today

The United States will be ready to launch a missile attack on Iran's nuclear facilities as soon as early this month, perhaps "from 4 a.m. until 4 p.m. on April 6," according to reports in the Russian media on Saturday. According to Russian intelligence sources, the reports said, the US has devised a plan to attack several targets in Iran, and an assault could be carried out by launching missiles from fighter jets and warships stationed in the Persian Gulf.

IMO: Perhaps it is all for the best. Let's wait and see. The Iranians are trying to keep on good terms with the Christians, as in Armenia as I blogged recently. Turkey to join EU (with Armenians still grieving their dead after the Turkish genocide) ? Things do not add up very favorably for anyone.

Peter Hain has warned that the Blairites who are trying to stop Gordon Brown from becoming Prime Minister appear to want David Cameron to take power. As Mr Brown reinforced his credentials for the premiership on a visit to Afghanistan, the Northern Ireland Secretary made an outspoken attack on Tony Blair's allies who are trying to persuade David Milliband to mount a challenge.

To me, all this seems quite incomprehensible. Milliband has been heard to publically refuse to challenge Brown 8 times within an hour to my rough reckoning. It would look very bad for him and for Labor if he gave in to foolish pressure now. And as for "Blairites", how can they even exist as Blair has already said he is standing down soon and has clearly not given support to another candidate.

But Brown should really try to improve his act, and I have already briefly indicated some problem areas. I did not think much of his last budget, either. It seemed to increase tax for poor people, and almost admitted the truth of Tory criticisms of his being a 'stealth taxer'.. He certainly seems to befriend firms like Barclay's Bank and the usual bunch of carousel fraudsters though, and that cannot win him votes.

I find it hard to see how people can vote for "midnight toker" (and coker) Cameron, and even Tebbitt does not seem to hold him in high esteem, but the Labor Party seem to be almost trying to force Cameron on us. Hopefully things will improve soon. Libdem could be best at this time, particularly for the poor and/or payers of a lot of council tax, and Libdems aren't much good either.

IMO: At this time the UK voting prospect is not favourable. What is almost worse, in USA Bush seems to be drinking heavily, and even at his best, unlike say Bob Kiley, he was hardly much good.

The Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics, at M.I.T says, inter alia :

A remarkable fact about the recent debate about Singur is that it is so much about land, and so little about cars.

Cars are what economists call a 'public bad'. When I buy a car, it makes me happy (or at least that is the presumption) but it makes everyone else worse off. The suspended particles that get released into the air when I drive my car, will eventually contribute to killing someone and the carbon dioxide that results from burning hydrocarbons, even George Bush seems to have realised, might end up killing us all. Cars also contribute to worsening the traffic, lengthening the working day, and encouraging the murderous manoeuvres of drivers late for work.

Every time someone buys a car, the pressure on politicians to deliver better public transportation goes down. The people who get hurt by this realignment of political priorities are the poor, those who cannot imagine buying a scooter, let alone a car.... This is why a one lakh rupee car, targeted exactly towards the lower end of the middle classes, is likely to be particularly perverse in its effects.

The mystery is why a leftist government decided to make a showpiece out of a project for building small cars, when it would have much more sense for it to agitate for higher taxes on all cars. Since cars make everyone else pay for the driver's pleasure, the driver needs to pay society back, and a special tax on every new car purchase is the best way to get there. This tax could turn out to be in the lakhs.

All the above is probably true and then Professor Banerjee (not Didi, same name) suggests instead developing a cheap and far more energy efficient version of the Tata Sumo presumably for mutual or joint use.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The White House has criticized House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's plans to stop in Syria next week during a Middle East trip that began Friday. She will be the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit Syria since relations deteriorated between Damascus and Washington.

The United States has accused Syria of aiding the Sunni insurgency in western Iraq with weapons and fighters. Syria also is accused of supporting the militant extremist groups Hezbollah, a Shiite political party and militia, and Hamas.

"We think that someone should take a step back and think about the message that it sends ... to our allies."

The US encouraged Savak, who routinely tortured students in the Middle East by shoving broken alcohol bottles up their bums, I was told by the friend of a victim, so surely Nancy Pelosi won't be much of a threat. But then, I'm not a Republican, so I don't know from personal experience.

IMO: I think it would be a good idea if senior Washington people had a first hand view of Syria's problems.

Tehran, March 30: One of the 15 British service members held captive in Iran appeared Friday on the government`s Arabic-language TV and apologized for entering Iranian waters "without permission".

IMO: But, is he not going to admit to killing the Pope and blowing up the UK Houses of Parliament ?

The Massive Ordnance Penetrator should be just the ticket for deep bunkers. Most of its 30,000-pound weight is actually in the hardened metal casing, which will strike the earth at several times the speed of sound after falling from high altitude. This should enable the MOP to drill a long way down before exploding. Delivery is by B-52 Stratofortresses or B-2 stealth bombers.

The Iranian nuke facility at Natanz is said in parts to be 75 feet underground and covered by metres of reinforced concrete.

IMO: If penetrating that feeble effort of protection by Iran is about the best that can be expected from the MOP, "Nukes 'R Us" is soon likely to be the catch cry.

Many other (indeed most) countries have separate Ministries of the Interior and Justice. These changes can, for example, bring prisons and convicts permanently to the fore, rather than just when there's a big scandal.

Either a joint or split model can be made to work. The issue is that Governments in the UK, both Labor and Tory, have been poor at implementation. Reid's idea may well be worth trying.

It is easy to announce new laws and initiatives. What is difficult is dealing with the organisational issues that are causing the problems. Some posible specifics might be, generally speaking : Poor systems, confused goals, demotivated staff, incompetent management. A combination of all four? But these are issues that need addressing. And it is only in dealing with these problems will improvement occur.

Politicians frequently love to self-publicise and go round giving speeches. Turning around any organisation means rolling your sleeves up and getting on with the job. And there is little evidence, in domestic policy anyway, that this government has ever been willing to do that.

IMO: Reid has now been given a little more space for hard work. Anyone who has seen even videos of the Home Office really has to agree with Reid that there is a lot of space for improvement. But will Reid have time or desire to do the work, and not just magically disappear to another post in the usual "musical chairs" ballet. Only time will tell and we must hope for the best, and hope for more than simply spin or highfalutin Blairite pseudoscientific schemes which can never really work.

Madurai, Mar 28 (UNI) The temple elephant of the famed Meenakshi Amman temple here, Angayarkanni, is indisposed and is being treated for various ailments. A medical team headed by Namasivayam, Joint-Director of Health, was attending on the critically ill 41-year-old pachyderm.

According to temple sources, the elephant was lying down on the floor since yesterday and could not lift itself up. A team of experts in treating domesticated elephants was expected to arrive here tomorrow from Guruvayur.

Angayarkanni was gifted to the temple and had been part of many temple rituals, especially during festive occasions.

IMO: God's blessings are on it and it is hoped that it will recover.Not every elephant has been so fortunately blessed. Many elephants just have to pull logs and have to work, like the rest of us.

Madurai, March 31: The temple elephant, ailing for the past few days and undergoing treatment here, died today despite efforts of the doctors to save it

More than 128,000 staff were surveyed. Nearly two thirds of health staff would not be happy to be a patient in their own NHS trust, a survey shows.

The Healthcare Commission poll of more than 128,000 workers also found less than half felt patients were a top priority.

The 80-year-old revolutionary asserted that President Bush's support for using crops to produce ethanol for cars could deplete corn and other food stocks in developing nations, putting the lives of 3 billion people at risk worldwide.

"The sinister idea of converting food into combustible was definitively established as the economic line of the foreign policy of the United States," Mr. Castro wrote of Mr. Bush's discussions of biofuels with U.S. automakers this week.

He noted that Cuba has also experimented with extracting ethanol from sugar cane, but said there could be disastrous consequences if rich nations imported key food crops such as corn from poor countries to help meet energy needs. "Apply this recipe to the countries of the Third World, and you will see how many people among the hungry masses of our planet will no longer consume corn," the article said.

As the UK mid-liberal paper the Guardian says "Castro warns poor will starve for greener fuel".

Use of agricultural land on the subcontinent must be carefully considered, both because people need to eat (at least as well as they do now) and because of relevance to global warming. Obviously the peasants on the land will also need fair treatment and this fact is blogged here continually.

IMO: Congratulations Mr. Castro for yet again speaking out for the poor. Green factors are important to all, as even Bollywood points out these days, but savings should be made at the serious expense of the rich also , not just all impossibly burdened on the poor who have enough problems already.

Taliban style vigilantism is visible on the streets of the Pakistani capital Islamabad and it is getting shriller.

Militant, burka-clad schoolgirls have stepped up their drive for a Taliban-style Islamic regime in Pakistan by launching "vice and virtue" demanding the closure of music and video stores.

