Klimaatverandering 48

Alert Net bericht:

'UN says number of ocean 'dead zones' rising fast.

NAIROBI, Oct 19 (Reuters) - The number of "dead zones" in the world's oceans may have increased by a third in just two years, threatening fish stocks and the people who depend on them, the U.N. Environment Programme said on Thursday.

Fertilizers, sewage, fossil fuel burning and other pollutants have led to a doubling in the number of oxygen-deficient coastal areas every decade since the 1960s.

Now experts estimate there are 200 so-called ocean dead zones, compared with 150 two years ago.

"Some successes are being scored but in other areas -- like sewage, nutrients from fertilizer run off, animal wastes and atmospheric pollution; sediment mobilization and marine litter -- the problems are intensifying," UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner said in a statement.

The first "dead zones" -- where pollution-fed algae remove oxygen from the water -- were found in northern latitudes like the Chesapeake Bay on the U.S. East Coast and the Scandinavian fjords.

Today, the best known is in the Gulf of Mexico, where fertilizers and other algae-multiplying nutrients are dumped by the Mississippi River.

Others have been appearing off South America, Ghana, China, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Portugal and Britain.

The UNEP said in a statement that experts warn "these areas are fast becoming major threats to fish stocks and thus to the people who depend upon fisheries for food and livelihoods." The full list is expected to be published early next year, but the preliminary findings were released on Thursday at an international marine pollution conference in Beijing, China, which gathered delegates from more than 100 nations.'

Lees verder: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L19301317.htm

Klimaatverandering 47

De Independent bericht:

'Cracking up: Ice turning to water, glaciers on the move - and a planet in peril.

A new study proves it was global warming that sent an Antarctic ice shelf larger than Luxembourg crashing into the ocean. Geoffrey Lean reports.

Nothing else quite like it has happened at any time in the past 10,000 years. In just over a month an entire Antarctic ice shelf, bigger than a small country, disintegrated and disappeared, altering world atlases for ever.
A new study shows that the catastrophic collapse of the Larsen B shelf, four and a half years ago, was man-made, not an "act of God". It is thought to have been the first time that a major disaster has been proved to have been caused by global warming.
Research at the blue-chip British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, published last week, has identified the causes of "dramatic warming" of the eastern side of the Antarctic peninsula, where the vast, 3,250 sq km expanse of ice used to be. Gareth Marshall, the lead author of the study, says it marks "the first time that anyone has been able to demonstrate a physical process directly linking the break-up of the Larsen ice shelf to human activity".
The research has also linked the collapse to the hole in the Earth's protective ozone layer that opens up over the Antarctic every southern spring. Nasa scientists reported last week that this year's hole, at a massive 10.6m square miles, is bigger than ever.
It was in March 2002 that the ice shelf - thought to have been stable for thousands of years - suddenly gave way. In just over 30 days an unimaginable 500bn tonnes of ice shattered into tens of thousands of icebergs, drifting in the Weddell Sea. This one event dumped more ice into the Southern Ocean that surrounds Antarctica than all the icebergs of the past 50 years combined. "This is staggering", said the British Antarctic Survey's Dr David Vaughan at the time. "It fell over like a wall and has broken as if into hundreds of thousands of bricks."'

Lees verder: http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article1919117.ece

Irak 108

Het Westerse geweld, onder aanvoering van de Verenigde Staten, heeft geleid tot de totale vernietiging van de Iraakse samenleving. Alert Net bericht:

