From our desk dictionary:

fuse (noun)

1 : a continuous train of a combustible substance enclosed in a cord or cable for setting off an explosive charge by transmitting fire to it


Loyal Syrian Arab Republic citizens gather behind their national flag. Their anthem is Homat el Diyar ("Guardians of the Land").


The armed insurgents within Syria tend to favor the green-white-black tricolor three-star flag of the Syrian Republic (1932-1958), a component of the French Mandate of Syria and Lebanon. From 1940 to 1943, the Syrian Republic was under the control of Vichy France, and upon liberation became a sovereign state. In 1958, Syria joined with Egypt in forming the United Arab Republic.

Inside Syria, even people who support regime change tend to oppose sanctions, military solutions and foreign intervention. Commentators on the Arab Awakening sometimes make the mistake of assuming that 22 Arab states are one and the same, all destined to oust dictators with the same sequence of events that follow either the Tunisian or Libyan models writes Sharmine Narwani, a senior associate at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University.

Syria is not Tunisia or Libya
Sharmine Narwani Veterans Today USA February 6, 2012

While President Bashar al-Assad has made some gross miscalculations since the crisis began in March, he is still favored by a slight majority of Syrians, according to recent online polls. But popularity is not why his government remains intact. The regime still enjoys the support of its key constituencies: the army, the major cities, the business/regime elite, minorities and Sunni secularists, with limited defections of the sort experienced by other Arab states.

On the flip side, after 11 months, the opposition still remains fundamentally divided along ethnic, religious, political and geographic lines, and is unable to articulate a detailed political platform. Furthermore, the armed opposition groups – brought to light in the recent Arab League mission report – lack a central command, are locally based, and have limited, irregular access to the military supply lines essential for operating on a larger scale.

Also, external parties have very little leverage in Syria. The country has adapted to living under sanctions and has a small but cohesive group of allies on which it relies. It functions largely without the web of dependencies typical of other Arab states, does not have a national debt problem, and has recently gained a valuable buffer from the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China), which insist on Syria resolving its crisis internally.

The view from inside Syria, meanwhile, varies starkly from the narratives spun outside. A closer look at the U.N. death toll of 5,000 shows a critical lack of discernment between pro-regime and opposition casualties, and fails to highlight the 2,000 dead regular soldiers whose funerals are televised daily within the country. In contrast to external opposition figures, mainstream domestic ones — even those who seek regime change — tend to reject sanctions, military solutions and foreign intervention in favor of a peaceful political resolution of the crisis ...

Heading for war on Syria
Stephen Lendman SteveLendmanBlog USA February 6, 2012

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Washington's longstanding policy is regime change in Iran and Syria. At issue is replacing independent regimes with client ones and securing unchallenged control of valued Middle East resources.

On February 4, Russia and China vetoed a largely one-sided anti-Assad resolution. A previous article called him more victim than villain. Yet he's falsely blamed for months of externally generated violence. In fact, he confronted a Western-backed armed insurgency replicating the Libya model. By so doing he acted responsibly against a heavily armed insurrection.

Imagine a similar scenario in America. Local police, National Guard forces, and Pentagon troops would confront it violently. Combined, they'd way exceed Assad's response. Mass killing would follow. Western media scoundrels would approve. In contrast, the New York Times calls Syria's self-defense state-sponsored "butchery." ...

Long-suffering Afghans, Iraqis, Libyans, Somalis, Bahrainis, Yemenis, Palestinians, and many others elsewhere understand the horrors when America intervenes. So do Syrians. They abhor Washington led meddling in their internal affairs and want no part of it. In fact, a mid-December Qatar Foundation-funded YouGov Siraj poll found 55% of Syrians back Assad. It contradicts Western discourse of majority opposition. Except for the London Guardian, the findings were unreported in the West.

On February 4, Global Research editor Michel Chossudovsky explained "armed opposition groups" operating in Syria. They include the Western-backed Syria Free Army (FSA) "involved in criminal and terrorist acts." They're killing civilians and security forces. They're reigning terror blamed on Assad. They're destroying state assets, including fuel pipelines, trains and vehicles carrying fuel, as well as buildings and other targets. Their ranks include elements similar to Libyan insurgents, including "Al Qaeda affiliated" militants, "Muslim Brotherhood" members, and "Salafists. Turkey, Israel and Saudi Arabia" support them. So do other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) States and Jordan. ...

Below: Alan Hart is a former ITN and BBC Panorama foreign correspondent who covered wars and conflicts wherever they were taking place in the world and specialized in the Middle East. He nominates William Hague, Britain’s Foreign Secretary and Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the UN for an international prize for hypocrisy. But, given that there is no end to hypocrisy in the Western Axis nations, he welcomes others to put forward nominees for the prize that unfortunately does not yet exist.

How about an international award for hypocrisy?
Alan Hart Veterans Today USA February 7, 2012

...

Arising out the will of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish chemist who invented dynamite, the Nobel Prize is universally recognized as the most prestigious award in the fields of peace-making, economics, chemistry, physics, medicine and literature. How about an international award – without the gold medal, the diploma and the money – for hypocrisy?

Such an award could be called the Lebon Prize (reversing Nobel).

If there was such an award, the statements of European and American leaders in the immediate aftermath of Russia and China’s veto of the Security Council resolution to end the killing in Syria suggest two most obvious nominees for it. ...

UK rules out military action or arming Syrian rebels
Nigel Morris The Independent UK February 8, 2012

Britain categorically ruled out military intervention by the West in Syria yesterday despite the intensification of the crackdown on dissidents by President Bashar al-Assad's forces.

David Cameron chaired a meeting of the National Security Council which agreed to increase sanctions against the regime and to strengthen links with opposition leaders. ... [I]t made clear there was no prospect of arming rebel factions, stressing that support was limited to advice on communications and training. Alistair Burt, the Foreign Office minister, also said military action was impossible after Russia and China vetoed a UN resolution calling on Mr Assad to step down. ...

Britain believes the Arab League has to lead pressure on Mr Assad to end his brutal suppression. Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates announced yesterday they were recalling their ambassadors from Damascus and expelling Syrian envoys. The Gulf Cooperation Council, which comprises the six states, accused Syria of rejecting Arab attempts to "solve this crisis and prevent the bloodshed of the Syrian people". It said: "The council considers it is necessary for the Arab states... to take every decisive measure faced with this dangerous escalation against the Syrian people. Nearly a year into the crisis, there is no glint of hope in a solution."

In a report today, the House of Commons defence select committee also warns of practical problems in mounting another military operation on the scale of the intervention in Libya. ...

US begins review of military options in Syria
John Glaser Antiwar.com USA February 7, 2012

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The Pentagon and U.S. Central Command have begun a preliminary review of U.S. military options against the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad, as violence throughout the country continues to escalate.

The most significant violence is reported to have taken place in the city of Homs, where government security forces have bombed civilian areas in their attempt to extinguish an armed uprising against the Assad regime, led by army defectors in the Free Syrian Army. As the crisis worsens, Washington has begun openly talking about intervention. ...

The U.S. and its Arab allies in the Gulf States would welcome the chance to remove Assad from power and eliminate Iran’s primary ally. But the consequences of intervention are likely to be more dire than anything seen so far in Syria. A substantial U.S. intervention could set off violent sectarian wars in the event of a power vacuum. Furthermore, as has been the case in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and beyond, the regimes Washington leaves behind after ruthlessly instituting regime change are typically just as brutal as the ones they ousted.

Syria raises specter of proxy conflict for U.S., Russia
Andrew Quinn Thomson Reuters Canada/UK February 7, 2012

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - As the Obama administration weighs worst-case scenarios for Syria, one stands out: a civil war that develops into a proxy battle between Arabs and the West on one side, and Russia and Iran on the other.

U.S. officials stress they do not want to play a military role in Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad's crackdown on protests has killed more than 5,000 people and raised fears of a protracted power struggle in a country at the heart of the Arab world.

But after U.S. and Arab-led efforts to craft consensus in the U.N. Security Council on Syria's political transition were torpedoed by vetoes from Russia and China, some analysts say risks are growing that the international community will line up on opposite sides of a fratricidal war.

The volatile ingredients are already in place. ...

From our desk dictionary:

restaurant (noun)

: a business establishment where meals or refreshments may be purchased

Origin of RESTAURANT

French, from present participle of restaurer to restore, from Latin restaurare

First Known Use: 1819

The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food by Adam Gopnik. Published by Knopf, New York, October 25, 2011. (Hardcover and eBook)

Publisher's description

Never before have we cared so much about food. It preoccupies our popular culture, our fantasies, and even our moralizing—“You still eat meat?” With our top chefs as deities and finest restaurants as places of pilgrimage, we have made food the stuff of secular seeking and transcendence, finding heaven in a mouthful. But have we come any closer to discovering the true meaning of food in our lives?

With inimitable charm and learning, Adam Gopnik takes us on a beguiling journey in search of that meaning as he charts America’s recent and rapid evolution from commendably aware eaters to manic, compulsive gastronomes. It is a journey that begins in eighteenth-century France—the birthplace of our modern tastes (and, by no coincidence, of the restaurant)—and carries us to the kitchens of the White House, the molecular meccas of Barcelona, and beyond. To understand why so many of us apparently live to eat, Gopnik delves into the most burning questions of our time, including: Should a Manhattanite bother to find chicken killed in the Bronx? Is a great vintage really any better than a good bottle of wine? And: Why does dessert matter so much?

Throughout, he reminds us of a time-honored truth often lost amid our newfound gastronomic pieties and certitudes: What goes on the table has never mattered as much to our lives as what goes on around the table—the scene of families, friends, lovers coming together, or breaking apart; conversation across the simplest or grandest board. This, ultimately, is who we are.

Following in the footsteps of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, Adam Gopnik gently satirizes the entire human comedy of the comestible as he surveys the wide world of taste that we have lately made our home. The Table Comes First is the delightful beginning of a new conversation about the way we eat now.

The Table Comes First: Adam Gopnik on the meaning of food
Book review by Maria Popova The Atlantic USA November 7, 2011

It seems to be the season of intriguing food-related releases. From Adam Gopnik, one of my favorite nonfiction writers working today, comes The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food -- a fascinating journey to the roots of our modern obsession with food and culinary culture. From the dawn of our modern tastes in 18th-century France, where the first restaurant was born, to the kitchens of the White House to the Slow Food movement to Barcelona's bleeding-edge molecular gastronomy scene, Gopnik tours the wild and wonderful world of cuisine, with all its concomitant sociocultural phenomena, to explore the delicate relationship between what goes on the table and what goes on around it as we come together around our food. It's history, nutrition, philosophy, anthropology, and sociology all rolled up into one delectable streusel of insight and illumination, in Gopnik's unapologetically intelligent yet charmingly witty style.

Having made food a more fashionable object, we have ended by making eating a smaller subject. When 'gastronomy' was on the margins of attention it seemed big because it was an unexpected way to get at everything -- the nature of hunger; the meaning of appetite; the patterns and traces of desire; tradition, in the way that recipes are passed mother to son; and history, in the way that spices mix and, in mixing, mix peoples. You could envision through the modest lens of pleasure, as through a keyhole, a whole world; and the compression and odd shape of the keyhole made the picture more dramatic. Now the door is wide open, but somehow we see less, or notice less, anyway. Betrayed by its enlargement, food becomes less intimate the more intensely it is made to matter. --Adam Gopnik

The book opens with Charles Darwin's famous haikuesque meditation:

We have happy days, remember good dinners.

...

BOOK REVIEW: The Table Comes First
Aram Bakshian Jr. The Washington Times USA January 13, 2012

...

The venerable New Yorker magazine is a bit like Gaulstown House, the ramshackle Irish country seat of George Rochfort, immortalized in verse by his friend, the poet Jonathan Swift:

It is just half a blessing, and just half a curse -

I wish then, dear George, it were better or worse.

At its worst, the New Yorker can be verbose, trendy-lefty and pretentious; at its best it tackles subjects with a graceful mixture of wit, erudition and insight. Since 1986, Adam Gopnik has been one of the magazine’s mainstay contributors as a Paris correspondent, art critic and scribbler of scores of fiction and nonfiction articles. His writing - sometimes in the same paragraph - exemplifies both the New Yorker’s virtues and its vices.

This is particularly true of his latest book, an overlong, overwritten Franco-centric ramble on the meaning of dining as both a culinary and a social phenomenon. There are many interesting bits and pieces - lucid, engaging reflections on everything from the ethics of eating meat to the all-but-vanished splendors of classic French cuisine. But, as someone once remarked of the massive memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon, the occasional oases are separated by vast stretches of desert.

