Patrick Dodd: Music for Film

January 04, 2011 "Raw Story" --  A psychologists' group has sent a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates asking him to "rectify the inhumane, harmful, and counterproductive treatment" of the Army private accused of being WikiLeaks' source for the US State Department cables.

betraying the principles upon which America was founded, endangering your nation, and displaying a distinctly "unamerican" subservience to unaccountable authority.

SYDNEY -- Japanese whalers shot water cannons at anti-whaling activists on Saturday, the conservationist group's founder claimed, hours after the activists tracked down the hunting fleet in the remote and icy seas off Antarctica.

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is chasing the fleet in the hopes of interrupting Japan's annual whale hunt, which kills up to 1,000 whales a year. The two sides have clashed violently in the past, including last year, when a Sea Shepherd boat was sunk after its bow was sheared off in a collision with a whaling ship.

On Saturday, Sea Shepherd founder Paul Watson was talking to The Associated Press by telephone from his ship when he said the whalers suddenly began blasting one of his group's inflatable boats with a water cannon.

“They just turned their cannons on our Zodiac,” Watson told The AP. “Right at this moment.”

New Zealand-based Glenn Inwood, spokesman for Japan's Tokyo-based Institute of Cetacean Research, which sponsors the whale hunt, said he had no comment.

Every year, Japan and Sea Shepherd make claims of aggression against each other, but the accounts are generally impossible to verify. Their skirmishes take place in an extremely remote part of the ocean off Antarctica.

The Japanese are allowed to harvest a quota of whales under a ruling by the International Whaling Commission, as long as the mammals are caught for research and not commercial purposes. Whale meat not used for study is sold for consumption in Japan, which critics say is the real reason for the hunts. Each hunting season runs from about December through February.

Japan's whaling fleet set out for Antarctic waters in December. Sea Shepherd has been searching for them since, and spotted the first whaling vessel on Friday, Watson said. By Saturday, the group had tracked down three of the fleet's ships in an area about 3,200 km (1,700 nautical miles) southeast of New Zealand, he said.

“We got them before they started whaling and now that we're on them, we're hoping to make sure they don't kill any whales for this season,” Watson said.

 

Men view a Baghdad display that warns that women who don't wear the hijab, or traditional Muslim head covering, will be punished in the afterlife. The display, which depicts women engulfed in flames, was erected by Islamist leaders as part of what many women see as a campaign to limit their role in public life. | Sahar Issa / MCT

By Shashank Bengali and Sahar Issa | McClatchy Newspapers

BAGHDAD — When Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki introduced what he called a national partnership government two weeks ago, he included allies and adversaries, Arabs and Kurds, Shiite Muslims and Sunnis. One group, however, was woefully underrepresented.

Only one woman was named to Maliki's 42-member cabinet, sparking an outcry in a country that once was a beacon for women's rights in the Arab world and adding to an ongoing struggle over the identity of the new Iraq.

Whether this fledgling nation becomes a liberal democracy or an Islamist-led patriarchy might well be judged by the place it affords its women.

Nearly eight years after American-led forces toppled Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, Iraq's record is decidedly mixed.

Maliki's last cabinet included four women, and since 2005 the Iraqi constitution has set aside one-quarter of legislative seats for females. Of 325 lawmakers elected in March, 82 were women, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union.

Yet analysts said their political contributions so far have been limited, and activists and female lawmakers seized on their exclusion from the new cabinet as a sign of women's continued struggle to find a place in Iraqi public life.

"It's a mockery," said Hanaa Edwar, a founder of the Iraqi al Amal Association, a leading women's rights group. "Especially when you take into consideration that this is a retreat from the previous cabinet…it's really a slap in the face for all of us."

The lone woman in the cabinet, Bushra Hussein, was named a minister of state, a relatively low position without a portfolio or budget. Another female lawmaker, Vyan Dakheel, told McClatchy that she was offered the post of minister of state for women's affairs but turned it down because that ministry was "just a show…without real power to serve women"; it's now being filled temporarily by a man.

After Maliki announced his lineup, Alaa Talabani, a female lawmaker from the northern Kurdistan region, delivered a rousing condemnation of the selection process to a packed legislative chamber.

