This government isn't scared of mass vandalism. The public, however, is - and that is precisely why fistfuls of images of young people in masks smashing up the Ritz and throwing smoke bombs have been tossed at our screens for five days now. The state requires us to be fearful so that it can acquire our consent for its spending cuts, and the public fears disorder even more than it fears mass unemployment and the decimaton of public services. So perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that the images of officers of the law assaulting unarmed young people, and the images of riot cops arresting an entirely peaceful protest group on orders which are rumoured to have come right from the top, have largely been been overlooked or dismissed.
Meanwhile, UKUncut - a group whose modus operandi is inclusive, creative, defiant people power of the type that really does scare the government - has been brutally suppressed. A hundred and thirty eight members have been detained, including a fifteen year old girl who was so frightened in jail that she was made to sign a form excusing the police from culpability, should she go on to commit suicide. There has been very little public outcry. The next wave in the battle for the hearts and minds of the British public has truly begun.
Dr. Hans Blix, former chief of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) between 1999 and 2003, was called to testify at the British Iraq War Inquiry board. He was discussing the findings of the inspection teams in Iraq before the US invasion in 2003 - findings that weren't released until June 2003, months after the invasion began.
Asked about the inspections he oversaw between November 2002 and 18 March 2003 - when his team was forced to pull out of Iraq on the eve of the war - he said he was "looking for smoking guns" but did not find any.
While his team discovered prohibited items such as missiles beyond the permitted range, missile engines and a stash of undeclared documents, he said these were "fragments" and not "very important" in the bigger picture.
"We carried out about six inspections per day over a long period of time.
"All in all, we carried out about 700 inspections at different 500 sites and, in no case, did we find any weapons of mass destruction."
Although Iraq failed to comply with some of its disarmament obligations, he added it "was very hard for them to declare any weapons when they did not have any".
It's a popular meme for the conservatives in our country to claim that Saddam didn't allow the inspectors back into the country prior to the 2003 invasion, but in fact he did. The teams had a little over three months before they withdrew, and they only withdrew because they were warned that Iraq was about to become a war zone. It's also a popular meme for the conservatives to even deny that WMDs were the principle justification for the US invasion. The record shows otherwise.
I'm not particularly thrilled by Blix's behavior in 2002-2003. I think he was extremely passive, that he could have done much more prior to the invasion to alert the media and other countries that Iraq really had no WMD program to either threaten Western interests or to arm terrorists. But, like many scientists, he preferred to wait until all the data were in and a full report could be staffed for the United Nations. Now he spends his time trying to make up for that lapse in judgment.
Acclaimed British cult TV favorite "Torchwood" is getting a U.S. makeover courtesy of Starz.
The premium cable outlet will share production costs on the show's upcoming season in exchange for domestic distribution rights. The 10-episode run will debut on BBC One and Starz next summer, and take on a more international scope. The bulk of the story will shift from UK to North America and key U.S. actors will join the cast.
Once again, stars John Barrowman and Eve Myles will return.
"This gives 'Torchwood' the chance to feel like a real global drama," said BBC Worldwide Productions executive vp Jane Tranter. "The story of 'Torchwood' will impact worldwide humanity and not just a small area of the UK. This will scale it up."
The most recent edition of "Torchwood" was a five-episode miniseries titled "Children of Earth" that was recently nominated for best miniseries by the Television Critics Association. The show chronicles a group that keeps Britain safe from hostile aliens and is led by an immortal named Captain Jack (Barrowman).
Producers previously were developing a U.S. version at Fox, which eventually passed on the project.
John Barrowman is an incredibly likable character who happens to be attracted to men, women and aliens. When I first read that FOX was thinking about picking up the show, I figured they would have to change his character and destroy it because there was no way they would let Capt. Jack make out with a guy on American TV, but now he'll be intact and so will the show. Something funny happened in the UK. The children didn't all turn "gay" after watching the show which is something the homophobes here would have screamed about.