Pro-Taliban militants firing rockets attacked a town and kidnapped the principal of a school where they had tried and failed to recruit students as suicide attackers. One security force member was killed.

So they are trying to close down the Pakistani army's entertainment centres. Interesting, as clearly some participants in this trade are not voluntary, i.e. they are slave workers - and strictly the UN probably should have intervened by now. But I doubt that would suit anyone as the UN, whatever its value, is not too keen on actually doing anything. This makes local extreme measures more likely as sometimes nothing else can be done. Also there have been many pedophile scandals within the UN, though admittedly probably fewer than in, for example, organised US religious groups.

March 28, 2007: Nuclear Pakistan breaking up. Last week, the World Sindhi Institute held a seminar in Washington, DC to mark the 40th anniversary of the Lahore Resolution, a document that promised sovereignty for the future Pakistan's ethnic minorities. However, Pakistan soon became a continuing dictatorship, led by one general after another, that squashed the autonomy of the ethnically distinct regions of Pakistan. Many speakers, representing the Baluchi, Sindhi, Pashtun, Kashmiri, and Balti peoples of Pakistan, stressed that an alliance of Pakistan, America, and Saudi Arabia works against the interests of the oppressed nations of Pakistan.

Baluchis, Kashmiris, Sindhis, Pashtuns, and Gilgitis/Baltis prepare to say goodbye to Pakistan, leaving a nuclear armed Punjabistan allied with Saudi Arabia.

A spokesperson for the World Sindhi Institute said that Pakistan is currently unraveling -- lawyers have been on strike and there have been mass resignations from the judiciary as the Punjabi military government in Islamabad cracks down on dissent and the media. The Sindh region suffers from internal colonization, especially now that 62 percent of the oil produced in Pakistan is found in Sindh. The Sindhi spokesperson said the United States does not see Pakistan as a multi-ethnic state and supports the 1.2 million active duty and retired Pakistani military personnel who run practically every facet of Pakistani society. In 1971, Bengalis in East Pakistan rebelled against the Pakistani military state and declared independence as Bangladesh. Now, large portions of remaining Pakistan stand to also break away as "other Bangladeshes." Although Pakistan is a nuclear state, the weapons are in the hands of the dominant Punjabis.

If Pakistan breaks up, Punjabistan will remain as a nuclear state allied to its financial supporters in Saudi Arabia -- the country that also backed the Taliban and "Al Qaeda." A number of individuals representing Pakistan's nations agreed that Pakistan is based on the "Three A's" -- Allah, the Army, and America.

A spokesman for the Pashtuns of Pakistan stressed that his region was influenced by Islamic terrorists receiving financial support and Wahhabist Islamic indoctrination from Saudi Arabia. It was agreed that if Saudi funds were cut off, the Islamic groups would rapidly lose interest in Saudi Wahhabism. Pakistan's ISI has waged a ruthless campaign against the ethnic minorities. A number of Sindhis and Baluchis have been "disappeared" by the U.S.-supported military regime of General Pervez Musharraf.

IMO: All this ill behooves Saudi Arabia, which should be setting a good example and not destabilising Islam for greed and short term financial gain, but it appears to be behaving intentionally against the will of Allah. Some interesting theology here. Maybe Saudia Arabia needs some female imams.

Some people wonder why the 'Cornwall' was so lightly armed. In fact the 'Cornwall' apparently mounts a 4.5-inch gun turret and Harpoon ship-killers. She could easily blast gunboat-class opponents to wreckage from beyond the horizon. In fact, her helicopter could do so on its own using Sea Skua missiles. But before the Pasdaran arrived, there would have been no adequate justification for vapourising them; and after, any use of serious firepower would have killed the British boarding party and probably innocent merchant seamen as well.

Now we are almost in a classic Kashmir situation where yokels (in this case Iranian rather than Pak) with a few weapons "unintentionally" cross a border and give trouble, in this case 'arresting' people doing a reasonable job in an agreed area. The diplomats on both sides can sort this one out but probably may not want to. An easy answer is to automatically liquidate every unauthorised thing that Iran sends across the border - life has already been cheaply treated in this Bush/Blair war and such action could be appropriate, together with further necessary steps like vigorously shelling Iranian harbours or strategic facilities. Iran seems by international standards to have become a 'rogue state'.

IMO: Let us hope the Iranians have more control over their personnel than the Pakis have, and some ability to make sensible decisions rather than the Paki decisions which are pretty mindless. Personally I doubt that ability of the present Iranian govt. and they probably think also that if the Pakis can get away with it in Kashmir with Mother India then Iran can with a few Brits near their border.

We have a terrible position in Pakistan where the Pakis may have been given cruise missiles either by the Chinese or the U.S., in the first case to make general trouble in the region and in the second, presumably to involve themselves in a dispute with regard to Iran and maybe even to 'try' take out major Iranian cities, and generally to promote US arms sales. I've already blogged the first option. The answer to both options is probably to nuke Pakistan, as I've already said. And how about the CIA personnel on the ground in Waziristan - "friendly fire" - the US seem to like using it.

According to Guido Fawkes, who appears to be a crony of the veteran political commentator Michael White.

You heard it here first, but only as a widely publicised rumour. Anyway, we can hope that 'New Labor' will clean up its act, and will improve its present governance which really seems too reminiscent of the Manchester bus services - i.e. a mess, and for similar reasons - and in earlier blogs we have tried to sketch out some possibility of improvement

Here in London, Bob Kiley's drinking seems to have had no merit but the astounding thing is that, even in spite of that, public transport Kenwise has been a success but nationwide Blair's economic approach has essentially been a failure. An answer for the Labor party is better governance. That could only be to the benefit of the country, and Labor principles can still be readily upheld.

"Some of India's home-grown extremist or terror groups like the Maoists, who have territorial control over rural areas in different parts of the country might be tempted to emulate the LTTE", former RAW officer B Raman said.

Another prominent defence expert, Bharat Verma, said "despite New Delhi's pretention of an emerging great power, a non-state actor like LTTE developing air force capabilities shows that India's influence in its neighbourhood is rapidly shrinking". Verma, editor of the Indian Defence Review, said: "The foremost reason for this is New Delhi's incompetence to strategise and boldly take steps to neutralise forces like LTTE, or Lashker-e-Taiba for that matter, that pose a direct challenge to our security."

IMO: And what about the Pakistan cruise missiles which could have atomic warheads. Dirty nuclear bombs could prove even worse, with the land mine philosophy that it is better to cripple than kill. But at least Delhi might consider twice before perpetrating another Nandigram atrocity since they will have not just Trinamool Cogress but the Maoists to answer to. A lot better and more patriotic if decent agricultural reforms could be carried out, making everybody happy with the Govt instead of just Ratan Tata and others like him. Everyone would benefit much more if proper reforms were carried out, even Tata.

And Mamata Banerjee says "It's time Buddha quits".

“If he has owned up responsibility for the Nandigram incident and has the minimum respect for democracy, he should resign,” Mamata said. “If anyone indulges in killing and says sorry, can the person be excused? The Chief Minister had prepared the blueprint for the Nandigram operation with the police and CPI-M cadres. If he really owns up responsibility and has the minimum respect for democracy, he should step down. But he will not quit his chair although the people want punishment for him.”

Good thinking, Didi.

In fact, Buddhadeb announced that the state government has decided to scrap the SEZ project in Nandigram and shift it to a new location.

IMO: I can see people want to save face but what is needed is proper co-ordinated planning not just face saving. Then people will not be so keen to support terrorism, and this must be of benefit.

And we have to remember that by now the terrorists may seem more sincere to many ordinary people than the Delhi govt. Certainly during the Tamil wars it was harder for many people to feel sorry for the death of Rajiv Gandhi than for the LTTE type groups. And that is by no means a good political result. Politicians have to think first of the people, not for their own benefit. Who would have been the best Chancellor of Germany? Rosa Luxembourg or Adolf Hitler ? Definitely NOT the sort of question we want to find ourselves having to answer now.

No not in N.I. - it's the new voters who will be half-human/half-sheep.

Scientists have created the world's first human-sheep chimera - which has the body of a sheep and half-human organs.

The development is likely to revive criticisms about scientists playing God, with the possibility of silent viruses, which are harmless in animals, being introduced into the human race. Dr. Patrick Dixon, an international lecturer on biological trends, warned: "Many silent viruses could create a biological nightmare in humans. Mutant animal viruses are a real threat, as we have seen with HIV." Animal rights activists fear that if the cells get mixed together, they will end up with cellular fusion, creating a hybrid which would have the features and characteristics of both man and sheep.

This is apparently part of the "Daily Mail" public relations for the UK Channel 4 program "Animal Farm". UK Channel 4 is the wonderful station that gave us Jade Goody and "leading scientists" who apparently do not believe in global warming - suggestions later were effectively that the word "not" was dubbed in.

IMO: Automatically doubt the truth of any alleged factual program on UK Channel 4. I know nothing of the chimera but it certainly will appeal to politicians.

