A vast expanse of western Sibera is undergoing an unprecedented thaw that could dramatically increase the rate of global warming, climate scientists warn today.

Researchers who have recently returned from the region found that an area of permafrost spanning a million square kilometres – the size of France and Germany combined – has started to melt for the first time since it formed 11,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age.

The area, which covers the entire sub-Arctic region of western Siberia, is the world’s largest frozen peat bog and scientists fear that as it thaws, it will release billions of tonnes of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere.
It is a scenario climate scientists have feared since first identifying “tipping points” – delicate thresholds where a slight rise in the Earth’s temperature can cause a dramatic change in the environment that itself triggers a far greater increase in global temperatures.
Full: guardian.co.uk

Donald Rumsfeld, the US secretary of defence, warned Iran this week about the extent of smuggling. The US has been protesting for the past two years over alleged Iranian meddling in Iraq. Mr Rumsfeld told a Pentagon briefing that the smuggling was “a problem” for the Iraqi government. “It’s a problem for the coalition forces. It’s a problem for the international community, and ultimately, it’s a problem for Iran,” he said.

Disclosure of the smuggling came hours after four American soldiers were killed and six were wounded as a patrol was attacked near Baiji, 112 miles north of Baghdad, late on Tuesday. A bomb wrecked two Humvees and a bigger armoured vehicle.

Iran has repeatedly denied any involvement in the insurgency or party politics in Iraq.

A senior British official disclosed yesterday details of the incident two weeks ago when a group crossing from Iran was intercepted near Maysan, which is in the British controlled sector of Iraq. Iraqi security forces opened fire and the smugglers fled back to Iran leaving their cache of timers, detonators and other bomb-making equipment.

The British official said he did not know the identity of the group or those behind it but said it had the “fingerprints” of either Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, controlled by the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, or the Lebanese based Hizbullah which Tehran backs. The incident came against a backdrop of tension between Iran and the west over allegations that Tehran is intent on securing a nuclear-weapons capability.

The US has had no diplomatic relationship with Iran since 1980 and has branded it part of the “axis of evil”. But Britain usually opts for a less confrontational approach than the US. The British official said he thought such smuggling from Iran was infrequent and trivial compared with the weapons going into Iraq from Syria.
Full: guardian.co.uk

It’s nauseating to sit and watch the ground being prepared for World War III…

An outbreak of flu in rural south-east Asia could spread around the globe in three months and infect half the world’s population within a year, unless strict measures to contain it are introduced, scientists said yesterday.

The warning comes from researchers who used computer models to investigate what would happen if the avian flu virus, which is currently rife among poultry in areas of China, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam, mutated into a form that spread easily among humans.

Scientists believe it is only a matter of time before the virus, known as H5N1, mutates to become more infectious to humans, possibly by swapping genes with the human flu virus.

“This is the event we’re all scared might happen at any time,” said Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London and the leading author of the study. “We’d be faced with an event worse than the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.”
Full: guardian.co.uk

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) is a wide range of specific rights and protection measures to protect children worldwide. It is also the most ratified international human rights treaty ever. It strictly prohibits the abuse and torture of children. In most Western countries, including the US, the abuse of children is a criminal offensive. However, this is not the case when the crimes are committed against Iraqi children by Western forces. It is part of the destructive policy brought into Iraq by the US Occupation of the country.

Contrary to Western politicians, Western media and Western “progressives” who welcomed the illegal war of aggression against Iraq, the plight of Iraqi children under Occupation is worsening. On all levels – human rights abuse, healthcare, medical, educational, and psychological – the Iraqi children are enduring immense hardship and suffering. It is a cover-up of crimes against humanity.

A recent investigation by Neil Mackay of the Sunday Herald, (01/08/05) has revealed that US-British forces are holding more than 100 children in jails such as Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca in the south. Witnesses claim that the detainees – some as young as 10 – are also being subjected to rape and torture. The investigation is based on classified UNICEF report written in June titled Children in Conflict with the Law or With Coalition Forces and on reports from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Many Iraqi children were detained indefinitely detaining some children without access to their family or to lawyers.

The UNICEF report has not been released, because UNICEF is no longer in the humanitarian business of criticising US power and its criminal practices of torture. UNICEF current Executive Director Ann M. Veneman, a member of the Bush cabal and former US secretary of Agriculture, is not likely to offend the Bush administration by releasing the report.

