Author: Mick Hartley

Most Iranians are keen to mend relations with the US, it seems:

Iranian voters are more accustomed to hearing their politicians chant “Death to America” – but ahead of next week’s presidential election the issue of relations with the U.S. has been turned on its head.

It is an ironic shift for the Islamic Republic, founded on the dogma of resisting “Zionist-American conspiracies” and priding itself on standing up to the “Great Satan.”

But, as one Iranian analyst pointed out, “for most Iranians the breaking off of relations with the United States is the main cause of their problems, and many people want to give their next president a mandate to finally resolve the issue.”

Iran’s regime has tried but failed to stem public calls for reconciliation, most recently in 2002 when it jailed a group of opinion pollsters who published a shock survey saying that three-quarters of the population wanted to see dialogue with the United States resume.

The poll was particularly embarrassing for the regime, given that one of the organizers was Abbas Abdi – a leading player in the seizing of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1980 and the holding of its diplomats for 444 days, the crisis that prompted the severing of ties. […]

The main reformist candidate and campaign outsider, Mostafa Moin, has proposed a plan to progressively resume dialogue without condition.

The fact that he has not been arrested is a sign in itself that the mood has changed.

As with all Iranian matters of state, however, the final say rests with supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – perceived as being opposed to any change in the status quo.

links. The internal intranet that was previously available to North Korean colleges such as the Kim Il Sung University has been shut down”. This is part of what seems to be a general crack-down on communications:

North Korea is aggressively asserting greater control over domestic and international communications, apparently out of fear the United States could launch a preemptive military strike on the country, two sources with close connections to North Korea have suggested.

Starting in April, the sources said Pyongyang blocked 90 percent of its international phone lines to hinder leaks of information to the outside world. Before April, the North operated 970 international phone lines, but the sources said a direct order came from the North’s leader, Kim Jong-il, to cut the lines. The North Korean Foreign Ministry is now said to operate with just two lines, while the North’s military operates another two and the Ministry of Foreign Trade possesses one.

In another measure, the sources said Pyongyang has also impounded 20,000 cell phones since May of last year after the North Korean authorities came to believe cell phone calls leaked news of a massive explosion at the rail station in the town of Ryongchon. North Korean citizens who paid $1,200 as a deposit on the cell phones are said to have been angered because the deposits are not being returned. Cell phone service in the North was started in August of 2002.

This is wonderful (via Japundit):

Japan has taken a step into the science-fiction world with the release of a “robot suit” that can help workers lift heavy loads or assist people with disabilities climb stairs.

“Humans may be able to mutate into supermen in the near future,” said Yoshiyuki Sankai, professor and engineer at Tsukuba University who led the project.

The 15-kilogram (33-pound) battery-powered suit, code-named HAL-5, detects muscle movements through electrical-signal flows on the skin surface and then amplifies them.

It can also move on its own accord, enabling it to help elderly or handicapped people walk, developers said.

Mugging a pensioner may soon prove to be a big mistake.

Nerddom of the ’70s and ’80s, and those nerds are now old enough to pay good money to go and see a Broadway show. Over here it’s different: it was great at the time, but we’ve moved on, as indeed have all the other Pythons apart from Eric Idle. It’s not going to work.

Still, it’s amusing to see a touch of bitterness creeping in:

Of the five remaining members of the Monty Python team, only Eric Idle stands to gain substantially from the show. He obtained permission from the others to use the name Monty Python but rewrote the script himself. The other surviving members of the team — Graham Chapman died in 1989 — all support the show, but some did not foresee its success.

Terry Jones, who co-directed the original film, said that he found Spamalot “utterly pointless and full of hot air”.

“It is Eric’s show,” he said. “He will make more out of Spamalot than anybody has ever made out of Python. Good luck. But if we [Jones and the other surviving members of the Python team, Terry Gilliam, Michael Palin and John Cleese] had known it was going to be such a success, we’d have gone for a better deal.”

Utterly pointless and full of hot air is how some of us might characterise the leaden sarcasm of Terry Jones’ recent political commentaries.

Just in case anyone thought Bashar Assad was a man with the vision to see that change was needed:

Ignoring international pressure and rising domestic frustration, Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian President, failed yesterday to announce broad and imminent reforms as he opened an eagerly awaited conference of the ruling Baath party.

In an address lasting barely ten minutes, Mr Assad told the 1,250 delegates: “We are convinced the ideas and precepts of the Baath party are still of relevance and respond to the interests of the people and the nation in its desire for unity, freedom, justice and development.” […]

Domestic unrest is on the rise. Syria’s Kurdish population is increasingly assertive. Kurds have held several demonstrations recently over the kidnapping and murder last week of a prominent Kurdish cleric, an act blamed on the regime.

On Sunday a policeman was reportedly shot and killed when hundreds of Kurds rioted in Qamishly in the remote north east near the borders with Iraq and Turkey. The town was then stormed by Arab tribesmen, who looted shops belonging to Kurds.

Ammar Abdulhamid, a Syrian social analyst and staunch critic of the regime, said the riots were a sign of things to come. “The country’s implosion is just awaiting a trigger event.”

lity, seemingly even by allotting the best homes to the Jews – along the Bosphorus, in Istanbul’s most luxurious area.

“And, characteristic of their savage, treacherous [nature], in return they [the Jews] first overthrew Sultan Abdulhamid and destroyed the Ottomans; [then], like insects, they ate away at the Ottoman [Empire]; and as if this were not enough, they stabbed the Muslim Turkish soldiers in Palestine in the back.