Like Saint-Simon, Mr. Gopnik doesn’t know when to quit. Where most of us might define an enjoyable restaurant experience as a well-prepared, well-served meal in pleasant surroundings, lubricated by the right type and amount of alcohol and shared in good company, Mr. Gopnik just can’t leave it at that. “The restaurant,” he writes, “whether in its most abstract, ritzy form or at its most elemental, can always be diverted back toward a primal magic, a mood of mischief, stolen pleasures, a retreat from the world.”

Note that, amid all the blather about “primal magic” and “stolen pleasures,” the words “food” and “eat” do not appear once. ...

Adam Gopnik: The Table Comes First
Interview by John Donvan NPR USA November 24, 2011

Contains a transcript of and an audio (30:19) link to the interview.

What goes on the dining table has never mattered as much to our lives as what goes on around it, says Adam Gopnik, a staff writer for The New Yorker. Guest host John Donvan talks with Gopnik about his new book, The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food.

This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm John Donvan, in Washington. Neal Conan is away. Some of the things we use meals for: to celebrate; to commemorate, to reinvigorate a fading romance, or to start one off, or to close deals, or to open our hearts as we open the wine for which the meal may only be the excuse.

Oh, and we use meals to eat, which as a species we cannot afford not to do if we want to survive. So many meals, so much meaning, especially when you hear the meaningful food vamping of Adam Gopnik, a staff writer for the New Yorker who in a new book goes in search of how our relationship with food and cooking has not only defined us but has changed over the centuries and changed us over the centuries and what it tells us about who we are and how we live. ...

DONVAN: ... But the interesting thing starts with the origin of the word restaurant. Tell me about that.

...

GOPNIK: ... And it's really weird if you think about it because obviously exchanging food for money is one of the most fundamental things that people could do, and to find out that the way we mostly do it in the restaurant is a specific invention with a date on it is a little like finding out that, I don't know, having sex in beds was invented in Berlin in 1836, and then word got around...

DONVAN: Which it probably was not...

GOPNIK: I suspect it was not, though presumably it was invented somewhere.

DONVAN: So - and the word restaurant, you're saying, actually comes from the name of a particular dish, a restorative dish.

GOPNIK: That's right, a kind of bullion. ...

...

DONVAN: You have an aphoristic way of writing. Every few pages, you state a rule of one kind or another that's very pithy and on point. And on page 106, you say: It's not just that we are what we eat, but we eat what we are. And you have about 30 seconds to explain that.

GOPNIK: To explain that?

DONVAN: Yeah.

GOPNIK: I mean by that: It isn't the things we ingest that make us the people we are. It's the things we choose express the values that we have.

DONVAN: Adam Gopnik, I want to thank you very much. It's a pleasure. Your book is a fantastic read. ... And I want to thank all of our callers for telling the stories of the meals that made history in their lives. ...

Tasty mains, but unsatisfying entremets
Book review by Jessica Ward Globe and Mail Canada January 17, 2012

Asking an essayist to write a book is a bit like asking a miniaturist to paint the Sistine Chapel: It can be done, but it’s rarely done well. Virginia Woolf, easily the best essayist in the English language, pulled it off, but Hugh Trevor-Roper, no slouch himself, always seemed to freeze whenever it came to writing whole books. And who now remembers William Hazlitt’s biography of Napoleon? Or Sydney Smith’s sermons?

Adam Gopnik, a staff writer at The New Yorker, has made a career out of writing essays. He is best known for an anthology he published more than a decade ago (Paris to the Moon), and if the subject – Paris and the French – was inherently frivolous, he was still operating within the rules laid down by Woolf (“The essay can be short or long, serious or trifling, about God and Spinoza, or about turtles and Cheapside”).

Gopnik has lately become rather more ambitious, and in The Table Comes First he has set his sights on the urbanite’s equivalents of God and Spinoza: food and the increasingly precious theorizing that surrounds it.

The food he writes about is for the most part French, and the table he has in mind is of the metaphorical variety, “the one plausible hearth of family life, the raft to ride down the river of our existence even in the hardest times.” The table, very simply, is the nexus of civilized sociability: Forget this and eating becomes an animal act; take it to heart and eating becomes an intelligent one.

...

Scene from the grand opening ceremony of The Boxcar Grocer in Atlanta, Georgia. Photo: The Boxcar Grocer

Photo right: Alphonzo and Alison Cross, founders of The Boxcar Grocer

Testament
Alison Cross The Boxcar blogs USA January 24, 2012

Visit this page for its embedded links.

Last night was a testament to the power of community. It was also an ode to what can happen when one lets go of anger and embraces the possibilities that abound in disruptive moments in life. Three years ago our family lost 165 acres of heir property that had been in our family for over 100 years in Swainsboro, Georgia on the courthouse steps with no representative in attendance. It’s a fairly common occurrence considering the fragile nature of rural land ownership among Black families in the South. This store emerged from the powerlessness we felt in that situation.

It was at that moment that we received the paperwork detailing the loss that I decided we needed to create a way to connect what had been lost to something positive to keep us from focusing on how angry we were about the situation.

The Boxcar Grocer allows us to provide food for a community that has clearly been ignored. But it also allows us to express how important the land is to our health, our growth, our families, and to help provide a forum to communicate the value and importance of land and farming, especially at this particular moment in time.

So many beautiful faces turned up at our grand opening celebration last night. Lots of regular customers who have already come to rely on us being at the store on a daily basis to provide the food they so crave. And also lots of new people who were just shocked at the magic of it all. ...

Rebranding the food movement to broaden its appeal
Zak Stone GOOD USA February 6, 2012


Atlanta's Boxcar Grocer. Visit this page for its embedded links.

As entrepreneurs and food activists attempt to bring fresh produce to more and more urban food deserts, they're setting their crosshairs on one target in particular: the corner store. Packed to the gills with cigarettes, lotto tickets, liquor, and processed foods, the shops do little to nourish the communities where they operate, and in many urban areas—particularly black, Latino, or low-income neighborhoods—these stores are the only places to buy any food at all.

According to Alphonzo and Alison Cross, founders of The Boxcar Grocer in Atlanta (and winners of GOOD's contest to redesign the supermarket), this needs to change. Their just-opened corner store alternative, where local and organic food options get prime shelf space, is an attempt to respect "the fact that every community desires fresh food, and locally made food is just about as fresh as you can get," says Alison.

The Castleberry Hill neighborhood, where Boxcar sits, is full of preserved railroad warehouses (hence the name), but doesn't have another decent grocery store within five miles, despite its proximity to City Hall and college campuses. "We chose to put the store here exactly for this reason," says Alison. "The demographics, to us, looked like a sure sign of success."

The brother-sister duo's mission is to broaden the appeal of the food movement to embrace more black eaters. The first step is the vintage train-themed brand. "Railroads are great connectors," according to Alison. "They are also what took African Americans out of the South, saving our lives in many instances, as well as brought them back to visit their families." While the typical branding on the nonprofits and businesses of the local food movement tends to idealize an agricultural lifestyle, that's "something the African American community does not really desire to go back to, even though we need to address lots of health issues directly related to the type of foods we're eating," Alison says. ...

Website: The Boxcar Grocer

...

About us

At the intersection of food justice and high concept retail lay the idea behind The Boxcar Grocer. We are an independently, family owned business located in Atlanta, GA. Our goal is to become a model neighborhood resource, a new vision of what a corner store can be. A place that recognizes the health of a nation begins with the health of its individual communities.

Eventually, with community support, we will have a thriving model of convenience store retail that successfully unifies the ideals of the larger environmental and food movements with the needs and voices of diverse urban communities such as Castleberry Hill, Mechanicsville and the West End areas of Atlanta.

Patenting seeds has led to a farming and food crisis - and huge profits for US biotechnology corporations. Even as the disappearance of biodiversity and seed sovereignty creates a major crisis for agriculture and food security, corporations are pushing governments to use public money to destroy the public seed supply and replace it with unreliable, non-renewable, patented seed - which must be bought each and every year.

Massive corporations now rule the earth. But they are recent arrivals which can and should be dispatched. It is time for people to again take control. The legal fiction of corporate personhood and the constitutional rights taken by corporations must cease. - Bill Quigley, an American human rights lawyer

Monsanto modifies soy beans to grow 'fish oil'
Jeff McMahon Forbes USA April 11, 2011

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The biotechnology firm Monsanto stands just one FDA approval away from growing soybeans that have been genetically modified to produce those omega-3 fatty acids that doctors are always recommending.

That FDA approval is expected this year, according to Science News.

Monsanto is so despised by environmentalists that Google’s first suggested search term for the St. Louis company is “Monsanto evil.” Readers of Natural News voted Monsanto the world’s most evil corporation in a January poll, giving the corporation a whopping 51 percent of the vote.

BP, by contrast, received 9 percent.

But there may be reasons for even health-loving greens to love “stearidonic acid soybean oil,” as Monsanto’s new product is called. Among them: depleted fisheries, environmental toxins in fish oil, and a new threat, the scope of which has not yet been fully realized: millions of gallons of radioactive water dumped into the ocean at the Fukushima-Daichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan.

The American Heart Association recommends Americans eat two servings of fish per week for the purpose of ingesting omega-3 fatty acids, which health experts say is essential to human health. Even the stodgy FDA agrees that omega-3 reduces risk of heart disease and recommends fish.

Omega-3 fatty acids are also available in whole grains, flax seed, fresh fruits and vegetables, olive oil, garlic, and “moderate wine consumption,” according to the University of Maryland Medical Center, but Americans don’t eat enough of those. Thus, the fish recommendation. And the “SDA soybean oil.”

Monsanto plans to include SDA soybean oil in just about everything: “baked goods and baking mixes, breakfast cereals and grains, cheeses, dairy product analogs, fats and oils, fish products, frozen dairy desserts and mixes, grain products and pastas, gravies and sauces, meat products, milk products, nuts and nut products, poultry products, processed fruit juices, processed vegetable products, puddings and fillings, snack foods, soft candy, and soups and soup mixes, at levels that will provide 375 milligrams (mg) of SDA per serving.” ...

Banned in Germany, but you're probably still eating it
Dr. Joseph Mecola Mercola.com USA January 31, 2012

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... GM crops are now a mainstay of American agriculture.

Ninety percent or more of all US-grown corn, soybeans, canola, and sugar beets are genetically modified versions, which means that virtually all processed food items contain at least one or more genetically modified ingredients.

GM foods are, from what I perceive, one of the most significant threats that we have against the very sustainability of the human race. Why? In a nutshell, these toxins are being linked to a growing repertoire of assaults against human health and the environment -- and they are already migrating into fetal blood, which means future generations are now at risk.

Virtually all of the claims of benefit of GM crops – increased yields, more food production, controlled pests and weeds, reductions in chemical use in agriculture, drought-tolerant seeds – have not materialized. ...

Genetically engineered seeds are banned in Hungary, as they are in several other European countries, such as Germany and Ireland. Peru is also following the precautionary principle, and has even passed a law that bans genetically modified ingredients within the nation for 10 years.

In the United States, certain states are passing legislation that protects the use of GM seeds and allows for unabated expansion. To date, 14 states have passed such legislation and Michigan's Sen. Bill 777, if passed, would make that 15. The Michigan bill would prevent anti-GMO laws and would remove "any authority local governments may have to adopt and enforce ordinances that prohibit or regulate the labeling, sale, storage, transportation, distribution, use, or planting of agricultural, vegetable, flower or forest tree seeds."

Bills like these are obviously music to Monsanto's ears, which spends millions of dollars lobbying the U.S. government at the federal level for favorable legislation that supports the spread of their toxic products. ...

The Indian government announced last August that it will sue Monsanto and its Indian collaborator for biopiracy.

Heat on Monsanto over brinjal piracy
Dinesh C Sharma India Today India August 12, 2011

New Delhi - American seed giant Monsanto and its Indian collaborator, Maharashtra Hybrid Seeds Company (Mahyco) are to be prosecuted for allegedly 'stealing' indigenous plant material for developing genetically modified brinjal variety known as Bt brinjal.

The National Biodiversity Authority (NBA), a statutory body set up under the Biological Diversity Act, 2002, has decided to initiate legal proceedings against the two companies and their collaborators for using indigenous brinjal germplasm without necessary permission.

Taking plant material without any permission and using it for commercial purposes is considered an act of biopiracy.

"The authority has decided to proceed legally against Mahyco and Monsanto, and all others concerned to take the issue to its logical conclusion", NBA secretary C Achalender Reddy said. The decision on the complaint filed by the Bangalore- based Environment Support Group (ESG) was taken in June by the authority and it was formally confirmed during its meeting held in New Delhi this week.

Any violation of the Biodiversity Act is a non- bailable, cognizable offence and the authority plans to initiate criminal proceedings against the offenders. It took almost one year for the authority to prepare a case against the two companies.

