It is a time of sleep deprivation, constant tiredness and a regular inability to carry out even the simplest task. But now scientists have discovered – after experimenting on the California deer mouse, laboratory rats, and humans – that pregnancy also confers startling benefits: it actually boosts brainpower.

During pregnancy, learning and memory skills improve dramatically, say researchers, reversing the popular myth that it is a time of dumbing down. Key brain areas also alter in size; changes that can persist for decades. Far from transforming mothers into weakened emotional wrecks who lose car keys and drop in IQ, it turns out having children makes them cleverer. It’s just hard to spot thanks to all that lost sleep.

‘Many benefits seem to emerge from motherhood, as the maternal brain rises to the reproductive challenge,’ says Professor Craig Kinsley, of Richmond University, and Professor Kelly Lambert, of Randolph-Macon College, both in Virginia, writing in the latest Scientific American. ‘In other words, when the going gets tough, the brain gets going.’

guardian.co.uk

The deputy leader of al-Qaeda was not in a Pakistani village near the Afghan border which was hit in an apparent missile attack, Pakistan officials say.
The unnamed officials said the attack – in which at least 18 people were killed – was based on “false information”.

Quoting intelligence sources, US media said it was a CIA raid. The US military says it is not aware of any operations taking place in the Bajaur tribal area.

Pakistan’s information minister condemned the attack.

Sheikh Rashid Ahmed told a news conference the US ambassador would be summoned to explain.

The Pakistani government wanted “to assure the people we will not allow such incidents to reoccur”, Mr Ahmed said.
bbc.co.uk

The idea of state sovereignty has surely fallen victim to this ‘war on terror.

Spain has said it will go ahead with the sale of 12 military planes to Venezuela despite US objections.

However, the aircraft will be made with more expensive European parts because the US has blocked the use of its technology for Venezuela.

The US says Venezuela’s Socialist President Hugo Chavez could use the planes to destabilise the region.

Both Madrid and Caracas have said the equipment – also including eight patrol boats – is for defensive purposes.

Deputy Prime Minister Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega said Spain “did not share” the US reasons for blocking the deal.
bbc.co.uk

U.S. Bars Spain’s Sale of Planes to ‘Antidemocratic’ Venezuela
MADRID, Jan. 13 -The United States will not allow Spain to sell military aircraft with American technology to Venezuela, saying the sale would aid the increasingly “antidemocratic” government of President Hugo Chávez and would destabilize the region, the American Embassy announced Friday.

The Spanish government, led by Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, said it regretted the decision, but vowed to move forward with the deal after acquiring the necessary technology elsewhere.

Under the accord, which was signed in November, Spain agreed to sell Venezuela 12 transport airplanes and 8 patrol boats for about 1.7 billion euros, or $2 billion.

Because the airplanes, which are not yet built, were to contain American technology, Spain was required to obtain a license from Washington before completing the sale. Neither Spanish nor American officials would describe the technology.

In rejecting Spain’s request, American officials said the sale amounted to support for an oppressive government that threatened to spread instability.

“Despite being democratically elected, the government of President Hugo Chávez has systematically undermined democratic institutions, pressured and harassed independent media and the political opposition, and grown progressively more autocratic and antidemocratic,” the embassy said in a statement.

ha! Who are they talking about?

by Manuel Talens
…And now, once I have set the premises of my exposition I will centre on the name of a country that recently was the object of fierce debates in the cyber exchanges of a plurinacional forum of translation to which I belong. I am referring to The United States of America, alias America. Yes, the citizens of The United States call America their own country and, as a consequence, they call themselves “Americans”, despite the fact that America is a whole continent with more than thirty countries, big and small, that might claim the same right to this appellation. We are therefore facing a flagrant case of undue and unilateral appropriation of a common name, something that rhetorically speaking we might qualify as synecdoche or metonymy, that is, the transfer of meaning from a term that designates a whole to only one of its parts.
axisoflogic.com

NEW ORLEANS — Assemble the brass band and let the funeral march begin, because the old New Orleans is dead.

The passing of our most distinctive city, so prominent in American imagination and lore, became official Wednesday when a blue-ribbon commission presented its plan to rebuild on the mud-caked ruins. One way or another — through a proposed moratorium on rebuilding in the areas flooded when the levees failed, or through protracted argument over whether to have a moratorium — the plan all but guarantees additional months of delay and rot. Every day, meanwhile, more evacuees will decide to make new lives for themselves elsewhere.

