The US military has stopped battalion commanders from dismissing new recruits for drug abuse, alcohol, poor fitness and pregnancy in an attempt to halt the rising attrition rate in an army under growing strain as a result of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

An internal memo sent to senior commanders said the growing dropout rate was “a matter of great concern” in an army at war. It told officers: “We need your concerted effort to reverse the negative trend. By reducing attrition 1%, we can save up to 3,000 initial-term soldiers. That’s 3,000 more soldiers in our formations.”
Full: guardian.co.uk

3,000 more hunks of meat for the grinder.

Gordon Brown issued a global call to action yesterday to “reverse the fortunes” of Africa and transform millions of lives in the developing world.

Setting out the ambitious package of debt relief, aid and trade measures that Britain will take to next month’s G8 summit at Gleneagles, Scotland, the chancellor expressed confidence that progress could be made and said public protests could play a key part.

He also revealed that the government would pick up the £500,000 tax and cleaning tab for the Live 8 concert in London’s Hyde Park, and gave what appeared to be tacit approval to calls for mass demonstrations in Edinburgh in the week of the summit.
Full: guardian.co.uk

Mass demonstrations so people whose country is stealing Africa blind, so they can feel good about themselves. Hypocrites. Parasites.

The cause of European unification yesterday suffered another swingeing blow when one of the parties in Silvio Berlusconi’s governing coalition threw its weight behind a campaign to pull Italy out of the euro.

Roberto Maroni, Mr Berlusconi’s social security minister and a joint acting leader of the Northern League, said his party would start collecting signatures for a referendum on the issue later this month. He also appealed for the process of ratifying the EU constitution to be halted.
Full: guardian.co.uk

Faced with daily reports of car bombs and kidnappings, it’s difficult to feel optimistic about Iraq. But last week in the south of the country I heard a very different story. A story of the movement that has formed to rebuild the country’s economy and national pride, to create an Iraq with neither the tyranny of Saddam nor the pillage of military occupation.
Last week Basra saw its first conference on the threat of privatization, bringing together oil workers, academics and international civil-society groups. The event debated an issue about which Iraqis are passionate: the ownership and control of Iraq’s oil reserves.

The conference was organized by the General Union of Oil Employees (GUOE), which was established in June 2004 and now has 23,000 members. Focused as much on the broader Iraqi public interest as on members’ concerns, its first aim was to organize workers to repair oil facilities and bring them back into production during the chaos of the early months of occupation.

This effort by the workers required both courage – often in conflict either with coalition troops or remnants of the Ba’athist regime – and considerable ingenuity, putting back together a working oil industry with minimal resources.
Full: commondreams.org

by Joseph Massad
Targeting the university is the latest mission of right-wing forces who have hijacked not only political power and political discourse in the United States but also the very vocabulary that can be used against them. The campaign of the last three years or so to attack US universities as the last bastion where a measure of freedom of thought is still protected is engineered to cancel out such freedom and ensure that scholars will not subvert the received political wisdom of the day.

Some of the major tactics in this campaign have been the launching of witch hunts against specific professors, calling for their dismissal from their jobs, and, failing that, smear their reputation; target Middle East Studies as a scholarly field more generally and cut federal funding to it and place it under governmental supervision, and promote apologists for Israel in the guise of scholars as the only adequate scholarly alternative. While shutting down the educational process in favour of religious theories of creationism and the like has been around for a while, the recent attack on scholars who disagree with US foreign policy and the policies of the state of Israel are the main mobilisational issues of the current campaign.

What is at stake in this assault is not only academic freedom, but scholarship per se, and specifically scholarship on Palestine and Israel, which is the primary target of the witch-hunters.
Full: counterpunch.org

It has got a sad record of disease, brutality and corruption, and fewer inhabitants than Sheffield. But Equatorial Guinea is one of the key targets of the west’s new “scramble for Africa”. So much so that a gang of British businessmen, including Sir Mark Thatcher, were accused last year of financing an armed coup to get their hands on its wealth.
This mini country located under the armpit of the West African coast has immense quantities of oil; it is currently exporting $4.5bn worth (about £2.5bn) a year. Yet such an astonishing bonanza appears to have done most of the country’s citizens no good. The IMF reported bluntly in May: “Unfortunately, this wealth has not yet led to measurable improvements in living conditions.”

