RIGHT IS MIGHT

The glamorous Meyrav Wurmser is a director of the Center for Middle East Policy and a senior fellow and former executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute.
An expert in the Middle East, she is part of a neo-conservative family. Her husband David is special assistant to Undersecretary of State John Bolton and a member of the American Enterprise Institute -- a highly aggressive and well-supported right-wing think tank.
She is, along with a former Colonel in Israeli intelligence, the co-founder of a charity which monitors the Arab media for anti-semitic opinions.
Ms Wurmser was among a group of neo-conservatives who wrote a report intended as advice for the then incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996.
The report, called "Rebuilding Zionism" called for a clean break with the Middle East peace process and talked about "rolling back Syria".
It also spoke about removing Saddam Hussein from power.
Other signatories of that report included Richard Perle, David Wurmser and Douglas Feith - who is now number three at the Pentagon.

Ms Wurmser appeared on Lateline (Australia, 31 May) to answer claims by Amnesty International that the US had lost its moral compass in the fight against terrorism.

Her demeanor and responses were interesting: She said what had occurred at Abu Ghraib was not torture and that everyone needed to get things in perspective.
She said the invasion of Iraq was NOT about WMDs but freedom and democracy.
She also dealt with a citations from journalist Seymour Hersch by laughing and saying he was not a respectable source.
She was also questioned on 'disgraced' Brigadeer Janice Kapinsky's claim that the section of the prison where the torture and abuse was occuring appeared to be run by mysterious plain-clothed men who visited frequently.
Ms Wurmser arched an eyebrow and stated in even tones that the Brigadeer also, was an unreliable source.

Tonight's stories should appear here in about 8 hours.

RE: EDUCATION

The most important thing I learned in school this year

"What I learned this year is that the President is not someone to mock. Even if he is an idiot and a war criminal who deserves to be hanged, and even if no one in the media has the balls to say so. (You shouldn't say balls either.)" -- Billy Wilson, 15, a High School sophomore in Freyburg, Maine, from of the essay section of the final exam in his English class.

Big stink over students poem

Bill Nevins, a New Mexico high school teacher was fired and classes in poetry and the poetry club at Rio Rancho High School were permanently terminated. It had everything to do with extremist politics.
Teenage student Courtney presented one of her poems before an audience at Barnes & Noble bookstore in Albuquerque, then read the poem live on the school's closed-circuit television channel.
A school military liaison and the high school principal accused the girl of being "un-American" because she criticized the war in Iraq and the Bush administration's failure to give substance to its "No child left behind" education policy.

THE BIG ONE

Be alarmed, not alert ... internet rumour follows:

The nations of the world are sending their naval fleets out to deep water in order to protect them from damage when an asteroid strikes the earth next month!

A supposed intercept of a US military SSB radio transmission on 26 January of this year referred to a mysterious "countdown" to an unnamed event which (by the countdown) will occur around June 19 or 20 of this year. In the past few weeks, however, naval units worldwide have been putting to sea in unusual numbers, sufficient to cause us to revisit the original message to assess movements and adopt a watch mode going forward into the June 19-20 period.

Perhaps this has something to do with British military personnel getting stuck in a Mexican cave.

British cavers rescued in Mexico

Six British cavers rescued from caverns in Mexico after being trapped for over a week say they were never in danger. The cavers were reached by specialist divers from the UK who escorted each man through flood water using scuba diving equipment.
The group were waiting at a camp they had set up for such an emergency and said everything had gone as planned. The men, who were military staff spent the night in a military hospital.
The six men on the expedition were part of a 13-strong group from the Combined Services Caving Association and a row has broken out between the UK and Mexico about their visas.
Mexican President Vicente Fox on Wednesday asked the UK to explain what the soldiers had been doing in the Cuetzalan caves.
Mexico complained it had not been told the military officers, who entered the country on tourist visas, were there.

FALL GUY

Bush bingle from bike on 'wet track'

A bike ride left President Bush a bit dinged up. The White House said Bush suffered cuts and bruises after taking a spill while mountain biking on his Texas ranch.
A spokesman said Bush has minor abrasions and scratches on his chin, lip, nose, right hand and both knees.
His personal doctor was along for the ride and cleaned the cuts. The spokesman said there had been a lot of rain in the area lately and that the topsoil was wet.

[This is Texas in summer, right?]