This is going to be a test case of biopiracy because for the first time a commercial entity will be booked under the Biodiversity Act. ...

The seed emergency: The threat to food and democracy
Vandana Shiva Al Jazeera English Qatar February 5, 2012

Activist and author Dr Vandana Shiva is the founder of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology. She has campaigned for biodiversity, conservation and farmers' rights, winning the Right Livelihood Award [Alternative Nobel Prize] in 1993. Visit this page for its embedded links.

New Delhi, India - The seed is the first link in the food chain - and seed sovereignty is the foundation of food sovereignty. If farmers do not have their own seeds or access to open pollinated varieties that they can save, improve and exchange, they have no seed sovereignty - and consequently no food sovereignty.

The deepening agrarian and food crisis has its roots in changes in the seed supply system, and the erosion of seed diversity and seed sovereignty.

Seed sovereignty includes the farmer's rights to save, breed and exchange seeds, to have access to diverse open source seeds which can be saved - and which are not patented, genetically modified, owned or controlled by emerging seed giants. It is based on reclaiming seeds and biodiversity as commons and public good.

The past twenty years have seen a very rapid erosion of seed diversity and seed sovereignty, and the concentration of the control over seeds by a very small number of giant corporations. In 1995, when the UN organised the Plant Genetic Resources Conference in Leipzig, it was reported that 75 per cent of all agricultural biodiversity had disappeared because of the introduction of "modern" varieties, which are always cultivated as monocultures. Since then, the erosion has accelerated.

The introduction of the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement of the World Trade Organisation has accelerated the spread of genetically engineered seeds - which can be patented - and for which royalties can be collected. Navdanya was started in response to the introduction of these patents on seeds in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade - a forerunner to the WTO - about which a Monsanto representative later stated: "In drafting these agreements, we were the patient, diagnostician [and] physician all in one." Corporations defined a problem - and for them the problem was farmers saving seeds. They offered a solution, and the solution was to make it illegal for farmers to save seed - by introducing patents and intellectual property rights [PDF] on those very seeds. As a result, acreage under GM corn, soya, canola, cotton has increased dramatically. ...

As a farmer's seed supply is eroded, and farmers become dependent on patented GMO seed, the result is debt. India, the home of cotton, has lost its cotton seed diversity and cotton seed sovereignty. Some 95 per cent of the country's cotton seed is now controlled by Monsanto - and the debt trap created by being forced to buy seed every year - with royalty payments - has pushed hundreds of thousands of farmers to suicide; of the 250,000 farmer suicides, the majority are in the cotton belt. ...

Related: "Ten Ways Monsanto and Big Ag Are Trying to Kill You - And the Planet"
Organic Bytes #314 Organic Consumers Association USA n.d.

Energy-intensive industrial farming practices that rely on toxic chemicals and genetically engineered crops are not just undermining public health, they're destroying the planet.

Here's how: ...

The World According to Monsanto is a recipe for disaster. Monsanto and Big Ag contaminate every link in the food chain, threatening the very foundation of life: living nutrient-rich soil, clean water, resilient crops, healthy animals, stable climates, and diverse food sources. ...

Natural Society declared Monsanto the worst company of 2011 for "threatening both human health and the environment."

Occupy corporations: How to cut corporate power
Bill Quigley CounterPunch USA February 6, 2012

Bill Quigley is a human rights lawyer who teaches at Loyola University New Orleans and works with the Center for Constitutional Rights.

“Corporations are people, my friend.”

– Mitt Romney at Iowa State Fair

Corporations are obviously not people. But Romney is accurate in the sense that corporations have hijacked most of the rights of people while evading the responsibilities. An important part of the social justice agenda is democratizing corporations. This means we must radically change the laws so people can be in charge of corporations. We must strip them of corporate personhood and cut them down to size so democracy can work. People are taking action so democracy can regulate the size, scope and actions of corporations.

One of the most basic roles of society is to protect the people from harm. The massive size of many international corporations makes democratic control over them nearly impossible.

Corporate crime is widespread. ...

Making corporations responsible to democracy of the people is challenging considering Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest corporation, does more business itself annually than all but two dozen of the two hundred plus countries in the world. Without dramatic changes, how can we expect people in small or even big countries to force corporations like Wal-Mart, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil, BP, Toyota or Chevron to live by the same rules all the people have to?

Justice demands we make sure corporations do not harm people. Democracy must require that they operate for the common good.

In order to cut corporations down to size, the people must strip corporations of the special artificial legal protections they have created for themselves.

The story of how corporations took the full rights of legal persons in one of the great perverse tragedies in legal history. ...

Harper to raise Syria crisis on China trip
CBC News/Huffington Post Canada February 5, 2012


China's President Hu Jintao is greeted by Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper (R) at the G20 Summit in Toronto, June 26, 2010. Photo: Jim Young/AFP/Pool

Prime Minister Stephen Harper will raise the crisis in Syria on his trip to China, a top Canadian government official says, a day after China joined Russia in vetoing a UN Security Council resolution calling on Syria President Bashar Assad to step down.

In an interview with CBC News Sunday, Deepak Obhrai, parliamentary secretary to Minister of Foreign Affairs John Baird, said Canada is pursuing "diplomatic efforts" with Russia and China in an effort to end the crisis in Syria.

"We will be talking to the Chinese and to the Russians, and explaining to them our view, as to why their veto is wrong," said Obhrai.

The prime minister, along with Baird and a delegation of MPs and other Canadian officials, are heading to China on Monday where Obhrai said several issues will be raised, "not only Syria but Iran as well."

"This is the opportunity for the prime minister to raise these issues with the Chinese leadership," he said. ...

Keeping good jobs in Canada
Karl Nerenberg rabble.ca Canada February 6, 2012

Caterpillar has picked up and left town.

Goodbye London, Ontario.

Hello Muncie, Indiana. ...

The Harper government is becoming more than an active cheerleader in the anti-union movement. It is taking on the role of enabler -- witness its interference in the Air Canada dispute, and newly enunciated policy that the federal government can intervene in private sector labour disputes when the "interests of the Canadian economy" are at stake.

It seems that we're in a bad way, in Canada, when it comes to private sector jobs that are not in natural resources or services.

The urgent public policy challenge is to find the right mix of measures that will foster high value-added employment in Canada.

This country has a natural advantage when it comes to commodities of one sort or the other, and the federal government wants to play that card to the hilt. Just think: "tar sands and energy exports."

And the fact is that when it comes to secondary manufacturing, capital is extremely mobile and will frequently migrate to where labour costs are lowest. However, when there was a dispute at Vale-Inco in Sudbury, the foreign-owned company could not just pick up and move elsewhere. The nickel they need is beneath Northern Ontario soil.

Should Canada simply forget about manufacturing and become a commodity-exporting economy? Is there no strategy or set of related strategies that would help build and maintain a vigorous, competitive and innovative manufacturing sector? ...

China talks must go beyond oil: Opposition
CTV News Canada February 6, 2012


Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his wife Laureen board a government aircraft as they prepare to depart from Ottawa, Monday, Feb. 6, 2012. Photo: Adrian Wyld/ The Canadian Press

The official Opposition is calling on Prime Minister Stephen Harper to broaden trade talks with China beyond energy during his visit to the country this week.

Harper boarded a plane in Ottawa around midday Monday for a four-day visit designed to strengthen ties with the Asian giant.

Major powerbrokers from Canada's energy sector are travelling with Harper, as part of an entourage that also includes a number of representatives from Canada's agricultural, transportation and education sectors.

The presence of presidents from several oil and gas companies, some of whom are involved in major pipeline projects, highlights the Chinese interest in Canadian energy.

But the NDP says the prime minister must address issues such as the loss of manufacturing jobs in Canada.

"If these trade talks are only about oil, which is a wonderful resource we are giving away as fast as we can, then we will have failed the hundreds of thousands of Canadians and our children, who are looking for productive employment," Jinny Sims, the NDP's international co-operation and deputy foreign affairs critic, told CTV News Channel.

"This has to be about far more than oil. This has to be about manufacturing, and it has to be looking at trade in the widest spectrum." ...

Both services fall under the Department of the Navy. But for a decade, they haven’t fought alongside one another at sea. The Marines have been too busy in Iraq and Afghanistan. But as the land wars recede and the U.S.’ defense strategy looks west to the deep, blue Pacific, the Navy and the Marines are re-learning how to attack an enemy from the water, as one force.

Adm. Jonathan Greenert, the Navy’s new top officer, didn’t bother concealing his pride when he came aboard Saturday, greeted by a phalanx of sailors and Marines in the Wasp’s hangar deck. “Seeing this blue-green field,” Greenert said, “has been a long time coming.”

Since 2006, to be exact, when Greenert and his Marine counterpart, Gen. James Amos, began planning what would become Bold Alligator — an exercise continuously delayed by the Marines’ extended stays fighting through Iraq’s Anbar Province and Afghanistan’s Helmand Province. Greenert worries about a generation of Navy officers who don’t know how to plan an amphibious assault; Amos worries about a generation of Marines who came of age acting like a second land Army.

The past week has been a reacquaintance. Thirty-one ships — including some from nine foreign allies’ seafarers — have sailed into the waters off the Atlantic coast.... - Spencer Ackerman

But first, popular culture propaganda motivation at sea.

Superbowl at sea: Marines prep for huge wargame with gridiron fight
Spencer Ackerman Wired, Danger Room blog) USA February 6, 2012


Photo: Mark Riffee/Wired.com

ABOARD THE U.S.S. WASP — Very early Monday morning, over 14,000 U.S. sailors, Marines and their foreign allies will launch the most ambitious naval war game in a decade, testing their ability to come ashore by sea and air from dozens of miles out in the Atlantic Ocean against a hostile force, (hopefully) demonstrating that amphibious warfare is back after ten years of grueling land battles. And tonight, in the hangar deck of this 40,000-ton assault ship, no one cares.

Because tonight is Super Bowl XLVI.

The training exercise called Bold Alligator is unofficially on pause for the rematch of the dramatic 2008 Patriots-Giants Super Bowl. Hundreds of enlisted sailors and Marines watching the game in the ship’s hangar deck aren’t interested in rehearsing the complex flight, landing craft and logistics plans for the evening. They wonder about Tom Brady’s plans to escape the Giants’ pass rush; about the Patriots’ questionable secondary defense against the Giants’ deep threats of Mario Manningham, Hakeem Nicks and Victor Cruz; about how a Giants team that finished the regular season a pathetic 9-7 stands a chance against the most dominant NFL team of the last decade.

Inevitably, the answers came. The Giants took the rematch, 21-17, on the strength of a crucial 40-yard Manning-to-Manningham completion, some savvy delays to drain away the clock ahead of the final Giants touchdown with a minute left in the game, and an inadvertent first-quarter assist by Brady to hand the G-men a free two points. Giants fans took over the hangar deck, blowing whistles, jeering Brady, and turning the decibel level to a sonic boom.

Bold Alligator is for tomorrow, and tomorrow is a very long way away.

The cold, cavernous hangar deck bearing the Wasp’s logo was bathed in green light for the game, almost like night vision, except for a screen fit for a small movie theater projecting the game via satellite. It’s deafeningly loud until the National Anthem starts; when the song ends, so does the silence. A huge cheer goes out when the cameras cut to a shot of soldiers and Marines in southern Afghanistan’s Camp Leatherneck. A second goes out for the game’s first beer commercial, since the ship is dry. ...

Below: Bedouins of the Negev will soon witness a Chinese-built railway line snake its way through the desert to the Mediterranean and Levant Basin oil and gas reserves. The "Med-Red" plan is symbolic of China's bold Middle East advance on three tracks: Iran, Gulf states and Israel. The geopolitical implications are profound and pose unsolvable riddles for other outside powers.

A dragon dance in the Negev
M K Bhadrakumar Asia Times Online Hong Kong Dateline February 2, 2012

There is no record of dragons in the nomadic life of the Negev desert, which dates back at least 4, 000 years (some say 7,000). That may be about to change in the Year of the Dragon.

The Bedouins of the Negev will soon witness the sight of a Chinese-built railway line snaking its way through the melange of brown, rocky, dusty mountains and the wadis and deep craters, leading north from the resort city of Eilat in the Gulf of Aqaba toward the eastern Mediterranean.

Having developed strong interests on the two sides of the Persian Gulf divide - Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states and Iran - China is taking an awesome leap as a big-time player in the geopolitics of the Middle East by elevating its ties with Israel to a strategic partnership. ...

