PARROT SKETCH

Is this parrot psychic? Try a pollygraph test.

Aimée Morgana noticed that her language-using African Grey parrot, N'kisi, often seemed to respond to her thoughts and intentions in a seemingly telepathic manner. We set up a series of trials to test whether this apparent telepathic ability would be expressed in formal testing.
He scored 23 hits: the mean number of hits expected by chance was 12, with a standard deviation of 3.

Listen to N'kisi here. It is difficult to discern which is the human and which is the smart one.

[Parrot's oratory stuns scientists (January 2004)]

COINCIDENCE?

Kazakh 'lighter' tower catches fire




[Kazakhstan's tallest building, affectionately known to locals as "the cigarette lighter" due to its shape, has lived up to its name by catching fire.]

DOOMED, DOOMED

Prof. James Lovelock talks about the fate of humanity.

This has nothing to do with global warming but ...

Carbon in the ocean is changing its chemistry; coral reefs are in danger and creatures with shells may be destroyed.
CO2 enters the ocean as a dissolved gas, it reacts with the sea water and it is making the ocean more acidic.
Since the pre-industrial 1800s to the present, the ocean's acidity has increased by about 0.1 pH units.

[This really is an effect independent of global warming. As we show in the Arctic, global warming can make the problem even worse. – Dr Richard Matear at CSIRO in Hobart has published his research in Nature, and there's more to come.]

HOWARD'S WAY

Political Amnesia and Howard's Ten Years

The mainstream press's analysis of "Ten Years of Howard" has involved a massive dose of political amnesia. A pattern of Government lies and racism is all but ignored. Instead Howard is lauded for his "mainstream" values and for keeping down interest rates.
So what about:
- The "$8 billion dollar black hole" the government discovered upon election to office that meant it had "no choice" but to slash public funding for health, welfare and education.
- the introduction of the regressive GST despite denials before coming to office of their intentions
- the curtailing of Native Title rights with the Wik legislation.
- the lies and secrets surrounding the training of scabs by the military in Dubai prior to the MUA dispute where the PM and senior Ministers lied about their involvement
- the Children Overboard scandal where the Prime Minister and his senior ministers again lied
- the racist treatment of the Tampa and the subsequent establishment of the "Pacific Solution"
- the lies and cruelty that has occurred in the past decade in the running of on-shore immigration detention facilities.
- Howard's implicit support for the ideas of Pauline Hanson through "dog whistle statements" and a refusal to condemn her ideas and then the subsequent adoption of much of her platform
- the wrongful imprisonment and deportation of Australian citizens in Australian immigration detention
- the lies surrounding the invasion of Iraq
- the failure to sign the Kyoto Agreement and massive subsidies to the coal industry. They have also promoted the expansion of Uranium mining and other parts of the nuclear cycle such as reactors and waste dumps.
- the AWB lies
- the introduction of regressive and unpopular IR laws
- ballooning spending on Defence as the Government increasing make the Australian military another division of the U.S. "Foreign Legion".
- the racist scapegoating of Muslims both at home and abroad
- the introduction of draconian and undemocratic security laws which have wiped out centuries of hard won legal rights such as the presumption of innocence and the right to not be detained without trail.

POWER OF ONE

David Hicks before his Guantanamo nightmare began.

Anti-war mum Cindy Sheehan slams Australian PM Howard

Australian Pime Minister John Howard was an illegal combatant waging a war of terror against the world, a prominent US anti-war activist told a peace rally in Melbourne today.
Cindy Sheehan, whose volunteer soldier son Casey, 24, was killed in Baghdad two years ago, called for an end to the Iraq war and for the closure of Guantanamo Bay prison, where Australian citizen David Hicks is incarcerated.
"Our governments are saying they (Guantanamo Bay inmates) don't deserve civil rights because they're illegal enemy combatants," Ms Sheehan told the rally.
"George Bush and John Howard and Tony Blair are illegal combatants, there's nothing about this war on terror that is legal.
"These people (world leaders) perpetuate the torture and the killing and they're still allowed to run free and live in society, except George Bush; he can't go outside unprotected he has to ride around in cars that are better armoured than the one my son was killed in."
Ms Sheehan was speaking at a protest rally outside the Australian Liberal Party offices in Exhibition street.
She told about 200 people the war on terror was immoral and eroded basic civil and human rights.
She said prisoners such as David Hicks – who has been incarcerated for four years after being captured training with the Taliban in Afghanistan – deserved to be treated with humanity and justice.
As for the soldiers, we must "get them the hell out of Iraq".

