The Etch-A-Sketch President: Artist uses toy to draw famous faces

By Sara Nelson

The face of newly sworn-in American President Barack Obama is a familiar sight on posters, T-shirts and badges – and it has now appeared on an Etch A Sketch too.

The portrait was created by artist George Vlosich, using the retro toy which originates from the late 1950s.

The likeness took 80 hours to draw with two dials on a plastic frame – all using one unbroken black line.

Artistic endeavours: The portrait of Barack Obama took 80 hours to produce

Twisting the knobs moves a stylus that removes aluminum powder from the back of the screen, leaving a black line.

Vlosich, from Ohio, created the image especially for an art gallery show to celebrate the first black President's inauguration.

He has also produced Etch A Sketch portraits of Will Smith, Tiger Woods, Muhammed Ali and The Beatles.

The 30-year-old, who has been using the toy since the age of ten, said: 'Each is an original work of art that takes 70-80 hours to create.

'Once finished, the piece is then preserved to stand the test of time by removing the powder from the Etch A Sketch.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1127863/The-Etch-A-Sketch-President-Artist-uses-toy-draw-famous-faces.html

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Next step unclear as judge defies Obama on Guantanamo

By Carol Rosenberg

The chief judge of the Guantanamo war court, Army Col. James Pohl, on Thursday spurned a request from President Barack Obama to freeze the military commissions there, and said he would go forward with next month's hearing for an alleged USS Cole bomber in a capital terror case.

The decision was immediately denounced by the head of the American Civil Liberties Union, which said the ruling smacked of Bush administration holdovers at the Pentagon trying to prevent President Barack Obama from fulfilling his promise to close Guantanamo.

The order, said ACLU executive director Anthony Romero, "raises serious questions about whether Secretary of Defense (Robert) Gates is the 'New Gates' or is the same old Gates under a new president. Gates certainly has the power to put a halt to these proceedings, and his lack of action demonstrates that we may have more of the same — rather than the change we were promised.''

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/61020.html

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Nevada shouldn't tolerate Torture Airlines

by GEORGE KNAPP

 

Few eyebrows were raised on Sunday when an otherwise-obscure Boeing 757 slipped into McCarran airport. The airliner is known to sometimes carry a crew of 11 and can accommodate 178 passengers, but it's unlikely the plane was ferrying gamblers or CES conventioneers to our fair city.

The plane is well-known, though, to a cadre of die-hard aviation watchers who recognized the registration number -- N226G. That number speaks volumes to those who understand what it represents.

N226G is widely suspected of being one of the infamous "rendition planes." As readers know, American intelligence agencies have been waging their own secret war on terror. They use an innocuous term "rendition" to describe the tactics they employ, but there's another word that would work just as well -- torture.

Extraordinary rendition is an abomination. It represents everything that we as Americans are supposed to oppose. Under this program, terrorists or suspected terrorists have been kidnapped, whisked away aboard private aircraft, plopped into dark, dank prisons located in countries with despicable human rights records and are reportedly then subjected to horrific torture techniques. Many suspected terrorists have died or disappeared. A "lucky" few have been let go, sometimes after months of physical abuse, because their captors had to reluctantly admit they had grabbed the wrong guys.

After 9/11, the Bush administration pursued these renditions with a vengeance. Whatever legal rights the suspects had were thrown out the window. International law was ignored. There were no warrants, no formal charges, no judicial oversight, no trials.

Can we say for certain that N226G is a torture plane? No. We do have a lot of clues, though. The plane is owned by a company called Comco, which is owned by another company called L-3 Capital, which has reportedly done a lot of work for prominent defense contractor Raytheon (a longtime fixture at the Nevada Test Site and Area 51). Maybe it is a coincidence, but L-3 and Raytheon both share the same modest address, a building in Helena, Mont., that houses several law offices. That, too, is a clue. In general, the CIA doesn't transport terrorists from place to place in planes that carry a CIA logo on the outside. The agency relies instead on shell companies run by fictional people, firms that are established by real-life lawyers who fudge the documents and try to make it as hard as possible for anyone to figure out who the real owners are. Nevada's loose incorporation laws have made it pretty easy for the CIA to set up bogus front companies right here in the Silver State, a fact that has been outlined in previous CityLife columns.

Anti-torture activists all over the world do their best to track every flight of every suspected torture plane, including N226G. One of its sister planes, also owned by Comco, caused an international stir back in 2003 when it was forced to land in India after it left Karachi, Pakistan, on its way to the Maldives, both of which are places you don't want to go if you're a rendition victim.

It seems doubtful that N226G arrived in Las Vegas this week carrying any torture victims. The rendition planes serve many functions, such as shuttling Homeland Security types or other spooks to different military bases for training or other operations. (One of the planes was carrying tons of cocaine when it crashed in Mexico not too long ago.) Other torture planes have been making regular stops in Nevada for the last few years, not only at McCarran but also at North Las Vegas and Nellis. Maybe the crews are trying to tie up loose ends before things hit the fan on Inauguration Day, a day when -- we hope -- America's well-documented reliance on illegal kidnappings and abominable torture techniques will end ... forever.

To make sure that Nevada does not remain a haven for the shell companies that perpetuate torture, let's hope state officials tighten up our incorporation laws so that phony companies created to shield illegal and heinous activities can be weeded out of the files and tossed into the trash where they belong. The next time N226G comes to town, maybe it will be carrying a planeload of porn stars instead of spooks.

