Author: Mick Hartley

Iran continues developing its nuclear programme:

Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has inaugurated a new phase of a heavy water reactor project despite Western fears about its nuclear programme. He said Iran posed no threat to other states, not even its “enemy” Israel.

Heavy water reactors produce plutonium which can be an alternative route to a nuclear device, the other being highly enriched uranium.

Observers say Iran’s move aims to send a signal of defiance days ahead of a UN deadline to halt uranium enrichment.

But, as Mohammad Sa’idi, international affairs deputy of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization, explains on Iranian TV, there’s no cause for alarm here. The heavy water’s for drinking:

Interviewer: “You just said that in some cases, heavy water can even be used for drinking.”

Mohammad Sa’idi: “Yes.”

Interviewer: “Could you elaborate on this?”

Mohammad Sa’idi: “One of the products of heavy water is depleted deuterium. As you know, in an environment with depleted deuterium, the reception of cancer cells and of the AIDS viruses is disrupted. Since this reception is disrupted, the cells are gradually expelled from the body. Obviously, one glass of depleted deuterium will not expel or cure the cancer or eliminate the AIDS. We are talking about a certain period of time. In many countries that deal with these diseases, patients use this kind of water instead of regular water, and consume it daily in order to heal their diseases.

“In other words, the issue of heavy water has to do with matters of life and death, in many cases. One of the reasons that led us to produce heavy water was to use it for agricultural… medical purposes, and especially for industrial purposes in our country.” […]

“There is no connection whatsoever between heavy water and plutonium.

From Wikipedia:

Heavy water production reactors can be designed to turn uranium into bomb-usable plutonium without requiring enrichment facilities…. Heavy water production reactors have been used for this purpose by India, Israel, Pakistan, North Korea, Russia and USA.

Strangely the Wikipedia article fails to mention the extraordinary health benefits of drinking heavy water:

Mammals such as rats given heavy water to drink die after a week, at a time when their body water approaches about 50% deuteration. The mode of death appears to be the same as that in cytotoxic poisoning (such as chemotherapy) or in acute radiation syndrome (though of course deuterium is not radioactive), and is due to deuterium’s action in generally inhibiting cell division. Deuterium oxide has even been tested as a chemotherapeutic agent, but it seems to offer no advantages. As in chemotherapy, deuterium-poisoned mammals die of a failure of bone marrow (bleeding and infection) and intestinal-barrier functions (diarrhea and fluid loss).

Women’s Project; and a few, lone, courageous individuals who have taken matters into their own hands. In the past year I have come across three teachers who have helped teenage pupils to escape from actual or threatened violence at home. Each seems to have been the only person the girls could confide in. Each has found the girl a refuge and tried to help her to start a new life.

But it is not easy. Even if you escape, you still have to hide. You still face the wrench of losing your family. None of these three can get council housing because they are deemed to have made themselves “intentionally homeless” by running away. Two live in fear of veangeful brothers who want revenge. Yet the social services want to “reconcile” them with their families, reinforcing the sense of guilt and shame they have at leaving. The suicide rate among young Asian women is more than three times the national average. Why is this not a mainstream campaigning issue?

working classes. To a man, they were idle, shiftless, useless: too demoralised by welfare and socialism to be any good for anything.

They arrived at the car, which had a very flat tyre. Neither of them had a clue what to do. Fortunately, a passing member of the working class observed their plight and changed the tyre. He departed. Perry waited for a change of tone: in vain. Sherman merely continued: “As I was saying, absolutely no good, the whole lot of them.”

We in the UK are blocked from reading this NYT article on the Heathrow terror plot:

On advice of legal counsel, this article is unavailable to readers of nytimes.com in Britain. This arises from the requirement in British law that prohibits publication of prejudicial information about the defendants prior to trial.

but Jan at Secular Blasphemy has the main details. And the full article’s available here.

A fine article by Louis Menand in the New Yorker, about Dylan.

