Lawmakers Reach Accord on Huge Financial Rescue
Vote on $700B Bailout Plan May Come as Early as Monday
By Lori Montgomery and Paul Kane
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, September 28, 2008; 3:05 PM
Congressional leaders and the Bush administration this morning said they had struck an accord to insert the government deeply into the nation's financial markets, agreeing to spend up to $700 billion to relieve Wall Street of troubled assets backed by faltering home mortgages.
House and Senate negotiators from both parties emerged with Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. at 12:30 a.m. from a marathon session in the Capitol to announce that they had reached a tentative agreement on a proposal to give Paulson broad authority to organize one of the biggest government interventions in the private sector since the Great Depression.
Congressional aides worked through the night to assemble the package, and hoped to post it to the Internet by midday today. Meanwhile, as preparations were being made for a vote in the House tomorrow morning, the congressional caucuses were preparing their own private huddles to review the proposal. The most critical meeting, among House Republicans, was expected later this afternoon. They have been the most reluctant to support the plan to purchase the securities. House Democrats were likely to meet in mid-afternoon.
"We've made great progress, but we have to commit it to paper before we can formally agree," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who has pledged to make the plan available to the public for at least 24 hours before the House votes on it. A vote could come as early as tomorrow in the House, with the Senate expected to follow soon after.
"We've been working on this a long time. We've still got more to do to finalize it, but I think we're there," Paulson said. "So far, so good."
Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), who represented House Republicans, the group that had raised the most serious objections to the plan, said he was pleased with the progress made but that he had to take the proposal back to his caucus before committing his support for it. "I look forward to what we're going to see on paper and presenting these ideas to my colleagues and getting their reaction," Blunt said.
House Republicans appeared headed for a potentially spirited fight.
The office of House Minority Leader John A. Boehner, without officially endorsing the legislation, put out a series of talking points in the early afternoon outlining the favorable portions of the bill for conservatives.
However, one leading conservative, Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.), issued what amounted to a call to arms to fight the bailout.
"The decision to give the federal government the ability to nationalize almost every bad mortgage in America interrupts this basic truth of our free market economy. ... Before you vote, ask yourself why you came here and vote with courage and integrity to those principals. If you came here because you believe in limited government and the freedom of the American marketplace, vote in accordance with those convictions," Pence wrote to House Republicans today.
A senior administration official, who requested anonymity to speak freely about the plan, said both sides had made significant concessions to achieve compromise. The Bush administration has agreed to accept a number of Democratic demands, including:
· The money would be disbursed in segments, with Paulson receiving $250 billion immediately, $100 billion upon White House certification of its necessity and the final $350 billion only after Congress has been given 15 days to object.
· Firms participating in the bailout would be required to grant the government warrants to obtain nonvoting shares of stock, so taxpayers can benefit if the companies return to profitability. Taxpayers also would be first in line to receive repayment if a participating firm fails.
· Firms that receive an infusion of government cash of $300 million or more will be required to limit compensation for senior executives, with especially severe limits on "golden parachutes" at failing firms. For most firms, compensation limits will be enacted primarily through the tax code by reducing tax deductions for firms that pay their top five executives more than $500,000 a year.
The administration also agreed to Democratic demands that the financial services industry should help pay for the program. Under the agreement, the president would be required to propose a fee on the industry if the government has not recovered its money through sales of the assets within five years.
Democrats also made a number of concessions, abandoning demands that bankruptcy judges be empowered to modify home mortgages on primary residences for people in foreclosure. They also agreed not to dedicate a portion of any profits from the bailout program to an affordable housing fund that Republicans claimed would primarily assist social service organizations that support the Democratic Party, the official said.
Meanwhile, House Republicans won a major victory, convincing negotiators to include a provision that would require the Treasury Department to create a a federal insurance program, funded by the banks, that would guarantee banks and other firms against loss from any troubled asset.
According to summaries of the deal released this morning by leaders in both parties, the agreement also calls for strict oversight of the bailout program, including an independent Inspector General and an oversight board appointed by both parties in Congress. The agreement also permits Treasury to purchase bad assets from pension plans, local governments and small banks, as well as major financial firms. And it would permit community banks that hold now worthless stock in mortgage-finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were seized by the government, to count those losses immedately against ordinary income.
The House was gaveled into session at 1 p.m. today, starting with the usual one-minute speeches before actual legislative business began later in the afternoon. One by one, the most liberal and conservative members took to the well of the House to denounce the bill.
"Hold hearings, let's right this bill well," said Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), a senior member of the Financial Services Committee opposed to the legislation.
"I have been thrown out of more meetings than I thought possible," said Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Tex.), who opposes the bill and was ejected around 8 p.m. last night from a meeting with Paulson he tried to enter in the offices of Boehner (R-Ohio).
Leadership in both parties remained confident, however, that a consensus would form that the legislation would pass, likely with a large majority of Democrats and a sizeable portion of Republicans. Both Republicans and Democrats in the House were scheduled to huddle in closed-door meetings this afternoon to review the proposals. Passage in the Senate is considered much easier.
The plan to rescue the U.S. financial markets was first advanced by the Bush administration in a late-night meeting with lawmakers just 10 days ago. Under the proposal, Paulson would be authorized to purchase mortgage-backed assets from struggling firms in hopes of easing a credit crunch that has pushed global markets to the brink of collapse.
With home prices plummeting, many of those assets are now almost worthless, and investors have lost confidence in many of the firms that hold them. That has undermined some of the biggest names on Wall Street and caused banks to stop lending money, sparking a credit crisis that threatens to deliver a devastating blow to businesses, consumers and the broader economy.
Administration officials have stressed that the ultimate cost of the bailout would be much less than $700 billion because the government would eventually sell the assets it purchased and recover most, if not all, of its investment.
Yesterday's talks, conducted mainly in Pelosi's suite of offices on the second floor of the Capitol, were focused heavily on how to cover the cost of the program so taxpayers don't get stuck with the bill.
"We believe that the taxpayer should not be left holding the bag at the end of the day, and we've proposed a way to address that," said Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), a member of Pelosi's leadership team.
Democrats said there were no outstanding issues remaining, but that negotiators need to see the words on paper before they can sign off on the plan. "It's really a question of seeing what we believe we've agreed to," said Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), chairman of the Senate Banking Committee.
Even strong opponents of the plan said they expected it to pass.
Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), the senior Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, who has refused to participate in the talks, said a "critical mass" was forming behind the measure because of fears that Congress's failure to act would cripple financial markets and devastate the economy.
Yesterday's negotiations, which began shortly after 3 p.m., were at times tense and confusing, according to participants. At one point, according to Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), one senator sought advice from investor Warren E. Buffett, one of the world's richest men and a director of The Washington Post Co.
From 3 p.m. to 5:30 p.m., Conrad and other lawmakers met with Paulson around a massive table in Pelosi's conference room under an ornate portrait of Abraham Lincoln. Among lawmakers, Democrats outnumbered Republicans nine to two, an imbalance that so irritated Paulson that he called and complained to Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), according to three GOP sources familiar with the call.
Reid told Paulson he would not pull any of his colleagues out of the meeting. A Reid spokesman, Jim Manley, said: "If the secretary doesn't like it, that's just too bad, because he is going to need the help of each and every one of them to sell the president's plan to the Democratic caucus and the American people."
After a break for dinner, the sides scattered into at least three separate groupings -- Paulson huddled in House Minority Leader John A. Boehner's office with other GOP leaders, Democrats in Pelosi's conference room and Pelosi in a separate suite talking with other Democrats.
Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) and Pelosi's chief of staff spent a couple of hours in shuttle diplomacy, frantically walking from room to room carrying sheets of paper. Conrad, the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said the negotiators were "shopping language" of the bill's draft versions. He and Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, also spent time in Boehner's office with Paulson.
By 11 p.m., the three groups had once again converged in Pelosi's office to strike a final deal.
Yesterday's focus on limiting taxpayer exposure may help rally support in Congress, where lawmakers have been reluctant to back the hugely expensive and unpopular bailout measure less than six weeks from the November elections. But it could unnerve Wall Street, where investors are seeking the largest possible program with the fewest strings attached. They also hope lawmakers approve it before tomorrow's opening bell.
In his public testimony and private remarks, Paulson has repeatedly emphasized the need to spend $700 billion to soothe nervous markets. At that price, the government's upfront investment in the rescue package would be more expensive than the current cost of the Iraq war, which stands at about $650 billion, according to the Congressional Research Service.
But the White House and politicians on Capitol Hill have said the government could earn back much of its money, or even turn a profit.
"Many of these assets still have significant underlying value, because the vast majority of people will eventually pay off their mortgages," President Bush said yesterday in his weekly radio address. "In other words, many of the assets the government would buy are likely to go up in price over time. This means that the government will be able to recoup much, if not all, of the original expenditure."
Bush attempted to address criticisms from the right and left that the plan would bail out irresponsible financiers while doing nothing for regular Americans. Echoing frequent comments by him and his aides, Bush said allowing Wall Street to collapse further would pose greater dangers to the economy, perhaps triggering a "deep and painful recession."
"The rescue effort we're negotiating is not aimed at Wall Street -- it is aimed at your street," Bush said. "And there is now widespread agreement on the major principles. We must free up the flow of credit to consumers and businesses by reducing the risk posed by troubled assets."
Democratic leaders have emphasized to rank-and-file members that Paulson has told them that he could only spend about $50 billion a month on the securities purchase program. Of the $700 billion figure, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said: "Nobody believes that's going to be the final cost."
Staff writer Dan Eggen contributed to this report.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Mysterious Activity Going on in the Marriott Hotel Islamabad
What Was Mysterious Activity Going on in the Marriott Hotel Islamabad by United States Marines
Sunday, 21 September 2008 12:18
www.daily.pk
Marriott Hotel has now become a ghost house which was yesterday the most beautiful and prestigious hotels in the Islamabad. While the condemnation of the blasts and the deaths and the loss of property is going on from all the quarters, some intriguing news is also pouring in.
After the blast, mysteriously fire was started at the fourth and fifth floors. It was said that this fire was the result of gas pipeline burst running through the hotel. The million dollar question is that was the gas pipeline not running through the other floors? Why the fire broke out from the fourth and fifth flours? That is the question which perhaps holds the key to the mystery as why the hotel was targeted yesterday, in which more than 60 people died including many foreigners.
Though it would never get confirmed but the fire on the fifth and fourth floor of the hotel broke out because those flours were housing the mysterious steel boxes under the heavy guard of United States marines and no one including the Pakistani security forces and the security men of the hotel were allowed to go near with the them. These boxes were shifted inside the hotel when the Admiral Mike Mullen met Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and others in Islamabad.
It is said that one member of parliament Mumtaz Alam who belongs to the PPP, the ruling party was there eye witnessed the whole scene when the white truck of US embassy came to the gate of Marriot Hotel and US marines themselves unloaded the steel boxes from the trucks and shifted them to the fourth and fifth floors without passing through them the scanners at the entrance of the hotels. When the truck was there, all the entrance and the exit passage way to the hotels were closed.
And now this blast has occurred at the Marriott, while that mysterious activity was going on.
Sunday, 21 September 2008 12:18
www.daily.pk
Marriott Hotel has now become a ghost house which was yesterday the most beautiful and prestigious hotels in the Islamabad. While the condemnation of the blasts and the deaths and the loss of property is going on from all the quarters, some intriguing news is also pouring in.
After the blast, mysteriously fire was started at the fourth and fifth floors. It was said that this fire was the result of gas pipeline burst running through the hotel. The million dollar question is that was the gas pipeline not running through the other floors? Why the fire broke out from the fourth and fifth flours? That is the question which perhaps holds the key to the mystery as why the hotel was targeted yesterday, in which more than 60 people died including many foreigners.
Though it would never get confirmed but the fire on the fifth and fourth floor of the hotel broke out because those flours were housing the mysterious steel boxes under the heavy guard of United States marines and no one including the Pakistani security forces and the security men of the hotel were allowed to go near with the them. These boxes were shifted inside the hotel when the Admiral Mike Mullen met Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and others in Islamabad.
It is said that one member of parliament Mumtaz Alam who belongs to the PPP, the ruling party was there eye witnessed the whole scene when the white truck of US embassy came to the gate of Marriot Hotel and US marines themselves unloaded the steel boxes from the trucks and shifted them to the fourth and fifth floors without passing through them the scanners at the entrance of the hotels. When the truck was there, all the entrance and the exit passage way to the hotels were closed.
And now this blast has occurred at the Marriott, while that mysterious activity was going on.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Silence in the Face of Horror: No War of Words
The New World War
The Silence Is A Lie
In an article for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes the 'great silence' over the annual British party conferences as politicians and their club of commentators say nothing about a war provoked and waged across the world the responsibility for which lies close at hand.
By John Pilger
25/09/08 "ICH" -- - Britain's political conference season of 2008 will be remembered as The Great Silence. Politicians have come and gone and their mouths have moved in front of large images of themselves, and they often wave at someone. There has been lots of news about each other. Adam Boulton, the political editor of Sky News, and billed as "the husband of Blair aide Anji Hunter", has published a book of gossip derived from his "unrivalled access to No 10". His revelation is that Tony Blair's mouthpiece told lies. The war criminal himself has been absent, but the former mouthpiece has been signing his own book of gossip, and waving. The club is celebrating itself, including all those, Labour and Tory, who gave the war criminal a standing ovation on his last day in parliament and who have yet to vote on, let alone condemn, Britain's part in the wanton human, social and physical destruction of an entire nation. Instead, there are happy debates such as, "Can hope win?" and, my favourite, "Can foreign policy be a Labour strength?" As Harold Pinter said of unmentionable crimes: "Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening, it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest."
The Guardian's economics editor, Larry Elliott, has written that the Prime Minister "resembles a tragic hero in a Hardy novel: an essentially good man brought down by one error of judgement". What is this one error of judgement? The bank- rolling of two murderous colonial adventures? No. The unprecedented growth of the British arms industry and the sale of weapons to the poorest countries? No. The replacement of manufacturing and public service by an arcane cult serving the ultra-rich? No. The Prime Minister's "folly" is "postponing the election last year". This is the March Hare Factor.
Reality can be detected, however, by applying the Orwell Rule and inverting public pronouncements and headlines, such as "Aggressor Russia facing pariah status, US warns", thereby identifying the correct pariah; or by crossing the invisible boundaries that fix the boundaries of political and media discussion. "When truth is replaced by silence," said the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko, "the silence is a lie."
Understanding this silence is critical in a society in which news has become noise. Silence covers the truth that Britain's political parties have converged and now follow the single-ideology model of the United States. This is different from the political consensus of half a century ago that produced what was known as social democracy. Today's political union has no principled social democratic premises. Debate has become just another weasel word and principle, like the language of Chaucer, is bygone. That the poor and the state fund the rich is a given, along with the theft of public services, known as privatisation. This was spelt out by Margaret Thatcher but, more importantly, by new Labour's engineers. In The Blair Revolution: Can New Labour Deliver? Peter Mandelson and Roger Liddle declared Britain's new "economic strengths" to be its transnational corporations, the "aerospace" industry (weapons) and "the pre-eminence of the City of London". The rest was to be asset-stripped, including the peculiar British pursuit of selfless public service. Overlaying this was a new social authoritarianism guided by a hypocrisy based on "values". Mandelson and Liddle demanded "a tough discipline" and a "hardworking majority" and the "proper bringing-up [sic] of children". And in formally launching his Murdochracy, Blair used "moral" and "morality" 18 times in a speech he gave in Australia as a guest of Rupert Murdoch, who had recently found God.
A "think tank" called Demos exemplified this new order. A founder of Demos, Geoff Mulgan, himself rewarded with a job in one of Blair's "policy units", wrote a book called Connexity. "In much of the world today," he offered, "the most pressing problems on the public agenda are not poverty or material shortage . . . but rather the disorders of freedom: the troubles that result from having too many freedoms that are abused rather than constructively used." As if celebrating life in another solar system, he wrote: "For the first time ever, most of the world's most powerful nations do not want to conquer territory."
That reads, now as it ought to have read then, as dark parody in a world where more than 24,000 children die every day from the effects of poverty and at least a million people lie dead in just one territory conquered by the most powerful nations. However, it serves to remind us of the political "culture" that has so successfully fused traditional liberalism with the lunar branch of western political life and allowed our "too many freedoms" to be taken away as ruthlessly and anonymously as wedding parties in Afghanistan have been obliterated by our bombs.
The product of these organised delusions is rarely acknowledged. The current economic crisis, with its threat to jobs and savings and public services, is the direct consequence of a rampant militarism comparable, in large part, with that of the first half of the last century, when Europe's most advanced and cultured nation committed genocide. Since the 1990s, America's military budget has doubled. Like the national debt, it is currently the largest ever. The true figure is not known, because up to 40 per cent is classified "black" – it is hidden. Britain, with a weapons industry second only to the US, has also been militarised. The Iraq invasion has cost $5trn, at least. The 4,500 British troops in Basra almost never leave their base. They are there because the Americans demand it. On 19 September, Robert Gates, the American defence secretary, was in London demanding $20bn from allies like Britain so that the US invasion force in Afghanistan could be increased to 44,000. He said the British force would be increased. It was an order.
In the meantime, an American invasion of Pakistan is under way, secretly authorised by President Bush. The "change" candidate for president, Barack Obama, had already called for an invasion and more aircraft and bombs. The ironies are searing. A Pakistani religious school attacked by American drone missiles, killing 23 people, was set up in the 1980s with CIA backing. It was part of Operation Cyclone, in which the US armed and funded mujahedin groups that became al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The aim was to bring down the Soviet Union. This was achieved; it also brought down the Twin Towers.