STALAG GITMO

Trouble at Guantanamo

Something happened at Guantanamo Bay this month. Was it an uprising? Or was it made to look that way?

Moazzam Begg, the Birmingham bookshop owner released from the camp last year, said the detention cells were too closely monitored and controlled for inmates to organise a revolt so well. Clive Stafford Smith and Brent Mickum, defence lawyers who regularly visit clients in the base, said they suspected the official accounts were "rubbish".
Begg, who was seized by the CIA in Pakistan in 2002, said he was sceptical that inmates would be able to avoid the round-the-clock surveillance by CCTV cameras, foot patrols and watchtowers to make and hide weapons.

Several guards suffered "cuts, scrapes and bruises, just like a good football game," according to Colonel Mike Burngarner, the base's chief of detention operations.

[Next month, the US Supreme Court is due to deliver a critical ruling on whether President Bush's administration can legally refuse to block legal hearings for the 460 inmates now there. ]

MONSTER WITHIN

US dismisses Guantanamo 'torture' report

The United States has dismissed as "full of inaccuracies" a United Nations report that says the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay amounts to torture.

The UN Committee Against Torture has expressed particular concern at the use of dogs to frighten detainees and shackles.
The UN committee's Fernando Marino Menendez says the indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay amounts to torture and this leaves only one solution.
"We told them that Guantanamo should be closed definitively," he said.
"We indicated that some interrogation techniques being used were prohibited by the Convention Against Torture and we gave concrete examples.
"We also indicated that the prohibition of cruel, degrading and human punishment applied to any activity on foreign territory and not only within the United States. We also indicated that secret prisons were banned by the convention."

CLOAK AND DAGGER

Is it a bird, is it a plane

The US administration released video footage of 'a Boeing 757' hitting the Pentagon.
Looks like another case of the Emperor's new clothes.

FLASHBACK: Rumsfeld referrs to a 'missile' striking the Pentagon

Here we're talking about plastic knives and using an American Airlines flight filed with our citizens, and the missile to damage this building and similar (inaudible) that damaged the World Trade Center. The only way to deal with this problem is by taking the battle to the terrorists, wherever they are, and dealing with them.

Also, last week, the Pentagon staged a mock anthrax attack

The drill, Gallant Fox '06, was designed to test the response efforts for both federal and Arlington County responders. During the exercise, crews acted as though there was an anthrax attack inside the Pentagon.
The mock anthrax attack lasted less than one hour, with Red Cross members and other volunteers posing as victims. They acted out the signs and symptoms of anthrax exposure.
When exposed to anthrax, victims are forced to strip off their clothes and take showers to wash off the biological agent.

Last year there was a big false alarm.

Oh, and 'The DaVinci Code' was released too.

[Five years on, concurrent with the release of the Pentagon 'footage', this Flash video was shown at this year's Cannes film festival.]

OUR COSMOS

Cassiopeia A is not dying peacefully. Is it a rare magnetar?

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena reported this week that NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has made accidental and surprising infrared images of light echoes from a star that was supposed to have died 325 years ago in a supernova explosion. But the new infrared information indicates Cassiopeia has released "at least one burst of energy as recently as fifty years ago" from its cosmic grave 11,000 light-years from Earth.

[The echo of an energy burst is the first witnessed around a long-dead star and the largest ever seen. Another astronomer at UA, George Rieke, Ph.D., said, "We had no idea that Spitzer would ever see light echoes. Sometimes you just trip over the biggest discoveries."]

