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Iran Threatens to Attack any Country that Assists ‘Enemies’

EU Times — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 22:49:05 +0000

A senior Iranian military official says Tehran will attack any country used by “enemies” to launch a military strike against his country. The statement comes amid growing tensions between Iran and the West.

”Any spot used by the enemy for hostile operations against Iran will be subjected to retaliatory aggression by our armed forces,” the deputy head of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards, Hossein Salami, said Sunday according to Iran’s Fars news agency.

The official did not name any particular country suspected of acting as a launching pad for military action against Iran, and the six Gulf Arab states considered to be US allies have said they would not allow their territories to be used for attacks on Iran.

Meanwhile, two Iranian naval ships docked in the Saudi port of Jeddah on Sunday, a move Iranian officials say aims to project the country’s “power on the open seas” and “confront Iranophobia.”

Salami’s statement comes as the Revolutionary Guard conducts two-day ground exercises some say are dedicated to demonstrate Iranian military strength.

The Revolutionary Guard is a branch of Iran’s military established to protect the country’s Islamic system.

It is not Tehran’s first warning amid rising tensions with the West. Earlier, Iran warned that any military action against it would result in a “painful” response on Israeli and US bases in the Gulf.

Iran also threatened to close off the vital Gulf oil shipping route through the Strait of Hormuz if becomes subject to oil export sanctions.

Iran’s nuclear program has long been a stumbling block between the country and the West. The tensions escalated last November after an IAEA report claimed Iran had worked on developing nuclear weapons, a charge Tehran has many times denied, reiterating that its nuclear activities are purely peaceful.

Though UN inspectors failed yet again to find any traces of an Iranian nuclear weapons program, Washington and Tel Aviv are sure to come up with an alleged secret location where Tehran is building nuclear weapons, says Kamel Al Wazne, a political analyst in Beirut.

“Probably, the Israelis are getting desperate at this point, because they think if Iran become capable of building a nuclear weapon – this would be devastating to them,” Al Wazne said, predicting that “before six months we might be heading into a major confrontation in the Persian Gulf.”

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Kim Jong-il to be embalmed by Russian specialists

EU Times — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 21:48:11 +0000

On Wednesday, December 28, North Korea holds the funeral service for its leader Kim Jong-il, who died on December 17. The first stage of the funeral will be held in Kymsusan memorial complex in Pyongyang – the official residence of Kim Jong-Il’s father, Kim Il Sung.

According to North Korean media, Kim Jong-Il died from a heart attack as he was traveling by train across the country. His younger son, Kim Jong Un, has been named the successor.

According to RIA Novosti, the sarcophagus will be carried along the streets of Pyongyang prior to the ceremony. The people of North Korea will thus be able to bid farewell to the leader, who ruled the 24-million-strong country for over 17 years. According to South Korean media, Kim Jong-Il’s body will rest in a glass coffin with the body of his father at Kymsusan palace.

Russian experts were invited to Pyongyang to embalm Kim Jong-Il, Yonhap agency said. The experts with Vladislav Kozeltsev at the head arrived from the Moscow Center for Biomedical Technologies. The specialists of the center preserve the body of Vladimir Lenin in the Mausoleum. Kim Jong-Il’s car, a carriage of his legendary armored train, his clothes and his desk will be on display in the tomb of the “dear leader.”

A mass meeting of mourning is to take place at the central square in Pyongyang on Thursday morning. Up to 100,000 people are expected to take part in the meeting. They will swear an oath to Kim Jong Un, who still formally serves as Deputy State Defense Committee of the DPRK. Kim Jong Un has already been named the leader of the state, party and armed forces. The information about it has been published in the official publications of the country.

The funeral committee said that the ceremony would be marked with cannon volleys in memory of the deceased leader in Pyongyang and other cities. All locomotives and vessels will sound their sirens, whereas the citizens of North Korea will bow our heads during a three-minute moment of silence.

The DPRK authorities have decided not to welcome foreign delegations for the ceremony. However, a private delegation from South Korea arrived in Pyongyang to bid farewell the North Korean leader. The delegation is headed by the widow of former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, who conducted the policy of “sunshine” towards the DPRK and visited Pyongyang, RIA Novosti said.

North Korea’s main party newspaper Rodong Sinmun published a special article on the front page about the visit of the South Korean delegation. During the visit, Kim Jong Un thanked the guests for condolences, but there was no special meeting with him.

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Inequality in modern-day America is worse than Ancient Rome

EU Times — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 22:53:09 +0000

Inequality in modern-day America is worse than Ancient Rome

The 99 percent has found an ally 2,500 years in the past. It just so happens that it’s with those that found themselves in the Ancient Roman plebian and slave classes.

According to research done recently by historians Walter Schiedel and Steven Friesen, the income inequality gap in modern day America is far greater than the separation within the societies during the days of Julius Caesar. During the Ancient Roman Republic, says the duo’s study published in Per Square Mile, the top one percent controlled 16 percent of society’s wealth. If you fire up the Delorean and go from the Diocletian Empire to twenty-first century USA, you’ll see that things are a little more uneven. Today, that one percent on top controls 40 percent of the country’s wealth.

What difference does a few dozen centuries make, though? Emperors back then had a trained arsenal of soldiers equipped with on equines with hand-trebuchets, and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg today calls the NYPD his own army (who come with Tasers and pepper-spray on the ready). Want more? Today the top one percent saw their incomes rise by 275 percent between 1979 and 2007. Back then, well, back then the Romans saw the rise of the Constantine. Neither, frankly, was all that pretty.

Historical humor aside, the narrowing of America’s middle class and rise of poverty has been a long time in the making, even if just become more obvious in recent times thanks in part of course to the Occupy Wall Street movement’s pressing for reform. While 50 million Americans are currently living below the poverty line, in all one-in-two Americans are what the US Census Bureau calls “low-income.” In Washington DC, which is part of the wealthiest metropolitan region per-capital in the country, one-in-ten residents actually earns less than half of what would put them at the poverty line, creating an entire new class of the poorest of the poor which is only increasing as the wealth is torpedoed upwards to the top of the pyramid.