On 20 September the inevitable response to the latest invasion came with the bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad. For me, it is reminiscent of President Nixon's invasion of Cambodia in 1970, which was planned as a diversion from the coming defeat in Vietnam. The result was the rise to power of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge. Today, with Taliban guerrillas closing on Kabul and Nato refusing to conduct serious negotiations, defeat in Afghanistan is also coming.
It is a war of the world. In Latin America, the Bush administration is fomenting incipient military coups in Venezuela, Bolivia, and possibly Paraguay, democracies whose governments have opposed Washington's historic rapacious intervention in its "backyard". Washington's "Plan Colombia" is the model for a mostly unreported assault on Mexico. This is the Merida Initiative, which will allow the United States to fund "the war on drugs and organised crime" in Mexico – a cover, as in Colombia, for militarising its closest neighbour and ensuring its "business stability".
Britain is tied to all these adventures – a British "School of the Americas" is to be built in Wales, where British soldiers will train killers from all corners of the American empire in the name of "global security".
None of this is as potentially dangerous, or more distorted in permitted public discussion, than the war on Russia. Two years ago, Stephen Cohen, professor of Russian Studies at New York University, wrote a landmark essay in the Nation which has now been reprinted in Britain.* He warns of "the gravest threats [posed] by the undeclared Cold War Washington has waged, under both parties, against post-communist Russia during the past 15 years". He describes a catastrophic "relentless winner-take-all of Russia's post-1991 weakness", with two-thirds of the population forced into poverty and life expectancy barely at 59. With most of us in the West unaware, Russia is being encircled by US and Nato bases and missiles in violation of a pledge by the United States not to expand Nato "one inch to the east". The result, writes Cohen, "is a US-built reverse iron curtain [and] a US denial that Russia has any legitimate national interests outside its own territory, even in ethnically akin former republics such as Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia. [There is even] a presumption that Russia does not have fully sovereignty within its own borders, as expressed by constant US interventions in Moscow's internal affairs since 1992 . . . the United States is attempting to acquire the nuclear responsibility it could not achieve during the Soviet era."
This danger has grown rapidly as the American media again presents US-Russian relations as "a duel to the death – perhaps literally". The liberal Washington Post, says Cohen, "reads like a bygone Pravda on the Potomac". The same is true in Britain, with the regurgitation of propaganda that Russia was wholly responsible for the war in the Caucasus and must therefore be a "pariah". Sarah Palin, who may end up US president, says she is ready to attack Russia. The steady beat of this drum has seen Moscow return to its old nuclear alerts. Remember the 1980s, writes Cohen, "when the world faced exceedingly grave Cold War perils, and Mikhail Gorbachev unexpectedly emerged to offer a heretical way out. Is there an American leader today ready to retrieve that missed opportunity?" It is an urgent question that must be asked all over the world by those of us still unafraid to break the lethal silence.
WWW.JOHNPILGER.COM
The Silence Is A Lie
In an article for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes the 'great silence' over the annual British party conferences as politicians and their club of commentators say nothing about a war provoked and waged across the world the responsibility for which lies close at hand.
By John Pilger
25/09/08 "ICH" -- - Britain's political conference season of 2008 will be remembered as The Great Silence. Politicians have come and gone and their mouths have moved in front of large images of themselves, and they often wave at someone. There has been lots of news about each other. Adam Boulton, the political editor of Sky News, and billed as "the husband of Blair aide Anji Hunter", has published a book of gossip derived from his "unrivalled access to No 10". His revelation is that Tony Blair's mouthpiece told lies. The war criminal himself has been absent, but the former mouthpiece has been signing his own book of gossip, and waving. The club is celebrating itself, including all those, Labour and Tory, who gave the war criminal a standing ovation on his last day in parliament and who have yet to vote on, let alone condemn, Britain's part in the wanton human, social and physical destruction of an entire nation. Instead, there are happy debates such as, "Can hope win?" and, my favourite, "Can foreign policy be a Labour strength?" As Harold Pinter said of unmentionable crimes: "Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening, it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest."
The Guardian's economics editor, Larry Elliott, has written that the Prime Minister "resembles a tragic hero in a Hardy novel: an essentially good man brought down by one error of judgement". What is this one error of judgement? The bank- rolling of two murderous colonial adventures? No. The unprecedented growth of the British arms industry and the sale of weapons to the poorest countries? No. The replacement of manufacturing and public service by an arcane cult serving the ultra-rich? No. The Prime Minister's "folly" is "postponing the election last year". This is the March Hare Factor.
Reality can be detected, however, by applying the Orwell Rule and inverting public pronouncements and headlines, such as "Aggressor Russia facing pariah status, US warns", thereby identifying the correct pariah; or by crossing the invisible boundaries that fix the boundaries of political and media discussion. "When truth is replaced by silence," said the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko, "the silence is a lie."
Understanding this silence is critical in a society in which news has become noise. Silence covers the truth that Britain's political parties have converged and now follow the single-ideology model of the United States. This is different from the political consensus of half a century ago that produced what was known as social democracy. Today's political union has no principled social democratic premises. Debate has become just another weasel word and principle, like the language of Chaucer, is bygone. That the poor and the state fund the rich is a given, along with the theft of public services, known as privatisation. This was spelt out by Margaret Thatcher but, more importantly, by new Labour's engineers. In The Blair Revolution: Can New Labour Deliver? Peter Mandelson and Roger Liddle declared Britain's new "economic strengths" to be its transnational corporations, the "aerospace" industry (weapons) and "the pre-eminence of the City of London". The rest was to be asset-stripped, including the peculiar British pursuit of selfless public service. Overlaying this was a new social authoritarianism guided by a hypocrisy based on "values". Mandelson and Liddle demanded "a tough discipline" and a "hardworking majority" and the "proper bringing-up [sic] of children". And in formally launching his Murdochracy, Blair used "moral" and "morality" 18 times in a speech he gave in Australia as a guest of Rupert Murdoch, who had recently found God.
A "think tank" called Demos exemplified this new order. A founder of Demos, Geoff Mulgan, himself rewarded with a job in one of Blair's "policy units", wrote a book called Connexity. "In much of the world today," he offered, "the most pressing problems on the public agenda are not poverty or material shortage . . . but rather the disorders of freedom: the troubles that result from having too many freedoms that are abused rather than constructively used." As if celebrating life in another solar system, he wrote: "For the first time ever, most of the world's most powerful nations do not want to conquer territory."
That reads, now as it ought to have read then, as dark parody in a world where more than 24,000 children die every day from the effects of poverty and at least a million people lie dead in just one territory conquered by the most powerful nations. However, it serves to remind us of the political "culture" that has so successfully fused traditional liberalism with the lunar branch of western political life and allowed our "too many freedoms" to be taken away as ruthlessly and anonymously as wedding parties in Afghanistan have been obliterated by our bombs.
The product of these organised delusions is rarely acknowledged. The current economic crisis, with its threat to jobs and savings and public services, is the direct consequence of a rampant militarism comparable, in large part, with that of the first half of the last century, when Europe's most advanced and cultured nation committed genocide. Since the 1990s, America's military budget has doubled. Like the national debt, it is currently the largest ever. The true figure is not known, because up to 40 per cent is classified "black" – it is hidden. Britain, with a weapons industry second only to the US, has also been militarised. The Iraq invasion has cost $5trn, at least. The 4,500 British troops in Basra almost never leave their base. They are there because the Americans demand it. On 19 September, Robert Gates, the American defence secretary, was in London demanding $20bn from allies like Britain so that the US invasion force in Afghanistan could be increased to 44,000. He said the British force would be increased. It was an order.
In the meantime, an American invasion of Pakistan is under way, secretly authorised by President Bush. The "change" candidate for president, Barack Obama, had already called for an invasion and more aircraft and bombs. The ironies are searing. A Pakistani religious school attacked by American drone missiles, killing 23 people, was set up in the 1980s with CIA backing. It was part of Operation Cyclone, in which the US armed and funded mujahedin groups that became al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The aim was to bring down the Soviet Union. This was achieved; it also brought down the Twin Towers.
On 20 September the inevitable response to the latest invasion came with the bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad. For me, it is reminiscent of President Nixon's invasion of Cambodia in 1970, which was planned as a diversion from the coming defeat in Vietnam. The result was the rise to power of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge. Today, with Taliban guerrillas closing on Kabul and Nato refusing to conduct serious negotiations, defeat in Afghanistan is also coming.
It is a war of the world. In Latin America, the Bush administration is fomenting incipient military coups in Venezuela, Bolivia, and possibly Paraguay, democracies whose governments have opposed Washington's historic rapacious intervention in its "backyard". Washington's "Plan Colombia" is the model for a mostly unreported assault on Mexico. This is the Merida Initiative, which will allow the United States to fund "the war on drugs and organised crime" in Mexico – a cover, as in Colombia, for militarising its closest neighbour and ensuring its "business stability".
Britain is tied to all these adventures – a British "School of the Americas" is to be built in Wales, where British soldiers will train killers from all corners of the American empire in the name of "global security".
None of this is as potentially dangerous, or more distorted in permitted public discussion, than the war on Russia. Two years ago, Stephen Cohen, professor of Russian Studies at New York University, wrote a landmark essay in the Nation which has now been reprinted in Britain.* He warns of "the gravest threats [posed] by the undeclared Cold War Washington has waged, under both parties, against post-communist Russia during the past 15 years". He describes a catastrophic "relentless winner-take-all of Russia's post-1991 weakness", with two-thirds of the population forced into poverty and life expectancy barely at 59. With most of us in the West unaware, Russia is being encircled by US and Nato bases and missiles in violation of a pledge by the United States not to expand Nato "one inch to the east". The result, writes Cohen, "is a US-built reverse iron curtain [and] a US denial that Russia has any legitimate national interests outside its own territory, even in ethnically akin former republics such as Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia. [There is even] a presumption that Russia does not have fully sovereignty within its own borders, as expressed by constant US interventions in Moscow's internal affairs since 1992 . . . the United States is attempting to acquire the nuclear responsibility it could not achieve during the Soviet era."
This danger has grown rapidly as the American media again presents US-Russian relations as "a duel to the death – perhaps literally". The liberal Washington Post, says Cohen, "reads like a bygone Pravda on the Potomac". The same is true in Britain, with the regurgitation of propaganda that Russia was wholly responsible for the war in the Caucasus and must therefore be a "pariah". Sarah Palin, who may end up US president, says she is ready to attack Russia. The steady beat of this drum has seen Moscow return to its old nuclear alerts. Remember the 1980s, writes Cohen, "when the world faced exceedingly grave Cold War perils, and Mikhail Gorbachev unexpectedly emerged to offer a heretical way out. Is there an American leader today ready to retrieve that missed opportunity?" It is an urgent question that must be asked all over the world by those of us still unafraid to break the lethal silence.
WWW.JOHNPILGER.COM
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Big Talk
The Big Talk
How to tell a six year old where all the birds and bees have gone
by Sandra Steingraber
Published in the September/October 2008 issue of Orion magazine
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/3229
I WAS GOOGLING MYSELF recently (in an attempt, if you must know, to locate an essay that I had published somewhere), and I managed to misspell my own name. So I was directed to the one source that had mangled my name in the same way. And that is how I was confronted, in an obscure blog, with the question, “Why isn’t Sandra Steingraber [with dyslexic spelling] talking about climate change?”
It was unsettling. As the days went by, I began an imaginary argument.
Look, I first wrote about receding glaciers in 1988. I was assigning Al Gore to college students in 1992. Not long ago, I made climate instability the centerpiece of a commencement address I gave at a rural college in coal-is-king Pennsylvania. And if you think all the trustees were pleased with that theme, I invite you to give it a try. So the question is not “Why is S.S. not talking about climate change?” The question is “Why is S.S. not talking about it AT HOME?”
Okay. Why don’t you talk about it at home?
Because I have young children and because I believe that frightening problems need to be solved by adults who should just shut up and get to work.
So, how long are you going to keep hiding the truth from your kids?
That’s as far as I got before three other notable things happened. First, Elijah asked to be a polar bear for Halloween. As I pinned the chenille fabric, it occurred to me that his costume might well outlast the species. I decided not to tell him that.
A month later, Elijah asked his sister for a weather report. Faith walked out onto the porch, spread out her arms in the manner of Saint Francis, and came back in. “It’s global warmingish,” she said and went back to her cereal. No comment from me.
And then I overheard a conversation on the playground. One child said, “I know why it’s hot. Do you?”
Another said, “It’s because the Earth is sick.” They all nodded. I said nothing.
IT’S TIME TO SIT DOWN with my kids and have the Global Warming Talk. I carried off the Sex Talkand its many sequelswith grace and good biology. Surely, I can rise to this new occasion.
On the surface, procreation and climate change seem opposite narratives. Sex knits molecules of air, food, and water into living organisms. Climate change unravels all that. The ending of the sex story is the birth of a family. The climate change story ends with what biologist E. O. Wilson calls the Eremozoic Erathe Era of Loneliness.
But then I realized that the two stories share a common epistemological challenge. Both are counterintuitive. In the former case, you have to accept that your ordinary existence began with an extraordinary, unthinkable act (namely, your parents having intercourse). In the latter case, you have to accept that the collective acts of ordinary objectscars, planes, dishwashers, iPodsare ushering in things extraordinary and unthinkable (dissolving coral reefs, daffodils in January). So, I reasoned, perhaps the same pedagogical lessons apply: during the Big Talk, keep it simple, leave the door open for further conversation, offer reading material as follow-up.
Of which there is no shortage. In fact, a veritable cottage industry of children’s books on climate change has sprung up almost overnight. These range from the primer, Why Are the Ice Caps Melting? (Let’s Read and Find Out!), in which lessons on the ravaging of ecosystems also offer plenty of opportunities to practice silent e, to the ultra-sophisticated How We Know What We Know About Our Changing Climate: Scientists and Kids Explore Global Warming, by foremost environmental author Lynne Cherry, in which middle school readers are cast as coprincipal investigators. This new literary subgenre is impressive. Reading its various offerings, I found myself admiring the respectful tones and clear explanations. These books describe global warming as a reality that no longer lingers in the realm of debate. And yet, they are not, for the most part, scary. Indeed, the first sentence in the inside flap of How We Know What We Know is “This is not a scary book.”
And here is where the pediatric versions of the climate change story depart from their adult counterparts. The recent crop of books on global warming intended for grown-ups focuses on the surreal disconnect between the evidence for rapidly approaching, irreversible planetary tipping points (overwhelming) and the political response to that evidence (mostly zilch). The children’s books profile heroic individuals fighting to save the planetin ways that kids can get involved in. To read the children’s literature is to see the world’s people working ardently and in concert with each other to solve a big problem . . . and enjoying a grand adventure while they’re at it.
Is this the fiction we all should be laboring under? I don’t know. I do know that a fatalistic mindset, which afflicts many adults but almost no children, is a big part of what’s preventing us from derailing the global warming train that has now left the station. On this, I wholly agree with sociologist Eileen Crist, who argues that fatalism, masquerading as realism, is a form of capitulation that strengthens the very trends that generate it. I do know that we grown-ups need visions of effective challenges and radical actions that can turn into self-fulfilling prophecies.
I also know that I needed something to say to my six year old when we walked home from the library in Aprilno leaves to offer shade, the bank’s LED sign reading eighty-four degreesand he turned his ingenuous face to mine to ask, “Mama, is it supposed to be so hot?”
So I am working on my talk. For inspiration, I have arranged on my desk three documents. One is an essay that Rachel Carson published in Popular Science in 1951eight years before my birth. It’s entitled “Why Our Winters Are Getting Warmer,” and it includes a drawing of Manhattan deluged by seawater. Another is Carson’s essay “Help Your Child to Wonder,” published five years later. The third is a book by poet Audre Lorde that includes the sentence: Your silence will not protect you.
My talk features a story about a boat in which we all livepeople, butterflies, polar bears. A storm starts to rock the boat. The waves are chemical pollution, habitat destruction, industrial fishing, and warfare. Now along comes a really big wave. Global warming. The already-rocking boat is in danger of flipping over.
Then what happens? I don’t know. For the first time in my life, I have writer’s block. Somebody help me out here.
Start a Conversation about this article.
Sandra Steingraber is a scholar in residence at Ithaca College.
How to tell a six year old where all the birds and bees have gone
by Sandra Steingraber
Published in the September/October 2008 issue of Orion magazine
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/3229
I WAS GOOGLING MYSELF recently (in an attempt, if you must know, to locate an essay that I had published somewhere), and I managed to misspell my own name. So I was directed to the one source that had mangled my name in the same way. And that is how I was confronted, in an obscure blog, with the question, “Why isn’t Sandra Steingraber [with dyslexic spelling] talking about climate change?”
It was unsettling. As the days went by, I began an imaginary argument.
Look, I first wrote about receding glaciers in 1988. I was assigning Al Gore to college students in 1992. Not long ago, I made climate instability the centerpiece of a commencement address I gave at a rural college in coal-is-king Pennsylvania. And if you think all the trustees were pleased with that theme, I invite you to give it a try. So the question is not “Why is S.S. not talking about climate change?” The question is “Why is S.S. not talking about it AT HOME?”
Okay. Why don’t you talk about it at home?
Because I have young children and because I believe that frightening problems need to be solved by adults who should just shut up and get to work.
So, how long are you going to keep hiding the truth from your kids?
