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Blogmanac team
Jeannine Wilson (USA)
Veralynne Pepper (USA)
Pip Wilson (Australia)
Carpe diem!
Seize the day with more than 150 articles at Wilson's articles department
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and casualties of poverty and authority all around the planet
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Saturday, November 13, 2004
Silkwood: 30th anniversary
November 13, 1974 Karen Gay Silkwood (b. 1946), 28, American nuclear plant worker and whistle-blower, was killed in a car crash under suspicious circumstances.
During the week prior to her death, Silkwood was reportedly gathering evidence for her labor union to support her claim that Kerr-McGee was negligent in maintaining plant safety. In November 1974, Silkwood tested positive for plutonium contamination.
Karen Silkwood’s story has achieved worldwide fame as the subject of many books, magazine and newspaper articles, and even a major motion picture (Silkwood, 1983).
This is just a snippet of today's stories. Read all about today in folklore, historical oddities, inspiration and alternatives, with many more links, at the Wilson's Almanac Book of Days, every day. Click today's date (or your birthday) when you're there.
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"Cream to re-form" – God
 "I've been waiting so long/to be where I'm going"
OK, any old rockers out there. Hard to believe after 36 years, but Eric has just announced it. Cream will get together again.
Shown is Cream's famous 'Disraeli Gears' album cover, designed by Sydney artist Martin Sharp, one of the Oz Trial defendants.
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Beastie Boys win 3-note fight
"The three-note copyright battle between the Beastie Boys and jazz and classical flautist James Newton is over, with the Boys the winners.
"Newton claimed he was owed payment from way back in 1992 when the band sampled three notes from his Choir for their Pass the Mic."
Source: p2pNet
[One report I heard said that the Beasties spent a cool half million defending their three notes. Actually, it was two, because one of the notes was repeated. Big dough in pop culture!]
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No aid allowed into Fallujah
 "Baghdad (Reuters) - Aid agencies called on U.S. forces and the Iraqi government to allow them to deliver food, medicine and water to Falluja on Friday and said four days of intense fighting had turned the city into a 'big disaster'.
"The Iraqi Red Crescent Society, which receives support from foreign agencies including the Red Cross and UNICEF, said it had asked U.S. forces and Iraq's interim government to let them deliver relief goods to Falluja and establish medics there.
"But it said it had received no reply."
Continue here
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Getting your Iraq news Fox-style
Iraqi Gov't Warns Media About Coverage
[This probably means that everyone should follow the example of Sky News in the UK and Ireland, which takes its lead from the US military and refers to all Iraqi fighters in Fallujah as "the enemy". I've contacted Sky and asked when they became part of the US armed forces. I don't expect a reply.]
"Baghdad, Iraq (AP) - The Iraqi government warned news organizations Thursday to distinguish between insurgents and ordinary civilians in coverage of the fighting in Fallujah and to promote the leadership's position or face unspecified action.
"The warning came in a statement sent to news organizations by Iraq's Media High Commission [??] which cited the 60-day state of emergency declared Sunday on the eve of the offensive in Fallujah.
"'You must be precise and objective in handling news and information', the statement said.
"It stressed the necessity of differentiating between 'innocent citizens of Fallujah who are not targeted by the military operations and between the terrorist groups who infiltrated the city and took its people hostage under the pretext of resistance and jihad'.
"It also told news organizations to tell their correspondents 'to be credible and precise' and not to 'add patriotic descriptions to groups of killers and criminals'.
"Finally, the commission told news organizations to provide space to explain 'the government position, expressing the ambition of most of the Iraqi people' and underscore that 'these military operations did not come about until all peaceful means were attempted' to avoid violence.
"It said that failure to follow the instructions will require authorities to 'take all necessary measures to safeguard the supreme interest of the homeland'. The statement did not provide further details."
Source: The Guardian
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Blogroll Us Friday, November 12, 2004
Underage sex: teacher avoids jail
[Australia] "A teacher today avoided a jail term after she admitted having a sexual relationship with a 15-year-old boy.
"Married mother-of-three Karen Louise Ellis earlier pleaded guilty to six counts of sexual penetration with a child under the age of 16.
"Victorian County Court judge John Smallwood today sentenced her to 22 months' jail but suspended it for three years.