In coming up with their research, Schiedel and Friesen mulled over papyri ledgers, old school estimates and Biblical passages, specifically at around the times when the Roman Empire was at its population peak — around 150 C.E. Putting together the top members of the hierarchy around that times — the patricians, senators, equestrians and decuriones — the researchers have determined that the top 1.5 percent of the 70 million or so citizens of the empire had all-in-all around 20 percent of the wealth.

Despite this inequality, there was never an Occupy the Aqueducts movement or a tent city within the walls of the Coliseum — as far as we know, at least. Instead, rather, those that didn’t match up with the leading ranks were simply disregarded. As Per Square Mile puts it, the empire seems to have been “built on the backs of poor farmers and laborers,” adding, “it’s as though Rome’s 99 percent never existed.”

Sounds like something right out of Fox News.

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Noah’s Ark officially found in Turkish mountains

EU Times — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 16:40:40 +0000

Noah's Ark replica Schagen Netherlands

Reports about the traces of the legendary Noah’s Ark appear in the media on a regular basis. The majority of such messages say that there is a mysterious object resting on top of Ararat Mount. The object could be the ancient vessel, on which Noah rescued animals from the Great Flood.

Here is what the Bible says about the events, which took place in 2500 BC: “So God said to Noah, “I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth. Make yourself an ark of gopher wood. Make rooms in the ark, and cover it inside and out with pitch. This is how you are to make it: the length of the ark 300 cubits, its breadth 50 cubits, and its height 30 cubits. For behold, I will bring a flood of waters upon the earth to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life under heaven. Everything that is on the earth shall die. But I will establish my covenant with you, and you shall come into the ark, you, your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives with you. And of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every sort into the ark to keep them alive with you. They shall be male and female.”

As the Great Flood began, the boat was going higher and higher above the earth until it reached the top of the highest mountain. The flood continued for 40 days and 40 nights and then stopped. The boat continued to rest on top of Ararat Mount.

Many people have tried to find the remnants of Noah’s Ark on the mountain since then. However, the Bible says that the boat stopped on Mountains of Ararat, not Mount Ararat. Experts believe that it goes about Urartu Mountains in eastern Turkey.

In 1960, Lihan Durupinar, a captain of the Turkish army, made several aerial photos. On one of those photos, Durupinar saw a strange object staying at the height of 6,350 feet in Ararat Mountains. The object was shaped as a ship and was nearly 500 feet long. A mission of US and Turkish scientists set off on a mission to the mountains soon after the photo had been published.

At the height of nearly 7,000 feet above the sea level, they saw a flat plot of land covered with grass. The plot looked like a ship indeed. The size of the plot of land was very close to that mentioned in the Bible. The scientists did not conduct a detailed examination of the site. They simply concluded that the strange formation was nothing else but a natural phenomenon.

In September 1960, a 27-year-old US doctor Ron Wyatt, an amateur archeologist, read an article in Life Magazine about the phenomenon. The search for Noah’s Ark became the primary objective in his life.

In 1977, Wyatt started the mission to Turkey with his two sons. Having overcome numerous difficulties, the US researcher and his sons reached the village, where they found conductors among the local population. On the outskirts of the village, the men found several boulders, which looked like anchor rocks. Ron had seen the photos of those rocks in archeology books before. The rocks with holes drilled in them served as anchors for ancient vessels. It turned out that there were crosses engraved on all local rocks.

Some time later, Ron found the object that looked like a ship. The object was submerged deep into the ground. The men had to conduct excavation works to find out whether there was the legendary ship hidden in the ground.

In August 1979, after the Turkish earthquake, Ron Wyatt visited the site again. The researcher discovered that the ground bared the fossilized remains of the vessel. Wyatt had not received a permit for the archeological works by that time, so he decided to work on his own. Next time, he used metal finders in his work. It happened in August 1984.

The scanning revealed a metal network around the object. The network was supposedly of artificial origin. Ron explored the slope of the mountain where the “Ark” was resting. Up in the mountain, he discovered the ruins of an ancient stone construction. There was a plot of land near the ruins measured 120×40 feet. The plot was framed with something like fossilized wood.

In December 1986, Turkish officials representing interior and foreign ministries, as well as a group of researchers from the city of Ataturk approved the official solution saying that the formation discovered by Ron Wyatt and his colleagues contained the remains of Noah’s Ark indeed.

Many discussions have taken place since the “official” discovery of Noah’s Ark. Some scientists say that Wyatt indeed discovered the Biblical vessel, whereas others deny this theory. The search for the Ark still continues.

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Vikings used mysterious sunstone ‘sat nav’ to sail to America

EU Times — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 22:30:28 +0000

Inventive: A new study claims to have revealed how the Vikings were able to navigate on cloudy days with a sunstone

Ancient legends of Viking mariners using mysterious sunstones to reveal the position of the sun on a cloudy day may well be true, according to a new study.

Before the invention of the compass, Norse adventurers travelled thousands of kilometres across the oceans toward Greenland and most likely as far as North America centuries ahead of Christopher Columbus.

Evidence shows that these fearless seamen navigated by reading the position of the sun and stars along with an intimate knowledge of landmarks, currents and waves.

But how they could voyage such distances across seas at northern latitudes while hampered by light obscuring clouds and fog remained a mystery.

While experts have long argued that Vikings knew how to use blocks of light-fracturing crystal to locate the sun through dense clouds, archeologists have never found solid proof.

Doubts also remained as to exactly what kind of material it might be.

An international team of researchers led by Guy Ropars of the University of Rennes in Brittany, says they have the answer.

Vikings, they argue, used transparent calcite crystal – also known as Iceland spar – to fix the true bearing of the Sun to within a single degree of accuracy.

The naturally occurring stone has the capacity to ‘depolarise’ light, filtering and fracturing it along different axes, the researchers explained.

The recent discovery of an Iceland spar aboard an Elizabethan ship sunk in 1592 – tested by the researchers – bolsters the theory that ancient mariners were aware of the crystal’s potential as an aid to navigation.

