Author: Mick Hartley

More deaths in Darfur:

Militias backing Sudan’s government have killed at least 63 people in attacks in Darfur in the past week, African peacekeepers say.

At least 27 of the victims are thought to be children under the age of 12.

The attacks were carried on camps for the displaced in the rebel stronghold of Jebel Moon, in West Darfur.

The government says it is disarming the Janjaweed militia but a BBC correspondent in Sudan says all the evidence points to the exact opposite.

Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, meanwhile, is in China, thanking the Chinese for their support:

Sudan will not accept U.N. peacekeeping forces into its troubled Darfur region as it would risk turning the country into a second Iraq, President Omar Hassan al-Bashir said on Friday.

Visiting the Chinese capital for a summit that brings together 48 African leaders, Bashir also thanked China for its support in the face of western pressure over a humanitarian crisis that the United States has labelled genocide.

Sudan has flatly rejected a 22,500-strong U.N. peacekeeping force for Darfur, aimed at bolstering about 7,000 under-funded, African troops on the ground, saying it amounted to colonialism.

“As regards the U.N. peacekeeping force, we decided that with such an army moving in to our country, the impact is going to be the same as what’s been happening in Iraq,” Bashir told a news conference…..

Bashir said only 10,000 people had died in Darfur compared with around 655,000 in Iraq following the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion — a figure from a study by U.S. and Iraqi public health teams.

I trust the Lancet and the John Hopkins team who came up with the 655,000 figure are happy to see their work being cited by the leader of a genocidal regime, in support of his continuing intransigence.

It’s good to see Ken using our money so wisely and well:

London’s mayor is making a surprise trip to Cuba, flying on Thursday to the capital Havana as part of a week-long tour around Latin America.

It was known he was to visit Venezuela in a return visit which saw President Hugo Chavez visit London earlier this year.

But the Cuban leg of the tour was kept a closely guarded secret until Wednesday evening when he revealed on BBC London 94.9FM he was going to the Caribbean country.

Angie Bray, leader of the London Assembly Conservatives, sums it up:

“[G]iven the well documented far left Socialist past of some of the mayor’s closest advisors, is this not just an excuse to visit the last remaining bastion of 20th Century Marxism, and maybe also the gravely ill Fidel Castro – no doubt an ideological hero to some of his inner circle – all conducted at our expense?

“There seems to be little benefit to Londoners from this trip, only a great deal of expense, as Mr. Livingstone joins his comrade, President Chavez and his cronies, in his obsessive pursuit of widening his anti-American alliance.”

I managed to catch the China Power Station show in its last week at Battersea Power Station. The show itself was fairly dismal: the Chinese art world, it seems, is going through its deeply-tedious-videos-with-pretentious-titles stage. In one of the videos – which I’d assumed was shot in somewhere like deepest Shiangxi province – I recognised parts of the Lea valley in deepest East London, so God knows what that was about. Maybe it was all a cunning deconstruction of our preconceptions about what a Chinese art show should be like, and was in fact put together by an artists’ collective in Leytonstone. You can never be too sure in art galleries nowadays.

And then there was the wall of rotting apples, which was, well, a load of apples rotting away behind some wire mesh. Speaks for itself, really.

No, the main reason for going – and the reason it’s been such a popular show – is the chance to see inside the power station before they start tarting it up. I’d never been inside, or even up close, before – and I have to say it’s an amazing structure. Why we have to have the excuse of an art show to open the place up to the public I don’t know. Inside, with the mammoth chimneys against a clear blue sky, and flocks of pigeons wheeling around, it was spectacular.

Less spectacular was the blurb in the leaflet produced by the developers: “Power to the Imagination” (power – power station. Clever, eh?)

Imagine… from the place that produced the art of Damien Hirst and Lucien Freud, the music of Blur and The Rolling Stones, imagine what’s possible when imagination is unleashed. Imagine the future. Imagine a new London destination. Imagine one of the largest urban regeneration initiatives in Central London…

And so on. At least we’re spared “prestigious”, but really, would you trust people who can write guff like that? It’s not even clear what we’re going to be getting…

The Power Station is a catalyst, a place to expect the unexpected, to create possibility. Inspiring creativity, inspiring thought, inspiring people.