Who then, is getting the benefit? One of the answers can be found in Equatorial Guinea’s recent big British deal.
BG Plc, formerly British Gas, takes full-page prestige advertisements in New Statesman, the Labour magazine, to boast that it intends “to play an important role in securing Britain’s energy supply”.

The company says it hopes to make considerable profits on what is being touted as the fuel of the future. It is buying up nearly 60m tonnes of liquefied natural gas – the entire planned output for 17 years of Equatorial Guinea’s new LNG plant – an amount that is worth about $15bn at today’s prices.

The company will not disclose what it will be paying for the gas, despite having signed up to the Blair government’s idealistic scheme, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, under which companies and governments are urged to come clean about oil payments.
Full: guardian.co.uk

A team of scientists at the University of Utah has proposed that the unusual pattern of genetic diseases seen among Jews of central or northern European origin, or Ashkenazim, is the result of natural selection for enhanced intellectual ability.

The selective force was the restriction of Ashkenazim in medieval Europe to occupations that required more than usual mental agility, the researchers say in a paper that has been accepted by the Journal of Biosocial Science, published by Cambridge University Press in England.

The hypothesis advanced by the Utah researchers has drawn a mixed reaction among scientists, some of whom dismissed it as extremely implausible, while others said they had made an interesting case, although one liable to raise many hackles.

“It would be hard to overstate how politically incorrect this paper is,” said Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard, noting that it argues for an inherited difference in intelligence between groups. Still, he said, “it’s certainly a thorough and well-argued paper, not one that can easily be dismissed outright.”

“Absolutely anything in human biology that is interesting is going to be controversial,” said one of the report’s authors, Dr. Henry Harpending, an anthropologist and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

He and two colleagues at the University of Utah, Gregory Cochran and Jason Hardy, see the pattern of genetic disease among the Ashkenazi Jewish population as reminiscent of blood disorders like sickle cell anemia that occur in populations exposed to malaria, a disease that is only 5,000 years old.

In both cases, the Utah researchers argue, evolution has had to counter a sudden threat by favoring any mutation that protected against it, whatever the side effects. Ashkenazic diseases like Tay-Sachs, they say, are a side effect of genes that promote intelligence.

The explanation that the Ashkenazic disease genes must have some hidden value has long been accepted by other researchers, but no one could find a convincing infectious disease or other threat to which the Ashkenazic genetic ailments might confer protection.

A second suggestion, wrote Dr. Jared Diamond of the University of California, Los Angeles, in a 1994 article, “is selection in Jews for the intelligence putatively required to survive recurrent persecution, and also to make a living by commerce, because Jews were barred from the agricultural jobs available to the non-Jewish population.”
Full: nytimes.com

Well this raises my ‘hackels’ alright. Let’s see people who work the land are not as intelligent as people who ‘make a living by commerce?’ If persecution does indeed increase selection pressure for intellectual ability then dark skinned Africans win that one hands down. Funny that it’s the white Jews who are deemed superior. Oh I could go on and on about Utah and The New York Times and Jared Diamond and co-opted science and Western intellectual bankruptcy and…

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Syria test-fired three Scud missiles last week, including one that broke up over Turkey, senior Israeli security officials said on Friday.

The officials, citing intelligence data, said the missiles, using North Korean technology and designed to carry chemical warheads, were fired last Friday from northern Syria in the first such tests by Israel’s arch-foe since 2001.

In New York, Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom said the Syrian tests were “very dangerous.”

Speaking after talks with United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, he said: “This arms race in our region is something that we can’t accept.”

There was no comment from Damascus.

Israeli security officials said one of the missiles was fired by Syria southwest toward the Mediterranean and it disintegrated over the Turkish province of Hatay, shedding debris over two villages.

The New York Times, which first reported Israel’s allegations, quoted the Turkish ambassador in Washington, Osman Faruk Logoglu, as confirming that “during a (Syrian) military exercise, there was a technical mishap.”