Even in the era of the compass, crews might have kept such stone on hand as a backup, the study speculates.

‘We have verified that even only one of the cannons excavated from the ship is able to perturb a magnetic compass orientation by 90 degrees,’ the researchers wrote.

‘So, to avoid navigation errors when the Sun is hidden, the use of an optical compass could be crucial even at this epoch, more than four centuries after the Viking time.’

The study appeared in Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical and Physical Sciences, a peer-reviewed journal published by Britain’s de facto academy of science, the Royal Society.

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Israel agrees historic deal with Hamas to free Soldier

EU Times — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 19:40:12 +0000

Gilad Shalit, the teenage conscript seized by Hamas, is set to be released

1,000 Palestinian prisoners to be swapped for soldier held captive in Gaza for five years.

What could prove a historic deal to release hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for an Israeli soldier held captive in Gaza has been agreed between Israel and Hamas, concluding five years of negotiations that have repeatedly collapsed in acrimony and violence.

The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said that he had telephoned the parents of Gilad Shalit, the soldier captured by Hamas in a cross-border raid in 2006, to tell them that their son would be home “within days”.

Mr Netanyahu said that a deal with Hamas was initialled last Thursday and signed yesterday, adding that he got “the best deal we could get”. He had earlier been quoted by an Israeli television station as saying “the window has been opened for a historic deal”.

Hamas leader Khalad Meshal confirmed the deal and said that it would see 1,000 Palestinian prisoners released in two stages, the first 450 within a week. The group would include 315 serving life sentences and all Palestinian women in Israeli prisons, he said, hailing the deal as a “national accomplishment” and declaring those to be released were heroes who would “come back to freedom and struggle against occupation”.

A delegation led by a top Hamas official, Mahmoud Zahar, had arrived in Cairo on Monday night from the group’s headquarters in Syria. A source involved in the talks said the deal had been mediated by Egypt.

There were conflicting reports last night over whether Marwan Barghouti, a former top local commander of Fatah, would be part of the deal. If so, it would be a hugely significant step as the release of Barghouti, the most prominent imprisoned Palestinian who is serving multiple life terms for his role in deadly attacks against Israelis, has long been a sticking point in negotiations.

German and Egyptian mediators have tried to broker deals between Israel and Hamas over the past five years. Those talks have repeatedly broken down, and Israel has carried out a number of military strikes and imposed a blockade on the Gaza Strip, partly to pressure Hamas over the case of the soldier. In 2009, it was reported that an exchange was close on similar terms to those which have now reportedly been agreed.

The deal collapsed, however, after disagreements over the release of a number of “heavyweight” prisoners held by Israel, who were accused of planning terrorist attacks on the country. Other sticking points have been whether prisoners would be allowed to return to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, or be sent into exile.

If agreed, the deal would see the release of Sergeant Shalit, 25, after five years in captivity in the Gaza Strip.

He was 19 when he was captured in June 2006 by Palestinian militants who burrowed into Israel and took him into Gaza. His prolonged captivity has been an emotive issue in Israel, where military service is mandatory for Jewish citizens, and many Israelis have identified with the Shalit family’s predicament.

Key captives…

Gilad Shalit

The Israeli and French national was a 19-year-old sergeant in the Israeli army when he was captured by Palestinian militants and taken to Gaza in 2006. Since his capture in a cross-border raid, the only contact between Shalit and the outside world has been three letters, an audio tape and a DVD video.

Marwan Barghouti

Even though he is a long-time Fatah leader, Barghouti is seen as a possible unifying figure among Palestinians. Despite being imprisoned by Israel in 2002 for five counts of murder, he is considered a strong candidate to succeed Mahmoud Abbas as President of the Palestinian Authority.

Richard Hall

Israel’s long fight: How prisoners triggered a campaign

With conscription a fact of life in Israel and with a perception that the country is surrounded by enemies fuelling a strong sense of the need for national solidarity, the government in Jerusalem always faces a difficult calculus when determining how far to go to bring back a captured soldier.

That Israel is prepared to go to extreme lengths to bring back its young conscripts alive is indicated by the numbers of Palestinian prisoners that Benjamin Netanyahu was prepared to release for Gilad Shalit. But if Mr Netanyahu and his cabinet were seen to be reluctant to make the necessary sacrifices for the soldier’s freedom, the political costs could be significant.

In the past, limits on Israel’s willingness to bargain have been defined by whether those up for exchange have “blood on their hands”. The steps soldiers are instructed to take to prevent a snatch are also unusual. Under the so-called “Hannibal Directive”, it is said that Israeli forces would be ordered to fire upon anyone abducting one of their soldiers even at the cost of the life of the victim.

A soldier’s death can be borne, the reasoning goes, but his lengthy incarceration can be disastrous for national morale.

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Retired US Officer issues Appology to Germany for WW2

EU Times — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 20:55:12 +0000

Photo of German prisoners rounded up by US Airborne troops in Ruhr

A retired officer in the US army has apologized to the German army for the mass deaths of German prisoners in US army camps after World War Two. Following extensive private investigations in the US and Germany, Merrit P. Drucker has sent an e-mail to Lt. Col. Max Klaar, head of the Verband der deutscher Soldaten (German Veterans’ Association), regretting the lethal conditions in the US camps where some 750,000 Germans died while they were denied available food and shelter.

Drucker has also formed a committee of six people, in Germany, the UK, Canada and the US to pursue further investigations and make amends by way of apologies to the families of the dead, and veterans’ institutions. Drucker’s first e-mail letter has been posted on the veterans’ website where there is also a questionnaire asking for details of prisoners’ internment.

The book Other Losses by James Bacque, which helped to set off the investigation, is being re-issued in an American edition in October. The launch will be held in Washington in the Marriott Hotel where Drucker plans to present a formal letter of apology to Klaar who is flying over for the occasion. Klaar will present in his turn a proposal for a peace treaty between the USA and Germany. It has 14 points. Two films about postwar Germany are included in the program.