PLAYGROUND BULLIES

Bush slips buddies $155 million worth of land for bargain $875

In April, Bush quietly gave a mining conglomerate larded with his top contributors a little gift: $155 million worth of federal land, the Denver Post reports. Invoking an obscure 1872 law designed to help frontier prospectors gain title to their small mining claims, Bush turned over a swathe of prime Colorado mountaintop property to the firm of Dodge Phelps, whose board is packed with oil men, military contractors and official Bush "Pioneers": corporate fat cats who've strongarmed at least $100,000 from their friends -- and employees -- for Bush campaign coffers.
Because the never-updated 1872 law requires that federal mining land be sold for $5 per acre, Bush's bagmen only had to pony up $875 for the whole spread -- in an area where land is worth a staggering $1 million per acre. The idea is to build an elite ski playground on the looted public property -- even though the law requires that such land sales be used for actual mining.

OIL WARS

Iraq government -- and economy -- beholden to US, for years to come

"Throughout the spring, ... Bush viceroy in Iraq Paul Bremer was quietly signing a series of edicts that will give the United States effective control over the military, ministries -- and money -- of any Iraqi government, for years to come, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Bremer has placed U.S.-appointed 'commissions' made up of Americans and local puppets throughout Iraqi government agencies; the ministers supposedly in charge weren't even told of the edicts.
These boards 'will serve multiyear terms and have significant authority to run criminal investigations, award contracts, direct troops and subpoena citizens,' the Journal reports. Any new Iraqi government 'will have little control over its armed forces, lack the ability to make or change laws and be unable to make major decisions within specific ministries without tacit U.S. approval, say U.S. officials.'"

OIL WARS

Why didn't Bush target al Qaeda after USS Cole attack

Q: Why didn't the Bush people punish al Qaeda when they got proof that the group was behind the Cole bombings?
A: Because they were trying to get a deal struck with the Taliban who were the allies of bin Laden. The pipeline was to run a constant supply of cheap natural gas to India, where it would have been picked up by a pipeline built by Enron which would deliver that gas to their Dabhol Electric utility

Enron is a scandal so enormous that it's hard to wrap your mind around it. Not just a single financial disaster, it's actually a jigsaw of interlocking scandals, each outrageous in its own right. There's Enron the Wall St. con game, where company bookkeepers used slight of hand to turn four years of steady losses into stunning profits. There's Enron the reverse Robin Hood, which stole from its own employees even as its executives were hauling millions of dollars out the backdoor. There's Enron's Ken Lay the Kingmaker, who used the corporation's fraudulent wealth to broker elections and skew public policy to his liking. And then there are the Enron coverups, as documents are shredded and the White House seeks to conceal details about meetings between Enron and Vice President Cheney. More ...

MOORE STRANGE TRUTH

When the oil sticks

In his latest documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, Mike Moore highlights several connections among Bush, his family and associates, and Saudi Arabia. Fifteen of the 19 September 11 hijackers were Saudis, as is Osama bin Laden.
The film notes that Bush's father, George H. W. Bush, worked as a senior adviser to the Carlyle Group, a private investment company with various ties to Saudi Arabia and even, for some years, to bin Laden's family.
'My point is first of all that the Bushes were so close to the Saudis that they essentially had turned a blind eye to what was really going on before 9/11,' Moore said.
'And after 9/11 they were in denial.'
More specifically, the movie implies that the Saudi connections explain why the US facilitated the departure of dozens of Saudi nationals from the country - including relatives of bin Laden - shortly after the September 11 attacks, and charges that they were not properly questioned. "

POLITICAL ANIMALS

Right-wing pundits play doctor; diagnose Gore as 'insane'

Former Vice President Al Gore's May 26 speech, delivered at New York University, called for the resignation of six top Bush administration officials. The American right wing media had no hesitation in declaring him insane and of making a hate speech.

TOMORROW PEOPLE

The invisibility cloak ... so crazy it might work.

The anti-game showcased at Frisco NextFest

Brainball is a computer game in which being ferociously competitive is not on. Co-inventor Thomas Broome, of Sweden's Interactive Institute, says it's an anti-game.
'The more relaxed you are, the more you can get unconnected to your state of winning and wanting that you actually win this game. Brainball measures your alpha waves and the person who is the most relaxed can push the ball to the other side and win.'
Among the game's fans are the musician Brian Eno, yoga gurus and children with attention deficit disorders.