The Sunday Herald noted that a section of the report reads: ‘Information on the number, age, gender and conditions of incarceration is limited. In Basra and Karbala children arrested for alleged activities targeting the occupying forces are reported to be routinely transferred to an internee facility in Um Qasr. The categorisation of these children as ‘internees’ is worrying since it implies indefinite holding without contact with family, expectation of trial or due process’. Um Qasr is a port city on Iraq’s southern border and isolated from the other centres. Further, Reports from Iraq accuse the US Marines of kidnapping children and hold them as hostages.
Full:globalresearch.ca

…Specialist Garrovillas is among 20,000 military service members who have become American citizens since July 2002, many of whom applied under a fast-track process approved by President Bush in 2003 and enacted in October 2004. Under the new rules, people in the military can become citizens without paying the customary $320 application fee or having to be in the United States for an interview with immigration officials and naturalization proceedings.

The president also made thousands of service members immediately eligible for citizenship by not requiring them to meet a minimum residency threshold, as civilians applying to be citizens must do, although they must still be legal residents of the United States.

The new citizenship laws have offered a powerful tool to recruiters at a time when the military is struggling to meet its monthly enlistment quotas. The armed forces now have at least 27,000 members who do not have United States citizenship.
Full: nytimes.com

WASHINGTON — Anticipating a new burst of insurgent violence, the Pentagon plans to expand the U.S. force in Iraq to improve security for a planned October referendum and a December election.

Although much public attention has been focused recently on the prospect of reducing U.S. forces next spring and summer, defense officials foresee the likelihood of first increasing troop levels.
Full: washingtonpost.com

Atlanta (CNSNews.com) – A featured speaker at Saturday’s civil rights march in Atlanta said the Bush administration and Republican Party leaders are “thieves” who “need to be locked up” for stealing the past two presidential elections and presiding over federal budget deficits and the war in Iraq.

“They all need to be locked up because they are all criminals and they are all thieves,” said Judge Greg Mathis, the star of the syndicated television program “The Judge Mathis Show.”

Mathis made his remarks to an enthusiastic crowd assembled in Atlanta to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Participants are launching a two-year campaign to extend and strengthen key aspects of the act when it expires in 2007.

“It is indeed criminal to steal an election and within two years run up a federal deficit of half-a-trillion dollars, send our young people over to Iraq to die for an unjust war. What they are doing is criminal,” Mathis said to loud cheers.

The march was sponsored by the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition and included leaders from the National Urban League, The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the NAACP, and the AFL-CIO.

Entertainer/activist Harry Belafonte also used charged rhetoric during the march when he referred to black members of the Bush administration as “black tyrants.”

Mathis, whose speech drew the largest and most raucous reception from the crowd, also chastised the Supreme Court for its role in the 2000 presidential recount.

“[The] Supreme Court was an accomplice to the biggest election crime in history in 2000. And I call it a crime because indeed that is exactly what it was,” he said to applause.

The Bush administration was equated with past policies of slavery and segregation and labeled “the enemy of our (black America’s) progress” by Mathis.

“They shot and missed when they enslaved, segregated and oppressed our people. They shot and missed when they stole the past two presidential elections. They shot and missed when they denied our right to vote,” Mathis said.

An extension and strengthening of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is imperative to ensure black Americans the right to vote, according to Mathis. “The enemy of democracy continues to attack voting rights here, while they try to fight for democracy in Iraq,” he said.

‘Intimidation and discrepancies’Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California appeared at the march and noted that minorities may not have had full voting rights in the last two presidential elections.

“Some changes have to be made so we don’t have a repeat of 2000 and 2004 where there was intimidation and discrepancies at the polls,” Pelosi told Cybercast News Service during the voting rights march.

“In the state of Ohio, where they had fewer voting booths and long lines in minority neighborhoods and no lines and many voting booths in white neighborhoods, that the balance is not what it should have been,” she added.

U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) echoed the accusation of many at the march that Bush was an illegitimate president.

“The last two elections were stolen. They were stolen and so we will not rest until we reclaim our democracy and this is what today is all about,” Lee told the crowd gathered.
Full: crosswalk.com

The price of oil rose to its highest level for more than 22 years after warnings of imminent terror attacks against Westerners in Saudi Arabia.