 

http://www.lasvegascitylife.com/articles/2009/01/08/opinion/knappster/iq_26152313.txt

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Get Some: Obama's New Hard Line on Afghanistan

Written by www.daily.pk   

The Obama administration has decided that blood and iron, not hearts and minds, will be the new focus of the American military adventure in Afghanistan. Top Obama officials – anonymous, natch -- used the front page of the New York Times as a conduit for conveying the imperial will to the rabble this week. The basic strategy, it seems, will be the same one that professional nudnik Glenn Reynolds once proposed for the recalcitrant tribes of the Middle East: "more rubble, less trouble."

As we noted here the other day – drawing on a story in the Independent that the Times is just now catching up with – the Obama team is preparing to throw aside Hamid Karzai, the dapper if hapless Washington-picked Afghan president. The NYT uncritically – not to say hilariously – funnels the Obama line that Karzai is being sidelined "because corruption has become rampant in his government, contributing to a flourishing drug trade and the resurgence of the Taliban."

This is pretty rich, even for Washington, where the comedy of hypocrisy never stops. Leaving aside the staggeringly vast corruption that is the meat and drink, the quintessence, the sine qua non, of the American government, when have our imperial overlords ever been troubled for even a single instant by the corruption – rampant or otherwise – of its various foreign clients? And what was the prime example of this Afghan corruption given by the Obama officials? Karzai's failure to arrest his own half-brother, a powerful local politician, for drug trafficking. Can you even imagine such a thing? A well-connected public official not being prosecuted by the national government for serious crimes? Such a thing could never happen in Washington, could it?

And given the long-running, apparently eternal, thoroughly bipartisan commitment to the ever-ineffectual but highly profitable "war on drugs," it seems a bit churlish -- not to say ignorant -- to blame Karzai for dirt-poor Afghan farmers resorting to such a rich cash crop. As for the gangsters who move the merchandise around the world -- it is the illegality of these substances that makes them so lucrative on the street; legalize them, regularize them, tax them, and they would lose nine-tenths of their allure for the criminal syndicates. But then, what would our civilized governments do without all those juicy, draconian "anti-drug" powers. (For more on all this -- and its connection to Afghanistan -- see "Gainspotting: Terror War Meets Drug War.")

In any case, the drug trade is "flourishing" in Afghanistan because the American-led "regime change" operation there removed a government that had practically eliminated the Afghan drug trade -- the Taliban -- and replaced with it a gaggle of drug-running warlords. Now Washington is shocked -- shocked! -- to find drug-running going on there. Comedy gold, I tell you.

 

http://www.daily.pk/world/americas/9253--get-some-obamas-new-hard-line-on-afghanistan.html

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Stimulus Details

Posted by Charles Platt

Earlier today I wondered what the actual text is of H.R.1, the bill to authorize an $819 billion "stimulus package." Newspapers don't generally go into this kind of detail, perhaps fearing that it would bore their readers, so I visited the very usefulOpen Congress site to find out. As I read the bill, two things caught my eye.

The first should have been obvious: The money will be mostly distributed among existing federal agencies. To spend huge sums of money, the government simply has to channel it through the system that already exists to allocate and track it. Unfortunately, some of these agencies are not widely known for timely and efficient behavior.

The second lesson is a corollary of the first and could be described as "no agency left behind." Naturally when you suddenly have more than $800 billion floating around, everyone wants a piece of it. Thus we find that very substantial sums are being allocated for purposes such as assisting local law enforcement (the war on drugs, no doubt), housing soldiers, and (of course) increasing homeland security.

Here are some random items that I copied and pasted. For more details, check the link above.

Law Enforcement
$3 billion for state and local law enforcement assistance.
$1 billion for community policing services.

Department of Defense
$4.5 billion to modernize and repair Army barracks and other defense facilities.

General Services Administration
$6 billion for construction and repair of federal buildings.
$1 billion for immigration facilities at ports of entry.

Homeland Security
$250 million for salaries and construction at ports of entry.
$500 million for purchase and installation of explosive detection systems.
$150 million for alteration or removal of obstructive bridges.

The last item is amusing in a grim way. I thought this bill was largely intended to restore "crumbling infrastructure" but apparently $150 million will be spent partly on tearing it down.

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/01/29/stimulus-details.html

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The office of making shit up

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Iraq, Afghanistan VA Patients Exceed 400,000

 

by Maya Schenwar

 

Symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) bring the horrors of the battlefield home. Twenty-six percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who seek care at the VA have PTSD. (Photo: Joe Raedle / Getty Images)

    As the number of veterans seeking health care continues to rise, the VA is straining to meet demands.

 

    Amid talk of a drawdown of troops in Iraq, new statistics from the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Department of Veterans' Affairs (VA) show that US casualties are still climbing quickly. Iraq and Afghanistan battlefield injuries and deaths number 81,361, up from 72,043 last January, according to data obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by Veterans for Common Sense (VCS). Veteran patients - including those who didn't seek care until their return home - shot up to 400,304 (from 263,909 in December 2007).

 

    For the thousands of soldiers flooding the VA, mental illness tops the list of ailments. Forty-five percent of VA patients have already been diagnosed with mental health conditions, including a startling 105,000 diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). These data do not include the incalculable number of mentally ill veterans who have not received a diagnosis or haven't sought treatment at the VA.