"The 37-year-old former physical education teacher had repeated, unprotected sex with the boy at her North Eltham home while her husband was away in October and November last year."
Source: Herald Sun
"Noel McNamara from the Crime Victims Association says there needs to be consistency.
"NOEL MCNAMARA: Oh, I just think it's disgusting. It's, you know, it's clearly a travesty of justice when Hopper gets a jail sentence and Ellis gets a non-custodial sentence, and that's completely wrong, it's just disgusting, it shouldn't be that way. And for just to draw a line in the sand and make it a gender issue, which has obviously been done Smallwood, it's disgraceful."
Source: The World Today
Boy in school sex case defends his teacher
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These are our defenders
Soldier promoted after racist stunt
 [Australia] "One of the soldiers taunted by comrades dressed as members of the Ku Klux Klan tried to hang himself just days before the incident was investigated by the army.
"The Daily Telegraph can reveal that as the [Aboriginal] soldier became depressed and tried to kill himself, the white platoon commander who arranged the stunt was promoted."
Source: The Advertiser
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Blogroll Us Thursday, November 11, 2004
Nuclear whistleblower Vanunu arrested in Jerusalem
 "Mordechai Vanunu, who was freed in April after 18 years in an Israeli prison for revealing the country's nuclear ambitions, was re-arrested Thursday, police said.
"Mr Vanunu is suspected of having communicated "secret information to foreigners" and of having violated the restrictions imposed on him by Israeli security services after his release from prison, police said.
"The former Israeli nuclear technician, 50, was taken into custody at an east Jerusalem hotel, where police seized documents found in his room, they said.
"Since his release on April 21 after 18 years in prison, Vanunu has been subject to a series of sweeping restrictions, including a ban on travelling abroad as well as holding unauthorised meetings with foreigners.
"He was also banned from leaving Israel for at least a year.
"Mr Vanunu was abducted by Israeli secret service agents in Italy, smuggled back to Israel and then jailed in 1986 after leaking top-secret details about the Dimona nuclear plant in the southern Negev desert to the Sunday Times.
"In July, Israel's supreme court rejected an appeal file by Mr Vanunu, who sought the lifting of what he believed were unfairly severe restrictions.
"Mr Vanunu has said that he wants to leave Israel after not only lifting the lid on the country's nuclear ambitions but also converting to Christianity.
"'I don't like Israel. I don't want to live in Israel. I want to be free and to leave Israel,' he said in July.
"Israel has never admitted to having nuclear weapons, but is believed to possess an arsenal of about 200 warheads."
It was only a matter of time, as he's been giving great interviews. The guy's a hero.
Mordechai Vanunu in the Book of Days
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Now that he's gone
Let's just remember Yassir as we knew him when we first loved him: a cute little moptop drummer, with a charming sense of humour and a David Jones department store tea-towel on his head.
Now it's time to say goodnight
(Goodnight, sleep tight)
Now the sun turns out his light
(Goodnight, sleep tight) ....
Dream sweet dreams for me
Dream sweet dreams for you
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Winston's macaw talks like an Aussie
 "SHE WAS at Winston Churchill's side during Britain's darkest hour. And now Charlie the parrot is 104 years old...and still cursing the Nazis.
"Her favourite sayings were 'F*** Hitler' and 'F*** the Nazis'. And even today, 39 years after the great man's death, she can still be coaxed into repeating them with that unmistakable Churchillian inflection.
"Many an admiral or peer of the realm was shocked by the tirade from the bird's cage during crisis meetings with the PM.
"But it always brought a smile to the war leader's face.
"Churchill bought Charlie – giving him a boy's name despite the fact she was female – in 1937.
"She took pride of place in a bizarre menagerie of pets including lambs, pigs, cattle, swans and, at one point, a leopard.
"He immediately began to teach her to swear – particularly in company – and she is keeping up the tradition today.
"The blue and gold macaw is believed to be Britain's oldest bird."
Source
Note: F*** is a word not found in Australian parrots' dictionaries, as I found a month or so ago. I was at a christening and, bored out of my scone, sidled off to have a chat with a poor caged cockatoo who asked me what I fucking wanted.
