Israel orders killing of Hamas politicians

November 20th, 2006 § 0 comments § permalink

“The Gaza Strip is about to turn into the biggest terrorist compound on earth,” Yuval Diskin, the head of the Israeli internal security service, warned a parliamentary committee last week. “We have no choice but to consider a massive military operation there.”

Yesterday, deputy prime minister Avigdor Lieberman called for the assassination of Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders. “They have to disappear, go to paradise, all of them,” he said.
Link

Never mind why the occupation is being resisted, but then what else can be expected from Lieberman.

Via a comment here

Labels: ,

Have you got a licence for that?

November 19th, 2006 § 0 comments § permalink

The present Mrs -O is a little fed up of only five channels, not enough X-Factor and Eastenders apparently, and so I was swiftly dispatched to a well known store to get one of these new-fangled freeview boxes.

I got to the store, and Mrs -O knowing me better than I know myself, I already knew what I was going to buy and so went straight to the till.
The girl on the till took the product number and then looked at me through eyes framed with an inch wide border eyeliner and asked “Can I have your name please?”.
When I gave her the response she was expecting, she followed up with “and your postcode…”.
It was only when I was checking that the till had brought up my correct address that I thought ‘Why?’.
So I asked.
I think the answer to this simple question had already been provided to the girl, but had probably got distorted passing through all the hairspray on the way to her ears, and so came out as “er, for the telly company, we have to do it for DVD players an stuff.”
I presumed at the time she meant the TV licencing Agency, and followed with “would you be allowed to sell it to me if I refuse?”
This flummoxed her and said so, so I left it at that and got home and fitted my new set top box.
All that’s needed now is some decent telly programmes.

Any way, the point is, more information about you, what you are buying and such is being collected. More surveillance.

I think I might try to find out some answers.

Labels: , Privacy

Technology+Government=???

November 17th, 2006 § 0 comments § permalink

This story in Technology section of the Guardian Unlimited regarding the new biometric passports reveals that secure, hard to defraud biometric ID cards/passports are either a lot harder to make or, and I suspect this may be the case, the government has not thought it through properly.

…the UK had just begun to issue new, ultra-secure passports, incorporating tiny microchips to store the holder’s details and a digital description of their physical features (known in the jargon as biometrics). These, the argument went, would make identity theft much more difficult and pave the way for the government’s proposed ID cards in 2008 or 2009.

Today, some three million such passports have been issued, and they don’t look so secure. I am sitting with my scary computer man and we have just sucked out all the supposedly secure data and biometric information from three new passports and displayed it all on a laptop computer.

The UK Identity and Passport Service website says the new documents are protected by “an advanced digital encryption technique”. So how come we have the information? What could criminals or terrorists do with it? And what could it mean for the passports and the ID cards that are meant to follow?

And we’re expected to trust these jokers with private, confidential medical information on one big database…?

Define Optimism.

November 16th, 2006 § 0 comments § permalink

Optimism. Oxford defines it as: Hopefulness and confidence about the future or success of something.
But it could just as easily be demonstrated as 15th November. Palestine Independance day.
I didn’t know Palestine had an Independance day. I didn’t know Palestine was independant.
Optimistic, hopeful, yeah. that sound’s right. The Declaration of Independance sounds good too, saying all the right things about democracy and protecting minorities and freedoms.

But the reality is always, and where Palestine is concerned usually depressingly different.


A local Falafel shop owner in Beit Jala town, near Bethlehem, Khaled Al Shatla, was joking with the people on Tuesday, saying “Tomorrow is November 15 — our independence day. Independence!! It has been eighteen years since the declaration, and the people are still suffering, and the occupation continues its massacres against them”.

Al Shatla said that independence has moral and political importance for the Palestinians, who are determined to achieve liberation and freedom, but added that the people should not overestimate this day.

“We aren’t independent yet, we are still living under occupation, we should not believe that we are independent”, he added, “real independence is still far away”

Comments

Labels: Palestine

OJ Simpson – Sicko of the Week

November 15th, 2006 § 0 comments § permalink

Via Truthdig:

Truthdig is sickened by the former football star and actor, whose new book has a working title of “If I Did It, Here’s How It Happened.”

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If Amercans Knew…

November 15th, 2006 § 0 comments § permalink

Comments

Labels: , Palestine, USA

Designer drug to blame for disintegrating euro notes

November 14th, 2006 § 0 comments § permalink

German police have claimed that the corrosive designer drug known as “crystal meth” was responsible for hundreds of self-destructing euro notes which have been mysteriously disintegrating in the hands of baffled shoppers and bank clerks since early last summer.

More than 1,700 crumbling €50 and €20 notes have surfaced in at least 17 German towns and cities since June this year, prompting fears of a potential health risk and speculation about a possible blackmail attempt.

The crumbing note mystery, which causes large holes to appear in euro notes as soon as they are touched, prompted a nationwide investigation by police and the German Bundesbank, which has been obliged to take back hundreds of damaged €50 and €20 notes. Yet nobody blamed drug users for the problem.

Police and the German Bundesbank said they had almost certainly solved the mystery. The answer is apparently the designer drug crystal methamphetamine. Taken through the nose, the drug is rapidly replacing cocaine at parties and on the German club scene. Rainer Wenzel, a police forensic scientist who has been given the job of solving the bank-note mystery, said yesterday that crystal meth addicts habitually used a €50 or a €20 note to portion out and snort the drug because the notes had the right proportions.