 

    Health care for veterans has improved substantially in the past year, mostly due to legislative changes and funding boosts, according to Raymond Kelley, legislative director of AMVETS. The recently passed Dignity for Wounded Warriors Act entitles veterans to up to five years of free health care for military-related medical conditions. Other legislative victories include improvements to VA facilities, increased mental health care research and a boost for the claims processing system, which has been vastly understaffed and overburdened throughout the "war on terror."

 

    However, many barriers to adequate care and compensation remain, particularly for veterans filing for disability benefits. Delays and denials of those claims are routine. Among vets with PTSD, 59 percent have not been approved for benefits, meaning that their claims are pending or rejected - or that, due to any number of deterrents, they have not filed a claim.

 

http://www.truthout.org/012909J

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Officials: Army suicides at 3-decade high

By PAULINE JELINEK

WASHINGTON – Suicides among U.S. soldiers rose last year to the highest level in decades, the Army announced Thursday. At least 128 soldiers killed themselves in 2008. But the final count is likely to be considerably higher because 15 more suspicious deaths are still being investigated and could also turn out to be self-inflicted, the Army said.

A new training and prevention effort will start next week. And Col. Elspeth Ritchie, a psychiatric consultant to the Army surgeon general, made a plea for more U.S. mental health professionals to sign on to work for the military.

"We are hiring and we need your help," she said.

The new suicide figure compares with 115 in 2007 and 102 in 2006 and is the highest since record keeping began in 1980. Officials calculate the deaths at a rate of roughly 20.2 per 100,000 soldiers — which is higher than the adjusted civilian rate for the first time since the Vietnam War, officials told a Pentagon news conference.

"We need to move quickly to do everything we can to reverse this disturbing ... number," Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Chiarelli said.

Officials have said that troops are under tremendous and unprecedented stress because of repeated and long tours of duty due to the simultaneous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090129/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/army_suicides

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Gitmo

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2009 Will Be a Year of Panic

From the fevered mind of Bruce Sterling and his alter-ego, Bruno Argento, a consideration of things ahead.

by Bruce Sterling

"Once people lose faith in the institution of insurance — because insurance can't be made to pay in climate-crisis conditions — we'll find ourselves living in a Planet of Slums."

Illustration: Joe Kloc.

I'm always impressed by people's behavior during massive panics. They rarely believe or admit that they are panicked. Instead they assure one another that at last the wool has been lifted from their eyes. They are seeing the clear daylight of rationality after years of delusion.

But a delusion that lasts for decades is not a delusion. It's an institution. And these, our institutions, are what now fail us. People no longer know what they value. They don't know what to believe. And unfortunately, it's part of the human condition to believe and invest in things that are demonstrably not true.

As 2009 opens, our financial institutions are deep in massive, irrational panic. That's bad, but it gets worse: Many other respected institutions have rational underpinnings at least as frail as derivatives or bundled real-estate loans. Like finance, these institutions are social constructions. They are games of confidence, underpinned by people's solemn willingness to believe, to conform, to contribute. So why not panic over them, too?

Let's consider seven other massive reservoirs of potential popular dread. Any one of these could erupt, shattering the fragile social compact we maintain with one another in order to believe things contrary to fact.

1. The climate. People still behave as if it's okay. Every scientist in the world who isn't the late Michael Crichton knows that it's not. The climate is in terrible shape; something's gone wrong with the sky. The bone-chilling implications haven't soaked into the populace, even though Al Gore put together a PowerPoint about it that won him a Nobel. Al was soft-peddling the problem.

It's become an item of fundamentalist faith to maintain that the climate crisis is a weird leftist hoax. Yet, since the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike, an honest fear of the consequences will prove hard to repress. Since the fear has been methodically obscured, its emergence from the mists of superstition will be all the more powerful. Unlike mere shibboleths of finance, this is a situation that's objectively terrifying and likely to remain so indefinitely.

2. Intellectual property. More specifically, the fiat declaration that properties that are easy to reproduce shouldn't be reproduced.

Declaring that "information wants to be free" is an ideological stance. A real-world situation where information can't be anything but free, where digital information cannot be monetized, is bizarre and deeply scary. No banker or economist anywhere has the ghost of clue what to do under such conditions.

Intellectual property made sense and used to work rather well when conditions of production favored it. Now they don't. If it's simple to copy just one single movie, some gray area of fair use can be tolerated. If it becomes easy to copy a million movies with one single button-push, this vast economic superstructure is reduced to rags. Our belief in this kind of "property" becomes absurd.

To imagine that real estate is worthless is strange, though we've somehow managed to do that. But our society is also built on the supposed monetary worth of unreal estate. In fact, the planet's most advanced economies are optimized to create pretty much nothing else. The ultimate global consequences of this situation's abject failure would rank with the collapse of Communism.

http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2009/01/2009_will_be_a_year_of_panic.php

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Legal Jeopardy For American Torturers Here and Abroad?

 A Q & A Session With An Expert on the Issue, Philippe Sands
By JOHN W. DEAN

Remarkably, the confirmation of President Obama's Attorney General nominee, Eric Holder, is being held up by Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn, who apparently is unhappy that Holder might actually investigate and prosecute Bush Administration officials who engaged in torture. Aside from this repugnant new Republican embrace of torture (which might be a winning issue for the lunatic fringe of the party and a nice way to further marginalize the GOP), any effort to protect Bush officials from legal responsibility for war crimes, in the long run, will not work.

