Hypocrites on global warming...

The global warming believers seem to just want to punish the west, no??

Science is supposed to be about results, but global warming is about belief. President Clinton is good because he said he believed. If you say you believe, you don't have to deliver.

If global warming is facing the tipping point, then the United Nations should lean on China. Believers shouldn't put their politics -- United States a must, China a maybe -- before the planet.

If undeveloped countries will pay the biggest price for global warming, as Ban said, then that's more reason to make them curb their emissions -- not less.

If the economics are clear, as Ban said, he should not have to pressure countries and businesses, execs would be making the right changes without government pressure. And Ban would not have to ask the media for help, as he did Friday.

If results matter, Ban ought to be hectoring Democrats in Congress, who are about as likely as Bush to pass a carbon tax. But he's not.

And if results really were paramount, why aren't global warming advocates talking about the sacrifices necessary to meet their goal of 50 percent to 90 percent fewer emissions? Instead, they talk as if Americans can change their light bulbs, or drive a hybrid, not an SUV -- and that will do the trick.

It's as if they don't care about results, they only care if you believe.

Who's responsible for Darfur??? The Jews!

Who else???

Sudan's defense minister, Abdel Rahim Mohamed Hussein, has accused "24 Jewish organizations" of "fueling the conflict in Darfur" last week in an interview with a Saudi newspaper.

Hussein was interviewed during an official state visit to the Saudi kingdom last week.

A journalist from Saudi Arabia's Okaz newspaper asked Hussein: "Some people are talking about the penetration of Jewish organizations in Darfur and that there is no conflict there?"

"The Darfur issue is being fuelled by 24 Jewish organizations, who are making the largest amount of noise over the issue, and using the Holocaust in their campaigning," the Sudanese defense minister replied.

Lala Land in Gaza....

At least the Daily Telegraph is skeptical..how much of the mainstream press will be fooled???

It was the name of the bus company chosen by Hamas to drive foreign guests around Gaza yesterday that said it all. The name was Sweety Tours.

The tour was meant to counter weeks of adverse publicity about the supposedly draconian nature of "Hamastan" - the name given to the Gaza Strip by critics of the Islamist movement since its violent takeover last month.

So for five sweaty hours, the coach from Sweety Tours took a few dozen reporters on a tour of the Gaza Strip to try to counter this image. The bus stopped at the presidential guest house - Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian national authority and Fatah leader is locked out of Gaza - to show that the gardens were being watered and the building maintained.

A great deal was made of the fact the portrait of Mr Abbas still hung in the main reception room. But then a few minutes later the bus passed a vast mural of Yasser Arafat, the former Fatah leader. The mural was pockmarked with fresh-looking bullet holes.

"We believe in freedom of speech and democracy," said Ahmed Bahar, the deputy speaker of the Palestinian parliament and a senior Hamas figure.

His words would have sounded more convincing had the Hamas authorities in Gaza not chosen yesterday to arrest several distributors of Palestinian newspapers from the West Bank, the territory still under Fatah control.

The bus continued to the main prison in Gaza City, the Serai, where the cell doors were thrown open to provide access to the inmates. They all dutifully provided glowing accounts of how the administration had improved since Hamas took over.

None of the inmates was prepared to speak about torture even though human rights groups had documented cases allegedly committed by Hamas security forces.

The coach party was then taken to the main church of Gaza's tiny 204-strong Palestinian Catholic community to hear a glowing account of co-existence from the priest, Father Manuela Salaameh.

Pork emissions???

Are they worse than CO2???

A group of Muslims have opposed plans for a pet food factory to be built as possible pork emissions will violate their religious rights.

Butchers Pet Care could shelve plans for a factory in Coton Park, near Rugby, because angry Asian families have complained to their residents' association about pork smells drifting into their garden.

Muslim residents in the area also claim the pork will effectively "rain down" on their homes and gardens after the factory's 100ft chimney has pumped the meat extracts into the atmosphere.

The Coton Park Residential Association said they have received complaints from Muslims - who are directed to not eat pork by the Qur'an - and are taking the matter very seriously.

One family who live less than 100 yards from the proposed factory, but who did not wish to be identified, said: "A significant proportion of meats used in the pet foods processes are pig meat.

"Our religion expressly forbids us to consume pig meat in any form.

"Because of the way in which this meat material will leave the factory and give that the area can be 'rained upon' we will be consuming pork via inhalation of this 'rain'.

"Not only that but our clothes will be contaminated by pork."

A good reason to support gay marriage...

This ruling is really sick...

A judge has ordered a man to continue paying alimony to his ex-wife — even though she’s in a registered domestic partnership with another woman and even uses the other woman’s last name.

California marriage laws say alimony ends when a former spouse remarries, and Ron Garber thought that meant he was off the hook when he learned his ex-wife had registered her new relationship under the state’s domestic partnership law.

An Orange County judge didn’t see it that way.