Below: In mid-January, regarding US sanctions aimed at Iran, Indian Foreign Secretary Ranjan Mathai said: "“We have accepted sanctions which are made by the United Nations. Other sanctions do not apply to individual countries. We don’t accept that position.” He also cited examples of other European countries such as Greece which continues to import oil from Iran. (Greece? Greece? Isn't something going on there, too?) India is the world's fourth-largest petroleum consumer. Last month an Indian delegation was in Tehran discussing options for payment. Central Bank of Iran agreed to open an account with an Indian bank for receiving payment. (Reuters reported at the time India's UCO Bank was the likely choice as it does not have any interests in the United States.) India agreed to pay, primarily, the price of crude oil it imports from Iran in gold, which will make it the first country to drop the US dollar for purchasing the Iranian oil. (Iraq and Libya previously announced that they would begin accepting non-US dollar currencies and gold for their oil. We know what happened to them.) Further to India's ties with Iran, because Pakistan blocks Indian commerce through Afghanistan to Central Asia, Iran forms a key Indian transit route. For more see, "The Coming U.S.-India Train Wreck".

Exclusive: India delegation to go to Iran to boost oil exports
Matthias Williams Thomson Reuters Canada/UK February 2, 2012

NEW DELHI - (Reuters) - India will send a business delegation to Iran at the end of February to explore how it can increase exports in order to meet payments for Iranian oil hit by international sanctions, a senior government official said on Thursday.

India, Iran's second-biggest oil client after China, buys 12 percent of its oil needs from the Islamic nation, worth about $12 billion annually.

Last month, Reuters reported that India would pay for some of its oil imports in rupees via an Indian bank, resorting to the partially convertible currency after more than a year of payment problems in the face of fresh, tougher U.S. sanctions.

To meet its oil demand, India could step up exports including in farm products such as wheat, industrial goods and gems and jewelry, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivities of the subject.

"You have to devise a mechanism with which you can pay for the import of oil and avoid attracting sanctions," the official said. "We will need to lead a business delegation there, taking potential exporters across a range of sectors, and go out there and talk to their counterparts."

"It's for individual traders to strike deals with each other," the official said.

India to send business delegation to Iran
Press TV Iran February 2, 2012

... After imposing sanctions against Iran's oil and Central Bank on December 31, 2011, Washington has been trying to persuade emerging economies in Asia -- Iran's biggest oil market -- to cut imports of petroleum from the country.

US sanctions require foreign financial firms to make a choice between doing business with Iran's Central Bank and oil sector or with the US financial sector.

Earlier this week, however, Indian Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee refuted US call for putting a ban on Iran oil, saying India would continue to buy Tehran's oil despite sanctions.

"It is not possible for India to take any decision to reduce the imports from Iran drastically, because among the countries which can provide the requirement of the emerging economies, Iran is an important country amongst them."

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. - English language idiom. Russia and China vetoed the latest UN Security Council resolution on the ongoing violence in Syria because it leaves out sanctions on the opposition alongside those on the Assad government. Moscow said it had no other option but to use its veto right, claiming the draft didn't realistically reflect the situation in Syria, and, as a result, could have sent an unbalanced signal to all sides of the conflict. American Ambassador Susan Rice told the Security Council following the vote that the US was “disgusted” at Russia and China’s decision to go against the resolution. Downing Street said over the weekend the actions of Russia and China were "incomprehensible and inexcusable". President Nicolas Sarkozy of France meanwhile said he would speak with President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia to discuss the situation in Syria, which he described as a "scandal". German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she was "appalled" by Russia’s obstruction of the UN Security council resolution. The tidal wave of criticism now being directed at Russia and China leaves little scope for any new USNC document. The diplomatic standoff around Syria seems to be reaching its endgame as the US and the UK withdrew their ambassadors today and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is flying to Damascus tomorrow for talks with the Assad government.

West 'hysterical' and wrong over Syria – Lavrov
RT Russia February 6, 2012

The western reaction to Moscow and Beijing's veto on the UN Security Council resolution on Syria is “indecent” and “almost hysterical”, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said. “Those who get angry are hardly ever right,” Lavrov stated at a media conference in Moscow. According to the diplomat, the point of such “hysterical statements” is to conceal what has really been happening in Syria. ...

Below: Russia and China's double veto of the Arab League resolution on Syria in the United Nations Security Council could come to mark the end of the "post-Soviet era" in world politics. As a test of will develops over Damascus, the coordinated move to challenge Washington on its triumphalist march from Libya toward Syria and Iran constitutes a watershed event thinks retired Indian diplomat, Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar. In his analysis he writes: "The West has chosen to ignore China's stance. Obviously, the West is dismissive about the dragon's pretensions in the Middle East, whereas it takes the bear seriously, given its vast experience historically in the affairs of that region. So, the West's propaganda barrage is pitting Russia as a hurdle to democratic reforms and change in the Middle East."

Run-up to proxy war over Syria
M K Bhadrakumar Asia Times Online Hong Kong Dateline February 7, 2012

If a date needs to fixed marking the end of "post-Soviet era" in world politics, it might fall on February 4, 2012. Russia and China's double veto of the Arab League resolution on Syria in the United Nations Security Council constitutes a watershed event.

Curiously, the secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Anders Fogh Rasmussen chose the same day as the veto in New York to snub Russia; saying that that the alliance would have the first elements of the US's missile defense system (ABM) up and running in Europe by the alliance's summit in May in Chicago, no matter Moscow's objections.

The first double veto by Russia and China on the Syrian issue in the United Nations Security Council last October was a coordinated move that sought to scuttle a resolution that might be seized by the Western alliance to mount a military operation in Syria. But the repeat double veto on a motion pressing Syria's President Bashar al-Assad to abandon power conveys a much bigger meaning.

The Syrian situation has evolved since October and has surged as a geopolitical struggle over the future of the Iranian regime, control of the Middle East's oil and the perpetuation of the West's preponderant influence in that region. Russia and China sense that they could be booted out of the Middle East.

With the double veto, the only option available for the US and its allies in Syria is to flout both international law and the UN charter and overthrow the regime in Damascus. Indeed, the option exists to backtrack from the path of covert intervention, but it is a remote possibility. According to former Central Intelligence Agency officer Philip Giraldi, writing in the current issue of The American Conservative magazine:

Unmarked NATO warplanes are arriving at Turkish military bases close to Iskenderum on the Syrian border, delivering weapons from the late Muammar Gaddafi's arsenals as well as volunteers from the Libyan Transitional National Council who are experienced in pitting local volunteers against trained soldiers, a skill they acquired confronting Gaddafi's army. Iskenderum is also the seat of the Free Syrian Army, the armed wing of the Syrian National Council. French and British special forces trainers are on the ground, assisting the Syrian rebels while the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] and US Spec Ops are providing communications equipment and intelligence to assist the rebel cause, enabling the fighters to avoid concentrations of Syrian soldiers.

Giraldi adds that the CIA analysts themselves are "skeptical regarding the approach to war", as they know that the frequently cited United Nations account of civilians killed is based largely on rebel sources and uncorroborated. ...

Agence France-Presse reported February 6, 2012 15:41 Zulu Time:

“The United States has suspended operations of our embassy in Damascus as of February 6. Ambassador (Robert) Ford and all American personnel have now departed the country,” a State Department statement said. ... “This is a decision we never take lightly. Our embassies are a very important part of our diplomacy around the world,” a senior official said.

The Telegraph reports:

Shortly before the embassy’s closure was announced, [Robert Ford, the US ambassador,] vowed to seek further sanctions against Damascus but maintained that the West did not need to launch a military campaign as it did in Libya. “It is very important for us to try to resolve this without recourse to outside military intervention,” he told NBC. “And I think that's possible.”

US closes embassy in Syria as diplomatic pressure mounts on Assad
Alex Spillius and Henry Samuel in Paris Daily Telegraph UK February 6, 2012

... The idea of a “Friends of Syria” group was mooted over the weekend by Mr Sarkozy and Alain Juppé, the French foreign minister. “We are going to help the Syrian opposition to structure itself, to get organised,” Mr Juppé said.

"Europe will further tighten the sanctions imposed on the Syrian regime and then we are going to try to ratchet up international pressure and there will come a time when the regime will be obliged to acknowledge that it is totally isolated and that it cannot continue.”

But diplomatic sources say France is intent on avoiding forming a “Western front” against the Syrian regime, preferring that the Arab League play a central role. A meeting is slated “in the coming days”, the sources told Le Figaro newspaper.

Qatar, who currently holds the presidency of the Arab League, could play a pivotal role, both in stepping up sanctions and – potentially – coordinating military aid to the Syrian opposition, analysts said.

“A great deal of sanctions decided by member states have still not been applied, like for example the suspension of air routes between Damascas and Arab capitals,” Hazem Nahar, a Syrian opposition figure based in Qatar told Le Monde. “If all these measures became effective, the regime would have much more trouble paying its chabiha – pro-regime miltita – and security service members. That could accelerate its collapse.”

“Western countries are terrified by the idea of military intervention,” said David Roberts of the Royal United Services Institute in Doha. “But after the Russian-Chinese veto, the Qataris could feel more authorised to send money, arms and instructors to members of the Free Syrian Army,” he told Le Monde.

Gérard Longuet, the French defence miniser, kept up criticism of the UN veto saying: "It's a disgrace for the countries that refuse to assume their responsibilities." ...

Russia is determined not be drawn into proxy wars which are a drain on resources, but the Western Axis is comfortable since the fabulously wealthy Qatari emir is prepared to bankroll operations. And, to end, no post on Syria would be complete without the latest from the informed, insightful Brazilian reporter, Pepe Escobar. United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the double veto on Syria by Russia and China a "travesty", while US ambassador to the UN Susan Rice says it was "disgusting". Now it's the time, says Escobar, for the Western Axis to get on with its Plan B - to plunge Syria into full-blown civil war.

Syria and those 'disgusting' BRICS
Pepe Escobar Asia Times Online Hong Kong Dateline February 7, 2012

A Greek choir of the "disgusted" and the "outraged" predictably greeted BRICS members Russia and China double veto to the United Nations Security Council resolution imposing regime change in Syria. The resolution was backed by that haven of democracy, the GCC League, the organization controlled by the six monarchies/emirates of the Gulf Cooperation Council formerly known as the Arab League.

United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the double veto a "travesty". Then Clinton duly incited "friends of democratic Syria" to keep working for regime change, which was the object of the resolution. The copyright for this idea is held by the liberator of Libya, neo-Napoleonic French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who said Paris was already working to create a NATOGCC "Friends of the Syrian People Group" in charge of implementing the Arab League's regime change plan.

Right on cue, Paris puppet Burhan Ghalyun, the head of the Syrian National Council (SNC) - the opposition umbrella group - also summoned these countries "friendly to the Syrian people". Everybody knows who they are; the US, Britain, France, Israel and GCC members Qatar and Saudi Arabia. With "friends" like these, the "Syrian people" certainly don't need enemies. ...

Russia, vocally - and China, silently - had been adamant for weeks; forget about a UN resolution for regime change in Syria, or worse yet, opening the doors for a Libya-style NATO humanitarian bombing.

Russia has its own geopolitical reasons to consider Syria a red line; Syria hosts Russia's only naval base in the Mediterranean, in the port of Tartus; and Syria buys Russian weapons. But in fact all the five BRICS - plus the overwhelmingly majority of the developing world - are in synch; forget about regime change-enabling UN resolutions, promoted by the usual suspect Western trio US-Britain-France and - the summit of hypocrisy - devised by the "democratic" House of Saud and Qatar. ...

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC

Photo right: Leonard Cohen (born September 21, 1934, Montreal, Quebec, Canada) in 2008. Jim comment: His 1966 novel, Beautiful Losers, grappled with the mysticism of the Mohawk Catholic saint Kateri Tekakwitha. That novel, together with James Joyce's 1917 novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (wherein Joyce traces the intellectual and religio-philosophical awakening of young Stephen Dedalus as he begins to question and rebel against the Catholic and Irish conventions with which he has been raised) and Stephen Crane's 1895 novel, The Red Badge of Courage (Crane tells the tale of a young man who is traumatized by his experience in the American Civil War) were three of the most important books of my own inner 'coming-of-age'. Themes of political and social justice recur in Cohen's work. Cohen is Jewish, and he has drawn from Jewish religious and cultural imagery throughout his career. Cohen has also been involved with Buddhism since the 1970s and was ordained a Buddhist monk in 1996; however he is still a religiously observant Jew: "I'm not looking for a new religion. I'm quite happy with the old one, with Judaism." How does a poet of despair survive in rock ʻn’ roll? Ideas are the engine of Leonard Cohen’s success. His ideas are old and radical and, on occasion, surprisingly persuasive.