The NextFest expo in San Francisco, organised by Wired technology magazine also featured flying cars, transparent cloaks, and technology which can read mind.
The levitating Skycar is the brainchild of Paul Moller, who has spent $200 million trying to get his invention airborne. The car needs 35 feet to take off, but thanks to its 770hp engine can climb at 6,400 feet a minute and reach speeds of 365mph.
On the battlefield, an invisibility cloak could be just the ticket. Straight out of a Harry Potter adventure, the cloak is covered with tiny light-reflective beads. It appears to be transparent as it's fitted with cameras which project what is in front of the wearer onto the back of the cloak, and vice versa.
Also showcased is brain fingerprinting, which aims to help those solving crimes or interrogating terror suspects. It reads minds by measuring brain waves and the responses that someone has to trigger words or images of a specific event.
Its inventor is neuroscientist Dr Lawrence Farwell, of the Brain Fingerprinting Lab, who has worked with the CIA and FBI.
Larry Farwell, a Harvard-trained neuroscientist who works out of a small office in the Washington Technology Center on the University of Washington campus, hopes to use the case of Oklahoma death-row inmate Jimmy Ray Slaughter to convince law enforcement officials and the courts that the technique is scientifically sound and accurate.
A jury convicted Slaughter of shooting, stabbing and mutilating his former girlfriend, Melody Wuertz, and of shooting to death their eleven-month old-daughter, Jessica.
"Jimmy Ray Slaughter did not know where in the house the murder took place; he didn't know where the mother's body was lying or what was on her clothing at the time of death - a salient fact in the case," says Dr Farwell.

Visual gadgets of the future

A television sewn into your shirtsleeve. A dashboard screen to monitor the kids in the backseat. A 3-D computer monitor sharp enough to make a hardcore gamer's heart stop -- or help a surgeon start one.
The gizmo-packed exhibition hall at the Society for Information Display's international symposium offers a tantalizing vision of what's to come. This week's meeting was all about extremes -- monitors that are very big or very small, very thin, very light and very, very high-resolution.

PROPAGANDA CENTRAL

The rewriting of Iraqi history is now going on at supersonic speed

"Weapons of mass destruction? Forget it. Links between Saddam and al-Qaida? Forget it. Liberating the Iraqis from Saddam's Abu Ghraib life of torture? Forget it. Wedding party slaughtered? Forget it. Clear the decks for both 'full (sic) sovereignty' and 'chaotic events.' This is, at any rate, according to Bush. When I heard his hesitant pronunciation of Abu Ghraib as 'Abu Grub' on Monday night, I could only profoundly agree." -- Robert Fisk

CLOAK AND DAGGER

'CIA worked in tandem with Pak to create Taliban'

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) worked in tandem with Pakistan to create the 'monster' that is today Afghanistan's ruling Taliban, a leading US expert on South Asia said here.
'I warned them that we were creating a monster,' Selig Harrison from the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars said at the conference here last week on 'Terrorism and Regional Security: Managing the Challenges in Asia.'
Harrison said: 'The CIA made a historic mistake in encouraging Islamic groups from all over the world to come to Afghanistan.' The US provided $3 billion for building up these Islamic groups, and it accepted Pakistan's demand that they should decide how this money should be spent, Harrison said.

MYSTERIOUS DNA

Biology's big brainteaser: are archaea cause for hope or concern?

Unravelling what role, if any, archaea play in disease is becoming a priority for teams of microbiologists around the world. Most believe it's a matter of time before they are confirmed, at least, as contributing to the progress of certain illnesses.
'It's very important we get to the bottom of this, because if archaea are causing diseases we may have a problem,' says Peter Westerman, an expert in archaea at the Technical University of Denmark. The antibiotics we have now have all been designed with bacteria in mind, and a new generation of drugs would be needed to tackle archaea. 'It's all a bit scary,' he says.

The microbiologist Carl Woese divided all life into three groups: bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes. The latter includes animals, plants and fungi. Archaea are somewhere in the middle but have genetic mechanisms closer to ours than bacteria.
They are tiny single-cell organisms. They make up about a fifth of all life on the planet and cover the whole spectrum of earth's environments.
It had been thought that archaea held the key to switching off pathogenic microbes, but there is increasing speculatiohn that the life-forms are not as benign as once thought.
"On the evidence we've got so far, we should be finding more than 30 types of archaea that cause disease," says Rick Cavicchioli, a molecular biologist at the University of New South Wales.

[Did you know: A gram of human faeces can hold 10 billion archaea.]