The judge ruled that a registered partnership is cohabitation, not marriage, and that Garber must keep writing the checks, $1,250 a month, to his ex-wife, Melinda Kirkwood. Gerber plans to appeal.

The truth about wind power....

It's expensive, inefficient and ugly....

Mr. Adams pointed out that Canada's energy needs peak in the summer when air conditioners are humming, but when wind energy production is at its lowest.

He said wind power does very little to maintain grid reliability because it is difficult to forecast wind production even a few hours into the future.

Wind farms in Ontario reached only 21.5% of their capacity in 2006, said Terry Young, a spokesman for the Independent Electricity Systems Operator, which maintains Ontario's power grid.

But, read the whole thing...

And, what does Michael Moore say about this???

Here's an interesting case study from the UK....

A woman of 108 has been told by health chiefs that she must wait 18 months to get a new hearing aid.

	108-year-old Olive Beal was told she must wait 18 months for a new digital hearing aid

Olive Beal, one of the oldest women in Britain, is confined to a wheelchair and losing her sight.

Being able to communicate and listen to music is her only contact with the outside world, says her family.

Mrs Beal, who has six grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren, has used an old-fashioned analogue hearing aid for the last five years.

But she struggles to hear with it and needs a modern digital hearing aid which cuts out background noise.

After being told of the wait, Mrs Beal, who lives in a care home in Deal, Kent, said: "I could be dead by then."

Only one Jew left in Afghanistan....

Sadly, like many other muslim countries, the Jews have all left....or were expelled...

In the war-torn country of 30 million Muslims, Zebulon Simentov stands alone.

Thirteen centuries after the first Jews arrived in Afghanistan, Simentov is the last Jew left in the nation.

"It makes no difference," says the 47-year-old, who wears a yarmulke along with his shalwar kameez. "I'm like a lion -- strong and courageous."

While there were more than 40,000 Jews in Afghanistan at the turn of the 19th century, the community emptied -- first in 1948, when the state of Israel was established, and then in 1979 when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.

Another nutty royal....

This one is particularly crazy...

PRINCESS Martha Louise of Norway has shocked the nation by announcing she is a clairvoyant and wants to teach people how to communicate with angels.

Last week, the 35-year-old princess launched Astarte Education, a centre offering courses in spiritual and alternative therapy which she co-founded with a friend, Elisabeth Samnoy.

The princess said she realised as a child that she could read people’s inner feelings, but only developed the ability to talk with angels when, as a keen show jumper, she dealt closely with horses and learnt to connect on a “deeper level with animals”.

Writing on the centre’s website Martha Louise described angels as “forces that surround us” and “a help in all aspects of our lives”. She declared her desire to share her important psychic “gift” with other people; by offering a three-year training programme at a cost of £2,000 a year.

The BBC is caught again...

Yet another scandal....

The BBC was dragged into a fresh row over standards after police claimed it broadcast a misleading investigation into child-trafficking.

The report, which led BBC1's Ten O'Clock News on Thursday, purported to expose Bulgarian criminals offering toddlers for sale to British couples for £40,000 each.

But Commissioner Veselin Petrov, head of police in the Bulgarian city where the undercover report was filmed, has insisted that there is no evidence of organised criminals selling children.

Petrov accused the BBC of entrapping 'Harry', the alleged trafficker, by offering him money, and threatened to charge the reporters with incitement, an offence that carries a prison sentence of up to a year. The BBC adamantly deny that they offered any money.

Why did they wait three hours to toss him out???

If you or I had done the same, we would have been tossed off in minutes...

A member of Qatar's royal family was thrown off a British Airways flight after delaying take-off for several hours by insisting that strangers should not sit next to women in his party.

Sheikh Bader Bin Kalifa al-Thani, a junior noble in Qatar's 3,000-strong ruling clan, was travelling from Milan to London on Thursday afternoon on flight BA563.

The sheikh was accompanied by another male family member, three women, a cook and a butler. There was no first-class compartment on the flight.

When the sheikh failed to convince other passengers in the Club Europe compartment to change their seats, he got up and walked to the pilot's cabin to complain.

A three-hour delay followed, as the Qatari group refused to sit down, or to listen to entreaties from a representative of the Qatari embassy in Italy, who was sent to mediate.

Eventually the pilot called a security team to eject the group, which later flew to London with Alitalia. The Corriere della Sera newspaper said the women sat around the sheikh on the later flight.

The delay caused 50 of the 117 passengers on board to miss their connecting flight in London.

Hurricanes and global warming...

William Gray is recognized as one of the world's top hurricane experts...

Consider, for example, the intensity of U.S. land-falling hurricanes over time -- keeping in mind that the periods must be long enough to reveal long-term trends. During the most recent 50-year period, 1957 to 2006, 83 hurricanes hit the United States, 34 of them major. In contrast, during the 50-year period from 1900 to 1949, 101 hurricanes (22% more) made U.S. landfall, including 39 (or 15% more) major hurricanes.