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Use of Shannon puts Ireland in line of fire - Jesse Jackson
 "The use of Shannon Airport by US military aircraft on their way to Iraq puts Ireland 'in the line of fire' from terrorist organisations, US civil rights campaigner the Rev Jesse Jackson said in Dublin last night.
"While it was 'to the good' that the Government did not overtly support the invasion of Iraq and favoured 'the UN route', the Republic was still 'indirectly' participating in the war, Rev Jackson said after a Literary and Historical Society meeting at University College Dublin.
"'I try to be sensitive to the delicate situation that Ireland is in'.
"'Number one, it does not endorse the war, it has no troops in the war. Ireland chose the UN route rather than the US/Britain route (in the build up to war). That was a strong position. On the other hand Ireland is now very strong economically and there may be a feeling that some of the big, strong international companies play hardball ... they move on countries, they move on companies. So I sense Ireland is trying to balance that'.
"'These economic pressures may have been the reason the Irish Government allowed US war planes to land here. I understand the tight-rope the Taoiseach is walking. But in this global terrorism that fact that Shannon is being used does put Ireland in the line of fire', he told The Irish Times."
[my emphasis above - N] Source: Irish Times [subscription]
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Falluja's defiance of a new empire
"George Bush and Tony Blair have apparently concluded that they can crush the Iraqi people's will to resist occupation and legitimise a puppet regime next January by occupying Falluja. Maybe they imagine they can emulate the British forces that terrorised Iraqi Kurdistan in the 1920s by obliterating recalcitrant villages.
 "The US generals will no doubt deliver Falluja to Bush and Blair after bombarding its neighbourhoods with artillery and rockets. But they are doomed to deliver neither the Fallujans nor the people of Iraq. Perhaps they are unaware that Fallujans defied Saddam's rule during his last years in power. Falluja -- known as the city of a thousand mosques -- attracted Saddam's wrath in 1998 when its imams refused to hail the tyrant in their Friday sermons. Many were imprisoned, and the city punished as a result.
"But the generals certainly do know how resistance began in Falluja. On April 28 2003 US soldiers opened fire on parents and children demonstrating against the continued military occupation of their primary school -- killing 18 of them in cold blood and injuring about 60 others. Until the killing of those demonstrators, not a single bullet had been fired at US soldiers in Falluja or any of the cities north of Baghdad. But, remorselessly, little-known Falluja became a world-renowned centre of defiance, where a poor and poorly armed people has courageously faced the military wing of the new empire."
Continue at The Guardian
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Judge Rules Guantanamo Trials Unlawful
"GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba - A federal judge ruled Monday that President Bush had both overstepped his constitutional bounds and improperly brushed aside the Geneva Conventions in establishing military commissions to try detainees at the United States naval base here as war criminals.
"The ruling by Judge James Robertson of United States District Court in Washington brought an abrupt halt to the trial here of one detainee, one of hundreds being held at Guantánamo as enemy combatants. It threw into doubt the future of the first set of United States military commission trials since the end of World War II as well as other legal proceedings devised by the administration to deal with suspected terrorists."
Continue
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Blogroll Us Wednesday, November 10, 2004
'Brain' in a dish flies flight simulator
"A Florida scientist has developed a 'brain' in a glass dish that is capable of flying a virtual fighter plane and could enhance medical understanding of neural disorders such as epilepsy.
"The 'living computer' was grown from 25,000 neurons extracted from a rat's brain and arranged over a grid of 60 electrodes in a Petri dish.
"The brain cells then started to reconnect themselves, forming microscopic interconnections, said Thomas DeMarse, professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Florida."
Source: CNN
From Baz 'Brain in a Dish' le Tuff.
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Free Wilson's Almanac screensaver
Check it out.
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'Sorry' site overload
"A website that allows Americans to apologise to the rest of the world for the election victory of President George W Bush was overwhelmed today after a report about it on CNN.
"The crash of the site reflected the deep disappointment of many Bush opponents about the election results, and their feeling that the victory of the right wing president could have disastrous effects around the globe on issues ranging from war and peace to the environment.
"The website, sorryeverybody.com, features pictures of troubled US citizens holding up signs of apology. It was the brainchild of neuroscience student James Zetlen who kicked off the popular new pastime with the message 'Sorry, world, we tried'."
