Daily life in Yemen

Between worlds: A wadi, which serves as a highway during dry season, separates new Sanaa (left) from old Sanaa (right). Old Sanaa is one of four UNESCO World Heritage sites in Yemen.

Manhattan of the desert: The ancient walled city of Shibam, situated in the vast Wadi Hadramaut in eastern Yemen, dates back to the fourth century A.D. Most of its towering “skyscrapers,” made of sun-dried mud bricks, were built in the 16th century or later. Some 7,000 residents still inhabit the narrow streets of this UNESCO World Heritage site.

East meets Middle East: The 11th century port city of Al Mukalla, located along the Gulf of Aden, was badly damaged during Yemen’s civil war, but remains an important center for the fishing industry. The mixture of architectural styles that still dominate local buildings reflect its history as a key trading post between India and Africa.

@'Foreign Policy'

Suppressed BBC report on toxic dumping in the Ivory Coast by Trafigura

Here (PDF) is the original BBC story which has now been taken down from the BBC site.

WIKI 
(Thanx Chris Coltrane)

Alcohol substitute that avoids drunkenness and hangovers in development

The new substance could have the added bonus of being "switched off" instantaneously with a pill, to allow drinkers to drive home or return to work.

The synthetic alcohol, being developed from chemicals related to Valium, works like alcohol on nerves in the brain that provide a feeling of wellbeing and relaxation.

But unlike alcohol its does not affect other parts of the brain that control mood swings and lead to addiction. It is also much easier to flush out of the body.

Finally because it is much more focused in its effects, it can also be switched off with an antidote, leaving the drinker immediately sober.

The new alcohol is being developed by a team at Imperial College London, led by Professor David Nutt, Britain's top drugs expert who was recently sacked as a government adviser for his comments about cannabis and ecstasy.

He envisions a world in which people could drink without getting drunk, he said.

No matter how many glasses they had, they would remain in that pleasant state of mild inebriation and at the end of an evening out, revellers could pop a sober-up pill that would let them drive home.

Prof Nutt and his team are concentrating their efforts on benzodiazepines, of which diazepam, the chief ingredient of Valium is one.

Thousands of candidate benzos are already known to science. He said it is just a matter of identifying the closest match and then, if necessary, tailoring it to fit society’s needs.

Ideally, like alcohol, it should be tasteless and colourless, leaving those characteristics to the drink it’s in.

Eventually it would be used to replace the alcohol content in beer, wine and spirits and the recovered ethanol (the chemical name for alcohol) could be sold as fuel.

Professor Nutt believes that the new drug, which would need licensing, could have a dramatic effect on society and improve the nation's health.

The NHS report Statistics on Alcohol: England, 2009 found more than 800,000 alcohol-related admissions to hospitals in 2007-08 – and more than 6,500 deaths – at a cost to the service of £2.7bn a year.

Some charities estimate that the toll could be up to five times higher. Drink is, for example, a factor in 40 per cent of fatal fires, 15 per cent of drownings, 65 per cent of suicides and 40 per cent of domestic abuse. It also has other costs, including 17 million lost working days a year, worth about £20bn to the economy.

“I’ve been in experiments where I’ve taken benzos,” said Professor Nutt. “One minute I was sedated and nearly asleep, five minutes later I was giving a lecture.

“No one’s ever tried targeting this before, possibly because it will be so hard to get it past the regulators.

“Most of the benzos are controlled under the Medicines Act. The law gives a privileged position to alcohol, which has been around for 3,000 years. But why not use advances in pharmacology to find something safer and better?”

Getting the drug approved could be hard for the team as clinical trials are expensive, and it is not clear who would pay for them, according to Professor Nutt.

He said that the traditional drinks industry has not shown any interest, however some countries might be persuaded to sponsor the team.

Some countries have more liberal regimes than others, though, and Professor Nutt thinks Greece or Spain, within the EU, could lead the way.

The latest Home Office performance figures showed that more than one in four people believe that alcohol is blighting their community.

A survey of every police force area in England and Wales found that 26 per cent of those polled “perceived people being drunk or rowdy in public placed to be a problem in their area” – a slight increase from last year.