Below: Tablet is a daily online magazine of Jewish news, ideas, and culture. Liel Leibovitz is the author, most recently, of The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ideals of Divine Election, co-written with Todd Gitlin. A native of Tel Aviv, he completed his doctoral studies in communications at Columbia University, researching the ontology of video games. This means he spends more time playing games than a grown man should. Liel Leibovitz is at work on a book about Leonard Cohen, to be published next year by W.W. Norton.

St. Leonard’s Passion
Liel Leibovitz Tablet Magazine USA January 31, 2012

Leonard Cohen releases his 12th studio album, the profoundly moving Old Ideas, today. None of his records has ever cracked the top 50, and his last album, 2004’s Dear Heather, peaked at No. 131 on the Billboard charts. Those few of his songs that are well-known—particularly the ubiquitous “Hallelujah”—are well-known for being covered by other musicians. He is 77 years old, and his peers are either nostalgia acts or four decades dead, icons of a church that’s fallen into sad disrepair.

But not Cohen: He’s featured on the album’s cover, dressed in a suit and a tie, donning his trademark fedora and wearing dark shades, sitting on a blue wooden chair in a Los Angeles backyard, grinning slightly, and reading a book. It’s a fitting pose for the man he’s become, the kind and pensive dispenser of profound truths who earns in acclaim what he lacks in raw popularity; he’s the only entertainer around who looks as natural receiving Spain’s top literary award from Prince Felipe as he does sharing the dais with Madonna and John Mellencamp at the 2008 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony that honored all three. Even that almanac of cool, the Financial Times, recently saw fit to lionize St. Leonard, calling him “a sage for the post-crisis age.”

It wasn’t a role he was preordained to play. ...

How, then, to explain Leonard Cohen’s unlikely third act, and the accolades he now enjoys from the same people who had once dismissed him as too grim for public consumption? Working on a book about Cohen, I asked myself this question frequently, and the best answer I found is right there in the title of his new album, Old Ideas. Although he’s rightfully celebrated for his grace with notes and his dexterity with lyrics, his ideas are the true engine of Cohen’s survival. In a pursuit like rock ’n’ roll, which is entirely devoted to redemption, Cohen’s ideas were not only old but radical. His peers all insisted that salvation was at hand. To go to a Doors concert was to stare at the lithe messiah undressing on stage and believe that it was entirely possible to break on through to the other side. To see Cohen play was to gawk at an aging Jew telling you that life was hard and laced with sorrow but that if we love each other and fuck one another and have the mad courage to laugh even when the sun is clearly setting, we’ll be just all right. To borrow a metaphor from a field never too far from Cohen’s heart, theology, Morrison, Hendrix, Joplin, and the rest were all good Christians, and they set themselves up as the redeemers who had to die for the sins of their fans. Cohen was a Jew, and like Jews he believed that salvation was nothing more than a lot of hard work and a small but sustainable reward.

The Jewish messiah, it turned out, was a gaunt poet with a guitar who promised not to whisk us away to some other, better world but to teach us how to come to terms with this one. Cohen’s peers all generated heat, but it was Cohen we’d always turned to for light, sometimes literally, like in the summer of 1970, in the English Isle of Wight, the former home of Queen Victoria and Alfred Lord Tennyson, and a favored retirement spot for naval officers and other assorted Empire types. The island, with its salt-stricken limestone cliffs, looks like the footprint of some enormous animal long extinct, and a few cool cats from London thought the primordial spot could be the British equivalent of Yasgur’s farm. They obtained the necessary permissions and invited the usual suspects. One day, late in August, they arrived: Hendrix and the Doors, Joni Mitchell and Miles Davis, Jethro Tull and the Who all set up in trailers just behind the enormous makeshift stage and awaited their turn to play.

The audience arrived, too, and at first, they all looked like decent kids. ... On its first day, the festival looked like it would live up to expectations and become England’s Woodstock.

And then came the troublemakers. ...

... I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center. - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. from Chapter 9, Player Piano (1952). The book was his first published novel. It is a dystopia of automation and capitalism, describing the dereliction they cause in the quality of life. The story takes place in a near-future society that is almost totally mechanized, eliminating the need for human laborers. This widespread mechanization creates conflict between the wealthy upper class—the engineers and managers who keep society running—and the lower class, whose skills and purpose in society have been replaced by machines. The book uses irony and sentimentality, which were to become a hallmark developed further in later works.

And so it goes. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was “born into prosperity, raised in austerity, and redeemed by posterity.” The last laugh is his

Below: Humanities is the magazine of the NationaL Endowment for the Humanities. The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent federal agency of the United States established by the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965 dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities. The NEH provides grants for high-quality humanities projects to cultural institutions such as museums, archives, libraries, colleges, universities, public television, and radio stations, and to individual scholars. The agency is also a base supporter of a network of private, nonprofit affiliates, the 56 humanities councils in the United States. Former San Francisco Chronicle book editor/critic and National Endowment for the Arts literature director David Kipen is the founder of Libros Schmibros, a lending library and used bookshop in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Unhappy ccamper
David Kipen Humanities USA January/February 2012: Volume 33, Number 1

Left: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

If you want your child to be a writer, go bankrupt.

The evidence confirms it. Failing that, at least suffer a severe financial reversal, obliging your son or daughter to endure the social opprobrium of changed schools and dropped friendships. Let him know the shame of fallen status, that he might grow ever more attuned to the minutest of slights, real or imagined. Careful scrutiny of his fellows will likely become a habit, a good sense of humor his first line of defense. Imagination will be his refuge. If you want your child to be a writer, do all this, and you may yet join an impecunious fraternity of writers’ parents that includes John Shakespeare, John Joyce, John Clemens, John Dickens, John Ernst Steinbeck, and Kurt Vonnegut, Sr. (Apparently, you might also want to consider changing your name to John.) Not convinced? Throw in Jorge Guillermo Borges Haslam, Edward Fitzgerald, and Richard Thomas Hammett, too.

There are great writers whose fathers did not go bust, of course. There are probably also politicians who got enough love as children. Just not many. The late Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., whose most productive decade has just entered the Library of America pantheon with the publication of Novels & Stories 1963–1973, is no less classic a case than the rest.

Born into a prosperous German-American family in 1922 Indianapolis, the son and grandson of architects, his mother a privileged beer heiress soon unstrung by the Depression, Vonnegut was rudely yanked out of private school as the thirties began. “A wise use of resources,” he once ruefully called this step down in the world, still smarting in an interview quoted in Charles J. Shields’s fine, undeluded new Vonnegut biography, And So It Goes.

The hijacking of Vonnegut’s early education embarrassed him not just at the time but down the road, when his career would bring him into contact with writers more well-read than he was. “Who’s Keats?,” he once innocently asked of his writing students at the University of Iowa, and then, mortified at their laughter, fled the room. Two years later, a “Who’s Keats?” banner hung above his thronged, adoring going-away party.

Vonnegut may not have read his Keats, but he found his way early to the models he’d need most: the black humorists Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, and H. L. Mencken. Together they form a too often unacknowledged tradition in our letters, that of the Great American Dyspeptic. (Later, Hunter S. Thompson would join their raffish parade.) If he’s lucky, a reader finds them in adolescence, perhaps first as a suspiciously recurrent presence in Bartlett’s Quotations or other bathroom books. Of them, only Twain was a novelist, and therefore the only one likely to stray onto a school syllabus. Twain has also become the one most strongly identified over the years with Vonnegut, and the one likeliest to wind up alongside him on the business end of some bluestocking’s library or curriculum challenges.

All that dubious glory lay far in the future when Vonnegut first embarked on the genre fiction career that ultimately led to Library of America’s first volume of his writing. ...

Indispensable to Vonnegut’s humane comedy is this informal sense of reader rapport. The first sentence of Slaughterhouse-Five uses the phrase “more or less,” the second, “pretty much.” Before the paragraph is out, we’ll see “And so on.” Precision matters less to Vonnegut than commiseration, the feeling that we’re all in this together and nobody finishes on top, and therefore that sweating every last adverb may not really be for him.

This isn’t laziness. No lazy man spends the two decades on a novel that Vonnegut lavished on Slaughterhouse-Five. It’s the modesty of a man underpraised for his early books and relatively overpraised for the late ones, who knew he was playing with house money from the day he got out of Dresden alive. ...

Václav Havel (right)—Czech playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and politician—was keen to the limits of rationalism, and insistent that something stands above us, beyond our understanding.

Below: Democracy Digest provides news, analysis and information on democracy assistance and related issues. The Digest consists of a blog and an e-bulletin produced at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). "Each year, with funding from the US Congress, NED supports more than 1,000 projects of non-governmental groups abroad who are working for democratic goals in more than 90 countries." The Digest is edited by Michael Allen, Special Assistant for Government Relations and Public Affairs at the National Endowment for Democracy. Paul Berman's essay appeared in The New Republic January 26, 2012. The full text is available to subscriber's only.

Václav Havel’s legacy – reconciling democracy and the human heart
Democracy Digest January 31, 2012

Visit this page for its embedded links.

Václav Havel was in favor of promoting what he called “the basic values of the West” – a democratic market society with human rights – viewing the “rapid dissemination” of the Western values as “the only salvation of the world today”—the best guarantee of “human freedom, justice, and prosperity,” writes Paul Berman.

But he blamed the democratic world for what he called “its limited ability to address humanity in a genuinely universal way,” he writes in The New Republic:

As a consequence, democracy is seen less and less as an open system that is best able to respond to people’s basic needs; as a set of possibilities that must be continually rediscovered, redefined, and brought into being. Instead democracy is seen as something given, finished, and complete as is, something that can be exported like cars or television sets, something that the more enlightened purchase and the less enlightened do not.

“One of the “most heroic figures of modern times,” he sought to develop “a more spiritual concept of democracy” to help resolve the “conflicts of cultures,” Berman writes.

Havel’s intellectual and political legacy rests on three ideas found in such essays as "The Power of the Powerless" and his "Open Letter to Gustáv Husák": ...

Related: Václav Havel stands an his own as an independent artist and thinker. He was, hovever, a part of the Velvet Revolution. (The term Velvet Revolution was coined by Rita Klímová, the dissidents' English translator who later became the new non-Communist regime's ambassador to the United States.) Václav Havel became the President of Czechoslovakia on December 29, 1989. Havel aside, NED was established in 1983 by an act of Congress. NED is structured to act as a grant-making foundation, distributing funds to private non-governmental organizations for the purpose of promoting democracy abroad. NED funds ultimately go to specially trained operatives who work, in conjunction with US Embassy personnel, with the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute and NGOs such as the Free Trade Union Institute (affiliated with the AFL/CIO), the National Chamber Foundation (the nonprofit think tank of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce), Freedom House and the Soros Foundation to meddle in the internal affairs of other nations in the attempt to foster US-friendly regime changes.


Workers from the National Democratic Institute, or NDI, wait as Egyptian officials raid their office in Cairo, Egypt, Thursday, December 29, 2011. Photo: AP

With Americans holed up in Cairo embassy, Egypt's lobbyists in DC quit
Dan Murphy Christian Science Monitor USA January 30, 2012

On Sunday, a group of Egyptian officers landed in the US to lobby for their annual $1.3 billion stipend form Congress to keep flowing. Not coincidentally, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta called Egypt's military ruler, Field Marshal Mohammed Tantawi, to ask a little favor at about the same time. Would he please lift the travel ban on a group of Americans working on democracy promotion in Egypt?

The answer, apparently, was no. Tonight the Americans, a group of employees for the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI), are holed up in the US Embassy in Cairo, avoiding possible arrest. One of them is Sam LaHood, IRI's Egypt director and the son of US President Barack Obama's Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. ...

Egypt to prosecute Americans in NGO probe
Ernesto Londoño Washington Post USA February 5, 2012

CAIRO — The Egyptian government intends to prosecute at least 40 people, including some U.S. citizens, as part of an investigation into nongovernmental organizations that receive foreign funding, state media reported Sunday.

The announcement came a day after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton warned the Egyptian Foreign Ministry that failure to quickly resolve the probe could jeopardize the more than $1.3 billion Egypt expects to get this year in U.S. aid. ...

The Post says as many as 19 Americans may be tried. So does the New York Times story.

Six Americans and 34 other NGO affiliates to be tried in Egyptian criminal court
Ahram Onlne Egypt February 5, 2012

Forty NGO personnel -- including Egyptians and six Americans -- are accused of influencing political groups in Egypt by offering funding through their NGOs and will be prosecuted as a result of the ministry of justice investigation.

Some suspects were shocked to discover that they were being investigated and that they were not allowed to leave the country, which sent alarms through diplomatic channels in the US. The US responded by demanding that Egypt's ruling military stop "endangering American lives."

The accused will stand trial in the Cairo criminal court with the travel ban still in place; six of whom are Americans working for publicly-funded US organisations in Egypt.