[Somebody just said "we already have a half-devil/half-human in Toady".]

March 27, 2007 David Hicks could be back in Australia by the end of the year after a shock decision to plead guilty to providing material support for terrorism.

The unexpected guilty plea of an Australian who was the first Guantanamo detainee to stand trial before a military tribunal was likely linked to a deal with prosecutors, the man's father said Tuesday.

Australian papers cover this matter in a lot of detail and of course the details vary a lot, from day to day. Apart from the plea bargaining aspect, Hicks seemed to have most unfair and biassed treatment from the courts. Any non-US citizen who has as much as eaten a few times in US greasy-spoon restaurants may easily understand the way this can happen. Hence the existence of such usenet groups as alt.nuke-the-usa . In short you can find a lot of annoying hypocrites in the USA, if you look at all.

But to be fair, Hicks does seem to have been a deplorable nuisance to the USA, and at the very least he seems to have posed for AlQaida with materiel like rocket launchers etc, which can't bring him much praise from the security conscious U.S., even if they are pretty gung-ho themselves anyway.

IMO: By now Hicks should perhaps be put in Australian custody. There are several political elements to that as well.

It is understood Ian Paisley Jnr will be executive producer on the project. Describing the script as "a tremendous opportunity to explore and expose the great man and all his vices and virtues", the film has the total support of the Paisley clan.

I have always felt a great deal of respect for Mr. Paisley and share many of his views.

OTOH outside of Europe the Roman Catholic Church has often been of truly great value in education of the poor, and other charitable acts. All religions have their faults and I'm afraid many faults quickly come to mind, in fact in Europe I probably think first of the Magdalene sisters and their RC sweatshops. Others will have far worse memories. In fact the last time I was nearly blown up by the IRA - a few feet away from the blast - I was not at all happy about the RCs and I could doubtless think of many other cases.

IMO: Christianity must be seen as a world religion, though nowadays a minor and probably declining one. So best of luck to Mr. Paisley and his efforts for Northern Ireland.

March 27, 2007 A BOOZE-free town has won a battle to stay dry and stopped a supermarket opening an off-licence. Bournville has had no pubs or bottle shops since choc tycoon George Cadbury founded it 100 years ago.

But its Tesco Express applied to sell alcohol for three hours a day. The council turned the off-licence down.

Local Sam Stephenson, 26, said: “This is a great victory. It’s good to know people can stand up to huge companies who think they can just waltz in and change the rules.”

Tesco said the branch will be its only booze-free shop in the UK. Quaker Cadbury built Bournville near Birmingham for factory workers.

You can't drink and drive safely and you do not think clearly when you are drunk. The council have behaved correctly and it is to be hoped that similar measures may occur elsewhere.

Earlier blogs have made it plain that alcohol is addictive and a health hazard - not a personal opinion only but a medical view. It ill behooves any firm to push harmful addictive substances at an unwilling or misled community.

Alcohol is normally forbidden in many countries unlike the decadent UK which is clearly on the way downhill with crime and corruption. I have even heard it said that Tony Blair is becoming to look more and more like the devil himself. Personally I think he has suffered from bad photography recently and may be in poor health but anyway he is the cause of wars and trouble.

IMO: Alcohol is prohibited to strict Hindus and Muslims (who are a large percent of the world's population) and even by many of the lower orders like some Christians, and it should be eschewed by all.

London, March 25: Prince Harry, who was out on a secret date with a close friend Natalie Pinkham, reportedly indulged in booze fuelled rage on March 24. The 22-year old prince, who was partying at posh London club Boujis with former TV presenter Natalie, went berserk attacking one photographer and shouting at him to "F*** off". The matter continued "... then grabbed me and tried to shove me over. He had his hands round my collar and back. It was an assault. I've never known anything like it before," "He was very drunk. I took a few shots of him and he just came for me."

IMO: The snappers are comprehensibly rude (they get well paid for THEIR bad behaviour) but if Harry does not get rid of his alcohol addiction - he is no George Best in any way and could rid himself of his addiction - he is setting such a bad example he should never be allowed to reign in modern England. I would say he could be given an ASBO (fair enough for once) and even ordered to do an Anger Management course, but colleagues doing such courses say they are crap and surely HM can afford to have him treated privately. Very 1984 I suppose, but he could be King one day.

A website run by associates of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, reported last night that the Britons would be put before a court and indicted. Referring to them as “insurgents”, the site concluded: “If it is proven that they deliberately entered Iranian territory, they will be charged with espionage. If that is proven, they can expect a very serious penalty since according to Iranian law, espionage is one of the most serious offences.”

The penalty for espionage in Iran is death.

Iranian military sources are alleged to say that the aim was to trade the Royal Marine sailors (captured by Iran for supposed border crossing) for five Revolutionary Guards captured in Iraq by the US earlier this year. But the US probably take the view that captives aren't worth releasing just because the Brits might like it. One could assume this in view of the US clear refusal to accept full guilt over an earlier "friendly fire" incident where untrained US soldiers took out serious UK personnel.

Lord Triesman, a Foreign Office undersecretary who had held talks with Iran's ambassador on Saturday, told Sky News the issue of whether the sailors had strayed into Iranian waters was a technical one. Triesman. "It's a technical issue and I think it could be resolved as a technical issue."

Obviously this is basically unrelated to the more serious nuclear issue but a possible Iranian strategy for capturing these troops can be seen. They may be trying to get US and UK to break ranks. OTOH it could provide a sensible opportunity for face to face negotiations.

Also, Russia is rather reluctantly coming to somewhere near the US view but is going to want compensation (which it may not get). Vive le EU, (wrt France) one may say.

IMO: The best thing to do might be for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to be somehow replaced by a female imam (who in a proper democracy would get more votes) and then, as usual, the woman could carry the can. I'm joking, (I think).

Former Foreign Minister Jack Straw said on Sunday he would run the leadership campaign of Chancellor Gordon Brown to replace Prime Minister Tony Blair when he steps down later this year.

AFAIK the only likely successful opponents so far seem to be Alan Milburn or Charles Clarke whose website launch was described by the acute Jackie Ashley as "intellectually incoherent". Also there are the well known business tieups (for example Milburn is a director of Lloyd's pharmacy, relatively harmless so far) which could lead to the NHS being regarded as disrespectfully as the Manchester bus services, and leading to far more loss of life. Thanks to Ken Livingstone, London bus services are by and large excellent. But Manchester felt the full force of Toady's corruption and so far have appalling service, non English drivers who can't even read road signs, and appalling accidents. It seems the reasonable Milliband, reasonably, is not standing for leader.

IMO: Good for Jack Straw, as far as I am aware Gordon Brown is the best candidate so far, though certainly far from perfect. Also, Jack Straw replies to my emails.

Even in New York. The picture is from as early as 2005, the quite fetching Dr. Amina Wadud led the Muslim service after another woman, who wore no headscarf, sounded the call to prayer.More than a hundred men and women knelt in adjacent rows, with no curtain to divide them. Some of the men at times looked nervous or unsure they should be there. Newspaper reporters, photographers and television cameras surrounded those attending.

Mildly interesting religious debate about it, here and here.

Common enough now, even in China and Morocco.

IMO: Mujahidaats are common enough whether you like them or not - I strongly dislike that idea, by and large, but they do happen. So on the face of it female imams could be a more positive, modern, side of Islam. Just as polygamy can be legal in Islam, for somewhat similar reasons it can also be argued that female imams are a good idea. and indeed one might well hopefully expect some of them to be so-called 'Imams of Dibley".

Do you want to be referred for an operation by Tesco or Sainsbury's? Would you trust Asda to prescribe the medication that is best for you? New Labour is proposing that supermarkets should be able to provide GP services. But private companies' priority is always profit, and they won't agree to provide healthcare unless profits are guaranteed.

To help the profiteers, New Labour are also proposing to restrict the treatments everyone is entitled to on the NHS. That brings us another step closer to the disastrous US system where a whole family can be wiped out financially if one member needs medical treatment that isn't covered by their insurance. The only way New Labour can get away with these proposals is if the enormous support that exists for the NHS is not mobilised to defend it.

Over 10,000 doctors, junior doctors, medical students, friends and family marched through London and Glasgow on 17 March to protest about changes to the training of junior doctors. Marchers chanted "What do we want? Jobs! When do we want them? Now". Many demonstrators were eager to sign a petition to support a national demonstration to defend the health service but pointed out that it wasn't just their jobs they were marching for, but against attacks on the NHS as a whole.

Two thirds of junior doctors admit to having made a mistake at some time and four out of 10 say they have made a mistake in the past six months. For the survey in the journal 'Occupational and Environmental Medicine' , doctors filled in questionnaires and were rated on a standard test. Doctors remembered making the most errors in emergency medicine, when 57 per cent said they had made a mistake at some time. For anaesthetics the figure was 46 per cent and for intensive care 38 per cent. More than a third of all registrars and half of all house officers - the most junior of doctors - recalled making a mistake, and that is only the ones foolish or honest enough to admit mistakes, clearly most doctors do not.

