, told Discovery News.

A different route?
In the following years, the Castiglioni brothers studied ancient maps and came to the conclusion that Cambyses’ army did not take the widely believed caravan route via the Dakhla Oasis and Farafra Oasis.

“Since the 19th century, many archaeologists and explorers have searched for the lost army along that route. They found nothing. We hypothesized a different itinerary, coming from south. Indeed we found that such a route already existed in the 18th Dynasty,” Castiglioni said.

According to Castiglioni, from El Kargha the army took a westerly route to Gilf El Kebir, passing through the Wadi Abd el Melik, then headed north toward Siwa.

“This route had the advantage of taking the enemy aback. Moreover, the army could march undisturbed. On the contrary, since the oasis on the other route were controlled by the Egyptians, the army would have had to fight at each oasis,” Castiglioni said.

To test their hypothesis, the Castiglioni brothers did geological surveys along that alternative route. They found desiccated water sources and artificial wells made of hundreds of water pots buried in the sand. Such water sources could have made a march in the desert possible.

“Thermoluminescence has dated the pottery to 2,500 years ago, which is in line with Cambyses’ time,” Castiglioni said.

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In their last expedition in 2002, the Castiglioni brothers returned to the location of their initial discovery. Right there, some 62 miles south of Siwa, ancient maps had erroneously located the temple of Amun.

The soldiers believed they had reached their destination, but instead they found the khamsin — the hot, strong, unpredictable southeasterly wind that blows from the Sahara desert over Egypt.

“Some soldiers found refuge under that natural shelter, other dispersed in various directions. Some might have reached the lake of Sitra, thus surviving,” Castiglioni said.

Mass grave discovered
At the end of their expedition, the team decided to investigate Bedouin stories about thousands of white bones that would have emerged decades ago during particular wind conditions in a nearby area.

Indeed, they found a mass grave with hundreds of bleached bones and skulls.

“We learned that the remains had been exposed by tomb robbers and that a beautiful sword which was found among the bones was sold to American tourists,” Castiglioni said.

Among the bones, a number of Persian arrow heads and a horse bit, identical to one appearing in a depiction of an ancient Persian horse, emerged.

“In the desolate wilderness of the desert, we have found the most precise location where the tragedy occurred,” Del Bufalo said.

The team communicated their finding to the Geological Survey of Egypt and gave the recovered objects to the Egyptian authorities.

“We never heard back. I’m sure that the lost army is buried somewhere around the area we surveyed, perhaps under 16.4 feet of sand.”

Piero Pruneti, editor of Archeologia Viva, Italy’s most important archaeology magazine, is impressed by the team’s work.

“Judging from their documentary, their hypothesis of an alternative route is very plausible,” Prunetic told Discovery News. “Indeed, the Castiglioni’s expeditions are all based on a careful study of the landscape…An in-depth exploration of the area is certainly needed!”

احسان فتاحیان چهارشنبه اعدام می شود

حكم اعدام زنداني سياسي کرد روز چهار شنبه اجرا مي شود.
حكم اعدام احسان فتاحيان، زنداني سياسي محكوم به اعدام زندان مركزي سنندج بامداد روز چهارشنبه مورخ 20 آبان ماه در محوطه ي اين زندان اجرا خواهد شد. تعجيل در اجراي حكم اعدام احسان، در پي نامه ي تذكر آميز روز پنج شنبه ي قوه ي قضاييه به دادگستري سنندج در خصوص عدم تامل در اجراي اين حكم صورت گرفته است. در همين راستا، روز گذشته به وكيل احسان ابلاغ شده است كه بامداد روز چهار شنبه يعني روز اجراي حكم، در زندان حضور يابد تا شاهد اجراي حكم باشد.
احسان فتاحیان اهل کرمانشاه در مردادماه سال گذشته در شهر کامیاران از توابع استان کردستان توسط نیروهای امنیتی بازداشت شد، نامبرده در دادگاه اولیه در آبان ماه سال گذشته توسط دادگاه انقلاب سنندج به ده سال حبس تعزیری توام با تبعید به زندان رامهرمز خوزستان محکوم گردید که پس از اعتراض ، پرونده به دادگاه تجدید نظر استان کردستان ارجاع گردید.
دادگاه تجدید نظر استان کردستان پس از بررسی پرونده اقدام به صدور حکم اعدام به اتهام عضویت در یکی از احزاب اپوزیسیون کرد بر اساس ماده 186 قانون مجازات اسلامی برای این فعال سیاسی کرد نمود.
تا دیر نشده کاری کنیم.

America is Performing Its Familiar Role of Propping Up a Dictator

by Robert Fisk

Could there be a more accurate description of the Obama-Brown message of congratulations to the fraudulently elected Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan? First the Palestinians held fair elections in 2006, voted for Hamas and were brutally punished for it - they still are - and then the Iranians held fraudulent elections in June which put back the weird Mahmoud Ahmadinejad whom everyone outside Iran (and a lot inside) regard as a dictator. But now we have the venal, corrupt, sectarian Karzai in power after a poll far more ambitiously rigged than the Iranian version, and - yup, we love him dearly and accept his totally fraudulent election.

And now we are still trying to persuade his opponent to join a national unity government, an administration led by the man whose vote-stuffing was the very reason that same leader of the opposition - the good pseudo-Pashtun Abdullah Abdullah - refused to run in a second round of elections. And Karzai got his fawning congrats from the Obama-Brown twins. So that’s OK then. Wagons Ho. For Westmoreland, read McChrystal. Send in the brave 40,000 to join the rest of the US cavalry as it fights its way west - or rather south-west - to the Khe Sanh of Afghanistan in Year Eight of the War on Terror.

The March of Folly was Barbara Tuchman’s title for her book on governments - from Troy to Vietnam-era America - that followed policies contrary to their own interests. And well may we remember the Vietnam bit. As Patrick Bury, a veteran British soldier of our current Afghan adventure, pointed out yesterday, Vietnam is all too relevant.

Back in 1967, the Americans oversaw a “democratic” election in Vietnam which gave the presidency to the corrupt ex-General Nguyen Van Thieuman. In a fraudulent election which the Americans declared to be “generally fair” - he got 38 per cent of the vote - Thieu’s opponents wouldn’t run against him because the election was a farce.

In 1967, Washington needed the elections to give legitimacy to this revolting dictator - and thus provide credibility to its own military occupation of Vietnam in the war against Communism. As in Vietnam - where Saigon was a lonely kingdom of brutal power totally isolated from the rest of the country - Karzai is going to rule over an equally tiny island of corruption, protected by US mercenaries while the Americans perform their familiar role of propping up a dictator.

As ex-Lieutenant Bury sagely points out, the Afghan war is “campaigning on a par with the 19th-century British colonial army trying to manage the unwinnable… What was or is the strategy behind these long, bloody conflicts?” Well, in 1967, it was the possible communisation of Laos, Cambodia and Thailand. Now it is Pashtunistan, Baluchistan, Waziristan. For us, the vast ignorant “plebes”, it’s supposed to stop the Taliban/al-Qa’ida beasts from attacking our looming towers all over again, albeit that the 2001 murderers in question largely hailed from that friendly, moderate, brutal, oligarchical monarchical dictatorship called Saudi Arabia where - thank the good gods - they don’t hold elections.

But it’s part of a dreary pattern. US forces were participating in a civil war in Vietnam while claiming they were supporting democracy and the sovereignty of the country. In Lebanon in 1982, they claimed to be supporting the “democratically” elected President Amin Gemayel and took the Christian Maronite side in the civil war. And now, after Disneyworld elections, they are on the Karzai-government side against the Pashtun villagers of southern Afghanistan among whom the Taliban live. Where is the next My Lai? Journalists should avoid predictions. In this case I will not. Our Western mission in Afghanistan is going to end in utter disaster.

Double Meaning

All this photos has something in common, most of them are from Russia or made by Russians. The thing is common is… well everyone can figure out this by himself, probably.

“Hi, Freak!”