The hypothesis that increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases the number of hurricanes fails by an even wider margin when we compare two other multi-decade periods: 1925-1965 and 1966-2006. In the 41 years from 1925-1965, there were 39 U.S. land-falling major hurricanes. In the 1966-2006 period there were 22 such storms -- only 56% as many. Even though global mean temperatures have risen by an estimated 0.4 Celsius and CO2 by 20%, the number of major hurricanes hitting the U.S. declined.

If global warming isn't the cause of the increased Atlantic hurricane activity seen over the past dozen years, what is?

My Colorado State University colleagues and I attribute the increase in hurricane activity to the speed-up of water circulating in the Atlantic Ocean. This circulation began to strengthen in 1995 -- at exactly the same time that Atlantic hurricane activity showed a large upswing.

Here's how it works. Though most people don't realize it, the Atlantic Ocean is land-locked except on its far southern boundary. Due to significantly higher amounts of surface evaporation than precipitation, the Atlantic has the highest salinity of any of the global oceans. Saline water has a higher density than does fresh water. The Atlantic's higher salinity causes it to have a continuous northward flow of upper-ocean water that moves into the Atlantic's polar regions, where it cools and sinks due to its high density. After sinking to deep levels, the water then moves southward, and returns to the Atlantic's southern fringes, where it mixes again. This south-to-north upper-level water motion, and compensating north-to-south deep-level water motion, is called the thermohaline circulation (THC).

The strength of the Atlantic's THC shows distinct variations over time, due to naturally occurring salinity variations. When the THC is strong, the upper-ocean water becomes warmer than normal; atmospheric circulation changes occur; and more hurricanes form. The opposite occurs when the THC is weaker than average.

Since 1995, the Atlantic's THC has been significantly stronger than average. It was also stronger than average during the 1940s to early 1960s -- another period with a spike in major hurricane activity. It was distinctly weaker than average in the two quarter-century periods of 1970-1994 and 1900-1925, when there was less hurricane activity.

Some bad news from Afghanistan....

I really hope this is not true...

Taliban militants have used a heat-seeking surface-to-air missile to attack a Western aircraft over Afghanistan for the first time.

The attack with a weapon believed to have been smuggled across the border with Iran represents a worrying increase in the capability of the militants which Western commanders had long feared.

The Daily Telegraph has learnt that the Taliban attempted to bring down an American C-130 Hercules aircraft flying over the south-western province of Nimroz on July 22. The crew reported that a missile system locked on to their aircraft and that a missile was fired.

It closed in on the large C-130 aircraft, pursuing it as the pilots launched a series of violent evasive manoeuvres and jettisoned flares to confuse the heat sensors in the nose of the missile. Crew members said that they saw what they believe was a missile passing very close to the aircraft. The C-130 was not damaged in the attack.

Nato officials yesterday refused to confirm or deny that such an attack had taken place.

Commies...an excerpt

I'm reading a memoir, Commies, by Ronald Radosh - yet another old Jewish lefty who became disillusioned with the left. There's one story, I just had to put in my blog:

In the 70s, Radosh and a group of lefties go to Cuba for one-month long visit, and they go visit a mental hospital:

"When we toured the arts center, I saw an obviously energetic and totally sane young man teaching patients how to paint. He seemed to know English, so I asked him how he was able to deal with those patients who were clearly mentally unbalanced. He laughed nervously and replied, "I'm a patient myself." I didn't understand. Then he said, "I'm a homosexual, and that is why I'm confined here." An artist, he passed the time by using his skills to help others in the arts and crafts unit. When we confronted the doctor during the question and answer perioid, he argued that homosexuality was a disease justifying commitment to a mental hospital.

As the tour progressed, we couldn't help but notice the obvious glazed and drugged-out expression on the faces of most of the patients. Clearly they had been given massive does of tranquilizers, but when we asked the doctor in charge about it, we heard an even more shocking answer. "We are proud," he told us, "that in our institution, we have a larger proportion of hospital inmates who have been lobotomized than any other mental hospital in the world." Lobotomy, he assured us, did wonders for their behavior and state of well-being. Indeed, he told us that a huge percentage of those incarcerated were in fact recipients of these lobotomies. We were flabbergasted, particularly a young man named Larry, a radical therapist who taught at a New Jersey college. "This stinks!" Larry screamed to our group as we got back on our bus. "Lobotomy is a horror. We must do something to stop this. It's exactly what we're working against at home." Castro loyalist Suzanne Ross glared at Larry, shot us all a contemptuous look, and said harshly, "We have to understand that there are differences between capitalist lobotomies and socialist lobotomies."

Go buy this book - it's a quick read and offers very good insights into the left.

Where are the feminists????

Women are being killed in Gaza..but silence from western feminists...