IMO: Maybe the doctors have been too busy complaining "gissajob" too much to worry about their patient's welfare. Patients sometimes say that but many think it safer to keep quiet in case they get the old gone-with-the-wind treatment ("Where's the rest of me?" though a few trips to B.Liar's new, democratic Iraq may make such worries needless).

But then, they always say 'Ibrahim done it'. Jamaican police declared Woolmer was murdered and confirmed they would investigate whether he was killed to stop him exposing match-fixing. Apparently Woolmer was born in Kanpur, India, so he may have understood Asia.

As Bob Woolmer sat in the dressing room watching his Pakistan side painfully extinguished from the Cricket World Cup last weekend, a disturbing chant echoed from outside. "Death to Woolmer ... death to Pakistan," angry Pakistan spectators shouted. There are definitely possibilities there. But that was, after all, only what Fox News said and they might have made it up.

On Thursday, a notorious gangster, Babloo Srivasetava, brazenly told Indian television that the country's most wanted man, Dawood Ibrahim, may be behind the murder.

"The Pakistan-Ireland match must have been fixed," Srivasetava said while being taken to court in the north-west city of Lucknow for an unrelated murder case. "The D-Company [Ibrahim's gang] may have lots of money at stake. Woolmer may have got an inkling of the fixing and hence he was killed." In normal times, this would have been scoffed at as an an underworld figure trying to get even with a rival. But these are not normal times and Ibrahim, wanted for the 1993 Mumbai bombings which killed more than 250 people, has long been suspected of being the match-fixing kingpin.

IMO: AFAIK gambling on cricket matches is illegal everywhere in India and Pakistan, so by nature such gambling is connected with organised crime in those countries and there is also a lot of high spirits over games. In all fairness it would seem just if a person whose background was mainly English, like Bob's, was one of the first victims of lethal cricket violence as the English invented 'cricket violence' in recent years as well as body line bowling (now outlawed) much earlier, where the bowler bowls to hit the batsman and not the wicket. Seems a pity though, as Woolmer was just about to retire peacefully to South Africa. Whatever the facts, it seems likely that like Larwood, Woolmer was 'acting under orders'.

And are probably going to be wrong again.

The new ranking system places alcohol and tobacco in the upper half of the league table, ahead of cannabis and several Class A drugs such as ecstasy.

So what do the nincompoops want ? Not, almost certainly, in practice to make cigarettes and alcohol illegal. Alcohol was illegal in India for many years and to get it you had to obtain an addict's permit from a Doctor - which many foreigners, doubtless mainly dead by now in the customary George Best way - did contrive to do. In fact I've often said that one good thing that was done in Hyderabad by a muslim town council (at last memory now hindu again) was the prohibition of alcohol, only made legal after argument and protests. Alcohol should be illegal everywhere but unfortunately it is very easy to make at home, though soon scientifically designed sniffers should be up to eradicating it - I hope. It is said that the only reason alcohol was made legal in Delhi was that the police were afraid of drunken monkeys and elephants raiding the illegal liquor that was seized.

The corrupt hands of alcohol and cigarette manufacturers should be physically cut off,.but in the UK this won't happen. And the idea that because less people die or are made ill by ecstacy and so ecstacy should be legalised is obviously nutty. For one thing it is much less frequently used, and individual doses can wreck a life - I've known unfortunate cases in the UK. We even see an heir to the UK throne called 'Wills', so someone could get money from the cigarette manufacturers.

I mentioned here in an earlier blog that Kareem got jail (4 years) for blogging. Here is an extract of the blog he got arrested about:

"The mere existence of legal provisions that criminalize freedom of thought, and threaten with imprisonment anyone who criticizes religion in any way, is a grave defect in the law."

More details of this matter, a podcast, and a place you can add your complaint and message of support, as a fellow blogger, for Kareem to the many received is here.

It is reasonably claimed that Microsoft's new Windows Vista operating system is a giant step backward for your freedoms.

Usually, new software enables you to do more with your computer. Vista, though, is designed to restrict what you can do. Further claims along the same lines are given here and measures which can be taken are suggested here.

IMO: Juggernauts like Microsoft are often enough a lot of trouble to avoid. At least beware of threats to your freedom. I am far from suggesting even the time consuming necessity of changing to another operating system. The badvista site suggests sources of FREE SOFTWARE, apparently United Nations approved..

"It is not 1970s; they will not know what has hit them”, so said General Pervaiz Musharraf about the Baloch rebels. Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti was the most prominent among hundreds who have been hit since then. Hitting is still going on and consequently the hatred against the state is going up. After the military operation in East Pakistan whomsoever one would talk to about the negative repercussions, likely disintegration of Pakistan, the response that would come used to be terrible: West Pakistan said at the time: we would keep Pakistan united even if we had to exterminate half of Bengali population. Result: half of Pakistan separated.

And now Waziritstan: The death toll from four days of fierce fighting between local and foreign militants in a remote Pakistani border region has risen to about 135, three security officials said Thursday. About 100 foreigners, mostly Uzbeks, and their supporters have died since the fighting broke out in the South Waziristan region on Monday, the three senior officials told The Associated Press. About 25 local militants and ten civilians caught in the crossfire have also died, they said. The officials — one from the military and two intelligence agents — asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

And now - the world: Pakistan test-fires nuclear capable cruise missile Islamabad, March. 22 (PTI): Pakistan today successfully test-fired a nuclear capable cruise missile which can avoid radar detection and has a range of 700 km, bringing many Indian cities within its reach. "The Hatf-VII missile, which is also called the Babur, has a range of 700 km and can carry various warheads including nuclear," a Pakistan military statement here said. "The Babur is a terrain hugging, radar avoiding cruise missile, whose range has now been enhanced to 700 km."

50 injured as lawyers, police clash in Lahore. At least 50 people, 40 of them lawyers, were injured in fierce clashes between police and members of the legal fraternity at the Lahore High Court (LHC) here on Saturday. The other injured included journalists and policemen. About 1,500 lawyers had gathered at the Karachi Hall of the LHC to participate in an all-Pakistan lawyers' convention called by the Lahore High Court Bar Association (LHCBA) to discuss a strategy to handle the issue concerning Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry. And now the Pak lawyers plan a nationwide strike on Apl 3. Pathetic or what ?

IMO: Oh dear, such a pity. Is Pakistan the new, worse, Iraq ? Ask the lawyers . Pakistan clearly is a bust country which cannot stand on its own feet, and now they have somehow stolen the plans of cruise missiles from the American CIA (now resident in Waziristan) or from colluding Chinese. And some Brits are still mad enough to say the UK does not need a nuclear deterrent ? I'd say - nuke the Paki bastards the first time an Englishman dies at their hands. But then, I'm not a diplomat, just somebody who knows the needless and useless trouble the Pakis have already made in Kashmir, and at the Indian border, and the countless lives lost due to their mindless violence..

AGARAK, Armenia, March 19 : Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad today inaugurated a new gas pipeline in Armenia. ''My visit was brief but very productive,'' Ahmadinejad said after lighting a torch with his Armenian counterpart Robert Kocharyan to mark the opening of the 200 million dollars pipeline to transport Iranian gas to Armenia.

Armenia will supply electricity to Iran in exchange for gas. ''I am pleased and grateful to the Almighty who allowed us to open the gas pipeline today. The snow and rain are also the gifts of the Almighty,'' Ahmadinejad told a briefing at the Armenian village of Agarak . Armenian and Iranian energy ministries also agreed on Monday to invest $200 million in building two new hydro-electric power stations. Building will start this year.

Most Armenians (94%) are Christians. In 301 AD Armenia became the first country to establish Christianity as its state religion.

Midnapore, Mar 19 (UNI) Altogether 300 faculty member and students of the Indian Institute of Technology(IIT), Kharagpur today organised a silent procession within the campus, in protest against police atrocities in Nandigram.

If the state does not take any step, all the IITs would resort to a joint movement for the cause, they said. Meanwhile, educationists, social workers and common people in the town here also condemned the police firing on innocent peasants and requested the Governor for compensation.

Home Secretary John Reid has revealed his mother may have cleaned a house for Tony Blair's grandparents. At the time, the hard-up Reids were living in a council house in the nearby coal mining village of Cardowan. Mary's husband Tommy was a postman and she cleaned the houses of wealthier families.

Cargo containers imported from China are said to be turned into temporary jails to ease the British prisons overcrowding crisis, reports say. This could be so the illegal immigrants - and others - can be shipped back they way they came in.

Reid announced his plans to clean up the Home Office only three weeks ago and has already lost the battle to put the police and security services together into a new “antiterrorism” department.

Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, is reported to have threatened to resign if the Foreign Office did not keep control of the security services.

A lot of high-level opposition is yet another blow to John Reid’s efforts to create both a ministry of justice and a new terrorism department with himself as “security supremo” in charge of police, security services and terrorism. By now anyone can see that the Tories had fallen for a lot of "Yes, Minister" pranks and the Home Offfice is a mess as Reid said in the first place. But now the civil servant ploy merchants are making sure it is not put right, and at every step more jobs seem to be demanded.

IMO: Well Reid is not doing much of a job of cleaning up the Home Office so far but he certainly seems to "go postal" a lot.

["go postal" is a US term referring to indulging in on-the-job mindless anger and often extreme violence to the point of massive multiple murder - see for example wikipedia. ]

A FORMER spy who claimed MI6 might have been involved in Princess Diana's car crash has been banned from giving evidence at the inquest.

Richard Tomlinson, Britain's MI6 agent in France between 1991 and 1995, has been gagged by the Attorney General Lord Goldsmith. During the earlier inquiry led by Lord Stevens, he had told of seeing a top secret file detailing how to make an assassination look like a crash. The inquiry rejected his claims as irrelevant.

IMO: But all this has been gone into already in some detail. What we do note is that the person who has caused all the trouble and delay is Mohammed Al Fayed, whose employees put Princess Diana in a car where the driver was drunk and caused the death crash. Clearly this corrupt, drunken and un-Islamic conduct had been known by, and cleared by, Mohammed Al Fayed who by now actually seems like the murderer of Princess Diana. Some details in this week's Private Eye (No 1180, p13). Al Fayed should be jailed for a very long time, but the British police are too idle and corrupt to do so.

Part of the BBC2 series "The Trap", full details here. This episode shows how in the 1990s politicians from both the right and the left tried to extend an idea of freedom based on the freedom of the market to all other areas of society. The basis of this new 'freedom' was "Game Theory". Even John Nash has now expressed some doubts about his model of simplistic selfish individuals. It is mainly believed nowadays that two groups in society actually behave in a rational self-interested way in all experimental situations. One is economists themselves, and the other is psychopaths.

IMO: I would certainly say it is true of psychopaths and of the misguided and of the spin merchants like "Greed is Good" Ivan Boesky. I take complex systems theory very seriously, in fact I'm writing several papers on it, and what the economists and psychologists would appear to have given the politicians is wildly oversimplified.

It is pathetic to see leaders in two major countries at least, Britain and America, falling for this nightmarish pseudoscientific flapdoodle. (Though I reiterate very strongly that that certainly does not apply to the topics considered, just to oversimplified presentations that the politicians have accepted and taken for their own ends). According to Curtis, it seems, for example, that was the reason why Gordon Brown allowed (perhaps reasonably anyway) the Bank of England to dictate interest rates and it gave Clinton an excuse to tolerate the greed of the medical establishment.

The idea behind the mathematical system was to liberate public servants from old forms of bureaucratic control and workers were free to meet their targets anyway they wanted - total crap. The sort of thing that led to was that in one hospital patients were phoned up and asked when they were taking their holidays and the operations were then scheduled for the time they'd be away.

We see the bad effects as reported elsewhere in earlier posts here with regard to such matters as policing, medicine and the politics of local or national devolution.

Britain under New Labour is now even more unequal than it was under Margaret Thatcher with more and more wealth going to the tiny one percent at the top. Since 1997 differences in life expectancy and also in child mortality in different regions have increased too.

When confronted with a desperate predicament, the Northern German is said to take the attitude that "the situation is serious, but not hopeless" whereas the Southern German, confronting the same predicament, would take the attitude that "the situation is hopeless, but not serious". With the southern attitude, Paul Watzlawick offers a simple solution to seemingly impossible predicaments. One predicament is choosing to operate on the world the way one thinks it should be instead of the way it is.

IMO: Watzlawick says of people like Toady B. Liar , "As captain of his ship, which the rats (in this case the behavioural scientists) have already abandoned, he heroically steers into the stormy night." With Toady out of the way, it is possible that New Labour may still present workable policies. Milliband's approach to climate change, for example, if not 100% correct at least has political merit.

A spacecraft orbiting Mars has discovered deposits of ice at its south pole so thick that they would cover the planet in 36 feet of water if they were melted, said scientists. The scientists used the joint NASA-Italian Space Agency radar instrument on the European Space Agency Mars Express spacecraft to estimate the thickness and volume of ice deposits at the Martian south pole. These ice deposits cover an area larger than Texas.

But researchers are baffled by what happened to the water -- perhaps only 10 percent of the water that once existed on Mars is now trapped in the polar ice caps.

"Even if you took the water in these two (polar) ice caps and added it all up, it's still not nearly enough to do all of the work that we've seen that the water has done across the surface of Mars in its history."

The amount of water in the Martian past may have been the equivalent of a global layer hundreds of meters deep, while the polar deposits represent a layer of perhaps tens of meters. Other water may exist below the planet's surface or perhaps some was lost into space through the atmosphere.

Shah Rukh Khan is Bollywood's brand ambassador. The star of Bollywood, who is all the time all over the place, is troubled lately by the happenings in the Islamic world. At the same time, he feels it is important for him to stand up and be counted, "to be standing for the goodness of Islam".

In an interview with the weekly news magazine, Tehelka, the Bollywood icon whose children are being brought up by the tenets of both religions says he stands for what a modern Muslim should be.

"I'd like people to know that Islam is not only about being a fanatic, or radically different, angered person, or one who only does jihad. I'd like people to know that the actual meaning of jihad is to overcome one's own violence and weakness.

IMO: Views on Islam differ widely but one can reasonably argue that Allah will punish some intentional misrepresenters of the faith. These may well include many who hold to other views than those above.

Nandigram is perhaps a lesson in What Not to Do. It’s a story of rural India’s sentimental attachment to fertile agricultural land, an emotional bond that has developed over centuries, a tie that cannot be simply snipped off by one administrative order and re-joined by another that rescinds the earlier one. The idea that "land is a socio-economic issue and it requires very precise understanding of the character of a region before any forced acquisition programme is launched" is a widely held view.

This is an area where both Hindus and Muslims have co-habited peacefully over the ages.

These are people who are seeped in generations of tradition. Hindu women compulsorily light the diya under the tulsi-manch every evening, carry their dieties in dolis through the villages during festivities. The Muslims read their namaz five times a day and when the muslims have their festive occasions, Hindu ladies blow on the conchshells because muslim women also blow on their own conchs during Hindu festivals. "That is how they have always lived and that is how we have found them to be over the years we have been in charge here” the officers said. Next comes the land issue. The literacy rate in Midnapore, east or west, is very high. But you will also find a lot of frustration among the youth — many of whom are graduates and post-grads. Most of them have not found jobs and most of the shops in this wee village run hand to mouth. It is a very sentimental issue to these people and you must understand that, and the village, well.

So now the Washington Post says: "An Indian state government said Saturday it is dropping plans for an industrial zone after deadly riots [caused by the police and authorities] .. Land would not be acquired for any special economic zones in Nandigram." Federal Commerce Minister Kamal Nath promised a more cautious approach when land acquisition was an issue.

IMO: I certainly hope so, but I'll believe that when I see it.. We have already had enough problems due to bad planning.

In the first comprehensive study of the antioxidant content of various juices, published in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry, researchers at the University of Glasgow examined 13 different brands of fruit juices from a local U.K. supermarket.

They measured the number as well as the levels of antioxidants in apple, orange, grapefruit, cranberry, pineapple, tomato and grape juice, and found that purple grape juice has the highest concentration of antioxidants among juices. In fact, the more popular orange juice or clear apple juice have the lowest antioxidant content.

The recent U.S.-based Kame project suggested that volunteers who drank three or more glasses of juice a week could reduce the risk of Alzheimer's by 76 percent, compared with those who drank juice less than once a week.

But some scientists, like Bridget Aisbitt, a nutrition scientist at the British Nutrition Foundation, counsel caution about the antioxidant phenomenon. According to Aisbitt "These days, 'antioxidant' has become such an over-hyped buzzword, it's used on everything from shampoo to food. People should be careful about jumping onto the bandwagon".

A word to the wise: The study was funded by the National Grape Co-operative, a consortium of U.S. farmers which is owned by Welch's, the makers of Concord purple grape juice.

Yes, even in the Top People's paper, the "London Times" : David Cameron is being haunted by a renewed bout of speculation about his possible use of cocaine. Tabloid newspapers have dispatched investigators to try to pin down the truth of persistent Westminster rumours that he has used the Class A drug. Stories surfaced in the Sunday papers raising questions about Mr Cameron’s possible link to cocaine without actually answering them.

The drug issue dogged Mr Cameron’s party leadership campaign in 2005, and his failure to deny the rumours meant that they have lingered on ever since.