“Gay”

via leprosorium.ru

Making Sense of the Tragedy at Fort Hood

Eddie Zawaski Salem-News.com

Since he survived the shootings, Major Hasan will now have his forty years to relieve the massacre and try to make some sense of it. War just isn’t worth it and this shooting proves it.

Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan

(PATAGONIA, Argentina) - Making sense of the Fort Hood shootings will be a difficult process for Americans. While some may swiftly consign this tragedy to the context of a black and white struggle between Islam and Christianity or Arab vs. American, others will look for more complex and more personal explanations.

How Americans and our military interpret and respond to this event will determine whether we have more or fewer tragedies like this in the future.

Thus, I would like to offer a personal and more complex explanation of what happened yesterday, an explanation that rings true for me.

When I read of the circumstances surrounding Maj. Hasan’s recent life, I broke into a cold sweat. His nightmare was my nightmare. I had been down the same road as he forty years earlier.

Like Major Hasan, I had been trained by our military to work with returning combat veterans suffering from PTSD. In my case, it was the Philadelphia Naval Hospital in the wake of the Tet Offensive and stressed-out Marines were arriving in droves every day.

I was the admissions corpsman on ward T-15, the first place a medically evacuated psychatric casualty came to in the US. My job was to listen to their stories and then file a report for the doctor who would care for them in our hospital. It didn’t take long for this job to wear me down.

Day after day, I listened to horrific stories. One Marine had shot his best friend in the back of his head and couldn’t get his buddy’s blood off his uniform. Another had “blown away” an innocent mother and child and had transformed himself into a german shepherd to avoid the responsibility for his action.

Six to ten times a day, I heard stories full of gore told by men unable to bear the burden of what they had done and seen. Even the glassy-eyed catatonics with no stories could not conceal the horror that they brought into my interview room.

The only way I could continue in this job was to disassociate, to refuse to believe that these stories were real or that any of it could happen to me. Then, one day in August of 1968, my armor was stripped away.

When I got my orders to be shipped out to Vietnam, I went into a complete panic. It was one thing to go into a war zone blind, not knowing what to expect, but it was an absolute nightmare when you already knew all the worst of it.

This was the point of the sword that both Major Hasan and I had been placed upon. Both he and I had been placed in positions of supreme responsibility on account of our intelligence and steady good judgement, but when the horror of the war became immediate and immanent, intelligence and judgement vanished. Panic set in.

I didn’t know what to do as, I am sure, Major Hasan didn’t know either. The real horrors that we had been living and working with so long tumbled over us and screamed at us to do something and do it fast.

Since we had been putting so much effort into disassociating, remaining objective about our PTSD victims and their circumstances, we hadn’t given a glimmer of a thought to what we would do when faced with the possibility that we, too, would get in line for horrors of our own. Under such conditions, only the most irrational solutions seem possible. The use of force seemed the only way out.

In my case, the force I used was on myself; I attempted suicide. I had seen so many others pass through my station on their way to a lifetime of reliving war’s deepest agony that I thought it better to take the quickest detour to a peaceful end. I did not want a life of veterans hospitals and tranquilizers. It was a stupid decision made by a man incapable of thinking clearly. I have no idea what Major Hasan could have been thinking.

Perhaps he sought to save the soldiers he killed from the horrors of war by dispatching them swiftly and unexpectedly at home. Whatever he may have thought, I’m sure he was certain that he would not survive his deeds, that he, too, was attempting suicide. Any explanation for what he did, no matter how crazy, has to be correct because what was done was done in a panic. When you are nuts, anything goes. When you are going to die, die now.

Both Major Hasan and I survived our moments of extreme panic. He will recover from his wounds, stand trial, be convicted and will have a lifetime to think about the consequences of his deeds.

I have been thinking about mine for forty years. While some may make conclusions about what happened based on Major Hasan’s name, religion or origins, I choose to make my own conclusion based on my eerily similar experience during an earlier war. Here’s how I see it.

War is the culprit in this tragedy, war and the people who declare it and wage it. It is easy for the Osama bin Ladens and George Bushes of this world to declare wars and prosecute them for they are the sons of wealth and privilege who will never suffer the consequences of the conflicts they seek.

Take away the war and everything is different. I end up going straight through college without being drafted and Major Hasan has a nice career as an army psychiatrist. Osama bin Laden and George Bush get lost in history. No matter what justification there may be for war, any war, the consequence of the horrors of combat are so deep and so lasting that all of us, even the best of us, are ruined by it.

Since he survived the shootings, Major Hasan will now have his forty years to relieve the massacre and try to make some sense of it. War just isn’t worth it and this shooting proves it.

Berlusconi, the Mafia and the Radioactive Wrecks

Italy’s Secret Ships of Poison

By MICHAEL LEONARDI

The colors of the Mediterranean are strong at this time of year on the border of Calabria and Basilicata. The sun shines brightly and low in the sky. The mountains and the sea are beautiful here and rich in traditions of organic agriculture, music and art that date back to the findings of paleolithic man and the Magna Grecia civilization before the Roman Empire. But all is not well.  The Mediterranean Sea, calm at times and agitated at others, holds the wrecks of “secret ships,” as it whispers and roars the hidden history of its revolutionary past. These ships are known here as the Navi Dei Veleni (ships of poison), and their contents are kept secret from the population and the world by the Italian Mafia/State. This Berlusconi led Mafia/State with its unconstitutional decrees  that violate Article 32 (see note) of the Italian constitution along with others, puts the health of the population at risk through a legacy of toxic and radioactive dumping now coming to light across the sea and landscape.  People are worried: about the economy, the flu, the poor conditions of the hospitals, schools constructed with contaminated building materials that poison the young, and a sea full of ships whose cargos lie unknown and uninvestigated on the sea floor.

In the city of Amantea, Calabria, on October 24, there was a mass International demonstration. Simultaneous actions were held in solidarity in France and Spain as well. Over 400 organizations, local and from all across the Italian peninsula joined together to call for an end to the intentional poisoning of our lands and waters by a criminal/political caste submersed in scandals of sex, prostitution, and  corruption, both on the left and the right. The October 24th demonstration in Amantea was called by the local organizing committee which takes its name in memory of the former commander of the Italian Navy, Natale De Grazia, who died in 1995 under very mysterious circumstances at the age of 39.  Commander De Grazia was at the forefront of the investigation into the trafficking of radioactive and toxic wastes and was the key point person in the investigation of the lost Ships of Poison.  The 24th of October rally brought over 30,000 citizens together with buses from all across the region and as far away as Rome. On a day in Amantea where the sea roared loudly, the people voiced their anger in unison at a State that represents the interests of business and criminals before the health of its citizens and the environment.

Italy’s environment minister, Stefania Prestigiacomo,
on a recent sea cruise.

Much contamination has poisoned the land and water throughout Calabria and Basilicata, with illegal dumpsites and government documentation of elevated levels of cancer-causing substances in the environment. These substances were mixed  with building materials in the city of Crotone and toxic  materials were discovered on the site of an abandoned textile factory on the shores of the sea in Praia a Mare. There is a profound lack here of effective water treatment facilities along the Calabria’s Tyrrhenian coast, and especially in the summer during high tourist season, tons of raw sewage are dumped directly into the sea.  There are thought to be ships with radioactive and toxic waste sunk off the coasts of Cetraro and Maratea, a wild coastline still teaming with sea life that stretches from Calabria to Baslilicata in the north.  The ship off Cetraro is though to be the Cunsky and that off of Maratea the Yvonne A. There are many others.The Italian public prosecutor says there are 40 Ships of Poison, Loyds of London says 24 ships, while Bruno Branciforte, the former head of Italian intelligence SISMI (now AISE) on the 25th of September confirmed 55 ships.

In the week following the passionate cry from Amantea, the Italian national government went to work on an investigation of a shipwreck off the coast of Cetraro. This investigation was a follow-up to one already initiated by the region of Calabria. The region’s investigation discovered and filmed a shipwreck that included what seemed to be iron drums on the sea floor. The ship was covered in fishing nets and was in the same area where analyses of fish done by the local health authority ASL (Aziende Sanitarie Locali) showed high levels of arsenic, chrome and other heavy metals.  This Regional investigation was initiated in part due to the testimony of Mafia Pentito (turncoat) Francesco Fonti, and in part because fisherman had actually fished out waste drums from the sea’s depths.