Other Losses, a world-wide best-seller published in 13 countries, has been suppressed in the US for over 20 years. The new edition is being published by Talonbooks of Vancouver, whose editor, Karl Siegler, is the son of a former prisoner in a US army camp. When his father told him what had happened to him in the US camp, Siegler said, “I don’t believe you.” He changed his mind after reading Other Losses. Because of such sad events, Lt. Colonel Klaar has said that “Germany is a country of wounded souls.” Many Germans have already written to Major Drucker to thank him for taking a heavy weight of grief and guilt off their minds.

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Lithuania wants compensation for Soviet-era occupation

EU Times — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 11:26:05 +0000

Lithuania's Foreign Minister Audronius Azubalis

Lithuania’s top diplomat urged Moscow on Tuesday to start considering the issue of compensation for the Soviet-era “occupation” of his country.

“I have encouraged Russia to open a dialogue on the joint evaluation of the past, the restoration of justice, compensation for the occupation, and problems of the investigation of crimes and the perpetuation of the memory of the victims,” Foreign Minister Audronius Azubalis said following a session of the Russian-Lithuanian Intergovernmental Commission.

Russia has long been at odds with the Baltic states of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia, as well as Poland, over perceived attempts to rewrite the history of World War II and diminish the Soviet role in the defeat of Nazi Germany.

While Russia maintains that the Red Army liberated the Baltic states from German invaders, many residents of the republics put the two occupations on a par, citing mass Stalin-era deportations.

Last year, the Lithuanian parliament approved amendments stipulating criminal penalties for those publicly justifying, denying or playing down international crimes, as well as crimes “committed by the U.S.S.R.” and the Nazis against Lithuania.

Lithuania became the first Soviet republic to declare its independence on in March 1990. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev called the declaration “illegitimate and invalid” and sent Soviet tanks to the capital, Vilnius. Although the tanks withdrew after a few hours, Soviet troops were still stationed in Lithuania. More than 10 people were killed and many more were injured during protests that started when Soviet troops tried to seize the television station in Vilnius in January 1991.

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French history erased in new wave of revisionism

EU Times — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 12:45:48 +0000

France, Marseille: Pupils wait for entering their classroom at Fraissinet school, on the first day of the school year.

Parents and teachers across France are up in arms over new textbooks which carry accounts of French history revised to avoid insulting ethnic minority pupils. They say common sense has been sacrificed to political correctness in French schools.

Natives of France now fear their identity will soon disappear along with their history.

A modern French history textbook now boasts no less than 20 pages on the history of black slavery while devoting a mere six pages to the achievements of Napoleon – shown here sitting on a toilet.

France’s new history textbooks are enraging parents and teachers who call it political correctness gone mad.

Dimitri Casali, history professor and best-selling author on the newly-banished giants of France warns of dire consequences of the new educational policy.

“If we don’t teach our minorities the history of their adopted country, they won’t feel French. We’re already seeing riots on our streets,” Casali exclaims.

In the new textbook, the Crusades are now called insulting to Muslims, the Sun King Louis 14th is labeled imperialist and Napoleon is mocked as the Colonel Gaddafi of his day. The star of the new school books is Mali’s previously little-known King Kankou Musa who ruled over the West African country in the 13th century.

The purge even extends to literary giants like Victor Hugo, author of the world classic, Les Miserables.

France is already breaking up, believes Professor Casali, because its young people have no sense of identity. Parents are deeply concerned too.

Father-of-three Jean-Noel Villemin from Paris says, “We need to study even the worst pages of our history because you cannot understand politics today if you don’t understand history, if they want to understand and vote properly.”

Legal action is seen as the only way to stop the erasure of France’s national history.

“Schools now give 10 per cent of their schedule to the medieval African Mali Empire. I’ve studied it, and what exactly is its contribution to world development?” asks Parisian lawyer Marcel Ceccaldi.

Thousands signed a petition after lessons on the French Revolution were replaced by study of the African kingdom of Monomotapah, which many say they have never heard of. The Ministry of Education refused to be interviewed, but gave RT this statement:

“We are changing the school curriculum to reflect globalization. Monomotapah is being taught because it is important to have a view on other world cultures such as Egypt, China and India,” the statement reads.

A new European Parliament report has backed compulsory school lessons on the benefits of the EU, from “a very young age.” Critics say pupils are learning less and less about their own countries and warn that states which stop teaching their past will simply consign themselves to history.

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Moon to have no-fly zones by month end

EU Times — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 22:15:25 +0000

THE PURPOSE: NASA's "recommendations" of no-fly zones are for preserving and protecting Apollo missions' historical sites and artefacts.

No-fly zones will come into effect on the moon for the very first time by the end of this month! Why, even buffer zones that spacecraft may have to avoid will come into existence. The reason: avoiding any spraying of rocket exhaust or dust onto certain historical sites and artefacts on the moon.

The historical sites are of course the Apollo landing sites and artefacts present on the moon. And the “recommendations” are for preserving and protecting these historical sites. There are currently more than three dozen historical sites that preserve the more than four-decade-old remains.

“Apollo 11 and 17 sites [will] remain off-limits, with ground-travel buffers of 75 metres and 225 metres from each respective lunar lander,” states the July 20 guidelines of NASA. Science journal had obtained the guidelines.

No legal binding

According to Science, by the end of this month NASA is expected to come up with a set of “recommendations” for spacecraft and astronauts visiting the “U.S. government property on the moon.” Of course, these recommendations will not be legally binding as the 1967 Outer Space Treaty makes it clear that the lunar surface has no owner.

Despite the lack of ownership, NASA is hopeful that other countries will respect the U.S. sentiments. Incidentally, the restriction list contains more than the historical sites. For instance, the list includes studying discarded food and abandoned astronaut faeces.

Study of bacteria

Though these restrictions may appear preposterous, there are clear scientific compulsions to collect and study them. For example, studying the discarded food will reveal the viability of bacteria on the moon and, if present, how they have mutated and survived after years of exposure to solar radiation.

