India says it is to build an aerospace defense command aimed at preventing possible attacks from space.

BBC / January 28, 2007

The head of India’s air force outlined the plans saying it would protect both Indian territory and assets.

Air Chief Marshal Shashi Tyagi said India was an aerospace power with “trans-oceanic reach” and it was vital it should be able to exploit space.

It comes two weeks after China carried out a test in which it used a missile to destroy an old satellite in orbit.

Military command

In the wake of China’s test, in which a ground-based medium-range ballistic missile was used to destroy a weather satellite, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called for a “weapons free outer space”.

The demand was backed by Russian President Vladimir Putin during a recent visit to India.

“The fundamental position of the Russian Federation is that outer space should be absolutely weapons free,” Mr Putin told a joint press conference with Mr Singh in Delhi.

Military analysts say the Indian project would probably replicate the North American Aerospace Defence Command (Norad) set up by the United States and Canada, which detects and tracks man-made objects in space.

“As the reach of our air force is expanding it has become extremely important that we exploit space and for it you need space assets,” Air Chief Marshal Tyagi said.

“We are an aerospace power having trans-oceanic reach and we have started training a core group of people for the aerospace command,” he added.

He said civilian expertise would be used to be build the planned aerospace command, but that it would be under military command.

Last week India said it successfully tested the technology which ensures the safe return of astronauts from space after an orbiting capsule returned to Earth.

The capsule splashed down in the Bay of Bengal off the east coast after 11 days orbiting the earth, the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) said.

Neil Mackay

Sunday Herald / January 28, 2007

Since the Sunday Herald was founded in 1999, it has led the way in exposing the “dirty war” in Northern Ireland. Today, we report on the most shocking revelations to date. Our investigations show that far from merely “turning” terrorists to work for the state, British military intelligency actually created loyalist murder gangs to operate as proxy assassins. They even cleared areas in which the gangs were operating of police and army, to allow them to carry out their hits and escape.

ON MONDAY, the world was stunned by the release of a report by Nuala O’Loan, the police ombudsman for Northern Ireland, which stated that Special Branch officers in Belfast had “colluded” with loyalist terrorists working for the British state as informers. According to O’Loan, police failed to stop these paramilitary gangs, part of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) from killing an estimated 15 people in the 1990s. While this was seized upon by republicans as proof that security forces had aided a loyalist campaign of sectarian assassination, in reality O’Loan’s findings barely scratched the surface of a 30-year history of criminality and murder orchestrated by the British army and the Ulster police.

HE INSISTS on being named only as “JB”, a sick, ageing man, who fears that ill-health or a bullet from an assassin wishing to silence him will claim his life before he has the chance to tell the true story of his life and crimes. On Wednesday, JB passed a bundle of papers to the Sunday Herald, making up the bulk of his unpublished memoirs, which paint British military intelligence as a callous, murderous, criminal cabal. JB claims that he - and dozens of other members of the terrorist organisation, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) - were trained and armed by military intelligence.

He also claims select UVF officers were ordered by military intelligence to carry out assassinations against both IRA figures and ordinary Catholics. Such soft targets as innocent men and women were pinpointed by military intelligence in order to psychologically undermine the nationalist population of Northern Ireland and cut the support base from beneath the Provisional IRA.

Martin Ingram, the false cover name for a former member of the covert British military intelligence outfit the Force Research Unit (FRU), has supported the claims made by JB. Ingram eventually turned whistleblower, disgusted at the deaths the FRU had caused by colluding with terrorists in Ulster. He later went on to write a book about the double agent Stakeknife - IRA operative Freddie Scappaticci - who had been “handled” by Ingram’s FRU team and exposed by Sunday Herald investigators. Ingram says he is aware of JB’s history, and believes his claims are “completely credible”. Loyalist sources have also confirmed JB’s credibility.

JB, who was convicted twice of terrorist offences, once in the 1970s and again in the early 1990s, says he carried out some 50 UVF operations sanctioned by his handlers in the Military Reconnaissance Force (MRF), the army team which gathered intelligence and ran agents in Ulster. He says he became a “killer, bomber, arsonist and robber”. Of the 50 state-sanctioned operations he took part in, “not all were successful”.Some, he says, “were aborted”. So far he has refused to go into details of the actual murders he took part in on behalf of British military intelligence. Beyond admitting that killings took place, he will only talk about how the British army trained him as a terrorist proxy.

In JB’s words, “military intelligence trained, armed and moulded squads of loyalists to put pressure on the IRA to abandon their campaign of bloodshed and carnage”. JB was a young UVF member in the early 1970s when first approached by an MRF handler. JB says the military intelligence officer, whom he will name only as “Mike”, told him that the then prime minister Edward Heath had sanctioned the “training of loyalists”.Mike later added that “nobody, except at the very highest level of the British government and senior officers of the military” knew about the covert counter-insurgency operations.

Mike told JB that “London has ordered the war be taken to the IRA obviously this can’t be done openly and must be done covertly. That’s why we are looking for people like you … We are enlisting men from all over the province to co-ordinate attacks, to convince the Catholic people that support for the Provos will only bring death and destruction to their own community.”