Or again…

At the heart of the Power Station will be an ever changing calendar of events – from art installations to spectacular shows – inspiring Londoners and visitors alike.

Here’s the project website, if you can stand the excitement.

I think I’ve just seen the best of Battersea Power Sation, as a wonderful piece of derelict industrial architecture. It could well be downhill from here on in.

The winner is announced in the great Iranian Holocaust cartoon competition:

Iran awarded a Moroccan artist Wednesday the top prize in an exhibition of cartoons on the Holocaust that has received international condemnation, including from U.N. chief Kofi Annan.

Meant to be a response to the Danish cartoons of Islam’s Prophet Mohammed that sparked rage among Muslims around the world, the exhibit appears inspired by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s tirades calling for Israel to be destroyed.

Tehran has several times announced plans to host a conference to examine the scientific evidence supporting the Holocaust, dismissing it as exaggerated. Its most recent announcement came in September during Annan’s visit to the Iranian capital, where he said he discussed the cartoon show with officials.

“The Holocaust is a myth and this issue has finally made waves thanks to the action of President Ahmadinejad in daring to express himself on the subject and break the Holocaust taboo,” Iranian Culture Minister Mohammad Hossein Saffar-Harandi said as he announced the cartoon winners.

Abdollah Derkaoui received $12,000 for his work depicting an Israeli crane piling large cement blocks on Israel’s security wall and gradually obscuring Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. A picture of Nazi Germany’s Auschwitz concentration camp appears on the wall. […]

The exhibit curator, Masoud Shojai, said the contest will be an annual event.

“Actually, we will continue until the destruction of Israel,” he said.

Speaking of which….

Iran’s military has fired dozens of missiles during a military exercise in central Iran, state-run TV reported.
The missiles included the Shahab-3, which has a 2,000km (1,240 mile) range, and the Shahab-2, which can carry cluster bombs, the report said.

Analysts say the Shahab-3 is capable of hitting Israel and US military bases in the Gulf.

The missile tests come at the start of 10 days of military manoeuvres planned across the country.

On Wednesday, the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, General Yahya Rahim Safavi, said the exercises, named “Great Prophet”, would take place in the Gulf, the Gulf of Oman and several provinces of the country.

Gen Safavi said the exercises would be a show of defensive capability.

Daniel Finkelstein argues that deposing Saddam was the right decision, despite the outcome:

You cannot….judge the quality of a decision by its outcome.

The outcome of any political decision is uncertain. You use your best estimate of the probabilities of different results and make a choice. Even if you have calculated the probabilities correctly and made a sensible choice, the outcome might still be a poor one. Only an analysis of the results of repeated decisions can provide a proper insight into whether your choice was a good one. […]

The critics believe that Mr Blair should have defied the request from our closest ally and chosen to stand aside and do nothing about Saddam.

They reach this point with two sleights of hand that make the decision to go to war seem impossibly stupid. The first is to criticise the known outcome of the course taken without reference to the unknown outcome of the course not taken. Not prosecuting the war would have meant leaving Saddam in power, followed in due course by his mad, murderous sons. If you ignore the possible result of allowing this then, of course, the war becomes difficult to explain.

The second thing the critics do is to consider the Iraq war as an isolated decision, rather than one in a long series. It can’t be looked at like that.

Even if you consider the history of policy towards Saddam alone, the decision to remove him is simply one among many. But the Iraq invasion also has to be seen as one decision among many in the War on Terror, in the recent history of liberal interventionism and in the long course of the special relationship.

On the whole, I believe that robust partnership with the United States, and a strong military approach to dangerous, aggressive dictators with nuclear ambitions is a better foreign policy than the alternatives. And on the whole, I think that believing intelligence reports about weapons of mass destruction is a more sensible thing to do than ignoring them.

That’s why I supported the war in Iraq. And why I still believe that decision was the right one.

sense and logic, so are completely unpredictable. It is that unpredictability that leads to panic and intellectual paralysis. That’s the secret of the current Iranian despotism.”

That, and hypocrisy. The well-to-do are paying a price for their comforts, and I wonder sometimes if they understand what it is. How can you have a revolution when everyone is watching TV?

What would Gil Scott-Heron have to say?

on between a ‘historical reality’ and ‘a reality of facts’? […]

There are also those who retreat to a different mode of truth. An English novelist convinced that the primal scene in Freud’s case history of the wolf man never happened argued that it nevertheless possessed ‘a different, deeper kind of truth.’ There are still others: those who appear willing to dispense with truth altogether in view of the moral grandeur of the Freudian vision. This too has its analogies in the history of Soviet apologetic. André Malraux once argued ‘Just as the inquisition does not detract from the fundamental dignity of Christianity so the Moscow Trials do not detract from the fundamental dignity of communism.’ It is my impression that no sooner has it been made impossible for Freudians to maintain that Freud’s discoveries are true in the sense in which they were advanced and taken, than they will discover that they possess a ‘a fundamental dignity’.

In other words, it’s not a science, it’s a faith.

A scientist argues that the Chicxulub meteorite 65 miilion years ago off the Yucatan peninsula was just the warm-up for the dinosaur extinction:

Dinosaurs were killed off by a meteor that hit the Earth 300,000 years after the one blamed for their extinction, a scientist has claimed.

Dr Gerta Keller, from Princeton University, New Jersey, insists the Chicxulub impact off the coast of Mexico 65 million years ago could not on its own have wiped out the dinosaurs.

Evidence of the crater left by the giant asteroid or comet has been found under the sea off the coast of Yucatan.

But according to Dr Keller, Chicxulub was only the warm-up for a much larger impact more than a quarter of a million years later. It was this meteor which left a tell-tale layer of extraterrestrial iridium in rocks around the Earth, not the earlier one, she says.

However, no-one has yet found the crater from the “final straw” impact which ended the age of reptiles in one of the largest ever mass extinctions.

“There is some evidence that it may have hit in India,” said Dr Keller.

The crater, named Shiva by one expert, is estimated to measure 310 miles in diameter. However, there is little proof of its existence.

So – nice idea, but not much in the way of, um, evidence for this. How difficult can it be to find a 310-mile diameter crater? Still, if you want to find out about known meteor craters, you can check out the Earth Impact Database (via). Just click on the continent of your choice at the top of the page. In Europe they seem to be centred round the Baltic, with a secondary group in the Ukraine. Shows you where God’s been directing his wrath….

that it was obligatory for women to wear the niqab (face-veil) in the presence of men who were not their blood relatives.

Sacha is one of several hundred Islamic clerics in Britain with the status of mufti, entitling him to issue fatwas based on Islamic law. Although Muslims are expected to follow fatwas, they are not obliged to do so, particularly if they live in a non-Muslim state.

Nick Whittingham, manager at the Kirklees law centre, which defended Azmi, said she went to seek Sacha’s advice before starting a job as classroom assistant at Headfield Church of England junior school in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, in September 2005.

Whittingham said that Azmi, who had been wearing the niqab since the age of 15, asked Sacha whether women had a choice whether or not to wear the niqab. She was told it was obligatory, Whittingham said.

“The mufti meant exactly what he said, and those views are widely held,” Dr Ahmed said.

“I did my own little poll this morning, of a security guard and others who are Muslim, and all said they agreed with the mufti, that he is absolutely right.

“It comes from households, where young Muslims get the message that white girls are different, and that women in general are a corrupting influence.”

Dr Ahmed said it was “an opinion I’ve heard throughout my life, that women can tempt you into trouble. Even otherwise sophisticated people will say this, and slur white women.

“My own theory is, when they are growing up, they are told they are not allowed to participate in much of Western life, they cannot drink, they cannot go to parties.

“And when they are very young, I think they would love to participate – but then they get older, and suddenly, they find they have developed a contempt for the society in which they live.”

Dr Ahmed rejects the argument that women wear the veil because “it’s their choice”. “You see children aged five wearing it. Are we seriously arguing there is an element of choice, when you sexualise a child in that way?”