That’s as far as I got before three other notable things happened. First, Elijah asked to be a polar bear for Halloween. As I pinned the chenille fabric, it occurred to me that his costume might well outlast the species. I decided not to tell him that.
A month later, Elijah asked his sister for a weather report. Faith walked out onto the porch, spread out her arms in the manner of Saint Francis, and came back in. “It’s global warmingish,” she said and went back to her cereal. No comment from me.
And then I overheard a conversation on the playground. One child said, “I know why it’s hot. Do you?”
Another said, “It’s because the Earth is sick.” They all nodded. I said nothing.
IT’S TIME TO SIT DOWN with my kids and have the Global Warming Talk. I carried off the Sex Talkand its many sequelswith grace and good biology. Surely, I can rise to this new occasion.
On the surface, procreation and climate change seem opposite narratives. Sex knits molecules of air, food, and water into living organisms. Climate change unravels all that. The ending of the sex story is the birth of a family. The climate change story ends with what biologist E. O. Wilson calls the Eremozoic Erathe Era of Loneliness.
But then I realized that the two stories share a common epistemological challenge. Both are counterintuitive. In the former case, you have to accept that your ordinary existence began with an extraordinary, unthinkable act (namely, your parents having intercourse). In the latter case, you have to accept that the collective acts of ordinary objectscars, planes, dishwashers, iPodsare ushering in things extraordinary and unthinkable (dissolving coral reefs, daffodils in January). So, I reasoned, perhaps the same pedagogical lessons apply: during the Big Talk, keep it simple, leave the door open for further conversation, offer reading material as follow-up.
Of which there is no shortage. In fact, a veritable cottage industry of children’s books on climate change has sprung up almost overnight. These range from the primer, Why Are the Ice Caps Melting? (Let’s Read and Find Out!), in which lessons on the ravaging of ecosystems also offer plenty of opportunities to practice silent e, to the ultra-sophisticated How We Know What We Know About Our Changing Climate: Scientists and Kids Explore Global Warming, by foremost environmental author Lynne Cherry, in which middle school readers are cast as coprincipal investigators. This new literary subgenre is impressive. Reading its various offerings, I found myself admiring the respectful tones and clear explanations. These books describe global warming as a reality that no longer lingers in the realm of debate. And yet, they are not, for the most part, scary. Indeed, the first sentence in the inside flap of How We Know What We Know is “This is not a scary book.”
And here is where the pediatric versions of the climate change story depart from their adult counterparts. The recent crop of books on global warming intended for grown-ups focuses on the surreal disconnect between the evidence for rapidly approaching, irreversible planetary tipping points (overwhelming) and the political response to that evidence (mostly zilch). The children’s books profile heroic individuals fighting to save the planetin ways that kids can get involved in. To read the children’s literature is to see the world’s people working ardently and in concert with each other to solve a big problem . . . and enjoying a grand adventure while they’re at it.
Is this the fiction we all should be laboring under? I don’t know. I do know that a fatalistic mindset, which afflicts many adults but almost no children, is a big part of what’s preventing us from derailing the global warming train that has now left the station. On this, I wholly agree with sociologist Eileen Crist, who argues that fatalism, masquerading as realism, is a form of capitulation that strengthens the very trends that generate it. I do know that we grown-ups need visions of effective challenges and radical actions that can turn into self-fulfilling prophecies.
I also know that I needed something to say to my six year old when we walked home from the library in Aprilno leaves to offer shade, the bank’s LED sign reading eighty-four degreesand he turned his ingenuous face to mine to ask, “Mama, is it supposed to be so hot?”
So I am working on my talk. For inspiration, I have arranged on my desk three documents. One is an essay that Rachel Carson published in Popular Science in 1951eight years before my birth. It’s entitled “Why Our Winters Are Getting Warmer,” and it includes a drawing of Manhattan deluged by seawater. Another is Carson’s essay “Help Your Child to Wonder,” published five years later. The third is a book by poet Audre Lorde that includes the sentence: Your silence will not protect you.
My talk features a story about a boat in which we all livepeople, butterflies, polar bears. A storm starts to rock the boat. The waves are chemical pollution, habitat destruction, industrial fishing, and warfare. Now along comes a really big wave. Global warming. The already-rocking boat is in danger of flipping over.
Then what happens? I don’t know. For the first time in my life, I have writer’s block. Somebody help me out here.
Start a Conversation about this article.
Sandra Steingraber is a scholar in residence at Ithaca College.
Olympic 'Spirit Train' Protests
Departure of Olympic 'Spirit Train' met with protesters in B.C.
1 hour, 9 minutes ago
By The Canadian Press
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/080921/national/oly2010_spirit_train
PORT MOODY, B.C. - The departure of a cross-country rail trip designed
to boost enthusiasm for the Vancouver 2010 Olympics is being
overshadowed by noisy protesters.
About three dozen protesters attempted to drown out a ceremony in Port
Moody, B.C., held to mark the departure of the Canadian Pacific (TSX:CP)
Spirit Train.
There were scuffles with police as officers tried to hold the protesters
back, and one man was arrested and carried away by his arms and legs.
With several hundred people attending the event, the group - a mix of
First Nations and non-First Nations protesters - yelled slogans about
stolen native land and housing.
The train is staging a 10-city tour, and anti-Olympic activists have
pledged to meet the train at every stop.
A group calling itself the Olympic Resistance Network says the Olympics
will displace Vancouver's homeless population, hurt the environment and
perpetuate the "theft of indigenous land."
The federal government has worked hard to counter such criticism,
signing agreements worth billions of dollars with the four bands whose
traditional territories are home to the Games.
The Spirit Train is scheduled to stop in Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon,
Winnipeg, Thunder Bay, Sudbury, Mississauga and Smith Falls, Ont.,
before ending its journey in Montreal on Oct. 18.
The train will make a repeat journey in the fall of next year and
potentially after the Games as a tour for medallists.
CP Rail paid somewhere between $3 million and $15 million to be the
official rail freight services supplier to the 2010 Olympics.
1 hour, 9 minutes ago
By The Canadian Press
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/080921/national/oly2010_spirit_train
PORT MOODY, B.C. - The departure of a cross-country rail trip designed
to boost enthusiasm for the Vancouver 2010 Olympics is being
overshadowed by noisy protesters.
About three dozen protesters attempted to drown out a ceremony in Port
Moody, B.C., held to mark the departure of the Canadian Pacific (TSX:CP)
Spirit Train.
There were scuffles with police as officers tried to hold the protesters
back, and one man was arrested and carried away by his arms and legs.
With several hundred people attending the event, the group - a mix of
First Nations and non-First Nations protesters - yelled slogans about
stolen native land and housing.
The train is staging a 10-city tour, and anti-Olympic activists have
pledged to meet the train at every stop.
A group calling itself the Olympic Resistance Network says the Olympics
will displace Vancouver's homeless population, hurt the environment and
perpetuate the "theft of indigenous land."
The federal government has worked hard to counter such criticism,
signing agreements worth billions of dollars with the four bands whose
traditional territories are home to the Games.
The Spirit Train is scheduled to stop in Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon,
Winnipeg, Thunder Bay, Sudbury, Mississauga and Smith Falls, Ont.,
before ending its journey in Montreal on Oct. 18.
The train will make a repeat journey in the fall of next year and
potentially after the Games as a tour for medallists.
CP Rail paid somewhere between $3 million and $15 million to be the
official rail freight services supplier to the 2010 Olympics.
Methane Time Bomb
The Methane Time Bomb
Tuesday 23 September 2008
» http://www.truthout.org/article/the-methane-time-bomb
by: Steve Conner, The Independent UK
In the past few days, researchers believe that the sub-sea layer of permafrost has melted away to allow methane to rise from underground deposits formed before the last ice age. (Photo: Getty Images)
Arctic scientists discover new global warming threat as melting permafrost releases millions of tons of a gas 20 times more damaging than carbon dioxide.
The first evidence that millions of tons of a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide is being released into the atmosphere from beneath the Arctic seabed has been discovered by scientists.
The Independent has been passed details of preliminary findings suggesting that massive deposits of sub-sea methane are bubbling to the surface as the Arctic region becomes warmer and its ice retreats.
Underground stores of methane are important because scientists believe their sudden release has in the past been responsible for rapid increases in global temperatures, dramatic changes to the climate, and even the mass extinction of species. Scientists aboard a research ship that has sailed the entire length of Russia's northern coast have discovered intense concentrations of methane - sometimes at up to 100 times background levels - over several areas covering thousands of square miles of the Siberian continental shelf.
In the past few days, the researchers have seen areas of sea foaming with gas bubbling up through "methane chimneys" rising from the sea floor. They believe that the sub-sea layer of permafrost, which has acted like a "lid" to prevent the gas from escaping, has melted away to allow methane to rise from underground deposits formed before the last ice age.
They have warned that this is likely to be linked with the rapid warming that the region has experienced in recent years.
Methane is about 20 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and many scientists fear that its release could accelerate global warming in a giant positive feedback where more atmospheric methane causes higher temperatures, leading to further permafrost melting and the release of yet more methane.
The amount of methane stored beneath the Arctic is calculated to be greater than the total amount of carbon locked up in global coal reserves so there is intense interest in the stability of these deposits as the region warms at a faster rate than other places on earth.
Orjan Gustafsson of Stockholm University in Sweden, one of the leaders of the expedition, described the scale of the methane emissions in an email exchange sent from the Russian research ship Jacob Smirnitskyi.
"We had a hectic finishing of the sampling programme yesterday and this past night," said Dr Gustafsson. "An extensive area of intense methane release was found. At earlier sites we had found elevated levels of dissolved methane. Yesterday, for the first time, we documented a field where the release was so intense that the methane did not have time to dissolve into the seawater but was rising as methane bubbles to the sea surface. These 'methane chimneys' were documented on echo sounder and with seismic [instruments]."
At some locations, methane concentrations reached 100 times background levels. These anomalies have been seen in the East Siberian Sea and the Laptev Sea, covering several tens of thousands of square kilometres, amounting to millions of tons of methane, said Dr Gustafsson. "This may be of the same magnitude as presently estimated from the global ocean," he said. "Nobody knows how many more such areas exist on the extensive East Siberian continental shelves.
"The conventional thought has been that the permafrost 'lid' on the sub-sea sediments on the Siberian shelf should cap and hold the massive reservoirs of shallow methane deposits in place. The growing evidence for release of methane in this inaccessible region may suggest that the permafrost lid is starting to get perforated and thus leak methane... The permafrost now has small holes. We have found elevated levels of methane above the water surface and even more in the water just below. It is obvious that the source is the seabed."
The preliminary findings of the International Siberian Shelf Study 2008, being prepared for publication by the American Geophysical Union, are being overseen by Igor Semiletov of the Far-Eastern branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Since 1994, he has led about 10 expeditions in the Laptev Sea but during the 1990s he did not detect any elevated levels of methane. However, since 2003 he reported a rising number of methane "hotspots", which have now been confirmed using more sensitive instruments on board the Jacob Smirnitskyi.
Dr Semiletov has suggested several possible reasons why methane is now being released from the Arctic, including the rising volume of relatively warmer water being discharged from Siberia's rivers due to the melting of the permafrost on the land.
The Arctic region as a whole has seen a 4C rise in average temperatures over recent decades and a dramatic decline in the area of the Arctic Ocean covered by summer sea ice. Many scientists fear that the loss of sea ice could accelerate the warming trend because open ocean soaks up more heat from the sun than the reflective surface of an ice-covered sea.
Tuesday 23 September 2008
» http://www.truthout.org/article/the-methane-time-bomb
by: Steve Conner, The Independent UK
In the past few days, researchers believe that the sub-sea layer of permafrost has melted away to allow methane to rise from underground deposits formed before the last ice age. (Photo: Getty Images)
Arctic scientists discover new global warming threat as melting permafrost releases millions of tons of a gas 20 times more damaging than carbon dioxide.
The first evidence that millions of tons of a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide is being released into the atmosphere from beneath the Arctic seabed has been discovered by scientists.
The Independent has been passed details of preliminary findings suggesting that massive deposits of sub-sea methane are bubbling to the surface as the Arctic region becomes warmer and its ice retreats.
Underground stores of methane are important because scientists believe their sudden release has in the past been responsible for rapid increases in global temperatures, dramatic changes to the climate, and even the mass extinction of species. Scientists aboard a research ship that has sailed the entire length of Russia's northern coast have discovered intense concentrations of methane - sometimes at up to 100 times background levels - over several areas covering thousands of square miles of the Siberian continental shelf.
In the past few days, the researchers have seen areas of sea foaming with gas bubbling up through "methane chimneys" rising from the sea floor. They believe that the sub-sea layer of permafrost, which has acted like a "lid" to prevent the gas from escaping, has melted away to allow methane to rise from underground deposits formed before the last ice age.
They have warned that this is likely to be linked with the rapid warming that the region has experienced in recent years.
Methane is about 20 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and many scientists fear that its release could accelerate global warming in a giant positive feedback where more atmospheric methane causes higher temperatures, leading to further permafrost melting and the release of yet more methane.
The amount of methane stored beneath the Arctic is calculated to be greater than the total amount of carbon locked up in global coal reserves so there is intense interest in the stability of these deposits as the region warms at a faster rate than other places on earth.
Orjan Gustafsson of Stockholm University in Sweden, one of the leaders of the expedition, described the scale of the methane emissions in an email exchange sent from the Russian research ship Jacob Smirnitskyi.
"We had a hectic finishing of the sampling programme yesterday and this past night," said Dr Gustafsson. "An extensive area of intense methane release was found. At earlier sites we had found elevated levels of dissolved methane. Yesterday, for the first time, we documented a field where the release was so intense that the methane did not have time to dissolve into the seawater but was rising as methane bubbles to the sea surface. These 'methane chimneys' were documented on echo sounder and with seismic [instruments]."
At some locations, methane concentrations reached 100 times background levels. These anomalies have been seen in the East Siberian Sea and the Laptev Sea, covering several tens of thousands of square kilometres, amounting to millions of tons of methane, said Dr Gustafsson. "This may be of the same magnitude as presently estimated from the global ocean," he said. "Nobody knows how many more such areas exist on the extensive East Siberian continental shelves.
"The conventional thought has been that the permafrost 'lid' on the sub-sea sediments on the Siberian shelf should cap and hold the massive reservoirs of shallow methane deposits in place. The growing evidence for release of methane in this inaccessible region may suggest that the permafrost lid is starting to get perforated and thus leak methane... The permafrost now has small holes. We have found elevated levels of methane above the water surface and even more in the water just below. It is obvious that the source is the seabed."
The preliminary findings of the International Siberian Shelf Study 2008, being prepared for publication by the American Geophysical Union, are being overseen by Igor Semiletov of the Far-Eastern branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Since 1994, he has led about 10 expeditions in the Laptev Sea but during the 1990s he did not detect any elevated levels of methane. However, since 2003 he reported a rising number of methane "hotspots", which have now been confirmed using more sensitive instruments on board the Jacob Smirnitskyi.
Dr Semiletov has suggested several possible reasons why methane is now being released from the Arctic, including the rising volume of relatively warmer water being discharged from Siberia's rivers due to the melting of the permafrost on the land.
The Arctic region as a whole has seen a 4C rise in average temperatures over recent decades and a dramatic decline in the area of the Arctic Ocean covered by summer sea ice. Many scientists fear that the loss of sea ice could accelerate the warming trend because open ocean soaks up more heat from the sun than the reflective surface of an ice-covered sea.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Gorilla Radio for Sept. 22, 2008
This week, It's said, "Truth is stranger than fiction;" but when fiction is more strangely true than truth, you know you're in Mickey Z.'s world.Astoria-based author Mickey Z. and CPR for Dummies; Jon Elmer and Israel changing the guard. Yesterday, Ehud Olmert, Israel's prime minister resigned his office. Olmert's Kadima party primary delivered a clear leadership vote for Foreign minister Tzipi Livni.
Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Monday, 5-6pm Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, 104.3 cable, and on the internet at: http://cfuv.uvic.ca. He also serves as a contributing editor to the web news site, www.pacificfreepress.com. Check out the GR blog at: http://GorillaRadioBlog.blogspot.com.
It's said, "Truth is stranger than fiction;" but when fiction is more strangely true than truth, you know you're in Mickey Z.'s world. Long-time friend of GR and author of, among other books, '50 American Revolutions You're Not Supposed to Know,' 'The Seven Deadly Spins,' 'The Murdering of My Years,' and 'Saving Private Power,' Mickey Z.'s cross-genre writing is available at his website, mickeyz.net and now, his first novel, 'CPR for Dummies' is out. The Zed back in the house with the view from Astoria in the first segment.
And; Yesterday, Ehud Olmert, Israel's prime minister resigned his office. Olmert's Kadima party primary delivered a clear leadership vote for Foreign minister Tzipi Livni. Livni comes from a storied Israeli family, one that fought the British and sits still at the centre of Israel's warrior culture. Jon Elmer is a freelance Canadian writer and photo-journalist who has lived in and reported from some of the world's hottest hot spots. He's the author the news websites JonElmer.com and fromoccupiedpalestine.org.
Jon has followed the unfolding catastrophe that is daily visited upon Palestine from the beginnings of the on-going, so-called al-Aqsa intifada, more than five years old now, and he's served as Gorilla Radio's authority on Palestine. Jon Elmer and the changing of the guard in Israel in the second segment.
And; in solidarity with the Student University Building workers, members of the striking steel workers union, on action due to a labour dispute with the UVSS, Janine Bandcroft, formerly of the aforesaid organized labour collective, is standing figurative picket, and thus will have a nice day off... she urges your check out her relaitvenewz.ca website for the good going-ons in and around Victoria in the coming week.