It is worthwhile to remember that all scientific experiments conducted on board during space travel are of a few days duration and pale in comparison with decades of constant exposure to several stressful lunar conditions/environment.

Similarly, there are other scientific compulsions to study the artefacts left behind on the moon. For instance, any metallic objects would reveal how these materials have degraded after prolonged exposure to solar radiation and other peculiar conditions prevailing on the moon.

What prompted the space agency to act was the Google Lunar X prize for those landing a robot that moves 500 metres and sends images from the moon. Precise landing near the Apollo sites would get them more money.

Very recently, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) captured the sharpest images ever taken from space of the Apollo 12, 14 and 17 landing sites. The paths made when the astronauts explored the lunar surface have been very clearly captured by the images.

According to NASA, at the Apollo 17 site, the tracks laid down by the lunar rover are clearly visible, along with the last foot trails left on the Moon. The images also show where the astronauts placed some of the scientific instruments that provided the first insights into the Moon’s environment and interior.

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New York remembers victims of 9/11 attacks

EU Times — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 22:09:55 +0000

As the world remembers 3000 people killed in the United States on the tragic events of 9/11, demonstrators gathered in New York City in a memorial for the victims of the “global war on terror”.

Organizers say the event is to commemorate fallen soldiers and those forgotten.

Led by artists, activists and organizations across the country the memorial is to cry out in protest and grief with a different message to the people of the world: All this has not been done in our names.

In 2002, people living in the United States joined with millions around the globe in the largest protests in history against a coming war -Iraq- a country with no links to 9/11. Not In Our Name! they chanted. Today they gather once again their slogan: “Our grief is not a cry for war!”

And the message was clear: Unity and solidarity against racism and anti-Muslim bigotry.

Former US Army Muslim Chaplin at Guantanamo made a passionate called on Americans to speak out against the inhumane treatment of prisoners at the US prison base:

The event takes place as New York City continues to be on high security alert for possible terrorist attacks.

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Mayan Secrets to Be Revealed by Mexican Government in ’2012′ Doc

EU Times — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 21:37:27 +0000

The Mexican government is releasing state-held secrets about the end of the Mayan calendar to the makers of a documentary, “Revelations of the Mayans 2012 and Beyond,” TheWrap has learned.

The information — protected for 80 years — is expected to reveal Mayan beliefs in future catastrophes and wisdom characterized as “shocking,” producer Raul Julia-Levy, son of actor Raul Julia, told TheWrap.

The end of the Mayan calendar in December 2012 has long given rise to theories and speculation about the end of the world.

The agreement will allow Julia-Levy to film in never-before-seen locations.

“The Mayans used to construct one pyramid over another,” tourism minister for the Mexican state of Campeche Luis Augusto Garcia Rosado told TheWrap. “In the site at Calakmul (pictured below right), workers for INAH [the National Institute of Anthropology and History] have discovered rooms inside the pyramid that have never been seen or explored before.

“And we’re letting this documentary film there, to see what has been discovered inside the pyramid.”

Julia-Levy (above) said he’d been made aware of the secret Mayan information by former Mexican president Vicente Fox — a friend of his family — and that it took four years of phone calls to finally get the OK from current president Felipe Calderon.

“This is very important for humanity, not just for Mexico,” said Julia-Levy. “This information has been protected for 80 years, and now it’s important for people to understand the series of events that are coming, and the consequences for all of us.”

The English-language documentary will be directed by Juan Carlos Ruflo (whose other films include the 2006 Sundance winner “In the Pit”), and will begin shooting later this year. Elbert said the filmmakers are talking to investors and waiting for the government to give them their first look at the material and the site.

One big condition from the Mexican government was that the film get an initial theatrical release, which is planned for next fall, said Ed Elbert who is co-producing along with Julia-Levy and Sheila M. McCarthy and executive producer Eduardo Vertiz.

“It has to be released before the end of the Mayan calendar, which is Dec. 21, 2012,” said Julia-Levy.

That’s the date that the Mayan calendar — which some believe predicts a worldwide cataclysm — comes to the end of a 5,126-year cycle, and resets for another cycle.

Julia-Levy has been specifically ordered not to talk about any of the more mystical possibilities that might strain credulity as Mexico prepares to launch the far-reaching (and tourism-inducing) 2012 Mayan World Program.

At one point, Rosado was quoted in a press release talking about contact between the Mayans and extraterrestrials. That statement has been recalled, and Rosado now paints this as a simpler, more archaeological-oriented documentary.

“At the moment, talk of the Mayans is a big thing,” Rosado said.

“We’ve counted over 3 million websites talking about the end of the Mayan calendar, and we have been contacted by a lot of producers who want to come and film on our sites.”

The project is similar in some ways to a novel Julia-Levy was writing, variously entitled “Chronicles of the Mayan Tunnel” and “Secrets of the Mayan Time Machine.” He and co-producer Elbert were also going to make a 3D movie from that novel starring him and Wesley Snipes, he said in the summer of 2010.

Several reports from that time said the novel was being written with the help of “secret information” never before released by the Mexican government. But in their conversations with TheWrap, Julia-Levy and Elbert dismissed that project as a “Harry Potter”-style piece of fiction with no connection to the current documentary.

That film has been set aside, they said, because Snipes is serving a prison sentence for tax evasion. “We put that film on hold,” said Elbert. “Dollar-wise, this documentary might be smaller, but it is based on the release of new and important knowledge from the Mayans.”

Asked if the movie will involve aliens, mystical elements or doomsday scenarios that have fueled the popular imagination, Julia-Levy declined to elaborate.

“I’m not allowed to speak about that,” he said. “Everything is going to come out in time, but I can’t comment on aliens or on 2012.

“I can just say that the Mexican government is preparing to tell humanity and the world things that are critical for us, for the way we live, for the way we’ve been handling the planet.”

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Half of European men share King Tut’s DNA

EU Times — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 12:18:15 +0000

Nearly half of all Western European men are related to the Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun, British media report, citing a team of geneticists in Switzerland.