The Mail on Sunday republished an old story about how David Ruffley, a Conservative MP, stopped a colleague formally asking Mr Cameron during his leadership bid whether or not he had taken drugs. Mr Cameron was the only leadership contender not to be asked the question by MPs, and when it was sprung on him in a Channel 4 interview his response did not settle the issue.

Mr Cameron refused to deny the cannabis story, admitting that he made mistakes when he was young but insisting he had a right to a private life before he was involved in politics.

The Independent on Sunday ran a double-page feature titled “Cannabis, cocaine and the court of Cameron”, repeating speculation that he might have taken drugs when he was director of communications at Carlton Television or even when he was a Home Office adviser under the last Tory Government.

IMO: Of course, it has frequently been claimed that drug taking was rife during that Tory Govt and that they have been a direct major cause of street crime.

"It's absurd to say that there is not going to be a cost and a penalty - particularly when the SNP have got unfunded commitments, proposals for a local income tax, and when our two economies are so closely integrated."

An independent Scotland with the SNP in power would have a financial "black hole" which would have to be filled by taxes equivalent to £5,242 per household. And that is only the first and most obvious problem.

Analysts, however, say it is highly unlikely the SNP will win a majority and that independence is a distant prospect. To govern, the SNP would probably need to form a coalition with another major party and they all support the 300-year old union between Scotland, England and Wales. Unfortunately, it is still a mistake to vote SNP - a local protest against B.Liar is fine, but there is a real worry that the joke could go too far.

Scotland would be doomed if it separated and would be something like Slovakia or Moldova, cursed by their self-imposed isolation.

Scotland is too small to stand on its own feet by international standards. 'The English' (or Thatcherite corruption) have spent the oil money. The whole of Scotland has the population of a large suburb of Bombay and I cannot see the EU as being much use to them, at least in the forseeable future. I think even Dahisar would do better than Scotland as an independent country ! [others confirm] The Brits have improved the place no end and you'd have to be an utter fool to want it run by the whining Salmond, who is preparing to give Scotland away to any medium size bunch of jackasses who want the place.

IMO: Toady is right for once.

New Delhi/Siliguri (WB), Mar 16: Coming down heavily on the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) over the Nandigram killings, senior BJP leader and former party president Venkaiah Naidu today accused the Left party of adopting double standards. Naidu also criticised them for manhandling some Lok Sabha members on March 13 over the introduction of a bill to set up a maritime university in Tamil Nadu. As usual CPI-M had descended to fisticuffs and mindless heavy violence as that is apparently their only answer to problems nowadays, even in parliament. Naidu said: "CPI (M) is adopting double standards. They are engaging in double speak. Till yesterday, they had been giving 'pravachan' to other parties about how to conduct Parliament and all. Now, the way they have conducted the Parliament is national shame and the way they have used brutal force on innocent peasants in Nandigram speaks of their class character," Naidu said in New Delhi.

A 12-hour strike called by the main Opposition party Trinamool Congress against the killings of 14 people by police, shut business establishments, schools and offices in West Bengal. At least 21 people have died in Nandigram because of police violence since January.

Mamata Banerjee said :'In West Bengal the government is a joint venture of the Tatas and the CPI-M now.' Accusing Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya of making provocative statements at a rally Sunday in Kolkata to trigger violence against opposition parties, she said: 'The chief minister should first control his tongue if he wants to control the situation in the state.

'He is speaking like a moneyed person. He is maintaining double standards. He is playing with fire and doing whatever he wants. He has turned the state into a fiefdom and unleashed state-sponsored terrorism.' 'West Bengal is worse than Iraq or Iran. The chief minister is a dictator who is using his administrative people like a party cadre.'

Mamata Banerjee was hospitalised today when she complained of chest pain after allegedly being hit by a stone by the police while on her way to areas affected by violence yesterday. Banerjee was given saline and oxygen immediately after being admitted to the hospital.

IMO: I believe poor Didi is still not well but we can hope and pray for her early recovery. Doubtless the poor lady will be grateful for any support her party, Trinamool Congress, can be given.

A 'noddy' is a UK term for someone who admits to a lot of crimes, usually in the hope of getting remission of sentence. The idea being that by doing so, he has thus obtained more credit for the police who can say that they have solved crimes that the 'noddy' has actually had nothing to do with. The situation usually arises when the 'noddy' has already been seriously caught for at least one crime, for example on video, or he is simply some kind of mental case or retard who has not committed any crimes at all - or sometimes the 'noddy' falls into both categories. In the US, where police/CIA torture is more or less routine, it is believed that it is standard form to tell the suspect that he will be killed anyway, but that he will suffer less torture if he saves the authorities time by immediately admitting to some crimes which they have to solve, but which he may well not have been involved with.

The UK term 'noddy' is derived from the children's cartoon 'Noddy' in which a rather mentally retarded type called 'Noddy' rides around in a 'Noddy car'. In the trade, the 'noddy' rides around in the Police vehicle or 'noddy car' to the scenes of various crimes where he only needs to nod (as by this time the suspect may be in bad shape) if he can reasonably have been said by Police to have committed the crime. Presumably the Police need to do this to ensure that, for example, the suspect just could have been there and done the crime. (for example not provably out of town although in the Jill Dando case they may have slipped up even on that FAIK).

I have known cases where the UK police have simply convicted on verbals against opposing video evidence. In fact I can think of at least 7 current cases right now which are simply coerced social cases, mental retards, etc, some of whom are not guilty of offenses but 'might have been'.

The situation with Toady B. Liar running things in the UK, is that the police have to watch their backs and get convictions 'somehow'. I hope they get convictions on Toady B. Liar and on 'Lord' Levy.

"I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan," Mohammed said in a statement he wrote, which was read to the hearing by a military officer representing him. "For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the internet holding his head," he said.

Fair enough, but the other 31 offenses or proposed offenses like killing the Pope and blowing up the UK Houses of Parliament (satisfactory and sensible acts as some may consider them to be) don't actually seem to be proved. The obvous thing is that since by now the fellow is probably convinced he may be executed by the hick Americanos, he might as well admit to those things too, to take the heat off his cronies. A kindly act, and I am sure there is no reason to take a view that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would not act in such a kindly way, unlike say psychos like 'wonderful mind' Nash, who was said to be a real bastard.

IMO: I can think of at least three problems the US have been led to. The important first being a false moral position to the effect 'Of course we do not approve of torture but, given torture, .. thus and thus...' - effectively approving US torture. Secondly, since the guy has made them happy by admitting certain crimes, now they won't bother to find the real crooks who have done the crimes. Thirdly, the latter point implies at least the possibility of further corruption by the authorities.

According to the Scientific American, popular sleep drugs such as Ambien and Lunesta can cause odd and potentially dangerous behaviors such as driving while asleep - so-called "sleep driving" -- without any recollection afterward.

Patients taking the drugs were also found to make phone calls, have sex, eat and cook while asleep.

Complete known list: Ambien/Ambien CR (Sanofi Aventis), Butisol Sodium (Medpointe Pharm HLC), Carbrital (Parke-Davis) , Dalmane (Valeant Pharm) , Doral , Halcion (Pharmacia & Upjohn) , Lunesta (Sepracor) , Placidyl (Abbott) , Prosom (Abbott) , Restoril (Tyco Healthcare) , Rozerem (Takeda) , Seconal (Lilly) , Sonata (King Pharmaceuticals) .

So if taking the above drugs, don't be too surprised if you wake up in another country, or indeed not at all.

RAIPUR, India (Reuters) - Maoist rebels stormed a police camp in Chhattisgarh on Thursday, killing 49 members of the police and tribal militia in one of the deadliest attacks by the insurgents in years.

The latest attack underlined the presence of Maoist rebels in much of rural India where they have formed a "red corridor" stretching from the southern tip of India all along its southern, central and eastern forests and up to the border with Nepal. Ajai Sahni, executive director at the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management said rebels have spent much of last year amassing an enormous cache of arms.

More than 700 people were killed in the insurgency last year.

Maoists say they are fighting for the rights of poor peasants and landless workers.

Obviously, there has been Congress party mismanagement of the large difficult problems which have been staring them in their face for years, particularly with regard to the SEZs and now the situations have become nationwide, many have mobile phones and mobility unlike in 1947.

IMO: After all the deaths caused directly by the police in Nandigram, all this is far from surprising, though very unwelcome..

Tony Blair has effectively sacked Sir Alistair Graham, a trenchant critic of the Government’s ethical standards, as head of the sleaze watchdog. “Procedurally, it stinks. It’s a huge scandal,” a source said.

Sir Alistair said: “This risks the perception, unfair or otherwise, that this Government places a low priority on the maintenance of the highest standards of conduct in public life.”

Critics say that Mr Blair was enacting “revenge” on Sir Alistair after criticism from him over the cash-for-honours affair and the conduct of Tessa Jowell, the Culture Secretary, and John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister. All a bunch of useless cases. And these people are running the country ?