As well as being trained in firearms at army barracks and firing ranges around Northern Ireland - primarily at Palace Barracks near Holywood in County Down - men like JB were also provided with intelligence on potential targets and given details about which targets to hit. JB knows of at least 30 loyalists who received similar training to him, but believes more than 120 could have been trained as proxy assassins. At times, he was given a British army uniform to provide him with cover while with his handlers. He even drank, on occasions, with his handlers in the Naafi - armed forces bars on military bases.

When proxies like JB were dispatched on a murder operation, military intelligence would impose an Out Of Bounds (OOB) order on the area in which the attack was to take place. In military terms, an OOB means an intelligence operation is under way and army and police are forbidden from entering the area. This gave loyalist murder gangs freedom to operate with impunity during such state-sanctioned attacks. At one stage, claims JB, Mike told him: “Mr Heath and the top brass have given the green light for this.”

JB was trained by military intelligence, he says, in how to use a variety of hand-guns, machine guns and rifles, as well as bomb-making techniques. The UVF men working for military intelligence were also given consignments of guns and ammunition by handlers, sent on gruelling fitness courses and schooled in the arts of surveillance, counter-surveillance and intelligence gathering. Other classes included lectures on forensic science, how to avoid leaving incriminating evidence at the scene of crimes and how to steal cars for use in assassination operations.

JB also claims military intelligence instructed loyalists to plant explosives in a Catholic bar to make it look as if the IRA had accidentally set off the bomb. It was hoped such acts would drain Catholic support for republicans.

The bomb was planted in McGurk’s Bar in Belfast on December 4, 1971. It killed 15 men, women and children. The immediate blame was indeed placed on the IRA. However, seven years after the bomb, a UVF man received 15 life sentences for the atrocity. JB says he was told about the planned bombing two weeks before the attack and was with his handler at the time it happened. He also claims he saw his handler take pot-shots at republican youths on the streets of Belfast around this time.

A captain in military intelligence spelt out the reasons for the army creating these secret counter-insurgency cells during one discussion with JB. He said: “This type of war can’t be won by conventional means. The only solution is to implement a counter-operation, to counteract the violence of the enemy by heaping more violence on them That’s why we’ve chosen men like you to instil trepidation and pandemonium among the Provos and their support base, the Catholic community We will match whatever they do, and outdo them.”

In the weeks leading up to the events of Bloody Sunday in Derry, on January 30, 1972, in which the Paratroop Regiment killed 13 people taking part in a civil rights demonstration, JB was informed by his handlers that the British army had been ordered by the Cabinet “to use whatever force and tactics necessary to put these troublemakers down”. JB “concludes there were plans for mass murder to be committed that day The Bloody Sunday massacre was sanctioned by the government and top military chiefs.” JB is sure that there was a preconceived plan to open fire on the civil rights demonstrators, with the full knowledge this would cause civilian deaths. He believes military intelligence thought this would shake the IRA. Instead, the massacre was a huge boost to IRA support and recruitment.

The day before Bloody Sunday, JB was taken for a training session at Palace Barracks, where he was given a pep-talk by a major who praised him for “having the courage and loyalty to participate in covert actions against the common enemy”. The major told JB: “We are hoping to provoke a confrontation with the IRA in Derry, and give them an example of what to expect in future attacks.” JB was then offered the chance, he claims, to accompany his military handler, Mike, to Derry to watch the operation to contain the demonstration. Military intelligence sources today say events such as this would help forge a bond, or esprit de corps, between agent and handler.

JB was provided with a British army uniform, a gas mask, camouflage face-paint and a rifle as cover for the time he would spend in Derry with his handler. During the events, JB watched from a military intelligence observation post as soldiers opened fire on civilians. He also claims to have seen members of military intelligence shooting at, and hitting, unarmed civilians from the gun nest in the observation post.

Another killing carried out by loyalists and facilitated by military intelligence by the imposition of an OOB order took place in February 1972 when a bomb exploded in a pub killing, one Catholic man and injuring five others.

Trained proxies such as JB were often taken on “dummy run” assassination operations by handlers to ensure the OOB system wasworking. An OOB order would be given on a specific area of Belfast and JB and his team would enter the area, locate the home of a target, recce it and then leave. If they met with no security force patrols, they knew the OOB system was effective.

Mike at one time told JB: “We don’t expect every time an ASU active service unit of the UVF goes out, they will kill somebody. The mere fact an attempt has been made and shots fired, even if they wound or miss altogether, is all part of the terror tactics.” The policy was meant to “scare the shit” out of Catholics. Mike also instructed JB on how to “extract information” from Catholics or republicans they kidnapped. The techniques were “gruesome”, JB said. Mike made clear that torture should be used, and referred to the victims as “Taigs”, a derogatory term for Catholics. Mike also advised on the best shot to use to dispatch a victim of a backstreet execution.

