BEYOND any shadow of a doubt, the ugliest phrase to enter the English language last year was “extraordinary rendition”. To those of us who love words, this phrase’s brutalisation of meaning is an infallible signal of its intent to deceive.

“Extraordinary” is an ordinary enough adjective, but its sense is being stretched here to include more sinister meanings that your dictionary will not provide: secret; ruthless; and extrajudicial.

As for “rendition”, the English language permits four meanings: a performance; a translation; a surrender – this meaning is now considered archaic; or an “act of rendering”; which leads us to the verb “to render” among whose 17 possible meanings you will not find “to kidnap and covertly deliver an individual or individuals for interrogation to an undisclosed address in an unspecified country where torture is permitted”.

Language, too, has laws, and those laws tell us this new American usage is improper – a crime against the word. Every so often the habitual newspeak of politics throws up a term whose calculated blandness makes us shiver with fear – yes, and loathing.

“Clean words can mask dirty deeds,” The New York Times columnist William Safire wrote in 1993, in response to the arrival of another such phrase, “ethnic cleansing”.

“Final solution” is a further, even more horrible locution of this Orwellian, double-plus-ungood type. “Mortality response”, a euphemism for death by killing that I first heard during the Vietnam War, is another. This is not a pedigree of which any newborn usage should be proud.

People use such phrases to avoid using others whose meaning would be problematically over-apparent. “Ethnic cleansing” and “final solution” were ways of avoiding the word “genocide”, and to say “extraordinary rendition” is to reveal one’s squeamishness about saying “the export of torture”. However, as Cecily remarks in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, “When I see a spade, I call it a spade”, and what we have here is not simply a spade, it’s a shovel – and it’s shovelling a good deal of ordure.
smh.com.au

A new generation of nuclear power stations would increase five-fold the amount of a lethal and long-lasting form of highly radioactive nuclear waste stored in the UK, official figures show.

The analysis, by a government-sponsored committee of experts, reveals the scale of the legacy to future generations by building nuclear plants. It comes as the nuclear industry and supporters are pressing ministers to approve reactors in the face of uncertainty over gas supplies.

The figures reveal that spent uranium fuel rods from new power stations would almost triple radioactivity in the current inventory of UK nuclear waste. They contrast with claims that new reactors would create far less waste than predecessors.
commondreams.org

…Therein also resides the lie of 24: that it is not only possible to retain human dignity in performing acts of terror, but that if an honest person performs such an act as a grave duty, it confers on him a tragic-ethical grandeur. The parallel between the agents’ and the terrorists’ behaviour serves this lie.

But what if such a distance is possible? What if people do commit terrible acts as part of their job while being loving husbands, good parents and close friends? As Arendt says, the fact that they are able to retain any normality while committing such acts is the ultimate confirmation of moral depravity.
guardian.co.uk

…Therein also resides the lie of 24: that it is not only possible to retain human dignity in performing acts of terror, but that if an honest person performs such an act as a grave duty, it confers on him a tragic-ethical grandeur. The parallel between the agents’ and the terrorists’ behaviour serves this lie.

But what if such a distance is possible? What if people do commit terrible acts as part of their job while being loving husbands, good parents and close friends? As Arendt says, the fact that they are able to retain any normality while committing such acts is the ultimate confirmation of moral depravity.
guardian.co.uk

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Gold rallied to hit a new 25-year peak on Monday as fund managers shifted more money into the metal on bullishness for 2006 and uncertainty about economic growth and the dollar, analysts said.

Trading was volatile in Europe, with some speculative profit-taking emerging earlier, but a late flurry of fund buying in New York pushed bullion to a new high to reach above $550 an ounce for the first time since January 1981.

Spot gold was last quoted at $548.50/549.25, compared with its intraday peak at $550.75 touched late in New York and against Friday’s late quote of $538.30/9.00.

The day’s rally in gold — an asset seen as an alternative to more common investments — was unusual in that it coincided with the Dow Jones industrial average’s first rise above 11,000 in 4-1/2 years, and with a firmer dollar in the afternoon.
news.yahoo.com

…Perhaps something atavistic lurks in the way in which we see cetaceans. Whales and whaling are part of British heritage: in the 18th and 19th centuries, ports such as London, Hull and Whitby conducted massive culls of common or bowhead whales. From 1785 to 1826, Britain’s greatest whaler, William Scoresby Sr, killed 533.

Before the discovery of petroleum in 1859, London, Paris and New York were lit and lubricated by leviathans. Whaling – worth $120m a year by 1850 – was America’s first global industry, the germ of its empire. And unlike modern hunters, who at least claim whales for sustenance, the one part of the whale not used by the Victorians was its meat. Strips of fingernail-like baleen, with which whales strain their food, were used for umbrellas and corsets. Ambergris, produced by the sperm whale in reaction to indigestible squid beaks, was precious as a perfume fixative. Equally prized was oil from the animal’s block-like head. Even in the late 20th century, Nasa used this oil in its equipment.