The decision not to reappoint Sir Alistair did not come as a surprise to MPs because predecessors on the Standards Committee have only served one term. But the decision not to keep him in place until a replacement is chosen has angered MPs.

In an interview last year, Sir Alistair said that he was disappointed that Mr Blair had not given greater emphasis to upholding ethical standards.

IMO: SO AM I

Singur, Mar 13: A farmer, who committed suicide yesterday after he lost his land to the proposed site for building of the TATA car project in Singur, cremated here today. "About one acre of our farmland comes under the land allotted to the TATA car plant. We are completely dependent on our land. My father even went on a hunger strike for six to seven days. But for quite sometime he was feeling lost and dejected. The other day he broke down talking to me, saying we might not get back our farmland and afterwards he consumed poison," said Joydeb Bag, his son.

Tata Motors started to build its factory in Singur in January to make what the company claims will be the world's cheapest car for 100,000 rupees. But the project, which has become a test case for the Communists, has been mired in trouble with some farmers who say the government took their land against their will.

Meanwhile, Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) MP Vijay Krishna today warned the Congress-led UPA Government that contrary to its slogan "Congress ka haath aam admi ke saath", it was actually working against the interests of the poor and the downtrodden. The day was not too far off when people would throw Congress governments out of various States. The poll results in Punjab and Uttaranchal should serve as a warning to the party, he said.

Nandigram today (March 14) witnessed fresh clashes over proposed land acquisition for SEZ, killing three in the violence, when police burst teargas shells at Nandigram

LeDoux’s team also confirms the idea that a part of the brain called the amygdala is central to this process — communication between neurons in this part of the brain usually increases when a fearful memory forms, but it decreases in the treated rats. This shows that the fearful memory is actually deleted, rather than simply breaking the link between the memory and a fearful response.

Greg Quirk, a neurophysiologist from Puerto Rico, was quoted by Nature as saying he thinks that psychiatrists working to treat patients with conditions such as PTSD will be encouraged by the step forward.

60% cut in carbon dioxide emissions by 2050? Yes, it can fairly easily be done, and even an 80% cut is possible with less immediate worries than one might expect.

CO2 is fungible; if you believe in climate change, then CO2 is harming all of us, whether it’s spewed in India or in the UK.

In practice, the bill creates a massive incentive for gas-spewing UK businesses to invest in the developing world, and therefore achieve their individual budgets for carbon cuts by importing reductions. Some details and references here and elsewhere.

IMO: There are very many issues, certainly not all addressed so far, but the scheme is at least a start.

Mar 13, Vatican City - Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday reaffirmed his conservative views on matters of faith by issuing strict rules on the Eucharist and by inviting priests to revive Latin as the main language used during Holy Mass. In his 140-page document, Benedict reiterated his strong opposition to remarried Catholics and non-Catholic Christians taking part in the Eucharist and invited priests to refrain from celebrating the sacrament during weddings or funerals attended by non-practising Catholics.

'I ask that future priests ... be trained to understand and celebrate Holy Mass in Latin, use Latin texts and execute Gregorian chants,' the pope wrote.

He said Church should not jettison the rich heritage of sacred music it has created in 2,000 years of history. Last week, the Pope disclosed in a new book that in 1997 he was opposed to Bob Dylan appearing at a youth event with the late Pope John Paul because he considered the pop star the wrong kind of "prophet".

Of course he also upholds celibacy for priests, the ban on communion for remarried divorcees, and is opposed to gay marriage.

IMO: I think Tony B. Liar is more likely to become a Catholic than I am (not at all) but I can't blame Ratzinger for wanting a Latin mass (I know academic Latin but not church Latin) as it is much nicer. His other ideas may help remove a whiff of brimstone and the feeling of the proximity of the final abyss from RC believers. Personally I prefer Hinduism : in a word "better to live forever on beggar's bread than to banquet daily on a friend's flesh and drink his blood as if it were champagne" as so many nonvegetarian people do, as their best friends may win at Crufts. Just a thought, and it is certainly practical and day to day.

New Delhi, Mar 10: India and Japan are likely to sign a comprehensive agreement for enhancing bilateral trade and economic ties within one year, Minister of State for Industry Ashwani Kumar said here.

A comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) between India and Japan is under constructive discussion and Japan has committed it would be clinched within a year, he said at a CII seminar.

India, Japan and US will hold their first joint military drill in April in the Pacific off Japan's coast that will focus on maritime security. The week-long drill will focus on maritime security during large-scale natural disasters, such as earthquakes and tsunamis, Kyodo News agency reported on Monday. The drill, called by the Pentagon, comes amid rising concerns at the growing military power in the region of China, which announced on Sunday an increase in its defence budget by 17.8 per cent for 2007, the agency said.

In the meantime, China (says) it will execute less people: The Chinese government's judicial department also issued a report calling for an end to the use of torture in police interrogations and a sharp reduction in death penalty. It called for tighter implementation of rules on interrogation and evidence-gathering. Confessions obtained through torture will be inadmissible.
"Where there is a possibility someone should not be executed then without exception the person should not be killed," the report said. China accounts for at least 75 per cent of all the judicial executions in the world.

Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee visited China in 2003. Talks on the border were transferred to a much higher level. A settlement, involving ‘swapping’ claims and some minor face-saving border adjustments, still seems remote, due to the political difficulty of selling such a deal in India. New Delhi diplomats pooh-pooh the notion that Hu’s visit might herald a breakthrough on the border dispute, but an agreement is no longer inconceivable, though these matters are of great importance to India, probably less to China.

Also, the China-India relationship is having an ever-bigger influence on Beijing’s bilateral ties with every other Southasian country. Diplomatic relations between Delhi and Beijing are better than at any time since the war in 1962. Some Indians are rather carried away – they propose the dawn of a new era of partnership and cooperation, an ‘India-China nexus’ that will change the world.

IMO: Let's hope such Indians are right. There are seemingly no insuperable obstacles to such a future, but a lot needs to be done on the land border issues at the very least.

13 March 2007: Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, said: "It is the job of Government to strike a balance between working towards a safer world and protecting the security of the UK and its citizens... We cannot rule out the possibility that at some point in the 50 years Britain could face a new nuclear threat." Speaking on the BBC’s Politics Show, Mr Browne identified Iran and North Korea as examples of countries against which new deterrents were needed.

IMO that is only two of the many more countries that will stick their heads over the nuclear parapet before 2050, particularly with the desperation many will find because of (avoidable) global warming.

Greenpeace said additional costs could push the figure to over £100 billion, adding that spending the same amount on tackling climate change could reduce the UK's carbon emissions by more than 12 per cent.

Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, said it was "incredible" that the Government was even considering spending so much money on a new generation of nuclear weapons. "The great challenge of the 21st century will be to prevent catastrophic climate change and it is on this that Britain should be giving a clear lead."

Major General Patrick Cordingley, who commanded the Desert Rats in the first Gulf war, said the money which would be "wasted" on Trident would be better spent on conventional equipment for the Armed Forces as well as on peacekeeping efforts.

The govt already seem to have wasted a lot of money on NHS "reform", some say as much as £12 billion. How much of this new £100 billion is going down the drain as well. Remember the ordinary ashtrays, privys etc., obtained by NASA at enormous costs, so long ago details were hard to find on google.

IMO: Corruption happens but it should not be encouraged by undue secrecy,

ZDNet UK 12 March 2007 06:28 AM: Microsoft has admitted that its Live OneCare security suite has been accidentally deleting some users' Outlook and Outlook Express e-mails.

According to postings on Microsoft's OneCare forum, erasures have been caused when the antivirus program finds a virus in an e-mail attachment. Instead of then quarantining that single e-mail, users have reported that entire .pst or .dbx files -- the personal folder where non-Exchange Server users' messages and other details are kept -- have been quarantined or, in some cases, even deleted.

One user commented on the forum: "Is there a chance to recover it? If not, OneCare will have done more damage than any virus in my 30 years of active computing." Forum postings indicate, however, that recovery is possible in some cases, where the .pst or .dbx file is still available in OneCare's quarantine facility.

A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed that the company was "working to address an issue".

The NZ Herald sums it up roughly accurately as "Brown prefers 'green' incentives, Tories want taxes".

In other words neither UK party will do enough and the Tories even lie. John Redwood, supposedly the Tory 'green' representative, in fact says he welcomed global warming - claiming it will boost tourism.

In his blog, Redwood at first claimed the idea that pollution led to global warming was a "swindle". He then said if it was happening, we should "welcome the good effects it will have". He added: "We will benefit from the better weather for tourism, agriculture and outdoor sports." According to the BBC he now says crap like there are no Chelsea tractors on Mars, but they have global warmimg. An incoherent mess, like much proposed Tory policy, unfortunately.