WHILE refusing to give a statement about the actual operations in which he took part, JB said he knew about a number of high-profile loyalist atrocities, sponsored by the MRF. These included the shooting of three members of the Miami Showband, a popular Irish group, in July 1975. The band’s bus was flagged down by members of the UVF dressed in army uniforms at a fake military checkpoint. Another MRF-sponsored atrocity, says JB, was the Dublin and Monaghan bombings of May 17, 1974, which killed 33 people and injured 250.

JB lists a series of killings by loyalists which were facilitated by military intelligence putting out OOB orders on the location where the target lived, including the murder of a taxi driver, an eight-year-old girl, various men walking alone in Catholic areas and a Catholic woman in a bomb blast at public toilets in Lurgan. Referring to the last killing, JB says: “As long as it was a Catholic killed, fear would be creeping into Catholic minds - who would be next?’”When UVF proxies were targeting republicans or IRA men, nearly all the intelligence used in planning hits came from the British army’s intelligence wing.

Perhaps the most horrible of all hits facilitated by military intelligence, says JB, was one that involved the infamous Shankill Butchers murder gang. An OOB was put in place, allowing the UVF to put up an illegal roadblock at which they abducted a Catholic man and took him to the head of the Shankill Butchers - a UVF psychopath called Lenny Murphy. The gang tortured their victims for hours with knives before finally executing them. Sometimes the torture sessions took place in front of baying crowds in loyalist drinking dens. At least 19 people died at the hands of the gang. JB states: “I verify and confirm what I have written is a true and very accurate account of events.”

Henk Ruyssenaars

Foreign Press Foundation / January 28, 2007

Paris conference: $billions for Israel’s slaughter in Lebanon Imagine they wreck your house and car, kill your wife, rape your daughters and than blame you for attacking them and inviting their friends to cover some of your enormous loss with lies and loans.
 
NO SITTING ISRAELI PRESIDENT HAS EVER BEEN CHARGED WITH A CRIME

EUROPE (FPE) — Either we don’t understand logic anymore, or the  world as we knew it really has gone totally mad. International law and honesty was buried much deeper again at the conference held in Paris to ‘help’ by Israeli armed forces brutally and illegally war ravaged Lebanon. [map*] The foreign donors - who  agree with Israel’s genocides - on paper and in front of the TV cameras promised $billions, but it’s known that only those ever will pay a cent who see a return on their money, politically or economically. In Paris it was dirty politics and business as usual, proving that international law and decency for this group is a dead letter. None of the war criminals - and there’s tons of evidence - was arrested yet.
 
But also sorely lacking in Paris was any form of logical thinking. “If you break it you own it.” is the global logic, but that doesn’t seem to work in this ‘Alice in Wonderland’ meeting which was more ‘con’ than conference by the junta’s warmongers and their liars. Those who themselves are the origin, who have done all the damage, destroyed most of Lebanon’s infrastructure and killed and wounded all those people there too; the United States junta and Israel’s armed forces, those war criminals now expect others to pay their bloody bills and support their crimes against humanity. There’s only one conclusion possible: those psychopaths must be ripe for the Cuckoo nest. They look like human beings, but are stark raving mad in their chutzpah. - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/v49l3
 
The case for normal people in any country ought to be clear: “Bush helped Israeli attack on Lebanon.” as also normally compliant The Guardian in the UK wrote on August 14th 2006.* - And there is no doubt in any normal persons mind that: ‘’The US government was closely involved in planning the Israeli campaign in Lebanon, even before Hizbullah seized two Israeli soldiers in a cross border raids in July 2006.” Outside the US junta’s and Israel’s propaganda circles everybody knows that the attack to wipe out the political Hezbollah party in Lebanon and try to bomb back the country to the Stone Age was prepared and triggered by sending Israeli soldiers regularly across the border into Lebanon. Contrary to the war propaganda it is known that both Israeli soldiers were captured INSIDE Lebanon. On Lebanese territory. They were absolutely NOT ‘kidnapped’.
 
HOLLAND: TRANSITING BANNED AND OTHER US/NATO WEAPONS TO ISRAEL DURING THE WAR
 
What is absolutely incredible is the way the propaganda media globally avoid to talk about who or what is the reason and why a couple of thousand human beings in Lebanon were killed in cold blood. An unknown amount was by the Israelis wounded and maimed for life and Israel has confirmed the use of banned and other weapons. ‘Made in the USA’ mostly and flown in via the junta’s cowardly Quislings in Holland who betray all and everybody for their warlords. The Netherlands officially confirms 23 uncontrolled flights with military cargos of great quantities of weapons and ammunition from the United States via Holland to Israel during the last two months of the Iraeli invasion of Lebanon. This according to the ‘very underreported’ written answers to rare questions by Dutch member of parliament Farah Karimi.*
 
None of this is ever broadcasted by the dreary ‘national’ propaganda sewers in Holland which up to 99% all work for the war machine. If you are not for Bush and his murdering policy, you’re out of the media. One of the worst is the Dutch NOS propaganda TV which at 13.00 hrs today totally prostituted themselves and broadcasted three full minutes about Lebanon, including a lousy comment from Beirut by parrot Nicole le Fevre, the conference and the help without even mentioning the word Israel! Israel as the criminal killer was not even mentioned! The NOS nitwits are beyond all limits of human decency, and keep supporting the genocides.
 
