The Arctic ice shelf has melted for the fourth straight year to its smallest area in a century, driven by rising temperatures that appear to be linked to a build-up of greenhouse gases, US scientists have claimed.

Scientists at NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Centre, which have monitored the ice via satellites since 1978, say the total Arctic ice in 2005 will cover the smallest area since they started measuring.

It is the least amount of Arctic ice in at least a century, according to both the satellite data and shipping information going back many more years, according to a report from the groups.

As of September 21, the Arctic sea ice area had dropped to 5.31 million square kilometres, the report said.

From 1978 to 2000, the sea ice area averaged 7 million square kilometres, the report said. It noted the melting trend had endangered polar bears, seals and other wildlife.

The report warns that if melting rates continue, the summertime Arctic may be completely devoid of ice before the end of the century.

The melting trend increasingly appeared to be caused by a build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the scientists said.

Most scientists believe greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide that is released mainly from vehicles and utility smokestacks, cause global warming by trapping solar heat in the atmosphere. Many believe global warming can lead to catastrophic consequences, including raising sea levels and strengthening weather events such as hurricanes.

(Source: The Age)

 

An Australian mining company provided pay, food, and vehicles to transport corpses after a bloody crackdown on rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to a United Nations report.

The report outlines the final conclusions of a UN special investigation into allegations of human rights violations by Democratic Republic of Congo soldiers after a shambolic uprising last year.

It says witnesses claimed the corpses - perhaps including victims of summary execution - were taken in vehicles owned by Perth-based Anvil Mining to an area where two shallow graves were later located.

Witnesses also claimed the company's vehicles were used to transport pillaged goods.

The UN says it has confirmed that three Anvil employees drove vehicles used by the army when quelling the uprising in the impoverished central African nation on October 14, 2004, and that Anvil provided food and pay to soldiers.

According to the report, the company admitted that its vehicles had been used by the armed forces but it denied that corpses or pillaged goods had been transported in them.

Anvil is said to have acknowledged that planes chartered by it to evacuate staff were used to transport about 150 soldiers into the Kilwa area where the uprising took place and to fly rebel suspects to the provincial capital, Lubumbashi.

The company told the UN investigators that it had provided food for DRC soldiers to prevent pillaging.

Anvil Mining is being investigated by the Australian Federal Police, Canadian authorities and the World Bank over allegations made against it since the Kilwa massacre.

Melbourne law firm Slater and Gordon is representing several human rights groups that have accused Anvil of breaching international human rights laws.

(Source: The Age)

 

Religious belief is associated with high murder rates, sexually transmitted diseases and suicide, according to a new study.

The paper, published in the Journal of Religion and Society, a US academic journal, compares various social factors in relatively secular countries such as Britain, to more religious countries such as the US.

The paper reports that "many Americans agree that their churchgoing nation is an exceptional, God-blessed, shining city on the hill that stands as an impressive example for an increasingly sceptical world.

"In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.

"The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so."

Gregory Paul, the author of the study and a social scientist, used data from the International Social Survey Programme, Gallup and other research bodies to reach his conclusions.

He compared social indicators such as murder rates, abortion, suicide and teenage pregnancy.

The study concluded that the US was the world's only prosperous democracy where murder rates were still high, and that the least devout nations were the least dysfunctional. Mr Paul said that rates of gonorrhoea in adolescents in the US were up to 300 times higher than in less devout democratic countries. The US also suffers from uniquely high adolescent and adult syphilis infection rates, and adolescent abortion rates.

The study does not determine which is cause and which is effect. It may be that a greater devotion to religion leads to a dysfunctional society, that a dysfunctional society leads to higher religious devotion, or that a third factor causes both. However the study does tend to undermine the frequent claim by religious believers that religion is necessary to provide the moral and ethical foundations of a healthy society.

(Source: The Times [UK])

 

Quote of the Moment:

"I feel terrific! I look as good on the outside as I feel on the inside."