The trouble is that fools believe other fools - Czech Civic Democrats (ODS) and the British Conservatives will jointly found a new center-right group in the European Parliament. Dennis McShane, former British Minister of State for Europe, says "the ODS leaders’ position on global warming is eccentric, to say it politely."

IMO: Maybe the ODS have hired the 'good soldier Schweik', though I would have thought even he would have had nothing to do with them on their present showing.

Any complaint should definitely provoke a crisis at Channel 4, now recovering from the Jade Goody Big Brother storm. It had to make a rare public apology after the Independent Television Commission convicted previous programmes on environmental issues by the same film-maker, Martin Durkin, of similar offences - and is already facing questions on why it accepted another programme from him.

Leading US climate scientist is considering legal action after he says he was duped into appearing in a Channel 4 documentary that claimed man-made global warming is a myth. Carl Wunsch, professor of physical oceanography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the film, The Great Global Warming Swindle, was 'grossly distorted' and 'as close to pure propaganda as anything since World War Two'.

He says his comments in the film were taken out of context and that he would not have agreed to take part if he had known it would argue that man-made global warming was not a serious threat. 'I thought they were trying to educate the public about the complexities of climate change,' he said. 'This seems like a deliberate attempt to exploit someone who is on the other side of the issue.' He is considering a complaint to Ofcom, the broadcast regulator.

According to the Hong Kong "Standard", bin Laden has restructured al-Qaeda despite its losses, creating new base areas in Africa and Iraq, expanding into Europe, drawing in thousands of new recruits around the world, reviving the Taleban movement in Afghanistan and turning Pakistan into "Terrorism Central."

Although bin Laden takes part in strategic decision making, day-to-day running of the movement is in the hands of Zawahiri, the Egyptian doctor who has placed fellow countrymen in many of the key leadership positions. Before the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, senior posts in al-Qaeda were largely held by Saudis and Yemenis. There have been rumors of tensions among the Arabs, but bin Laden has always been weak on organization and is reported to have accepted Zawahiri's major contribution to al-Qaeda's revival.

While bin Laden remains the spiritual and military inspiration, Zawahiri has fashioned a core group of around 100 Arab trainers - experts in explosives, finances, communications, military training, urban warfare and propagand.

Zawahiri - a believer in suicide bombings and attacks on soft targets - has used these tactics in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. Afghanistan saw 139 suicide bombings in 2006 compared with 27 in 2005.

IMO: The CIA presence in Waziristan hasn't helped, then ?

Sat, Mar 10, 2007 TaipeiTimes: Anna Lo became the first ethnic Chinese to win a seat in the British parliament as one of six members representing south Belfast. She stood for the centrist, cross-community Alliance Party, which wants to put an end to the traditional practice of Protestant and Catholic communities voting along sectarian lines. Now the chief executive of the Chinese Welfare Association charity, Lo has lived in Belfast for 32 years, is a British citizen and has even acquired the distinctive Northern Irish accent.

Lo has suffered racist abuse and has been advised by the police to carry a panic alarm with her when out meeting the public.

IMO: Both Catholic and Protestant political parties by now look pretty strange to outsiders, and Anna Lo's election may be one of the best things to have happened in Northern Ireland this century.

MUMBAI: Shiv Sena candidate Shubha Raul was on Saturday elected as Mumbai mayor. A medico (ayurvedic) by profession, she was elected to the Mumbai municipal corporation from Dahisar. Lets hope things there will improve now. In Dahisar slums (walking distance from my flat), I quote: "Living conditions are abysmal; slum dwellers have to cope with issues such as constant migrations, lack of water, no sewage or solid waste facilities, no electricity, poor healthcare facilities, lack of public transport, pollution and a shortage of adequate housing."

As per the partywise strength in the newly formed BMC, Shiv Sena has 83 members followed by Congress (71), BJP (28), NCP (14), SP (8), Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (7), RPI-Athavale (2), Akhil Bharatiya Sena (2), BSP (1) and Independents (9). The deputy Mayor would be from BJP, in continuation of the present arrangement, Sena sources said.

The Mayor's post has been reserved for OBC women. Also, for the first time, the Mayor was elected by raising the hands and not by secret ballots. Personally I prefer the secret ballot as it leaves less space for intimidation, though many say the secret ballot is always dishonest and with raising hands you can see the vote.

To make the city "clean, beautiful and safe" is the motto of newly-elected Mayor Shuba Raul, who asserted that 24-hour water supply, expansion of roads and tax cuts would figure high on her agenda. The Mayor also promised to modernise the Jijabai Bhonsale Zoo.

Patrick Mercer, the Tory party's homeland security spokesman and a former Army colonel, was dismissed yesterday after he said that being called a "black bastard" was part and parcel of being in the Armed Forces.

"Guilty of opening his gob. The truth hurts and people don't like it but for an intelligent man he didn't behave too wisely. It is a pity because HM Forces need people like him who are able to speak on their behalf," said one poster.

Of course this is all true. But another unfortunate truth is that the British Army is full of the worst kind of snobbery and deceit, together with the idlers referred to by Mercer. It has got to the point that whatever Prince Harry is like, a lot of people really want him killed by "friendly fire".

IMO: If Cameron wants any votes he had to sack the guy. Cameron himself, in getting away completely with things that would have ruined his life if they had happened to a nonwhite in Coldharbour Lane, must have already lost a lot of votes. He certainly has not got my vote or that of others I have spoken to.

Unwise or what ?

The five-year tenure of Congress Party in Uttarakhand was full of scandals and sky rocketing prices of essential commodities and chief minister Amrinder Singh paid price for his personal attack against Prakash Singh Badal of Akali Dal in Punjab.

Amrinder Singh, during his five-year tenure chief minister left no stone unturned to fix Badal. It attitude of taking revenge angered the peasantry, which has always been with Akali Dal. Subsequently, Congress was routed even in its stronghold Malwa region of the state.

IMO: It distinctly gives the impression of a very dirty old pot calling a cleanish new kettle black.

Recent research shows that when your brain doesn't have the capacity to pay attention to an image, even images that act on our subconscious simply do not get registered.

Without looking in great detail at a lot of other work, for example that of Phil Merikle, the current work at UCL seems to imply that some degree of attention is needed for even the subconscious (as some people term a certain part of the mind/brain) to pick up on so called 'subliminal' images. But also, that fMRI scans may well show that some things that we do not think we see, are in fact picked up in some sense 'subliminally' by the brain.

So the research presumably shows that what suits advertisers could be empty minds that they can easily fill with worthless trash.Indeed when I earlier looked at direct mail advertising, I was advised by experts that the best place to advertise could be magazines for teenage girls and such places.

IMO: It is up to all independently minded people to think, and to do so soberly, often, and rationally, to retain their self respect and sanity.

A British police officer who used maximum force to strike a black woman during an arrest was not motivated by race, the police force said. Well if I need someone to chop wood, I know where to go after seeing the video, which presumably is on somewhere like youtube by now. Of course "The force is outraged at the suggestion this may be linked to any kind of racist incident."

OTOH, Shami Chakrabarti called for an Independent Police Complaints Commission investigation. These images turn the stomach and raise serious questions about police misconduct," Chakrabarti said.

In Iran, the authorities refuse to bring in a physician to women in hospital who have been beaten by police over asking for women's rights. Women who objected were allegedly violently beaten and taken to the criminal's ward of Evin Prison.

They were detained while gathering outside a courthouse to demand a fair trial for five prominent women's rights activists whose court was convening at the same place. The women held up banners outside the revolutionary court, saying: "We have the right to hold peaceful protests."

It sort of mirrors the attitude Lord Levy, apparently of Jewish origin but living in the UK, takes towards women, as mentioned in the previous blog.

Labour fundraiser Lord Levy was accused of trying to 'bully' Tony Blair's top aide into changing her story in the cash for peerages case. His meeting with the Prime Minister's 'gatekeeper', Ruth Turner, last summer left her in tears and triggered a police investigation into a possible cover-up.

OTOH, Lord Levy tried to dampen down the row over his attempts to gag the media reporting the cash for honours scandal, describing as "preposterous" claims that his actions were politically motivated.

Well we know Joe Kagan and Rudy Sternberg (AKA Lord Kagan and Lord Plurenden after getting peerages) went to the nick, and the words "Lady Slagheap" still creates a stench even in the Labor Party.

What is more it seems that leaks claim that Reid for all his talk, is not concerned with cleaning up the Home Office which is regarded by many as by now a lamentable mess, all he wants to do is to find out what harmless members of the Probation Service are leaking information, and to hell with the need for a cleanup.

Britain is looking to win a 2 billion pound order from Saudi Arabia for up to three naval destroyers, the Independent said on Friday in an unsourced report. Riyadh could be interested in purchasing two or three Type 45 destroyers, it said. So at least Lord Goldsmith must be doing well with his covering up if there are any hopes of that order.

IMO: At least people won't have to vote Tory, we have a Tory Govt right now it seems. And that has often been said.