But first Mickey Z. and CPR for Dummies.
G-Radio is dedicated to social justice, the environment, community, and providing a forum for people and issues not covered in the corporate media.
Some past guests include: M. Junaid Alam, M. Shahid Alam, Joel Bakan, Maude Barlow, David Barsamian, Rhoda Berenson, William Blum, Luciana Bohne, William Bowles, Mordecai Briemberg, Vincent Bugliosi, Helen Caldicott, Noam Chomsky, Michel Chossudovsky, Diane Christian, Juan Cole, David Cromwell, Murray Dobbin, Jon Elmer, Reese Erlich, Anthony Fenton, Jim Fetzer, Laura Flanders, Chris Floyd, Connie Fogal, Glen Ford, Susan George, Stan Goff, Amy Goodman, Robert Greenwald, Denis Halliday, Chris Hedges, Sander Hicks, Julia Butterfly Hill, Scott Horton, Robert Jensen, Dahr Jamail, Chalmers Johnson, Diana Johnstone, Kathy Kelly, Naomi Klein, Brewster Kneen, Anthony Lappe, Frances Moore Lappe, Jason Leopold, Jeff Leys, Dave Lindorff, Jim Lobe, Jennifer Loewenstein, Wayne Madsen, Stephen Marshall, Linda McQuaig, George Monbiot, Loretta Napoleoni, John Nichols, Kurt Nimmo, David Orchard, Greg Palast, Mike Palecek, Michael Parenti, Robert Parry, John Pilger, Kevin Pina, William Rivers Pitt, Justin Podur, Lila Rajiva, Jack Random, Sheldon Rampton, Paul Craig Roberts, David Robb, Paul de Rooij, John Ross, David Rovics, Danny Schechter, Vandana Shiva, Norman Solomon, Starhawk, Grant Wakefield, Paul Watson, Bernard Weiner, Mickey Z., Howard Zinn and many others.
Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Monday, 5-6pm Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, 104.3 cable, and on the internet at: http://cfuv.uvic.ca. He also serves as a contributing editor to the web news site, www.pacificfreepress.com. Check out the GR blog at: http://GorillaRadioBlog.blogspot.com.
It's said, "Truth is stranger than fiction;" but when fiction is more strangely true than truth, you know you're in Mickey Z.'s world. Long-time friend of GR and author of, among other books, '50 American Revolutions You're Not Supposed to Know,' 'The Seven Deadly Spins,' 'The Murdering of My Years,' and 'Saving Private Power,' Mickey Z.'s cross-genre writing is available at his website, mickeyz.net and now, his first novel, 'CPR for Dummies' is out. The Zed back in the house with the view from Astoria in the first segment.
And; Yesterday, Ehud Olmert, Israel's prime minister resigned his office. Olmert's Kadima party primary delivered a clear leadership vote for Foreign minister Tzipi Livni. Livni comes from a storied Israeli family, one that fought the British and sits still at the centre of Israel's warrior culture. Jon Elmer is a freelance Canadian writer and photo-journalist who has lived in and reported from some of the world's hottest hot spots. He's the author the news websites JonElmer.com and fromoccupiedpalestine.org.
Jon has followed the unfolding catastrophe that is daily visited upon Palestine from the beginnings of the on-going, so-called al-Aqsa intifada, more than five years old now, and he's served as Gorilla Radio's authority on Palestine. Jon Elmer and the changing of the guard in Israel in the second segment.
And; in solidarity with the Student University Building workers, members of the striking steel workers union, on action due to a labour dispute with the UVSS, Janine Bandcroft, formerly of the aforesaid organized labour collective, is standing figurative picket, and thus will have a nice day off... she urges your check out her relaitvenewz.ca website for the good going-ons in and around Victoria in the coming week.
But first Mickey Z. and CPR for Dummies.
G-Radio is dedicated to social justice, the environment, community, and providing a forum for people and issues not covered in the corporate media.
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Tar: Canada's Death Throes
Dirty business
The tar sands of Alberta and toxic waste
September, 21 2008
By Andrew Nikiforuk
Andrew Nikiforuk's ZSpace Page
Fred McDonald, a Métis trapper and storyteller extraordinaire, often questioned the reasoning and science behind the proliferation of toxic ponds and end-pit lakes. Before he died in 2007 of kidney failure, McDonald lived in Fort McKay, an Aboriginal community 72 kilometres north of Fort Saskatchewan. The stench of hydrocarbons from the surrounding mines often hangs heavily in the air there, and in 2006, an ammonia release from a Syncrude facility hospitalized more than 20 children.
On a fall day in 2006, McDonald sat in his kitchen, sipping a glass of rat root juice ("It's good for everything," he told me) and breathing through an oxygen tube. The day before, he had spent several hours on a dialysis machine. McDonald's kidneys were failing but not his mind. He recalled the days when Tar Island was a good place to fish and hunt. (Tar Island was so named by local Cree and Métis after the bitumen that often oozed down its banks. In the late 1960s, Suncor transformed the island into a tailings pond, the first in the tar sands.) "It always had moose on it. We loved that island. We are slowly losing everything."
McDonald was born on the river, and he had trapped, fished, farmed and worked for the oil companies. He fondly remembered the 1930 and 1940s, when Syrian fur traders exchanged pots and pans for muskrat and beaver furs along the Athabasca River. Families lived off the land then and had feasts of rabbit. They netted jackfish, pickerel and whitefish all winter long. "Everyone walked or paddled, and the people were healthy," McDonald said. "No one travels that river anymore. There is nothing in that river. It's polluted. Once you could dip your cup and have a nice cold drink from that river, and now you can't."
McDonald said that tar-sands pollution is killing berries. The mines are also draining the surrounding muskeg of water: "It's our future source of water, and it's drying." Climate warming has changed the clear blue ice of the Athabasca River in the winter to a dangerous slush. McDonald had recently told his son not to have any more children: "They are going to suffer. They are going to have a tough time to breathe and will have nothing to drink." He dismissed the talk of reclaiming waste ponds and open-pit mines as a white-skinned fairy tale. "There is no way in this world that you can put Mother Earth back like it was."
Because of "the bad behaviour of clays," Natural Resources Canada researcher Randy Mikula suspects that tar-sands waste won't settle to solid form for 1,000 years, so "something has to be done." Right now the best solution might be a "brute force" centrifugal approach, says Mikula. Waste is spun (much like lettuce in a spinner) in order to create material that is dry and stackable, while recovering water at the same time. Both Syncrude and Suncor have started pilot projects. "We could reduce water usage by a barrel, which means less water withdrawn from the Athabasca River," Mikula says.
The volume of sand and toxic waste produced by the tar sands to date is as great as the agricultural drainage and sewage water the water-short nation of Egypt, with a population of 80 million, reuses every year. By 2015, the tar sands could be creating ponds of wastewater three times that size.
The growing waste problem is nowhere more evident than downstream in Fort Chipewyan, where the Athabasca and Peace rivers spill into Lake Athabasca. About 10 years ago, Raymond Ladouceur, a 65-year-old commercial Métis fishermen, started to find something new in his pickerel nets: damned ugly fish. The deformities included crooked tails, humpbacks, bulging eyes and skin tumours. "Jesus, I was pulling them out all the time," says Ladouceur. "But we threw the deformed fish away. They weren't fit for human consumption."
In 2002, Ladouceur and other fishermen packed up 90 kilos of the deformed fish and flew them off to Fort McMurray for study by Alberta Environment. Nobody from the government department picked up the fish over the weekend, though, and they rotted.
Like most residents of Fort Chipewyan, Ladouceur believes there is something definitely wrong with the water. He has a list of suspects. Abandoned uranium mines on the east end of the lake, for example, have been leaking for years. "God knows how much radium is in this lake," he says. Then there are the pulp mills and, of course, the tar sands and tar ponds. Ladouceur says his cousin collected yellow scum from the river downstream from the mines and dried it, and "it caught on fire." Almost everyone in Fort Chip has witnessed oil spills or leaks on the Athabasca River.
The governments of Alberta and Canada, along with the multinational companies, insist not only that they'll clean up the whole mess but that rapid tar-sands development is sustainable. "Alberta is proving that environmental protection and economic development can happen at the same time," promises a 2008 provincial propaganda sheet entitled "Opportunity and Balance." The Canadian Parliament, an institution less inclined to hubris, talks about groping "towards sustainable development" in its 2007 tar sands report.
Alberta's bitumen apologists swear that "work is progressing to return the disturbed land to a natural state after development, and it will be done right." The province's former ambassador to the United States, Murray Smith, even assured our number-one oil market that the industry will achieve "100 percent long-term restoration of the lands it makes use of." Why, major tar-sand companies have even planted 7.5 million tree seedlings. The Mining Association of Canada says reclaiming open-pit mines can be done with a "vision worthy of a Group of Seven artist."
According to the Alberta government, open-pit mines will eventually obliterate 3,500 square kilometres of forest. The government likes to minimize the scale of the destruction by saying that it's "less than one percent of boreal forest area" in Canada. (In other words, it's perfectly okay to destroy small places.) Whatever the Orwellian rhetoric, the forest-top removal will cover an area four times larger than that of New York City. Outdoor enthusiasts can imagine half of Banff National Park flattened and excavated.
Even at that, the mines make up only a small part of the wreckage created by the megaproject. The Alberta government has leased an additional 50,000 square kilometres of land (and another 100,000 square kilometres await global investors) for in-situ projects including steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD). Canada's four famed mountain parks - Jasper, Banff, Yoho, and Kootenay - could easily fit into this industrial zone with approximately 20,000 square kilometres left over. SAGD development will slice and dice the land with thousands of industrial well sites, seismic lines, pipelines and roads. This fragmentation will transform the forest into a bitumen park, exterminating the population of woodland caribou and decimating song-birds home from their winter in the tropics. Seismic lines, which make a forest look like an engineered spider web, typically nee! d more than 100 years to fill in with trees again. Yet the government has no tight guidelines for reclaiming forest ruined by SAGD.
Government definitions of reclamation exhibit a genuine vagueness as well as a preference for mechanics over biology. According to Alberta's Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act, reclamation is mostly about "stabilization, contouring, maintenance, conditioning or reconstruction of the surface of the land." Operators of the open-pit mines must "conserve and reclaim disturbed land to an equivalent land capability." Doing so will earn them a certificate proving the deed done. Industry-friendly scientists talk about creating "a self-sustaining ecosystem with no long-term toxicity." Those reassured by such academic language might want to consider the actual pace of reclamation: after nearly 50 years of mining, the provincial government has certified only 104 hectares of forest, or 0.2 percent of the land dug up since 1963. Even industry admits that reclamation has moved more slowly than cold bitumen in a pipeline! .
The uncomfortable truth remains simply this: the rapid mining of the boreal forest has outpaced the science on the reclamation of wetlands, soil, and forest uplands by decades. No one has a handle on the real costs of reclamation. Security deposits remain laughably inadequate. And both Alberta and Canada have an appalling record of environmental negligence and disregard for taxpayers.
Reclamation in the tar sands now amounts to little more than putting lipstick on a corpse. Unless Alberta and Canada soon address the pace, effectiveness and transparency of reclamation, a rich forest will become an impoverished industrial park littered with salts, grass, polluted water and spindly trees. It might, with a bit of luck and some regular rainfall, eventually resemble a third-rate golf course in the Sudan.
Excerpted from Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent, to be published October 15 by Greystone Books / Douglas & McIntyre.
The tar sands of Alberta and toxic waste
September, 21 2008
By Andrew Nikiforuk
Andrew Nikiforuk's ZSpace Page
Fred McDonald, a Métis trapper and storyteller extraordinaire, often questioned the reasoning and science behind the proliferation of toxic ponds and end-pit lakes. Before he died in 2007 of kidney failure, McDonald lived in Fort McKay, an Aboriginal community 72 kilometres north of Fort Saskatchewan. The stench of hydrocarbons from the surrounding mines often hangs heavily in the air there, and in 2006, an ammonia release from a Syncrude facility hospitalized more than 20 children.
On a fall day in 2006, McDonald sat in his kitchen, sipping a glass of rat root juice ("It's good for everything," he told me) and breathing through an oxygen tube. The day before, he had spent several hours on a dialysis machine. McDonald's kidneys were failing but not his mind. He recalled the days when Tar Island was a good place to fish and hunt. (Tar Island was so named by local Cree and Métis after the bitumen that often oozed down its banks. In the late 1960s, Suncor transformed the island into a tailings pond, the first in the tar sands.) "It always had moose on it. We loved that island. We are slowly losing everything."
McDonald was born on the river, and he had trapped, fished, farmed and worked for the oil companies. He fondly remembered the 1930 and 1940s, when Syrian fur traders exchanged pots and pans for muskrat and beaver furs along the Athabasca River. Families lived off the land then and had feasts of rabbit. They netted jackfish, pickerel and whitefish all winter long. "Everyone walked or paddled, and the people were healthy," McDonald said. "No one travels that river anymore. There is nothing in that river. It's polluted. Once you could dip your cup and have a nice cold drink from that river, and now you can't."
McDonald said that tar-sands pollution is killing berries. The mines are also draining the surrounding muskeg of water: "It's our future source of water, and it's drying." Climate warming has changed the clear blue ice of the Athabasca River in the winter to a dangerous slush. McDonald had recently told his son not to have any more children: "They are going to suffer. They are going to have a tough time to breathe and will have nothing to drink." He dismissed the talk of reclaiming waste ponds and open-pit mines as a white-skinned fairy tale. "There is no way in this world that you can put Mother Earth back like it was."
Because of "the bad behaviour of clays," Natural Resources Canada researcher Randy Mikula suspects that tar-sands waste won't settle to solid form for 1,000 years, so "something has to be done." Right now the best solution might be a "brute force" centrifugal approach, says Mikula. Waste is spun (much like lettuce in a spinner) in order to create material that is dry and stackable, while recovering water at the same time. Both Syncrude and Suncor have started pilot projects. "We could reduce water usage by a barrel, which means less water withdrawn from the Athabasca River," Mikula says.
The volume of sand and toxic waste produced by the tar sands to date is as great as the agricultural drainage and sewage water the water-short nation of Egypt, with a population of 80 million, reuses every year. By 2015, the tar sands could be creating ponds of wastewater three times that size.
The growing waste problem is nowhere more evident than downstream in Fort Chipewyan, where the Athabasca and Peace rivers spill into Lake Athabasca. About 10 years ago, Raymond Ladouceur, a 65-year-old commercial Métis fishermen, started to find something new in his pickerel nets: damned ugly fish. The deformities included crooked tails, humpbacks, bulging eyes and skin tumours. "Jesus, I was pulling them out all the time," says Ladouceur. "But we threw the deformed fish away. They weren't fit for human consumption."
In 2002, Ladouceur and other fishermen packed up 90 kilos of the deformed fish and flew them off to Fort McMurray for study by Alberta Environment. Nobody from the government department picked up the fish over the weekend, though, and they rotted.
Like most residents of Fort Chipewyan, Ladouceur believes there is something definitely wrong with the water. He has a list of suspects. Abandoned uranium mines on the east end of the lake, for example, have been leaking for years. "God knows how much radium is in this lake," he says. Then there are the pulp mills and, of course, the tar sands and tar ponds. Ladouceur says his cousin collected yellow scum from the river downstream from the mines and dried it, and "it caught on fire." Almost everyone in Fort Chip has witnessed oil spills or leaks on the Athabasca River.
The governments of Alberta and Canada, along with the multinational companies, insist not only that they'll clean up the whole mess but that rapid tar-sands development is sustainable. "Alberta is proving that environmental protection and economic development can happen at the same time," promises a 2008 provincial propaganda sheet entitled "Opportunity and Balance." The Canadian Parliament, an institution less inclined to hubris, talks about groping "towards sustainable development" in its 2007 tar sands report.
Alberta's bitumen apologists swear that "work is progressing to return the disturbed land to a natural state after development, and it will be done right." The province's former ambassador to the United States, Murray Smith, even assured our number-one oil market that the industry will achieve "100 percent long-term restoration of the lands it makes use of." Why, major tar-sand companies have even planted 7.5 million tree seedlings. The Mining Association of Canada says reclaiming open-pit mines can be done with a "vision worthy of a Group of Seven artist."
According to the Alberta government, open-pit mines will eventually obliterate 3,500 square kilometres of forest. The government likes to minimize the scale of the destruction by saying that it's "less than one percent of boreal forest area" in Canada. (In other words, it's perfectly okay to destroy small places.) Whatever the Orwellian rhetoric, the forest-top removal will cover an area four times larger than that of New York City. Outdoor enthusiasts can imagine half of Banff National Park flattened and excavated.
Even at that, the mines make up only a small part of the wreckage created by the megaproject. The Alberta government has leased an additional 50,000 square kilometres of land (and another 100,000 square kilometres await global investors) for in-situ projects including steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD). Canada's four famed mountain parks - Jasper, Banff, Yoho, and Kootenay - could easily fit into this industrial zone with approximately 20,000 square kilometres left over. SAGD development will slice and dice the land with thousands of industrial well sites, seismic lines, pipelines and roads. This fragmentation will transform the forest into a bitumen park, exterminating the population of woodland caribou and decimating song-birds home from their winter in the tropics. Seismic lines, which make a forest look like an engineered spider web, typically nee! d more than 100 years to fill in with trees again. Yet the government has no tight guidelines for reclaiming forest ruined by SAGD.
