Thursday, May 3. 2007
'After four disastrous years of US military occupation, Bill Moyers' April 25 PBS special Buying The War attempted to hold the mainstream US media accountable for its complicity in selling the war on Iraq to the US public. Moyers documented how the US media, with The New York Times in a leading role, bowed to financial and political pressure, succumbed to an environment of patriotism and fear of terrorism, and uncritically reported false US government claims. Tragically, despite the terrible consequences of 60 years of Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people, there is still no significant movement to hold the US mainstream media accountable for a similar, dramatic failure in covering Israel and Palestine, and for its complicity in the US' uncritical support for Israel.' (Electronic Intifada article). media-underground.net
Wednesday, February 14. 2007
'The UK has been accused of failing its children, as it comes bottom of a league table for child well-being across 21 industrial countries.
'The Unicef report looked at 40 indicators including poverty, relationships with parents and health.
'The Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and Finland head the list.
'Children's charities have condemned the findings. The government says it has made progress on child well-being through several initiatives.
'Unicef - the United Nations' children's organisation - says the report, titled Child Poverty in Perspective: An Overview of Child Wellbeing in Rich Countries, is the first study of childhood across the world's industrialised nations.
'Unicef UK executive director David Bull said all the countries had weaknesses that needed to be addressed.
'"By comparing the performance of countries we see what is possible with a commitment to supporting every child to fulfil his or her full potential," he said.' (BBC News article). media-underground.net
Friday, January 5. 2007
'As Jimmy Carter's new book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid climbs the bestseller list, the reaction of Israel's apologists scales new peaks of lunacy. I will examine a pair of typical examples and then look at the latest weapon to silence Carter.' (Counterpunch article). media-underground.net
Saturday, December 16. 2006
'The British government never believed Saddam Hussein posed a threat to British interests and warned the US that toppling him would lead to "chaos", according to a Foreign Office diplomat closely involved in negotiations in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.
'Damning repudiation of the government's public claims in the run-up to the war is contained in secret evidence to Lord Butler's committee on the abuse of intelligence over Iraq by Carne Ross, a diplomat at Britain's UN mission in New York.
'His evidence, in which he says the government privately assessed that Iraq possessed no significant quantity of weapons of mass destruction, has been published on the Commons foreign affairs committee website. Mr Ross gave evidence to the group last month but some MPs had been reluctant to have it published.
'Mr Ross told Lord Butler he read UK and US human and signals intelligence on Iraq every working day during the four years he spent in New York up to 2002, and spoke at length to UN weapons inspectors.
'"At no time did [the government] assess that Iraq's WMD (or any other capability) posed a threat to the UK," he told the Butler committee. "On the contrary, it was the commonly-held view among the officials dealing with Iraq that any threat had been effectively contained... At the same time, we would frequently argue, when the US raised the subject, that 'regime change' was inadvisable, primarily on the grounds that Iraq would collapse into chaos.' (Guardian article). media-underground.net
Thursday, December 14. 2006
'Torture, secret prisons and disappearances: all feature prominently in the legacy of Augusto Pinochet. It is a matter of great regret that the former Chilean dictator - brought to power in a CIA-backed coup on September 11 1973 - avoided trial for gross abuses of human rights in his ravenous pursuit of power. But it is a matter of even greater regret that the same tools and the same sponsors are back in action today, with the same impunity, as part of the "war on terror" launched after September 11 2001.
'When the Bush administration brought 14 of its most highly valued terrorism suspects to Guantánamo Bay from secret prisons in various countries in September, the US president himself acknowledged for the first time the existence of a network of CIA prisons. This was intended to close a chapter that had become embarrassing to Washington. The US practice of illegal kidnapping known as "extraordinary rendition", and the secret detention and torture that was part of it, had - after more than four years - finally become a scandal condemned by many European politicians, UN officials and international lawyers, as well as US-based human-rights groups.
'But, as a new report from the British monitoring group Cageprisoners reveals, the men held in Guantánamo Bay are only the tip of the iceberg: thousands more are hidden elsewhere, outside the law. The "war on terror" is taking a terrible toll on Muslim families and societies through a vast programme of secret detention and torture.' (Guardian article). media-underground.net
Saturday, December 2. 2006
'Millions of American and international travellers coming into and out of the US over the past four years have each been assigned a risk assessment score designed to pinpoint potential terrorists or criminals, the US government has revealed.
'The travellers, including all British passengers to the US, have been given a security profile that draws on information from a number of key American departments as well as intelligence held on them by the airlines and co-operating governments. The profiles are held in a central computer in Washington for 40 years.
'The details of the system, known as the Automated Targeting System or ATS, were put on the federal noticeboard last month but attracted little attention. The system builds on measures to target suspected terrorists first developed in the wake of the September 11 attacks.
'The process of garnering intelligence from many different sources and then processing it to produce a profile or score indicating risk levels was initially applied to cargo. But over recent years it has been widened to include individual air passengers as well as flight crews, without any public notification and without the knowledge of data protection groups.' (Guardian article). media-underground.net
Tuesday, November 7. 2006
I was having an argument recently with someone about the truth of evolution. She told me that evolution was a lot of rubbish and that there was no way that it could be true; basically because she couldn't imagine how it could be true. I kept arguing with her, trying to persuade her that evolution was the best theory that scientists had come up with so far of explaining how the natural world came to be.
I mustered up as much evidence as I could in support of this contention, but to no avail. When all was said and done she was simply unwilling to accept that a blindly random process like evolution could produce something as bewilderingly complex, as apparently beautifully designed and as comprehensively well suited to its environment, as the human body. She just couldn't imagine, indeed couldn’t picture, how the human body, or indeed any other animal’s body, could be solely the result of evolution - even taking into consideration that the mechanisms of genetic mutation and natural selection have the chance to operate over billions of years.
Continue reading "The Importance Of Imagination"
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