Notably, Sam LaHood – the son of US Transportation Secretary, Ray LaHood – works for the International Republican Institute and National Democratic Institute and is among those not allowed to leave Egypt.

A month earlier, police raided the Cairo offices of several US funded non-governmental organisations.

Washington had indicated before the raid that it is considering reviewing the $1.3 billion it gives the Egyptian military each year if they continued to intimidate the NGO employees.

Unrelated: Ned is a derogatory term applied in Scotland to hooligans, louts or petty criminals.

The Spengler Cup is an annual ice hockey tournament held in Davos, Switzerland. First held in 1923, the Spengler Cup is often cited as the oldest invitational ice hockey tournament in the world. The event is hosted by the Swiss team HC Davos and played each year in Davos, Switzerland, between Christmas (December 25) and New Year's Day. All the matches are played in the Vaillant Arena.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) is a Swiss non-profit foundation, based in Cologny, Geneva. It describes itself as an independent international organization committed to improving the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas. The Forum is best known for its annual meeting in Davos, a mountain resort in Graubünden, in the eastern Alps region of Switzerland. The meeting brings together some 2,500 top business leaders, international political leaders, selected intellectuals and journalists to discuss the most pressing issues facing the world, including health and the environment. The 2011 annual meeting in Davos was held from January 26 to January 30. The intellectual glitterati were at it again, pontificating on “G-Zero World” and the “Rise of Regions” (whatever that means) from an otherwise obscure Swiss village. Welcome to Davos.

Below: Clyde V. Prestowitz is the founder and president of the Economic Strategy Institute (ESI), where he has become one of the world's leading writers and strategists on globalization and competitiveness, and an influential advisor to the U.S. and other governments. He has also advised a number of global corporations such as Intel, FormFactor, and Fedex and serves on the advisory board of Indonesia's Center for International and Strategic Studies. He is the author of the 2010 book The Betrayal of American Prosperity: Free Market Delusions, America's Decline, and How We Must Compete in the Post-Dollar Era.

Clueless in Davos
Clyde Prestowitz Foreign Policy blogs USA January 26, 2012

As it always does this time of year, my inbox is filling up with messages of a certain kind. They all begin with: "I'm here in Davos" and then, in an intellectual form of name dropping, proceed to mention key words and phrases such as Geopolitical Risk, G-Zero World, and Rise of Regions. This, of course, sounds really heavyweight and important. But I am not fooled. Nobody knows what those words mean. The only purpose is inform me that the sender is among the elect glitterati who get invited to the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos.

You have to hand it to Klaus Schwab, the founder and CEO of the Forum. He's the greatest showman since P.T. Barnum. Short, bald, and unimposing, he is what you envision when someone says "gnome of Zurich." Yet, despite his anti-charisma, Schwab has managed to persuade a large number of the world's top CEOs, politicians, academics, media stars, and bureaucrats that they have to be in a cramped, second rate hotel in a cold Swiss village with mediocre skiing and food every year during the bridge weekend between January and February. Indeed, he has not only convinced these people that they have to be there, he has them begging him for invitations and prime spots on the program.

Of course, it's a combination of competitive vanity and convenience that makes it all work. Glitteratus A begs for an invitation because he/she can't stand the thought of not being there if Glitteratus B is there. The fact that many are there then makes it easy to do in a few days a lot of business with each other that without the meeting would take weeks or months. So, for organizing a nice party for them, the glitterati each pay Schwab anywhere from $50,000 to several hundred thousand dollars. I told you he's the best since Barnum.

The theory of Davos is that Davos man is setting the agenda for and leading the charge toward a fully globalized system of international relations. It is at the annual meeting that the Masters of the Universe divine the alignment of global forces and develop the marching orders that will guide them through the year after they descend from the mountain.

The reality is quite different. ...

Slaughterhouse-Five became a counterculture sensation, joining Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and anticipating his fellow Cornellian Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow in their time-scrambled use of the same “good war” to indict the absurdity of any war at all. - David Kipen, Unhappy camper, Kipen's look at Dresden firebombing survivor, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s literary career


The US now has 7,000 drones operating and 12,000 more on the ground according to Peter Singer, director of the 21st Century Initiative at the Brookings Institution. Photo: Reuters (File)

U.S. drones targeting rescuers and mourners
Glenn Greenwald Salon.com USA February 5, 2012

Visit this page for its embedded links.

On December 30 of last year, ABC News reported on a 16-year-old Pakistani boy, Tariq Khan, who was killed with his 12-year-old cousin when a car in which he was riding was hit with a missile fired by a U.S. drone. As I noted at the time, the report contained this extraordinary passage buried in the middle:

Asked for documentation of Tariq and Waheed’s deaths, Akbar did not provide pictures of the missile strike scene. Virtually none exist, since drones often target people who show up at the scene of an attack.

What made that sentence so amazing was that it basically amounts to a report that the U.S. first kills people with drones, then fires on the rescuers and others who arrive at the scene where the new corpses and injured victims lie.

In a just-released, richly documented report, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, on behalf of the Sunday Times, documents that this is exactly what the U.S. is doing — and worse:

The CIA’s drone campaign in Pakistan has killed dozens of civilians who had gone to help rescue victims or were attending funerals, an investigation by the Bureau for the Sunday Times has revealed.

The findings are published just days after President Obama claimed that the drone campaign in Pakistan was a “targeted, focused effort” that “has not caused a huge number of civilian casualties”. . . .

A three month investigation including eye witness reports has found evidence that at least 50 civilians were killed in follow-up strikes when they had gone to help victims. More than 20 civilians have also been attacked in deliberate strikes on funerals and mourners. The tactics have been condemned by leading legal experts. ...

“Drones also targeting mourners and rescuers”
DAWN.com Pakistan February 5, 2012

This item also deals with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism report. Visit this page for its embedded links.

.. The first confirmed attack on rescuers took place in North Waziristan on May 16, 2009. According to Mushtaq Yusufzai, a local journalist, Taliban militants had gathered in the village of Khaisor and at least 29 people died in total.

The Bureau reports that along with Taliban militants, locals said that six ordinary villagers also died that day. They were identified by Bureau field researchers as Sabir, Ikram, Mohib, Zahid, Mashal and Syed Noor.

Interestingly, the reports also reveal that often when the US attacks militants in Pakistan, the Taliban seal off the site to retrieve the dead. However, “an examination of thousands of credible reports relating to CIA drone strikes also shows frequent references to civilian rescuers. Mosques often exhort villagers to come forward and help, for example – particularly following attacks that mistakenly kill civilians.”

Quoting Christof Heyns, a South African law professor who is United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extra- judicial Executions, the report states that “Allegations of repeat strikes coming back after half an hour when medical personnel are on the ground are very worrying. To target civilians would be crimes of war.” Heyns is calling for an investigation into the Bureau’s findings.

The Bureau’s report also states that according to Peter Singer, director of the 21st Century Initiative at the Brookings Institution, the US now has 7,000 drones operating and 12,000 more on the ground. ...

Related: FBI again warns of secondary explosive devices, cautions officers to watch surroundings
PoliceOne.com USA May 17, 2004

Terrorists may use secondary explosive devices to kill and injure emergency personnel responding to an initial attack, the FBI has again warned U.S. law enforcement agencies.

PoliceOne has previously sent alerts of this subject, and we again warn law enforcement to be vigilant during all terrorist-type incidents for secondary attacks or explosions.

In its weekly bulletin sent late Wednesday, the FBI cautioned police officers and others to carefully watch their surroundings.

"These devices may be hidden in everyday objects such as vehicles, briefcases, flower pots or garbage cans, or can be sequential suicide attacks in the same locations, and are generally detonated less than one hour after initial attack, targeting first responders as well as the general population," the bulletin said.

One high-profile example of a secondary attack, according to one analyst, was the second plane to crash into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. Jack Spencer, Heritage Foundation senior policy analyst for defense policy, said rescue crews responding to the strike of the first airplane and spectators at the scene were caught by surprise.

"The problem is that once the initial explosion goes off, many people will believe that's it, and will respond accordingly," Spencer said. He said it is because of concerns about a secondary attack that law enforcement warns people to run away from an initial event. ...

N. Korea developing unmanned attack aircraft from U.S. drones: Source
Yonhap News Agency South Korea February 5, 2012

SEOUL, Feb. 5 (Yonhap) -- North Korea is developing unmanned attack aircraft using U.S. target drones purchased from the Middle East, a military source in Seoul said Sunday, indicating the aircraft will likely target the South.

"North Korea recently bought several U.S. MQM-107D Streakers from a Middle Eastern nation that appears to be Syria, and is developing unmanned attack aircraft based on them," the source said on condition of anonymity.

The MQM-107D Streaker is a high-speed target drone used by the U.S. and South Korean militaries for testing guided missiles.

North Korea has conducted numerous tests on high-speed target drones mounted with high explosives, but has yet to master the technology, the source said, citing South Korean intelligence sources.

If it succeeds in developing the attack aircraft, the North appears likely to deploy them near the inter-Korean border to target South Korean troops stationed on border islands in the Yellow Sea.

• Click on a headline below to go to that news item

Friday, February 3,2012

Commentary
Climate notes: Mexico’s rural politics and an example of how the global corporate media lies

Commentary
Harper goes to China next week to pander: Comments regarding his trip—shale-gas, bitumen and seal products

Commentary
Military attack on Iran? Round and round she goes, where she stops, nobody knows

Thursday, February 2,2012

Commentary
Another Canadian foreign policy is possible: Alternatives to Harper's militarism

Commentary
Decades of foreign bumbling push Syrians towards war: Can the present violence be stopped before it goes farther?

World News
Panetta: US to end combat role in Afghanistan next year. If true, how many permanent military bases will the USA leave in Afghanistan? Not to mention the intelligence assets and the private mercenary army operating out of the Kabul embassy

Commentary
In front of the smoke and mirrors, economic sleights of hand—a shell game (to be polite)

Wednesday, February 1,2012

Commentary
Eye on Canada's outlaw leader: Steal from the nation and the people, give to the 'nobles'

Commentary
Glen Ford: "When the U.S. president arrogates to himself the right to bomb and kill at will, with no respect for national boundaries and sovereign rights, he makes himself an outlaw."

World News
‘Mission accomplished’ in Libya? Not so fast & To those contemplating intervention in Syria, 'intervention lite' ain't so easy

World News
For the love of liberty. Liberian civil war, a bit of modern African history: Doublecrossing and crossdressing

World News
Droning on: "We Never Make Mistakes"

Tuesday, January 31,2012

World News
Fighting back: Syria under seige

Monday, January 30,2012

Commentary
As the lion defends her pride, the question is: What are North Atlantic Treaty Organization/Gulf Cooperation Council Western Axis members up to in Syria?

Commentary
What if the shoe were on the other foot? 'Iran Through the Looking Glass' & 'Through the Looking-Glass, and What the Western Axis Found There'

World News
Originally scheduled for decommissioning in March, LPD 15 being converted into an 'Afloat Forward Staging Base' scheduled to be ready by May

Sunday, January 29,2012

Arts
Though he was read by an eccentric few, we still live in Nietzsche's intellectual shadow

Social Ideas
The Inquisition built the modern world

World News
Reports of significant air, troop and warship movements near Iran

Below: With more than 30 years of experience in Latin American news and analysis, the Americas Program of the Center for International Policy is a leading source of information for activists, academics and citizens concerned about US foreign policy toward Latin America and movements for social justice within the hemisphere.

Mexico climate politics heats up
Kent Paterson Americas Program USA February 1, 2012

Drought has been a recurrent problem in the Sierra Tarahumara since at least the 1990s, and thousands of Raramuris have since fled their homes for Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua City and other urban refuges. But there is much more to their plight than just a changing climate.

History has not been kind to the indigenous Raramuri people of the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua. Pushed to remote mountains of a harsh land by Spanish and mestizo colonists, the Raramuri managed to hang on to their culture while eking out an existence based on rain-fed farming and small herd grazing. In recent decades their lands have been invaded again, this time by cattlemen, loggers, miners, dope growers, tourism developers, and soldiers.

According to Mexican analyst and farm activist Victor Quintana, the United Nations named six municipalities with a large Raramuri presence as among the 10 least-developed indigenous municipalities in Mexico in 2005.

Ironically, Quintana wrote in a recent column, the Raramuri suffer water shortages and malnutrition while from their Sierra Tarahumara springs the headwaters of rivers that nourish commercial, export-oriented agriculture in the “fertile valleys” below.

“Richness and prosperity on the lower river: misery where the water is born,” Quintana wrote. “And the rich Sinaloan, Sonoran, Baja Californian and Chihuahuan growers don`t pay a single cent for environmental services to the indigenous people of the Chihuahua mountains.”