It is difficult to believe that Eric Holder would agree not to enforce the law, like his recent Republican predecessors. Indeed, if he were to do so, President Obama should withdraw his nomination. But as MSNBC "Countdown" anchor Keith Olbermann stated earlier this week, even if the Obama Administration for whatever reason does not investigate and prosecute these crimes, this still does not mean that the Bush Administration officials who were involved in torture are going to get a pass.

With few exceptions, the discussion about what the Obama Administration will do regarding the torture of detainees during the Bush years has been framed as a domestic matter, and the fate of those involved in torturing has been largely viewed as a question of whether the Department of Justice will take action. In fact, not only is the world watching what the Obama Administration does regarding Bush's torturers, but other countries are very likely to take action if the United States fails to do so.

Bush's Torturers Have Serious Jeopardy

Philippe Sands, a Queen's Counsel at Matrix Chambers and Professor of International law at University College London, has assembled a powerful indictment of the key Bush Administration people involved in torture in his book Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values. He explains the legal exposure of people like former attorney general Alberto Gonzales, Dick Cheney's counsel and later chief of staff David Addington, former Office of Legal Counsel attorney John Yoo, the former Department of Defense general counsel Jim Haynes, and others for their involvement in the torture of detainees at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and CIA secret prisons.

After reading Sands's book and, more recently, listening to his comments on Terry Gross's NPR show "Fresh Air," on January 7, 2009 I realized how closely the rest of the world is following the actions of these former officials, and was reminded that these actions appear to constitute not merely violations of American law, but also, and very literally, crimes against humanity – for which the world is ready to hold them responsible.

Here is what Professor Sands told Terry Gross on NPR: "In talking to prosecutors around the world, as I have done, they all recognize the very real political difficulties of taking on someone who has been Vice President of the United States, or President of the United States, or Secretary of Defense of the United States. But those arguments melt away as you go a little down the chain. And I don't think the same arguments would apply in relation to the man, for example, who was Vice President Cheney's general counsel, at the time the decisions were taken, David Addington…. I think he faces a very real risk of, you know, investigation for complicity in an act that amounts to torture…." Later, referring to "international investigations," he added that Addington (and others) were at "serious risk of being investigated."

These are remarkable statements from a very well-informed man. Because we have a common publisher, I was able to contact him in London, and pose a few questions. I find his book, statements and responses to my questions chilling.

http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20090123.html

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2009 Political Oscars

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ACLU tests Obama with request for secret Bush-era memos

By Marisa Taylor | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Dozens of secret documents justifying the Bush administration's spying and interrogation programs could see the light of day because of a new presidential directive.

The American Civil Liberties Union asked the Obama administration on Wednesday to release Justice Department memos that provided the legal underpinning for harsh interrogations, eavesdropping and secret prisons.

For years, the Bush administration refused to release them, citing national security, attorney-client privilege and the need to protect the government's deliberative process.

The ACLU's request, however, comes after President Barack Obama last week rescinded a 2001 Justice Department memo that gave agencies broad legal cover to reject public disclosure requests. Obama also urged agencies to be more transparent when deciding what documents to release under the Freedom of Information Act.

The ACLU now sees a new opening.

"The president has made a very visible and clear commitment to transparency," said Jameel Jaffer, the director of the ACLU's National Security Project. "We're eager to see that put into practice."

The collection of memos, written by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, are viewed as the missing puzzle pieces that could help explain the Bush administration's antiterrorism policies.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/60870.html

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NATO High Commander Issues Illegitimate Order to Kill

 

BATTLING AGHAN DRUG DEALERS

By Susanne Koelbl

The approach to combatting the drug mafia in Afghanistan has spurred an open rift inside NATO. According to information obtained by SPIEGEL, top NATO commander John Craddock wants the alliance to kill opium dealers, without proof of connection to the insurgency. NATO commanders, however, do not want to follow the order.

AP

US soldiers on patrol in Afghanistan. The radical Islamists from the Taliban obtain much of their financing through the sale of heroin. NATO commander John Craddock wants to cut off that source of money -- by giving NATO troops the authority to attack those involved in the drug trade.

A dispute has emerged among NATO High Command in Afghanistan regarding the conditions under which alliance troops can use deadly violence against those identified as insurgents. In a classified document, which SPIEGEL has obtained, NATO's top commander, US General John Craddock, has issued a "guidance" providing NATO troops with the authority "to attack directly drug producers and facilities throughout Afghanistan."

According to the document, deadly force is to be used even in those cases where there is no proof that suspects are actively engaged in the armed resistance against the Afghanistan government or against Western troops. It is "no longer necessary to produce intelligence or other evidence that each particular drug trafficker or narcotics facility in Afghanistan meets the criteria of being a military objective," Craddock writes.

 

The NATO commander has long been frustrated by the reluctance of some NATO member states -- particularly Germany -- to take aggressive action against those involved in the drug trade. Craddock rationalizes his directive by writing that the alliance "has decided that (drug traffickers and narcotics facilities) are inextricably linked to the Opposing Military Forces, and thus may be attacked." In the document, Craddock writes that the directive is the result of an October 2008 meeting of NATO defense ministers in which it was agreed that NATO soldiers in Afghanistan may attack opium traffickers.

