Category: Archive

The UIF (Howard’s Uranium Industry Framework), plan, which Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane was expected to receive next month, complements a private enterprise bid by the Nuclear Fuel Leasing Group, a four-member group pushing to develop an enriched uranium export business based on Olympic Dam’s reserves in South Australia, reported The Australian Financial Review, (16/6/2006), p. 32 .

Business case by early next year: It outlined a timetable to detail a:

• business case by early next year;

• a stewardship plan with agreed responsibilities by December 2007; and

• endorsement by government and industry by May 2008.

Australia a one-stop nuclear shop: The NFLG plan was outlined to Prime Minister John Howard in Washington last month as he was briefed on US President George Bush’s plan for a Global Nuclear Energy Partnership. Mr Bush’s partnership concept would allow Australia and Canada to become one-stop nuclear shops leasing enriched uranium to encourage greenhouse-friendly power generation.

The nuclear lobby: With Mr Bush pressing on the global stage, the Federally appointed UIF group was to urge the Howard government to develop the necessary domestic policies to ensure that all "materials, goods and services that make up the uranium value chain are produced, managed and disposed of in a socially and environmentally friendly way".

Who’s who: John White, executive director of Global Renewables and one of the four members of NFLG, which developed the business plan behind the Bush scheme, was also chairman of Mr Macfarlane’s UIF group.

Opportunities and impediments: The UIF, appointed in August 2005, will report on opportunities and impediments for development of Australia’s uranium reserves, which are about 39 per cent of the world’s total. Comprising representatives of state and territory governments, miners such as BHP and ERA,(Rio Tinto) as well the Northern Lands Council, the UIF was separate from Howard’s nuclear taskforce under Ziggy Switkowski that will study the economics of nuclear power.

Federal committee plans business case: UIF outlines a program to develop a business case. Urging governments, current uranium mine operators and other stakeholders to support and develop a stewardship plan, the UIF outlines a program to develop a business case, undertake analysis of all steps from mining to disposal, document hazards and risk management controls and develop new stewardship actions to take uranium through the entire nuclear fuel cycle.
L/F/l/l

The Australian Financial Review, 16/6/2006, p. 32

Source: Erisk Net  

Our van is slowly driving along the dirt road, bypassing Ban Khai village, finally stopping in the middle of waste meadow. Enormous craters dot the entire countryside, plains and hills. "We can’t drive any further," says Mr. Van Lorn. "There are bombs buried in the ground and our van could explode on one of them. We have to walk."

He leads me to one of the craters and then back to the van, helping me to climb to the roof for a better view. When I finish taking photographs, he points to the village: "Pick out any house in this town. I will translate for you. There is not one family in this area which did not suffer during the war. Each family lost relatives and had to leave this part of the country."

I ask the driver to stop at a humble looking compound. We enter the courtyard and are greeted by an old man. His name is Mr. Nai Phommar and he is 81 years old. He invites us to his clean and simple house; his children bring "Lao whiskey" and fruits.

"People are dying in this area," explains Mr. Phommar. "We lost 2 people six years ago, but this is just a small village and we are lucky we have had no more casualties since then."

I first feel hesitant to ask him about the war, but the old man is happy to share his memories. "We used to hide by the side of the road, in the ditch. Bombs kept falling and once our entire family was buried and we had to dig ourselves out. People were dying all around us. They used to bomb us with enormous airplanes which flew so high that we couldn’t see or hear them approaching. And they used to send small planes which were looking for people on the ground: those flew so low that we were able to see faces in the cockpits."

"But the carpet bombing was the scariest. There was no warning. Bombs began to explode all around this area and we had no idea where they were coming from. On average, they bombed us 5 times a day. They bombed us almost every day, for more than ten years. Laos had only 2 million people then. And we were later told that the US and its allies dropped 3 million tons of bombs on us."

"Eventually, nobody could survive here, anymore. Our houses were destroyed and our fields were full of unexploded substances. People were dying and so were the animals. We had to leave and so we decided to go to Vietnam, to search for refuge. But the journey was tremendously arduous. We were moving at night, carrying few possessions. During the day we were hiding from the enemy planes."

"During the war I was very angry at Americans. I couldn’t understand how can somebody be so brutal – how can somebody kill fellow human beings in such cold blood. But now my government tells me that everything is ok, that it is past and we should forget. But how can we forget? I don’t feel angry anymore, but I would like the world to know what happened to us."

John Bacher, a Ph.D. in history and a Metro Toronto archivist once wrote about The Secret War in Laos: "More bombs were dropped on Laos between 1965 and 1973 than the US dropped on Japan and Germany during WWII. More than 350 thousand people were killed. The war in Laos was a secret only from the American people and Congress. It anticipated the sordid ties between drug trafficking and repressive regimes that have been seen later in the Noriega affair."