On the East Coast folk scene that Dylan joined, and then, famously, left behind:

Nothing that Dylan did to get from Hibbing to “Blonde on Blonde” was scandalous, or even eccentric. He happened to come of musical age at a moment when rock and roll was moribund—Frankie Avalon stuff, songs for high-school sock hops. If you were serious, you played folk songs. And to become a folkie, unless you actually were from Oklahoma, you invented a persona. The whole folk revival was make-believe, anyway: it was urban kids trying to sound like hillbillies and sharecroppers. One of the folk-music veterans when Dylan came on the scene was Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, a singer with a cowboy twang who had once hoboed around with Guthrie himself. Ramblin’ Jack was the stage name of one Elliot Adnopoz, a Jewish kid from Flatbush whose father was a prominent surgeon. Cambridge was another center of the folk revival—it’s where Baez got her start, in the coffeehouses around Harvard Square. (She was a B.U. dropout.) There was a bluegrass group in that scene, composed mostly of college students, who called themselves the Charles River Valley Boys. Artifice was the price of authenticity.

And this quote from a Dylan interview – the one where he talked about his “wild mercury sound” on “Blonde on Blonde” – which I’d not come across before, about the sound of the streets:

That ethereal twilight light, you know. It’s the sound of the street with the sunrays, the sun shining down at a particular time, on a particular type of building. A particular type of people walking on a particular type of street. It’s an outdoor sound that drifts even into open windows that you can hear. The sound of bells and distant railroad trains and arguments in apartment buildings and the clinking of silverware and knives and forks and beating with leather straps. It’s all—it’s all there. Just lack of a jackhammer, you know.

It’s that “just lack of a jackhammer, you know” – only Dylan….

And on Dylan’s “gorgeous late-period croak”:

It sounds a little the way “Buena Vista Social Club” might have sounded if Cuba had been the birthplace of the blues.

ns from the books included on the “100 Essential Readings” list, comprising children’s and world literature as well as Turkish classics recommended to school children.

Some publishers had inserted Islamist ideology into the translations, making alterations in such classics as Hugo’s “Les Miserables,” Spyri’s “Heidi” and Collodi’s “Pinocchio.”

Some of the books on the list, printed with the ministry-approved logo, were either distorted to reflect the publishers’ often religious ideology or included obscene words and phrases.

The scandal grew further when newspapers discovered that a riddle book for kids bearing the ministry logo features brainteasers using obscene terminology, including vulgar language depicting male reproductive organs….

The Ministry of Education logo on the books suggest they are approved and recommended to school children by the ministry, but Çelik said his ministry had approved only the list of books to be recommended and not their versions published by private publishing houses.

“We cannot check the content of the books every day. But if there is slang and swear words, we will sue them for using the ministry logo,” he said in the eastern province of Van….

In Dumas’ “Three Musketeers,” D’Artagnan while on his way to see Aramis is stopped by an old woman who explains: “You can’t see him right now. He is surrounded by men of religion. He converted to Islam after his illness.”

Eleanor H. Porter’s “Pollyanna” confirms her belief in the Muslim apocalypse, while La Fontaine’s fisherman prays using Muslim terminology to catch more fish.

Spyri’s Swiss orphan Heidi is told by Ms. Sesasman that “praying is relaxing.”

“Invented” phrases employing Muslim terminology were also inserted into classics from masters such as Anton Chekhov and Oscar Wilde.

“I can resist everything except the will of Allah“?

me.

Frazer was officially greeted by senior officials from the ministries of foreign affairs and international cooperation

But dozens of protesters, chanting slogans and raising banners reading “Go Back Home”, “You Want War” and “We Want Peace” showed up at the airport, covered her car with banners and blocked her way before police intervened.