Source: Sydney Morning Herald
Anotherie from Baz 'I Ain't Sorry I Ain't Done Nuffink' le Tuff
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Obesity Raising Airline Fuel Costs
"Heavy suitcases aren't the only things weighing down airplanes and requiring them to burn more fuel, pushing up the cost of flights. A new government study reveals that airlines increasingly have to worry more about the weight of their passengers.
"America's growing waistlines are hurting the bottom lines of airline companies as the extra pounds on passengers are causing a drag on planes. Heavier fliers have created heftier fuel costs, according to the government study.
"Through the 1990s, the average weight of Americans increased by 10 pounds, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The extra weight caused airlines to spend $275 million to burn 350 million more gallons of fuel in 2000 just to carry the additional weight of Americans, the federal agency estimated in a recent issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine ...
"The extra fuel burned also had an environmental impact, as an estimated 3.8 million extra tons of carbon dioxide were released into the air, according to the study."
Source: onlyPunjab.com
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Blogroll Us Tuesday, November 09, 2004
Fast Arctic Thaw Threatens People, Polar Bears
 "Oslo (Reuters) -- Global warming is heating the Arctic almost twice as fast as the rest of the planet in a thaw that threatens millions of livelihoods and could wipe out polar bears by 2100, an eight-nation report said on Monday.
"The biggest survey to date of the Arctic climate, by 250 scientists, said the accelerating melt could be a foretaste of wider disruptions from a build-up of human emissions of heat-trapping gases in the earth's atmosphere.
"The 'Arctic climate is now warming rapidly and much larger changes are projected', according to the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA), funded by the United States, Canada, Russia, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, Norway and Finland."
Full text
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St. John's Wort May Interfere with Cancer Drug
 "New York (Reuters Health) - The herb St. John's Wort, used as an alternative therapy for mild depression, may hinder the effectiveness of a newer type of cancer drug, according to researchers.
"Their study of 10 healthy volunteers found that the herbal remedy lowered blood levels of the cancer drug Gleevec (known in some countries as Glivec) by as much as 42 percent.
"In a cancer patient, the study authors warn, this could mean the difference between success or failure on Gleevec, an oral drug used mainly to treat the blood cancer chronic myeloid leukemia.
"The findings, published in the journal Pharmacology, add to the list of prescription drugs that don't mix well with St. John's Wort. Past studies have shown that the drug may alter blood levels of some other chemotherapy drugs, as well as certain cardiovascular drugs, HIV medications, antidepressants and birth control pills. [my emphasis]
Full text
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What Mandate?
From Peter Rothberg, The Nation:
A day after the 2004 presidential voting was done, when it was finally possible to declare victory, Vice President Dick Cheney announced that, "President Bush ran forthrightly on a clear agenda for this nation's future, and the nation responded by giving him a mandate." [BUSHIT!! -v]
But, as John Nichols shows, Bush actually received far less of a mandate than voters typically grant presidents. In fact, Bush claimed the narrowest margin of victory for an incumbent president since Woodrow Wilson's re-election in 1916.
Unlike real landslides such as 1984, when Ronald Reagan won forty-nine of fifty
states and drubbed Walter Mondale in the popular vote, Bush barely squeaked
through to victory. Read Ari Berman's Daily Outrage for more.
Despite the history, the Republican spin machine hums on, helped by The Weekly
Standard's William Kristol, who declared Bush's win to be "an even larger and clearer mandate than those won in the landslide reelection campaigns of Nixon in 1972, Reagan in 1984, and Clinton in 1996."
To help counter propaganda like this, The Nation is encouraging readers to send letters to the editors of local daily and weekly newspapers making clear that a narrow win doesn't constitute a mandate. Find contact info for your local media and a sample letter at The Nation's Take Action center.
[Emphasis added. -v]
SOURCE
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Blogroll Us Monday, November 08, 2004
Global Ideas Bank
 Way back when (it was in 1979 but I was only about three years old, OK? Can it really be a quarter of a century? Yoikels!) I had a magazine which had as a feature a department called 'Partly Baked Ideas'.