 

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,604183,00.html

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How Bush will be remembered

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Recession Logos

http://pranks.com/2009/01/29/recession-logos/

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After Gaza: what’s behind 21st-century anti-Semitism?

	by Frank Furedi Anti-Israel sentiment is morphing into anti-Jewish sentiment, as more and more people project their disdain for the modern world on to 'the Jew'.

First, a health warning. For some time now it has been difficult to have a grown-up discussion about anti-Semitism. In post-Second World War Europe, this issue, perhaps more than any other, has provoked powerful memories and emotions. The debate about what constitutes anti-Semitism, and where it is being expressed, can be a moral minefield, and it can impact both positively and negatively on European attitudes towards Jewish people. As a result, there are frequently controversies about whether or not a certain statement or act is anti-Semitic.

For example, in early January an appeals court in Cologne, Germany, ruled that Henryk Broder, a German-Jewish journalist, could describe the statements made by a fellow Jew, Evelyn Hecht-Galinski, as anti-Semitic. 'Even German courts are beginning to understand that it is not enough to be Jewish in order not to be anti-Semitic', boasted Broder (1). This court case highlighted another difficulty in understanding the nature of anti-Semitism today. In recent times, how Jews are perceived has become closely bound up with the issue of Israel. So Broder had denounced the Jewess Hecht-Galinski as anti-Semitic because she had equated Israel's policies with those of Nazi Germany. As far as Hecht-Galinski was concerned, Broder's claim that her criticism of Israel in such a fashion was 'anti-Semitic' represented defamation against her character.

Disputes such as this one should remind us that there is a powerful subjective and interpretative element to how we characterise another individual's words and behaviour – and these acts of interpretation can be influenced by unstated cultural and political assumptions. Today, there are at least four important trends that complicate our understanding of how anti-Semitism works.

First of all, contemporary Western culture continually encourages groups that perceive themselves as victims to inflate the wrongs perpetuated against them. As a result, we are always being told that racism is more prevalent than ever before, or that homophobia and Islamophobia are rising, or that sexual discrimination is more powerful than in the past. It is unthinkable today for advocacy groups to concede that prejudice and discrimination against their members have decreased, and that the status of their community or people has improved. Such groups are acutely sensitive to how they are represented in the media, and to the language in which they are discussed and described. And this identity-based sensitivity is shared by Jewish organisations, too, which in recent decades have often been all-too-willing to interpret what are in fact confused and ambiguous references to their people as expressions of anti-Semitism.

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/6117/

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Signs

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CIA chief in Algeria accused of drugging and raping Muslim women

The CIA station chief in Algiers is under investigation after claims that he drugged and raped two Algerian women at his official residence, according to a report.

 

By Alex Spillius

Law enforcement sources told ABC News that the 41-year-old officer, named as Muslim convert Andrew Warren, had been sent home in October. He could face charges as early as next month.

Investigators from the Justice Department allegedly found more than a dozen secretly recorded videotapes of the Mr Warren performing sex acts with other women. An official said one woman appeared to be in a "semi-conscious state".

Both the women who came forward to complain and made sworn statements are Muslim, and the case could spark a strong reaction in the Arab world. One of the women said she met the him at the bar in the American embassy before going to his residence, where she was drugged.

Algiers is one of the most sensitive posts in the agency, as it works closely with local intelligence services against a branch of al-Qaeda that has been responsible for major bombings, including an attack in the capital last August that killed 48 people.

The CIA refused to confirm that the investigation was taking place, but a spokesman said: "I can assure you the agency would take seriously, and follow up on, any allegations of impropriety." ABC's sources said the investigation had expanded to Egypt where the officer, who has not been named, served previously.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/algeria/4377232/CIA-chief-in-Algeria-accused-of-drugging-and-raping-Muslim-women.html

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Survivor of Gaza carnage cries out for peace

By ROBERT L. JAMIESON JR.

IN RECENT DAYS, Mazen Abukarsh has been thinking fondly about "my Seattle years."

He lived in Northgate and Ballard, studied at North Seattle Community College and ran a Middle Eastern restaurant in the University District.

That was a beautiful time compared with what he, his wife and three young sons are going through now.

They live in the Gaza Strip, near the heart of the recent bombings and bulldozing by the Israeli military.

"It is hell," he told me by phone from Gaza last week. "Words cannot explain."

The 35-year-old Muslim grocer painted a grim picture of suffering from the conflict zone.

Israeli airstrikes and soldiers leveled thousands of Gaza homes in a brutish campaign that began Dec. 27. Tens of thousands of Palestin-

ians are now homeless. Only recently, after two waterless, powerless weeks did electricity and running water return. Israel announced a cease-fire Jan. 18.

The Palestinian people, Abukarsh says, remain in dire need of food, medicine and construction materials. The Israeli government, meanwhile, says its sortie was "precise" -- targeting militants with Hamas, an organization that has fired rockets at southern Israel.

But let's be real -- the Israeli offensive has not been symmetrical or surgically precise.

More than 1,300 people, many of them women and children civilians, were killed in Gaza in just 22 days.

Compare that with about a dozen Israeli soldiers and three civilians killed in Israel in the same period, according to Human Rights Watch.