“When a contaminated note comes into contact with human sweat, an aggressive acid is produced,” he said. “If the note is in a wallet with a wad of other notes, the corrosion will spread to all of them.”

Police said that although crystal meth had originated in the United States, where it has become the scourge of rural America, large quantities of the highly addictive and destructive drug were coming into Germany from Poland and the Balkans, where crystal methamphetamine was being refined and mixed with corrosive sulphates in the process.

Drug users in Europe should be wary: if the example of the US is anything to go by, crystal meth can prove lethal to rural communities not usually associated with chronic drug abuse. They should be checked into a rehab like the miami drug rehab.

Much more so than cocaine, crack, heroin or marijuana, small-town USA has steadily fallen prey to crystal meth, the effects of which are described by some as “having 10 orgasms at once”.

Originally produced using over-the-counter medication containing ephedrine bought from local chemists, use of the drug has steadily increased over the past few years.

Although disintegrating €50 and €20 notes are a new phenomenon, the discovery of drug traces on bank notes has become routine. Three years ago German researchers conducted an exhaustive examination of 600 euro notes. They found that nine out of 10 banknotes carried clearly measurable amounts of cocaine and concluded that they could contaminate notes in bank cash-counting machines.

Professor Fritz Soergel of the Nuremberg Institute for Pharmaceutical Research, which carried out the study, started examining euro notes shortly after the introduction of the new currency in January 2002. Back then, only two out of 70 notes were found to carry traces of cocaine.

He said that his findings showed there was a clear correlation between the contaminated notes and levels of recorded cocaine use in the 12 countries of the euro currency zone. “Much less cocaine was found on banknotes from countries where there is less cocaine usage, such as France, Finland and Greece,” he said.

The worst offenders were the Spanish. Professor Soergel said he and his team of researchers were “almost knocked flat” by the results of a study conducted in Barcelona. “The concentrations of cocaine on Spanish notes were almost a hundred times that of what we recorded in Germany,” he said.

German police have claimed that the corrosive designer drug known as “crystal meth” was responsible for hundreds of self-destructing euro notes which have been mysteriously disintegrating in the hands of baffled shoppers and bank clerks since early last summer.

That’s new, a drug that makes money disappear while it’s still in your wallet.

Labels: Drugs

Threatened In Your own Land

November 14th, 2006 § 0 comments § permalink

10 November 2006 – “Your heads will be on the stones if you don’t leave this place”, threatened an Israeli settler from illegal outpost Havot Ma’on (Hill 833), to members of Christian Peacemaker Teams in the Palestinian village of At-Tuwani. Captured on video, but ignored by district Israeli police, the threat is part and parcel of daily life for Palestinians – and the reason for the continuous presence of international human rights workers here since 2004. A few days later, during a “routine check”, I witness my neighbor being physically abused by Israeli soldiers. Such abuse often ceases when soldiers become aware that internationals are present, filming their actions.

Ancient At-Tuwani is located in the South Hebron Hills of the West Bank, home to some one thousand Palestinians who reside in natural caves, living off the land and grazing their flocks of goats and sheep. The topography is harsh; there is no running water or electricity. Under complete Israeli control in “Area C,” many South Hebron residents have been expelled and had their homes and property destroyed. Israeli settlers have attacked villagers and human rights workers, and destroyed olive trees. Villagers’ livestock and one water cistern have been poisoned, an act UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) Director Robert Kennedy calls a form of chemical warfare.

link

Is it any wonder that the Palestinians feel they have to take up arms?
Being threatened everyday, in your own land by people that have the army to back them up. Constantly having to resist pushing back, saying, shouting ‘No, this land is not yours’ for fear of yours and your loved ones lives being turned upside down, torn apart, crushed in to the dirt they want you to leave.
All in the name of security. Not your security, in your land. They need your land to make them secure, but it doesn’t make anyone secure. Not you. Not your neighbours.
Not them.
And so the cycle continues.

Labels: Israel, Palestine

How Israel put Gaza civilians in firing line

November 12th, 2006 § 0 comments § permalink

The most moral army in the world.
Do not target civilians.
Etcetera etcetera.

From the Observer:

Israeli military commanders drastically reduced the ‘safety’ margins that separate artillery targets from the built-up civilian areas of Gaza earlier this year, despite being warned that the new policy risked increasing Palestinian civilian deaths and injuries, The Observer can reveal.

The warning, delivered in Israel’s high court by six human rights groups, came after the Israeli Defence Force reduced the so-called ‘safety range’ in Gaza from a 300-metre separation from built-up areas to just 100 metres – within the kill radius of its 155mm high-explosive shells, generally regarded as being between 50 and 150 metres.
[…]
The revelation follows reports that the shelling of Gaza has continued despite the recent recognition by senior Israeli military officers, including the head of the IDF’s Southern Command, that indirect artillery fire (ie, firing without seeing the target) was largely pointless in countering Palestinian rocket fire
[…]
As more details of the Beit Hanoun incident have emerged, including Israel’s admission that the shells that killed the family were in response to the firing of Qassam rockets, probably from a car driven into the area by militants the previous day, they have raised more questions than they have answered.

I’ll just repeat that:

from a car driven into the area by militants the previous day

!!!
Come on Israel. Either cut the crap, or at last make an effort to look like you give a toss about innocent civilians.

And to show solidarity with their attack dog the USA has vetoed a UN SC resolution condemning the Beit Hanoun atrocity.

Labels: , , Politix, USA

November 11th, 2006 § 0 comments § permalink

Labels: War

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