We cannot be excused our culpability. Almost anyone born before 1960 ate whale – in margarine or ice cream – wore it as a cosmetic or fed it to their pets. The peak of whaling was not the brutal days of Melville’s Moby-Dick, but the 1960s when, in one season alone, floating factories “processed” 6,158 blue whales, 17,989 finback whales, 2,108 humpback whales and 2,566 sperm whales – not including the thousands killed by the Russians, unreported to the International Whaling Commission (IWC). The whale, too, was a victim of the Cold War.

Now, the greatest danger that it faces is not a harpoon, but fishing nets and shipping routes. The North Atlantic right whale, reduced to just 300 individuals by the legacy of whaling, has a gene pool so compromised that it is unlikely to survive the century.
commondreams.org

Toxic waste creates hermaphrodite Arctic polar bears

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — The American singer and activist Harry Belafonte called President Bush “the greatest terrorist in the world” on Sunday and said millions of Americans support the socialist revolution of Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez.

Belafonte led a delegation of Americans including the actor Danny Glover and the Princeton University scholar Cornel West that met the Venezuelan president for more than six hours late Saturday. Some in the group attended Chavez’s television and radio broadcast Sunday.

“No matter what the greatest tyrant in the world, the greatest terrorist in the world, George W. Bush says, we’re here to tell you: Not hundreds, not thousands, but millions of the American people … support your revolution,” Belafonte told Chavez during the broadcast.

The 78-year-old Belafonte, famous for his calypso-inspired music, including the “Day-O” song, was a close collaborator of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and is now a UNICEF goodwill ambassador. He also has been outspoken in criticizing the U.S. embargo of Cuba.
burlingtonfreepress.com

It was also announced that Vermont will be the next recipient of Chavez’s cheap heating oil.

…Latin America’s growing “leftward shift” reflects , beyond the election of some left and center-left Presidents, the radicalization of the citizens who voted for them. Nonetheless, there is a wider gulf between this radicalized citizenry and their elected leaders in some countries than in others. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has stated that the US has “good relations with people across the political spectrum in Latin America,” (At the right end of Rice’s spectrum is Colombia’s Alvaro Uribe Velez, at the left end Chile’s Ricardo Lagos, and Brazil’s Lula da Silva).

Yet, genuinely Left governments cannot possibly be on good terms with the empire, which demands that they sacrifice their sovereignty for the sake of multinational corporations, and even social democratic leaders are essentially hostages. Large economies such as Chile and Brazil are susceptible to US financial institutions, threats of sanctions, and other expressions of economic pressure. Poorer countries, like those of the Caribbean and Central America, are even more vulnerable. Absent from Rice’s spectrum are countries like Cuba and Venezuela, whose domestic and foreign policies challenge US hegemony.

This week’s Economist (December 17, 2005) expressed its own worries about the Bolivian election, noting: “Unlike Brazil’s Luiz Inácio da Silva and Uruguay’s Tabare Vasquez, Mr Morales is not a leftist who has made peace with democracy and capitalism, offering change without upheaval.” Morales’ commanding electoral victory aside, the Economist reveals a widespread assumption: that democracy and capitalism are one and the same, or at least compatible. Morales’ support for decriminalization of coca leaf production, and for increased state control over the oil and gas industry has lead many in the establishment to conclude that he is anti-capitalist, and therefore-according to this logic-undemocratic. But, for those who believe democracy entails active participation in the decision-making process and people’s control over resources, democracy and capitalism are inherently antagonistic.
axisoflogic.com

The Islamic Hamas group has launched a TV station in the Gaza Strip, a first step toward setting up a satellite station like the one Hezbollah guerrillas run in Lebanon, Hamas officials said Monday.

The Al-Aqsa Television station is being set up just weeks before the Palestinians’ January 25 parliamentary election, and if up and running in time, could help Hamas in its campaign, analysts said. Hamas presents a serious challenge to the ruling Fatah party, which has led the Palestinian Authority since its establishment in 1994.
haaretz.com

Women who eat GM foods while pregnant risk endangering their unborn babies, startling new research suggests.

The study – carried out by a leading scientist at the Russian Academy of Sciences – found that more than half of the offspring of rats fed on modified soya died in the first three weeks of life, six times as many as those born to mothers with normal diets. Six times as many were also severely underweight.

The research – which is being prepared for publication – is just one of a clutch of recent studies that are reviving fears that GM food damages human health. Italian research has found that modified soya affected the liver and pancreas of mice. Australia had to abandon a decade-long attempt to develop modified peas when an official study found they caused lung damage.

And last May this newspaper revealed a secret report by the biotech giant Monsanto, which showed that rats fed a diet rich in GM corn had smaller kidneys and higher blood cell counts, suggesting possible damage to their immune systems, than those that ate a similar conventional one.
independent.co.uk