'DAMASCUS. More than three million Iraqis who have been forced to flee their homes to other areas of Iraq and to neighbouring countries are facing what the United Nations' refugee agency (UNHCR) describes as a "very bleak future" after the agency's budget for offices across the region was halved for the coming year.
Andrew Harper, coordinator for the Iraq unit at UNHCR in Geneva, told IRIN that funds for the agency's Iraq programme have been drastically reduced for 2007 because of donors scaling back their contributions.
As Iraq makes up a significant proportion of UNHCR's work in the Middle East, Lolles said this cut in funds for Iraq roughly halves a region-wide budget that is already "totally insufficient to provide tangible results".
"Iraq has seen the largest and most recent displacement of any UNHCR project in the world, yet even as more Iraqis are displaced and as their needs increase, the funds to help them are decreasing," said Harper. "This growing humanitarian crisis has simply gone under the radar screen of most donors."
Harper added that this reduction of funds had led to the suspension of a number of priority UNHCR projects. These include work to identify and aid the most vulnerable Iraqi refugees, including single mothers, the sick and the elderly.
UNHCR estimates that more than 1.5 million Iraqis are internally displaced in Iraq, including some 800,000 who fled their homes prior to 2003 and 750,000 who have fled since. A further 1.6 million Iraqis are refugees in neighbouring countries, the majority in Syria and Jordan.
Donations to UNHCR's Iraq programme from the United States, European Union nations, Japan and Australia have been in free fall since the start of the US-led occupation of Iraq, despite the ever-increasing numbers of refugees fleeing the deadly violence there.
From a high of US $150 million in 2003, the UNHCR budget for its Iraq programme fell to just $29 million in 2006. One quarter of that budget is allocated to meeting the needs of Iraqi refugees in neighbouring countries Syria, Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon.
Syria hosts the largest Iraqi refugee community in the region. Before the fall of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's government in April 2003, the number of Iraqis living in Syria was estimated to be 100,000. Local NGOs estimate the current Iraqi community in Syria to be 800,000.
A report released in May by UNHCR, the UN's children's agency (UNICEF) and the World Food Programme concluded that an some 450,000 Iraqis in Syria "are facing aggravated difficulties" related to their "ambiguous legal status and unsustainable income". The population of Syria is nearly 19 million.'

Lees verder: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/

IRIN/a3eca4b722faa10052fe47a33d29b706.htm

De Israelische Terreur 96

Israelische kinderen die onder het oog van hun lachende ouders raketten signeren met opschriften als: 'Van Israel. Met liefde.' Raketten die deze zomer vele Libanese burgers vermoordden.

Er zijn nogal wat Westerlingen die het bombaderen van burgers met fosforbommen geen terreur vinden. Dat wil zeggen: als Israel dat doet en het de Arabische bevolking betreft. In het geval van Saddam Hoessein zou dit natuurlijk onmiddellijk zijn betiteld als terreur en oorlogsmisdaden, zeker als de Israelische bevolking slachtoffer zou zijn geweest. En terecht, want het doden van burgers met fosfor is terreur, een oorlogsmisdaad. Desondanks steunt de Nederlandse regering de Israelische oorlogsmisdaden politiek, militair en economisch. Zonder dat de Nederlandse bevolking hier massaal tegen in opstand komt. Net zomin als de Nederlandse bevolking tijdens de oorlog massaal tegen de jodenvervolging in opstand kwam. Op een betrekkelijk klein deel na van de Amsterdamse arbeiders keek de rest de andere kant op. De veel geprezen Nederlandse tolerantie is voor een groot deel ook niets anders dan pure onverschilligheid.

De Israelische kwaliteitskrant Haaretz bericht:

'Israel admits using phosphorus bombs during war in Lebanon
By Meron Rappaport, Haaretz Correspondent

Israel has acknowledged for the first time that it attacked Hezbollah
targets during the second Lebanon war with phosphorus shells. White
phosphorus causes very painful and often lethal chemical burns to those
hit by it, and until recently Israel maintained that it only uses such
bombs to mark targets or territory.

The announcement that the Israel Defense Forces had used phosphorus bombs
in the war in Lebanon was made by Minister Jacob Edery, in charge of
government-Knesset relations. He had been queried on the matter by MK
Zahava Gal-On (Meretz-Yahad).

"The IDF holds phosphorus munitions in different forms," Edery said. "The
IDF made use of phosphorous shells during the war against Hezbollah in
attacks against military targets in open ground."

Edery also pointed out that international law does not forbid the use of
phosphorus and that "the IDF used this type of munitions according to the
rules of international law."

Edery did not specify where and against what types of targets phosphorus
munitions were used. During the war several foreign media outlets reported
that Lebanese civilians carried injuries characteristic of attacks with
phosphorus, a substance that burns when it comes to contact with air. In
one CNN report, a casualty with serious burns was seen lying in a South
Lebanon hospital.

In another case, Dr. Hussein Hamud al-Shel, who works at Dar al-Amal
hospital in Ba'albek, said that he had received three corpses "entirely
shriveled with black-green skin," a phenomenon characteristic of
phosphorus injuries.