Honor killings are one of the area’s most sensitive legal and moral dilemmas. They are not condoned by Sharia, but they are becoming increasingly common in lawless Gaza. Under the Palestinian criminal code, murder can carry a death sentence, usually by hanging. But according to Palestinian officials, there has never been a case when the perpetrator of an honor killing has been executed. The killers often serve little more than three years, and rarely more than seven. Neither Fatah politicians nor the Islamists in Hamas are particularly sympathetic to the victims, even in peacetime. Amid the chaotic indifference of civil war, they are even less so. In 2007 alone, there have been a dozen honor killings, according to rights groups. "There is a very clear increase in the killing of women," says Younis.

Jewish Man Violently Attacked in Paris..

This is absolutely disgusting...

A 23-year-old Jewish man was violently attacked in Paris last Saturday in what appears to be an anti-Semitic aggression, police sources said.

The man, identified as Yossef, was on his way to the synagogue for Shabbat with his brother-in-law and his 3 year-old-son, he told the court. When the three passed a pedestrian crossing, a man in a car began to hoot at them and twinkle the lights. He was apparently irritated to see the child crossing too slowly.

''I gestured him to keep quiet and showed that pedestrians have right of way," Yossef, who was wearing the traditional Jewish Orthodox clothes, explained.

The driver stopped his car and reportedly shouted: ‘’I am going to look after you dirty Jew. I will make an end of you’’.

He then got out of the car and started beating Yossef first with the hands and later with an iron bar he found nearby. The Jewish man was wounded at the head and had his arm broken.

People who witnessed the scene intervened and threatened to call police before the aggressor escaped. The witnesses could notice the car's plate number which led police to arrest Nizar O., an electrician of North-African origin in his thirties.

Does renewable energy harm the planet???

Let's be honest - renewable energy (wind, solar) has a huge footprint...

Ramping up the use of renewable energy would lead to the "rape of nature", meaning nuclear power should be developed instead. So argues noted conservation biologist and climate change researcher Jesse Ausubel in an opinion piece based on his and others' research.

Ausubel (who New Scientist interviewed in 2006) says the key renewable energy sources, including sun, wind, and biomass, would all require vast amounts of land if developed up to large scale production – unlike nuclear power. That land would be far better left alone, he says.

Renewables are "boutique fuels" says Ausubel, of Rockefeller University in New York, US. "They look attractive when they are quite small. But if we start producing renewable energy on a large scale, the fallout is going to be horrible."

Instead, Ausubel argues for renewed development of nuclear. "If we want to minimise the rape of nature, the best energy solution is increased efficiency, natural gas with carbon capture, and nuclear power."

Here's how the Palestinians Use Their Money...

Here's how the Palestinians use their money...

When Israel decided to unfreeze $600 million it owed the Palestinian Authority, it did not intend for the money to be used to fill the bank account of former Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh.

After receiving the funds from Israel and additional aid from the United States and European countries, the Palestinian Finance Ministry decided to pay the monthly salaries of government members, including dismissed Hamas ministers and the group's representatives in the Legislative Council.

Each of these officials received on Monday NIS 12,000 (about $2,836) from Palestinian Prime Minister and Finance Minister Salam Fayyad's treasury. One of the people to receive this sum was former Palestinian Foreign Minister Mahmoud al-Zahar, one of Hamas' most radical members.

Can we get the CBC to do this???

The BBC has to send its employees on courses to learn honesty!

John Humphrys and Jeremy Paxman will be required to join Mark Thompson, the director general of the BBC, on a mandatory new training programme to teach honesty to BBC staff.

The Safeguarding Trust course is being set up as part of the damage limitation exercise by the corporation after the revelation that six children's and charity television programmes had misled viewers.

Mark Byford, the deputy director general, giving evidence to a Commons Culture Select Committee yesterday, said all employees, no matter how senior or famous, would have to attend the course if involved in making programmes.

Is Syria still occupying Lebanon???

Will the UN have the guts to stand tough against Syria???

As of this minute, Syria occupies at least 177 square miles of Lebanese soil. That you are now reading about it for the first time is as much a scandal as the occupation itself.

The news comes by way of a fact-finding survey of the Lebanese-Syrian border just produced by the International Lebanese Committee for U.N. Security Council Resolution 1559, an American NGO that has consultative status with the U.N. Because of the sensitivity of the subject, the authors have requested anonymity and have circulated the report only among select government officials and journalists. But its findings cannot be ignored.

In meticulous detail--supplemented by photographs, satellite images, archival material and Lebanese military maps predating Syria's 1976 invasion (used as a basis of comparison with Syria's current positions)--the authors describe precisely where and how Lebanon has been infiltrated. In the area of the village of Maarboun, for instance, the authors observed Syrian military checkpoints a mile inside Lebanon. In the Birak al-Rassass Valley, they photographed Syrian anti-aircraft batteries. On the outskirts of the village of Kossaya they found a heavily fortified camp belonging to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, in violation of U.N. resolutions and Lebanese demands.

Record cold snap in Australia..

At least in Queensland...

Horticulture and sugar cane farmers are also assessing frost damage in south-east Queensland.