They support in word and pictures the illegal wars in which Holland is taking part. They only can take part because the people who pay them are lied to: they are not informed about the facts. In the European Union people for instance do not know that their leading criminals postponed a ‘cease fire’ in Lebanon ‘’to let Israel have another go at it.” But Israel lost the by them started war in Lebanon. And they will lose a lot more when people everywhere are through with the war criminals. When people understand what’s done to them, why and by whom.
 
EU SUPPORTED ISRAEL SHOOTING FISH IN A BARREL
 
UNICEF Executive Director Venema reported on Lebanon: “The untold story of what is going on in this war is that 30 per cent of those who have died are children and 45 per cent of those who are displaced are children so this is really a war that has a very, very immediate and real impact on children.” And all this inhumanity is supported by the criminals running the European Union making the taxpayers foot all the bills. People are lied to and don’t even know what they are paying for or how much. Their personel in many cases has gone mad and behaves as if they were in power instead of being civil servants. Serving the people which pay them. But their time in jail will come too.
 
The so called ‘governments’ - and that also goes for most of the European Union as seen in the mainstream media - are totally in the beblooded hands of the junta. So for instance the traitors in The Netherlands who helped transiting US planes full of banned and other weapons to Israel which was committing a genocidal war in Lebanon. Contrary to all international law and secretly paid with the billions embezzled from uninformed Dutch taxpayers. The corrupted and blood besmirched compliant politicians - the criminal christian crusaders - were forced to admit this in writing, but it is an enormous shame that they are not in jail yet. For life and with hard labor, which they fully deserve as soon as justice can be done. They kill people and walk around free? That world must change!
 
TO DESTROY PEOPLE AND COUNTRY.
 
Listening in Paris to the gathered war criminals is more than a normal human being can stand. Whether it’s Washington’s puppet, Lebanese PM Siniora - who was put on his bloody throne by the US/CIA/Mossad fabricated ‘Cedar revolution’ or see US junta’s Condoleezza Rice who in human circles around the world was feared as the personification of the Black Plague. To normal people Rice only represents death and destruction. Millions have died in many countries around the world through their inhuman system and the US junta’s war machine Rice serves. But she’ll pay. And the criminal gang around her too.
 
The Paris conference of Bush supporters and Israel freaks - who never acknowledge the millions of innocent victims or the rape of Lebanon by the US/Israeli warmongers - this whole sick ‘conference’ is for the most lost to Israeli readers. They are confronted with former ‘president’ Moshe Katsav who ’shaking with fury’ rebuffed growing calls for his resignation saying forty-four (44) accusations he committed rape and other crimes were “poisonous, horrible lies” that were part of a broad conspiracy against him. So now ‘conspiracies are possible?
 
THE ‘PRESIDENT’ RAPES COUNTRIES AND PEOPLE IN REALITY
 
Moshe Katsav sees momentum building for lawmakers to open unprecedented impeachment proceedings against him, the same as should happen to Bush c.s. soon too. Israeli top officials, including the war criminal PM Ehud Olmert said: “Katsav cannot continue to fulfill his position and he must leave the president’s residence.” And that is quite a blow for Katsav, on top of the rest of the ‘blowback’. The question is of course why this Katsav is thrown to the wolves. He’s probably used as a patsy so the other mafiosi can go free for another while. Olmert c.s. is a war criminal himself and should have been in jail with the others a long time ago, but the tide is turning and they’ll - like their likewise guilty and raping president - soon be locked up forever.
 
NO SITTING ISRAELI PRESIDENT HAS EVER BEEN CHARGED WITH A CRIME.
 
But the Israeli public has grown accustomed to the spectacle of politicians mired in corruption scandals. Former Justice Minister Haim Ramon is currently being tried in a separate sexual misconduct case, and Olmert is under investigation for his role in the sale of a government-controlled bank.*
 
Informed observers like Prof. Michel Chossudovsky*  and Mike Whitney* wrote about Lebanon: “Remember, Siniora refused to even deploy the Lebanese army to fight the Israelis when they invaded his country and killed 1300 Lebanese nationals. For the hundreds of thousands of victims in the south, there’s no doubt as to where Siniora’s true loyalties lie.
 
WASHINGTON’S OBJECTIVE IS TO TRANSFORM LEBANON INTO A US PROTECTORATE.
 
Siniora is Washington’s man. In fact, he even kept the lines of communication open with Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, while his country was being bombed with American ordinance dropped from Israeli planes. After the war he quickly reopened the US embassy even though his country’s infrastructure was still in ruins from Israel’s 34 Day rampage. He has been a great asset to US-Israeli plans to create a “New Middle East”, but utterly useless for the great body of poverty-stricken and homeless Lebanese civilians.
 