The fears over the affects of alcohol range from urban to rural communities, with the worst hit being Manchester, South Wales, London, Northumbria and Gwent.

@'The Telegraph'

Hmmm!

This could well work though...

Les Negresses Vertes - Zobi La Mouche

Les Negresses Vertes

Always struck me as France's answer to The Pogues.
Zobi La Mouche (Club Mix)
Album here.

The worst lyrics of ALL time

Over at Adrian Sherwood's MySpazz page there are new trax that are forthcoming On-U releases. Among them is "Scheisse" by Dub No Frontiers. Sung in German by Ari Up. Thanx to RalfW here is the English translation:

"And the mother looks silently around the whole table. Shit, piss, doo-doo, poo-poo, pushing, doo-doo, wizzing. Shit.
Oh, oh. Yes, whatcha doin'? You can't make in your pants. What are you just doing? You can't make in your pants. Also
not in the bathtub. So, go to the loo, full throttle. (repeated...) Especially not while swimming, better leave it
inside. (repeated...) What did you eat? Did you devour everything? x2 Now it's pushing like a spring, must go to the
toilet as fast as you can. x2 What did you eat? Did you devour everything? x2 Vegetables, fruits, even bread, everything
good, now you're in trouble. x2 You don't need pampers (=diapers) anymore, walking isn't difficult either. You already
can read. Where does it go from [!yes, wrong in German!], it's the loo, there you are. (chorus)"

Get it

HERE

Bomber at C.I.A. Base Had Ties to Jordan Spy Agency

The suicide bomber who killed seven C.I.A. officers and one Jordanian intelligence officer last week in southeastern Afghanistan was an asset of the Jordanian intelligence service who had been brought to Afghanistan to help hunt down top members of the Qaeda network, according to a Western official briefed on the matter.

The bomber had been arrested in Jordan and recruited by that country’s intelligence service — which believed that it had turned him into an ally — and then brought to Afghanistan to infiltrate the Qaeda organization by posing as a foreign jihadi.

“He was definitely someone who could be seen as very helpful for something very important,” the official said.

 But the supposed intelligence asset was actually a double-agent who was given explosives by militants in the frontier region between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which he wore to a meeting last Wednesday at Forward Operating Base Chapman, the C.I.A. base in the southeastern province of Khost.He was able to elude base security and was not closely searched because of his perceived value as someone who could lead American forces to senior Qaeda leaders, and because the Jordanian intelligence officer who was his handler identified him as an intelligence asset...

@'NY Times'

Joe Sacco - author of the graphic novel 'Footnotes in Gaza'

Slideshow at 'The Wall Street Journal'

HERE

The 'evil goblin king' LOL!

“My eyeballs were merely fondled without permission.”

Burroughs on Ginsberg 1983

Meanwhile over @ Brainwashed

Well Sunn O))) hit the #1 album in the readers poll.

No arguement from me on that one, in my top ten of the year too and a lot of other good stuff in their charts but what the fug is it with Current 93 at #2?

I don't get this band at all. Never did.

Actually what I don't get is Dave (David) Tibet (Michael).

His fugn nonsensical Noddy songs warbled in that fugn awful voice with pretensious lyrics (Coptic anyone) of the highest (OTO?) order!

I want instrumental albums!

The music is great (Matt Sweeney, James Blackshaw, Sasha Grey (I will let her... sing) *sigh* amongst others, even had Bill Fay on stage with the group last year, but then he also had Sebastian fugn Horsley in the line up that night too!)

(Thinks to myself...if someone hadn't forced *ahem* heroin into my veins that night back in (81/82?) when 23 Skidoo blew up the stage at The Venue, I could have kidnapped Tibet in the smoke and kept him in a dungeon for the rest of his life, saving us all from the resulting dross. 

Problem is I suspect he probably would have enjoyed it.)

Congrats also to TG for the lifetime achievement award. 

Who would have thought it back then?

@'Brainwashed'

Transfer Window Day Three: Inter Milan target Steven Gerrard for £40m & Emile Heskey is targetted by Liverpool and Chelsea

Leonard Cohen - Un Canadien Errant

Michael Shields: Left with a lingering sense of injustice

If Michael Shields thought that the authorities were going to help smooth his return back into normal life, he was sorely mistaken. The combined shortcomings of the British and Bulgarian legal and political systems had already condemned the young Liverpool football fan to serve four-and-a-half years in prison for a crime he did not commit.