Lebanon's President Emile Lahoud also claimed that the IDF made use of
phosphorus munitions against civilians in Lebanon.

Phosphorus has been used by armies since World War I. During World War II
and Vietnam the U.S. and British armies made extensive use of phosphorus.
During recent decades the tendency has been to ban the use of phosphorus
munitions against any target, civilian or military, because of the
severity of the injuries that the substance causes.'

Lees verder: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/777549.html

The Empire 33

Deze zomer hoorde ik van de plaatselijke bevolking in Noord Arzona, vlakbij Monument Valley, dat daar de afgelopen tijd enkele oude uranium-mijnen weer in exploitatie waren genomen. De reden waarom blijkt uit het volgende bericht in de Washinton Post:

'US Plan for New Nuclear Weapons Advances
The United States took another step yesterday toward building a new stockpile of up to 2,200 deployed nuclear weapons that would last well into the 21st century, announcing the start of a multiyear process to repair and replace facilities where they would be developed and assembled and where older warheads could be more rapidly dismantled.
Thomas P. D'Agostino, head of defense programs for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), told reporters that the "Complex 2030" program would repair or replace "inefficient, old and expensive [to maintain]" facilities at eight sites, including some buildings going back to the 1940s Manhattan Project that built the first atomic bombs. He said the sites - primarily in California, New Mexico, Texas and Tennessee - "are not sustainable for the long term."
Yesterday's announcement comes as the Bush administration is pressing its allies to take harsh steps to halt nuclear weapons programs in both North Korea and Iran that it says are violations of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. That same treaty calls for the United States and other members of the nuclear club to eliminate their own stockpiles, but it gives no deadline by which that should take place.
The Bush administration plan would replace the aging Cold War stockpile of about 6,000 warheads with a smaller, more reliable arsenal that would last for decades. It would also consolidate the handling of plutonium, the most dangerous of the nuclear materials, in one center that would be built at a site that already houses similar special materials. Another part of the plan would be to remove all highly enriched uranium from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, D'Agostino said.
Key to the Bush plan is an expected decision in December by the NNSA on a design for the new "Reliable Replacement Warhead" (RRW). The nation's two nuclear weapons laboratories, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore, are competing for the new warhead design. Before going ahead with any new warhead, however, the NNSA would have to get Congress's approval to move into actual engineering development.'

Lees verder:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/19/AR2006101901863.html Of:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/102106C.shtml

Het gaat hier om nucleaire wapens, die niet ter afschrikking zijn zoals tijdens de Koude Oorlog, maar die daadwerkelijk worden ingezet bij een aanval op een land dat door Washington gezien wordt als bedreigend voor de belangen van de Amerikaanse economische elite, zoals de olierijke natie Iran.

De Suez Crisis 1956

De Suez Crisis in 1956 was de eerste keer dat Israelische strijdkrachten zich als een terroristische huurlingenleger liet gebruiken voor het beschermen van Westerse belangen, toen het onverwacht Egypte aanviel.

'A freelance journalist and a peace activist of India, J. Sri Raman is theRemembering the Suez Saga


As History Is Repeated

October 2006 marks the 50th anniversary of an important event of modern world history that is going conspicuously unobserved. The Suez crisis of 1956, which should be remembered as a saga of resistance in the Middle East to Western hegemonism, is being pushed into organized oblivion by the current powers and their puppets precisely because of the striking contemporary relevance of the subject.
Noticeably absent among the matters discussed at the Havana summit of the Non-Alignment Movement (NAM) in mid-September was the anniversary, which should actually have been high on its agenda. Suez was one of the major issues to inspire and unite the movement founded just two years before the crisis. The event of half a century ago seemed to belong to a hoary past for Egypt, which was at the center of the storm over the Suez. And India, whose first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru had then spoken up for Egypt's "sovereign rights," was busier now wrangling support for its nuclear deal with George Bush and watering down the NAM resolution on Iran.
It is mainly sections in Britain, which emerged badly bruised out of the crisis, that are recalling Suez. These recollections - regardless of the political opinions reflected - are also records of remarkable parallels between the situations in the battered region now and then. Whichever way one looks at it, clearly, the lesson of the war lost by a colonialism in its last gasp is primarily one for today's world - conquerors in Washington, whose forebearers played an apparently different role 50 years ago.
To recapitulate the episode briefly, what started it all was the rise to power in Egypt of Abdul Gamal Nasser and his nationalization of the Suez Canal (the narrow, man-made water strip linking the Mediterranean and the Red Sea). The step was intended, not as an economic policy of enlarged state control, but as an angry assertion of a nation's sovereignty over its natural resources. This snowballed into the famous Suez crisis, as Britain (which had lost Egypt as a protectorate) and France saw an opportunity to stage a neo-colonial comeback.
The colonial couple brought Tel Aviv into the conspiracy, thus beginning the process of enlarging the Israel-Palestine conflict into an Israel-Arab confrontation. The United States, then at once anti-colonial and anti-communist, intervened to contain and counter the combined anti-Nasser offensive. Under Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, an "anti-neutrality" or anti-NAM fanatic, however, the US did so only to become the dominant Western power in the region. It continued to play the part to find itself today, as many commentators now point out, in pretty much the same trap as the former colonialists.'