Michel Chossudovsky summarized the administration’s goals in Lebanon by stating that Washington’s objective is to transform Lebanon into a US protectorate. The Lebanese people are demanding the resignation of a government which is acting on behalf of the US and Israeli invaders of their country. They are demanding the formation of a national unity government which will defend the Lebanese homeland against US-Israeli aggression.” - Chossudovsky adds:
 
THE BEIRUT GOVERNMENT IS TAKING ORDERS DIRECTLY FROM THE US EMBASSY.
 
The Siniora government has allowed the deployment of NATO forces on Lebanese territory under the pretext of UN-sponsored peace-keeping operation. NATO warships under German command are stationed off the country’s eastern Mediterranean coastline. NATO has a military cooperation agreement with Israel.” That’s why and today again so many people in Lebanon want Siniora to disappear and there at present day and night are such massive strikes and demonstrations against the US-backed Lebanese Government.*
 
Not a word on the Paris conference was asked, but according to a poll published Thursday (today) in the Israeli mass circulation Yediot Ahronot newspaper showed that 71 percent of respondents want Katsav to resign at once, while 29 percent said he need not quit now. Resignation or dismissal would deprive Katsav, 61, of his presidential immunity.
 
But many are afraid that the shocking rape of Lebanon by Israel in the end pays too. Again confirming that for the US junta and its managers in power crime pays. Until they are stopped and punished. Paris was the limelight for these parasites and it is a pity they were not arrested yet.
 
But in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon many people fight against them.
 
AND THEY WIN.
 
 
HENK RUYSSENAARS
 
 
REFERENCES:
 
 
* Bush ‘helped Israeli attack on Lebanon’ - The Guardian (UK)

 
* THE TWO ISRAELI SOLDIERS WERE CAPTURED IN LEBANON

 
* Lebanon - Map and txt

 
* AP (American Propaganda) - Story in The Guardian (UK)

 
* THE DUTCH GOVERNMENT TRANSITED BANNED AND OTHER WEAPONS FOR THE US AND ISREAL DURING THEIR ILLEGAL WAR ON LEBANON - THAT IS A WAR CRIME

 
* US AND ISRAEL SUPPORTED BY THE EU KEEP KILLING

 
* WHERE IS ALL THE ‘DONOR MONEY’ RECYCLED? - Their ‘donors’ bank (BIS) has greater immunity than any sovereign nation on earth, is accountable to no one, runs global monetary affairs and is privately owned. The same group owns the Federal Reserve, their ‘money print shop’ in the US.

 
* THE US JUNTA CREATED ‘REALITY’ IS NOT FOR HUMAN BEINGS BUT FOR THIS GROUP OF INSANE ‘HUMANOIDS’

 
* PROF. MICHEL CHOSSUDOVSKY

 
* MIKE WHITNEY

 
* FORMER PRESIDENT MOSHE KAZAV’S PRESIDENTIAL PALACE

 
* The Dutch author this far has lived and worked abroad - never in an English speaking country - for more than 4 decades for international media as an independent foreign correspondent, of which 10 years - also during Gulf War I - in the Arab World and the Middle East. Seeing worldwide that every bullet and every bomb breeds more terrorism!
 
* FPF-COPYRIGHT NOTICE - In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107 - any copyrighted work in this message is distributed by the Foreign Press Foundation under fair use, without profit or payment, to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the information.

 
FOREIGN PRESS FOUNDATION
Editor: Henk Ruyssenaars

The Netherlands
fpf@chello.nl
 

John Fraher and Adrian Cox

Bloomberg / January 27, 2007

Jan. 27 (Bloomberg) — Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said his country has shifted some of its $82 billion of currency reserves away from the dollar and that potential foreign-exchange volatility may hurt exporters.

“We’re concerned for the reason that the high percentage of our international trade is in U.S. dollars,'’ said Abdullah today in an interview in Davos, Switzerland at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum. When asked whether Malaysia will cut its dollar holdings, he said: “We have already done. We’ll continue to watch the situation.'’

Abdullah’s comments reflect concern that lopsided trade flows between the U.S. and the rest of the world will weaken the dollar. The U.S. currency has dropped 6 percent against the euro in the past year. Kuwaiti Finance Minister Bader al-Humaidhi said on Jan. 24 that the third-largest Arab oil producer may abandon the dinar’s peg against the dollar in favor of a basket.

Malaysia’s central bank abandoned a peg to the dollar in July 2005 and manages it against an undisclosed basket of currencies. The ringgit has advanced 0.7 percent against the dollar this year, climbing to a nine-year high this month and trailing only the Icelandic krona as the world’s best performing currency.

“Overdependence on one currency can create a problem, the dollar or any other currency,'’ said Abdullah. He declined to comment further on the country’s foreign exchange policy or his favored currencies.

Central bank Governor Zeti Akhtar Aziz in November declined to comment on whether Malaysia was diversifying its reserves.

Abdullah also called on U.S. and European ministers meeting in Davos today to unblock stalled World Trade Organizations talks on dismantling trade barriers.

“The U.S. and the Europeans have a very important role to play,'’ he said. “A lot of things are stuck here because of these giants. If we can’t have it globally then people do it bilaterally or multilaterally.'’