“The Syrian government was sorry about this,” Logoglu said, adding that there were no casualties in the May 27 incident.

According to Israeli officials, the missiles were a Scud B, with a range of about 200 km (120 miles), and two Scud Ds, with a range of about 700 km (420 miles).

The officials said that the Jewish state had long monitored Syria’s missile program and saw nothing particularly surprising in the latest tests.

Shalom said Iran, Israel’s arch foe, was also developing long range missiles. Earlier this week, Iran said it had upgraded its Shahab-3 missile, already capable of hitting Israel, with solid fuel which could increase its range and accuracy.

“The whole international community should focus on trying to prevent the Syrians, the Iranians — and maybe some other countries that will follow them a short time after — from trying to develop those missiles,” Shalom said.

“They will escalate the situation in the Middle East.”
Full: nytimes.com

Look who’s talking. And boys, there can only be one ‘arch foe,’ though repeating it twice is good for effect. Throwing in North Korea was nice too.

SINGAPORE, June 3 – Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, arriving here today for a conference on Asian security, drew a sharp distinction between two of the region’s major powers, predicting that ties with India would strengthen while urging China to let political freedom grow there along with its economy.

“It would be a shame for the people of China if their government did not provide the opportunities that freer economic and political systems permit,” he said, describing a tension “between the nature of their political system and the nature of their economic system.”

Mr. Rumsfeld, in comments aboard his plane enroute to Singapore, declined to be drawn into a discussion of North Korea’s nuclear program, except to say that the Bush administration is re-examining its policy.

“It’s a policy that we’re reviewing, as we do understandably from time to time, as North Korea makes statements or makes announcements or does or doesn’t get involved in six-party talks,” he said. Those talks, aimed at ending North Korea’s nuclear program, have been in limbo for the past year.

The threat that North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs pose to the region is expected to be a focus of the annual conference, which the defense secretary will address Saturday morning.

In a brief survey of the region before landing here, Mr. Rumsfeld said the United States has “an excellent relationship with India,” but noted that China is a major purchaser of weapons on the international arms market, in particular from Russia.
Full: nytimes.com

Playing India against Russia and China. The new U.S. pipeline surrounded by four nuclear states.

by Binay Kumar
…The problem is that the British are past masters of the colonial game. And their approach to the ‘new scramble for Africa’ is camouflaged in heart-wrenching humanistic bravado. No such luck for the novices of neo-imperialism in America.

But American has not been sleeping on it. According to the highly-respected Le Monde, “The United States is turning its diplomatic and military attention to Africa, not just to the continent’s oil and natural gas supplies (although these represent an important future contribution to US energy supplies) but to its metal and industrial diamond resources. It is quietly establishing military training and equipment links with a number of countries to secure future supply lines.

The US political and military interest in Africa has increased significantly in recent years. That is clear from Secretary of State Colin Powell’s visit to Gabon and Angola in September 2002 (he spent just one hour in each) and from President George Bush’s tour of Senegal, Nigeria, Botswana, Uganda and South Africa in July 2003.”

The US military involvement in the African continent was next to nothing in the cold war years. Africa was the ‘back of beyond’, an expression so commonly used by Americans. No more; while Iraq, Iran and North Korea have hogged headlines last two years, Washington has deftly moved on several initiatives which can secure for them uninterrupted supplies of raw materials from Africa: manganese (for steel production), cobalt and chrome vital for alloys (particularly in aeronautics), vanadium, gold, antimony, fluorspar and germanium – and for industrial diamonds. And the insatiable US thirst for oil necessarily makes countries like Angola and Nigeria highly attractive for the likes of Chevron and Shell.

Can you not therefore genuinely ask if the Good Samaritan Sir Bob [Geldof] is unwittingly playing into the hands of the neo-imperialists? To quote Ms Clare Short, a long-time colleague of Tony Blair who quit his Cabinet in the wake of the Iraq war, “Debt relief and aid alone without really strong action to end conflict, arms supply, start building order, the basic institutions of a state, leave the poor outside the whole development system”.
Full: hindustantimes