Government definitions of reclamation exhibit a genuine vagueness as well as a preference for mechanics over biology. According to Alberta's Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act, reclamation is mostly about "stabilization, contouring, maintenance, conditioning or reconstruction of the surface of the land." Operators of the open-pit mines must "conserve and reclaim disturbed land to an equivalent land capability." Doing so will earn them a certificate proving the deed done. Industry-friendly scientists talk about creating "a self-sustaining ecosystem with no long-term toxicity." Those reassured by such academic language might want to consider the actual pace of reclamation: after nearly 50 years of mining, the provincial government has certified only 104 hectares of forest, or 0.2 percent of the land dug up since 1963. Even industry admits that reclamation has moved more slowly than cold bitumen in a pipeline! .
The uncomfortable truth remains simply this: the rapid mining of the boreal forest has outpaced the science on the reclamation of wetlands, soil, and forest uplands by decades. No one has a handle on the real costs of reclamation. Security deposits remain laughably inadequate. And both Alberta and Canada have an appalling record of environmental negligence and disregard for taxpayers.
Reclamation in the tar sands now amounts to little more than putting lipstick on a corpse. Unless Alberta and Canada soon address the pace, effectiveness and transparency of reclamation, a rich forest will become an impoverished industrial park littered with salts, grass, polluted water and spindly trees. It might, with a bit of luck and some regular rainfall, eventually resemble a third-rate golf course in the Sudan.
Excerpted from Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent, to be published October 15 by Greystone Books / Douglas & McIntyre.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Jury decides that threat of global warming justifies breaking
Cleared: Jury decides that threat of global warming justifies breaking
the law
By Michael McCarthy,
Environment Editor
The Independent
11 September 2008
The threat of global warming is so great that campaigners were justified in causing more than £35,000 worth of damage to a coal-fired power station, a jury decided yesterday. In a verdict that will have shocked ministers and energy companies the jury at Maidstone Crown Court cleared six Greenpeace activists of criminal damage.
Jurors accepted defence arguments that the six had a "lawful excuse" to damage property at Kingsnorth power station in Kent to prevent even greater damage caused by climate change. The defence of "lawful excuse" under the Criminal Damage Act 1971 allows damage to be caused to property to prevent even greater damage – such as breaking down the door of a burning house to tackle a fire.
The not-guilty verdict, delivered after two days and greeted with cheers in the courtroom, raises the stakes for the most pressing issue on Britain's green agenda and could encourage further direct action.
Kingsnorth was the centre for mass protests by climate camp activists last month. Last year, three protesters managed to paint Gordon Brown's name on the plant's chimney. Their handi-work cost £35,000 to remove.
The plan to build a successor to the power station is likely to be the first of a new generation of coal-fired plants. As coal produces more of the carbon emissions causing climate change than any other fuel, campaigners claim that a new station would be a disastrous setback in the battle against global warming, and send out a negative signal to the rest of the world about how serious Britain really is about tackling the climate threat.
But the proposals, from the energy giant E.ON, are firmly backed by the Business Secretary, John Hutton, and the Energy minister, Malcolm Wicks. Some members of the Cabinet are thought to be unhappy about them, including the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, and the Environment Secretary, Hilary Benn. Mr Brown is likely to have the final say on the matter later this year.
During the eight-day trial, the world's leading climate scientist, Professor James Hansen of Nasa, who had flown from American to give evidence, appealed to the Prime Minister personally to "take a leadership role" in cancelling the plan and scrapping the idea of a coal-fired future for Britain. Last December he wrote to Mr Brown with a similar appeal. At the trial, he called for an moratorium on all coal-fired power stations, and his hour-long testimony about the gravity of the climate danger, which painted a bleak picture, was listened to intently by the jury of nine women and three men.
Professor Hansen, who first alerted the world to the global warming threat in June 1988 with testimony to a US senate committee in Washington, and who last year said the earth was in "imminent peril" from the warming atmosphere, asserted that emissions of CO2 from Kings-north would damage property through the effects of the climate change they would help to cause.
He was one of several leading public figures who gave evidence for the defence, including Zac Goldsmith, the Conservative parliamentary candidate for Richmond Park and director of the Ecologist magazine, who similarly told the jury that in his opinion, direct action could be justified in the minds of many people if it was intended to prevent larger crimes being committed.
The acquittal was the second time in a decade that the "lawful excuse" defence has been successfully used by Greenpeace activists. In 1999, 28 Greenpeace campaigners led Lord Melchett, who was director at the time, were cleared of criminal damage after trashing an experimental field of GM crops in Norfolk. In each case the damage was not disputed – the point at issue was the motive.
The defendants who scaled the 630ft chimney at Kingsnorth, near Hoo, last year were Huw Williams, 41, from Nottingham; Ben Stewart, 34, from Lyminge, Kent; Kevin Drake, 44, from Westbury, Wiltshire; Will Rose, 29, from London; and Emily Hall, 34, from New Zealand. Tim Hewke, 48, from Ulcombe, Kent, helped organise the protest.
The court heard how, dressed in orange boiler suits and white hard hats bearing the Greenpeace logo, the six-strong group arrived at the site at 6.30am on 8 October. Armed with bags containing abseiling gear, five of them scaled the chimney while Mr Hewke waited below to liaise between the climbers and police.
The climbers had planned to paint "Gordon, bin it" in huge letters on the side of the chimney, but although they succeeded in temporarily shutting the station, they only got as far as painting the word "Gordon" on the chimney before they descended, having been threatened with a High Court injunction. Removing the graffiti cost E.ON £35,000, the court heard.
During the trial the defendants said they had acted lawfully, owing to an honestly held belief that their attempt to stop emissions from Kingsnorth would prevent further damage to properties worldwide caused by global warming. Their aim, they said, was to rein back CO2 emissions and bring urgent pressure to bear on the Government and E.ON to changes policies. They insisted their action had caused the minimum amount of damage necessary to close the plant down and constituted a
"proportionate response" to the increasing environmental threat.
Speaking outside court after being cleared yesterday, Mr Stewart said: "This is a huge blow for ministers and their plans for new coal-fired power stations. It wasn't only us in the dock, it was the coal-fired generation as well. After this verdict, the only people left in Britain who think new coal is a good idea are John Hutton and Malcolm Wicks. It's time the Prime Minister stepped in, showed some leadership and
embraced the clean energy future for Britain."
He added: "This verdict marks a tipping point for the climate change movement. When a jury of normal people say it is legitimate for a direct action group to shut down a coal-fired power station because of the harm it does to our planet, then where does that leave Government energy policy? We have the clean technologies at hand to power our economy. It's time we turned to them instead of coal."
Ms Hall said: "The jury heard from the most distinguished climate scientist in the world. How could they ignore his warnings and reject his leading scientific arguments?"
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/
cleared-jury-decides-that-threat-of-global-warming-justifies
-breaking-the-law-925561.html
the law
By Michael McCarthy,
Environment Editor
The Independent
11 September 2008
The threat of global warming is so great that campaigners were justified in causing more than £35,000 worth of damage to a coal-fired power station, a jury decided yesterday. In a verdict that will have shocked ministers and energy companies the jury at Maidstone Crown Court cleared six Greenpeace activists of criminal damage.
Jurors accepted defence arguments that the six had a "lawful excuse" to damage property at Kingsnorth power station in Kent to prevent even greater damage caused by climate change. The defence of "lawful excuse" under the Criminal Damage Act 1971 allows damage to be caused to property to prevent even greater damage – such as breaking down the door of a burning house to tackle a fire.
The not-guilty verdict, delivered after two days and greeted with cheers in the courtroom, raises the stakes for the most pressing issue on Britain's green agenda and could encourage further direct action.
Kingsnorth was the centre for mass protests by climate camp activists last month. Last year, three protesters managed to paint Gordon Brown's name on the plant's chimney. Their handi-work cost £35,000 to remove.
The plan to build a successor to the power station is likely to be the first of a new generation of coal-fired plants. As coal produces more of the carbon emissions causing climate change than any other fuel, campaigners claim that a new station would be a disastrous setback in the battle against global warming, and send out a negative signal to the rest of the world about how serious Britain really is about tackling the climate threat.
But the proposals, from the energy giant E.ON, are firmly backed by the Business Secretary, John Hutton, and the Energy minister, Malcolm Wicks. Some members of the Cabinet are thought to be unhappy about them, including the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, and the Environment Secretary, Hilary Benn. Mr Brown is likely to have the final say on the matter later this year.
During the eight-day trial, the world's leading climate scientist, Professor James Hansen of Nasa, who had flown from American to give evidence, appealed to the Prime Minister personally to "take a leadership role" in cancelling the plan and scrapping the idea of a coal-fired future for Britain. Last December he wrote to Mr Brown with a similar appeal. At the trial, he called for an moratorium on all coal-fired power stations, and his hour-long testimony about the gravity of the climate danger, which painted a bleak picture, was listened to intently by the jury of nine women and three men.
Professor Hansen, who first alerted the world to the global warming threat in June 1988 with testimony to a US senate committee in Washington, and who last year said the earth was in "imminent peril" from the warming atmosphere, asserted that emissions of CO2 from Kings-north would damage property through the effects of the climate change they would help to cause.
He was one of several leading public figures who gave evidence for the defence, including Zac Goldsmith, the Conservative parliamentary candidate for Richmond Park and director of the Ecologist magazine, who similarly told the jury that in his opinion, direct action could be justified in the minds of many people if it was intended to prevent larger crimes being committed.
The acquittal was the second time in a decade that the "lawful excuse" defence has been successfully used by Greenpeace activists. In 1999, 28 Greenpeace campaigners led Lord Melchett, who was director at the time, were cleared of criminal damage after trashing an experimental field of GM crops in Norfolk. In each case the damage was not disputed – the point at issue was the motive.
The defendants who scaled the 630ft chimney at Kingsnorth, near Hoo, last year were Huw Williams, 41, from Nottingham; Ben Stewart, 34, from Lyminge, Kent; Kevin Drake, 44, from Westbury, Wiltshire; Will Rose, 29, from London; and Emily Hall, 34, from New Zealand. Tim Hewke, 48, from Ulcombe, Kent, helped organise the protest.
The court heard how, dressed in orange boiler suits and white hard hats bearing the Greenpeace logo, the six-strong group arrived at the site at 6.30am on 8 October. Armed with bags containing abseiling gear, five of them scaled the chimney while Mr Hewke waited below to liaise between the climbers and police.
The climbers had planned to paint "Gordon, bin it" in huge letters on the side of the chimney, but although they succeeded in temporarily shutting the station, they only got as far as painting the word "Gordon" on the chimney before they descended, having been threatened with a High Court injunction. Removing the graffiti cost E.ON £35,000, the court heard.
During the trial the defendants said they had acted lawfully, owing to an honestly held belief that their attempt to stop emissions from Kingsnorth would prevent further damage to properties worldwide caused by global warming. Their aim, they said, was to rein back CO2 emissions and bring urgent pressure to bear on the Government and E.ON to changes policies. They insisted their action had caused the minimum amount of damage necessary to close the plant down and constituted a
"proportionate response" to the increasing environmental threat.
Speaking outside court after being cleared yesterday, Mr Stewart said: "This is a huge blow for ministers and their plans for new coal-fired power stations. It wasn't only us in the dock, it was the coal-fired generation as well. After this verdict, the only people left in Britain who think new coal is a good idea are John Hutton and Malcolm Wicks. It's time the Prime Minister stepped in, showed some leadership and
embraced the clean energy future for Britain."
He added: "This verdict marks a tipping point for the climate change movement. When a jury of normal people say it is legitimate for a direct action group to shut down a coal-fired power station because of the harm it does to our planet, then where does that leave Government energy policy? We have the clean technologies at hand to power our economy. It's time we turned to them instead of coal."
Ms Hall said: "The jury heard from the most distinguished climate scientist in the world. How could they ignore his warnings and reject his leading scientific arguments?"
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/
cleared-jury-decides-that-threat-of-global-warming-justifies
-breaking-the-law-925561.html
Monday, September 15, 2008
positively AFRICA invites you to “Africa at the Movies”
PRESS RELEASE
For immediate release
positively AFRICA invites you to “Africa at the Movies” This Saturday September 20th, 7:30-9:30 pm, at Camosun College (Landsdowne), the Young Auditorium, rm. 216.
A spiritually uplifting evening of film – a window into the lives of remarkable Africans. The films:
· "Time to Deliver" by Gary McNutt
· "Kapaseni" by Ben Fox
· "Children of Light" by Linda Weech
Admission by donation
We often think of situations in Africa as hopeless and imagine poor, sad and starving children – this is far from true. These films show us how simple it is to help.
positively AFRICA invites you to “Jazz in the Vineyard”. This Sunday, September 21, at Godfrey Brownell Vineyards in the Cowichan Valley. Sunday afternoon you can hear the unique trio of Wayne Kozac on baritone sax, Paul Sparrow on bass trumpet and the inimitable John Wade on string bass. This is a free day-long event where you can taste wonderful wine, listen to great jazz, relax in their outdoor oyster-shell patio - and support positively AFRICA! Directions to the vineyard on their website, http://www.gbvineyards.com.
Visit our website for more information www.positivelyafrica.org
For immediate release
positively AFRICA invites you to “Africa at the Movies” This Saturday September 20th, 7:30-9:30 pm, at Camosun College (Landsdowne), the Young Auditorium, rm. 216.
A spiritually uplifting evening of film – a window into the lives of remarkable Africans. The films:
· "Time to Deliver" by Gary McNutt
· "Kapaseni" by Ben Fox
· "Children of Light" by Linda Weech
Admission by donation
We often think of situations in Africa as hopeless and imagine poor, sad and starving children – this is far from true. These films show us how simple it is to help.
positively AFRICA invites you to “Jazz in the Vineyard”. This Sunday, September 21, at Godfrey Brownell Vineyards in the Cowichan Valley. Sunday afternoon you can hear the unique trio of Wayne Kozac on baritone sax, Paul Sparrow on bass trumpet and the inimitable John Wade on string bass. This is a free day-long event where you can taste wonderful wine, listen to great jazz, relax in their outdoor oyster-shell patio - and support positively AFRICA! Directions to the vineyard on their website, http://www.gbvineyards.com.
Visit our website for more information www.positivelyafrica.org
Saturday, September 13, 2008
'Contractors' Targetted in Afghanistan
US firm ambushed in Afghanistan, 23 killed
KABUL: At least 23 people were killed when Taliban ambushed a United States security firm convoy in southwestern Afghanistan on Friday. Provincial officials said it was the second attack on the firm in recent days. Provincial Police Chief Khalilullah Rahmani said 15 of the dead were Taliban killed in the fighting that broke out following the ambush.
Rahmani said US Protection and Investigations, a firm involved in escorting supplies for coalition forces, also suffered casualties, but gave no details. “The Taliban attacked the convoy with machineguns. Four vehicles were set on fire,” said a provincial official requesting anonymity. He said four Afghan guards and four civilians had been killed in the ambush that took place when the convoy was passing through Bakwa district in Farah province. Another convoy of the security firm had been attacked on Thursday in Kandahar city. Two people had been killed in the attack. In another incident, the US military said coalition forces had killed more than 10 Taliban and had detained two more during operations in eastern Afghanistan targeting the network of Taliban commander Jalaluddin Haqqani.
Two members of Haqqani’s team were picked up in Khost province, including one suspected of co-ordinating roadside attacks on coalition and Afghan forces, the US military said in a statement. Haqqani, who was backed by the United States during the war against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, is considered close to Osama Bin Laden.
The military said US forces had also targeted a Taliban commander in Kapisa province, northeast of Kabul, adding that 10 militants had been killed in the fighting. “Coalition forces were engaged with small-arms fire from multiple groups of armed militants as they entered a compound. The force returned fire, killing the militants,” said the statement.
Afghan police have arrested three men alleged to have provided international troops with ‘incorrect information’ that led to airstrikes said to have killed more than 90 civilians.
The three were on a list of people provided to President Hamid Karzai by locals who alleged they had misinformed troops ahead of the August 22 strikes, the head of police intelligence in the western province of Herat told reporters. “We arrested three people who were on the list. The operation is continuing to arrest the others,” said Mohammad Musa Rasouli. The interior ministry also announced the arrests of three men in a statement. Karzai visited Shindand district on September 4 and met with people who lost relatives in the strikes. He promised to arrest anyone whose ‘false information’ might have guided the attack, said an aide.
Afghan and UN rights investigations say more than 90 civilians had been killed in the strike, many of them children. The US military however, says that between five and seven civilians had been killed along with 30-35 Taliban, including an important commander. agencies
source
KABUL: At least 23 people were killed when Taliban ambushed a United States security firm convoy in southwestern Afghanistan on Friday. Provincial officials said it was the second attack on the firm in recent days. Provincial Police Chief Khalilullah Rahmani said 15 of the dead were Taliban killed in the fighting that broke out following the ambush.
Rahmani said US Protection and Investigations, a firm involved in escorting supplies for coalition forces, also suffered casualties, but gave no details. “The Taliban attacked the convoy with machineguns. Four vehicles were set on fire,” said a provincial official requesting anonymity. He said four Afghan guards and four civilians had been killed in the ambush that took place when the convoy was passing through Bakwa district in Farah province. Another convoy of the security firm had been attacked on Thursday in Kandahar city. Two people had been killed in the attack. In another incident, the US military said coalition forces had killed more than 10 Taliban and had detained two more during operations in eastern Afghanistan targeting the network of Taliban commander Jalaluddin Haqqani.