NUCLEAR DAYS

Example: Olympic Dam mine at Roxby Downs, Australia

Destructive long-term consequences of uranium mining

The radiation from the uranium tailings (mining waste) is many million times more dangerous to humans than the radiation from the ore in its original state, says German engineer Hans-Peter Schnelbögl,
These tailings are being produced in vast quantities in Australia – 14,000 tonnes each day.
They will cost human lives for millions of years.
By law, the tailings are required to be safely contained for 1000 years. Erosion may start within a 100 years. Even after 1000 years, the tailings retain 99% of their radioactivity – a scientific fact

[The uranium tailings issue presents an unprecedented challenge to our ethical framework paralleled only by the potential for a large scale nuclear war.]

BLACK FLAGS

200,000 assault rifles 'vanish' from US hands

A 99-tonne cache of 200,000 AK47 assault rifles was to have been secretly flown out of a US base in Bosnia. But the four planeloads of arms have vanished.
Orders for the deal were given by the US Department of Defense. But the work was contracted out via a complex web of private arms traders.
American defence chiefs hired a US firm to take the guns, from the 90s Bosnian war, to Iraq.
Aerocom, the Moldovan air firm at the centre of the 200,000 missing AK47s, was stripped of its licence by its national authorities a day before the first shipment.
The same airline was blasted by the UN in 2003 for smuggling arms to Liberia.

Air traffic controllers in Baghdad have no record of the flights, which supposedly took off between July 2004 and July 2005. A coalition forces spokesman confirmed they had not received "any weapons from Bosnia" and added they were "not aware of any purchases for Iraq from Bosnia".
Two other companies in the complicated sale claim to have papers proving the guns were delivered in Iraq but refuse to show them.

[The latest incident follows a separate probe claiming that thousands of guns meant for Iraq's police and army instead went to al-Qaeda. One arms broker's lawyer admitted nearly all of a shipment of AK-47s went missing. And a US official said £270million of equipment could not be traced. ]

Deeper and deeper: arming the perpetrators

Arms transportation services to Sudan are provided by air and sea generally through foreign companies, or joint arrangements with local companies.
For example, in 2004 a Moldavian registered cargo company, Aerocom, that carried shipments of arms from Serbia to Liberia in violation of the UN embargo in 2002, was carrying cargo to Sudan in 2004 and maintained a close business link to the Ukrainian national arms export company named on Sudanese arms import documents in August 2004.
In 2003 a Sudanese air cargo company leased a Kyrgyzstan-registered Antonov cargo plane from the latest in a long line of companies run by Victor Bout, a Russian arms broker named in several UN reports for violating UN arms embargoes.
The plane is reportedly based in Sharjah and run by British Gulf International Airlines of Kyrgyzstan formed in 2003 out of a Sao Tome-registered company of the same name, using the same office and staff.

OUR NOBLE LEADERS

Bush: My Best Moment as President Was Catching Largemouth Bass

President George W. Bush says his best moment as president was the time he caught a 7 1/2-pound largemouth bass.
During his more than five years in office, Bush has traveled the world's most impressive cities, met with world leaders and entertained celebrities.
But when the German newspaper Bild asked him to name his best and worst moments as president, Bush gave an offbeat answer about the best moment, while giving a more predictable response about his worst.

"The most awful moment was September the 11th, 2001," Bush said, adding that it took time to understand the depth of the terrorist attacks on the United States. "I would say the toughest moment of all was after the whole reality sunk in and I was trying to help the nation understand what was going on, and at the same time, be empathetic for those who had lost lives."

[Psychopathy has a new sound.]

SUPERMAX MOUSSAOUI

It's life, Jim, but not as we know it

Many defense attorneys for inmates convicted on terrorism charges say their clients are often subject to special administrative measures, or SAMs, ordered by the attorney general.
Bernard V. Kleinman, a New York lawyer is the only person allowed to visit his client.