Records have been broken this week as the mercury hit sub zero temperatures across parts of the Sunshine state.

Gympie recorded its coldest temperature this morning, with minus three point six breaking the 1971 record low of minus three point three.

Nearer the coast in the Bundaberg district, zucchinis, tomatoes, chillies and sweet potatoes have been damaged by frost.

Are worms killing the planet...

Kudos to Andrew Sullivan for finding this.....you never know what environmentalists will blame next...

Worm composting could be doing more harm than good to the environment, according to research in Germany.

"Worms produce a significant amount of greenhouse gases. Recent research done by German scientists has found that worms produced a third of nitrous oxide gases when used for composting," an expert was quoted as saying.

In an interview with a leading renewable resources journal, Jim Frederickson, senior research fellow at Britain`s Open Universities faculty of technology, said the German research showed that worm composting has deleterious effects on the environment that should be considered more seriously.

Worms naturally produce nitrous oxide gases when they are put into the process of composting.

Worms can be used for home grown composting or commercial composting and are typically red worms. They are used to recycle food scraps and other organic material into valuable soil worm compost, otherwise known as vermicompost. This compost can then be used to grow plants.

"We have concentrated on getting waste out of landfill and into worm composting systems but they can actually produce more greenhouse gases than landfill sites produce," Frederickson told Materials Recycling Week, a leading publication for the recycling and waste-management industry.

I'm surprised they didn't shoot anybody....

He actually sent in reinforcements...

Who stole the shoes of Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh while he was attending Friday prayers in Gaza City?

This is the question that Hamas's security apparatus has been trying to answer since last Friday.

The incident has embarrassed Hamas, whose leaders tried on Sunday to play down the case by claiming that the theft was the work of a child.

Hamas officials in the Gaza Strip accused Fatah leaders in Ramallah of exploiting the incident to defame Haniyeh.

The shoes were stolen after Haniyeh and his entourage arrived at a mosque in Gaza City for Friday prayers. Ever since he was appointed prime minister, Haniyeh has been delivering Friday sermons in various mosques in the Gaza Strip.
In line with Islamic tradition, worshipers are required to take off their shoes upon entering mosques.

Following the prayer, Haniyeh discovered that his shoes were missing. His nervous bodyguard immediately began searching for the missing shoes and all worshipers were required to remain inside the mosque until the search was over.

"It was a very embarrassing situation," said a Palestinian journalist who was present at the scene. "Hamas sent reinforcements to the area and a frantic search for the shoes began."

The shoes were discovered minutes later in the possession of a Palestinian child who admitted that he had stolen them, a Hamas official in the Gaza Strip told The Jerusalem Post.

The Great Global Warming Swindle - In Australia...

The film was shown on ABC and caused quite a stir..here's a comment from Martin Durkin, the film-maker...

Why are the global warmers so zealous? After a year of arguing with people about this, I am convinced that it's because global warming is first and foremost a political theory. It is an expression of a whole middle-class political world view. This view is summed up in the oft-repeated phrase "we consume too much". I have also come to the conclusion that this is code for "they consume too much". People who believe it tend also to think that exotic foreign places are being ruined because vulgar oiks can afford to go there in significant numbers, they hate plastic toys from factories and prefer wooden ones from craftsmen, and so on.

All this backward-looking bigotry has found perfect expression in the idea of man-made climate disaster. It has cohered a bunch of disparate reactionary prejudices (anti-car, anti-supermarkets, anti-globalisation) into a single unquestionable truth and cause. So when you have a dig at global warming, you commit a grievous breach of social etiquette. Among the chattering classes you're a leper.

But why are the supporters of global warming so defensive? After all, the middle classes are usually confident, bordering on smug.

As I found when I examined the basic data, they have plenty to be defensive about. Billions of dollars of public money have been thrown at global warming, yet the hypothesis is crumbling around their ears.

To the utter dismay of the global warming lobby, the world does not appear to be getting warmer. According to their own figures (from the UN-linked Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), the temperature has been static or slightly declining since 1998. The satellite data confirms this. This is clearly awkward. The least one should expect of global warming is that the Earth should be getting warmer.

Then there's the ice-core data, the jewel in the crown of global warming theory. It shows there's a connection between carbon dioxide and temperature: see Al Gore's movie. But what Gore forgets to mention is that the connection is the wrong way around; temperature leads, CO2 follows.

Then there's the precious "hockey stick". This was the famous graph that purported to show global temperature flat-lining for 1000 years, then rising during the 19th and 20th centuries. It magicked away the Medieval warm period and made the recent warming look alarming, instead of just part of the general toing and froing of the Earth's climate.

But then researchers took the computer program that produced the hockey stick graph and fed it random data. Bingo, out popped hockey stick shapes every time. (See the report by Edward Wegman of George Mason University in Virginia and others.)

In a humiliating climb down, the IPCC has had to drop the hockey stick from its reports, though it can still be seen in Gore's movie.