Two members of Haqqani’s team were picked up in Khost province, including one suspected of co-ordinating roadside attacks on coalition and Afghan forces, the US military said in a statement. Haqqani, who was backed by the United States during the war against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, is considered close to Osama Bin Laden.
The military said US forces had also targeted a Taliban commander in Kapisa province, northeast of Kabul, adding that 10 militants had been killed in the fighting. “Coalition forces were engaged with small-arms fire from multiple groups of armed militants as they entered a compound. The force returned fire, killing the militants,” said the statement.
Afghan police have arrested three men alleged to have provided international troops with ‘incorrect information’ that led to airstrikes said to have killed more than 90 civilians.
The three were on a list of people provided to President Hamid Karzai by locals who alleged they had misinformed troops ahead of the August 22 strikes, the head of police intelligence in the western province of Herat told reporters. “We arrested three people who were on the list. The operation is continuing to arrest the others,” said Mohammad Musa Rasouli. The interior ministry also announced the arrests of three men in a statement. Karzai visited Shindand district on September 4 and met with people who lost relatives in the strikes. He promised to arrest anyone whose ‘false information’ might have guided the attack, said an aide.
Afghan and UN rights investigations say more than 90 civilians had been killed in the strike, many of them children. The US military however, says that between five and seven civilians had been killed along with 30-35 Taliban, including an important commander. agencies
source
Murderous Theatre of the Absurd
A Murderous Theatre of the Absurd
by John Pilger
In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger examines news as parody as those prominent in the British media seek to justify the official versions of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
11/09/08 "ICH" - Try to laugh, please. The news is now officially parody and a game for all the family to play.
First question: Why are “we” in Afghanistan? Answer: “To try to help in the country’s rebuilding programme.” Who says so? Huw Edwards, the BBC’s principal newsreader. What wags the Welsh are.
Second question: Why are “we” in Iraq? Answer: To “plant a western-style open democracy”. Who says so? Paul Wood, the former BBC defence correspondent, and his boss Helen Boaden, director of BBC News. To prove her point, Boaden supplied Medialens.org with 2,700 words of quotations from Tony Blair and George W Bush. Irony? No, she meant it.
Take Andrew Martin, divisional adviser at BBC Complaints, who has been researching Bush’s speeches for “evidence” of noble democratic reasons for laying to waste an ancient civilisation. Says he: “The ‘D’ word is not there, but the phrase ‘united, stable and free’ [is] clearly an allusion to it.” After all, he says, the invasion of Iraq “was launched as ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’”. Moreover, says the BBC man, “in Bush’s 1 May 2003 speech (the one on the aircraft carrier) he talked repeatedly about freedom and explicitly about the Iraqi transition to democracy . . . These examples show that these were on Bush’s mind before, during and after the invasion.”
Try to laugh, please.
Laughing may be difficult, I agree, given the slaughter of civilians in Afghanistan by “coalition” aircraft, including those directed by British forces engaged in “the country’s rebuilding programme”. The bombing of civilian areas has doubled, along with the deaths of civilians, says Human Rights Watch. Last month, “our” aircraft slaughtered nearly 100 civilians, two-thirds of them children between the ages of three months and 16 years, while they slept, according to eyewitnesses. BBC television news initially devoted nine seconds to the Human Rights Watch report, and nothing to the fact that “less than peanuts” (according to an aid worker) is being spent on rebuilding anything in Afghanistan.
As for the notion of a “united, stable and free” Iraq, consider the no-bid contracts handed to the major western oil companies for ownership of Iraq’s oil. “Theft” is a more truthful word. Written by the companies themselves and US officials, the contracts have been signed off by Bush and Nouri al-Maliki, “prime minister” of Iraq’s “democratic” government that resides in an air-conditioned American fortress. This is not news.
Try to laugh, please, while you consider the devastation of Iraq’s health, once the best in the Middle East, by the ubiquitous dust from British and US depleted uranium weapons. A World Health Organisation study reporting a cancer epidemic has been suppressed, says its principal author. This has been reported in Britain only in the Glasgow Sunday Herald and the Morning Star. According to a study last year by Basra University Medical College, almost half of all deaths in the contaminated southern provinces were caused by cancer.
Try to laugh, please, at the recent happy-clappy Nurembergs from which will come the next president of the United States. Those paid to keep the record straight have strained to present a spectacle of choice. Barack Obama, the man of “change”, wants to “build a 21st-century military . . . to stay on the offensive everywhere”. Here comes the new Cold War, with promises of more bombs, more of the militarised society with its 730 bases worldwide, on which Americans spend 42 cents of every tax dollar.
At home, Obama offers no authentic measure that might ease America’s grotesque inequality, such as basic health care. John McCain, his Republican opponent, may well be a media cartoon figure – the fake “war hero” now joined with a Shakespeare-banning, gun-loving, religious fanatic – yet his true significance is that he and Obama share essentially the same dangerous prescriptions.
Thousands of decent Americans came to the two nominating conventions to express the dissenting opinion of millions of their compatriots who believe, with good cause, that their democracy is evaporating. They were intimidated, arrested, beaten, pepper-gassed; and they were patronised or ignored by those paid to keep the record straight.
In the meantime, Justin Webb, the BBC’s North America editor, has launched a book about America, his “city on a hill”. It is a sort of Mills & Boon view of the rapacious system he admires with such obsequiousness. The book is called Have a Nice Day.
Try to laugh, please.
by John Pilger
In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger examines news as parody as those prominent in the British media seek to justify the official versions of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
11/09/08 "ICH" - Try to laugh, please. The news is now officially parody and a game for all the family to play.
First question: Why are “we” in Afghanistan? Answer: “To try to help in the country’s rebuilding programme.” Who says so? Huw Edwards, the BBC’s principal newsreader. What wags the Welsh are.
Second question: Why are “we” in Iraq? Answer: To “plant a western-style open democracy”. Who says so? Paul Wood, the former BBC defence correspondent, and his boss Helen Boaden, director of BBC News. To prove her point, Boaden supplied Medialens.org with 2,700 words of quotations from Tony Blair and George W Bush. Irony? No, she meant it.
Take Andrew Martin, divisional adviser at BBC Complaints, who has been researching Bush’s speeches for “evidence” of noble democratic reasons for laying to waste an ancient civilisation. Says he: “The ‘D’ word is not there, but the phrase ‘united, stable and free’ [is] clearly an allusion to it.” After all, he says, the invasion of Iraq “was launched as ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’”. Moreover, says the BBC man, “in Bush’s 1 May 2003 speech (the one on the aircraft carrier) he talked repeatedly about freedom and explicitly about the Iraqi transition to democracy . . . These examples show that these were on Bush’s mind before, during and after the invasion.”
Try to laugh, please.
Laughing may be difficult, I agree, given the slaughter of civilians in Afghanistan by “coalition” aircraft, including those directed by British forces engaged in “the country’s rebuilding programme”. The bombing of civilian areas has doubled, along with the deaths of civilians, says Human Rights Watch. Last month, “our” aircraft slaughtered nearly 100 civilians, two-thirds of them children between the ages of three months and 16 years, while they slept, according to eyewitnesses. BBC television news initially devoted nine seconds to the Human Rights Watch report, and nothing to the fact that “less than peanuts” (according to an aid worker) is being spent on rebuilding anything in Afghanistan.
As for the notion of a “united, stable and free” Iraq, consider the no-bid contracts handed to the major western oil companies for ownership of Iraq’s oil. “Theft” is a more truthful word. Written by the companies themselves and US officials, the contracts have been signed off by Bush and Nouri al-Maliki, “prime minister” of Iraq’s “democratic” government that resides in an air-conditioned American fortress. This is not news.
Try to laugh, please, while you consider the devastation of Iraq’s health, once the best in the Middle East, by the ubiquitous dust from British and US depleted uranium weapons. A World Health Organisation study reporting a cancer epidemic has been suppressed, says its principal author. This has been reported in Britain only in the Glasgow Sunday Herald and the Morning Star. According to a study last year by Basra University Medical College, almost half of all deaths in the contaminated southern provinces were caused by cancer.
Try to laugh, please, at the recent happy-clappy Nurembergs from which will come the next president of the United States. Those paid to keep the record straight have strained to present a spectacle of choice. Barack Obama, the man of “change”, wants to “build a 21st-century military . . . to stay on the offensive everywhere”. Here comes the new Cold War, with promises of more bombs, more of the militarised society with its 730 bases worldwide, on which Americans spend 42 cents of every tax dollar.
At home, Obama offers no authentic measure that might ease America’s grotesque inequality, such as basic health care. John McCain, his Republican opponent, may well be a media cartoon figure – the fake “war hero” now joined with a Shakespeare-banning, gun-loving, religious fanatic – yet his true significance is that he and Obama share essentially the same dangerous prescriptions.
Thousands of decent Americans came to the two nominating conventions to express the dissenting opinion of millions of their compatriots who believe, with good cause, that their democracy is evaporating. They were intimidated, arrested, beaten, pepper-gassed; and they were patronised or ignored by those paid to keep the record straight.
In the meantime, Justin Webb, the BBC’s North America editor, has launched a book about America, his “city on a hill”. It is a sort of Mills & Boon view of the rapacious system he admires with such obsequiousness. The book is called Have a Nice Day.
Try to laugh, please.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Capella: The Towers on Victoria's Hills
[No mention here of Western Forest Products profiteering on this Bear
Mountain subdivision. Talk about biased news reporting!- Karen Wonders]
A huge custom-made crane from Spain works on the $1.4-billion luxury
Capella development on Bear Mountain in Langford.
Bruce Stotesbury, Times Colonist
Housing starts holding up for the year
Monthly figures dropped slightly during August
Carla Wilson, Times Colonist
September 10, 2008
Vancouver Island housing starts dropped in August from July but
year-to-date numbers are running close to the first eight months of last
year.
Nationally, new home construction moved up last month, to 211,000 starts
from 186,500 in July, on a seasonally adjusted basis, Canada Mortgage
and Housing Corp. said yesterday.
However, uncertainty is hovering around the capital region's once-hot
local housing market now that sales are slowing and the number of homes
for sale is at its highest level in a dozen years.
Even so, the median and average price for a single-family home in
Greater Victoria topped $500,000 last month.
On Vancouver Island, the 345 starts in August came in lower than 400 in
July. Last month is considerably higher than August of last year, when
262 homes were started.
April had the highest number of starts on Vancouver Island so far this
year with 588, said CMHC senior market analyst Travis Archibald.
He warns against drawing conclusions from monthly numbers, saying "The
year-to-date [figures] are the key."
Nanaimo took the lead on Vancouver Island with the most starts last
month, at 141, thanks to condo construction.
Victoria followed with 114 starts, then the Courtenay area with 46,
Duncan at 35, and Parksville-Qualicum with nine.
Langford, where much of the capital region's residential development is
taking place, led the way among Greater Victoria municipalities with 38
starts in August.
Of those, 30 are condominium units. Sooke followed with 20 starts, then
Saanich with 12.
A custom-made crane from Spain, with a large motor and the latest in
electronics, recently arrived at the Quigg Group's $1.4-billion luxury
Capella development at Bear Mountain in Langford. The Jaso 300 is one of
two in North America, and the only one in Western Canada, developer
Robert Quigg said from Vancouver.
Normally the company leases crane but it ordered this one to help build
four planned towers on Quigg's 20-acre site. The first is due to be
completed in June or July of 2010.
Quigg remains bullish on the real estate market, suggesting that fewer
starts now may lead to an undersupply of homes in a couple of years.
Fundamentals are positive in Canada, with low interest rates and a
strong western economy, he said.
About 60 per cent of the Capella units have sold, including the $3.25
million sub-penthouse, Quigg said. About one-third of buyers are from
Victoria and the south Island, one-third from Alberta and Saskatchewan,
and the rest from Eastern Canada and some from Europe.
Nationally, August exceeded analysts' expectations of between 191,000
and 195,000 starts.
Led by Ontario, multiple starts jumped 25.2 per cent in the month to
114,700 starts, while construction on single-family homes rose by two
per cent to 71,200.
All other provinces experienced a decline in housing activity.
© Times Colonist (Victoria) 2008
http://www.canada.com/victoriatimescolonist/news/business/
story.html?id=7eacd373-af01-4ebb-a3c6-540776ec5311
Mountain subdivision. Talk about biased news reporting!- Karen Wonders]
A huge custom-made crane from Spain works on the $1.4-billion luxury
Capella development on Bear Mountain in Langford.
Bruce Stotesbury, Times Colonist
Housing starts holding up for the year
Monthly figures dropped slightly during August
Carla Wilson, Times Colonist
September 10, 2008
Vancouver Island housing starts dropped in August from July but
year-to-date numbers are running close to the first eight months of last
year.
Nationally, new home construction moved up last month, to 211,000 starts
from 186,500 in July, on a seasonally adjusted basis, Canada Mortgage
and Housing Corp. said yesterday.
However, uncertainty is hovering around the capital region's once-hot
local housing market now that sales are slowing and the number of homes
for sale is at its highest level in a dozen years.
Even so, the median and average price for a single-family home in
Greater Victoria topped $500,000 last month.
On Vancouver Island, the 345 starts in August came in lower than 400 in
July. Last month is considerably higher than August of last year, when
262 homes were started.
April had the highest number of starts on Vancouver Island so far this
year with 588, said CMHC senior market analyst Travis Archibald.
He warns against drawing conclusions from monthly numbers, saying "The
year-to-date [figures] are the key."
Nanaimo took the lead on Vancouver Island with the most starts last
month, at 141, thanks to condo construction.
Victoria followed with 114 starts, then the Courtenay area with 46,
Duncan at 35, and Parksville-Qualicum with nine.
Langford, where much of the capital region's residential development is
taking place, led the way among Greater Victoria municipalities with 38
starts in August.
Of those, 30 are condominium units. Sooke followed with 20 starts, then
Saanich with 12.
A custom-made crane from Spain, with a large motor and the latest in
electronics, recently arrived at the Quigg Group's $1.4-billion luxury
Capella development at Bear Mountain in Langford. The Jaso 300 is one of
two in North America, and the only one in Western Canada, developer
Robert Quigg said from Vancouver.
Normally the company leases crane but it ordered this one to help build
four planned towers on Quigg's 20-acre site. The first is due to be
completed in June or July of 2010.
By the time the fourth tower is completed, "It will have been jacked to
an approximate height of 560 feet," he said.
Quigg remains bullish on the real estate market, suggesting that fewer
starts now may lead to an undersupply of homes in a couple of years.
Fundamentals are positive in Canada, with low interest rates and a
strong western economy, he said.
"I firmly believe than the shift we are seeing and the desire for
ownership in the market that we are pursuing is much more about a
demographic shift than an economic shift."
About 60 per cent of the Capella units have sold, including the $3.25
million sub-penthouse, Quigg said. About one-third of buyers are from
Victoria and the south Island, one-third from Alberta and Saskatchewan,
and the rest from Eastern Canada and some from Europe.
"There's no lessening of demand." People seeking homes are still in the
market, whether they buy now or next year, he said.
Nationally, August exceeded analysts' expectations of between 191,000
and 195,000 starts.
"After a brief pause in July, the volatile multiple segment bounced back
to a level of activity that is more consistent with our forecast for
this year," said Bob Dugan, CMHC chief economist. "Most of the
volatility in housing starts over the last three months reflected swings
in multiple starts in Ontario."
Led by Ontario, multiple starts jumped 25.2 per cent in the month to
114,700 starts, while construction on single-family homes rose by two
per cent to 71,200.
All other provinces experienced a decline in housing activity.
"On balance, this does not necessarily mean that housing activity
remains healthy. It should be taken for what it is -- a snapback from a
previously large decline," said Charmaine Buskas, senior economics
strategist at TD Securities.
"The Canadian housing market does have some headwinds that will bring
down activity in the next couple of quarters, which suggests a softer
trend in the housing market and a smaller contribution to growth."
© Times Colonist (Victoria) 2008
http://www.canada.com/victoriatimescolonist/news/business/
story.html?id=7eacd373-af01-4ebb-a3c6-540776ec5311
Tuesday, September 09, 2008
A Soldier's Dilemma: Serve and Torture or Desert and Face Torture
U.S. deserter feared torture orders
TheStar.com - Canada - U.S. deserter feared torture orders
ASHLEY HUTCHESON/TORONTO STAR
Peter Jemley fled the U.S. military after concluding his training was leading him to a possible torture role. Sept. 3, 2008 Arabic-speaking soldier may prompt Canada to wade into legal debate
September 06, 2008
Michelle Shephard
National Security Reporter
Peter Jemley is unique among the growing ranks of war resisters who have sought refuge in Canada.
For one thing, he's old by military standards. The only reason the army considered the 38-year-old recruit three years ago was because the age cap had been raised to fill the U.S. military's growing void.
The Tacoma, Wash., father of two young children also bucks the soldier stereotype. Jemley is a college history major, both quiet and fervently independent. If describing a bad situation he's likely to say it "sucked," then apologize for his profanity.
Now Jemley's reasons for deserting set him apart too, and make his case a historic first.
He wants Canada to accept him as a refugee because he's opposed to torture.
Jemley argues that as one of only a small number of Arabic linguists with top security clearance, he could be forced to violate international law by participating in the interrogations of terrorism suspects. It was something he hadn't considered when he enlisted in 2005 and was handpicked to undergo two years of intense training due to his adeptness with languages.
Only last February did he discover that his government had sanctioned new rules on how terrorism suspects could be interrogated. He believes it's torture and when he realized he might be asked to be a part of it, he fled.