World Science / November 21, 2005

Researchers say they have identified lasting changes in brain chemistry that result from childhood neglect. The research might lead to drug treatments that help undo these changes, they added.

Absence of a loving caregiver in the first years of life can sway the normal activity of two hormones that help form healthy social bonds and emotional intimacy, the scientists found in a study.

The work, by investigators at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is reported online in the Nov. 21 issue of the research journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers worked with 18 four-year-old adoptees who had spent their first years in orphanages in Russia and Romania. These institutions are often overwhelmed with children, and unable to provide a loving upbringing to each, the researchers explained.

Even though the children now live in stable homes—for over three years, in some cases—they might still display some telltale behaviors that researchers associate with early neglect, the researchers said. One is an abnormal willingness to seek comfort from unfamiliar adults, even in the presence of the adopted parent.

The scientists tracked the levels of two “social” hormones, called vasopressin and oxytocin, in the children through urine tests.

The researchers said they immediately noticed that the children who experienced early neglect had markedly lower levels of vasopressin than non-adopted children. Researchers think vasopressin is essential for recognizing individuals in a familiar social environment.

During the experiments, the children sat on the laps of either their mother or an unfamiliar woman and participated in an animated interactive computer game.

The half-hour game directed the children to engage in various types of physical contact with the adult they were sitting with, such as whispering or tickling each other, and patting each other on the head. At the end of the game, they were asked to give a urine sample.

The researchers said that in family-reared children, oxytocin levels go up following physical contact with their mothers. But in the neglected group, the levels stayed the same. Because oxytocin is necessary for forming secure relationships, this might help explain why many neglected children have trouble doing so, the scientists said.

But the results don’t indicate that victims of early neglect are permanently barred from forming healthy relationships, the researchers said. “It’s extremely important that people don’t think this work implies that these children are somehow permanently delayed,” said Seth Pollak, senior author of the study.

“All we are saying is that in the case of some social problems, here is a window into understanding the biological basis for why they happen and how we might design treatments.”

In the future, he said, and his colleagues hope to identify how particular factors, such as the duration or severity of childhood neglect, might influence types of child behavior. Another question worthy of exploration, the researchers added, is why hormone levels vary between children who have suffered similar neglect.

World Science / January 21, 2006

Memories may be the lifeblood of our identity. To some extent, you are what you remember.

But what if some of your memories aren’t really yours?

That might just be the case, says a group of psychologists from Duke University in Durham, N.C., and the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand.

In a new study, they seek to understand why some people seem to take over other people’s memories.

In past research, the team found that people, especially twins but others as well, sometimes spar over who owns a memory—and both can’t be right.

Thus, “some of the memories in which we play a leading role might in fact have been the experiences of others,” they wrote in the new study, published in the February issue of the research journal Genes, Brain and Behavior.

Many twins have noticed the phenomenon for years. But the researchers, one of whom is a twin herself, say they’re the first to document it scientifically, along with its occurrence among non-twins.

In the new research, the psychologists re-analyzed data from their past studies to try to understand why it occurs. Their finding: although our appropriation of other people’s memories is probably unintentional, it also tends to be self-serving.

People “claim for themselves memories for achievements and suffered misfortunes but are more likely to give away memories of personal wrongdoing,” they wrote. That’s consistent other recent research findings, they added, that have pointed to something obvious to many non-scientists: most of us are often quite selfish.

The scientists started the research “in part because of all of the heat involved in most real world memory errors,” wrote Duke’s David C. Rubin, a member of the team, in an email.

Controversy has surrounded the accuracy of memories for decades, largely because of how witness recollections affect court cases. A particularly thorny issue has been whether courts should let children sue their parents on grounds that they recently remembered long-suppressed memories of child abuse. Some critics contend these “memories” are often retrieved only with the help of hypnotherapists, who may actually have planted them through the force of suggestion.

Regardless of who is right, researchers have increasingly recognized that memories are highly fallible. And Rubin and colleagues say their findings suggest yet a new way that memories can be distorted.

In their new paper, they quoted as follows a typical conversation between 54-year-old female twins as they participated in one of the studies.

    Twin 1: I remember falling over and really hurting my elbow and knee when a wheel came off my roller skate.
    Twin 2: Hang on a minute, are you talking about those roller skates we got for our eighth or ninth birthday?
    Twin 1: Yeah, so what?
    Twin 2: Well that actually happened to me if you don’t mind.
    Twin 1: What do you mean, it was me! I was skating with you and […]
    Twin 2: Yeah, with Marie on the old tennis court.
    Twin 1: Yeah, but it was me not you, I remember it being really bumpy with grassy bits in it.
    Twin 2: I think you’ll find if you think really hard it was me.
    Twin 1: Well I remember it so clearly, and you skated home to get mum.
    Twin 2: No, you skated home to get mum, because I was hurt and crying and couldn’t move.
    Twin1: Oh well, I guess we get confused; it happened so long ago.