Survivors' tales tell another part of the story, and from those accounts it is clear: Palestinians, as I see it, were massacred.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/jamieson/397862_robert29x.html

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Plant a Victory Garden

 

http://www.livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe40s/crops_02.html

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Friedman: Abdullah II's five-state solution

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

In February 2002, I traveled to Saudi Arabia and interviewed the then crown prince, now king, Abdullah, at his Riyadh horse farm. I asked him why the next Arab summit meeting wouldn't just propose to Israel full peace and normalization of relations, by all 22 Arab states, for full withdrawal from all occupied lands and creation of a Palestinian state. Abdullah said that I had read his mind ("Have you broken into my desk?" he asked me) and that he was about to propose just that, which he later did, giving birth to the "Abdullah peace plan."

Unfortunately, neither the Bush team nor Israel ever built upon the Abdullah plan. And the Saudi leader always stopped short of presenting his ideas directly to the Israeli people. Since then, everything has deteriorated.

So, I've wondered lately what Abdullah would propose if asked to update his plan. I've even probed whether he'd like to do another interview, but he is apparently reticent. Not one to be deterred, I've decided to do the next best thing: read his mind again. Here is my guess at the memo Abdullah has in his drawer for President Obama. I'd call it: "Abdullah II: The Five-State Solution for Arab-Israeli peace."

Dear President Obama,

Congratulations on your inauguration and for quickly dispatching your new envoy, George Mitchell, a good man, to the Middle East. I wish Mitchell could resume where he left off eight years ago, but the death of Arafat, the decline of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel war in Lebanon, the 2009 Hamas-Israel war in Gaza, the continued expansion of colonial Israeli settlements and the deepening involvement of Iran with Hamas and Hezbollah have all created a new reality.

Specifically, the Palestinian Authority is in no position today to assume control of the West Bank, Hamas is incapable of managing Gaza and the introduction of rockets provided by Iran to Hamas has created a situation whereby Israel won't turn over the West Bank to any Palestinians now because it fears Hamas would use it to launch rockets on Israel's international airport. But if we do nothing, Zionist settlers would devour the rest of the West Bank and holy Jerusalem. What can be done?

I am proposing what I would call a five-state solution:

1. Israel agrees in principle to withdraw from every inch of the West Bank and Arab districts of East Jerusalem, as it has from Gaza. Any territories Israel might retain in the West Bank for its settlers would have to be swapped -- inch for inch -- with land from Israel proper.

2. The Palestinians -- Hamas and Fatah -- agree to form a national unity government. This government then agrees to accept a limited number of Egyptian troops and police to help Palestinians secure Gaza and monitor its borders, as well as Jordanian troops and police to do the same in the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority would agree to five-year "security assistance programs" with Egypt in Gaza and with Jordan in the West Bank.

With Egypt and Jordan helping to maintain order, Palestinians could focus on building their own credible security and political institutions to support their full independence at the end of five years.

3. Israel would engage in a phased withdrawal over these five years from all of its settlements in the West Bank and Arab Jerusalem -- except those agreed to be granted to Israel as part of land swaps -- at the same pace that the Palestinians meet the security and governance metrics agreed to in advance by all the parties. The U.S. would be the sole arbiter of whether the metrics have been met by both sides.

4. Saudi Arabia would pay all the costs of the Egyptian and Jordanian trustees, plus a $1 billion a year service fee to each country -- as well as all the budgetary needs of the Palestinian Authority. The entire plan would be based on U.N. Resolutions 242 and 338 and blessed by the U.N. Security Council.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/397789_friedmanonline29.html

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DF soldiers leave racist graffiti on Gaza homes

 

Gaza residents returning to their homes in Zeitun neighborhood find their houses covered with slogans such as 'Death to Arabs,' and 'One down, 999,999 to go.' IDF: Those responsible will be reprimanded

A painful reminder for Operation Cast Lead remained evident in Gaza in the form of blatant, racist graffiti left on houses' walls by IDF soldiers.

Photo: AFP

 

Residents of the Zeitun neighborhood who returned to their homes once the fighting in the region was over discovered that their walls had been marked with slogans such as "Die you all," Make war not peace," "Death to Arabs," "Arabs must die," and "One down, 999,999 to go."

Photo: AFP

 

Some of the graffiti was written on the ruins of the homes of the al-Samuni family, who lost dozens of its members during the war.

 

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3663008,00.html

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Why woodpeckers don't get headaches

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Attenborough reveals creationist hate mail for not crediting God

by Riazat Butt, religious affairs correspondent

Sir David Attenborough has revealed that he receives hate mail from viewers for failing to credit God in his documentaries. In an interview with this week's Radio Times about his latest documentary, on Charles Darwin and natural selection, the broadcaster said: "They tell me to burn in hell and good riddance."

Telling the magazine that he was asked why he did not give "credit" to God, Attenborough added: "They always mean beautiful things like hummingbirds. I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator."

Attenborough went further in his opposition to creationism, saying it was "terrible" when it was taught alongside evolution as an alternative perspective. "It's like saying that two and two equals four, but if you wish to believe it, it could also be five ... Evolution is not a theory; it is a fact, every bit as much as the historical fact that William the Conqueror landed in 1066."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/27/david-attenborough-science

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Is the Republican Party Still the Racist, Character-Assassination, Culture Wars' Squad Created by Lee Atwater? Ask Stefan Forbes

 

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

Anyone who thinks Obama will have easy sailing in Washington is profoundly naive. A lot of College Republicans have bought the ["Boogie Man"] DVD to study the Atwater playbook.

--  Stefan Forbes, Writer and Director, "Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story"

* * *

As BuzzFlash readers have been debating whether President Obama's "bi-partisan" approach will work with an obstructionist GOP minority (particularly in the Senate), we decided to interview Stefan Forbes, the director of the remarkable Lee Atwater documentary biography,  "Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story."