"The Iraqi women feel today, more than any other day, that democracy in Iraq has been slaughtered by discrimination, just as it was slaughtered by sectarianism before," Talabani said, her voice quaking with emotion.

Maliki returned to the lectern somewhat red-faced and said, "I had hoped that this cabinet would have more women than the last." He demanded that party leaders propose female candidates for the handful of vacancies remaining in the cabinet.

The U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, Jim Jeffrey, said of the one-sided list: "It surprised us."

Yet many believe that nominating women to cabinet posts — which control the all-powerful government ministries and their massive budgets _ simply hadn't occurred to the male-dominated ranks of party leaders.

For decades, Iraq led the region in promoting women's rights, beginning in 1959 with the passage of an extremely progressive civil liberties law and the appointment of the first female minister in the Arab world. Even Saddam was a friend to women in the 1970s and 1980s, passing strong legislation against sexual harassment and bringing huge numbers of women into the workforce as part of a drive to industrialize Iraq.

Now, however, Iraqi women are finding their hard-won freedoms limited by a society increasingly governed by religious conservatives. Many Iraqis say that politicians at the local and provincial levels, whether they hail from Islamist parties or merely take cues from them, are putting pressure on women to circumscribe their public role.

In Wasit, a mostly Shiite Muslim province southeast of Baghdad, women hold nine of 28 seats on the provincial council. Earlier this year, one was in a car accident and had to be carried to safety by her bodyguards, an incident that could have been construed as indecent.

Afterward, the female council members asked to employ a male member of each of their families to serve as a "mahram," or chaperone, when they traveled on public business "to avoid embarrassment," said Zaineb Raheem Abeed, a council member.

"She was pulled, pushed, lifted and dragged by men who do not have any relation to her," Abeed said of the lawmaker in the accident. "This is very embarrassing and not acceptable in our society, as you know."

Last month in Baghdad, a headmaster of a boys-only high school told parents that the school was struggling to field teachers for Arabic, math and biology classes because of pressures from the Baghdad provincial council, which is dominated by members of Maliki's Shiite Islamist Dawa party.

The headmaster, whose name is being withheld to spare him from recriminations, said that council officials were opposed to women being alone in classrooms with teenage boys.

"Some of our most successful teachers are women," the headmaster told a parent-teacher meeting. "If they have no objection teaching boys of this age group, I don't see why they should be discouraged."

A member of the Baghdad council, Mohammed al Rubeiy, said that while such policies weren't explicit, "there are high-ranking people who are pushing in that direction."

"If Iraq were to move on the same trajectory that it's currently on…then, yes, it is moving toward a situation in which freedoms will become more limited," Rubeiy said.

"But Iraqi society by its very nature has both people like Hanaa Edwar and Islamists. And it is my belief that Iraq will never be ruled completely by Islamists."

The tension between the two sides bubbled over last month in Kadhmiyah, a section of northern Baghdad, where local Islamist leaders erected a provocative display outside a major Shiite shrine. It shows four mannequins wearing the hijab, the traditional Muslim head covering for women, while behind four mannequins with uncovered heads are laced with burns, shackled in chains and have red strands lapping at their feet to simulate a fiery afterlife.

The message to women is clear: Dress modestly, or burn in hell.

"It's a reminder that there is a heavenly reward for those who are committed to the instructions of the Koran," the Muslim holy book, said Hazim al Araji, the head of the social committee for the hard-line Shiite cleric Muqtada al Sadr's political organization, which helped sponsor the display. "And there is a punishment for those who don't."

Almost immediately, a rival campaign sponsored by secularists erected signs urging Iraqis not to impose the hijab, some carrying the message: "Baghdad Won't Become Kandahar," a reference to the capital of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

"They want to fight and punish Islam with their ideas, which are far from the beliefs of Iraq and the Iraqis," Araji said. "What they are selling will never find a market here."

Edwar, whose organization opposed the hijab campaign, said that Sadrists and their allies "want to put the whole Iraqi state under the cover of religion." It's part of a larger fight over the future of Iraq, she said, but for now she's focused on lobbying political leaders to nominate women for the cabinet vacancies.

"This is a unique opportunity for us," Edwar said. "If we don't use it we will lose a lot of our achievements."