In another metaphoric twist to the Raramuri crisis, Chihuahua state officials are considering slaughtering thousands of wild pigs that regularly cross the border from Texas and devour what little cover is left on a rain-starved land. The meat, which one state official insisted was “tasty” and low in fat content, would then be shipped to hungry indigenous communities in the mountains.

The Raramuri are fast becoming a political football in a sharpening national struggle ostensibly over climate change and agricultural policy, but also intimately tied to free trade, food sovereignty and corporate consolidation of the food supply. Recently, Mexican media have been filled with stories about drought and hunger devastating the homeland of a people known for their long-distance running skills and passionate Easter season festivities. ...

The degree to which Raramuris have become pawns in an ongoing chess game of socio-politics was amply exhibited earlier this month when hundreds of indigenous residents of the Sierra Tarahumara were transported en masse to an event attended by Chihuahua Governor Cesar Duarte and Enrique Pena Nieto, the 2012 presidential candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). ...

The Wall Street Journal’s willful climate lies
Auden Schendler Grist USA February 1, 2012

Visit this page for its embedded links.

It wasn’t surprising that the Wall Street Journal published an error-riddled op-ed about climate change last week, essentially saying it was bunk and we shouldn’t “panic” about it. We’ve gotten used to that. But what has really started to amaze me about that newspaper’s editorial page and the far right is that they now venture beyond delusion or misinformation. They lie, and they know they are lying.

That’s a big claim, but how else do you account for the statement that “the earth hasn’t warmed for well over 10 years now” when it is well known by anyone working on climate that 2010 was the hottest year on record?

Despite the fact that many of the authors of the article are funded by ExxonMobil through the George C. Marshall Institute, and despite the fact that none of them are leading scientists, they, and the editor of the opinion page, simply had to know that that statement was false. They may be unethical, but they are not stupid. ... But rarely before have we seen brazen, unobscured lying in such a prominent location. ...

Big Energy has desires. China has desires. British Columbia has desires. Newfoundland and Labrador has desires. Harper wants to provide gratification for those desires.

From our desk dictionary:

pander (verb)

: to act as a pander; especially : to provide gratification for others' desires

pander (noun)

1 a : a go-between in love intrigues b : pimp

2 : someone who caters to or exploits the weaknesses of others

Below: PetroChina's estimated US$1 billion purchase of a stake in a Canadian shale-gas project sets the tone for Prime Minister Stephen Harper's visit to Beijing next week. China's urgent desire to exploit its own vast unconventional gas reserves dovetails nicely with Canada's technological know-how and willingness to do business.

Shale-gas deal sweetens Harper's Beijing trip
Robert M Cutler Asia Times Online Hong Kong Dateline February 4, 2012

MONTREAL - Chinese energy policy has increased its focus on commercial ties with Canada and the acquisition of technologies for exploration and development of unconventional natural gas in general and shale gas in particular.

This emerges from preparations being made in Beijing to receive Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper next week. He is due to arrive on Wednesday for a five-day visit to continue progress over a wide range of issues covering the economy and trade, energy and resources, and science and education, to public health and law enforcement.

China's ambassador to Canada, Zhang Junsai, explained to the Canadian Press news service that the two countries "have every reason to forge a stable and win-win partnership in the long run in the field of resources" in view of China's "rapid industrialization and urbanization, and its demand for energy and resources" on the one hand and, on the other, Canada's "rich[ness] in energy and resources" and "stable political situation as well as favorable conditions for investment". ...

B.C. premier plans liquefied natural gas exports
CBC News Canada February 3, 2012

Liquefied natural gas is the future of energy exports in B.C., Premier Christy Clark announced on Friday morning.

Clark was at Burnaby's BCIT campus to set out a new 10-year energy plan for the province, which includes the construction of two liquid natural gas plants in northern B.C. by 2020.

The premier said the plants in Kitimat would generate $2 billion in new revenue for the government each year.

"Like all commodities, natural gas prices go up and down. But one thing is clear to us: it is worth a lot more to us in Asia than it is in North America — a market to which we are currently captive," said Clark.

A pipeline that would deliver the gas from northeast B.C. to Kitimat has already been approved, and the National Energy Board has also approved the export permits needed to send the liquefied natural gas overseas.

The B.C. government said future liquid natural gas exploration and development could produce around $20 billion in investment and create thousands of new long-term jobs.

In a related announcement the premier revealed a change in the province's standard for energy self-sufficiency, which will clear the way for the liquid natural gas plants to get the enormous power requirements they need to convert the gas.

Related: Gateway pipeline unsustainable, energy union tells NEB
Media release Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada Canada February 2, 2012

OTTAWA -- In its submission to the National Energy Board, Canada's largest energy union says the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline is being built to export more bitumen than we could even produce by 2025.

In the process, the pipeline will cause profound damage to the environment, cost more than 26,000 Canadian jobs, and put Canada's own energy needs at risk, says the brief submitted today by the the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada (CEP).

"These are all serious threats to the public interest that should be examined carefully by the NEB as its mandate demands," says CEP President Dave Coles.

The CEP submission refers to independent research which shows that current Canadian export capacity will exceed Western Canadian projected production until 2025, and after 2025 Northern Gateway will add significant additional surplus capacity to that created by Keystone XL and Kinder Morgan (TMX).

The union also hired one of Canada's leading economic consulting companies, Informetrica Inc., to assess the potential impact of the Northern Gateway project.

"A study by Informetrica shows there are an estimated 26,000 jobs that would otherwise be created in the Canadian economy if bitumen extracted in Alberta was simply upgraded in Canada," says Coles. "As with the Keystone XL pipeline, Gateway would take thousands of jobs away from Canadian workers."

The brief points out that two major refinery closures in Ontario and Quebec have created even more of a dependency on foreign suppliers for refined petroleum products: gasoline, diesel fuel and heating oil.

"Canadians should also be alarmed that, while Canada exports most of its bitumen to foreign sources, Atlantic Canada and Quebec import 90% of their oil, and Ontario imports 30%," says Coles. ...

Noted: Harper to promote seal products on China trip
Tamara Baluja Globe and Mail Canada February 3, 2012

n a bid to resurrect Canada’s flailing sealing industry, Prime Minister Stephen Harper will make seal product exports a priority on his trip to China next week.

The Conservatives have been pushing to open the Chinese market for more than two years, but little materialized from a tentative deal that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans announced in early 2011.

“Our government will continue to vigorously defend this humane and highly regulated industry and to seek new international markets for Canadian seal products, including China,” Mr. Harper said in a statement released on Thursday.

Although the sealing industry is a small fraction of Canada’s fishing industry on the Atlantic coast, the annual hunt is a hot political topic in Newfoundland and Labrador, where the Conservatives hold many seats and most of the country’s 11,000 registered seal hunters live.

Russia used to be Canada’s largest buyer of seal items, but banned the import of harp seal pelts two months ago, and the European Union has had a ban in effect since 2010. Animal activists say these two bans ring the death knell of the East Coast’s commercial seal hunt.

Many Canadian sealers seem to have given up hope since the bans went into effect. Last year, some 37,000 harp seals were killed, only 10 per cent of the total allowed catch set by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. ...

Further noted: Exclusive: How the Sierra Club took millions from the natural gas industry—and why they stopped
Bryan Walsh TIME, Ecocentric blog USA Febrluary 2, 2012

Visit this page for its embedded links and video, "The Fuss Over Fracking".

Mainstream environmental groups have struggled to find the right line on shale natural gas and the hydraulic fracturing or fracking process. Gas has a much smaller carbon footprint than coal—according to most scientists—and produces far fewer air pollutants. That was enough for many major green groups to give support to gas as a “bridge fuel” to a cleaner energy future—the next best domestic alternative to coal as an electricity source while alternatives like wind and solar scaled up. But for grassroots members of those groups—especially in parts of the country where fracking was already underway—the risk of local pollution wasn’t worth the national and global climate benefits of greater gas consumption, especially as media and scientific attention on the potential threats to water supplies grew. It was a major challenge for environmental leaders: how to balance local concerns about traditional pollution with planet-sized worries over climate change, and how to work with corporate America without being seen as selling out.

Now the biggest and oldest environmental group in the U.S. finds itself caught on the horns of that dilemma. TIME has learned that between 2007 and 2010 the Sierra Club accepted over $25 million in donations from the gas industry, mostly from Aubrey McClendon, CEO of Chesapeake Energy—one of the biggest gas drilling companies in the U.S. and a firm heavily involved in fracking—to help fund the Club’s Beyond Coal campaign. Though the group ended its relationship with Chesapeake in 2010—and the Club says it turned its back on an additional $30 million in promised donations—the news raises concerns about influence industry may have had on the Sierra Club’s independence and its support of natural gas in the past. It’s also sure to anger ordinary members who’ve been uneasy about the Club’s relationship with corporations. “The chapter groups and volunteers depend on the Club to have their back as they fight pollution from any industry, and we need to be unrestrained in our advocacy,” Michael Brune, the Sierra Club’s executive director since 2010, told me. “The first rule of advocacy of is that you shouldn’t take money from industries and companies you’re trying to change.” ...

Round and round she goes, where she stops, nobody knows - A standard phrase used by carnival barkers. This was one of the lines from "Major Bowes Original Amateur Hour" which was a radio show that ran from 1934-1948, when it made the transition to television as the "Ted Mack Original Amateur Hour" and ran until 1970. Smokey Stover opines: "'This is the show that made the "gong" famous as well as "the wheel of fortune" and the phrase: "round' and 'round she goes, and where she stops, nobody knows."' I'm inclined to think the phrase, as used on the Amateur Hour, referred to the Wheel of Fortune. Is this, then, the first use of the catch-phrase? Or just the show that made it famous? Does it matter?"

Items: Will Israel really attack Iran?
gray's choices USA January 29, 2012

The real answer is no, they will not. But you would never figure that out by reading the New York Times.

The sensationalist article in the Sunday New York Times Magazine (Jan. 29) adds to the hysteria surrounding U.S. and Israeli relations with Iran. Ronen Bergman, a columnist with the leading Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, concludes that Israel will probably attack Iran this year.

He draws this fearful conclusion after recounting his discussions with key Israeli military and intelligence officials, present and former, who describe to him in great detail: (1) why Israel is incapable of conducting such an attack; (2) why such a foolhardy action would fail to stop Iran’s nuclear program; and (3) why it would actually leave the situation far worse than it is now.

Say what?

Not only is his conclusion at odds with virtually everything he produces as evidence, but there are some omissions in his analysis that regrettably have become predictably routine in talking about the Iranian nuclear program: ...

Why do these false alarms keep going off? Bergman suggests an answer with disarming honesty: “Some have argued that Israel has intentionally exaggerated its assessments to create an atmosphere of fear that would drag Europe into its extensive economic campaign against Iran…” To this, the ubiquitous “senior American official” adds that “It is unclear if the Israelis firmly believe this or are using worst-case estimates to raise greater urgency from the United States.” In other words, Israel benefits by keeping the pot near the boiling point so that no one can ignore the Iran issue, even for a moment. ...

Below: In an unexpectedly low-key visit, US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey has explicitly warned Israel's leadership that the US won't defend Israel if it unilaterally strikes Iran. However, Israel knows it can count on the US right-wing to pressurize Washington into falling in line over an attack, particularly in an election year. Gareth Porter elaborates.

Dempsey told Israelis U.S. won't join their war on Iran
Gareth Porter Inter Press Service International February 1, 2012


General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Photo: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

WASHINGTON, Feb 1, 2012 (IPS) - Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey told Israeli leaders Jan. 20 that the United States would not participate in a war against Iran begun by Israel without prior agreement from Washington, according to accounts from well-placed senior military officers.

Dempsey's warning, conveyed to both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak, represents the strongest move yet by President Barack Obama to deter an Israeli attack and ensure that the United States is not caught up in a regional conflagration with Iran.

But the Israeli government remains defiant about maintaining its freedom of action to make war on Iran, and it is counting on the influence of right-wing extremist views in U.S. politics to bring pressure to bear on Obama to fall into line with a possible Israeli attack during the election campaign this fall.

Obama still appears reluctant to break publicly and explicitly with Israel over its threat of military aggression against Iran, even in the absence of evidence Iran has decided to build a nuclear weapon.

Dempsey's trip was highly unusual, in that there was neither a press conference by the chairman nor any public statement by either side about the substance of his meetings with Israeli leaders. Even more remarkable, no leak about what he said to the Israelis has appeared in either U.S. or Israeli news media, indicating that both sides have regarded what Dempsey said as extremely sensitive.

The substance of Dempsey's warning to the Israelis has become known, however, to active and retired senior flag officers with connections to the JCS, according to a military source who got it from those officers.

