The Empire 107

'Old story: Women may have it worse.
Divorce and lost earning time could put living standards in a free
fall late in life.
By Jonathan Peterson, Times Staff Writer

Ellen Tucker Emerson cut short her nursing career to help raise her
children, but money was never a worry. Her husband made a good living
as a lawyer, and the family didn't miss her income.

"We traveled where we wanted," she said. "He bought me furs and
jewelry. We stayed at the best hotels."

Then the marriage fell apart. Now 51, Tucker Emerson scrambles to pay
the bills and wonders how she will get by in retirement.

"Maybe I'll be that old lady on the cruise ship working as a singer,
and I'll supplement my income working in a nursing home," said Tucker
Emerson, who lives on the coast of Maine. She added, "We need to
teach our daughters that you have to take care of yourself for the
future."

Like millions of other upwardly mobile women of the baby boom
generation, Tucker Emerson faces the danger that retirement will
bring a sharp downhill slide in lifestyle. Many of these women could
suffer a greater decline in living standards in later life than their
mothers did.'

Lees verder: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-women28dec28,0,7446902.story

Klimaatverandering 68

'Ice Shelf Collapse Sends Chill.
By Margaret Munro.

Canada's North changing. Global warming suspected cause of huge breakup on Ellesmere Island.
An ancient ice shelf has cracked off northern Ellesmere Island, creating an enormous 66-square-kilometre ice island and leaving a trail of icy blocks in its wake.
"It really is incredible," said Warwick Vincent of Universite Laval, one of the few people to have laid eyes on the scene. "It's like a cruise missile has come down and hit the ice shelf."
The breakup was so powerful, earthquake monitors 250 kilometres away picked up the tremors as the 3,000- to 4,500-year-old shelf tore away from its fjord on Ellesmere.
It broke up 16 months ago, but no one was present to see it. The scientists say they are only now making public details after piecing together what occurred using seismic monitors and Canadian and U.S. satellites.
They say the ice shelf collapse, suspected to have been caused by global warming, is the biggest in Canada in 30 years and is indicative of the transformation under way on Ellesmere, Canada's most northern land mass.
"We are seeing incredible changes," said Vincent, whose group is studying the island's disappearing ice shelves and their unique ecosystems. "People talk of endangered animals - well, these are endangered landscape features and we're losing them."
The Ayles ice shelf was one of six ice shelves left in Canada, remnants of a vast icy fringe that used to cover the top end of Ellesmere.
Scientists consider the Canadian shelves, located about 800 kilometres south of the North Pole, sentinels that reflect the accelerating change in the Arctic.
In 2002, one of Vincent's graduate students, Derek Mueller, discovered that Ellesmere's Ward Hunt ice shelf had cracked in half. The researchers have also seen the sudden collapse of ice dams and the draining of 30-kilometre-long lakes into the sea.
The shelves are 90 per cent smaller than they were when Arctic explorer Robert Peary crossed them in 1906. And the Ayles ice shelf can be erased from Canada's maps.
"It no longer exists," Vincent said.
Laurie Weir, of the federal Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, was poring over images from the RADARSAT satellite when she noticed the shelf had broken away. She passed the information on to Luke Copland, head of the new global ice lab at the
University of Ottawa, who led the effort to determine what had happened.
It turned out it took less than one hour for the ice shelf to calve off in the early afternoon of Aug. 13, 2005, Copland said. Low frequency "rumbling" and tremors were picked up on earthquake monitors, and Canadian and U.S. satellites captured images of the shelf cracking and breaking away.
"If you were standing right on the edge of the shelf, there'd have been this huge 15-kilometre crack as far as you could see in both directions," Copland said.
"And then the ice drifted off."'

Lees verder:
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/122806EA.shtml Of: http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/story.html?id=e4c99314-a71a-4418-a246-eea457e8b873&k=82636

De Israelische Terreur 138

De Palestijnse diaspora begon in 1948 toen het Israelische leger met een gewelddadige politiek van etnische zuiveringen begon en tenminste 670.000 Palestijnen verdreef .