Scientists at a Zurich-based DNA genealogy center, reconstructed the DNA profile of the boy Pharaoh, who ascended the throne at the age of nine more than 3,000 years ago.

The results showed that King Tut belonged to a genetic profile group to which more than 50 per cent of all men in Western Europe belong, indicating that they share a common ancestor.

Around 70 per cent of Spanish and 60 per cent of French men also belong to the genetic group of the Pharaoh, while the figure among modern-day Egyptian males does not exceed 1 percent, the study says.

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Nixon’s ‘war on drugs’ began 40 years ago, and the battle is still raging

EU Times — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 07:22:32 +0000

In 1971, President Richard Nixon, motivated by addiction among US soldiers in Vietnam, told Congress drug abuse was "public enemy number one".

Despite decades of battling against narcotics, the levels of addiction, trafficking and violence continue to rise. The war on drugs has failed. Now, politicians in Latin America are calling to review all options – from full legalisation to a new war.

Four decades ago, on 17 July 1971, President Richard Nixon declared what has come to be called the “war on drugs”. Nixon told Congress that drug addiction had “assumed the dimensions of a national emergency”, and asked Capitol Hill for an initial $84m (£52m) for “emergency measures”.

Drug abuse, said the president, was “public enemy number one”.

But as reported the following morning in our sister newspaper, the Guardian, the president’s initiative appears to have been primarily motivated not by considerations of the ghettoes or Woodstock festival, but by addiction among soldiers fighting in Vietnam: the first and immediate measure in the “war on drugs”, implemented 40 years ago this weekend, was the institution of urine testing for all US troops in Indochina. The Guardian’s “sidebar” story to the news bulletin was not from Chicago or Los Angeles but the Mekong Delta, with soldiers laughing: “You can go anywhere, ask anyone, they’ll get it for you. It won’t take but a few seconds.”

Nixon signed his war on drugs into law on 28 January 1972, Adam Raphael quoting him in this newspaper as saying: “I am convinced that the only way to fight this menace is by attacking it on many fronts.” The catchphrase “war on drugs” mimicked that of Nixon’s predecessor Lyndon B Johnson, who had declared a “war on poverty” during his state of the union address in 1964.

Four decades on, in a world (and an America) accursed by poverty and drugs, there is almost universal agreement that the war on drugs has failed as thoroughly as that on poverty. In the US and Europe, the war has been fought on the streets, in the courts and through the jail system, to no apparent avail. In the world that has “developed” since 1971, it has been fought in the barrios; it has defoliated land and driven peasants into even worse poverty. The war in the so-called “producing” countries has ravaged Colombia, is currently tearing Mexico apart, and again threatens Afghanistan, Central America, Bolivia, Peru and Venezuela. In places such as west Africa, the war is creating “narco states” that have become effective puppets of the mafia cartels the war has spawned.

The drugs themselves have wrought misery and havoc across the planet, and continue to do so. According to the United Nations, in an exhaustive report by a global commission on drugs published this summer, worldwide opiate consumption increased by 34.5% between in the two decades to 2009, and that of cocaine by 25%. The UN estimates the drug business to be the third biggest in the world after oil and arms, worth £198bn a year. The former head of its office on drugs and crime, Antonio Maria Costa, posits that the laundered profits of the narco-trafficking underworld by the “legitimate” financial sector is what kept the banks afloat for years before they finally crashed in 2008.

But while Costa (and I, for what it’s worth, after three years covering the Mexican drug war) advocates going after the money as the most urgent priority, most of the lexicon in the now burning debate about what to do in the wake of the drug war’s manifest failure concerns decriminalisation, or even legalisation.

There has been a campaign for the legalisation of drugs in the US ever since the first state ban on marijuana in 1915.

Now President Barack Obama’s drug tsar, Gil Kerlikowske, carefully describes America’s own war on drugs as “unhelpful”. Last month, former president Jimmy Carter wrote in the New York Times that “excessive punishment” has “destroyed the lives of millions of young people and their families”; drug policy, he said, should be “more humane and more effective”.

Obama has entirely changed the language of the US’s relationship with Mexico, conceding “co-responsibility” for the dual catastrophe of violence south of the border and addiction north of it. Experts such as David Shirk, of the Trans-Border Institute in San Diego, say that “the legalisation of marijuana in the US within 10 years is an inevitablity”.

The UK has traditionally been a hardline participant in the war on drugs, but in opposition David Cameron said: “Drugs policy has been failing for decades.” Professor David Nutt of the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs, who has become synonymous with the anti-prohibition movement, says that “the obscenity of hunting down low-level cannabis users to protect them is beyond absurd”.

In Europe, the Netherlands famously refuses to criminalise cannabis users, while Portugal became the first European country, in 2001, to abolish criminal penalties for personal possession of all drugs, sending addicts for counselling instead. Italy has decriminalised possession of less than half a gram of most illegal substances.

Prohibitionism, however, remains strongly supported by most law enforcement agencies in the US and UK. But prohibitionism has its creative and radical exponents too, not least Costa, who argues: “Why open the floodgates to addiction by increasing access to drugs?” He wrote for this newspaper: “Maybe western governments could absorb the health costs of increased drug use, if that’s how taxpayers want their money spent. But what about the developing world? Why unleash an epidemic of addiction in parts of the world that already face misery and do not have the health and social systems to cope with a drug tsunami?”

Costa proposed that “drugs should be regarded as a health issue”; he wanted to “reduce vulnerability to drugs in regions of the world where governance is weak”, and – calling the bluff of rich countries that host the big banks – “get serious about organised crime”.

The most compelling and sophisticated initiatives in the debate 40 years on from Nixon’s declaration come from the region that has arguably suffered more than anywhere from the ravages of drug production, trafficking and now addiction, too – Latin America.

Last August, Argentina’s supreme court ruled it unconstitutional to punish people for using marijuana for personal use. Even Mexico, which has since 2005 been the theatre for a singularly vicious drugs war, has elected to legalise limited amounts of all drugs for personal use, for example: 0.5g of cocaine, 40mg of methamphetamine and 50mg of heroin. Felipe Calderón, the president, has called for “a fundamental debate on the legalisation of drugs”, even though he opposes such a policy himself.