In reality, it is hard to call this twisted campaign of terror "a war". There were hardly any serious strategic merits of indiscriminately bombing one of the poorest countrysides in the world, scarcely inhabited by subsistence farmers and their domestic animals.

In this biggest covert operation in US history, the main goal was to "prevent" pro-Vietnamese forces from gaining control over the area. But the entire operation seemed more like a game, overgrown boys allowed to play, unopposed, their war games, bombing an entire nation into the stone age for more than a decade. The result of that "game" was one of the most brutal genocides in the history of the 20th century.

Some of the most brutal bombing raids were done out of spite, with no planning. When US bombers couldn’t find their targets in Vietnam due to bad weather, they just dumped their load on the Laos countryside, as the airplanes couldn’t land with the bombs on board. After the end of the bombing campaign against North Vietnam, the US military decided to simply use its old bomb arsenal (by dropping it on Laos) accumulated in Southeast Asia, instead of carrying it back home. The value of human lives, of the Lao people, was never taken into consideration.

I ask Mr. Van Lorn to take me to an isolated Hmong village, and after a half hour journey we park in front of the school in ancient and extremely poor Ban Tajock. We walk through traditional houses, followed by the silent stares of local inhabitants. Some of them walk around barefoot. Most of the houses have no electricity. Fences are mainly made out of rusty bombs.

I ask where they got the bombs. After all, the Hmong tribe was supporting the US during the war. Mr. Van Lorn replied laconically: "Do you think they really cared? They were just bombing everything that moved. Bombing was their main obsession."

I ask whether anyone lost his or her life in this village due to unexploded ordnance. "3 children," we were told by the school teacher. "On February 26. They were playing behind their house and found an unexploded bombie. They took it behind their hut and it exploded. All three died on the spot."

We walk towards the area where the tragedy took place. Three girls follow us. They are unwashed, some of them barefoot. Mr Van Lorn asks them whether they knew the boys.

"They were our friends," says Kalia, a 10 year old girl. "We used to play together. They were good friends. Now I am so afraid. We all have to work here, even at our age. Our families don’t have money. The boys found the bomb and they probably tried to take it apart – to open it so it could be sold for scrap. Then it exploded and all three of them died. I cried for two weeks."

I ask her whether she knows how this bomb got here. I asked her whether she ever heard about the war, about the foreign pilots dropping millions of tons of explosives on her country. She listens to my questions translated by Mr. Van Lorn, while drawing long line in the dirt with her little toe. Then she looks at me, confused: "I don’t know," she said. "I never heard about it. The bombs are here. They were always here. I am sorry, I don’t knowÂ…"

Further east, there is Tham Piu Cave, the biggest of the caves penetrated by American missiles. 473 people died there. Most of them are still buried under stones and debris. There is no light inside the cave, except that which comes from the entrance. Mr. Van Lorn insists that we go inside. The cave is one huge mass grave and one of the symbols of the "Secret War".

The Lao government claims that the cave was full of civilians hiding here from the carpet bombing of the area. Others say that there were some pro-Vietnamese fighters inside when the missile struck. I find this dispute absolutely irrelevant and to a large extent insulting.

What does it matter? A foreign country comes to Laos, bombs it to the ground; bombs everybody to the ground, from those it considers its enemies to those it designates as its friends. It penetrates other caves full of civilians. Those boys on a rampage probably saw it as their highest achievement, real bravado to identify the cave and send their missile to finish the hundreds of those they didn’t even consider to be human beings. Would they bomb Tham Piu Cave if it were full of pro-Vietnamese fighters? Definitely! Would they bomb it if they knew there were only women and children hiding inside? No doubt they would, as they bombed other caves and villages full of civilians.

On the way back to Phonsavan we are passing a truck full of rusty bombs. "They will take it to the outskirts and try to open them," says Mr. Van Lorn. "If they are made of aluminum, chances are they will make some decent money. That is, if they survive. Many people die trying to open old bombs. But they are very poor; they have to eat. They will try again and again, risking their lives."

The next day in Phonsavan I meet David Davenport, Technical Field Manager of Mines Advisory Group (MAG). David is a former member of the Australian military, married to a Vietnamese woman, helping to de-mine some of the worst contaminated areas of the world: Iraq, Afghanistan, Congo. I ask him how many people have died since the end of the war in Laos.