And finally, there are those pesky satellites. If greenhouse gases were the cause of warming, then the rate of warming should have been greater, higher up in the Earth's atmosphere (the bit known as the troposphere). But all the satellite and balloon data says the exact opposite. In other words, the best observational data we have flatly contradicts the whole bally idea of man-made climate change.

They concede that CO2 cannot have caused the warming at the beginning of the 20th century, which was greater and steeper than the recent warming. They can't explain the cooling from 1940 to the mid-'70s. What are they left with? Some mild warming in the '80s and '90s that does not appear to have been caused by greenhouse gases.

An interview with Nigel Calder...

Calder is the former editor of the New Scientist and was featured prominently in the documentary, the Great Global Warming Swindle.

LBR: Do you think that there has been a change in the debate on climate change recently? Is there a greater willingness to entertain alternative views on the causes of climate change?

NC: A local victory for free speech has occurred in the BBC, where an internal report on impartiality (June 2007) picked out climate change as a subject where dissenting voices really should be heard. That verdict is already having some effect, although BBC reporters still tend to assume that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change must be right. More generally there's a contrast between a hardening of attitudes on the part of the scientists, politicians and journalists in the 'man-made global warming' camp, which contrasts with more open scepticism among the general public. One reason for the latter may be horror fatigue, about all the scare stories. Another is a suspicion that politicians are glad of a new excuse to raise taxes. But most importantly there is plain common sense about the weather's variability. If you're told that a warm UK April 2007 is foretaste of hotter times to come, you cannot but ask what a cold and wet June portends. And while some of the media and greenhouse scientists have fiercely attacked The Chilling Stars and Henrik Svensmark's theory, I've not heard a single complaint from friends, or friends of friends. It was the same when I appeared in the Channel 4 documentary 'The Great Global Warming Swindle'.

LBR: Given the controversy over 'The Great Global Warming Swindle?, do you think your decision to take part was a wise one?

NC: Yes. I was in distinguished company with a string of prominent scientists to demonstrate that critics of the man-made warming hypothesis are not just a bunch of crackpots. There's been almost no attempt to rebut what we interviewees said individually and criticisms were focused on some linking narrations and explanatory animations, which some of us might have scripted a bit differently. By the way, Al Gore's movie 'An Inconvenient Truth' is applauded by greenhouse scientists even though they know know it contains misleading statements. To be inaccurate in a politically correct cause seems to be OK in their ethos.

Syria deals with the devil...

Another reason why Israel can't make peace with Syria....

Iran will reportedly fund, at a price of $1 billion, new Syrian fighter jets, tanks, missiles against naval craft and will aid in Syria's nuclear and chemical weapons research programs. In return, Syrian President Bashar Assad has reportedly promised Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to cease the pursuit of peace talks with Israel in exchange for Iranian support of Syrian interests in Lebanon.

The sensitive details from the two leaders' meeting in Damascus earlier in the week were related to the Lebanese Arabic daily Asharq Alawsat by an anonymous Iranian source involved with the discreet meeting, and were brought to light on Saturday.

More lies from the BBC....

Every time you think the BBC has sunk lower....

The BBC faced a grave crisis of public trust last night after admitting that a series of flagship children's and charity phone-in programmes had deliberately deceived viewers.

Children in Need, Comic Relief and Sport Relief all featured fake competition winners, the corporation said.

An internal investigation, ordered after the BBC's apology to the Queen last week, also disclosed serious breaches of editorial standards involving a series of other phone-in shows. In some instances production staff posed as competition winners.

After the scale of the deceptions became clear, Mark Thompson, the director-general, immediately suspended all phone-related competitions on television and radio. Interactive and online competitions were also halted.

The inquiry identified cheating on six television and radio programmes. The audit - of a million hours of output since January 2005 - followed the row over a BBC1 trailer that wrongly implied that the Queen stormed out of a sitting with the photographer Annie Leibovitz.

Mr Thompson presented the inquiry's findings at a meeting with the BBC Trust, the corporation's governing body, which had demanded an explanation over the royal fiasco.

The trust called the editorial breaches "deeply disappointing" and ordered an immediate investigation.

A number of executives face suspension over the deceptions. Mr Thompson last night warned that dismissals were inevitable.

The BBC has also decided not to commission any new programmes from RDF, the production company whose incorrectly edited trailer of the documentary about the Queen appeared to show her walking out of the Leibovitz photographic session in a "huff". The company has been dropped until the result of a separate inquiry into the misrepresentation of the Queen is completed in the autumn.

The six new cheating cases follow the £50,000 fine imposed on the BBC last week after Blue Peter faked a competition. The watchdog Ofcom criticised the programme for making a young studio visitor "complicit" in the deception by asking her to pose as a winner.

A message to British police....

A message the left can get behind...

Dozens of veiled women gathered outside the Old Bailey to protest against the jail sentences given to four Muslim men for encouraging terrorism.

Mizanur Rahman, 24, Umran Javed, 27, and Abdul Muhid, 25, were each jailed for six years for inciting murder and racial hatred during a demonstration against cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.

A fourth man, 32-year-old Abdul Saleem, was cleared of soliciting murder but convicted of inciting racial hatred. He was jailed for four years.

Message of hate: Muslim women hold placards outside the Old Bailey

Rahman had called for British soldiers to come home from Iraq in body bags, and Muhid chanted: "Bomb, bomb the UK".

Spying squirrels in Iran....

You just can't fool the Iranians...

Iranian intelligence operatives recently detained over a dozen squirrels found within the nation's borders, claiming the rodents were serving as spies for Western powers determined to undermine the Islamic Republic.

"In recent weeks, intelligence operatives have arrested 14 squirrels within Iran's borders," state-sponsored news agency IRNA reported. "The squirrels were carrying spy gear of foreign agencies, and were stopped before they could act, thanks to the alertness of our intelligence services."

Iranian police commander Esmaeil Ahmadi-Moqadam confirmed the report, saying that a number of squirrels had been caught bearing foreign spy gear within Iran's borders.

Doesn't this sound like the CBC???

This is from a Melanie Phillips article in the Daily Mail about the BBC in the UK...

Over a vast range of issues — big business, Conservatism, family values, America, Europe, Northern Ireland, the Middle East, climate change, abortion, multiculturalism — the BBC fails to be dispassionate, objective or truthful.

Both present and former BBC names have spoken about the Left-wing group-think that saturates its coverage. In his recent book Can We Trust The BBC?, its former journalist Robin Aitken provides example after example of its bias to show that we cannot. And only yesterday, the Centre for Policy Studies published an excoriating analysis by the writer Sir Antony Jay — co-author of the brilliant BBC TV comedy series Yes Minister — of the BBC mindset to which he acknowledges he himself once subscribed.

He paints a picture of a BBC in which arrogance and a false sense of moral superiority combine with gross ignorance of the real world to spread an ideology ‘based not on observation and deduction but on faith and doctrine’, and into which all events are wrenched to fit.

What all this means is that objectivity has been replaced by ideology. With an attitude that regards all challenges to its warped world-view as beyond the moral pale, it follows axiomatically that the truth goes out of the window altogether.

Most disturbingly of all, that world-view is never challenged. As Sir Antony writes, BBC employees mix only with people who think like themselves. They are therefore totally unable to tolerate the idea that there is room for any other approach. They represent a totally closed thought-system.

Just replace BBC with CBC...and it's all the same....

European anti-semitism...

A new poll in Europe....

Anti-Semitic feeling in Europe is growing, with half of respondents in a new survey believing that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the countries where they live and a third saying Jews have too much influence in business and finance, according to a report released Tuesday by the Anti-Defamation League.

The report, based on polling in six European countries, found a general increase in negative attitudes toward Jews since a similar survey in 2005.

Launching the latest findings from interviews with 500 adults each in Austria, Belgium, Britain, Hungary, the Netherlands and Switzerland, ADL director Abraham Foxman said that the data showed the persistence of anti-Jewish stereotypes in those countries, despite efforts by individual governments and by the European Union.

"These attitudes die hard and help incite and legitimize anti-Semitic acts, including violence against Jews," Foxman told a press conference in Jerusalem.

He called the questioning of Jewish loyalty "the most distressing, disturbing, frightening issue," as it was liable to fuel anti-Semitic incidents.

According to the survey, an overall 49.7 percent of respondents said it was "probably true" that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to their home countries, compared to an average of 38.2% in 2005. A breakdown of the results showed that view was most widely held in Austria and Belgium, where 54% of those polled agreed, compared to Switzerland, with 44%.

Other questions showed wider differences between countries. Sixty percent of respondents in Hungary said it is "probably true" that Jews have too much power in the business world, while only 11% in the Netherlands held the same view. An average of 34.5% across the six countries agreed that Jews have too much financial and business clout, compared to 26.7% two years ago.

In addition, 43% of the total respondents in the latest survey said Jews talk too much about the Holocaust.

The latest scandal from the BBC....

I love free speech...and I would support keeping this comment online - as long as they were consistent and allowed other objectionable speech....

The BBC is refusing to remove a provocative and anti-Semitic message posted on one of its message boards despite a barrage of complaints.

The message was posted on the BBC Radio Web site message board following a discussion about a television program on anti-Semitism that screened on the UK's Channel Four network last week.

The offensive message, left by someone using the alias "Iron Naz," reads: "Zionism is a racist ideology where jews [sic] are given supremacy over all other races and faiths. This is found in the Talmud. There is a law called Baba Mezia which allows jews to lie as long as its to non-jews. Many pro jewish supporters will cringe at this being exposed because they know it exists, yet they keep quiet about it, hey frip, jla and co [the aliases of other people taking part in the discussion]. The Law of Baba Mezia!! Tsk tsk tsk! It's in the Talmud."