An unnamed woman quoted in a British newspaper, talking about the results of her cosmetic surgery. She had been blind for 12 years.

 

A Chinese cosmetics company is using skin harvested from the corpses of executed convicts to develop beauty products for sale in the First World.

When formally approached by the Guardian newspaper, an agent for the company denied it was using skin 'harvested' from executed prisoners. However, he had already admitted it was doing precisely this during a number of conversations with a researcher posing as a Hong Kong businessman.

The agent told the researcher that "a lot of the research is still carried out in the traditional manner using skin from the executed prisoner and aborted foetus."

He added that "the government has put some pressure on all the medical facilities to keep this type of work in low profile."

The agent said his company exported to the west via Hong Kong. "We are still in the early days of selling these products, and clients from abroad are quite surprised that China can manufacture the same human collagen for less than 5% of what it costs in the west." Skin from prisoners used to be even less expensive, he said. "Nowadays there is a certain fee that has to be paid to the court."

Human rights activists in China have repeatedly claimed that organs have been harvested from the corpses of executed prisoners and sold to surgeons offering transplants to fee-paying foreigners.

(Source: The Guardian [UK])

 

British troops used tanks last night to break down the walls of a prison in the southern Iraqi city of Basra and free two undercover British soldiers who were seized earlier in the day by local police.

An official from the Iraqi interior ministry said half a dozen tanks had broken down the walls of the jail and troops had then stormed it to free the two British soldiers. The governor of Basra condemned the "barbaric aggression" of British forces in storming the jail.

Aquil Jabbar, an Iraqi television cameraman who lives across the street from the jail, said dozens of Iraqi prisoners also fled in the confusion.

The soldiers, who were said to have been wearing Arab headdress, were accused of firing at Iraqi police when stopped at a road block.

British defence secretary John Reid said in a statement that "we remain committed to helping the Iraqi government for as long as they judge that a coalition presence is necessary to provide security."

(Source: The Guardian [UK])

 

878 asylum seekers have tried to deliberately harm themselves while in Australian immigration detention centres over the past three years according to government figures, with refugee advocates saying the real figures are probably even higher.

About one in 20 detainees incarcerated during this period had tried to harm themselves in acts including attempted suicide, self-mutilation and voluntary starvation, according to Immigration Department documents obtained under Freedom of Information.

Between June 2003 and June 2004 alone, 305 detainees tried to harm themselves at Baxter alone.

Earlier this year a bipartisan parliamentary committee found conditions at Baxter were not conducive to good mental health. When the migration committee, chaired by Liberal MP Don Randall, visited Baxter in April, more than 50 of the 240 detainees were on anti-depressants.

The Palmer Inquiry into the wrongful detention of Cornelia Rau also found mental health care at Baxter was inadequate by any standards.

Rural Australians for Refugees spokesman John Highfield said he believed self-harming in detention centres would be much higher than the figures showed.

Last week three asylum seekers were admitted to hospital. Two were Bangladeshis, following a hunger strike at Villawood. The third, Peter Jackson Mode, a Zimbabwean at Baxter, was rushed to hospital on September 10, after slashing his wrists with broken glass.

Mr Highfield said that most detainees' mental health started to deteriorate after about eight months. "We've known children who put nooses around their necks - children rarely do those sorts of things," he said.

Jon Jureidini, who has psychiatrically assessed about 50 Baxter detainees, said he also believed the figures could be higher. "Self-harm is universal in the population I've seen," said Dr Jureidini, head of psychological medicine at Adelaide's Women's and Children's hospital.

"I don't think I've seen anybody over the age of 11 who hasn't harmed themselves in some way." He said examples included self-cutting, starvation, drinking poisons and overdoses.

"It's a worrying level of self-harm for a population we have no reason to believe brought psychiatric disturbances into detention," he said. "The primary problem is that it is an environment that drives people mad."