 "It’s very hard to give exact figures," explains David. "Estimates are based only on the number of people who reached hospitals, so the numbers which we have say that since the end of the war some 20 thousand people were killed or maimed. Now, as I said to you, in many villages that we go to, if someone dies he is simply buried and it may never get recorded."

"About statistics on ordinance: we say that it’s about 10 tons per sq/kilometer but that’s dealing with the whole country – the whole country was not bombed. This is one of the most contaminated provinces in Laos and Laos is the most heavily bombed country on the face of the planet. During the conflict, Americans could do anything they wanted, because they never declared war on Laos. There were never any defined rules of engagement. That’s why temples were hit, hospitals were hitÂ… And no Geneva Convention would apply, because officially nothing happened here; there was no war in LaosÂ…"

I know what David is referring to. 20 miles away, the ancient capital of the province – Xiengkhouang or Ban Phiawat – had been leveled with the ground. Now only a statue of Buddha is sitting erect in defiance, his body partially burned, surrounded by the ruins of a once magnificent temple. The nearby French Hospital is nothing more than a mountain of rubble. No wonder, the local Xieng Khouang airport used to be, during the conflict, the second busiest in the world, with 13 thousand sorties recorded every month. All these bombs had to fall on something and so they did: on farmers, children, hospitals, rice fields, water buffaloes.

Between what is left of the ancient capital and Phonsavan (the new dusty capital city built by the refugees) is the world famous Plain of Jars, a UNESCO tentative world heritage site. It contains hundreds of mysterious and beautiful ancient jars scattered around green and gently rolling hills. But the entire site is also surrounded by craters and some of the jars are broken, the result of aerial bombardment. Bombs and bombies are scattered all around the site. A large MAG sign welcomes sporadic visitors: "Colored concrete markers at ground level indicate the area that has been cleared."

Those who pay can enter and feel relatively safe. While those outside can still have a taste of what the US stands for, all over the world, so passionately, determinedly and consistently: freedom, democracy, respect for others and justice for all.

ANDRE VLTCHEK: novelist, journalist and filmmaker, co-founder of Mainstay Press, a new publishing house for progressive political fiction (http://www.mainstaypress.org). He can be reached at: andre-wcn@usa.net

I took my translation – "the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time" – from the indefatigable Professor Juan Cole’s website where it has been for several weeks.

But it seems to be mainly thanks to the Guardian giving it prominence that the New York Times, which was one of the first papers to misquote Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, came out on Sunday with a defensive piece attempting to justify its reporter’s original "wiped off the map" translation. (By the way, for Farsi speakers the original version is available here.)

Joining the "off the map" crowd is David Aaronovitch, a columnist on the Times (of London), who attacked my analysis yesterday. I won’t waste time on him since his knowledge of Farsi is as minimal as that of his Latin. The poor man thinks the plural of casus belli is casi belli, unaware that casus is fourth declension with the plural casus (long u).

The New York Times’s Ethan Bronner and Nazila Fathi, one of the paper’s Tehran staff, make a more serious case. They consulted several sources in Tehran. "Sohrab Mahdavi, one of Iran’s most prominent translators, and Siamak Namazi, managing director of a Tehran consulting firm, who is bilingual, both say ‘wipe off’ or ‘wipe away’ is more accurate than ‘vanish’ because the Persian verb is active and transitive," Bronner writes.

The New York Times goes on: "The second translation issue concerns the word ‘map’. Khomeini’s words were abstract: ‘Sahneh roozgar.’ Sahneh means scene or stage, and roozgar means time. The phrase was widely interpreted as ‘map’, and for years, no one objected. In October, when Mr Ahmadinejad quoted Khomeini, he actually misquoted him, saying not ‘Sahneh roozgar’ but ‘Safheh roozgar’, meaning pages of time or history. No one noticed the change, and news agencies used the word ‘map’ again."

This, in my view, is the crucial point and I’m glad the NYT accepts that the word "map" was not used by Ahmadinejad. (By the way, the Wikipedia entry on the controversy gets the NYT wrong, claiming falsely that Ethan Bronner "concluded that Ahmadinejad had in fact said that Israel was to be wiped off the map".)

If the Iranian president made a mistake and used "safheh" rather than "sahneh", that is of little moment. A native English speaker could equally confuse "stage of history" with "page of history". The significant issue is that both phrases refer to time rather than place. As I wrote in my original post, the Iranian president was expressing a vague wish for the future. He was not threatening an Iranian-initiated war to remove Israeli control over Jerusalem.