(Issa is a McClatchy special correspondent.)

The UK-built solar-powered Zephyr aeroplane has been confirmed as a record-breaker following its non-stop two-week flight earlier this year.

The right to liberty is one of the foundation rights of a free people. The idea that any US President can bypass Congress and bypass the courts by issuing an executive order setting up a new legal system for indefinite detention of people should rightfully scare the hell out of the American people.

Scientists raise hopes for a large-scale renewable source of liquid fuel with a simple reactor that mimics plants

A Good Interview below with Gerald Celente. He starts of with an “I told you so” about Greece, then talks about what to expect this year and why it is happening.

I believe Gerald is 100% right about the economy, our fiat monetary system and the coming collapse of 2010.

osted by wycky on December-23-2010 Add Comments

I don’t think you’ll see this in the main stream news:

Victims of clerical sex abuse have reacted furiously to Pope Benedict’s claim yesterday that paedophilia wasn’t considered an “absolute evil” as recently as the 1970s.

In his traditional Christmas address yesterday to cardinals and officials working in Rome, Pope Benedict XVI also claimed that child pornography was increasingly considered “normal” by society.

“In the 1970s, paedophilia was theorised as something fully in conformity with man and even with children,” the Pope said.

“It was maintained — even within the realm of Catholic theology — that there is no such thing as evil in itself or good in itself. There is only a ‘better than’ and a ‘worse than’. Nothing is good or bad in itself.”

Read more: http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-news/popersquos-child-porn-normal-claim-sparks-outrage-among-victims-15035449.html#ixzz18uCm9QOK
So now according to the pope who is the head of the Catholic church is telling us that Child pornography is “normal” and there is no such thing as good or evil???? only better an worse?????

Therefore i cant do no evil?

If i rape or murder someone I’m not evil in the eyes of the catholic church i am just worse then someone who doesn’t?????????????

http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-julian-assange-uk-bail-appeal.html

Why I'm Posting Bail Money for Julian Assange

By Michael Moore

 

On the heels of World AIDS Day comes a stunning medical breakthrough: Doctors believe an HIV-positive man who underwent a stem cell transplant has been cured as a result of the procedure.

Timothy Ray Brown, also known as the "Berlin Patient," received the transplant in 2007 as part of a lengthy treatment course for leukaemia. His doctors recently published a report in the journal Blood affirming that the results of extensive testing "strongly suggest that cure of HIV infection has been achieved."

While Brown is the first person to ever be declared cured of HIV, his case paves a path for constructing a cure for HIV through genetically-engineered stem cells.

More...

Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange has been freed on bail, with help and a webhosting offer from filmmaker Michael Moore.

MILWAUKEE (AP) -- He seemed like Superman, able to guide jumbo jets through perilous skies and tiny tubes through blocked arteries. As a cardiologist and United Airlines captain, William Hamman taught doctors and pilots ways to keep hearts and planes from crashing.

He shared millions in grants, had university and hospital posts, and bragged of work for prestigious medical groups. An Associated Press story featured him leading a teamwork training session at an American College of Cardiology convention last spring.

But it turns out Hamman isn't a cardiologist or even a doctor. The AP found he had no medical residency, fellowship, doctoral degree or the 15 years of clinical experience he claimed. He attended medical school for a few years but withdrew and didn't graduate.

Did you actually think that this country is 'yours'? Do you understand that the Congress that supposedly represents you only works three days a week? And we won't even begin to discuss all the vacations and junkets they take when they could do it all from behind a computer. Do you know that the clients they represent are in reality the world's largest corporations and that they don't give a damn about you and never have?

A remarkable study published in the Cochrane Library found no evidence of benefit for influenza vaccinations and also noted that the vast majority of trials were inadequate.

I have to say, I agree.  Mandating that Americans give their money to insurance companies is B.S.  We need SINGLE PAYER! It is the only potentially fair system, and to hell with the insurance companies.

WASHINGTON — When Hajji Juma Khan was arrested and transported to New York to face charges under a new American narco-terrorism law in 2008, federal prosecutors described him as perhaps the biggest and most dangerous drug lord in Afghanistan, a shadowy figure who had helped keep the Taliban in business with a steady stream of money and weapons.