Author and academic Denise Leith, who received the FoI documents last week almost a year after she lodged the request, said she became alarmed about the high level of self-harm after becoming involved in PEN, an international organisation that campaigns to free writers from detention.

According to the documents, the Immigration Department defines self-harm as: "a self-inflicted injury or the act of causing harm to oneself, such as attempts and acts of cutting the body, voluntary starvation etc".

(Source: The Age)

 

Quote of the Moment:

"I couldn't help feeling TB [British Prime Minister Tony Blair] was rather relishing his first blooding as PM, sending the boys into action...despite all the necessary stuff about taking action 'with a heavy heart' I think he feels it is part of his coming of age as a leader."

Lance Price, former deputy media advisor to Tony Blair, writing about Mr Blair's decision to send RAF pilots to bomb Iraq in 1998. This entry was changed in his book, but the original version appeared in the Mail on Sunday newspaper.

 

Quote of the Moment:

"A politician is a fellow who will lay down your life for his country."

Texas Guinan.

 

The scale of the disaster in New Orleans is at least partly due to the 'free market' policies of the American government, according to some American commentators.

When an especially powerful hurricane hit the Third World nation of Cuba last year, 1.3 million people (more than 10 percent of the country's population), were evacuated without any loss of life. Cuba's economy, as measured by its GDP, is less than one third of one percent of that of the United States.

By contrast, American officials simply announced that people should evacuate, leaving people to make their own plans. Many people were still in the city when the hurricane hit - almost all poorer people with less ability to relocate.

Although many people had warned of the need to fortify New Orleans levees and upgrade the system of pumping out water, these plans were not carried out due to a 44 percent reduction in the budget for the New Orleans Corps of Engineers.

Similarly, the wetlands, which served as a natural barrier and absorbant against storms and flooding, had been disappearing, due to their being drained by developers.

The American government also refused offers of aid from, among others, France, Germany and Russia.

(Source: Zmag [US])

 

Quote of the Moment:

"Photos widely circulated on Yahoo.com with captions yesterday, presented an image of a black man with a garbage bag full of God knows what, side by side with a picture of two white folks wading through waist-deep water with bags of food in their hands: the captions? The black man, according to the news, had 'just looted' a store. The white man and woman had 'found' food from a flooded store...

In another photo, taken in an outlying area, one white man and one black man are pictured: the former is walking away from a clearly looted store, looking through his stash, while the latter is jumping through the store's broken front window. But instead of labeling the shot, as 'two looters standing outside a ransacked business establishment,' AP tells us that the white man is 'looking through his shopping bag.'"

Tim Wise on the media coverage of looting in New Orleans.

 

Centrelink has been accused of 'bullying a woman to death' after she was forced out of her sickbed to prove she deserved benefits.

Ms Cha-on Waldron, 50, was taking medication for a thyroid condition, her hair had fallen out, and she rarely left her Brunswick flat when, wrapped in a blanket, she arrived at the August 16 meeting. Mrs Waldron had been unable to pay her rent or buy food after her payments were suspended.

She collapsed at the Moreland Centrelink office, and died of heart failure at St Vincent's Hospital.

Her daughter, Mon Kanthip, says "I said she was very ill, but they said, 'She has to come in for an interview before we can continue the payments'".

Ms Waldron was listed under the Newstart jobseekers' allowance, despite being seriously ill.

Four years ago, Ms Waldron's disability pension application was rejected by a Centrelink-appointed doctor, despite an autopsy revealing a long-term heart condition.

Ms Kanthip claims officers said her mother's file listed her as having osteoporosis, which she did not have.

Her mother had worked most of her life at Abbotsford's Phoenix biscuit factory before breaking her shoulder in a 1999 accident.

Centrelink has agreed to pay Ms Waldron's funeral costs.

(Source: Herald Sun)

 

Melbourne clubs and pubs are receiving tax breaks by falsely claiming to have donated money to the community, according to new research.