"It's a soldier's obligation to say `no' if their commander is doing things that are criminally complicit," Jemley, now 42, said in a recent interview in Toronto. "I think everyone is agreeing now that torture is really what has been going on ... I have every reason to believe that from my small pool that I belong to, with my credentials, that I'd be ordered to do such things."
`Torture' has become a much-debated word with profound legal implications since the 9/11 attacks and the U.S. administration's decision to re-write the laws of war.
Detainees held at Guantanamo Bay and the undisclosed CIA prisons around the world have claimed widespread abuse. The CIA has admitted to using `coercive techniques' during interrogations, such as waterboarding, a process whereby agents simulate drownings.
Much of the legal community considers this treatment torture and point to international laws such as the Geneva Conventions, which were established after WWII to impose legal restrictions on the barbarity of war.
Canada so far has largely been able to sidestep the debate about torture and the Bush administration's post-9/11 policies. Other cases of deserters in Canada have focused on the larger question of the legality of the Iraq war. About a dozen cases are working their way through the refugee board and courts with varying legal arguments and one deserter has already been deported back to face a court martial.
The issue of Guantanamo's legality arose earlier this year in the Supreme Court case concerning Canadian detainee Omar Khadr. The high court justices ruled that Canadian agents had acted illegally by interrogating the Toronto teenager in 2003 and 2004. But the high court relied on a U.S. Supreme Court decision that deemed Guantanamo illegal, rather than debating issues of torture and indefinite detention specifically.
Jemley's case is the first to deal with the issue directly. The CIA has admitted it uses acts such as waterboarding. There's evidence that Guantanamo detainees were subjected to programs such as sleep deprivation, intimidation with dogs and sexual humiliation. If these tactics are torture, thereby violating international law, Jemley argues he could be prosecuted for war crimes if he participates.
Canada must decide whether the U.S. administration has sanctioned torture in deciding his case, his lawyer says.
"There are specific rules for soldiers and the basic idea is nobody should participate in torture, ever," said Jemley's lawyer Jeffrey House. "Nobody should associate themselves with torture or violations of the Geneva Conventions because if we start to wink at violations of the Geneva Conventions they're no longer law, they're just guidelines."
Calls to Jemley's commander at the 341st Military Intelligence Battalion at Camp Murray, Tacoma, were not returned this week. But a letter of "unexcused absence" emailed to Jemley from Maj. Brian Bodenman outlined what penalties he could face if he failed to show up to training by yesterday's deadline.
Punishment includes a court martial with possibility of jail time or a discharge and transfer to "inactive ready reserve." The latter means Jemley could still be called to duty for a period of five years.
"To me it's like being an indentured servant. You can't leave, and you can't give your skills back," Jemley said.
Since the U.S. invaded Iraq in March 2003, there is no accurate account of how many deserters have fled to Canada – best guess is a couple hundred, with many remaining underground having not filed a refugee claim.
Comparisons are often made to the Vietnam War when thousands came to Canada. But during Vietnam there was a draft, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative government has little sympathy for today's deserters.
Jemley's decision to join the army was not one he took lightly, nor one borne of patriotic duty. "It wasn't a political decision. I didn't really like the Bush administration any more then, than I do now, but Iraqis are people too and I'm not afraid of doing difficult things. So I thought I could help," Jemley said.
After scoring extremely high on the army's Defense Language Aptitude Battery test he was asked if he'd become a linguist and was sent to the Army's language school in Monterey, Calif., for two years. Upon graduation, he spent a brief stint at the secretive National Security Agency, the U.S. government's electronic eavesdropping agency, and then sought independent contracts where he could work until his unit was deployed.
In February, he signed a lucrative contract with Washington's Office of Military Commissions, the legal arm of the Guantanamo trials that is prosecuting a couple dozen detainees, including Khadr. It was when Jemley started doing his own research into the Guantanamo cases that he came up with media reports about the waterboarding of suspects. When he was asked to sign an addendum to his OMC contract, which added that he must be available to be on-call for "other language related assignments," he refused and was fired.
A second contract offered him work in unspecified locations with "the agency" based in northern Virginia. No one would confirm it was the CIA and when he couldn't get answers about what he'd be doing he turned down the job.
By then he knew he was trapped. These were positions he could refuse, but if he was ordered to duty he couldn't say no.
"I did everything I was supposed to. I'm not afraid to be deployed. I'm not afraid to die," Jemley said.
"(But) I'm ashamed about what's going on."
His wife Sarah and children aged 8 and 3 have remained in Tacoma until Sarah can finish her master's nursing degree. They hate the separation but Jemley says he's confident in his decision.
"I know it sounds glib but I mean it. If one less person gets tortured then it'll all be worth it."
The Zionist Myth of Exile
Israel deliberately forgets its history
By Schlomo Sand
Zionist nationalist myth of enforced exile
An Israeli historian suggests the diaspora was the consequence, not of the expulsion of the Hebrews from Palestine, but of proselytising across north Africa, southern Europe and the Middle East
Every Israeli knows that he or she is the direct and exclusive descendant of a Jewish people which has existed since it received the Torah (1) in Sinai. According to this myth, the Jews escaped from Egypt and settled in the Promised Land, where they built the glorious kingdom of David and Solomon, which subsequently split into the kingdoms of Judah and Israel. They experienced two exiles: after the destruction of the first temple, in the 6th century BC, and of the second temple, in 70 AD.
Two thousand years of wandering brought the Jews to Yemen, Morocco, Spain, Germany, Poland and deep into Russia. But, the story goes, they always managed to preserve blood links between their scattered communities. Their uniqueness was never compromised.
At the end of the 19th century conditions began to favour their return to their ancient homeland. If it had not been for the Nazi genocide, millions of Jews would have fulfilled the dream of 20 centuries and repopulated Eretz Israel, the biblical land of Israel. Palestine, a virgin land, had been waiting for its original inhabitants to return and awaken it. It belonged to the Jews, rather than to an Arab minority that had no history and had arrived there by chance. The wars in which the wandering people reconquered their land were just; the violent opposition of the local population was criminal.
This interpretation of Jewish history was developed as talented, imaginative historians built on surviving fragments of Jewish and Christian religious memory to construct a continuous genealogy for the Jewish people. Judaism’s abundant historiography encompasses many different approaches.
But none have ever questioned the basic concepts developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Discoveries that might threaten this picture of a linear past were marginalised. The national imperative rejected any contradiction of or deviation from the dominant story. University departments exclusively devoted to “the history of the Jewish people”, as distinct from those teaching what is known in Israel as general history, made a significant contribution to this selective vision. The debate on what constitutes Jewishness has obvious legal implications, but historians ignored it: as far as they are concerned, any descendant of the people forced into exile 2,000 years ago is a Jew.
Nor did these official investigators of the past join the controversy provoked by the “new historians” from the late 1980s. Most of the limited number of participants in this public debate were from other disciplines or non-academic circles: sociologists, orientalists, linguists, geographers, political scientists, literary academics and archaeologists developed new perspectives on the Jewish and Zionist past. Departments of Jewish history remained defensive and conservative, basing themselves on received ideas. While there have been few significant developments in national history over the past 60 years (a situation unlikely to change in the short term), the facts that have emerged face any honest historian with fundamental questions.
Founding myths shaken
Is the Bible a historical text? Writing during the early half of the 19th century, the first modern Jewish historians, such as Isaak Markus Jost (1793-1860) and Leopold Zunz (1794-1886), did not think so. They regarded the Old Testament as a theological work reflecting the beliefs of Jewish religious communities after the destruction of the first temple. It was not until the second half of the century that Heinrich Graetz (1817-91) and others developed a “national” vision of the Bible and transformed Abraham’s journey to Canaan, the flight from Egypt and the united kingdom of David and Solomon into an authentic national past. By constant repetition, Zionist historians have subsequently turned these Biblical “truths” into the basis of national education.
But during the 1980s an earthquake shook these founding myths. The discoveries made by the “new archaeology” discredited a great exodus in the 13th century BC. Moses could not have led the Hebrews out of Egypt into the Promised Land, for the good reason that the latter was Egyptian territory at the time. And there is no trace of either a slave revolt against the pharaonic empire or of a sudden conquest of Canaan by outsiders.
Nor is there any trace or memory of the magnificent kingdom of David and Solomon. Recent discoveries point to the existence, at the time, of two small kingdoms: Israel, the more powerful, and Judah, the future Judea. The general population of Judah did not go into 6th century BC exile: only its political and intellectual elite were forced to settle in Babylon. This decisive encounter with Persian religion gave birth to Jewish monotheism.
Then there is the question of the exile of 70 AD. There has been no real research into this turning point in Jewish history, the cause of the diaspora. And for a simple reason: the Romans never exiled any nation from anywhere on the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean. Apart from enslaved prisoners, the population of Judea continued to live on their lands, even after the destruction of the second temple. Some converted to Christianity in the 4th century, while the majority embraced Islam during the 7th century Arab conquest.
Most Zionist thinkers were aware of this: Yitzhak Ben Zvi, later president of Israel, and David Ben Gurion, its first prime minister, accepted it as late as 1929, the year of the great Palestinian revolt. Both stated on several occasions that the peasants of Palestine were the descendants of the inhabitants of ancient Judea (2).
Proselytising zeal
But if there was no exile after 70 AD, where did all the Jews who have populated the Mediterranean since antiquity come from? The smokescreen of national historiography hides an astonishing reality. From the Maccabean revolt of the mid-2nd century BC to the Bar Kokhba revolt of the 2nd century AD, Judaism was the most actively proselytising religion. The Judeo-Hellenic Hasmoneans forcibly converted the Idumeans of southern Judea and the Itureans of Galilee and incorporated them into the people of Israel. Judaism spread across the Middle East and round the Mediterranean. The 1st century AD saw the emergence in modern Kurdistan of the Jewish kingdom of Adiabene, just one of many that converted.
The writings of Flavius Josephus are not the only evidence of the proselytising zeal of the Jews. Horace, Seneca, Juvenal and Tacitus were among the Roman writers who feared it. The Mishnah and the Talmud (3) authorised conversion, even if the wise men of the Talmudic tradition expressed reservations in the face of the mounting pressure from Christianity.
Although the early 4th century triumph of Christianity did not mark the end of Jewish expansion, it relegated Jewish proselytism to the margins of the Christian cultural world. During the 5th century, in modern Yemen, a vigorous Jewish kingdom emerged in Himyar, whose descendants preserved their faith through the Islamic conquest and down to the present day. Arab chronicles tell of the existence, during the 7th century, of Judaised Berber tribes; and at the end of the century the legendary Jewish queen Dihya contested the Arab advance into northwest Africa. Jewish Berbers participated in the conquest of the Iberian peninsula and helped establish the unique symbiosis between Jews and Muslims that characterised Hispano-Arabic culture.
The most significant mass conversion occurred in the 8th century, in the massive Khazar kingdom between the Black and Caspian seas. The expansion of Judaism from the Caucasus into modern Ukraine created a multiplicity of communities, many of which retreated from the 13th century Mongol invasions into eastern Europe. There, with Jews from the Slavic lands to the south and from what is now modern Germany, they formed the basis of Yiddish culture (4).
Prism of Zionism
Until about 1960 the complex origins of the Jewish people were more or less reluctantly acknowledged by Zionist historiography. But thereafter they were marginalised and finally erased from Israeli public memory. The Israeli forces who seized Jerusalem in 1967 believed themselves to be the direct descendents of the mythic kingdom of David rather than – God forbid – of Berber warriors or Khazar horsemen. The Jews claimed to constitute a specific ethnic group that had returned to Jerusalem, its capital, from 2,000 years of exile and wandering.
This monolithic, linear edifice is supposed to be supported by biology as well as history. Since the 1970s supposedly scientific research, carried out in Israel, has desperately striven to demonstrate that Jews throughout the world are closely genetically related.
Research into the origins of populations now constitutes a legitimate and popular field in molecular biology and the male Y chromosome has been accorded honoured status in the frenzied search for the unique origin of the “chosen people”. The problem is that this historical fantasy has come to underpin the politics of identity of the state of Israel. By validating an essentialist, ethnocentric definition of Judaism it encourages a segregation that separates Jews from non-Jews – whether Arabs, Russian immigrants or foreign workers.
Sixty years after its foundation, Israel refuses to accept that it should exist for the sake of its citizens. For almost a quarter of the population, who are not regarded as Jews, this is not their state legally. At the same time, Israel presents itself as the homeland of Jews throughout the world, even if these are no longer persecuted refugees, but the full and equal citizens of other countries.
A global ethnocracy invokes the myth of the eternal nation, reconstituted on the land of its ancestors, to justify internal discrimination against its own citizens. It will remain difficult to imagine a new Jewish history while the prism of Zionism continues to fragment everything into an ethnocentric spectrum. But Jews worldwide have always tended to form religious communities, usually by conversion; they cannot be said to share an ethnicity derived from a unique origin and displaced over 20 centuries of wandering.
The development of historiography and the evolution of modernity were consequences of the invention of the nation state, which preoccupied millions during the 19th and 20th centuries. The new millennium has seen these dreams begin to shatter.
And more and more academics are analysing, dissecting and deconstructing the great national stories, especially the myths of common origin so dear to chroniclers of the past.
Shlomo Sand is professor of history at Tel Aviv university and the author of Comment le people juif fut inventé (Fayard, Paris, 2008)
By Schlomo Sand
Zionist nationalist myth of enforced exile
An Israeli historian suggests the diaspora was the consequence, not of the expulsion of the Hebrews from Palestine, but of proselytising across north Africa, southern Europe and the Middle East
Every Israeli knows that he or she is the direct and exclusive descendant of a Jewish people which has existed since it received the Torah (1) in Sinai. According to this myth, the Jews escaped from Egypt and settled in the Promised Land, where they built the glorious kingdom of David and Solomon, which subsequently split into the kingdoms of Judah and Israel. They experienced two exiles: after the destruction of the first temple, in the 6th century BC, and of the second temple, in 70 AD.
Two thousand years of wandering brought the Jews to Yemen, Morocco, Spain, Germany, Poland and deep into Russia. But, the story goes, they always managed to preserve blood links between their scattered communities. Their uniqueness was never compromised.
At the end of the 19th century conditions began to favour their return to their ancient homeland. If it had not been for the Nazi genocide, millions of Jews would have fulfilled the dream of 20 centuries and repopulated Eretz Israel, the biblical land of Israel. Palestine, a virgin land, had been waiting for its original inhabitants to return and awaken it. It belonged to the Jews, rather than to an Arab minority that had no history and had arrived there by chance. The wars in which the wandering people reconquered their land were just; the violent opposition of the local population was criminal.
This interpretation of Jewish history was developed as talented, imaginative historians built on surviving fragments of Jewish and Christian religious memory to construct a continuous genealogy for the Jewish people. Judaism’s abundant historiography encompasses many different approaches.
But none have ever questioned the basic concepts developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Discoveries that might threaten this picture of a linear past were marginalised. The national imperative rejected any contradiction of or deviation from the dominant story. University departments exclusively devoted to “the history of the Jewish people”, as distinct from those teaching what is known in Israel as general history, made a significant contribution to this selective vision. The debate on what constitutes Jewishness has obvious legal implications, but historians ignored it: as far as they are concerned, any descendant of the people forced into exile 2,000 years ago is a Jew.
Nor did these official investigators of the past join the controversy provoked by the “new historians” from the late 1980s. Most of the limited number of participants in this public debate were from other disciplines or non-academic circles: sociologists, orientalists, linguists, geographers, political scientists, literary academics and archaeologists developed new perspectives on the Jewish and Zionist past. Departments of Jewish history remained defensive and conservative, basing themselves on received ideas. While there have been few significant developments in national history over the past 60 years (a situation unlikely to change in the short term), the facts that have emerged face any honest historian with fundamental questions.
Founding myths shaken
Is the Bible a historical text? Writing during the early half of the 19th century, the first modern Jewish historians, such as Isaak Markus Jost (1793-1860) and Leopold Zunz (1794-1886), did not think so. They regarded the Old Testament as a theological work reflecting the beliefs of Jewish religious communities after the destruction of the first temple. It was not until the second half of the century that Heinrich Graetz (1817-91) and others developed a “national” vision of the Bible and transformed Abraham’s journey to Canaan, the flight from Egypt and the united kingdom of David and Solomon into an authentic national past. By constant repetition, Zionist historians have subsequently turned these Biblical “truths” into the basis of national education.
But during the 1980s an earthquake shook these founding myths. The discoveries made by the “new archaeology” discredited a great exodus in the 13th century BC. Moses could not have led the Hebrews out of Egypt into the Promised Land, for the good reason that the latter was Egyptian territory at the time. And there is no trace of either a slave revolt against the pharaonic empire or of a sudden conquest of Canaan by outsiders.
Nor is there any trace or memory of the magnificent kingdom of David and Solomon. Recent discoveries point to the existence, at the time, of two small kingdoms: Israel, the more powerful, and Judah, the future Judea. The general population of Judah did not go into 6th century BC exile: only its political and intellectual elite were forced to settle in Babylon. This decisive encounter with Persian religion gave birth to Jewish monotheism.
Then there is the question of the exile of 70 AD. There has been no real research into this turning point in Jewish history, the cause of the diaspora. And for a simple reason: the Romans never exiled any nation from anywhere on the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean. Apart from enslaved prisoners, the population of Judea continued to live on their lands, even after the destruction of the second temple. Some converted to Christianity in the 4th century, while the majority embraced Islam during the 7th century Arab conquest.