'The horrors of what happened in Europe as a result of 19th century nationalism fed the ethnocentric nationalism known as Zionism, and was used to justify the ethnic cleansing and destruction of Palestinian society.

By Mazin Qumsiyeh PalestineChronicle.com.

As a Palestinian-American, I am appalled that many people meeting in Teheran claim to support Palestine while denying or trying to minimize Jewish suffering. Few at the conference articulated that the Holocaust did happen, was horrendous, and it needn’t be denied in order to support Palestinian human rights or to oppose Zionism (throughout I refer to political Zionism not cultural Zionism).
This is not surprising, considering that Zionists constantly and intentionally conflate Zionism with Judaism. This is accomplished in many ways, using Jewish symbols for Israel, choosing a national anthem that speaks of Jewish yearning (even though 20% of the population is not Jewish), emphasizing Israel as a Jewish state, speaking of "the Jewish people" as united in support of Israel, even though most Jews are not Zionists, and countless other ways.
But to me the most dangerous Zionist myth that contributes to anti-Jewish ranting in Teheran and beyond is that political Zionism is the defender and protector of Jews against a hostile (gentile) world. The truth is otherwise, and is now well documented in declassified archives, in Zionist archives, in letters and books, and it is rather "inconvenient" (to put it mildly) to political Zionists.
In ‘Mein Kampf’, the only Jews admired were the Zionists. Hitler called it a "great movement out of Vienna" that helped him dispel the doubts he had as to whether Judaism simply represented another religion or was a nationality (and thus did not belong in Europe). After the 1935 Nazi racial laws were introduced, the Zionist Federation of Germany was the only Jewish group allowed to function, with offices open in Berlin until 1942. This is not surprising, considering that they (ZFG) wrote to the new Nazi regime that “Zionism believes that a rebirth of national life, such as is occurring in German life through adhesion to Christian and national values, must also take place in the Jewish national group”.
Edwin Black’s book “The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact Between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine” is an eye opener on the tragic practical results of this convergence of these two segregationist ideologies. In the US, a powerful Zionist lobby scuttled efforts to bring Jewish refugees from WWII; this is documented in books by Jewish leaders and intellectuals like Alfred Lilienthal and Morris Ernst.
The future first Israeli Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, rejected plans to save Jewish children, telling a meeting of Labor Zionist leaders on 7 Dec. 1938: “If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the People of Israel.” Iraqi Jew (and ex-Zionist) Naiem Giladi exposed this and other of Ben Gurion’s scandals in a book by that title. (e.g. Zionist underground forces bombed Jewish targets in Baghdad to achieve Zionist objectives of driving Jews to Israel).
Sigmund Freud wrote a letter rejecting putting his name in support of the Zionist project on psychological grounds: “Whoever wants to influence the masses must give them something rousing and inflammatory and my sober judgment of Zionism does not permit this… It would have seemed more sensible to me to establish a Jewish homeland on a less historically-burdened land. But I know that such a rational viewpoint would never have gained the enthusiasm of the masses and the financial support of the wealthy. I concede with sorrow that the baseless fanaticism of our people is in part to be blamed for the awakening of Arab distrust.”'

Lees verder: http://www.palestinechronicle.com/story-122006122942.htm

Klimaatverandering 67

De Independent bericht:

'Disappearing World: Global Warming Claims Tropical Island.

For the first time, an inhabited island has disappeared beneath rising seas.
Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India's part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.
As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities.
Eight years ago, as exclusively reported in The Independent on Sunday, the first uninhabited islands - in the Pacific atoll nation of Kiribati - vanished beneath the waves. The people of low-lying islands in Vanuatu, also in the Pacific, have been evacuated as a precaution, but the land still juts above the sea. The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented.
It has been officially recorded in a six-year study of the Sunderbans by researchers at Calcutta's Jadavpur University. So remote is the island that the researchers first learned of its submergence, and that of an uninhabited neighbouring island, Suparibhanga, when they saw they had vanished from satellite pictures.
Two-thirds of nearby populated island Ghoramara has also been permanently inundated. Dr Sugata Hazra, director of the university's School of Oceanographic Studies, says "it is only a matter of some years" before it is swallowed up too. Dr Hazra says there are now a dozen "vanishing islands" in India's part of the delta. The area's 400 tigers are also in danger.
Until now the Carteret Islands off Papua New Guinea were expected to be the first populated ones to disappear, in about eight years' time, but Lohachara has beaten them to the dubious distinction.'