…The oil market is particularly sensitive to bad news from Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest supplier of the commodity, hence the reaction to yesterday’s warning. The Foreign Office says there were “credible reports” that terrorists were in the “final stages” of planning attacks against Westerners in Saudi Arabia.

…News that Opec’s second-largest producer, Iran, had resumed its nuclear work, despite warnings from the European Union of possible United Nations sanctions, also weighed on markets yesterday.
Full: independent.co.uk

Ah yes the sensitive and civic-minded oil giants. looking out for the welfare of us all…

“I am utterly against the punishing of innocent people for the crimes of the guilty, whether it is done on the underground of London or the streets of Falluja by George Bush’s air force”. George Galloway MP

George Galloway is quite a guy.

His trip to the Middle East is causing a ruckus back in London, where his criticism of Bush and Blair is appearing like a spread-sheet on the front-page of the tabloids.

Congrats, George; those two deserve a good lambasting.

Yesterday he fired-off another barrage, landing a direct hit on Prime Minister Milquetoast and his Texas-twin. He said, “There’s far more blood on the hands of George Bush and Tony Blair than there is on the hands of the murderers who killed those people in London.”

Ka-boom! Right on target.

Galloway was stellar; praising the Iraqi resistance as “martyrs” and telling them that they “are not just defending Iraq, but defending the whole world against American hegemony.”

Bulls-eye.

Galloway’s comments drew attention to the young men who are swarming to Iraq to fight what he calls the “foreign invaders”. They’re normally disparaged by the pro-war crowd in the press like Tom Friedman who calls them a “jihadist death-cult”

What rubbish. Friedman should skip the name-calling and try to figure out who these guys really are. Men don’t simply throw away their lives for no reason. It is the injustice of the American occupation that has the swollen the ranks of the Iraqi resistance.

Galloway knows that and so does Friedman when he’s not shoveling manure into the “paper of record”.
Full: informationclearinghouse.info

NEVE DEKALIM, Gaza Strip – When children in the Israeli settlements of Gaza play their newest game, “Cops and Jews,” nobody volunteers to be the police officer.

Not far away, across barbed-wire fences and high walls, children in Palestinian towns and refugee camps take turns playing roles in a game called “Martyrs and Soldiers.”

Rivka Kirshenzaft, 11, said the rules for “Cops and Jews” are simple.

“Everyone goes to his spot, which is considered his home, and then the police come in and yell ‘Get out!’ and take the Jews to jail,” she said, tossing her bobbed, strawberry-blond hair. “The Jews say, ‘What? Are we criminals?’ Then it all ends and it’s time to go back to school.”

Suzan Qouta, 9, plays “Martyrs and Soldiers” with her friends in Gaza City.

“I explode myself and then I became a martyr,” she said. “Then I come to life again and throw blocks, which I shoot as bullets toward the soldiers and Sharon,” referring to Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister.

Ahead of Israel’s planned mid-August withdrawal of the nearly 9,000 settlers in Gaza, children caught in the cross-fire of warring adults are trying to make sense of the confusion and trauma with games.

For the Israeli children, the violence of drive-by shootings and mortar attacks has been joined by a new threat – that of a government-ordered eviction from their homes. Among their Palestinian counterparts, for whom tanks and attack helicopters are part of the landscape of childhood, there is a new enthusiasm for the departure of the settlers and the soldiers who protect them.

Ibrahim Nassar, 11, who lives with his mother and four younger siblings in the Deir el Balah refugee camp, has covered the walls of the living room in their two-room apartment with crayon drawings of rocket launchers and automatic rifles.

“This is what they fire at the Israelis in the settlements,” he said matter-of-factly. Because of these attacks, he said, “The Israelis will leave.”

His younger brothers, Ahmed, 5 and Ismail, 7, tend to stutter and do not like leaving the house. Their mother, Taghreed Nassar, said the two boys often wet their beds at night and cry out in the dark. Children are known for their resilience, even in the face of trauma, but when the threat of violence is continuing, as it often is in Gaza, it can be difficult for them to bounce back, say both Israeli and Palestinian child psychologists.
Full: nytimes.com