Research by Deakin University on 16 venues in the Darebin council area, showed that they claimed to have donated $14.3 million more to the community than they actually did.

Clubs with poker machines received an 8.3 percent tax break from the State government on the grounds that they made substantial community contributions.

The research found that, of the $83 million lost on poker machines in the area, 1.7 percent was given back to the community.

'Community contributions' reported by the clubs included the purchase of menus, curtains, tables and pagers.

(Source: Melbourne Times)

 

A Liberal state politician has been accused of cultivating links with Nazis in order to recruit people to the Liberal Party.

Twenty-seven years ago David Clarke was photographed at a function organised by a group linked with sympathisers of Ustashe, the Croatian group descended from the Nazi puppet government of Croatia during World War Two. Mr Clarke claimed he had no idea who organised the event.

However in April this year, Mr Clarke attended and was photographed at a similar event - commemorating April 10, 1941, the day when the German government installed the Ustashe puppet regime.

The Australian Jewish News has accused Mr Clarke of exploiting anti-Semitic sentiments among Croats and Muslims to recruit new members to the NSW Liberal Party.

The newspaper has interviewed a former Liberal Party branch president who alleges on the condition of anonymity that Mr Clarke recruited several Croats with Ustashe links to the party.

Former Liberal candidate for Auburn Irfan Yusef has publicly accused Mr Clarke of using religious wedge politics to recruit new members to the party.

The Ustashe are estimated to have killed 3 to 400,000 Serbs and several thousand Jews and gypsies.

(Source: Sydney Morning Herald)

 

The British program to use the police to curb truancy, which inspired a similar program in New South Wales, appears to have taken up considerable resources for no effect.

Both the British and Australian programs involve the police conducting 'sweeps' of urban centres, looking for school-age children who are absent from school without permission.

New research by the British group Action on Rights for Children (Arch) has found that two national truancy sweeps a year used up 16,318 police hours - the equivalent to the annual working hours of 10 full-time police officers.

Just over one-third of areas surveyed broadly fitted an average pattern, in which, for every two hours of police time, four children were stopped, of whom 2.5 had valid reasons for absence and 1.5 were truants. Four areas reported finding no truants at all during a combined total of 22.5 police hours.

The figures for 'truants' included children who had gone to the shops without permission during their lunch break and had not missed any lessons.

Children who were late were also counted as truants. Some sweeps were carried out just outside school grounds and, according to Arch director Terri Dowti, were likely to have been deliberately targeting latecomers in order to maximise the number of 'truants' found.

Dowti also said that "the majority of children are recorded as being out of school with permission for legitimate reasons, such as medical appointments. It is unacceptable that those going about their lawful business should be subjected to police questioning. Adults would not tolerate this, and it can only breed anxiety and resentment amongst law-abiding young people."

A British Department for Education and Skills report found that, between 1998 and 2004, there had been no change in the rate of truancy.

No figures are available on the effectiveness or otherwise of the Australian program.

(Source: The Guardian [UK], NSW police web site)

 

Mad cow disease may have originated from human remains mixed into cattle feed, according to a controversial new theory.

A leading British expert on Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, better known as 'mad cow disease' believes there is strong evidence for linking the brain disease - which gave rise to variant CJD in humans - to a trade in carcass material that was prevalent in the 1960s and '70s.

Over those decades Britain imported hundreds of thousands of tons of ground-up animal parts for use as fertiliser and the manufacture of feed.

Nearly half this meat-and-bone meal came from the Indian sub-continent.

Professor Alan Colchester, from the University of Kent in Canterbury, argues that some of it almost certainly contained human as well as animal remains.

The human material could be traced to corpses disposed of in rivers in accordance with Hindu funeral custom.

Collecting and selling bones and carcasses is a common local trade among peasants, who may not be too selective about what kind of remains they pick up, says Prof Colchester.