FREQUENT FLYER

Australia's costly asylum-seeker fiasco

AN asylum-seeker in Australia has been sent on a taxpayer-funded trip halfway round the world in a futile search for a home.
Edriess Abdulrahman and his entourage, including five guards, took 17 flights between them over 13 days in an extraordinary 24,000km journey. The cost to Australian taxpayers was almost $24,000.
But Mr Abdulrahman's travels ended where they began – in detention in Australia after Sudan refused to accept him as a citizen.
The trip began in remote Western Australia when authorities tried to deport Mr Abdulrahman last December.
Freedom of Information documents show escorts assigned to accompany Mr Abdulrahman cost taxpayers $4178 to guard him for more than 300 hours. About $3000 went on phone calls, accommodation and meals. The Immigration Department hired two troubleshooting companies – one Australian, the other South African – to help it offload Mr Abdulrahman, who spent three years in Port Hedland fighting for a visa.
The documents show taxpayers spent more than $15,000 for international and domestic flights as Mr Abdulrahman and his escorts criss-crossed two continents in search of a new home.
The journey turned to farce when his Australian Government-issued identity papers were rejected by Sudanese officials in Tanzania. Authorities tried to dump Mr Abdulrahman in Sudan even though Australia's refugee tribunal refused to accept he was Sudanese.
He was born in Kuwait to Sudanese immigrant parents, but the family was banished from that country after the 1990 Gulf War. Mr Abdulrahman, believed to be 29, went to Sudan for about one year, but left after refusing to join the national army.
Mr Abdulrahman is now in Baxter detention centre – at a cost of $310 a day – while Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone decides his future.

[If they put him in the Adelaide Hilton with three meals a day the Australian taxpayer would probably save $10 or $20 a da.]

PROPAGANDA CENTRAL

Al Qaeda highly likely to attack US: Homeland security chief says terror alert level will not be raised

Intelligence from multiple sources indicates that al Qaeda intends to attack the United States in the coming months, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft said Wednesday.
'This disturbing intelligence indicates al Qaeda's specific intention to hit the United States hard,' Ashcroft said in a news conference. 'Beyond this intelligence, al Qaeda's own public statements indicate that it is almost ready to attack the United States.'
Ashcroft said that after the March 11 train bombings in Madrid, Spain, 'an al Qaeda spokesman announced 90 percent of the arrangements for an attack on the United States were complete.'

LAND OF THE FREE

'Un-American' poetry not allowed in schools

In March last year, a teenage schoolgirl named Courtney presented one her poem, Revolution X before an audience at Barnes & Noble bookstore in Albuquerque, then read the poem live on the school's closed-circuit television channel.
A school military liaison and the high school principal accused the girl of being 'un-American' because she criticized the war in Iraq and the Bush administration's failure to give substance to its 'No child left behind' education policy.
The girl's mother, also a teacher, was ordered by the principal to destroy the child's poetry. The mother refused and may lose her job.
Bill Nevins was suspended for not censoring the poetry of his students. Remember, there is no obscenity to be found in any of the poetry. He was later fired by the principal.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Gregory David Roberts: "When I was tortured in an Indian prison -- chained to a wall and tortured -- I was writing the experience."

Torture just grist for writer's mill

Gregory David Roberts has worked as a counterfeiter and a poet, a smuggler and a speech writer, a street soldier for the Bombay mafia and a journalist.
Finally, Gregory David Roberts, in Launceston yesterday to promote his debut novel Shantaram, has his dream job.
'Writing books is exactly what I've always wanted to do, all my life,' Roberts said before signing copies of the 933-page tome at a Tasmanian bookstore.

SUFFER THE CHILDREN

A day in the life of a Gaza mother involves keeping her little ones out of the way of the armoured demolition bulldozers.

Gaza raids 'left 2000 homeless'

The UN says nearly 2,000 Palestinians have been made homeless this month by Israeli house demolitions in Gaza.
May has been one of the worst months in last three years, the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees said, with 575 people made homeless in the last week.
Israeli forces have now withdrawn from Rafah, but the halt in the operation was described by the army as a "pause".

MILITARY INTELLIGENCE

Guard stops enlistments for two recruits

Army Reserve recruiters called part-time soldiers to tell them they would be sent to Iraq if they didn't re-enlist in the Reserves.
Two Oregon National Guard recruits were allowed to rescind their enlistments Monday after authorities learned that they felt pressured by "false advice" [aka lies] that they could otherwise be sent to Iraq with the US Army Reserve.
Army Reserve recruiters contacted members of the Individual Ready Reserve with "misleading efforts" [aka lies] to get them back into the active reserve, Army Reserve spokesman Stephen Stromvall said from Fort McPherson, Georgia.

MEET THE PRESS

US paper apologises for false Iraq reports

The New York Times has admitted that information it published about Iraq's purported weapons of mass destruction programme was not supported.
In a letter from its editors entitled The Times and Iraq the paper said its coverage had not been "rigorous". "In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged."
"Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged - or failed to emerge."