And here’s the latest from Reeves:

The final moment of diplomatic truth for Darfur has at last arrived. All evidence suggests that the international community is prepared to acquiesce before the military onslaught Khartoum’s National Islamic Front is preparing for North Darfur, an offensive that will target both rebel military forces and non-Arab civilians who do not support the deeply flawed “Darfur Peace Agreement” (May 5, 2006, Abuja, Nigeria). Fighting in North Darfur over the past two months has increasingly involved collaboration between the forces of Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) faction leader Minni Minawi (a member of the Zaghawa tribe and the only Darfuri signatory to the Abuja agreement) and Khartoum’s regular military. This collaboration has produced attacks that have focused primarily on Fur villages. As Refugees International President Kenneth Bacon reports in a July 21, 2006 letter to President Bush (following an eleven-day assessment mission to Darfur):

“Minawi’s forces are attacking Fur villages in North Darfur. According to the United Nations, some of these attacks show the same signs of genocidal intent demonstrated by the government-back Janjaweed militia—the targeted killing of young men.”

The impending Khartoum-orchestrated offensive has been reported authoritatively by many sources on the ground, as well as by Hedi Annabi (UN Assistant Secretary-General for Peacekeeping) in a confidential report to the UN Security Council (August 17, 2006). […]

This is the final stage in Khartoum’s genocidal campaign in Darfur. It occurs against a backdrop of extraordinary suffering and continually declining humanitarian access and resources. In July the UN’s World Food Program was unable to reach almost 500,000 people in need of food relief. More broadly, Annabi stressed in his briefing of the Security Council that:

“humanitarian organizations now have full access to only slightly more than fifty percent of the 3.6 million civilians affected by the conflict [again, there are an additional 350,000 conflict-affected persons in eastern Chad—ER]. If conditions deteriorate further, many humanitarian organizations may be forced to completely withdraw from North Darfur, where more than 1.2 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance.” (Paragraph 4)

Cholera is poised to explode if water sanitation or supplies deteriorate further. A shocking nine humanitarian aid workers were killed in July. Khartoum continues its policy of systematically obstructing and harassing humanitarian workers and operations. We should remember that in June Khartoum “punished” the UN for moving rebel leader and humanitarian coordinator Suleiman Jamous by shutting down all UN operations in Darfur except those of UNICEF and WFP; the same threat still looms for some other “provocation.” Rape has recently soared in the area of the giant Kalma camp south of Nyala, a terrible reality unto itself and a telling barometer of insecurity. Malnutrition rates are rising rapidly. Humanitarian resources and funding are declining just as rapidly. Some 50,000 civilians have been displaced in recent weeks (UN Integrated Regional Information Networks [dateline: Nairobi], August 24, 2006). And the full brunt of renewed violence has yet to be felt, though it is only a matter of days—weeks at most—before this changes.

If under these circumstances the international community is unwilling even to threaten non-consensual intervention to protect civilians and humanitarians in Darfur, then Khartoum may rightly, in full throat, exult in its savage triumph. It is a triumph that has been long in coming; one that might have been stopped with sufficient will at any point; but one that is now terribly close to culmination.

p over the army. And, in the 1970s, he put forward the army-building programme on modeling the whole army on the Juche idea.

He also set forth such powerful slogans as “Let us fight devotedly for the great leader!” and “Let us train, study and live like the anti-Japanese guerrillas!” and aroused the whole army to carry them into practice and thus built the KPA as the leader’s army and the Party’s army both nominally and virtually.

That’s some achievement, advancing both the slogan, “Let us defend the Party Central Committee headed by Comrade Kim Il Sung even with our lives!”, and the equally compelling, “Let us fight devotedly for the great leader!”. Not to mention arousing the whole army both nominally and virtually.

Under the great Songun revolutionary leadership of Kim Jong Il, the KPA will display its invincible might fuller.