He said his client often spends days at a time without leaving his cell, declining an hour of solitary exercise time because of body-cavity searches performed before and after each session.

"Anybody who thinks the death penalty was more punishment than this doesn't know what it's like to live completely alone for the rest of your life."

[Bernard V. Kleinman, lawyer, regarding Zacharias Moussaoui's Supermax destination.]

MARCHING ORDERS

Take it to the street

In 1965, Federal District Court Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr. weighed the right of mobility against the right to march and ruled in favor of those marching from Selma to Montgomery. Judge Johnson ruled:

"The law is clear that the right to petition one's government for the redress of grievances may be exercised in large groups...and these rights may be exercised by marching, even along public highways."

CANNON FODDER

An Army of one wrong recruit

Jared is autistic.

He didn't know there was a war raging in Iraq until his parents told him last fall -- shortly after a military recruiter stopped him outside a Southeast Portland strip mall and complimented him on his black Converse All Stars.
"When Jared first started talking about joining the Army, I thought, 'Well, that isn't going to happen,' " said Paul Guinther, Jared's father. "I told my wife not to worry about it. They're not going to take anybody in the service who's autistic."
But they did. Last month, Jared came home with papers showing that he not only had enlisted, but also had signed up for the Army's most dangerous job: cavalry scout. He is scheduled to leave for basic training Aug. 16.

[Jared's story illustrates a growing national problem as the military faces increasing pressure to hit recruiting targets during an unpopular war.]

THE GREAT UNWELL

Scottish autism cases soar

A MASSIVE surge in the number of autistic schoolchildren in Scotland has been exposed after figures showed an increase of more than 600 per cent in secondary pupils with the condition in the past six years.
Official statistics show 825 pupils were diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorder in state secondaries in 2005, compared with 114 in 1999 - an increase of 623 per cent. Over the same period, the number of autistic youngsters in primary schools more than quadrupled, from 415 to 1,736.

FIRST CASUALTY

CIA veteran probes Rumsfeld

To prepare for my presentations, I took along a briefcase full of notes and clippings, one of which was a New York Times article datelined Atlanta, Sept. 27, 2002, quoting Rumsfeld's assertion that there was "bulletproof" evidence of ties between al-Qaida and the government of Saddam Hussein.

This was the kind of unfounded allegation that, at the time, deceived 69 percent of Americans into believing that the Iraqi leader played a role in the tragedy of 9/11. Rumsfeld's "bulletproof" rhetoric also came in the wake of an intensive but quixotic search by my former colleagues at the CIA for any reliable evidence of such ties.

A fresh reminder of the Bush administration's Iraq deceptions surfaced Thursday morning, when the Spanish newspaper El Pais published an interview with Paul Pillar, the senior U.S. intelligence specialist on the Middle East and terrorism until he retired late last year. Pillar branded administration attempts to prove a link between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein "an organized campaign of manipulation... I suppose by some definitions that could be called a lie."

Excerpt of transcript of Rumsfeld answering McGovern's questions.
...
RUMSFELD: Zar..., Zarqawi was in Baghdad during the prewar period. That is a fact.
McGovern: Zarqawi? He was in the north of Iraq in a place where Saddam Hussein had no rule. That's where he was.
RUMSFELD: He was also… (crosstalk) He was also in Baghdad.
McGovern: Yes, when he needed to go to the hospital. Come on, these people aren’t idiots. They know the story.
...

Full transcript here. Note "non secretor" should be "non sequitur".

[Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour. A 27-year veteran of CIA's analyst ranks, he now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.]

WIRED WORLD

Electronic pollution is choking us

The curse of the mobile phone age: around your home there are countless gadgets whose electrical fields, scientists now warn, are linked to depression, miscarriage and cancer
Invisible "smog", created by the electricity that powers our civilisation, is giving children cancer, causing miscarriages and suicides and making some people allergic to modern life, new scientific evidence reveals.
The evidence - which is being taken seriously by national and international bodies and authorities - suggests that almost everyone is being exposed to a new form of pollution with countless sources in daily use in every home.