A landmark proposal was made by three former presidents: Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico, César Gaviria of Colombia and Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil. It opened with the salvo: “Prohibitionist policies based on eradication, interdiction and criminalisation of consumption simply haven’t worked … The revision of US-inspired drug policies is urgent in the light of the rising levels of violence and corruption associated with narcotics.”

Of the three, Colombia – which has just emerged from a ferocious drug war – is the most impatiently adventurous in its call for a complete global overhaul of drugs policy. Colombia’s ambassador to London, Mauricio Rodríguez, says that this should be “based not on anyone’s political or ideological agenda, or any media agenda, but on the economic and social data and information we do not yet have, and must acquire”

“Our president has said very clearly that this is the time for a deep analysis of what has happened over the past 40 years, and to learn the lessons of the mistakes that have been made,” Rodríguez said in an interview with the Observer last week. “And we have to evaluate every alternative, without excluding any possibility – from complete legalisation to a second, different, war on drugs.”

The discourse, he says, “can no longer be that of this country or that, but a serious global discussion”. It cannot even, he says, make the conventional distinctions between “producing” and “consuming” nations, “since we now have widespread consumption in the so-called ‘producing’ nations and, with synthetic drugs, significant production in the ‘consuming’ nations”.

The global horizon is necessary, he says, “because we want to be sure that what is good for Colombia is good for the rest of the world, and vice versa. We are not saying that we have a solution; we are saying that we do have some moral authority because we have lived 24 years in hell – been through a painful experience which has cost us thousands of lives lost, hundreds of millions of dollars lost, the reputation of the country lost. We are now re-establishing that reputation, and stabilising the country, but the problem has moved elsewhere – to Central America, Mexico and West Africa.

“And so we realise,” Rodríguez continues, “that we need to start afresh with a global and entirely different approach, different analyses which are social, economic – and different solutions. I’ve been studying this for 25 years, and have heard too many superficial analyses: that this is to do with leisure, or this is a problem of mafia. We need a more complex analysis of the deep roots of this problem – we cannot fool ourselves about the root causes of the tragedy of drugs in both the developed and developing world, they are to do with poverty and deprivation, young people without access to employment, with no access to education. They are about alienation, fear and anger.”

Among the strategies he wants to see pursued are, first, “detailed economic work on these causes and the ways of combating them”. Second: “Let’s be serious about where the big money is. If you look at the trail of cocaine, you’ll find that 5% of the profits remain in the producing countries; 95% is in the distribution networks and laundered. The big money is in the big banks in the big countries; the big money is in the US, Europe and Asia.” And third: “Let’s talk about the human rights issues.”

Rodríguez discusses a programme his embassy has launched in collaboration with the police in Scotland called “Sniffing the rainforest”. “We tell the young people that one gram of cocaine involves the destruction of four square metres of rainforest. That it costs hundreds of lives – and although they are taken to drugs by economic alienation, the response to this kind of language has been positive.” We also tell them, he adds, “what else is involved in sniffing cocaine: gasoline, cement, sulphuric acid – and they listen to that”.

It was while working along the US-Mexican border, in an inferno of violence and addiction, that I came to see the wisdom of the proposed Colombian strategy. In the rehab clinics and wretched outskirts of Ciudad Juárez, where drugs are legal for personal use and easier to obtain than soft drinks, I developed a problem with the scope of the lexicon in the UK and, to a lesser extent, the US, which too often presumes that people take drugs for reasons of “recreation”, rather than out of desperation and despair.

This view of drugs as stimulating entertainment may hold true of Camden Lock in London and the capital’s West End clubs, but not of São Paulo or even the valleys of south Wales, let alone the US-Mexican border. What may work for Notting Hill might not work in Rhondda, let alone Tijuana.

In Tijuana in 2009, addicts could not believe their luck – those arriving at a Narcóticos Anónimos session were amazed that possession of up to four lines of cocaine or 50mg of heroin was now legal. Juan Morales Magana, 17, a windscreen-washer and registered methamphetamine and heroin addict, was working out how many hits the legal limit of 40mg of meth would get him, though his counsellor, an evangelical pastor, was ambivalent: “I wouldn’t want anyone to think that just because it is legal, one should live like this for fun. Drugs are the scourge of our society. All this can do would limit killing between small-time cholos [gangsters] for street-corner turf. The danger is that kingpins will accelerate the domestic market if possession is legal and smuggling into the US more difficult.”

“Personally, I sometimes wish drugs would be made legal so that the gringos can get high and we can live in peace,” said Tijuana police officer Elisio Montes, whose two best friends, his former boss and assistant, were murdered by executioners for the cartels. “Then I say to myself: no – these drugs are addictive after one single hit. They’re terrifying, they destroy lives, they destroy our young people. If they’re legal, they’ll buy more.”

Writing in the Times, Antonia Senior insists that: “Drugs policy must start from the premise that teenagers like taking drugs, because drugs make them feel good.” I would rather it started from the premise that life in most places is so awful that it leads to catastrophic addiction such as that in the barrios of Honduras or, indeed, the back streets of Naples or Swansea.

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Diplomatic scandal sparks between Russia and Romania over WW2

EU Times — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 13:28:39 +0000

A major diplomatic scandal broke out between Russia and Romania. The reason for the scandal is the statements of Romanian President Traian Basescu, who virtually justified his country’s participation in the war against the Soviet Union on the side of Hitler.

Basescu voiced the scandalous statements back on June 22. They were dedicated to the 70th anniversary of the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. On June 22, 1941, the Romanian troops along with the Germans crossed the border into the USSR and later occupied a considerable part of Moldova and Ukraine, including Odessa and Nikolaev. Bessarabia (the main part of Moldavia), Chernivtsi and Odessa regions of Ukraine were made a part of Romania, and a special administrative unit of Transnistria (Zadnestrove) was created on the rest of the occupied territory.