So when it came to his release, after a prolonged and impassioned campaign by his family and the people of his home city against his wrongful conviction for the attempted murder of a Bulgarian waiter, he was inured to the prospect of being let down again.

"If someone commits a crime and they get out of prison I know it's not much help but you do get a probation officer and they keep an eye on you. But no one has ever contacted me. I've never had anything from them, no offer of counselling or an offer of a reason why it happened," he says.

It is four months since the quietly spoken 23-year-old became the first Briton to be granted a royal pardon for a wrongful conviction overseas, and in that time he has begun to rebuild his life.

Shortly before Christmas, the young engineer found himself a job working on-site for a property management company. Still fit-looking from his time pumping iron at the prison gym, his hair longer now than in the pictures which publicised his campaign, work has provided a welcome change. In the immediate aftermath of his release, he spent long restless days in front of the television at his family home, trying not to mull over the sense of injustice burning away inside him. Life after jail poses considerable challenges for any former inmate. For those wrongly convicted those pressures can be immense.

Yet in many ways, admits Mr Shields, he has been lucky. He has a large and protective family and the support of a strong community of neighbours and fellow Liverpool FC fans. The club itself was pivotal in keeping up the pressure over his wrongful conviction, and he celebrated his first match back in the luxury of the directors' box at Anfield. His parents, Michael and Maria, who devoted all their energies to campaigning for his release, are having to adapt too. "They are fine. You can see them getting better. They are smiling more. It affected them more than anyone," Mr Shields acknowledges. "Through my family, I have had time to find my feet," he says.

Sitting in the front room of the smart terraced house in the Wavertree area of the city, with its vivid red colour scheme in tribute to Liverpool Football Club, he says he has found it easy to rekindle friendships that were put on ice when he was sentenced to 15 years by the court in Sofia in 2005 (though he declines to discuss whether he is now in a relationship). "The first two months everything happened too fast. I just couldn't take it in ... I couldn't relax. I couldn't sit down and watch the telly. I had to keep myself occupied. The last four weeks have been better." he says.

It was on the last day of his first-ever trip overseas, to see Liverpool win the Champions League, that normality was suspended for the young engineer, aged just 18 at the time. He was arrested by Bulgarian police investigating a brutal late-night attack on the waiter, Martin Georgiev, who had been punched to the ground and hit on the head with a heavy stone, leaving him severely injured. Failures in the inquiry, notably a flawed identity parade, meant Mr Shields was wrongly picked out. Another Liverpool fan, Graham Sankey, confessed to the assault, although he later withdrew his statement...

Continue reading
@'The Independent'

Obama and Afghanistan: America’s Drug-Corrupted War by Prof Peter Dale Scott

The presidential electoral campaign of Barack Obama in 2008, it was thought, "changed the political debate in a party and a country that desperately needed to take a new direction."[1] Like most preceding presidential winners dating back at least to John F. Kennedy, what moved voters of all descriptions to back Obama was the hope he offered of significant change. Yet within a year Obama has taken decisive steps, not just to continue America’s engagement in Bush’s Afghan War, but significantly to enlarge it into Pakistan. If this was change of a sort, it was a change that few voters desired.

Those of us convinced that a war machine prevails in Washington were not surprised. The situation was similar to the disappointment experienced with Jimmy Carter: Carter was elected in 1976 with a promise to cut the defense budget. Instead, he initiated both an expansion of the defense budget and also an expansion of U.S. influence into the Indian Ocean.[2]

As I wrote in The Road to 9/11, after Carter’s election:

It appeared on the surface that with the blessing of David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission, the traditional U.S. search for unilateral domination would be abandoned. But... the 1970s were a period in which a major "intellectual counterrevolution" was mustered, to mobilize conservative opinion with the aid of vast amounts of money... By the time SALT II was signed in 1979, Carter had consented to significant new weapons programs and arms budget increases (reversing his campaign pledge).[3]