Undoubtedly.

lly bowing to pressure and reaching some sort of compromise with a terrorist organisation, and that’s the way it’s usually presented. Like the British government and the IRA, for instance. But really, there’s no comparison. Although the LRA’s Joseph Kony adopts the language of the freedom fighter – as in this interview with the BBC – he has no realistic demands in terms of, say, independence for the Acholi people of Northern Uganda. He is, basically, a religious maniac of the most despicable kind, whose vision, as far as one can make any sense of it, is some kind of warped Biblical millenarianism. To achieve his ends he’s tortured raped and murdered his way through Northern Uganda and Southern Sudan, backed, in the days of the Sudanese civil war, by the government in Khartoum. His preferred method is the abduction of young children, who are then brutalised, often by forcing them to kill – perhaps even their own parents – and who then become sex slaves to the older LRA troops.

That Uganda’s president Museveni isn’t exactly Nelson Mandela, or that Ugandan troops, in their efforts against the LRA over the last 20 years, haven’t always acted with the decorum one might hope for in the forces of law and order, shouldn’t detract for a moment from the fact that there is only one side in this war which has any legitimacy whatsoever. On the one hand there’s a (reasonably) democratic government, on the other there’s a brutal psychopathic maniac. There should really be only one end to this story: the trial of Joseph Koby and his crew for crimes against humanity.

From the BBC (via b&w):

The 2012 Olympic Games in London is expected to provide a big boost for sport in the UK.

But there are still barriers to taking part in some communities, despite plenty of interest.

The Olympic games, coming to the British capital in 2012, continues to have an enormous impact on east London.

Huge areas of waste land have been cleared to make way for a state-of-the-art stadium and Olympic village, slum housing has been refurbished and property prices are booming. But is everyone getting excited about sport?

Not according to the organisation Sport England which encourages nationwide participation of sporting activities.

Its figures show that Muslim women are significantly less likely to take up exercise compared to other groups….

Eighteen-year-old Raheema from Tower Hamlets in east London explains how she only plays badminton in her backyard, away from prying eyes.

She is not encouraged to do any sport by her family who would rather see her in the kitchen or sewing. She last did sport regularly at school as it was compulsory then.

The last time she went swimming was six years ago when she was 12 years old and before she hit puberty. Raheema says this is because no Muslim girl can wear a revealing swimming costume.

Seventeen-year-old Asha on the other hand, another Muslim girl from east London, is a sport enthusiast.

She loves playing football and has been playing for the past seven years and has the trophies to prove it.

But she knows her days playing the game are numbered. Her mother, father and eldest brother are against her playing.

She says they will probably stop her from playing next year when she is 18. She will be a woman then and have to take on responsibilities.

“Now I’m young, I can play,” she said. “Sometimes I get excited (about the thought of playing professionally) but then I think my mum won’t let me, and my brother and I think I won’t be allowed.”

Shahid Saleh, a young British Muslim who has five sisters, explains how he does not like the idea of them playing games.

“I wouldn’t want them to play sports,” he said. “You’re not allowed to uncover yourself like wearing tracksuit bottoms and all that, and play football or badminton, you have to cover yourself.”

Cultural barriers remain in taking up a career in sport. Twelve-year-old Zahir Ahmed says that his parents encourage him to study hard rather than to waste time playing.

Although he does reckon his father would want him to become a famous tennis player as there is a lot of money in it.

Meanwhile, Sport England is working to try to get more Muslim women doing sport.

It is funding projects which target these groups and put on exclusive women-only activities which allow women wearing the full hijab and covered up to still take part.

It’s such a perfect snapshot of contemporary English officialdom. No question of trying to change this culture of misogyny, or arguing that, you know, living in Britain they might actually think about adapting to British mores. Instead we get the ludicrous prospect of state funding being poured into activities for segregated women, dressed up in hijab and maybe a nice full-length black robe, to compete in….what? The 100 yards shuffle? The hop hop and hop?

Mind you, I bet there’d be no shortage of potential spectators if they ever thought of doing it in public. The swimming events alone would be worth the entrance fee.