Romanian motivation was partially understandable: until 1940, it was composed of Bessarabia, Chernivtsi and Odessa region of modern Ukraine. The country gave the areas to the USSR under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Soviet authorities put pressure on the Romanians, and their ally, Germany did not intervene at the moment. At the same time, Bessarabia and Bucak (south of Odessa region) were captured by the Romanians in 1918, when a civil war was ongoing on the wreckage of the Russian Empire. In Bukovina (Chernivtsi region), the majority of the population always were Ukrainians.

As for the occupation of Odessa, Mykolaiv, and parts of Kherson, Kirovohrad and Vinnytsya regions, they have never been a part of Romania (Moldova and Wallachian principalities). The same goes for Transnistria. It was a pure act of aggression on the part of the then de facto leader of Romania, Marshal Ion Antonescu, which is recognized by all agreements signed after World War Two. As the lost party, the Romanians lost all these lands.

Now, Romanian President Traian Basescu tried to turn everything upside down. Speaking on June 22 at B1TV TV channel, he acquitted Antonescu’s actions 70 years ago. “I would also give such an order. We had an ally. Under those circumstances I would have done the same,” said Basescu, justifying the actions of the Romanian marshal.

Further, the president urged not to blame Antonescu for the deportation of local Jews and gypsies. Basescu even managed to find a “Russian trace” here. “We forget that the Romania head of state at the time (King Michael – Ed.). Antonescu was the Prime Minister. To one we pay homage and return the property, while we make the other a war criminal. Why? Just because one of them was a Russian servant? ” Basescu said. Perhaps he meant that after the war Mihai renounced the throne and was awarded the Soviet Order of Victory.

Surprisingly, the reaction of Russian diplomats to such a blatant statement of the Romanian leader followed only on June 30. However, it was justifiably very tough. “Russia is indignant with the remarks of the President of Romania. Such a statement, particularly made on the sad day of the 70th anniversary of the Great Patriotic War, during which our people have lost 27 million lives, cannot be explained either by the current political circumstances, or answers to the provocative questions of the journalists,” said Alexander Lukashevich, the spokesman of the Russian Foreign Ministry.

“It is obvious that such a shameless bravado justifying the Nazi aggression and desecrating the memory of the millions of victims of Nazism is unacceptable and must receive an adequate assessment of the civilized Europe,” said Lukashevich. However, no response from the civilized Europe followed. The Romanian diplomats began commenting on the reaction of the Russian colleagues, foaming at the mouth.

“We believe the vocabulary used in the statement of Russia’s officials on some of President Traian Basescu’s comments on historical subjects to be inappropriate,” the Romanian diplomats stated.

Obviously, realizing that they have crossed the line, the Romanian Foreign Ministry has decided to bring down the intensity of emotions. “The Romanian Foreign Ministry is fully open to a dialogue with the Russian Foreign Ministry to resolve any kind of misunderstanding and distortion of information that led to the reaction of the Russian officials. This incident should not lead to a breach of a natural dialogue held in the framework of politeness, which is normal for bilateral relations,” said Bucharest.

In the evening of June 30 Basescu took the floor again. He began speculating that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, in which Romania was deprived of the territories occupied in 1918, was condemned by both the Russian and Romanian parliaments. “I do not understand what is so insulting, because the Soviet Union no longer exists. We have a relationship with the Russian Federation, but when it comes to a debate about the Soviet Union, this is a discussion about something that is already in the past,” said the Romanian President, commenting on the scandal.

Basescu’s words could have been left unnoticed if we were talking about a marginal politician from countries like Andorra or Kiribati. Yet, Romania is a rather large 22,000,000 strong country, a member of the European Union and NATO, which borders with two countries of the CIS, Ukraine and Moldova. In the coming years the base elements of missile defense will appear on its territory. Basescu is not a lone wolf. He has a powerful political protection, and Russia will not be able to just brush him off.

Speculations on the topics of history have long been an integral part of the Romanian foreign policy. Starting his presidency in 2005, Basescu openly questioned the statehood of Moldova and refused to sign an agreement on the borders with it. A year later, he referred to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and said: “Romania and the Romanians is the only country, the only people who remain separated in Europe after the reunification of the divided Germany. Romania remains divided into two countries.” In 2007, Basescu said that he has already distributed a half million Romanian passports to the Moldovans.

The Romanian leader, shrugging off all diplomatic rules, brazenly interfered in the internal affairs of Moldova. During the memorable riots in Kishinev in April of 2009, he openly sided with the opposition, unhappy with the victory of the Communist Party in the parliamentary elections. His rational is clear: the then opposition and now the leaders of the ruling alliance openly advocate for the unification with Romania, and say that the Moldovan language should be called Romanian. Largely due to Basescu, a new election was held then, and the power in Chisinau was taken by the people who one way or another focused on Bucharest.

Striving for historical revenge, Basescu is actively engaged with Ukrainian affairs. While Yushchenko was fighting with the Russians, Romania virtually won at the International Court Ukraine’s shelf Snake Island in the Black Sea, possibly rich in hydrocarbons. In Chernivtsi and Odessa regions mass distribution of Romanian passports is ongoing. According to some reports, approximately 100 thousand of those have been distributed. Today the Romanians and Ukraine are disputing a small island at the mouth of the Danube, close to Ishmael.

The Romanian president had never made such open statements in defense of the Nazi allies. However, he made countless provocative statements and actions. The distribution of Romanian passports in the neighboring regions of Ukraine, public intervention in the affairs of Moldavia and open refusal to recognize the Moldovan statehood is a challenge to the post-war Europe, the entire system of boundaries on the continent.

Creeping Romanian revenge has been ongoing, but the “civilized Europe” is silently observing the words and actions of Basescu. Russian diplomats do not always react to the statements of the official in Bucharest, or often react with a delay. However, in this case Romania threw an open challenge to Russia. This is a combination of a blow to the historical memory and contemporary politics and a public praise of the Nazi ally.

Leaving this statement without consequences is hardly a choice. The belated statement of the Russian Foreign Ministry is unlikely to be sufficient, especially because Basescu is not the only one who makes such statements.

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