Eve Myles plays the female lead who is in love with Jack, but never says it even as she marries her boyfriend and really is the heart of Torchwood even though Captain Jack Harkness was the character that sold the show after he appeared on season one of the newer Doctor Who. From what I'm hearing the story arc is brilliant, it will have American actors/characters to make up the team and it's just as dark as Children of Earth which was the BBC America's biggest hit to date ratings wise at the time.
[Caution: graphic video not suitable for work or children. Full-length version here.]
On the fifth of April, WikiLeaks released a classified US military video from an Apache helicopter gunship as it killed over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad in 2007, including two Reuters new staff, as well as seriously wounding two young children. One of the journalists, gravely wounded in the attack, was then shot in a second barrage as he tried to crawl away, and his body run over by a Humvee. Since the attack, Reuters had been attempting to obtain this video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success. Now it is public for the first time.
Wikileak’s organisers were given the footage by an unnamed source, which they then decrypted and posted on-line. So far, the Pentagon has had no response. The high-quality video, according to BBC’s Adam Brookes in Washington, appears to be authentic, and includes the recording of the pilot’s radio transmission and troops on the ground. Wikileaks has also published a statement from Reuters news editor-in-chief David Schlessinger saying that the video was ‘graphic evidence of the dangers involved in war journalism and the tragedies that can result’.
Wikileaks has complained of surveillance and harassment by the US and other governments, primarily for their role in leaking documents on sensitive subjects, from the assassination of human rights lawyers in Nairobi, photos of murders committed in Tibet followed by a mass attack on Swedish servers by Chinese computers in retaliation, threats by the head of Germany’s BNP of prosecution over a report of CIA involvement in Kosovo, and more. This tiny blogsite, which won Amnesty International’s 2009 media award, is nearly broke and has depended on donations from human rights groups, journalists, technology experts and simply concerned individuals for survival, a ludicrous game of David and Goliath of the internet.
But it seems someone within the DoD or US Army Counterintelligence or CIA or somewhere still believes in the public’s right to know what our elected government is up to. According to documents leaked to Wikileaks, even our own government has conspired to shut down the organization, including exposing sources and identifying whistleblowers and retaliating by termination of employment, criminal prosecution, defamation of the organization to weaken its credibility. The lessons of Valerie Plame and the Freedom of Information Act be damned.
Be warned. This video is not for the faint-hearted. I watched the whole thing. It made me feel ill, but I watched it all. It's the least I could do for those people who lost their lives. At one point you can even see one of the men from the van trying to rescue the wounded journalist looking up at the helicopter, he knew it was there. He knew what he was risking, and tried to help anyway. The bravery of that man is astounding. And he died. If it were left up to our own government, he would have died without you or me or anyone else ever knowing, our ignorance the biggest weapon in any military arsenal. If this ungodly, horrible war is ever to end, it is not only the public’s right to know what we have done and are still doing in Iraq, and Afghanistan, it is our responsibility to demand to know.
What truly bothers me is the absolute callousness of the conversation going on in the Apache helicopter. Beyond the 'fucking prick' and the 'bastards' comments, it's the laughter, particularly during the shooting as if it's all just a video game, cheering each other on as the wounded journalist crawls on the ground, willing him to reach for a ‘weapon’ so they can shoot him again, laughing when his body is run over by a military truck. The comment when the crew realized children have been wounded was shocking: ‘Well, it’s their own fault for bringing their kids to a battle.'
Bringing their kids to a battle? Those children live there! This wasn't a 'battlefield' - it was just an ordinary neighbourhood that got pasted by an American helicopter, twice. We brought the war to them. Where the hell were the kids supposed to have been? Loma Linda? Ann Arbor? Tampa?
The Pope played a leading role in a systematic cover-up of child sex abuse by Roman Catholic priests, according to a shocking documentary to be screened by the BBC tonight.
In 2001, while he was a cardinal, he issued a secret Vatican edict to Catholic bishops all over the world, instructing them to put the Church's interests ahead of child safety.