The idea of PBI was for readers to send in ideas which, although not necessarily fully formed, the person who had had the brainwave would still like to get out in the public domain. My co-editor and I thought it might spark ideas and action for things that would help improve the world; we were dealing with 'social invention' as it's called now.
I've been thinking for a while that a PBI department would be a good thing to initiate in the Almanac, but I'm pleased to see that it won't be necessary because there's a group called Global Ideas Bank who are doing much the same thing, and doing it with more energy and resources than I'm sure I could muster. Worth bookmarking.
From the website:
"The Global Ideas Bank aims to promote and disseminate good creative ideas to improve society. It further aims to encourage the public to generate these ideas, to participate in the problem-solving process.
"These ideas we term social inventions: non-technological, non-product, non-gadget ideas for social change. These are a mix of existing projects, fledgling initiatives and new bright ideas ..."
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Blogroll Us Sunday, November 07, 2004
Arundhati Roy on equity
 The personal wealth of the top 587 richest people exceeds the national wealth of the poorest 135 nations combined.
Indian novelist Arundhati Roy (paraphrase), Sydney Peace Prize Lecture, November 3, 2004
Read more at Indymedia
And more
Listen to Roy's lecture [audio link will be there this week]
Interview this week with Arundhati Roy [audio]
[Roy's speech was a stinging indictment of the invasion of Iraq and the role of TNCs (transnational corporations) in profiting from the war and occupation. I'll post a link to the transcript as soon as it's online.]
Arundhati Roy (born November 24, 1961) is an Indian novelist, author of The God of Small Things, for which she won the Booker Prize.
The God of Small Things was a first book of the author, and (as of 2004) has been her only novel. The book, completed in 1996, took four years to write. Roy received half-a-million pounds in advances, and rights to the book were sold in 21 countries.
In 2002 she was convicted of contempt of court by the Supreme Court in New Delhi for accusing the court of attempting to silence protests against the Narmada Dam Project, but received only a symbolic sentence of one day in prison.
Roy was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize in May, 2004, for her work in social campaigns and advocacy of non-violence.
Wikipedia
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Quiz: When did women get the vote?
New at the Scriptorium
 Here's a quiz question (no prizes, I'm sorry):
Choose from this alphabetical list of nations and place them in the order in which women gained the vote:
Afghanistan
Australia
Finland
Iceland
Iraq
Kyrgyzstan
New Zealand
Switzerland
United Kingdom
United States of America
Answers: A world chronology of women's electoral rights in the Scriptorium
If you like, tell other Almaniacs how you did, in the comments box here. I'm sure the rest of us would love to hear.
[Second question: I feel like asking, in which country did women not have the vote when it was a friend of the West, but gained it when Saddam Hussein took over? But I won't press my luck.]
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Will the Anti-War Movement Stand Up This Time?
Fallujah and the Reality of War
By Rahul Mahajan
11/06/04 "CounterPunch.org" The assault on Fallujah has started. It is being sold as liberation of the people of Fallujah; it is being sold as a necessary step to implementing "democracy" in Iraq. These are lies.
I was in Fallujah during the siege in April, and I want to paint for you a word picture of what such an assault means.
Fallujah is dry and hot; like Southern California, it has been made an agricultural area only by virtue of extensive irrigation. It has been known for years as a particularly devout city; people call it the City of a Thousand Mosques. In the mid-90's, when Saddam wanted his name to be added to the call to prayer, the imams of Fallujah refused.
U.S. forces bombed the power plant at the beginning of the assault; for the next several weeks, Fallujah was a blacked-out town, with light provided by generators only in critical places like mosques and clinics. The town was placed under siege; the ban on bringing in food, medicine, and other basic items was broken only when Iraqis en masse challenged the roadblocks. The atmosphere was one of pervasive fear, from bombing and the threat of more bombing. Noncombatants and families with sick people, the elderly, and children were leaving in droves. After initial instances in which people were prevented from leaving, U.S. forces began allowing everyone to leave except for what they called "military age males," men usually between 15 and 60. Keeping noncombatants from leaving a place under bombardment is a violation of the laws of war. Of course, if you assume that every military age male is an enemy, there can be no better sign that you are in the wrong country, and that, in fact, your war is on the people, not on their oppressors, not a war of liberation.
[Emphasis added. -v]
CONTINUE
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