The national government’s investigation was led by the National Public Prosecutor’s Anti-Mafia division  and the Environmental Minister, Stefania Prestigiacomo. A research ship called the Mare Oceano was hired.  The Mare Oceano is the property of a company called Geolab from Naples that is controlled by the Italian Petroleum and Mining Industry Association.  Geolab is being paid 43,000 euros a day for the work of Mare Oceano by the Italian Mafia/State as this is being written.  The national government’s research has been conducted with no transparency. Local and regional officials, including Calabria’s Assessor of the Environment Silvio Greco – a marine biologist - , were excluded from this investigation as were representatives of national environmental organizations Legambiente and the World Wildlife Federation.

Some of the now “state secret” findings of this investigation called “Operation Cetraro” were reported in the Italian daily La Repubblica on October 29.  The Environmental Minister, Prestigiacomo, and Piero Grasso, public prosecutor and head of Italy’s Anti-Mafia division, reported their findings to the media. Equipped with photographs and a short video, they revealed: that the ship under investigation was a passenger ship called the Catania that was sunk in 1917 by a German submarine, that there was no radioactive or toxic cargo, that the mafia pentito (turncoat) Francesco Fonti who said he sank a ship off of Cetraro’s coast was an unreliable source, that the regional government had caused undue alarm in the population and that all is well beneath the waters of Cetraro. They said that the “case is closed.” This same Piero Grasso admitted for the first time this October that the Italian State has negotiated and made agreements with the Mafia to save the lives of government and judicial figures, generating a wave of condemnations and criticism of a State and Mafia working together hand in hand.  The revelations of “Operation Cetraro” are not sitting well with the local population here as many discrepancies have arisen and many questions remain as to where this Mafia/State’s real intentions lie.

Italy’s Environmental Minister Stefania Prestigiacomo has a questionable past. She comes from the town of Siracusa in Sicily and was part owner of a company there called Sarplast s.p.a.. This company went into bankruptcy in 1997 as a result of diseases and injuries among its workforce from exposure to toxic chemicals and hazardous working conditions. An investigation by police into the practices of the company documented violations of worker safety regulations. Three of the workers had children with birth defects. During the investigation of this company’s bankruptcy, fraudulent activities were discovered that included the embezzlement of billions of the old Italian monetary unit, the lire.  The bankruptcy investigation into this company was halted by the Public Prosecutor of Siracusa because of a law called the maxi amendment, that was made by the Berlusconi government in 2003 and which suspended punishments for these types of corporate legal infractions.  Now Prestigiacomo is responsible for protecting Italy’s lands and seas.

After a couple days of media reports that all was well with the sea in Cetraro, this story still hadn’t convinced local, regional and national environmental activists and organizations, the local and regional authorities, Calabria’s Environmental Assessor Silvio Greco, or the leadership of the opposition parties in Italy. Also at the level of the European Parliament, concerns are being raised by the European Green Parties, the European Commission on the Environment and others about the Italian government’s handling of this situation. Government insiders in Rome tell me that the government is playing politics with the health of the people and environment and has only worked to obstruct the truth on the story of these ships.  The spokesperson for the Environmental Minister became very defensive and incredulous when I posed the possibility of State and Mafia collusion, but could give me no clear responses to any of my questions. He ducked around the question of whether or not the minister believed that any of these ships really exists, by repeating that they didn’t find any waste on the ship they investigated.  Calabria’s Environmental Assessor Silvio Greco is hoping that this story gets out across  the world and that the Italian state is followed closely in this investigation by the international community.

On Saturday, October 31,  a press conference was held in Cetraro by representatives of the coalition that organized the October 24 demonstration in Amantea. They outlined their concerns about the discrepancies and doubts left by the Italian Mafia/State’s “Operation Cetraro” investigation. There concerns included: notable differences in the videos of the ships from the region and the state, different coordinates for where the research was conducted, and a complete absence of transparency on the part of the national authorities. One notable difference in the State’s video is that the fishing nets are no longer visible and nor are the iron drums.  They voiced perplexity as to why the Ministry of the Environment would want to throw water on this and other burning environmental emergencies across the region instead of working on solutions to the grave health risks that face the population here in Calabria. The participants in this press conference included environmental expert Francesco Cirillo who has followed these issues for over a decade, Mauro de Marco of the organization Zero Rifiuti (i.e., Zero Garbage), and Gianfranco Posa representing the Natale de Grazia committee among others.

The health risks here are caused by serious and documented ecological emergencies.  In the city of Crotone a school, roads and other buildings were built using materials mixed with toxic wastes.  Analyses administered by the local health authorities revealed high levels of cancer causing heavy metals in blood samples taken from children that attend the school, now known as the “School of Poisons” in Crotone. In Praia a Mare near the border of Basilicata and Maratea, an abandoned textile factory sits on lands contaminated by toxic dumping, also on sea coast. In Aiello Calabro near Amantea and along the river Oliva, radiation levels 6 times higher than normal have been measured and a population plagued with cancerous tumors seeks the truth about the cargo of the Jolly Rosso. The Jolly Rosso beached on the shore of Amantea in 1990 after a failed attempt to sink it at sea and then disappeared after two days.  Numerous other stories were documented, as well as the analysis of the fish off the coast of Cetraro.  The analysis of the fish off  Cetraro was done by the regional health authorities ASL and showed levels of heavy metals like arsenic, cobalt and chrome at higher than levels considered safe by Italian standards. In April of 2007, based on the findings of these analyses, the regional health authorities and the head of the Port of Cetraro banned fishing in certain areas. Then in August of 2008 this ban was mysteriously lifted despite the fact that no other analyses of the fish were taken. At the October 31 press conference the participants asked that the entire population of Calabria be given a health screenings to determine the risk factors posed by the environment.

On the first of November, the first major reports of problems with the Italian government’s “Operation Cetraro” began to surface in the regional media. Domenico Micelli reported in the daily newspaper Calabria Ora that there are at least three ships sunk off the coast of Cetraro and the coordinates of the ship investigated by the region did not match those of the ship investigated by the state. On the November 2, the World Wildlife Federation of Italy asked for the case of the ship off Cetraro to be re-opened by Minister Prestigiacomo and Piero Grasso.   WWF also pointed out discrepancies in the videos made by the region and the state. They asked for an explanation as to why the coordinates of the area investigated by the Region and the State are over 6 kilometers apart.  They call on the government to carry out their investigation with transparency and involvement of independent researchers from national environmental  organizations and regional and local governments.

On November 3, this sequence of discrepancies was reported in the national press. The Italian daily La Repubblica reports that a secret document has come to light from 2006 that confirms at least 3 different shipwrecks off the coast of Cetraro, thus bringing into question the State’s quick investigation and closing of the case. There are also serious questions being posed by Environmental Assessor Silvio Greco about the research methods employed by the Mare Oceano, he points out that the research vessel does not have the correct equipment to measure certain types of radionucliedes. There are also discrepancies about the timing of Prestigiacomo’s revelations to the media. She said that the ship was not the presumed Cunsky even before the robot was sent down to shoot the images of the Catania, giving the Mafia/State’s version a prefabricated veneer.

Italy is facing difficult times. The economy shows no signs of rebound and the stagnancy of wages keeps the majority of people struggling to make ends meet. The mass media are dominated by scandalous reports on prostitutes and transsexuals. Berlusconi faces the imminent risk of prison for corruption and fraud and says that even if he is found guilty by the “communist” judges he will not leave his post. On the October 22, after being arrested for having 20 grams of marijuana, a young man named Stefano Cucchi was beaten to death at the hands of state authorities in the Regina Coeli prison in Rome sending shockwaves throughout the peninsula.  Social and ecological justice are hard to find in Italy, and while much of the population seems content with their football games and material distractions, a growing and very well informed mass movement is afoot. Here in Calabria the voices are clamoring for the truth about what dangerous secrets the Mafia/State is hiding beneath the waters of the Mediterranean Sea. The restless citizenry here is also proposing their own investigation into this matter and is coming up with all types of creative solutions to the problems facing this area. There is a strong streak of resistance in the people here as they refuse to allow a corrupt political class to play games with the health of the people and the future of our beautiful mountains and sea.