The document recommended that rather than reporting sexual abuse to the relevant legal authorities, bishops should encourage the victim, witnesses and perpetrator not to talk about it. And, to keep victims quiet, it threatened that if they repeat the allegations they would be excommunicated.
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Cardinal Ratzinger reinforced the strict cover-up policy by introducing a new principle: that the Vatican must have what it calls Exclusive Competence. In other words, he commanded that all child abuse allegations should be dealt with direct by Rome.
Patrick Wall, a former Vatican-approved enforcer of the Crimen Sollicitationis in America, tells the programme: "I found out I wasn't working for a holy institution, but an institution that was wholly concentrated on protecting itself."
If this information had been exposed a few years ago, would Cardinal Ratzinger had ever been named Pope? I can't wrap my head around this. Forget if he's the Pope now. What type of human being would cover up crimes against the children? He obviously had a lot of experience in this matter.
Has anybody seen Bill Donohue lately? Maybe he'll go on TV again and blame the Hollywood Jews for this mess too.
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And there's this one where he calls some abuse cases "gold diggers" in Ireland.
TIME:
The shocking extent of child abuse by clergy in Ireland's parishes and Catholic institutions was exposed last year in two government enquiries, known as the Ryan Report and the Murphy Report. The first described "endemic sexual abuse" at schools and orphanages run by religious orders from the 1930s to the 1990s, while the latter accused the Catholic Church, the state and the Irish police of colluding in the cover up sexual abuse committed by priests in the archdiocese of Dublin.
A rape victim from Ireland slams Donohue over his remarks. "You're views are insane."
Beck's teaser called it "the biggest scam of the generation," and wondered: "Anybody seen Al Gore?"
Beck himself claimed that Jones suggested that another warming period recorded in Europe during the Middle Ages was as deep as the current period, but that there was no consensus on whether the warming was global:
Phil Jones admits, yes, no real consensus on this one. Too much debate on whether an event known as the medieval warming period, yes, was global in nature and hotter than it is like right now.
So, to quote, obviously, the late 20th century was not unprecedented. Oh, good.
Beck also argues that the Jones interview should cause every government in the world to halt their efforts toward curbing greenhouse gases: "If this were about science, wouldn't science matter just a little bit?"
Hannity repeated all of Beck's claims. Hannity sneered that Al Gore should be happy that he doesn't have to feel guilty about "hopping on that private jet anymore."
Most of the points they cite are distorted: Jones, for instance says that the Middle Age cooling is only significant it could be shown to have been global in nature.
Moreover, he also says that the cause of previous warming periods differs from "recent warming," which is "predominantly manmade":
During his Q&A with BBC, Jones stated that "the warming rates" of previous warming periods after 1860 are "similar and not statistically significantly different" from the most recent warming period. Jones was later asked, "If you agree that there were similar periods of warming since 1850 to the current period, and that the WMP is under debate, what factors convince you that recent warming has been largely man-made?" Jones responded, "The fact that we can't explain the warming from the 1950s by solar and volcanic forcing." He further stated that it would not be reasonable to conclude that "recent warming is not predominately manmade" from the evidence that there have been previous periods of warming since 1850.
I am so pleased this is finally happening. Haiti has been burdened by its national debt for a long time and this will help speed their recovery from the massive earthquake:
The world's leading industrialised nations have pledged to write off the debts that Haiti owes them, following a devastating earthquake last month.
Canada's finance minister announced at a summit in Iqaluit, northern Canada, that Group of Seven countries planned to cancel Haiti's bilateral debts.
Jim Flaherty said he would encourage international lenders to do the same.
Some $1.2bn (£800m) of Haiti's debts to countries and international lending bodies has already been cancelled.
"We are committed in the G7 to the forgiveness of debt, in fact all bilateral debt has been forgiven by G7 countries vis-a-vis Haiti," Mr Flaherty said at the end of the two day gathering of finance ministers.
