Category: Archive

Can We Call It Genocide Now?

admin /17 October, 2006

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

W hen does "collateral damage" so dwarf combatant deaths that war becomes genocide?

Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq has cost 655,000 Iraqis their lives. That is the conclusion of a study financed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for International Studies and conducted by physicians under the direction of Johns Hopkins University epidemiologists. These are deaths over and above the pre-invasion mortality rate. Bush’s illegal invasion raised Iraq’s mortality rate from 5.5 deaths per 1,000 people per year to 13.3 deaths per 1,000 people per year. The study is published by the distinguished British medical journal, The Lancet, and is available on the journal’s online site (October 11).

The Myth of the Spat Upon Vets

admin /17 October, 2006

By STEPHEN PHILION
J erry Lembcke is the author of The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam, He teaches Sociology at Holy Cross University.

In this interview he details research that indicates that Vietnam veterans were not spat upon, and  the myth that they were emerged some years later. He notes that soldiers returning from unsuccessful overseas wars in many countries in many eras have developed similar myths in response to their sense of loss over partaking in a losing war.

The main thrust of the interview, though, is how this myth damages logical analysis of why particular governments go to war at any given time. Lembke argues that the anti-war movement is as culpable as the pro-war movement.

El Nino Certain says NCC

admin /15 October, 2006

The National Climate Centre (NCC) has confirmed the chances of Australia avoiding the grip of an El Nino weather pattern this spring are virtually nil.

The prospect of hotter and drier conditions, particularly in south-eastern Australia, is dire news for farmers.

Near record temperatures have gripped much of Australia during September, and the south-east corner has recorded the most significant changes.

But at this stage climatologists say this El Nino is not looking as bad as the last one four years ago.

NSW calls for State of Emergency over water

admin /15 October, 2006

The New South Wales Government has rejected the State Opposition’s call for a state of emergency in response to the worsening water shortage.

The debate follows the first national water resources audit, which has criticised the states and territories’ progress on water conservation on a number of levels.

NSW Water Utilities Minister David Campbell has defended his Government’s record.

"We’re encouraging investment in recycling, indeed the Government is making its own investment in recycling with a $52 million contract let earlier this week," he said.

"The hysterical comments from the Opposition that there should be a state of emergency will not find one drop of water and will unnecessarily alarm people."

Gippsland running dry

admin /15 October, 2006

Farming region running out of water One of Victoria’s wettest farming regions is running out of water. The water storage at Leongatha, in Gippsland, is at 24 per cent and falling and residents are on stage four water restrictions. South Gippsland Water is auditing local businesses, including the major dairy processing plant Murray Goulburn, to Continue Reading →

UK plans coastal retreat

admin /12 October, 2006

The Guardian

Cottages are demolished due to erosion at Birling Gap, Sussex. Photograph: Tim Ockenden/PA
 

If you had been alive 18,000 years ago, you could have walked in a straight line from Cork to Stockholm. The floor of the North Sea was land. Objects have been found from that strange, drowned world. A carefully sharpened flint scraper has been retrieved by Norwegians drilling for oil in 450 feet of water 100 miles east of Shetland. Spearheads and mammal and rhinoceros teeth have been dragged up by trawlermen on the Dogger Bank. Sometimes in their trawls fishermen find lumps of peat from forgotten moors. It is an unsettling fact that tens of thousands of people once knew the floor of the North Sea as well as any of us might know the Yorkshire Dales or the Sussex Downs.

When this periglacial world began to warm up about 20,000 years ago, the ice sheets melted and sea-level rose, on average, at about a centimetre a year. By 5,000BC it was some 130m (430ft) higher than it had been at glacial maximum and Britain had become an island. But then the warming slowed. Since 2,000BC the sea level has remained extraordinarily constant, varying no more than a metre in 4,000 years. This period of sea-level stability has also seen the rise of urban and commercial civilisation. We have built our cities on a constant shore. That long constancy has allowed us to forget that we have been living in a privileged world. But that privilege is now over. The physical conditions of the world are changing for the first time since humanity started to build. For thousands of years we have shaped the world. Now, for the first time, the world is going to shape us.