Lees verder: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/122606P.shtml Of:
http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article2099971.ece

De Commerciele Massamedia 19

'Inside TV News: We Were Silenced by the Drums of War.

By Jeff Cohen

t r u t h o u t Guest Contributor

September 11th made 2001 a defining year in our country's history. But 2002 may have been the strangest. It began with all eyes on Osama bin Laden and ended with Osama bin Forgotten - as the White House turned its attention to Iraq. Bush's January 2003 State of the Union speech mentioned Saddam Hussein 17 times, but bin Laden not once.
Everything about my nine-month stint at cable news channel MSNBC occurred in the context of the ever-intensifying war drums over Iraq. The drums grew louder as D-Day approached, until the din became so deafening that rational journalistic thinking could not occur. Three weeks before the invasion, MSNBC Suits terminated "Donahue," their most-watched program.
For 19 weeks, I had appeared in on-air debates almost every afternoon - the last weeks heavily focused on Iraq. I adamantly opposed an invasion. I warned that it would "undermine our coalition with Muslim and Arab countries that we need to [help us] fight Al Qaeda" and would lead to "quagmire."
In October 2002, my debate segments were terminated. There was no room for me after MSNBC launched Countdown: Iraq - a daily show that seemed more keen on glamorizing a potential war than scrutinizing or debating it. The show featured retired colonels and generals resembling boys with war toys as they used props, maps and glitzy graphics to spin invasion scenarios. They reminded me of pumped-up ex-football players doing pregame analysis.
It was excruciating to be silenced while myth and misinformation went unchallenged. Military analysts typically appeared unopposed; they were presented as experts, not advocates. But their closeness to the Pentagon often obstructed independent, skeptical analysis.
When Hans Blix led UN weapons inspectors back into Iraq in November 2002 after a four-year absence, Countdown: Iraq's host asked an MSNBC military analyst, "What's the buzz from the Pentagon about Hans Blix?" The retired colonel declared that Blix was considered "something like the Inspector Clousseau of the weapons of mass destruction inspection program ... who will only remember the last thing he was told - and that he's very malleable."
Retired General Barry McCaffrey was the star military analyst on NBC and MSNBC - a hawk who pushed for an invasion every chance he got. (After the war started, McCaffrey crowed, "Thank God for the Abrams tank and the Bradley fighting vehicle." Unknown to viewers, McCaffrey sat on the board of a military contractor that pocketed millions on the Abrams and Bradley.)
As the war began, CNN news president Eason Jordan admitted that his network's military analysts were government-approved:
"I went to the Pentagon myself several times before the war started. I met with important people there and said, for instance, at CNN, here are the generals we're thinking of retaining to advise us on the air and off about the war. And we got a big thumbs-up on all of them. That was important."
[The idea of] Pentagon-approved analysts calls to mind FAIR's protest chant: "Two, four, six, eight/Separate the press and state."'

Lees verder: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/122606M.shtml

Uit eigen ervaring weet ik hoe ook in Hilversum dissidente visies onmogelijk werden gemaakt. Zelfs bij de VPRO. Ook de Hilversumse publieke omroepen zijn door de kijk- en luistercijfers en de reclame onderdeel van de commerciele massamedia, ook al worden ze voor een groot deel met belastinggeld gesubsidieerd.

Klimaatverandering 66

De Guardian bericht:

'The year the world woke up.