A spokesman for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Commander Patrick McNally, offered no comment Wednesday when IPS asked him about the above account of Dempsey's warning to the Israelis. ...

Below: In roughly one month, no less than three US aircraft carriers and their strike groups will be sloshing around the 'American Gulf', the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea. The only good thing among all this weaponized orgy is that Tehran and Washington are still talking - sort of - using the proverbial back channels.

Fear and loathing in the American Gulf
Pepe Escobar Asia Times Online Hong Kong February 3, 2012

Persian Gulf? Khaleej-e-Fars? Forget it; time to call it the American Gulf - to the delight of the vultures, jackals and hyenas of war, Israeli and Anglo-American. The House of Saud wouldn't be too displeased either.

So much for the Pentagon's "pivoting" strategy from the Middle East to East Asia - recently announced by United States President Barack Obama. The confrontation against China starts in Southwest Asia - in the American Gulf; and goes way beyond Washington cheerleading the hardcore Sunni sectarian killers of Jundallah in Iran's Sistan-Balochistan province, Israeli Mossad agents posing as US Central Intelligence Agency operatives, serial assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists, computer viruses, and ludicrous accusations of Tehran helping al-Qaeda and vice-versa. ...

The only good thing among all this weaponized orgy is that Tehran and Washington are still talking - sort of - using the proverbial back channels; in Baghdad (via both ambassadors); via Turkey (with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan as middleman); and in Vienna, the headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Agency (via diplomats). There's a five-month window for good sense to prevail until July 1 - when the US/European Union oil embargo on Iran kicks in. ...

The aggressive militarism of this government is central to its long-term political project for transforming this country -- that’s why it's imperative that all those fighting against Harper's domestic agenda also oppose his government’s foreign policy. - Derrick O'Keefe, Expanding foreign military bases serves Harper's war agenda, June 8, 2011

The Harper Government is moving quickly to institutionalize its emphasis on war fighting. Major capital acquisition programs such as the stealth F-35 strike aircraft, new nuclear submarines, frigates and destroyers consolidate a weapons-driven defence policy. These are now among the most advanced platforms for fighting in the sort of great power war that no one survives. The total expense is likely to exceed $100 billion, limiting capacity for other roles and imposing huge opportunity costs on the whole public sector. - Peter Langille, Dr. Peter Langille directs Global Common Security i3, where he specializes in peace and conflict studies, defense analysis and UN peace operations. He teaches in McMaster University's Peace Studies program.

Another Canadian foreign policy is possible: Alternatives to Harper's militarism
Peter Langille rabble.ca Canada February 2, 2012

The many Canadians who support our country's role as a peacemaker in the global community are likely to remain frustrated for the next four years. For the past two decades there has been an unheralded shift in emphasis towards war fighting and preparing for irregular war on an ongoing basis.

Given the ascendancy of militarism, it may now seem pointless to try to make the case for peace, the prevention of armed conflict and the protection of civilians. On the contrary, it is vital during these dark years that we keep these goals alive, and not succumb to the notion that it is a naïve and impossible dream.

Just as the Cold War was winding down, former Conservative Defence Minister Perrin Beattie introduced the "long war" policy. The objectives were three-fold: to expand the Canadian Forces, the defence-industrial base, and the "constituency of defence" so as to ready the nation for protracted conventional war. Naturally, expanding the defence constituency would also help to build a broader conservative constituency.

Redirecting this trajectory won't be easy. Understanding a few of the interests and connections in play is a first step. It is also important for people to recognize that there are credible alternatives, that we can offer an agenda for sustainable security. ...

Decades of foreign bumbling push Syrians towards war
Charles Glass The National Abu Dhabi, UAE January 31, 2012

Syria's leading poet Ali Ahmad Said Asbar, better known by his nom de plume Adonis, spoke for many in his country when he said recently: "I'm against the regimes of [Tunisia's Zine el Abidine] Ben Ali and [Syria's Bashar Al] Assad and against the Islamist opposition, because I don't want to fight one despotism for the sake of another."

The young dissidents risking their lives in Syria's streets are not doing so to bring in a new form of despotism, but that does not mean it won't happen anyway.

Syrian dissidents, most of whom are genuine democrats, see themselves as part of that tidal wave of revolutions that began a year ago in Tunisia and spread to Egypt, Yemen, Libya and Bahrain.

The Tunisian revolution, which of all the Arab Spring uprisings suffered the least foreign interference (apart from a French attempt to rearm the old regime), is doing well. The secularist president, Moncef Marzouki, is governing under an accommodation with the Islamists that so far suits the country. The outcome in the other Arab Spring states has yet to be decided, so Syrians cannot rely on them as guides to their own destiny.

Earlier revolutions in the Middle East have gone wrong, among them the Lebanese, Palestinian and Iranian. In 1975 young Lebanese, every bit as idealistic as their Syrian counterparts today, began a revolution against corruption and pseudo-democracy. It produced a 15-year war, foreign occupation and devastation. The Palestinian revolution sold out, making the lives of the people it claimed to represent more wretched in the Israeli occupied territories and in exile (most obviously, in Lebanon and Kuwait). The Iranian revolution, begun as a coalition of hope in 1978, led to a regime more brutal and corrupt than the one it replaced. Revolutions produce surprising outcomes, and those who start them must be prepared for the unintended consequences of success as much as for failure. The predicted futures for Syria are many and contradictory. ...

Some columnists in the Lebanese press suggest that Mr Al Assad is preparing the ground for retreat into an Alawite state centred on Latakia in the north-west that would bring about the Balkanisation of Syria.

This happened once before. In 1920, when France occupied Syria, it divided the country into separate states: Damascus, Aleppo, Jebel Druze, Alexandretta, Greater Lebanon and the Alawite State. Each was given its own flag, postage stamps and governor. Uprisings burst forth immediately, and by 1936 most of Syria had been reunited. Lebanon remained apart, and France ceded Alexandretta to Turkey in 1939. (Syrian-Turkish animosity ever since must be seen against the background of this imperially-imposed loss.) The Alawites in 1920, as now, preferred Syria over a sectarian enclave.

In the current uprising, neither side appears capable of a swift military victory. The escalation of violence produces a loss of trust among communities within the Syrian body politic. In Homs, at the moment the heart of the rebellion, kidnapping has become a fact of life. Sunnis and Alawites venturing into each other's neighbourhoods suffer captivity. As in Lebanon when it cracked in late 1975, and in Iraq after the American-led invasion of 2003, kidnappings lead to sectarian exodus and ghettoisation. This is not what most Syrians want, but foreign intervention would push Syria in this direction.

The "new military humanists", the term Noam Chomsky coined in a 1999 book to describe those who seek local conflicts as excuses for armed western intervention, are calling for the United States and western Europe to do battle for the Syrian rebels. ... Yet an attempt to impose a military solution will increase the death toll, demolish infrastructure, further divide the country's communities and send many of its people to seek refuge across their borders as so many Lebanese and Iraqis did during their long conflicts. Surely, "the West" (a euphemism for the US) and the UN could find a better way. ...

Jim comment: The Western Axis should drop the Libyan scenario when dealing with Syria. The country’s opposition is neither homogenous, nor ideologically transparent, and the Axis cannot be completely sure who it is supporting. Russia and China are doing their best to bring reason into our equation.

Related: Russia says will veto "unacceptable" Syria resolution
Steve Gutterman Thomson Reuters Canada/UK February 1, 2012

MOSCOW - (Reuters) - Russia said on Wednesday it would veto any U.N. resolution on Syria that it finds unacceptable, after demanding any measure rule out military intervention to halt the bloodshed touched off by protests against President Bashar al-Assad's rule. ...

Arab and Western states urged the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday to act swiftly on a resolution backing an Arab League plan calling for Assad to hand powers to his deputy and defuse the 11-month-old uprising against his family's dynastic rule.

"If the text will be unacceptable for us we will vote against it, of course," Russian U.N. envoy Vitaly Churkin told reporters in Moscow via a videolink from New York. "If it is a text that we consider erroneous, that will lead to a worsening of the crisis, we will not allow it to be passed. That is unequivocal," he said.

His remarks came hours after Russia's envoy to the European Union, Vladimir Chizhov, said there was no chance the Western-Arab draft text could be accepted unless it expressly rejected armed intervention. ...

Despite the Russian comments, French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said a "window of hope" had opened. "We will work furiously in the next few days to try and get a resolution that will allow the Arab League to forge ahead in finding a solution," he told parliament in Paris. ...

UN resolution drops demands for Assad’s resignation, arms embargo - reports
RT Russia February 2, 2012

Diplomats at the United Nations Security Council have reportedly agreed to drop demands for an arms embargo against Syria and the resignation of President Bashar al-Assad. Russia had vocally opposed both points.

The latest revision removes a clause calling on Assad to immediately transfer power to a deputy in advance of elections for a new government. However, the draft still “fully supports” the Arab League's decision to “facilitate a political transition leading to a democratic, plural political system,” the Associated Press reports. ...

Diplomatic insiders say there are currently two draft resolutions on the table in the UNSC. The proposal put forth by Morocco, the only Arab state on the Security Council, is opposed by Russia and China over provisions for foreign intervention in what both Moscow and Beijing call a ‘domestic’ affair. The two states had previously vetoed a similar resolution, fearing its passage would cause a repeat of the Libyan scenario with another NATO military incursion. ...

In November 2010, the US State Department announced it would spend $511 million to expand its embassy in Kabul. Speaking at the construction site, Ambassador Karl Eikenberry said the work would enable the United States "to carry out its pledge to maintain into the future its very significant security, government, economic, and civil society programs." He said the project, which is to be completed by 2014, had started earlier in 2010.

Panetta: US to end combat role in Afghanistan next year
Jason Ditz Antiwar.com News USA February 1, 2012

Visit this page for its embedded links.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told reporters Wednesday that the U.S. would end its combat role in Afghanistan by next year and switch primarily to a support and training role, reiterating the administration’s longstanding timetable.

While the media is treating the announcement as something new and a sign that the U.S. is beleaguered in their fruitless war against Afghan insurgents, the stated mission has not changed. A gradual drawdown of troops is planned to begin next year, followed by mountains of money, weapons, and training by 2014 and into the foreseeable future.

“Hopefully by mid to the latter part of 2013 we’ll be able to make a transition from a combat role to a training, advise and assist role,” Panetta said. “It’s still a pretty robust role that we’ll be engaged in. It’s not going to be a kind of formal combat role that we are now.”

But he made sure to clarify that the war and a sizable occupation of Afghanistan will go on: “That doesn’t mean that we’re not going to be combat ready. We will be because we always have to be in order to defend ourselves.”

Meanwhile, nothing about the NATO mission is going as planned. The Afghan army and police, scheduled to take over the security role in 2014, are corrupt, inept, and potentially infiltrated with insurgents. Violence keeps reaching all-time highs and U.S. and Afghan casualties continue to rise.

Furthermore, a recent U.S. National Intelligence Estimate concluded that the war was a stalemate, and a recently leaked U.S. military report found that the Taliban are set to retake power, with Pakistan’s help, after NATO forces withdraw.
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Pentagon pushes to leave Afghanistan as soon as possible
RT Russia February 2, 2012


US President Barack Obama speaks during the National Prayer Breakfast at the Washington Hilton in Washington, DC, February 2, 2012. Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP

Washington - Barely a month after the last US combat troops walked out of Iraq, the Pentagon announced on Wednesday that they would be altering already established plans in Afghanistan and doing the same there in a matter of months.

US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Wednesday announced that American combat troops will plan to vacate the nation of Afghanistan in 2013, a decision that contradicts a long-standing schedule that would have left the US military on an offensive role there through at least 2014.

Our goal is to complete all of that transition in 2013, and hopefully by mid- to the latter part of 2013, we'll be able to make a transition from a combat role to a training, advise and assist role," Secretary Panetta told reporters aboard a plane on Wednesday. Prior to the breaking announcement, US combat troops were expected to stay in Afghanistan until the end of 2014. Although they may stay stationed there for just as long still, Panetta wants offensive operations from American personnel winding down sometime during the next year.

The news of the decision comes almost immediately after a recent report that found US intelligence believes the Taliban will be able to successfully regain control even after American forces leave Afghanistan. The US and Taliban were believed to be initiating peace talks in order to negotiate a safe return of Afghanistan to Taliban rule, but more than ten years into a war that has provided few successes and massive casualties and disappointment, Panetta’s new plan seems to speed up the withdrawal process before matters worsen anymore. ...

Although the decision to end the war soon would add to the number of ended offensive operations under President Barack Obama’s belt if he secures a second term in the White House, critics are already attacking the administration for the new plan. Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney wasted no time responding to the news on Wednesday, offering some harsh words for the White House if they seriously want to end attacks on the Taliban ahead of plan. ...