Play a mournful dirge for the lost city they have left behind.
washingtonpost.com

2 Million Displaced By Storms
The Federal Emergency Management Agency yesterday increased its count of people displaced from the Gulf Coast by hurricanes Katrina and Rita by nearly a third, to about 2 million people. A FEMA spokeswoman attributed the sharp rise to a reporting error.

According to a news release, FEMA is paying rental assistance to 685,635 families whose homes were damaged or destroyed by the Aug. 29 and Sept. 24 storms, an increase of 167,000, or 32 percent, over a month ago. FEMA officials generally estimate three people per household as a rule of thumb.

In December, the agency counted only recipients of a transitional housing assistance program created Sept. 23, FEMA spokeswoman Nicol Andrews said. Shortly before Christmas, FEMA discovered that it had not counted families receiving rental assistance under a traditional disaster aid program, she said.

Counting up the numbers of boys and girls in a country has never been so troublesome. On Monday the medical journal the Lancet published a report estimating that prenatal selection and selective abortion in India was likely to be causing half a million girls to be culled every year. Within 24 hours, the Indian medical association weighed in to dispute the Lancet’s figures as out-of-date and exaggerated. The Indian government has made no formal statement, but is said to be incandescent with rage.

There are good reasons for all this sensitivity. The abnormally unbalanced gender ratios of some Asian countries – either due to abortion, sex-selective technologies such as ultrasound or old-fashioned infanticide – have been the subject of academic controversy since the late 1980s. Just recently, however, they come to be cloaked in a more sinister hue. One of the latest growth areas in the academy is in “security demographics”, where scholars are invited to predict the potentially dire implications of demographic change, and one of the most gloomy prognostications is rooted in what could happen when sex ratios spin out of kilter.

“Bare branches” is the Chinese term for the poor young men who are left with no prospect of finding a partner or starting a family. In their influential 2004 book of the same name, the American political scientists Valerie M Hudson and Andrea M den Boer argued that these men were an accident waiting to happen. The pair found evidence of a huge number of “missing females” in eight different Asian countries, but the vast majority were from India and China, where two-fifths of the world’s population now live. In 1999, they noted, the Chinese academy of social sciences admitted that the birth-sex ratio in that country had reached 120 boys for every 100 girls, and that the number of surplus Chinese males was now 111 million.
guardian.co.uk

You’d think they had won the Iraq war the way the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal and its minions are dividing the Earth’s spoils.

At the world’s No. 1 purveyor of arms and spilled blood (the Pentagon), Don Rumsfeld has quietly shuffled the order of succession, replacing the secretaries of the military services with such creepy civilians as Stephen Cambone.

Meanwhile, at the planet’s No. 1 source of development finance, the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz has installed former Dick Cheney flack Kevin Kellems in yet another absurdly powerful job. A sweet setup: The World Bank doles out money to “developing countries” only if they play along. The Pentagon does the same with arms.

It’s the long arm of Cheney that concerns many of the World Bank’s 10,000 employees, quite a few of whom are altruistic about helping spread the earth’s wealth instead of just letting the West plunder resource-rich continents. Wolfie’s already done a lot of trust-busting inside the bank.

Now Kellems, already a “senior advisor” to Wolfowitz, as I previously noted, is in line to become “director of strategy” at the bank’s External Affairs Department.

Insiders tell me that Wolfowitz tried to make Kellems (whom he took to the bank along with Boeing-scandal figure Robin Cleveland) the vice president for external affairs, but the bank’s board rebelled at that idea. Instead, Wolfowitz moved him in anyway, under VP Ian Goldin, who will be a figurehead.
villagevoice.com

Gordon Brown will propose today that Remembrance Sunday should be developed into a national day of patriotism to celebrate British history, achievements and culture. The chancellor envisages a “British Day”, equivalent to the Fourth of July independence celebrations in the United States.
Mr Brown’s remarks at a Fabian Society conference sponsored by the Guardian represent his clearest attempt yet to flesh out his personal political programme.

In his speech Mr Brown will embrace the patriotism of the US, saying: “In any survey our most popular institutions range from the monarchy to the army to the NHS. But think: what is our Fourth of July? What is our Independence Day? Where is our declaration of rights? What is our equivalent of a flag in every garden? Perhaps Remembrance Day and Remembrance Sunday are the nearest we have come to a British day – unifying, commemorative, dignified and an expression of British ideas of standing firm for the world in the name of liberty.”
guardian.co.uk

From firebrand to pussycat: Galloway’s TV transformation
He purred and mewed, his greying whiskers giving his face the appearance of a Cheshire cat. Next, George Galloway, the Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, and scourge of Capitol Hill, got on all fours and pretended to lick milk from the cupped hands of the once-famous television actor Rula Lenska. She rubbed the “cream” from his “whiskers” and stroked his head and behind his ears.
When he steps out into the real world, Mr Galloway may regret his decision to accept the producer’s challenge to mimic a pet on live television last night. He may feel his flirtation with a reality TV youth audience was not worth the loss of credibility that many of his critics claimed yesterday was an inevitable consequence.