Climate change In 2006, the public, politicians and industry have all shown significant signs that tackling global warming is on the agenda after scientific studies showed the pace of change gathering speed. John Vidal reports The Guardian
Not before time, the west awoke in 2006 to the vast economic, political and social implications of climate change - and twigged that it presented as many opportunities as threats to humanity. As temperature and rainfall records tumbled, and unseasonal, intense heatwaves, droughts and floods struck many countries, local and national politicians scrambled to beef up their green policies and credentials, some businesses found they could make a packet from trading carbon, and a broad-based global social and ecological movement emerged, linking climate change to social justice, as well as to poverty and lifestyles.
A plethora of scientific reports underpinned the global phenomenon throughout the year, which was officially the warmest ever recorded in Britain and the sixth warmest the world has known. It was, globally, a tad cooler than 2005, the hottest ever, but it continued a trend: the eight hottest years ever recorded have been in the last 10 years.
A succession of alarming reports came out. James Lovelock, the British scientist who devised the Gaia theory - that living organisms affect the environment - forecast planetary wipeout; government studies showed that Australia, in the middle of a "1,000-year" drought, would get even hotter and drier, and that worldwide crop yields would decrease. The Gulf Stream, which warms northern Europe, was found to be slowing, the tundra to be melting faster than previously thought, and satellite images showed that major rivers of Africa are carrying significantly less water than before. Monsoons were even more erratic across the Indian sub-continent, Arctic sea ice was predicted to disappear - along with polar bears - by 2040, and almost all the world's glaciers, in many cases providing water for cities, were confirmed to be in retreat.'

Lees verder: http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,1975381,00.html Of:
http://www.stanvanhoucke.net/audioblog/

De wereld mag dan zijn wakker geworden, maar niet Nederland. Milieuvraagstukken speelden nagenoeg geen rol in de parlementsverkiezingen. De Nederlander snurkt rustig verder in de verwachting dat alles wel over zal waaien. Zo gaat het al eeuwen. En waarom zou men verandering brengen in die succesvolle lethargie?

Klimaatverandering 65

'Book Description: Impeccably researched and explained survey of the evidence for imminent dramatic climate change. Synopsis: Climate change is not a matter of gradually increasing temperatures. New scientific findings about how our planet works show that it does not do gradual change. Under pressure, it lurches into another mode of operation. Man-made global warming is on the verge of unleashing unstoppable planetary forces. Biological and geological monsters are being woken, and they will consume us. Virtually overnight Nature's revenge will be sudden and brutal, like a climatic tsunami sweeping across the globe. No question, we are the last generation to live with any kind of climatic stability. In this impassioned report, Fred Pearce travels the world on the story to end them all. Most troubling, while visiting the places where the action may start: deep in the Amazon, high in the Arctic and among the bogs of Siberia, he uncovers the first signs that nature's revenge is already under way.

From the Back Cover: 'Engaging, lucid and balanced...This is a powerful book about the most important event in human history. Read it.' PROFESSOR LORD MAY, OXFORD UNIVERSITY.

Since the last ice age, almost 13,000 years ago, human beings have prospered in a stable, predictable climate. But our generation is the last to be so blessed. In THE LAST GENERATION Fred Pearce lays bare the terrifying prognosis for our planet. Climate change from now on will not be gradual - nature doesn't do gradual change. In the past, Europe's climate has switched from Arctic to tropical in three to five years. It can happen again. So forget what environmentalists have told you about nature being a helpless victim of human excess. The truth is the opposite. She is a wild and resourceful beast given to fits of rage. And now that we are provoking her beyond endurance, she is starting to seek her revenge.
'Do we really need another book telling us that doom is imminent? In this case, the answer has to be yes.' James Flint, DAILY TELEGRAPH

About the Author Fred Pearce: Fred Pearce is a former news editor at New Scientist magazine, and is currently its environment and development consultant. He is one of the world's leading writers on water. He also writes regularly for the Independent and the Times Higher Education Supplement, the Boston Globe and Foreign Policy in the US and has written reports and extended journalism for WWF, the UN Environment Programme, the Red Cross, UNESCO, the World Bank and the UK Environment Agency. He is syndicated in Japan, Australia and elsewhere and has filed articles from more than 50 countries in the past decade.
He was voted BEMA Environment Journalist of the Year in 2001 and has been short-listed for the same award in 2000, 2002 and 2003. He is a past recipient of the Peter Kent Conservation Book Award and the TES Junior Information Book Award. His books (for both adults and children) have been translated into eight languages.
He is a regular broadcaster on radio and TV, with interview credits from Today to Richard and Judy to the Open University.'