“‘Judaism’ is synonymous with ‘treason’ […] They [the Jews] even betrayed God […] When God told them to bow their heads while entering Al-Quds [Jerusalem], they entered with their heads up. The prophets sent to them, such as Zachariah and Isaiah, were murdered by the Jews […] In fact, no amount of pages or lines would be sufficient to explain the Koranic chapters and our Lord Prophet’s [Muhammad’s] words that tell us of the betrayals of the Jews. […]”

Columnist for the ultra-nationalist daily Ortadogu Selcuk Duzgun, in an article titled “Here is the Real Jew,” wrote: “Salamon [a Jewish name often used in a derogatory way] is on his deathbed. He asks his wife about each member of his family and wants to know if they are present. When the wife assures him that all his loved ones are beside him, he is angered and shouts at them for leaving the shop unattended.

“This is a clear example of what the real Jew is. While we read and laugh at our jokes about the Jews, they [the Jews] are enjoying themselves by fooling the entire world.

“[…] Oh my naive people – you have elevated so many of these [Jews], and you have given an identity to so many [who had none]. You have saved, protected, and fed so many of them!… […] and they have created the [country’s] agenda and continued their march to [their] ‘Promised Land.’ While we were calling them Masons, Sabbateans, Rotarians, etc., they had the privilege of ruling our country. Whatever name we call them, we always are faced with the truth that they are the ‘JEWS.’

“[…] We are surrounded. Wherever we look we see traitors. Wherever we turn we see impure, false converts. Whichever stone you turn over, there is a ‘JEW’ under it. And we keep thinking to ourselves: ‘Hitler did not do enough to these Jews.'[…]”

From the Scotsman:

A formal investigation into allegations of war crimes in Sudan’s Darfur region is to be held by the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

The ICC has been analysing the situation in Darfur since the United Nations referred allegations of rape, murder and plunder to it in April, following a UN Security Council vote.

Officials confirmed yesterday that the ICC would take the case. Dozens of court officials have begun preparing for the investigation, which is regarded as the largest and most important yet to be handled by the fledgling body since it was established in July 2002.

Prosecutors are due to announce formally the decision to move forward on Darfur today, and Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the chief prosecutor, will brief the UN about his plans later this month in New York, the officials said.

I imagine that the women in the Darfur camps subject to gang rapes, with the imminent prospect of starvation after they’ve been driven from their land and all their male providers massacred, will be tremendously heartened to know that a formal investigation is to be started, with dozens of court officials already making preparations. Never let it be said that our international institutions don’t know how to respond to these crises.

s, of course. But here in the refugee shantytowns of Darfur, the horrific stories that young women whisper are not of random criminality but of a systematic campaign of rape to terrorize civilians and drive them from “Arab lands” – a policy of rape.

One measure of the international community’s hypocrisy is that the world is barely bothering to protest. More than two years after the genocide in Darfur began, the women of Kalma Camp – a teeming squatter’s camp of 110,000 people driven from their burned villages – still face the risk of gang rape every single day as they go out looking for firewood.

Nemat, a 21-year-old, told me that she left the camp with three friends to get firewood to cook with. In the early afternoon a group of men in uniforms caught and gang-raped her.

“They said, ‘You are black people. We want to wipe you out,’ ” Nemat recalled. After the attack, Nemat was too injured to walk, but her relatives found her and carried her back to camp on a donkey.

A neighbor, Toma, 34, said she heard similar comments from seven men in police uniforms who raped her. “They said, ‘We want to finish you people off,’ ” she recalled.

Sometimes the women simply vanish. A young mother named Asha cried as she told how she and her four sisters were chased down by a Janjaweed militia; she escaped but all her sisters were caught.

“To this day, I don’t know if they are alive or dead,” she sobbed. Then she acknowledged that she had another reason for grief: a Janjaweed militia had also murdered her husband 23 days earlier.

Gang rape is terrifying anywhere, but particularly so here. Women who are raped here are often ostracized for life, even forced to build their own huts and live by themselves. In addition, most girls in Darfur undergo an extreme form of genital cutting called infibulation that often ends with a midwife stitching the vagina shut with a thread made of wild thorns. This stitching and the scar tissue make sexual assault a particularly violent act, and the resulting injuries increase the risk of H.I.V. transmission.

Sudan has refused to allow aid groups to bring into Darfur more rape kits that include medication that reduces the risk of infection from H.I.V.

The government has also imprisoned rape victims who became pregnant, for adultery. Even those who simply seek medical help are harassed and humiliated. […]

I’m still chilled by the matter-of-fact explanation I received as to why it is women who collect firewood, even though they’re the ones who are raped. The reason is an indication of how utterly we are failing the people of Darfur, two years into the first genocide of the 21st century.

“It’s simple,” one woman here explained. “When the men go out, they’re killed. The women are only raped.”

Over at Metafilter somebody – well, Asparagirl – has been doing a lot of homework on what could be a massive outbreak of bird flu in the Chinese province of Qinghai, which the Chinese authorities seem, predictably, to be covering up.

An interesting little snippet on “Have I Got News For You” last night: the odd-one-out round featured Fidel Castro appearing on Cuban TV in a drive for energy-efficient cooking. Comes the quip from compere Des Lynam (scripted, of course, by the smart young things at the Beeb), “Cuba often has electricity shortages, what with all the electrodes being attached to testicles…” What? Is the Beeb really dropping in a criticism of Cuba here? That’s very out of character. “…at Guantanamo Bay“. Ah yes, of course. Silly me. Smirks all round, and wild applause from the audience.

I imagine if you asked most of the audience, or indeed the writers of the show, for a country that practised torture, their first (only?) response would be America. Splashing urine on a Koran, attaching electrodes to testicles, a gulag where millions are worked to death, what’s the difference?