The firebrand parliamentarian earned the grudging respect of even his political enemies through his performance before the US Congress last year. But yesterday viewers only saw rolling footage of the cat performance. Commentators called it excruciating and his own supporters said it was an indignity.

As the cat scenes continued to play out, the Labour party moved into the absent MP’s constituency, in the form of Westminster chief whip Hilary Armstrong armed with a petition – as well as her own television cameras – demanding that the missing MP return to work. She urged Mr Galloway to “respect his constituents, not his ego”.

And as supporters argued that Channel 4 was censoring Mr Galloway’s political message, the Big Brother website was laden with innuendo after the cat incident, saying: “The task may be over, but George, it seems, just can’t keep his inner beast caged. George seemed to be feline frisky. First he starts a restless circling of the kitchen, looking every bit like a caged tiger marking his territory. Next he purrs something quietly in fellow feline Rula’s ear that makes her bottom jump and tighten excitedly. Sadly we don’t know what George said, but whatever it was got this reaction from our Polish thoroughbred: ‘Well I’m glad it can still do that for you.’ “

Those working for the MP said he had been prepared to suffer such indignities in the belief that his political message was getting across to millions of viewers. But, they claim, when he discovers his political message has been muted, he will be furious.

QIBYA, West Bank – It was the night that put Ariel Sharon on the map and the night the fledgling Jewish state, then just a few years old, signalled in the deadliest terms it would stop at nothing to defend itself.

And for the survivors of the West Bank village of Qibya, a night that lives on in infamy. Today, as the elders of this Palestinian town crane over their radios for updates on the fate of the stricken Israeli prime minister, the searing memory of Oct. 14, 1953, burns still.

Muslim propriety prevents Ibrahim Mohammed Hamad, 63, from rejoicing in Sharon’s demise. But one week after a devastating stroke, as Sharon battles back from the brink of death, Hamad finds it difficult to hear world leaders such as George W. Bush praise the ailing “man of peace” without choking on his hummus.

“As human beings, we do not make fun of the death of others,” said Hamad, who was 9 years old the night Sharon’s crack paratroop unit brought down his town, detonating 42 homes and a schoolhouse with 500 kilos of explosives.

“But do not think we will shed tears for Sharon. I don’t know if he acted alone or on orders from above. But he did not come here to get a suntan.”
commondreams.org

The FBI has a long, ignoble tradition of monitoring and harassing America’s top intellectuals. While people ranging from Albert Einstein, William Carlos Williams to Martin Luther King have been subjected to FBI surveillance, there remains an under-accounting of the ways in which this monitoring at times hampered the reception of their work.

In response to my request under the Freedom of Information Act, filed on behalf of CounterPunch, the FBI recently released 147 of Said’s 238-page FBI file. There are some unusual gaps in the released records, and it is possible that the FBI still holds far more files on Professor Said than they acknowledge. Some of these gaps may exist because new Patriot Act and National Security exemptions allow the FBI to deny the existence of records; however, the released file provides enough information to examine the FBI’s interest in Edward Said who mixed artistic appreciations, social theory, and political activism in powerful and unique ways.

Most of Said’s file documents FBI surveillance campaigns of his legal, public work with American-based Palestinian political or pro-Arab organizations, while other portions of the file document the FBI’s ongoing investigations of Said as it monitored his contacts with other Palestinian-Americans. That the FBI should monitor the legal political activities and intellectual forays of such a man elucidates not only the FBI’s role in suppressing democratic solutions to the Israeli and Palestinian problems, it also demonstrates a continuity with the FBI’s historical efforts to monitor and harass American peace activists.

Edward Said’s wife, Mariam, says she is not surprised to learn of the FBI’s surveillance of her husband, saying, “We always knew that any political activity concerning the Palestinian issue is monitored and when talking on the phone we would say ‘let the tappers hear this’. We believed that our phones were tapped for a long time, but it never bothered us because we knew we were hiding nothing.”
counterpunch.org