The University of Canterbury’s Mercedes Sheen, a member of the research team, wrote in her 2002 Ph.D. thesis: “My own twin and I dispute a memory over a first kiss at summer camp when we were 12. The boy in question was the ‘camp catch,’ and although we both vehemently believe we were the one who was there, the event (one would hope) only happened to one of us.”

Although many twins have noticed the disputed memory phenomenon on their own, the studies found it may happen more often than they think, the researchers wrote.

A 2001 study involving 20 pairs of same-sex twins uncovered 36 disputed memories, only 15 of which the twins involved already knew to be disputed, the researchers found. The discovery of a memory-ownership question “often seemed to come as a surprise to the participants, and many tried to assert their own right to the memory,” Sheen and colleagues wrote.

The team also interviewed 69 non-twins and found that six reported having experienced a disputed memory. In half the cases, the disagreement was with a sibling; in the other half, a friend.

In the new study, they analyzed 77 disputed memories gathered in past research. Most cases involved both members of a pair claiming the same memory. But some cases—slightly over one fourth—involved them “giving away” memories, claiming that the other person experienced the remembered event.

Some patterns turned up, the researchers said.

First, “the memories are predominantly bad (wrongdoing or misfortune) rather than good (achievement, gift or daring),” they wrote. Also, most of the disputes in both twins and non-twins occurred among females, they found, probably because “women share memories more than men.”

A participant was moreover “more likely to claim good memories for herself or himself” than bad ones, they wrote. Participants claimed for themselves 17 out of 18 of the good memories, but only 28 of 43 bad memories.

Also, they wrote: “Of the bad memories, there is a very much stronger tendency to claim misfortunes as one’s own (27 out of 34) than wrongdoings (three of 21).”

Thus, in many ways the memories “could be described as self-serving,” they concluded.

They also noted that parents usually were unable to resolve memory disputes. That was possibly because the conflicts tended to involve events of middling importance rather than great importance, and the parents themselves couldn’t recall the facts, they said.

The researchers said the apparent self-serving nature of disputed recollections is similar to self-serving tendencies that psychologists have found in other facets of life.

One interesting parallel is with children’s imaginary friends, they wrote.

Studies have found that “although the preschool children who were reported to have such companions normally appear to interact well with their imaginary friends, they also frequently blame the imaginary playmate when minor things go wrong,” they wrote. And one study indicated that “while imaginary companions are often involved in the child’s behaviour, they are rarely praised for their accomplishments.”

Another intriguing parallel, the researchers said, involves dreams. People sometimes can’t figure out whether they dreamt something or it really happened to them.

“These memories of uncertain origin are likewise rather rare and generally for events of intermediate importance,” they wrote. “Moreover, those who have such memories often try hard to resolve their origin in dreams or reality, just as our disputants expended effort in defending their right to ‘their’ memories.”

Scientists have shown growing interest in self-serving behavior in recent years, and the disputed-memory studies are adding to that research, according to the team.

One 2004 study found that people tend to “attribute their successes to themselves and their failures to external causes,” whereas a study four years earlier “showed that people who were confronted with positive and negative information about themselves later tended to recall the positive information and neglect or forget the negative.”

World Science / January 21, 2007

Courtesy National Science Foundation
and World Science staff

If in­deed “a dia­mond is forever,” the most prim­i­tive ori­gins of Earth’s so-called black dia­monds were in deep, uni­ver­sal time, ge­ol­o­gists have found—they came from space.

The study of the rare black gems, al­so called car­bo­na­do dia­monds, comes from a re­search group in­c­lud­ing Joz­sef Garai and Ste­phen Hag­gerty of Flor­i­da In­ter­na­tion­al Uni­ver­si­ty.

The dusky rocks, Hag­gerty said, may have once been as­ter­oid-sized—a kil­o­me­ter (0.6 miles) or more in di­am­e­ter when they first reached Earth.

The sci­en­tists based the claims on various fac­tors. They an­a­lyzed the dia­monds’ con­tents and found them to be si­m­i­lar to cer­tain oth­er dia­monds found in me­te­orites, which al­so or­i­ginate in space.

Minute amounts of hy­dro­gen in the car­bo­na­do rocks also be­trayed a sim­i­larity to dia­mond dust found in hy­dro­gen-rich en­vi­ron­ments among stars, his group said. In previous re­search, Hag­gerty sug­gested car­bo­na­do dia­monds formed in stel­lar ex­plo­sions called su­per­novae.

The term car­bo­na­do, coined by the Por­tu­guese in Bra­zil in the mid-1700s, al­ludes to the dia­monds’ re­sem­b­lance to po­rous char­coal. The stones are found on­ly in Bra­zil and the Cen­tral Af­ri­can Re­pub­lic.

Con­ven­tion­al dia­monds are mined from ex­plo­sive vol­can­ic rocks called kim­ber­lites that shoot from pro­found depths to the Earth’s sur­face, said So­nia Es­per­anca of the Na­tion­al Sci­ence Foun­da­tion’s Di­vi­sion of Earth Sci­ences, which funded the re­search. “This pro­cess pre­serves the unique crys­tal struc­ture that makes dia­monds the hard­est nat­u­ral ma­te­ri­al known.”

Diamonds consist of a dense, crys­tal­line form of car­bon. But from Aus­tral­ia to Si­be­ria, from Chi­na to In­dia, con­ven­tion­al dia­monds come from vir­tu­al­ly iden­ti­cal ge­o­log­i­cal set­tings, said Hag­gerty—none of them com­pat­i­ble with black dia­mond for­ma­tion.

About 600 tons of con­ven­tion­al dia­monds have been mined, traded, pol­ished and adorned since 1900. But not one black dia­mond has been dis­cov­ered in min­ing fields, added Hag­gerty, whose study appeared on­line Dec. 20 in the jour­nal As­t­ro­phys­i­cal Jour­nal Let­ters.

World Science / February 16, 2005

Courtesy the University of California at Los Angeles and World Science staff

Green tea extract may help fight bladder cancer by snarling up tiny “skeletons” within cells, which cancer cells use to move around, according to researchers.

The findings appear in a study published in the Feb. 15 issue of the scientific journal Clinical Cancer Research.

The researchers who conducted the study, from the University of California at Los Angeles, examined how the substance affected bladder cancer cells in laboratory tests. Their results were consistent with suggestions from previous studies that the extract fights several cancers, and showed how it might do so, said the university’s JianYu Rao, the study’s senior author.

It found the extract targets cancer cells while leaving healthy cells alone, the researchers said.

“Our study adds a new dimension in understanding the mechanisms of green tea extract,” Rao said. “If we knew exactly how it works to inhibit the development of cancer, we could figure out more precisely which bladder cancer patients might benefit from taking it.”

Previous studies had suggested the extract might work by killing cancer cells and hampering the development of a blood supply that feeds them.

The UCLA scientists said they showed that green tea extract affects a process, called actin remodeling, in which cells’ internal “skeleton” changes its shape. This rearrangement, not unlike the movements of our own skeletons, allows the cancer cells to move, and thus migrate out of the bladder to invade new areas of the body.

“The green tea extract may keep the cancer cells confined and localized, where they are easier to treat and the prognosis is better,” Rao said. “Cancer cells are invasive and green tea extract interrupts the invasive process of the cancer.”

The green tea extract influenced this remodeling by making cells stick together, preventing the skeletons from moving around very much, the researchers said.

The extract also had a second effect, they found: it changed the cells into slightly different types of cells.

This finding is consistent with a growing number of studies that have shown that forcing a cell into a particular shape or skeletal configuration can change the type of cell it is, often turning it into one of the types of cells that normally lives in that configuration.

These shape-shifting changes often switch a cell from an immature type—a stem cell, which potentially can become one of a number of specific kinds of cell, such as bone or fat—into one of those particular types.

Researchers have been working to exploit this shape-related change in cell type to create new cells that could help cure certain medical conditions. For instance, some researchers hope to use similar processes to grow new cartilage cells to replace those lost in arthritis.

But the new findings might represent the first time shape-related changes in cells are being harnessed to fight bladder cancer. The disease is the fifth most common cancer in the United States, with about 56,000 new cases diagnosed each year, according to the researchers. About half of all bladder cancers are believed to be related to cigarette smoking.

The cancer can be hard to detect in the early, most treatable stages, the researchers added. When not found early, the tumors can be aggressive, and more than half of patients with advanced cancers experience recurrences.

UCLA researchers currently are seeking hundreds of former smokers who have had bladder cancer for a clinical trial studying whether green tea extract prevents recurrence—one of the first studies in the country to test the agent on cancer patients. The university is asking volunteers interested in participating to call (310) 825-4415.

Rao cautioned that his study was conducted in a carefully controlled environment and that more research needs to be done to discover exactly how green tea extract functions as a cancer fighter. The next phase of his research will analyze urine from bladder cancer patients to determine which patients would benefit most from taking green tea extract. 

Outlaw News / January 29, 2007

This is Zionist propaganda.

They are pre-supposing that anyone who believes the book of Revelations supports Israel. This is almost laughable, since the book says the exact opposite - it’s black and white - king’s English, baby.

Read the book of Revelations (and Daniel, Ezekiel, & Isaiah) - Israel is the kingdom of the Antichrist, and it is blatantly stated. These people supporting Zionist genocide, in the name of God and the Messiah, are so evil.

The coming of the Great Leader had to be set up - that is why you see these Christians running around blithering about how everyone who doesn’t support the Apartheid Secular State is going to rot in hell. Like the majority of the rest of America, they are mindless, stupid filth, and they have witlessly become the Babylonian Church of the Antichrist. Just like the book says, most Christians will bow down at his feet when Al-Aqsa is destroyed and the Babylonian Temple is erected.

Even if you don’t believe in the Prophecies, this is clearly the game plan. We’re now taking bets.

Anyhow, this guys got a better understanding of the End Times than the “Christians”:

(The song’s about people worshiping TV. “Give the kids what they need”.)