Lees verder: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/102106B.shtml

Irak 107

Hoeveel Irakese burgers de Amerikanen ook mogen gevangen nemen en zo nodig martelen, hoeveel burgers ze ook mogen vermoorden, zelfs De Amerikaanse beleidsbepalers beseffen nu dat de ooorlog in het Midden Oosten verloren is. Nu het Nederlands kabinet nog en de PVDA die de gewelddadige Westerse politiek in het Midden Oosten steunen.

De Guardian bericht:

'Iraq Mayhem Triggers Hunt for Exit Strategy in US and UK .

Frantic efforts are under way in Washington and London to find an exit strategy for Iraq as a renewed surge in violence led George Bush to admit yesterday that tactics there might need to change.
Diplomats and politicians in both capitals are desperately reviewing and debating options that were once regarded as unthinkable.
The review was given added urgency yesterday when 800 gunmen, thought to be part of the Mahdi army militia, ran amok in Amara, a town transferred by the British to Iraqi control two months ago.
A source in the Amara police department said 30 officers and 20 civilians had been killed when the gunmen overran police stations and set up roadblocks. About 500 British soldiers were last night on standby to go back in.
In Washington, Mr Bush said he would consult his top military commanders in Iraq today over whether a change of tactics was necessary. But the president, who is under intense pressure to rethink his Iraq strategy if not his whole approach to foreign policy, said talks with the generals would only concern tactics, not strategy. "We are constantly adjusting tactics so we can achieve our objectives and right now, it's tough," the president admitted to the Associated Press.
With 74 American soldiers already dead in Iraq in October, it is likely to be the worst month for US forces in two years. US officers admitted on Thursday that the effort to pacify the capital, the Baghdad Initiative, had failed.
Pressure for a change of strategy is partly the result of leaks from a review from a study group set up by the former US secretary of state, James Baker, at Mr Bush's request. The leaks from Mr Baker's Iraq Study Group (ISG), which is due to report after next month's Congressional elections, suggest it will recommend a fundamental change of course.
The Foreign Office is conducting a review in tandem with Mr Baker. UK officials said the Foreign Office was "beavering away" on about half a dozen options, roughly the same as those considered by the ISG. One official said discussions were proceeding at "a high tempo".
Among the changes the ISG is expected to recommend is the opening of talks on Iraq's future with Syria and Iran, countries the White House has sought to isolate.
"The failure of the Baghdad initiative is convincing evidence that a military solution is not going to work," said Larry Diamond, a former adviser to the US-led occupation authority in Baghdad who also advised the ISG. "We should be talking to neighbouring Arab states and we think we should be talking to Iran - to broker the compromises which might save the situation," Mr Diamond told the Guardian.
Other options being considered are a redeployment of forces to "super-bases" in Iraq or bases outside the country, pressuring the Baghdad government to find a fairer way of sharing Iraq's oil wealth to give Sunnis a better deal, and even the partitioning of the country into autonomous Kurdish, Sunni and Shia regions - an idea the White House has dismissed as a "non-starter".
British diplomats, including Dominic Asquith, the ambassador to Iraq, and Sir David Manning, ambassador to Washington, have contributed to the ISG.
The Foreign Office is backing the ISG proposal to engage with Iran and Syria. "We are encouraging them to go with that," a Foreign Office source said.'

Lees verder: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1928037,00.html En:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/102106A.shtml