Our previous interview with Stefan in November 2008, gave you a feeling for the despicable, revolting and fascinating personality and reprehensible campaign tactics of Lee Atwater.  In this follow-up interview, particularly in light of the RNC dust-up over the "Barack the Magic Negro" Limbaugh song, we wanted to explore the implications of the Atwater legacy in an Obama era.

And what we found out from Stefan is simple: Don't be fooled, don't let your guard down.  Lee Atwater's vein is still running through the rotten heart of the GOP.

 

http://buzzflash.com/articles/interviews/144

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Thick and thin

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Paulson nets £100m from RBS slide

• Hedge fund manager profits from short-selling
• Bets also made on HBOS, Lloyds TSB and Barclays

by Jill Treanor, Nick Fletcher and Andrew Clark in New York

Billionaire hedge fund manager John Paulson has made a £100m profit by betting that the Royal Bank of Scotland's share price would fall dramatically, according to calculations by the Guardian, adding fuel to the debate about the impact of short-selling on bank stocks.

New York-based Paulson, who made more than $3bn by betting against the US housing market, now appears to be profiting from positions placed on the assumption that bank shares would tumble in the aftermath of the market chaos caused by the demise of the sub-prime mortgage industry.

His hedge fund, Paulson & Co, was one of the few to trade through the ban imposed on short-selling by the Financial Services Authority in September to protect the rescue takeover of HBOS by Lloyds TSB. On the basis of the disclosures that his company has made since then, the Guardian estimates Paulson is likely to have made a profit of £100m - and possibly more - after making around 240p on each of the RBS shares he sold.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jan/27/short-selling-rbs-banking

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Obama Gets Last Laugh: Tricks Chief Justice into Giving Him a Second Term

By Don Davis

"RAHM, IF WE CAN JUST GET ROBERTS TO ADMINISTER THE OATH A COUPLA' MORE TIMES, I MIGHT BE ABLE TO LAST LONG ENOUGH TO REPLACE SCALIA, THOMAS, ALITO … AND THE CHIEF JUSTICE HIMSELF." 

http://satiricalpolitical.com/?p=5724

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George W. Bush Memorial Reward

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Fantasy inauguration

1  Barack Obama
2. Michelle Obama
3. Martin Luther King Jr.
4. Thurgood Marshall
5. Rosa Parks
6. Barbara Jordan
7. Cynthia Wesley
8.Carole Robertson
9. Denise McNair
10.Addie Mae Collins
11. Emmett Till
12. Susan B. Anthony
13. C.T.Vivian
14. James Meredith
15. Homer Plessy
16. Harvey Milk
17.  Ida B. Wells
18. Malcolm X
19. Bayard Rustin
20. John Lewis
21. Mahatma Gandhi
22. Abraham Lincoln
23. Frederick Douglass
24. Cesar Chavez
25. Sojourner Truth
26. Nelson Mandela
27. Stephen Biko
28. Oliver Brown (Brown v. Education)
29. Chief Joseph
30. Lyndon Johnson
31. Medgar Evers
32. Rev. James Reeb
33. Fred Shuttleworth
34. W.E.B. Du Bois
35. Ralph Abernathy
36. Viola Gregg Liuzzo
37. Marcus Garvey
38. Andrew Goodman
39. James Chaney
40. Michael Schwerner
41. John Brown
42. Jackie Robinson
43. Dolores Huerta
44. Mary White Ovington
45. William Lloyd Garrison
46. Wang Dan
47. Stephen Samuel Wise
48. Harriet Tubman
49. Dred Scott
50. Booker T.Washington
51. David Richmond (and)
52. Joseph McNeil (Greensboro Four)
53. Martin Delany
54. The Little Rock Nine
55. William Still
56. Thomas Garrett
57. Elizabeth Cady Stanton
58. Samuel Burris
59.Thomas Paine
60. Abigail Kelley Foster
61. Jesse Jackson
62. Eugene V. Debs
63. Lucretia Mott
64. Paul Robeson
65. Henry David Thoreau
66. Shirley Chisholm

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Fili-Buster Watch

W

hich Senate Republicans have voted the most often with the Obama Administration so far?

Yes, the Senate is actually voting on stuff. Not a lot of stuff, but there are perhaps seven nontrivial votes for us to chew over. These include confirmation votes for Tim Geithner and Hillary Clinton, the bailout extension, both a cloture vote and an up-and-down vote the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, and both a cloture vote and an up-and-down vote on the Omnibus Public Land Management Act.

One Republican, Olympia Snowe of Maine, has taken the administration's position on all seven votes, as indicated by a blue square in chart below. Two, David Vitter of Louisiana and Jim DeMint of South Carolina, have gone 7-for-7 in opposing the administration (as denoted in red). A couple more thoughts follow after the graphic.

After Snowe, two Republicans have supported the administration on 6 of 7 votes: George Voinovich of Ohio and Judd Gregg of New Hampshire. Voinovich, who always ranks as among the most moderate Republicans, isn't really a surprise, but Gregg, who has a fairly conservative voting record, perhaps is. Such are the perils of running for re-election in a state that Obama won by 10 points.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/01/fili-buster-watch.html

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Fix the mess

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Roman Polanski

By Francesco Vezzoli, Christopher Bollen

Roman Polanski may soon be permitted back into the U.S., but he's made some of his most compelling films while in exile from the Hollywood machine. As he collaborates with artist Francesco Vezzoli on a commercial for a fictional perfume starring Natalie Portman and Michelle Williams, the director talks about the Perils of the movie world and the pleasures of skiing drunk at night.

When Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli went looking for a director to help him make his latest artwork, he went straight for the biggest. Vezzoli's productions have always served up larger-than-life spectacles studded with Hollywood mythos and celebrity. His piece, Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal's Caligula (2005), which starred luminaries Gore Vidal, Helen Mirren, Milla Jovovich, and Courtney Love, was an orgiastic "preview" for the 1979 film Caligula. For his live play reading at the Guggenheim of Right You Are (If You Think You Are) in 2007, Vezzoli cast actors such as Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, and Diane Wiest. This time, he had his mind set on creating a commercial and an ad campaign for an imaginary fragrance called Greed (heavily indebted to Marcel Duchamp's own fictional perfume piece, 1921's Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette). The artist selected two leading Hollywood beauties who pointedly did not already have fragrance contracts—Portman and Michelle Williams—to be the faces of the perfume. He had Miuccia Prada specially design the costumes. He had art dealer Larry Gagosian produce the project, which will be exhibited at Vezzoli's show at Gagosian Gallery in Rome this month. Naturally, for a work this overloaded with talent, he could think of only one man to direct: Roman Polanski. Last October, in a suite at the Hôtel Plaza Athénée in Paris, the 75-year-old director shot his glamorous testament to a substance that everyone wants but no one can ever get their hands on because it doesn't actually exist (the metaphor couldn't get any better, could it?).

http://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/roman-polanski-/

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What's going on in Bush's mind here?

Posted by Cory Doctorow, January 27, 2009 1:31 PM | permalink

This long NYT retrospective on the seminal news-photos of some guy named George Bush during his presidency ends with photos of the man on his way to his farewell address, during which it appears that he's been crying in the bathroom. I've looked at it several times now and I'm not sure I agree that's what's going on -- this facial expression seems to contain a lot more than mere sorrow.

And I turned to one of my editors — First I said, "Oh, my God." And he said, "What?" And I said, "You've got to see this picture of Bush. This is really stunning." And I flipped it over to him to process and his first reaction was, "Wow." And I said, "If he wasn't just back there behind that door crying, I don't know what that look on his face is." Because he just looks absolutely devastated as he comes through this door after essentially ending his eight year presidency. And it's just really striking. He just looks absolutely devastated.

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall

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It's snowing on Mars ...

... or at least in the sky above it. This is just one extraordinary piece of information being sent back to us by the landers, probes and rovers scanning the planet. Home to the largest mountain in the solar system and a canyon as long as the US is wide, it is a world as fantastic as any imagined by JG Ballard

Cape St Vincent, one of the cliffs of the Victoria crater. Photograph: Nasa/Reuters

High in the sky above Mars, it is snowing right now. Very gently snowing. The snow does not settle on the rubble-strewn land below - not these days, anyway - but instead vaporises into the thin atmosphere long before it reaches the ground.

The first flakes of snow, on a planet that until fairly recently was believed to be waterless, were spotted just a few months ago. A Nasa lander near the planet's north pole was scanning the sky with a laser when it noticed the telltale signs of snowfall. The probe, called Phoenix, announced the news in a radio signal that was picked up by an overhead orbiter and beamed back to Earth. Nothing like it had ever been seen before.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/jan/27/mars-snow-space-technology-nasa

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Global warming is 'irreversible'

Politicians must offset damage from man-made pollution, the report says

A team of environmental researchers in the US has warned many effects of climate change are irreversible.

The scientists concluded global temperatures could remain high for 1,000 years, even if carbon emissions can somehow be halted.

Their report was sponsored by the US Department of Energy and comes as President Obama announces a review of vehicle emission standards.

It appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The scientists have been researching global warming and the consequences for policymakers.

The team warned that, if carbon levels in the atmosphere continued to rise, there would be less rainfall in already dry areas of southern Europe, North America, parts of Africa and Australia.

The scientists say the oceans are currently slowing down global warming by absorbing heat, but they will eventually release that heat back into the air.

They say politicians must now offset environmental damage already done by man-made pollution.

"People have imagined that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide the climate would go back to normal in 100 years, 200 year - that's not true," said researcher Susan Solomon, the lead author of the report, quoted by AP news agency.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7852628.stm

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You Can Call Me Arne

 

By David Kurtz

Another federal employee checks in from the trenches:

I work at the Department of Education headquarters in DC. Today completed our 2-day introduction to Arne Duncan. Yesterday he had lunch in our cafeteria (Edibles, ha ha), with his wife and children. His wife wore jeans and a sweater and Arne looked like an average joe in khaki dress pants, white shirt and tie. They stood in all of the lines and talked to anyone who approached them. They probably stayed 90 minutes. It was definitely the highest cafeteria attendance ever.

Yesterday afternoon he visited every floor of our building and introduced himself to everyone. We all came out into the hall and he shook everyone's hand with a "Hi, I'm Arne."

By the end of the day yesterday, everyone was aglow, since this was already more attention than we'd received from Spellings or Paige. Today, however, was the all-staff meeting, and I can say that the morale in the building increased ten-fold by the end of it.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2009/01/you_can_call_me_arne.php

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