I noted further that the complex strategy for reversing Carter’s promises was revived for a new mobilization in the 1990s during the Clinton presidency, in which a commission headed by Donald Rumsfeld was prominent.[4]

The Vietnam War as a Template for Afghanistan

It is as if Washington had emerged with only one objective from America’s failure in Vietnam: the urge to do it again and get it right. But the principal obstacle to victory in Afghanistan is the same as in Vietnam: the lack of a viable government to defend. The importance of this similarity has been stressed by Thomas H. Johnson, coordinator of anthropological research studies at the Naval Postgraduate School, and his co-author Chris Mason. In their memorable phrase, "the Vietnam War is less a metaphor for the conflict in Afghanistan than it is a template:"

It is an oft-cited maxim that in all the conflicts of the past century, the United States has refought its last war. A number of analysts and journalists have mentioned the war in Vietnam recently in connection with Afghanistan. Perhaps fearful of taking this analogy too far, most have backed away from it. They should not—the Vietnam War is less a metaphor for the conflict in Afghanistan than it is a template. For eight years, the United States has engaged in an almost exact political and military reenactment of the Vietnam War, and the lack of self-awareness of the repetition of events 50 years ago is deeply disturbing.[5]

Many of the common features of an unpopular corrupted government have been well summarized by Johnson and Mason. In their words, quoting Jeffrey Record, "the fundamental political obstacle to an enduring American success in Vietnam [was] a politically illegitimate, militarily feckless, and thoroughly corrupted South Vietnamese client regime." Substitute the word "Afghanistan" for the words "South Vietnam" in these quotations and the descriptions apply precisely to today’s government in Kabul. Like Afghanistan, South Vietnam at the national level was a massively corrupt collection of self-interested warlords, many of them deeply implicated in the profitable opium trade, with almost nonexistent legitimacy outside the capital city. The purely military gains achieved at such terrible cost in our nation’s blood and treasure in Vietnam never came close to exhausting the enemy’s manpower pool or his will to fight, and simply could not be sustained politically by a venal and incompetent set of dysfunctional state institutions where self-interest was the order of the day.[6]

If Johnson had written a little later, he might have added that a major CIA asset in Afghanistan was Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of President Hamid Karzai; and that Ahmed Wali Karzai was a major drug trafficker who used his private force to help arrange a flagrantly falsified election result.[7] This is a fairly exact description of Ngo dinh Nhu in Vietnam, President Ngo dinh Diem’s brother, an organizer of the Vietnamese drug traffic whose dreaded Can Lao secret police helped, among other things, to organize a falsified election result there.[8]

This pattern of a corrupt near relative, often involved in drugs, is a recurring feature of regimes installed or supported by U.S. influence. There were similar allegations about Chiang Kai-shek’s brother-in-law T.V. Soong, Mexican President Echevarría’s brother-in-law Rubén Zuno Arce, and the Shah of Iran’s sister. In the case of Ngo dinh Nhu, it was the absence of a popular base for his externally installed presidential brother that led to drug involvement, "to provide the necessary funding" for political repression.[9] This analogy to the Karzais is pertinent.

An additional similarity, not noted by Johnson, is that America initially engaged in Vietnam in support of an embattled and unpopular minority, the Roman Catholics who had thrived under the French. America has twice made the same mistake in Afghanistan. Initially, after the Russian invasion of 1980, the bulk of American aid went to Gulbeddin Hekmatyar, a leader both insignificant in and unpopular with the mujahedin resistance; the CIA is said to have supported Hekmatyar, who became a drug trafficker to compensate for his lack of a popular base, because he was the preferred client of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which distributed American and Saudi aid.

When America re-engaged in 2001, it was to support the Northern Alliance, a drug-trafficking Tajik-Uzbek minority coalition hateful to the Pashtun majority south of the Hindu Kush. Just as America’s initial commitment to the Catholic Diem family fatally alienated the Vietnamese countryside, so the American presence in Afghanistan is weakened by its initial dependence on the Tajiks of the minority Northern Alliance. (The Roman Catholic minority in Vietnam at least shared a language with the Buddhists in the countryside. The Tajiks speak Dari, a version of Persian unintelligible to the Pashtun majority.)...

Continue reading

@'Global Research'