"The inclusion of human remains in material delivered to processing mills has been clearly described," he wrote in The Lancet medical journal in a paper co-authored by his daughter, Nancy Colchester, from the University of Edinburgh.

The theory suggests that "ordinary", or sporadic, Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease which arises naturally in humans was initially passed to cattle via feed contaminated with infected human tissue.

It emerged in the cow population as Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, or BSE. Later, the infective agent was transmitted back to humans consuming meat products such as beef-burgers. In 1995 it re-emerged in a new form as "variant" or vCJD, a deadly and incurable brain disease.

(Source: The Guardian [UK])

 

President George Bush has linked the war in Iraq to oil for the first time.

Speaking on the USS Ronald Reagan, President Bush said the Iraqi oil industry, already suffering from sabotage and lost revenues, must not fall under the control of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida forces led in Iraq by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

"If Zarqawi and bin Laden gain control of Iraq, they would create a new training ground for future terrorist attacks," he said. "They'd seize oil fields to fund their ambitions. They could recruit more terrorists by claiming a historic victory over the United States and our coalition."

President Bush did not investigate the question of whether Zarqaqi and bin Laden would have been able to seize control of Iraq or claim victory if the war had not occured.

(Source: The Guardian [UK])

 

The CIA fabricated evidence of terrorism for political purposes in the 1980s, according to a former senior British police officer.

The retired officer - of assistant chief constable rank or higher - has testified that the CIA planted the tiny fragment of circuit board crucial in convicting a Libyan for the 1989 Lockerbie bombing, which killed 270 people.

The police chief, whose identity has not yet been revealed, gave the statement to lawyers representing Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, currently serving a life sentence in Greenock Prison.

The officer is supporting earlier claims by a former CIA agent that his bosses "wrote the script" to incriminate Libya.

The vital evidence that linked the bombing of Pan Am 103 to Megrahi was a tiny fragment of circuit board which investigators found in a wooded area many miles from Lockerbie months after the atrocity.

The fragment was later identified by the FBI's Thomas Thurman as being part of a sophisticated timer device used to detonate explosives, and manufactured by the Swiss firm Mebo, which supplied it only to Libya and the East German Stasi.

At one time, Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence agent, was such a regular visitor to Mebo that he had his own office in the firm's headquarters.

The fragment of circuit board therefore enabled Libya - and Megrahi - to be placed at the heart of the investigation. However, Thurman was later unmasked as a fraud who had given false evidence in American murder trials, and it emerged that he had little in the way of scientific qualifications.

Then, in 2003, a retired CIA officer gave a statement to Megrahi's lawyers in which he alleged evidence had been planted.

The first suspects in the case were the Syrian-led Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC), a terrorist group funded by the Iranian government. But the first Gulf War altered diplomatic relations with Middle East nations, and Libya became the pariah state. Libya, and its dictator Colonel Gaddafi, were given a similar role in the American media in the 1980s to that given to Iraq and Saddam Hussein in the period leading up to the current war.

Doubts were first fuelled when internal documents emerged from the offices of the US Defence Intelligence Agency. Dated 1994, more than two years after the Libyans were identified to the world as the bombers, they still described the PFLP-GC as the Lockerbie bombers.

(Source: The Scotsman [UK])

 

Tax and welfare changes would mean that disabled people and single parents were effectively paying a higher rate of tax than millionaires, according to new research.

Research by the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling has found that, if the government adopts its proposal to cut the top tax rate to 35 percent, the average take-home pay for the richest 10 per cent of households would increase by up to $161 a week. Eight out of ten Australian families would receive no benefit.

Centre director Professor Ann Harding said that "changes at the top end are being contemplated at the same time that the disabled and sole parents are going to see major cuts in their income through the welfare-to-work changes."

"Under the proposed welfare-to-work changes, many disabled people and sole parents will be facing effective tax rates of 65 to 75 per cent, obviously much higher than the current top marginal tax rate of 48.5 per cent including the Medicare levy."

(Source: The Age)