Two other well-established translation sources confirm that Ahmadinejad was referring to time, not place. The version of the October 26 2005 speech put out by the Middle East Media Research Institute, based on the Farsi text released by the official Iranian Students News Agency, says: "This regime that is occupying Qods [Jerusalem] must be eliminated from the pages of history." (NB: not "wiped". I accept that "eliminated" is almost the same, indeed some might argue it is more sinister than "wiped", though it is a bit more of a mouthful if you are trying to find four catchy and easily memorable words with which to incite anger against Iran.)

MEMRI (its text of the speech is available here) is headed by a former Isareli military intelligence officer and has sometimes been attacked for alleged distortion of Farsi and Arabic quotations for the benefit of Israeli foreign policy. On this occasion they supported the doveish view of what Ahmadinejad said.

Finally we come to the BBC monitoring service which every day puts out hundreds of highly respected English translations of broadcasts from all round the globe to their subscribers – mainly governments, intelligence services, thinktanks and other specialists. I approached them this week about the controversy and a spokesperson for the monitoring service’s marketing unit, who did not want his name used, told me their original version of the Ahmadinejad quote was "eliminated from the map of the world".

As a result of my inquiry and the controversy generated, they had gone back to the native Farsi-speakers who had translated the speech from a voice recording made available by Iranian TV on October 29 2005. Here is what the spokesman told me about the "off the map" section: "The monitor has checked again. It’s a difficult expression to translate. They’re under time pressure to produce a translation quickly and they were searching for the right phrase. With more time to reflect they would say the translation should be "eliminated from the page of history".

Would the BBC put out a correction, given that the issue had become so controversial, I asked. "It would be a long time after the original version", came the reply. I interpret that as "probably not", but let’s see.

Finally, I approached Iradj Bagherzade, the Iranian-born founder and chairman of the renowned publishing house, IB Tauris. He thought hard about the word "roozgar". "History" was not the right word, he said, but he could not decide between several better alternatives "this day and age", "these times", "our times", "time".

So there we have it. Starting with Juan Cole, and going via the New York Times’ experts through MEMRI to the BBC’s monitors, the consensus is that Ahmadinejad did not talk about any maps. He was, as I insisted in my original piece, offering a vague wish for the future.

A very last point. The fact that he compared his desired option – the elimination of "the regime occupying Jerusalem" – with the fall of the Shah’s regime in Iran makes it crystal clear that he is talking about regime change, not the end of Israel. As a schoolboy opponent of the Shah in the 1970’s he surely did not favour Iran’s removal from the page of time. He just wanted the Shah out.

The same with regard to Israel. The Iranian president is undeniably an opponent of Zionism or, if you prefer the phrase, the Zionist regime. But so are substantial numbers of Israeli citizens, Jews as well as Arabs. The anti-Zionist and non-Zionist traditions in Israel are not insignificant. So we should not demonise Ahmadinejad on those grounds alone.

Does this quibbling over phrases matter? Yes, of course. Within days of the Ahmadinejad speech the then Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, was calling for Iran to be expelled from the United Nations. Other foreign leaders have quoted the map phrase. The United States is piling pressure on its allies to be tough with Iran.

Let me give the last word to Juan Cole, with whom I began. "I am entirely aware that Ahmadinejad is hostile to Israel. The question is whether his intentions and capabilities would lead to a military attack, and whether therefore pre-emptive warfare is prescribed. I am saying no, and the boring philology is part of the reason for the no."

Unless Avastin is approved in the UK by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice) it will not be universally available within the NHS. But because Genentech declines to apply for a licence for this use of Avastin, Nice cannot consider it. In spite of the growing drugs bill of the NHS, it will appraise, and probably approve, Lucentis next year.

Pharmaceutical firms say they need to launch drugs at high prices because of the hundreds of millions of pounds spent on developing them. Critics point out that the company’s calculations also include the marketing budget.

http://www.freemarketnews.com/WorldNews.asp?nid=15095

The government has hired defense subcontractor Lockheed Martin to design and develop an enormous blimp that will be used to spy on Americans, according to the Athens News. Government agencies such as the NSA are anticipating that as early as 2009 the blimp will be operational and begin supporting new ways of monitoring everything that happens in the country.

A prototype of the blimp is already being developed at a cost of $40 million. The spy ship, called the High Altitude Airship, will be seventeen times larger than the Goodyear Blimp and hover 12 miles above the ground. Although it is very large it will be invisible to both the naked eye and ground radar because of its distance from the earth. Fuel economic and self sufficient, it will be powered by solar energy and will be able to fly for years at a time.

The U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command has already conducted a study to determine some of the uses of the spy ship. It has the capability of monitoring an area 600 miles in diameter at a time with surveillance equipment, such as high-resolution cameras. The government has ordered 11 of them – enough to monitor every parcel of land in the U.S.