But what the government did not say was that Mr. Juma Khan was also a longtime American informer, who provided information about the Taliban, Afghan corruption and other drug traffickers. Central Intelligence Agency officers and Drug Enforcement Administration agents relied on him as a valued source for years, even as he was building one of Afghanistan’s biggest drug operations after the United States-led invasion of the country, according to current and former American officials. Along the way, he was also paid a large amount of cash by the United States.

MORE

Given the sensationalism in mainstream US news media coverage of alleged sexual impropriety charges filed against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in Sweden, it’s no surprise that other significant news about America involving that Scandinavian nation is being left uncovered.

In early November, Sweden called on the US to end the death penalty and to improve conditions in maximum security prisons, as the United States went through its first-ever Universal Periodic Review by the United Nation’s Human Rights Council.
US condemned for its continued use of capital punishment

Sweden joined nearly two dozen countries in calling upon the US to end its pariah-like status as the only western industrialized nation to engage in executions. The US has over 3,200 people facing death sentences, a sharp rise from 1968, when America’s death row population numbered just 517, according to statistics compiled by the Death Penalty Information Center.

Other countries critical of the US posture on the death penalty – practiced by the federal government and 35 states – included Australia (the birthplace of Assange), France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the Vatican.

The caustic onslaught in the U.S. against Assange for leaking sensitive documents, where attackers include members of Congress – some even calling for Assange’s death, either extrajudicially or after a trial--is ironic, coming so close to December 10th, the annual international observance of Human Rights Day.

That observance commemorates the UN’s 1948 adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
One clause in that Declaration provides people worldwide with the right to receive and impart information “through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

The American assaults on Assange extend beyond the White House and Capitol Hill. Amazon, under pressure from Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), removed WikiLeaks from its computer servers, while MasterCard, PayPal and Visa have halted payments to WikiLeaks from donors supportive of work of that entity, almost certainly after receiving pressure from the US government.

While US officials attending that human rights review held in Switzerland proudly pointed to such continuing rights progress in America as the election of a black President and his selection of a Hispanic female US Supreme Court Justice, fifty-six countries including staunch US allies offered 228 recommendations for improving human rights in the nation that touts itself as the world’s leader in protecting the rights of all.

Those recommendations involved a wide range of issues, ranging from attacking poverty among Native Americans to addressing abuses impacting immigrants and closing the infamous Guantanamo prison. However, most of the recommendations presented at that human rights review centered on concerns about deprivations and disparities in the U.S. criminal justice system.

Belgium and Switzerland, for example, called on America to stop sentencing teens to life in prison. Pennsylvania leads the nation in the number of life-sentenced teens, with over 300 currently languishing in the state’s prisons.

Haiti called for ending the discriminatory impact of mandatory minimum sentences and Thailand called for addressing sexual violence inside U.S. prisons, where homosexual rapes far exceed heterosexual rapes outside prison walls.

France urged the U.S. to study the racial disparities evident in the application of the death penalty. African-Americans comprise 41.43 percent of the people on death rows across America – a figure more than twice the percentage of America’s black population.

The United Kingdom expressed concerns about damning evidence that the death penalty could sometimes be administered in a discriminatory manner.

Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz recently wrote a commentary expressing his concerns about Kevin Cooper, a black California death row inmate facing execution for slaughtering four members of a white family in 1983, despite the troubling reality that the lone survivor told police the murders were white.

Facts now establish that police destroyed blood-stained clothing evidence supplied by the girlfriend of one (white) man police never investigated, and that the prosecution’s forensic witnesses falsified evidence against Cooper.

Dershowitz stated that the facts “do not add up” in the murder conviction of Cooper. He has asked outgoing California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to grant Cooper clemency. America’s largest death row is in California, which has 697 persons facing execution.

U.S. representatives responding to their international critics stated that despite legitimate debate on the propriety of the death penalty, as a matter of law at the federal level and in 35 states, “that punishment is permitted,” according to the draft report issued by the UN Human Rights Council.

While the America’s governmental scheme makes it structurally difficult for the federal government to outright ban states from conducting executions, the federal government could end its own use of the death penalty for federal crimes. The U.S. government death row holds nearly 70 persons.