Note: Article 32  [Health]

(1) The republic protects individual health as a basic right and in the public interest; it provides free medical care to the poor.

(2) Nobody may be forcefully submitted to medical treatment except as regulated by law.  That law may in no case violate the limits imposed by the respect for the human being.

Michael Leonardi currently lives in Calabria. He teaches English at the University of Calabria in Cosenza and at the Vocational Highschool in Maratea for training hotel and restaurant workers. He can be reached at mikeleonardi@hotmail.com

How America is snooping on YOU . and may soon a lot more.

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Dutch Liberal MEP Sophie In’t Veld was becoming irritated. Whenever she tried to board a flight in America – something she does several times each year – she was delayed by special security checks, subjected to questioning, additional searches of her bags and screening for explosives.

‘No one has ever accused me of involvement with terrorism or organised crime,’ In’t Veld said. ‘So I tried to discover why I was being singled out.’

Security expert In’t Veld, 41, wrote to three US government departments – State, Justice and Homeland Security – asking what they had on her in their files.

She especially wanted to know whether she had unjustly been deemed ‘high-risk’ under a scheme known as ATS, the Automated Targeting System.

It is a secret computer database whose conclusions can, under American law, be shared with a wide range of US and foreign government agencies and in some cases, employers.

Despite invoking America’s Freedom of Information Act, In‘t Veld got nowhere. Last week, she filed a US lawsuit, the first of its kind, demanding access to her records.

‘They say there are means of redress if US agencies hold damaging but inaccurate information about you,’ she said. ‘They don’t seem to work.’

Her case comes at a critical juncture. Since the start of this year, operating almost entirely beneath the public radar, the US Government has been making a concerted, multi-faceted push for unrestricted access to vast volumes of personal data held by governments on this side of the Atlantic.

What the US is after goes far beyond the ability to make requests case by case. They seek the ability to go on electronic fishing expeditions among British and other European databases held by law enforcement, immigration, financial and other official bodies – without even having to inform the databases’ custodians, let alone their subjects.

Some of this information – misleading police intelligence reports based on malicious hearsay, for example – might well turn out to have much more serious consequences than whatever titbit is responsible for inconveniencing Ms In’t Veld at airports.

Theoretically, it could lead to the extradition of British subjects to face criminal trial in America on the basis of unverified information derived from UK files, even in cases where authorities in Britain do not consider prosecution justified.

The 2003 Extradition Act has already made American extradition requests effectively immune to legal challenge, by removing any need for a prima facie case.

Last week Statewatch, the civil liberties monitoring group, obtained a copy of the final report of a group of senior US and European Union officials – the ‘High Level Contact Group on information sharing and privacy and personal data protection’.

Supposedly, its job was to agree some international standards to ensure the rights of EU citizens will remain protected under agreements to make European data available to America. In practice, these safeguards look alarmingly weak.

The report says the Americans want instant information from EU members’ databases for ‘the prevention, detection, suppression, investigation or prosecution of any criminal offence’, as well as ‘non-criminal judicial or administrative proceedings’ – in other words, pretty much anything.

It is difficult to read the report’s final section without feeling chilled. There is, for example, no prohibition on supplying details of someone’s ethnic origins, political, religious or philosophical beliefs, or personal information about health or sexual life.

Confidential data transferred to America under the terms of the document could also include details of personal investments, bank and credit-card spending.

All information could be disseminated to US agencies, and in some circumstances, to third countries.

There must, the report promises, be ‘independent oversight’. Yet it accepts that, sometimes, decisions could be taken by machines.

For example, a computerised warning making it impossible to board an aircraft might be issued because a piece of American software determined a person posed a threat.

The report says such ‘automated decisions’ can be taken ‘without human involvement’, as long as there are ‘appropriate safeguards in place, including the possibility to obtain human intervention’.

‘In the real world, such protection is meaningless,’ said Tony Bunyan, Statewatch’s director. ‘If there’s no right to be informed what a database says about you, the first you’re going to know is when you’re wrongly arrested, when you don’t get that job, or when you can’t get on that plane.’

While the High Level Contact Group has been busily diluting future data protection, the Americans have spent the past several months making some sweeping, more immediate demands.

Their chosen vehicle is the Visa Waiver Programme – the system that allows British and most EU citizens to visit America without passport visas. Henceforth, under the 9/11 Commission Act, passed in the US last year, visa waiver countries will be obliged to agree to stringent new security standards – including access to data.

In the words of the Act, decisions on whether to allow nations visa-free travel will depend on whether America decides they are ‘actively co-operating with the US to prevent terrorist travel, including sharing counter-terrorism and law enforcement information’.

America’s demands – set out in May by Richard Barth, assistant secretary for Homeland Security – in recent secret negotiations with the EU and individual states have been extraordinarily broad.

What the US sought, Barth said, was ‘requirements to provide certain information on air passengers, serious crimes, known or suspected terrorists, asylum and migration matters, and timely reporting of lost and stolen passport data, as well as co-operation on airport and aviation security.’

Of course, sharing information internationally can play a key role in combating terrorism and serious crime. But it is vital there must be rigorous methods of quality control and means to correct inaccurate records.

Neither Barth nor his officials have made any mention of this.

Yet another secret EU document leaked to Statewatch suggests Europe has already conceded America’s requests without putting up resistance on these key issues.

Dated April 11, it is the EU ‘mandate’ setting out the terms of Europe’s negotiating position – and accepts as its starting point that the EU should ‘explore the scope for agreement’ to the provisions of the 9/11 Act.

The document does say that any US-EU deal must ‘comply with fundamental rights and freedoms of individuals including the rights to privacy and data protection’. But as to how this lofty objective might be achieved, it is silent.

‘The safeguards are so minimal they might as well not exist,’ Bunyan said. ‘I’ve yet to see an occasion where Europe has refused American demands. They are in effect the 28th member of the EU.’

Civil libertarians like former Shadow Home Secretary David Davis have, rightly, become concerned at British Government measures such as 42-day detention for terrorist suspects.

But for most ordinary citizens, the pressure to share data from across the Atlantic is a far greater threat.

Don’t forget to duck: Giant Shoebill picks up feathered friend after he blocks his path

By Mail Foreign Service
Last updated at 1:28 PM on 05th November 2009

This duck got himself all in a flap after inadvertently straying into the path of a giant Shoebill while heading towards water.

But it was all water off a duck’s back for the imposing 4ft tall bird which instead of eating his smaller friend, carefully picked him up in his beak and moved him aside.

Despite its fearsome reputation as a predator around water, the Shoebill seemed more concerned with completing its journey than tucking into a feathered snack.

Bird food: The 4ft Shoebill picks up the squirming duck after it walked across its path at San Diego Wild Animal Park in the U.S.

These extraordinary pictures were captured by 51-year-old amateur photographer Mark Kay, at the San Diego Wild Animal Park in the U.S.

Mr Kay said he spotted the endangered Shoebill standing alone and immediately grabbed his Canon 1 DS camera and started shooting.

He said: ‘I was getting my camera out of the bag when I started to hear the ducks quacking. I immediately started shooting.

‘I thought the Shoebill was going to eat the duck, but soon realised he was moving him out of the way.

‘I suspect the duck had moved into his personal space. I have been back to the animal park a number of times, but have not captured anything as interesting there during my returns.

‘After the duck fell to the ground, he seemed flustered and just walked away. The Shoebill just carried on.’

Excuse me: The little duck, which is towered over by the endangered Shoebill, is gently moved out of the way

The father-of-two, a professor of paediatrics and genetics at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, said he uses the sequence of pictures when teaching his students.

He said: ‘What is most important is to know what we can conclude and what conclusion might be consistent with but not proved by our results.

‘I show the first image and almost everyone who sees it assumes the duck is to be eaten - that conclusion is consistent with what we see.

‘But if you look at the next frame, he is moving the duck away so our first conclusion although consistent was not the correct one.’

In a flap: The Shoebill then drops the startled duck to the ground, minus a few feathers, and carries on its way

Shoebills live in large swamps in eastern Africa and can grow to more than 5ft tall and can have a wingspan of up to 10ft.

The species was only discovered in the 19th century when some of the birds’ skins were brought to Europe.

Shoebills feed in muddy waters, preying on fish, frogs, reptiles such as baby crocodiles, insects and small mammals.

The species is classified as ‘threatened’ and the population is estimated at between 5,000 and 8,000.

Bible Is “A Catalogue of Cruelties,” Says Saramago
By Mario de Queiroz

LISBON, Oct 21 (IPS) - After a nearly two-decade truce, Portuguese Nobel literature laureate José Saramago has returned to the charge against the Catholic Church. This time his target is the Bible itself, which he describes as “a manual of bad morals,” and a “catalogue of cruelties and of the worst of human nature.”

“About the holy book, I tend to say: read the Bible and you’ll lose your faith,” said the first, and so far only, Portuguese-language writer to receive the Nobel Literature Prize, which he won in 1998.

In a meeting with the press Wednesday, Saramago repeated the ideas he expressed at an event Sunday in the northern Portuguese town of Penafiel, held to launch his latest book, “Cain”, which retells the story of Adam and Eve’s first-born son in a light-hearted, irreverent tone.

According to Saramago, there is nothing “divine” in the Bible. And although “Cain” has offended the Church, it won’t offend Catholics, he said, because “they don’t read the Bible.”

It took “a thousand years and dozens of generations” to write the Bible, which depicts a “cruel, spiteful, vengeful, jealous and unbearable God,” said the writer, who recommended people not to trust “the God depicted in the Bible.”

He said he would not have to settle accounts with God, because “the human brain is a great creator of absurd notions, and God is the most absurd one of all.”

Catholic Church officials lashed out at the writer’s statements, especially when he said that “without the Bible, we would be different, probably better, people,” and that he could not understand how the Bible became a “spiritual guide, when it’s so full of horrors, incest, betrayals and slaughter.”

“I’m not looking for controversy, but I have a few convictions and I say certain things. None of this is free: Cain has kept me company for many years,” Saramago responded to a question from IPS.

Writing this book “was an exercise in freedom for me,” said the polemical, provocative writer, who at the age of 86 maintains his rebelliousness intact – the same rebelliousness he showed when he joined the Communist Party, which was driven underground by Portugal’s 1926-1974 dictatorship, in 1969.

Saramago has ruffled many feathers over the years. He made Israel furious when he compared the Israeli military campaign in the besieged Palestinian West Bank to Auschwitz, and irritated Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi when he described him as “this thing, this illness, this virus (that) threatens to become the cause of the moral death of the country of Verdi” and could “end up corroding the veins and destroying the heart of one of Europe’s richest cultures.”

He also had a few choice words for Pope Benedict XVI, saying “Ratzinger has the nerve to invoke God to reinforce his universal neo-medievalism.”

In addition, he distanced himself from the Communists when he said Cuba “has lost my confidence, damaged my hopes, cheated my dreams.”

Another of his provocative ideas, expressed in one of his books, is that Portugal and Spain will one day merge into a united Iberia.

The 181-page Cain, which he wrote in four months and which hit the bookshelves simultaneously in Portuguese, Spanish and Catalonian on Monday, is according to Saramago, “an insurrection, an exhortation for everyone to dare to look for what is on the other side of things,” aimed at getting readers to think and reflect, because “we are manipulated all the time. We have to fight against that.”

His latest work also aims subtle barbs at contemporary issues, like the global economic crisis and its effect on unemployment, the rights of gays and lesbians, and the accumulation of wealth “in the name of the Lord.”

In 1991, with the publication of “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ”, Saramago infuriated the Church, which was backed in the row by the conservative government of then prime minister (and current president) Aníbal Cavaco Silva, which ended up vetoing the book’s presentation for the European Literary Prize on the argument that it was offensive to Catholics.

The book portrays Jesus Christ as a fallible, rebellious young man and hints at a more intimate relationship with Mary Magdalene.

At the time, the Portuguese government drew broad criticism from democrats within and outside Portugal for its censorship.

In response to the censorship, Saramago moved in symbolic–self exile to Spain’s Canary Islands, where he still lives today.

In the current controversy, which would appear to be far from over, the spokesman for Portugal’s bishops’ conference, Jesuit priest Manuel Morujão, said the whole thing was a “publicity stunt” mounted by the writer to drive up sales of Cain, which he said he had not read because “it is not one of my priorities.”

Morujão said the “offensive” terms used by Saramago to refer to the Bible “hurt the feelings of millions of Catholics around the world.” He also said the author “does not have sufficient knowledge” of the Bible to write about it.

A higher-level Catholic authority, Bishop Manuel Clemente of Oporto, Portugal’s second-largest city, urged the author to “be more careful and better informed” when writing about Biblical events.

Saramago responded by saying he was surprised by “the superficiality of the gentlemen of the Church, who did not read the book, but with unusual speed began to spread opinions and dismissive insults about it and its author.”

Father Morujão “said reading Cain is not one of his priorities. His frankness is appreciated, but it’s still strange when a spokesman does not know what he is talking about.”

“In terms of a lack of intellectual rigor, you could not ask for worse,” said the writer.

At the same time, Saramago said it is not against God that he is writing, “because he does not exist,” but that his stance is against religions, “because they do not, and have never, helped bring people together.”

In the writer’s view, “God only exists in our minds.”

His book points out that in the Old Testament, Cain killed his younger brother Abel in a fit of jealousy after God preferred his brother’s sacrifice of sheep to his.

“None of that happened, it’s obvious that they’re myths invented by man, just like God, a creation of men. All I do is lift up the stones and show the reality hidden beneath them,” said Saramago.

He said Cain is a book written “against any and all religions,” because throughout history, “all religions, without exception, have done humanity more bad than good.”

Visão magazine’s review of the book describes it is an ironic, provocative and irreverent work which, despite the humour in some parts, points to injustices, cruelties, limitations of free will and incongruities in the book of Genesis.

In Saramago’s book, Cain travels through time, witnessing events like the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Great Flood and the construction of Noah’s Ark, the fall of Jericho, and the conflict between God and Satan. He also keeps Abraham from stabbing his son Isaac.

Saramago concludes: “Yes, reader, that’s what it really says. The Lord ordered Abraham to sacrifice his own son, as casually as someone asking for a glass of water when they’re thirsty…The logical, natural or simply human thing would have been for Abraham to tell the Lord to go to hell.” (END/2009)

Spaceship Jesus Will Come Back and Whisk Us Away

But what is this unknown something with which the Reason collides when inspired by its paradoxical passion, with the result of unsettling even man’s knowledge of himself? It is the Unknown. It is not a human being, in so far as we know what man is; nor is it any other known thing. So let us call this unknown something: the God. It is nothing more than a name we assign to it.

– Philosophical Fragments, Søren Kierkegaard

Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series of sixteen novels (so far!) represents everything that is most deranged about religion. If I had to choose companions to take my chances with in a lifeboat, and the choice boiled down to picking Tim LaHaye, Jerry Jenkins, or Christopher Hitchens, I’d pick Hitchens in a heartbeat. At least he wouldn’t try to sink our boat so that Jesus would come back sooner. He might even bring along a case of wine.

The Left Behind novels have sold tens of millions of copies while spawning an “End Times” cult, or rather egging it on. Such products as Left Behind wall paper, screen savers, children’s books, and video games have become part of the ubiquitous American background noise. Less innocuous symptoms include people stocking up on assault rifles and ammunition, adopting “Christ-centered” home school curricula, fearing higher education, embracing rumor as fact, and learning to love hatred for the “other,” as exemplified by a revived anti-immigrant racism, the murder of doctors who do abortions, and even a killing in the Holocaust Museum.

No, I am not blaming Jenkins and LaHaye’s product line for murder or racism or any other evil intent or result. What I am saying is that feeding the paranoid delusions of people on the fringe of the fringe contributes to a dangerous climate that may provoke violence in a few individuals. And convincing folks that Armageddon is on the way, and all we can do is wait, pray, and protect our families from the chaos that will be the “prelude” to the “Return of Christ,” is perhaps not the best recipe for political, economic, or personal stability, let alone social cohesion. It may also not be the best philosophy on which to build American foreign policy! The momentum toward what amounts to a whole subculture seceding from the union (in order to await “The End”) is irrevocably prying loose a chunk of the American population from both sanity and their fellow citizens.

A time-out for disclosure is in order. I knew Jerry Jenkins quite well many years ago, and we worked on a baseball book project together, with me trying—and failing—to get his book made into a movie. I liked Jerry and he was kind and decent. I also have known Tim LaHaye for years, and some thirty years ago we shared the platform at several fundamentalist events. Both men always treated me well. This may come across as maudlin BS to some people, but I mean it when I say that if I weren’t convinced that their hugely “successful” work is about as innocuous as tossing gasoline and lighted matches into a nursery school, I’d never say a word about them. I’m betting that they mean well. It seems to me that they also have no idea what they have helped unleash. You can be very decent and very blind.

That said… the evangelical/fundamentalists—and hence, from the early 1980s until the election of President Obama in 2008, the Religious Right as it informed U.S. policy through the then dominant Republican Party—are in the grip of an apocalyptic Rapture cult centered on revenge and vindication. This End Times death wish is built on a literalist interpretation of the Book of Revelation. Too bad.

This weird book was the last to be included in the New Testament. It was included as canonical only relatively late in the process after a heated dispute. The historic Churches East and West remain so suspicious of Revelation that to this day it has never been included as part of the cyclical public readings of scripture in Orthodox services. The book of Revelation is read in Roman and Anglican Churches only during Advent. But both Rome and the East were highly suspicious of the book. The West included the book in the lectionary late and sparingly. In other words, the book of the Bible that the historical Church found most problematic is the one that American evangelicals latched on to like flies on you know what.

Given that Revelation is now being hyped as the literal—even desired—roadmap to Armageddon, it’s worth pausing to note that it’s nothing more than a bizarre pastoral letter that was addressed to seven specific churches in Asia at the end of the first century by someone (maybe John or maybe not) who appears to have been far from well when he wrote it. In any case, the letter was not intended for use outside of its liturgical context, not to mention that it reads like Jesus on acid.

The evangelical/fundamentalist literalistic “interpretation” of Revelation is symptomatic of a larger problem: make-it-up-asyou-go-along biblical interpretation suited to hyping whatever the evangelical/fundamentalist flavor of the moment is, in a desperate effort to keep religion relevant. But taken out of the context of being part of a worship cycle, the Bible became something like an extremely sharp butcher knife in the hands of children running around a garden. There’s nothing wrong with the knife per se, but context is everything. Enter semiliterate American evangelical/fundamentalist rubes armed with multiple “kitchen knives” and imbued with a frontier “no bishops or kings!” suspicion of any tradition, scholarship, or hierarchy that might moderate their wild-eyed personal “interpretations” of scripture and their burning desire to make a buck.

The Left Behind series is really just recycled evangelical/fundamentalist profit taking from scraps of “prophecy” left over from an earlier commercial effort to mine the vein of fearsome End Times gold. A book called The Late Great Planet Earth was the 1970s incarnation of this nonsense. It was written by Hal Lindsey, a “writer” who dropped by my parents’ ministry of L’Abri several times.

Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth interpreted Revelation for a generation of paranoid evangelicals who were terrified of the Soviet Union and communism and were convinced that the existence of the modern State of Israel was the sign that Jesus was on the way in our lifetimes, as Lindsey claimed. According to Lindsey, Revelation was “speaking” about the Soviet Union and imminent nuclear attacks between the Soviet Union and the United States. When Mikhail Gorbachev became president of the U.S.S.R., Planet Earth groupies claimed Gorbachev was the Antichrist, citing the references in Revelation to the “mark of the beast” as proof because Gorbachev had a birthmark on his forehead!

After everything predicted in the book came to nothing, Lindsey rewrote and “updated” his “interpretations” in many sequels, in what must have been some sort of record for practicing George Orwell’s idea of “doublethink” via editorial revision of ever-changing “facts.” Trying to follow the prophecy party line eventually got confusing, even for the Lindsey followers, and Lindsey faded into well-deserved obscurity.

This would be amusing, if not for the lives touched by this crazy nonsense. For instance, a good friend of mine was dragged—at age five—to Alaska, where his parents huddled in an “End Times” commune, a place chosen to be out of the way of major cities so that when the bombs fell, his family (and some fellow “pilgrims”) could await the Lord’s return in safety. My friend’s life was almost destroyed by suffering through years of a cruel and bizarre lifestyle in which his family was reduced to eating their goats and bear meat hunted (with the many guns kept by the members of this particular cult) on the “mission’s” garbage dump. Of course, school was not a big concern since Jesus was on the way! Discipline was harsh so that everyone could be found “pure of heart” at the Lord’s imminent return. After five or six years of this, my friend’s miserably duped parents dragged themselves back to a neighborhood near ours where it happened that Genie and I got to know their utterly dislocated and severely damaged children, one of whom grew to become a close friend of ours.

According to Jenkins and LaHaye, who have taken over the Hal Lindsey franchise of apocalypse-for-fun-and-profit and expanded it into a vast industry, the “chosen” will soon be airlifted to safety. The focus on the “signs” leading up to this hoped-for aeronautical excursion is understandably no longer the defunct U.S.S.R. but the ripped-from-the-headlines gift that keeps on giving: the Middle East.

The key to understanding the popularity of this series (and the whole host of other End Times “ministries” from the ever weirder Jack-the-Rapture-is-coming!-Van-Impe to the smoother but no less bizarre pages of Christianity Today magazine) isn’t some new or sudden interest in prophecy, but the deepening inferiority complex suffered by the evangelical/fundamentalist community.

The words left behind are ironically what the books are about, but not in the way their authors intended. The evangelical/fundamentalists, from their crudest egocentric celebrities to their “intellectuals” touring college campuses trying to make evangelicalism respectable, have been left behind by modernity. They won’t change their literalistic anti-science, anti-education, anti-everything superstitions, so now they nurse a deep grievance against “the world.” This has led to a profound fear of the “other.”

Jenkins and LaHaye provide the ultimate revenge fantasy for the culturally left behind against the “elite.” The Left Behind franchise holds out hope for the self-disenfranchised that at last soon everyone will know “we” were right and “they” were wrong. They’ll know because Spaceship Jesus will come back and whisk us away, leaving everyone else to ponder just how very lost they are because they refused to say the words, “I accept Jesus as my personal savior” and join our side while there was still time! Even better: Jesus will kill all those smart-ass Democrat-voting, overeducated fags who have been mocking us!

Nietzsche talked about “everyday being oneself” and not belonging to “the herd,” but we want to belong. We have to belong! We want to find the purpose, be it Jesus, or the study of the biological/ evolutionary origins of religion, or blogging on left-wing sites and reading all those responses from people just like us. We can’t change that desire to belong to the winning side. But some evangelical/ fundamentalists not only wish to be proved right; they also want revenge.

The bestselling status of the Left Behind novels proves that, not unlike Islamist terrorists who behead their enemies, many evangelical/fundamentalist readers relish the prospect of God doing lots of messy killing for them as they watch in comfort from on high. They want revenge on all people not like them—forever.

Knowingly or unknowingly, Jenkins and LaHaye cashed in on years of evangelical/fundamentalists’ imagined victimhood. I say imagined, because the born-agains had one of their very own, George W. Bush, in the White House for eight long, ruinous years and also dominated American politics for the better part of thirty years before that. Nevertheless, their sense of being a victimized minority is still very real—and very marketable. Whether they were winning politically or not, they nurtured a mythology of persecution by the “other.” Evangelical/fundamentalists believed that even though they were winning, somehow they had actually lost.

Most of that sense of lost battles is related to the so-called culture wars issues in which evangelical/fundamentalists did not fare so well, from the legalization of abortion to gay rights. But rather than admitting that they were often losing the arguments, or had come across as so mean (or plain dumb) that few outsiders wanted to be like them, they blamed everyone else, from the courts to organizations such as Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, the New York Times, and the “left-wing media.” Just about any scapegoat would do to deny or disguise the simple fact that fewer Americans wanted to follow the evangelical/fundamentalist Church Ladies into their gloomy cave (and/or the never-never land of the Rapture) and park their brains there.

Click the cover to buy the book!

I used to be part of the self-pitying, whining, evangelical/fundamentalist chorus. I remember going on the Today Show with host Jane Pauley back in the late 1970s (or early 1980s). I debated with the head of the American Library Association about my claim that our evangelical/fundamentalist books weren’t getting a fair shake from the “cultural elites.” We Schaeffers were selling millions of books, but the New York Times never reviewed them. I made the point that we were being ignored by the “media elite,” which was somewhat ironic, given that I had been invited to appear on Today to make that claim.

I dropped out of the evangelical/fundamentalist subculture soon after that Today appearance (years later I was back on Today in my secular writer incarnation, being interviewed about a book of mine on the military/civilian divide, but I decided not to mention that I’d been on the show about thirty years before in what seemed like either another lifetime or an out-of-body experience.

Others carried on where I left off, pushing the victimhood mythology to the next generation of evangelical/fundamentalists, and they have cultivated a following among the terminally aggrieved based on ceaselessly warning them about “the world.” For instance “An Evangelical Manifesto,” a document put together by yet another self-appointed evangelical/fundamentalist “leadership group” (in 2008), was widely circulated in evangelical/fundamentalists circles. It put forward the idea of the evangelical/fundamentalist battle with the dangerous forces of secularism, claiming that “Nothing is more illiberal than to invite people into the public square but insist that they be stripped of the faith that makes them who they are. … If this hardens into something like the European animosity toward religion in public life the result would be disastrous for the American republic. … [The] striking intolerance shown by the new atheists is a warning sign.”

The evangelical/fundamentalist authors of this document were claiming that fundamentalists were being stripped of their political power. Worse, we’d soon find that America would be just like— heavens!—France! They made this case during the Bush presidency!

A host of evangelical/fundamentalist Cassandras tour college campuses reinforcing their followers’ perennial chip-on-the-shoulder attitude by telling fearful evangelical/fundamentalist students to hold fast against the secular onslaught. They tell their student listeners (and those students’ even more worried parents) to not let “those people”—professors, members of the Democratic Party, moderates, progressives, and such ordinary American men and women as Jews, gays, and members of the educated “elite”—strip them of their faith. Hundreds of books by many evangelical/fundamentalist authors could be consolidated into one called How to Get Through College with Your Fundamentalist Faith Intact So You Won’t Wind Up Becoming One of Them.

Sometimes right-wing paranoia takes an ugly twist. A website maintained by James Von Brunn, an avowed racist and anti-Semite well known to the netherworld of white supremacy—and the assassin who killed a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in June of 2009—said that Brunn tried to carry out a “citizen’s arrest” in 1981 on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, whom he accused of “treason.” When he was arrested outside the room where the board was meeting, he was carrying a sawed-off shotgun, a revolver, and a knife. Police said he planned to take members of the Fed hostage.

“Mainstream” (in other words, slightly less nutty and less violent) religious-right Republicans have been saying the same thing as Brunn about the Fed for years, particularly the so-called “dominionists” who believe it’s their job to reestablish God’s dominion on earth. They preach Old Testament–style vengeance and loony gold-standard “economics” from many “respectable” pulpits. They also hate America (as it is), want a revolution in the name of God, and espouse “pro-life” beliefs, anti-gay hate, racism, and far-right Republican politics. They take the Republican anti-government propaganda to the next step and say that even paying taxes is “unconstitutional.” I know them well.

I knew the founders of the dominionist movement—people like the late Reverend Rousas John Rushdoony, the father of “Christian Reconstructionism” and the modern evangelical/fundamentalist home school movement. Rushdoony (whom I met and talked with several times) believed that interracial marriage, which he referred to as “unequal yoking,” should be made illegal. He also opposed “enforced integration,” referred to Southern slavery as “benevolent,” and said that “some people are by nature slaves.” Rushdoony was also a Holocaust denier. And yet his home school materials are a mainstay of the right-wing evangelical home school movement to this day. In Rushdoony’s 1973 book, The Institutes of Biblical Law, he says that fundamentalist Christians must “take control of governments and impose strict biblical law” on America and then the world. That would mean the death penalty for “practicing homosexuals.”

Many evangelical leaders deny holding Reconstructionist beliefs, but Beverly and Tim LaHaye (of Concerned Women for America and the co-author of the novels we’re talking about in this chapter), Donald Wildmon (of the American Family Association), and the late D. James Kennedy (of Coral Ridge Ministries and a friend of mine before I left the movement) served alongside Rushdoony on the secretive Coalition for Revival, a group formed in 1981 to “reclaim America for Christ.” I went to some of the early meetings.

The New Atheists have played into the evangelical/fundamentalist’s hands. Each side fans the flames of victimhood. “An atheist can never be president!” says one side. “A Christian never gets a fair shake in the New York Times!” claims the other. Each side is led by opportunists claiming to speak for a beleaguered minority.

Indeed, Dawkins needs the evangelicals and they need him. As the authors of An Evangelical Manifesto wrote, “striking intolerance shown by the new atheists is a warning sign.” Conversely, how would Dawkins’s followers use their Scarlet A pins to open their conversations if America weren’t full of evangelical/fundamentalists? The fundamentalists in both camps need to claim they are hated. The leaders push their followers to fear each other to maintain their identity—and lecture fees.

But getting back to the Apocalypse—since all the good God-fearing folks are going to be forced to be Europeans anyway, why not end it all now? Jenkins and LaHaye’s “I told you so” to all those “elites” who aren’t like “us” comes packaged as ultra-violence. The promotional copy for one of the books in the Left Behind series— Shadowed—promises plenty of killing: “After God intervenes with a miracle of global proportions, the tide is turned on international atheism!” Those Europeans the evangelical/fundamentalist leaders warned all “Real Americans” about are about to get theirs!

If you want to know what it means to turn the tide on “international atheism,” here’s an example from Glorious Appearing, in which Jesus slaughters unbelievers.

The riders not thrown leaped from their horses and tried to control them with the reins, but even as they struggled, their own flesh dissolved, their eyes melted, and their tongues disintegrated. … [T]he soldiers stood briefly as skeletons in now-baggy uniforms, then dropped in heaps of bones as the blinded horses continued to fume and rant and rave. Seconds later the same plague afflicted the horses, their flesh and eyes and tongues melting away, leaving grotesque skeletons standing, before they too rattled to the pavement.

Many evangelical/fundamentalists can’t get enough of this garbage. They’ve been sucking it up since the early 1970s, and now, in the Left Behind books, the message has gone viral. The video game Left Behind: Eternal Forces was developed by a publicly traded company, Left Behind Games. The player controls a “Tribulation Forces” team and is invited to “use the power of prayer to strengthen your troops in combat and wield modern military weaponry throughout the game world.” The game blesses religious violence. It’s the Americanized version of some Islamic sheik drumming hate of the infidel into young minds in some dusty Pakistani madrassa. It’s legal evangelical Jihad training, a fantasy foreshadowing of the all-too-real killings of abortion doctors and others hated as “anti-Christ.”

The expanding Left Behind entertainment empire also feeds the dangerous delusions of Christian Zionists, who are convinced that the world is heading to a final Battle of Armageddon and who see this as a good thing! Christian Zionists, led by many “respectable” mega-pastors—including Reverend John Hagee—believe that war in the Middle East is God’s will. In his book Jerusalem Countdown: A Warning to the World, Hagee maintains that Russia and the Arabs will invade Israel and then will be destroyed by God. This will cause the Antichrist—the head of the European Union—to stir up a confrontation over Israel between China and the West.

Perhaps, in the era of Obama, Hagee will do a fast rewrite and say that President Obama is the Antichrist, because the same folks who are into Christian Zionism are also into the far, far loony right of the Republican Party represented by oddities like Sarah Palin. These are the same people who insist that President Obama is a “secret Muslim,” “not an American,” and/or “a communist,” “more European than American,” or whichever one of those contradictory things is worse—not like us anyway, that’s for sure.

Christian Zionists support any violent action by the State of Israel against Arabs and Palestinians because the increasingly brutal State of Israel is, in the fevered evangelical/fundamentalist mind, the nation presently standing in for Jesus as avenger on evildoers everywhere, by which they mean Arabs and others not like us. Christian Zionists are yet another reason why I and countless other Christians, including many of the more moderate evangelicals, mainline Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Orthodox are hesitant to be labeled “Christian.” Who wants to be confused with some of the most dangerous and stupid people in the world: nuclear-armed, paranoid evangelical/fundamentalist Bible thumpers rooting for Armageddon and worrying in paranoid “official” documents about being forced to become like “the Europeans”? (Just a thought: does that make high-speed rail service a tool of the Devil?)

Perhaps I’m not alone when I say that it would be tempting to walk away from trying to follow Jesus, if for no other reason than to avoid the constant hassle of having to explain what I’m not.

© 2009 Frank Schaeffer. This is an excerpt from his latest book, Patience with God: Faith for People Who Don’t Like Religion (or Atheism), published by Da Capo Press.

Charlie Chaplin fans were seizing on the news Friday that a lost film of the comic genius had been found on eBay for $5.68.

Morace Park, who lives in Essex, England, bought the battered olive green film canister listed as “an old film” for <!– /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:”"; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-fareast-font-family:”Times New Roman”;} p.Fit, li.Fit, div.Fit {mso-style-name:_Fit; mso-style-parent:”"; mso-style-next:Normal; margin-top:0in; margin-right:0in; margin-bottom:6.0pt; margin-left:0in; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; tab-stops:.75in 1.5in 2.25in; background:#CCCCCC; mso-shading:white; mso-pattern:gray-20 auto; border:none; mso-border-alt:solid windowtext .75pt; padding:0in; mso-padding-alt:1.0pt 1.0pt 1.0pt 1.0pt; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:Arial; mso-fareast-font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-bidi-font-family:”Times New Roman”; color:green; mso-ansi-language:EN-GB;} span.Write {mso-style-name:_Write; color:lime;} p.webhead, li.webhead, div.webhead {mso-style-name:web_head; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-fareast-font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-ansi-language:EN-CA;} span.ital {mso-style-name:ital; color:windowtext; font-style:italic;} p.by1, li.by1, div.by1 {mso-style-name:by1; margin-top:3.0pt; margin-right:0in; margin-bottom:3.0pt; margin-left:0in; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt; font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-fareast-font-family:”Times New Roman”; font-variant:small-caps; mso-ansi-language:EN-CA; font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:normal;} p.by2, li.by2, div.by2 {mso-style-name:by2; margin-top:3.0pt; margin-right:0in; margin-bottom:6.0pt; margin-left:0in; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:8.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt; font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-fareast-font-family:”Times New Roman”; text-transform:uppercase; mso-ansi-language:EN-CA;} p.txt, li.txt, div.txt {mso-style-name:txt; mso-style-update:auto; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; text-indent:.3in; mso-pagination:none; mso-layout-grid-align:none; text-autospace:none; font-size:12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt; font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-fareast-font-family:”Times New Roman”; color:black; mso-ansi-language:EN-CA;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} –> £3.20, and found the title Charlie Chaplin in Zepped inside.

His neighbour, John Dyer, former head of education at the British Board of Film Classification, knew the legend of the lost seven-minute film that includes a Zeppelin bomb attack. Released in 1916, it was believed to be World War I propaganda to reduce fear in Britain of German airship attacks, but the film vanished years ago.

Most recently, a Russian film academic article reported in 2006 that “the film has not survived.”

“It starts with live shots of Chaplin,” Park told The Guardian newspaper. “It then turns into a dreamscape. We see a Zeppelin bombing attack. And then we see Chaplin taking the mickey out of the Zeppelin, at the time a powerful instrument of terror.”

Michael Pogorzelski, director of the archive at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles, told The Guardian: “It is an extremely interesting find” believed to be put together from outtakes of earlier films and shots of Zeppelins and other material.

The fragile 35 mm nitrate film should be transferred to film quickly to preserve it, said Pogorzelski.

After their discovery, Park and Dyer set out on what’s now a month-long odyssey to Hollywood to piece together the story of Zepped, blogging and tweeting as they went. On Friday, they were in Los Angeles with filmmaker Hammad Khan, who was making a documentary about the discovery.

“We found a film. A lost film. But not just any old lost film,” they reported on lostfilmproject.wordpress.com Oct. 9. “We think we might have made THE cinematic find of the last 100 years. It’s something we feel compelled to get to the bottom of. And quick.”

Later, they speculated: “Is it really that one in a million opportunity to grab a ride on what could turn out to be something quite remarkable and memorable – and not just for ourselves? These questions will persist, no doubt. But there’s no turning back for sure. Of that I’m convinced. And that alone, is a little bit scary.”

On Nov. 1 on Twitter, http://www.twitter.com/lostfilmproject, they disclosed what they had. Slowly word trickled out, first in Variety, the entertainment trade magazine, and then in several British newspapers on Friday.

As early as three weeks ago, fans at the online Charlie Chaplin Club started buzzing about the possibility Zepped still existed.

When an enthusiast with the screen name “Copper” at the Charlie Chaplin Club agitated to see a clip once the discoverer verified the news, Park doused him with, “Have patience. It’s a little tricky getting nitrate film transferred.”

The film was produced by the Essanay film company, to which the 25-year-old Chaplin was under contract in 1915 and where he established the Little Tramp character that would make him a superstar.

گزارش تصویری/ آبگیری زاینده رود -2

Some Palestinians only get 20 litres of water a day, Amnesty says

Israel is denying Palestinians access to even the basic minimum of clean, safe water, Amnesty International says.

In a report, the human rights group says Israeli water restrictions discriminate against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

It says that in Gaza, Israel’s blockade has brought the water and sewage system to “crisis point”.

Israel says the report is flawed and the Palestinians get more water than was agreed under the 1990s peace deal.

‘Basic need’

In the 112-page report, Amnesty says that on average Palestinian daily water consumption reaches 70 litres a day, compared with 300 litres for the Israelis.

Israel must end its discriminatory policies, immediately lift all the restrictions it imposes on Palestinians’ access to water Donatella Rovera Amnesty International

It says that some Palestinians barely get 20 litres a day - the minimum recommended even in humanitarian emergencies.

Amnesty says that Israel denies West Bank Palestinians to dig wells, and has even destroyed cisterns and impounded water tankers.

At the same time, the report claims, Israeli settlers are enjoying swimming pools and green gardens.

In Gaza, Israel refuses access to many of the building materials needed to renovate the ailing water system, the document says.

It adds that Israel uses more than 80% of the water from the Mountain Aquifer - the main source of underground water in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.

“Water is a basic need and a right, but for many Palestinians obtaining even poor-quality, subsistence-level quantities of water has become a luxury that they can barely afford,” Amnesty’s Donatella Rovera said.

“Israel must end its discriminatory policies, immediately lift all the restrictions it imposes on Palestinians’ access to water.”

Ms Rovera also urged Israel to “take responsibility for addressing the problems it created by allowing Palestinians a fair share of the shared water resources”.

Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev said the report was factually inaccurate, accusing the Palestinians of mismanaging water resources.

He also rejected the claim that Israel was preventing Palestinians from drilling for water.

The spokesman said Israel had approved 82 such projects but the Palestinians had only implemented 26 of them.