Most Zionist thinkers were aware of this: Yitzhak Ben Zvi, later president of Israel, and David Ben Gurion, its first prime minister, accepted it as late as 1929, the year of the great Palestinian revolt. Both stated on several occasions that the peasants of Palestine were the descendants of the inhabitants of ancient Judea (2).
Proselytising zeal
But if there was no exile after 70 AD, where did all the Jews who have populated the Mediterranean since antiquity come from? The smokescreen of national historiography hides an astonishing reality. From the Maccabean revolt of the mid-2nd century BC to the Bar Kokhba revolt of the 2nd century AD, Judaism was the most actively proselytising religion. The Judeo-Hellenic Hasmoneans forcibly converted the Idumeans of southern Judea and the Itureans of Galilee and incorporated them into the people of Israel. Judaism spread across the Middle East and round the Mediterranean. The 1st century AD saw the emergence in modern Kurdistan of the Jewish kingdom of Adiabene, just one of many that converted.
The writings of Flavius Josephus are not the only evidence of the proselytising zeal of the Jews. Horace, Seneca, Juvenal and Tacitus were among the Roman writers who feared it. The Mishnah and the Talmud (3) authorised conversion, even if the wise men of the Talmudic tradition expressed reservations in the face of the mounting pressure from Christianity.
Although the early 4th century triumph of Christianity did not mark the end of Jewish expansion, it relegated Jewish proselytism to the margins of the Christian cultural world. During the 5th century, in modern Yemen, a vigorous Jewish kingdom emerged in Himyar, whose descendants preserved their faith through the Islamic conquest and down to the present day. Arab chronicles tell of the existence, during the 7th century, of Judaised Berber tribes; and at the end of the century the legendary Jewish queen Dihya contested the Arab advance into northwest Africa. Jewish Berbers participated in the conquest of the Iberian peninsula and helped establish the unique symbiosis between Jews and Muslims that characterised Hispano-Arabic culture.
The most significant mass conversion occurred in the 8th century, in the massive Khazar kingdom between the Black and Caspian seas. The expansion of Judaism from the Caucasus into modern Ukraine created a multiplicity of communities, many of which retreated from the 13th century Mongol invasions into eastern Europe. There, with Jews from the Slavic lands to the south and from what is now modern Germany, they formed the basis of Yiddish culture (4).
Prism of Zionism
Until about 1960 the complex origins of the Jewish people were more or less reluctantly acknowledged by Zionist historiography. But thereafter they were marginalised and finally erased from Israeli public memory. The Israeli forces who seized Jerusalem in 1967 believed themselves to be the direct descendents of the mythic kingdom of David rather than – God forbid – of Berber warriors or Khazar horsemen. The Jews claimed to constitute a specific ethnic group that had returned to Jerusalem, its capital, from 2,000 years of exile and wandering.
This monolithic, linear edifice is supposed to be supported by biology as well as history. Since the 1970s supposedly scientific research, carried out in Israel, has desperately striven to demonstrate that Jews throughout the world are closely genetically related.
Research into the origins of populations now constitutes a legitimate and popular field in molecular biology and the male Y chromosome has been accorded honoured status in the frenzied search for the unique origin of the “chosen people”. The problem is that this historical fantasy has come to underpin the politics of identity of the state of Israel. By validating an essentialist, ethnocentric definition of Judaism it encourages a segregation that separates Jews from non-Jews – whether Arabs, Russian immigrants or foreign workers.
Sixty years after its foundation, Israel refuses to accept that it should exist for the sake of its citizens. For almost a quarter of the population, who are not regarded as Jews, this is not their state legally. At the same time, Israel presents itself as the homeland of Jews throughout the world, even if these are no longer persecuted refugees, but the full and equal citizens of other countries.
A global ethnocracy invokes the myth of the eternal nation, reconstituted on the land of its ancestors, to justify internal discrimination against its own citizens. It will remain difficult to imagine a new Jewish history while the prism of Zionism continues to fragment everything into an ethnocentric spectrum. But Jews worldwide have always tended to form religious communities, usually by conversion; they cannot be said to share an ethnicity derived from a unique origin and displaced over 20 centuries of wandering.
The development of historiography and the evolution of modernity were consequences of the invention of the nation state, which preoccupied millions during the 19th and 20th centuries. The new millennium has seen these dreams begin to shatter.
And more and more academics are analysing, dissecting and deconstructing the great national stories, especially the myths of common origin so dear to chroniclers of the past.
Shlomo Sand is professor of history at Tel Aviv university and the author of Comment le people juif fut inventé (Fayard, Paris, 2008)
Sunday, September 07, 2008
A List of Books Not Wanted in Libraries: America
BOOK BAN LIST:
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Blubber by Judy Blume
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
Carrie by Stephen King
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Christine by Stephen King
Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Cujo by Stephen King
Curses, Hexes, and Spells by Daniel Cohen
Daddy's Roommate by Michael Willhoite
Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
Decameron by Boccaccio
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Fallen Angels by Walter Myers
Fanny Hill (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure) by John Cleland
Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Forever by Judy Blume
Grendel by John Champlin Gardner
Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K.
Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K.
Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban by J.K.
Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
Have to Go by Robert Munsch
Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Impressions edited by Jack Booth
In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
It's Okay if You Don't Love Me by Norma Klein
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H.Lawrence
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Little Red Riding Hood by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Love is One of the Choices by Norma Klein
Lysistrata by Aristophanes
More Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
My Brother Sam Is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
My House by Nikki Giovanni
My Friend Flicka by Mary O'Hara
Night Chills by Dean Koontz
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer
One Day in The Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Ordinary People by Judith Guest
Our Bodies, Ourselves by Boston Women's Health Collective
Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy
Revolting Rhymes by Roald Dahl
Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones by Alvin Schwartz
Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
Separate Peace by John Knowles
Silas Marner by George Eliot
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
The Bastard by John Jakes
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Devil's Alternative by Frederick Forsyth
The Figure in the Shadows by John Bellairs
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Snyder
The Learning Tree by Gordon Parks
The Living Bible by William C. Bower
The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
The New Teenage Body Book by Kathy McCoy and Charles Wibbelsman
The Pigman by Paul Zindel
The Seduction of Peter S.
by Lawrence Sanders
The Shining by Stephen King
The Witches by Roald Dahl
The Witches of Worm by Zilpha Snyder
Then Again, Maybe I Won't by Judy Blume
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary by the Merriam-Webster
Editorial Staff
Witches, Pumpkins, and Grinning Ghosts: The Story of the Halloween
Symbols by Edna Barth
The 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–20001
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
See also Challenges by Initiator, Institution, Type, and Year.
For comparison, see also The Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–1999.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Dealing with Challenges | Reporting a Challenge |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“[I]t's not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers.” — Judy Blume
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Scary Stories (Series) by Alvin Schwartz
Daddy's Roommate by Michael Willhoite
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling
Forever by Judy Blume
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
Alice (Series) by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
My Brother Sam is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Giver by Lois Lowry
It's Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris
Goosebumps (Series) by R.L. Stine
A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Newton Peck
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Sex by Madonna
Earth's Children (Series) by Jean M. Auel
The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
Go Ask Alice by Anonymous
Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers
In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
The Stupids (Series) by Harry Allard
The Witches by Roald Dahl
The New Joy of Gay Sex by Charles Silverstein
Anastasia Krupnik (Series) by Lois Lowry
The Goats by Brock Cole
Kaffir Boy by Mark Mathabane
Blubber by Judy Blume
Killing Mr. Griffin by Lois Duncan
Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam
We All Fall Down by Robert Cormier
Final Exit by Derek Humphry
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
What's Happening to my Body? Book for Girls: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Daughters by Lynda Madaras
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
The Pigman by Paul Zindel
Bumps in the Night by Harry Allard
Deenie by Judy Blume
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Annie on my Mind by Nancy Garden
The Boy Who Lost His Face by Louis Sachar
Cross Your Fingers, Spit in Your Hat by Alvin Schwartz
A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Sleeping Beauty Trilogy by A.N. Roquelaure (Anne Rice)
Asking About Sex and Growing Up by Joanna Cole
Cujo by Stephen King
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell
Boys and Sex by Wardell Pomeroy
Ordinary People by Judith Guest
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
What's Happening to my Body? Book for Boys: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Sons by Lynda Madaras
Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
Crazy Lady by Jane Conly
Athletic Shorts by Chris Crutcher
Fade by Robert Cormier
Guess What? by Mem Fox
The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende
The Face on the Milk Carton by Caroline Cooney
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Native Son by Richard Wright
Women on Top: How Real Life Has Changed Women's Fantasies by Nancy Friday
Curses, Hexes and Spells by Daniel Cohen
Jack by A.M. Homes
Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo A. Anaya
Where Did I Come From? by Peter Mayle
Carrie by Stephen King
Tiger Eyes by Judy Blume
On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer
Arizona Kid by Ron Koertge
Family Secrets by Norma Klein
Mommy Laid An Egg by Babette Cole
The Dead Zone by Stephen King
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Always Running by Luis Rodriguez
Private Parts by Howard Stern
Where's Waldo? by Martin Hanford
Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene
Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman
Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
Running Loose by Chris Crutcher
Sex Education by Jenny Davis
The Drowning of Stephen Jones by Bette Greene
Girls and Sex by Wardell Pomeroy
How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
View from the Cherry Tree by Willo Davis Roberts
The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
The Terrorist by Caroline Cooney
Jump Ship to Freedom by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1Out of 6,364 challenges reported to or recorded by the Office for Intellectual Freedom, as compiled by the Office for Intellectual Freedom, American Library Association. (See Background Information: 1990–2000 under The Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000.) The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom does not claim comprehensiveness in recording challenges. Research suggests that for each challenge reported there are as many as four or five which go unreported.
Contacts: Macey Morales
Manager, ALA-PIO Media Relations
(312) 280-4393
mmorales@ala.org
Jennifer Petersen
PR Coordinator, ALA-PIO Media Relations
(312) 280-5043
jpetersen@ala.org
NEWS
For Immediate Release
September 3, 2008
ALA President Jim Rettig releases statement on censorship
Chicago - The American Library Association (ALA) opposes book banning and censorship in any form, and supports librarians whenever they resist censorship in their libraries. Since our society is so diverse, libraries have a responsibility to provide materials that reflect the interests of all of their patrons.
Each year, the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom receives hundreds of reports on books and other materials that were "challenged" (their removal from school or library shelves was requested). The ALA estimates the number reported represents only about a quarter of the actual challenges.
In support of our efforts to fight censorship, the ALA annually celebrates Banned Books Week – a national celebration of the freedom to read. Observed during the last week of September each year, Banned Books Week reminds Americans not to take the precious democratic freedom to read for granted. This year, Banned Books Week will take place September 27–October 4, 2008.
The American Library Association is a nonprofit, 501(c) (3) educational association that supports quality library and information services and public access to information. As such, it is not allowed to take a position on political candidates and strives to be nonpartisan in its activities.
To learn more about book challenges and Banned Books Week please visit http://www.ala.org/bbooks.
AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION
50 E. Huron Chicago, IL 60611 Call Us Toll Free 1-800-545-2433
© 2008 American Library Association. Copyright Statement
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Blubber by Judy Blume
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
Carrie by Stephen King
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Christine by Stephen King
Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Cujo by Stephen King
Curses, Hexes, and Spells by Daniel Cohen
Daddy's Roommate by Michael Willhoite
Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
Decameron by Boccaccio
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Fallen Angels by Walter Myers
Fanny Hill (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure) by John Cleland
Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Forever by Judy Blume
Grendel by John Champlin Gardner
Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K.
Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K.
Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban by J.K.
Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
Have to Go by Robert Munsch
Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Impressions edited by Jack Booth
In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
It's Okay if You Don't Love Me by Norma Klein
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H.Lawrence
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Little Red Riding Hood by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Love is One of the Choices by Norma Klein
Lysistrata by Aristophanes
More Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
My Brother Sam Is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
My House by Nikki Giovanni
My Friend Flicka by Mary O'Hara
Night Chills by Dean Koontz
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer
One Day in The Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Ordinary People by Judith Guest
Our Bodies, Ourselves by Boston Women's Health Collective
Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy
Revolting Rhymes by Roald Dahl
Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones by Alvin Schwartz
Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
Separate Peace by John Knowles
Silas Marner by George Eliot
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
The Bastard by John Jakes
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Devil's Alternative by Frederick Forsyth
The Figure in the Shadows by John Bellairs
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Snyder
The Learning Tree by Gordon Parks
The Living Bible by William C. Bower
The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
The New Teenage Body Book by Kathy McCoy and Charles Wibbelsman
The Pigman by Paul Zindel
The Seduction of Peter S.
by Lawrence Sanders
The Shining by Stephen King
The Witches by Roald Dahl
The Witches of Worm by Zilpha Snyder
Then Again, Maybe I Won't by Judy Blume
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary by the Merriam-Webster
Editorial Staff
Witches, Pumpkins, and Grinning Ghosts: The Story of the Halloween
Symbols by Edna Barth
The 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–20001
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
See also Challenges by Initiator, Institution, Type, and Year.
For comparison, see also The Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–1999.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Dealing with Challenges | Reporting a Challenge |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“[I]t's not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers.” — Judy Blume
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Scary Stories (Series) by Alvin Schwartz
Daddy's Roommate by Michael Willhoite
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling
Forever by Judy Blume
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
Alice (Series) by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
My Brother Sam is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Giver by Lois Lowry
It's Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris
Goosebumps (Series) by R.L. Stine
A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Newton Peck
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Sex by Madonna
Earth's Children (Series) by Jean M. Auel
The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
Go Ask Alice by Anonymous
Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers
In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
The Stupids (Series) by Harry Allard
The Witches by Roald Dahl
The New Joy of Gay Sex by Charles Silverstein
Anastasia Krupnik (Series) by Lois Lowry
The Goats by Brock Cole
Kaffir Boy by Mark Mathabane
Blubber by Judy Blume
Killing Mr. Griffin by Lois Duncan
Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam
We All Fall Down by Robert Cormier
Final Exit by Derek Humphry
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
What's Happening to my Body? Book for Girls: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Daughters by Lynda Madaras
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
The Pigman by Paul Zindel
Bumps in the Night by Harry Allard
Deenie by Judy Blume
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Annie on my Mind by Nancy Garden
The Boy Who Lost His Face by Louis Sachar
Cross Your Fingers, Spit in Your Hat by Alvin Schwartz
A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Sleeping Beauty Trilogy by A.N. Roquelaure (Anne Rice)
Asking About Sex and Growing Up by Joanna Cole
Cujo by Stephen King
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell
Boys and Sex by Wardell Pomeroy
Ordinary People by Judith Guest
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
What's Happening to my Body? Book for Boys: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Sons by Lynda Madaras
Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
Crazy Lady by Jane Conly
Athletic Shorts by Chris Crutcher
Fade by Robert Cormier
Guess What? by Mem Fox
The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende
The Face on the Milk Carton by Caroline Cooney
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Native Son by Richard Wright
Women on Top: How Real Life Has Changed Women's Fantasies by Nancy Friday
Curses, Hexes and Spells by Daniel Cohen
Jack by A.M. Homes
Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo A. Anaya
Where Did I Come From? by Peter Mayle
Carrie by Stephen King
Tiger Eyes by Judy Blume
On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer
Arizona Kid by Ron Koertge
Family Secrets by Norma Klein
Mommy Laid An Egg by Babette Cole
The Dead Zone by Stephen King
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Always Running by Luis Rodriguez
Private Parts by Howard Stern
Where's Waldo? by Martin Hanford
Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene
Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman
Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
Running Loose by Chris Crutcher
Sex Education by Jenny Davis
The Drowning of Stephen Jones by Bette Greene
Girls and Sex by Wardell Pomeroy
How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
View from the Cherry Tree by Willo Davis Roberts
The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
The Terrorist by Caroline Cooney
Jump Ship to Freedom by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
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1Out of 6,364 challenges reported to or recorded by the Office for Intellectual Freedom, as compiled by the Office for Intellectual Freedom, American Library Association. (See Background Information: 1990–2000 under The Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000.) The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom does not claim comprehensiveness in recording challenges. Research suggests that for each challenge reported there are as many as four or five which go unreported.
Contacts: Macey Morales
Manager, ALA-PIO Media Relations
(312) 280-4393
mmorales@ala.org
Jennifer Petersen
PR Coordinator, ALA-PIO Media Relations
(312) 280-5043
jpetersen@ala.org
NEWS
For Immediate Release
September 3, 2008
ALA President Jim Rettig releases statement on censorship
Chicago - The American Library Association (ALA) opposes book banning and censorship in any form, and supports librarians whenever they resist censorship in their libraries. Since our society is so diverse, libraries have a responsibility to provide materials that reflect the interests of all of their patrons.
Each year, the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom receives hundreds of reports on books and other materials that were "challenged" (their removal from school or library shelves was requested). The ALA estimates the number reported represents only about a quarter of the actual challenges.
In support of our efforts to fight censorship, the ALA annually celebrates Banned Books Week – a national celebration of the freedom to read. Observed during the last week of September each year, Banned Books Week reminds Americans not to take the precious democratic freedom to read for granted. This year, Banned Books Week will take place September 27–October 4, 2008.
The American Library Association is a nonprofit, 501(c) (3) educational association that supports quality library and information services and public access to information. As such, it is not allowed to take a position on political candidates and strives to be nonpartisan in its activities.
To learn more about book challenges and Banned Books Week please visit http://www.ala.org/bbooks.
AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION
50 E. Huron Chicago, IL 60611 Call Us Toll Free 1-800-545-2433
© 2008 American Library Association. Copyright Statement
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