One U.S. death-row inmate – Pennsylvania’s ‘Death Row Journalist’ Mumia Abu-Jamal – received mention by name in one recommendation. Abu-Jamal, perhaps the most well-known of 25,000-plus under death sentence worldwide, observes the macabre anniversary of spending 29-years inside a death-row prison cell on December 9th.

Cuba called on the U.S. to “end the unjust incarceration of political prisoners including Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu-Jamal.” Ample evidence supports international claims that Native American leader Peltier, repeatedly denied parole, and ex-Black Panther Abu-Jamal, are unjustly incarcerated for deaths involving law enforcement officers.

The issue of political prisoners in the US is a subject generating interest internationally, yet it is an issue largely ignored by Americans, said Efia Nwangaza, a lawyer who attended that UN human rights review session held in Geneva, Switzerland.

“There are over 75 political prisoners in the US, most of them former Black Panther or Black Liberation Army people,” said Nwangaza, a Philadelphia native now living in South Carolina, who helped prepare documentation on US political prisoners for that UN review.

“We’ve made progress through an admission by omission, with the US not denying it has political prisoners.”

In addition to criticisms about death penalty policies in the U.S., nations around the world raised concerns about racial profiling practices in America against blacks, Latinos and persons perceived as Muslim, inclusive of U.S. citizens, immigrants and visitors.

U.S. representatives, responding to criticisms about racial profiling, “assured delegations” that America condemns racial and ethnic profiling in all forms,” according to the Human Rights Council’s report.

Ironically, even as U.S. representatives offered their assurances, the ACLU of Pennsylvania filed a class-action lawsuit against the Philadelphia Police Department for racial profiling in that city where the U.S. Constitution was drafted and approved.

That lawsuit involves the police practice called ‘stop-&-frisk’ – where police detain and search persons. This practice in Philadelphia impacted 253,333 persons in 2009 – a 148-percent increase over 2005 – with 72.2 percent of those subjected being blacks, who comprise 44 percent of that city’s population, according to the lawsuit.

This dragnet-style policing only produced arrests in 8.4 percent of the ‘stops,’ with the majority of those arrests being for “interactions following the initial stop” like disorderly conduct and resisting arrest – i.e. alleged crimes that most likely resulted from legitimate objections to being stopped without cause.

One of the plaintiffs in that lawsuit is State Representative Jewell Williams, a veteran of 20-years in law enforcement work, who was roughed up by Philadelphia police in March 2009 while inquiring about a police stop of two 65-year-old black men during an encounter around the corner from Williams’ house.

Exposing a paradox in America’s race-based policing, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter and the city’s Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey (named in the ACLU lawsuit) are both black, but they back their Stop-&-Frisk policy, downplaying its demonstrable racially-disproportionate impact.

“Mayor Nutter repeatedly promised that this policy [Stop-&-Frisk] would be carried out in a way that respected the Constitution,” said Mary Catherine Roper, an ACLU-Pa staff attorney. “But instead of stopping people suspected of criminal activity, the police appear to be stopping people because of race.”

Former Philadelphia Mayor John Street told ThisCantBeHappening! recently that the excessive Stop-&-Frisk practices are actually counter-productive to effective crime fighting because the practices alienate citizens that police need to assist them in crime fighting.

A federal judge in California has ordered the removal from the ground of plants grown to produce seeds for genetically modified sugar beets, citing the potential for environmental harm.

According to a story filed late Wednesday, Cheney will be indicted in a Nigerian bribery case as part of an investigation into an alleged $180 million bribery scandal.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/nigeria-issue-arrest-warrant-dick-cheney-bribery-case/

Dr. Banovac always refuses to go through the metal detector. She has to use a metal wheelchair and that means that she always gets a pat down no matter what. Lately, she says she feels violated because the pat downs have become increasingly invasive during the last few months. "If it happened anywhere else, it would have been sexual assault," she declared to a local newspaper.

She was so angry with the situation that she decided to change things. On November 30, the 52-year-old arrived to the Will Rogers World Airport in Oklahoma City en route to Phoenix, wearing just a trench coat. When it was time to pass through the check point, she took off her coat, stripping down to her black lace lingerie. She hoped that, by showing that she had nothing to hide, she would not be hand-searched.

Sadly for her, things got worse: