It’s been common knowledge for some time that the IRA maintains a vigilante discipline over Republican areas of Northern Ireland. I posted about it over a year ago. Now it’s out in the open, the US is moving to sever relations with Sinn Fein, and things will never be the same again.
Michael Gove has some thoughts on how the IRA has been getting away with murder for years.
Japundit is a great source of tales from the odd side of Japan. Here’s a strange one:
City officials in Itami, Hyogo have discovered that a man who was registered as the oldest living male in Hyogo Prefecture actually died 10 years ago.
According to police, his offspring, all of whom are in their 70s, continued living with the corpse, apparently believing that some day che ould be resurrected. A relative alerted police to the situation after the man’s son mentioned it to him.
Police say the man’s son and two daughters kept his kimono-clad body (which had become mummified) in the house, surrounded by religious amulets, charms and tokens. They even left meals next to the body each day.
The dead man’s offspring were able to avoid suspicion by telling people that their father was too ill to receive any visitors.
From the Scotsman:
The melting of sea ice at the North Pole may be the result of a centuries-old natural cycle and not an indicator of man-made global warming, Scottish scientists have found.
After researching the log-books of Arctic explorers spanning the past 300 years, scientists believe that the outer edge of sea ice may expand and contract over regular periods of 60 to 80 years. This change corresponds roughly with known cyclical changes in atmospheric temperature.
The finding opens the possibility that the recent worrying changes in Arctic sea ice are simply the result of standard cyclical movements, and not a harbinger of major climate change.
The amount of sea ice is currently near its lowest point in the cycle and should begin to increase within about five years.
As a result, Dr Chad Dick, a Scottish scientist working at the Norwegian Polar Institute in Tromso, believes the next five to ten years will be a critical period in our understanding of sea ice and the impact, if any, of long-term global warming. […]
Dr Dick said the research did not suggest that global warming was not a reality.
“You couldn’t say, ‘The sea ice is coming back so therefore there’s no global warming’. It’s never going to be that simple,” he said. “But the question now is the extent of global warming, how fast it will happen and whether there are any surprises on the way.
“We know there is warming and that it’s caused by humans, but it will be a great relief to many people if the ice comes back as opposed to going away.”
He added that some people might be pleased to see less ice in the Arctic as it would finally open up the North-west Passage trade route – sought by many of the explorers whose log-books were used in the study – between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
“If the sea ice continues to disappear it could cut something like 5,000km off the sea route from Europe to Japan and China. There are people who think that’s a good thing,” Dr Dick said.
“Humans are great at adapting to change. We might lose polar bears and some species of seal, but most people don’t worry about that, it doesn’t affect them. And if it means their stereo can be shipped from China more quickly, they are happy with that.”
I don’t think he’s going to endear himself to the Greens with that sort of talk, our Dr Dick.
Via Marc Cooper, a superb Syrian blog by author Ammar Abdulhamid. This is a man who’s a known American-educated liberal, an obvious target in any security round-up; a man whose father-in-law reportedly died under torture in 1981, “though no one but some of his released cellmate[s] would confirm this report.” From today’s posting:
“Three thousands people demonstrated in support of their President on March 5.” So went one news report. Actually they were army recruits in civilian attire doing their commanders bidding, following orders.
Tomorrow, and on the eve of the “glorious” event that brought the Baath Party to power in 1963, more such recruits will gather in al-Jalaa Stadium to perform another sycophant song and dance about national honor and pride (a similar demonstration organized by Hizbollah will take place in Beirut). But the truth is, and the people know it, Baath rule brought nothing but shame and humiliation. It destroyed the very moral and civil fabric of our fledgling republic.
And the people know it. And the people know it. That’s exactly the problem. The people know it. This is not the time of ignorance anymore. We know. We are informed. We may not the whole truth about what is happening all around in us, but we really don’t need to. We just know enough not to be fooled by empty promises and gestures. We know enough to distinguish between victory and defeat, between a show of principles and a freak show.
The air of Damascus is getting more polluted with every passing day, but we can handle the smell of kerosene, and we can handle the smell of sweat and urine. But for the life of me how can we ever handle the smell of all these putrid souls around us?
Dutch blogger Zacht Ei translates part of an article from Nederlands Dagblad by veteran war reporter Harald Doornbos:
‘Be careful not to get kidnapped,’ I told the female Italian journalist sitting next to me in the small plane that was headed for Baghdad. ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘That won’t happen. We are siding with the oppressed Iraqi people. No Iraqi would kidnap us.’
It doesn’t sound very nice to be critical of a fellow reporter. But Sgrena’s attitude is a disgrace for journalism. Or didn’t she tell me back in the plane that ‘common journalists such as yourself’ simply do not support the Iraqi people? ‘The Americans are the biggest enemies of mankind,’ the three women behind me had told me, for Sgrena travelled to Iraq with two Italian colleagues who hated the Americans as well.
(Doornbos goes on to explain how the women demeaned him for travelling as an embedded reporter with the US military, for security reasons. They didn’t want to hear about any safety concerns.)
‘You don’t understand the situation. We are anti-imperialists, anti-capitalists, communists,’ they said. The Iraqis only kidnap American sympathizers, the enemies of the Americans have nothing to fear.
(Doornbos tells them they’re out of their mind.)
But they knew better. When we arrived at Baghdad Airport, I was waiting for a jeep from the American army to come pick me up. I saw one of the Italian women walking around crying. An Iraqi had stolen her computer and television equipment. They were standing outside shivering, waiting for a cab to take them to Baghdad.
With her bias Sgrena did not only jeopardize herself, but due to her behavior a security officer is now dead, and the Italian government (prime minister Berlusconi included) has had to spend millions of euros to save her life. It is to be hoped that Sgrena will decide to have a career change. Propagandist or MP perhaps. But she should give up journalism immediately.
What’s depressing about the debate on separate black classes is the general assumption that there’s such an easy split between black and white and asian. It ain’t like that any more. How black do you have to be before you qualify? Do you need to prove that your ancestry is 100% African. Or could you scrape by with over 50%? That’s quite aside from the obvious point that if there’s a problem with low expectations for these black youth, or with their “not cool to be clever” attitude, separate classes would only exacerbate the problem.
No surprise, I suppose, that Trevor Phillips, whose whole career is based on race, gets to see everything in race terms.
Arab democratic opening will be long and tortuous. The regimes that block it are strong, cunning and ruthless. The rhetoric of “resistance”—Islamist, Arab nationalist, anti-American, anti-globalisation, or whatever—retains a powerful grip. Many Arabs still support groups such as al-Qaeda. A huge amount still depends on the outcome in Iraq: a descent into chaos or the failure of the political process there could crush democratic stirrings throughout the region. For all these reasons, it is probably too early for the Americans to crow about an Arab year of revolutions. All the same, the distance between Mr Bush’s talk of freedom and Arab aspirations, which only recently seemed to yawn so wide, may at last be starting to close.
No change in Zimbabwe:
At least ten candidates for Zimbabwe’s opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) have been arrested for putting up posters or trying to campaign ahead of this month’s parliamentary election, party officials said yesterday.
While Robert Mugabe, the president, boasts that the election on 31 March will be free and fair, the opposition says its members are harassed daily by police and ruling party supporters.
“MDC candidates and activists appear to be the target of increasing police harassment as polling day approaches,” said Paul Themba Nyathi, an MDC spokesman.
Late last month, Godfrey Chimombe, an MDC candidate, and two party activists were arrested in the rural Shamva district near Harare for putting up campaign posters on a wall already plastered with fliers for Mr Mugabe’s ruling Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF).
An opposition candidate for Mount Darwin alleged he was assaulted by ZANU-PF councillors in northern Mount Darwin last week.
“Police are actually participating in a process of torturing and intimidating MDC members ahead of general elections,” Henry Chimbiri told the Standard newspaper.
Police deny the claim. Mr Mugabe, who is accused of stealing the last two elections in Zimbabwe, is riding high on expressions of solidarity from regional leaders including South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki.
This, from Neal Ascherson’s review of Moshe Lewin’s “My Soviet Century”, caught my eye:
…Lewin is anything but an apologist for the old system. Certainly, he blasts Cold War writers for exaggerating the scale of Stalin’s repression…
Exaggerating the scale of Stalin’s repression? Not a phrase many would dare to come up with now, after the publication of books like Anne Applebaum’s “Gulag“. George Walden, in the Telegraph (via AL Daily), is less impressed.
Lewin’s thesis “that we must see the Russian 20th century not simply in ideological terms but as social history” would be defensible, were it not that the book turns out to be a covert apology for Soviet socialism, complete with double-speak and poisonous, Pravda-style innuendo against the West: “Cold War pressures, and the whole complex put in place by the West (with the intelligence services playing a leading role), to identify the slightest crack in the other camp, were not invented by paranoia.”
It soon becomes clear that Lewin has it in for the West in a big way. Amongst other things we are accused of “demonising” Stalin – “a quaint notion, which becomes all the quainter when the author himself describes him as a “half-crazed actor” inclined to fits of “dementia”, and the people close to him as “human scum”. When the dictator drags the soon to be slaughtered but for the moment just badly beaten up Field Marshal Tukhachevsky into his presence, for the pleasure of it, Lewin comments: “We are dealing with a maniac.” You said it.
There is a perverse logic to this and many more inconsistencies. If there is one thing Lewin wants to do even more than snarl at the West, it is to deify Lenin.
Scientists in Ethiopia have discovered what they believe is our oldest bipedal ancestor:
US and Ethiopian scientists working in north-eastern Ethiopia say the remains of the hominid, or primitive human, date back four million years.
The skeleton is said to be that of the world’s oldest animal walking on two feet, or biped.
The bones were found just 60km (40 miles) from the site where Lucy, one of the first hominids, was discovered.
Lucy, whose remains were found in 1974, lived 3.2 million years ago and is thought to have given rise to the Homo line which ended in modern humans.
But the as yet unnamed fossil found in February at a new site called Mille in Afar region of Ethiopia, might be a far earlier brother or sister.
Researchers believe it could provide valuable clues to the phases of human evolution before her.
“This is the world’s oldest biped,” said Bruce Latimer of the national history museum in Ohio, who made the discovery with his Ethiopian colleague Yohannes Haile-Selassie.
“It will revolutionise the way we see human evolution.”