A number of Jewish community members, including a community organization, appealed to the BBC to remove the posting. They all received a standard response: "We have decided that it does not contravene the House Rules and are going to leave it on the site..."

A BBC Radio spokesman told The Jerusalem Post: "The Radio Five Live message board is a forum of debate and people can express their views, some of which others will strongly disagree with. The complaint was brought to the attention of our moderators who looked into the issue and concluded that the post was not one that merited removal from the site as it was not felt to have breached the message board house rules. A guide to the house rules is found on the Five Live message board. Posts that are removed include ones that are considered likely to disrupt, provoke attack or offend others or are considered racist, homophobic, sexually explicit or otherwise objectionable."

I am sure that if someone had put up a homophobic comment, it would have been immediately removed.

Are carbon advisers coming to Canada????

This story from the UK is frightening...

Town Halls across Britain are estimated to have spent more than £100 million recruiting an army of green warriors.

Take Hull. A couple of weeks ago, the council was woefully unprepared for the floods which swept through the city. Residents washed out of house and home were left to fend for themselves.

I'm sure it came as a great comfort to them to learn that Hull now has 30 staff beavering away on 'environmental issues'. It's just a pity they weren't beavering away building dams, instead of dreaming up exciting new punishments for people who put the wrong kind of rubbish in the wrong kind of sack.

In Tower Hamlets, the poorest borough in London and arguably the most deprived in Britain, 58 employees have job titles which contain the words 'climate change' or 'global warming'. Tower Hamlets still has the worst recycling record in the country, as well as some of the Nottingham has 22 staff dedicated to dealing with 'issues around global warming'. The city also boasts 70 'green champions'. We're not talking Robin Hood and his Merry Men here.

East Hampshire, hardly a hotbed of the Guardianistas, is employing someone to go round schools showing impressionable pupils Al Gore's propaganda flick An Inconvenient Truth - even though scientists remain deeply divided on what the 'truth' about climate change really is.

As far as the bien-pensants are concerned, the debate is closed. The truth doesn't enter the equation, it's an article of faith.

Global warming is the new multi-culturalism. And it can only be addressed by a vast new bureaucracy, backed up by a raft of laws, inspectors, monitors and enforcers.

Hamas bans Israeli produce....

They want to make a humanitarian crisis..and then blame it on Israel...

Hamas's Finance Ministry on Monday barred Israeli fruits and vegetables from entering the Gaza Strip on Monday, according to the spokesman for the Fruit Growers Association.

The move is likely to cost Israeli fruit growers NIS 3-5 million a day, according to the association.

The Hamas decision will also make it harder for Palestinians to keep fruits and vegetables in their diet, particularly those items not grown in Gaza, according to Shlomo Dror, spokesman for the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories.

Upon hearing that Palestinian private contractors on the Gaza side of the Kerem Shalom crossing planned to adhere to the prohibition, Israeli businessmen did not send out the scheduled 60 trucks of produce, Dror told The Jerusalem Post. The fruit and vegetable ban is the latest in a set of anti-Israel moves by Hamas, including continued mortar fire on the crossing, to keep Kerem Shalom closed.

On Saturday, Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said, "We are against opening the Zionist-controlled crossing of Kerem Shalom." He added that its use was part of a conspiracy by Israel and the pro-American Fatah leadership in Ramallah against the Palestinians in Gaza.

But according to the United Nations, the use of Kerem Shalom and Sufa as alternative crossings has been a lifeline that has allowed the UN to provide food staples to 1.1 million of the 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza.

Is the Sun responsible for global warming....

The BBC last week played up reports of a study debunking the claim that the sun is behind global warming...perhaps they were too quick...

Recently the United States' National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration said that 2006 was statistically indistinguishable from previous years.

Looking at annual global temperatures, it is apparent that the last decade shows no warming trend and recent successive annual global temperatures are well within each year's measurement errors. Statistically the world's temperature is flat.

The world certainly warmed between 1975 and 1998, but in the past 10 years it has not been increasing at the rate it did. No scientist could honestly look at global temperatures over the past decade and see a rising curve.

It is undisputed that the sun of the later part of the 20th century was behaving differently from that of the beginning. Its sunspot cycle is stronger and shorter and, technically speaking, its magnetic field leakage is weaker and its cosmic ray shielding effect stronger.

So we see that when the sun's activity was rising, the world warmed. When it peaked in activity in the late 1980s, within a few years global warming stalled. A coincid-ence, certainly: a connection, possibly.

My own view on the theory that greenhouse gases are driving climate change is that it is a good working hypothesis - but, because I have studied the sun, I am not completely convinced.

The sun is by far the single most powerful driving force on our climate, and the fact is we do not understand how it affects us as much as some think we do.

Hey..it's cold in South America...

I hear lots in the news about how hot it is in BC...but this hasn't made the news here in Canada...

Argentina's capital, Buenos Aires, has seen snow for the first time in 89 years, as a cold snap continues to grip several South American nations.

Temperatures plunged to -22C (-8F) in parts of Argentina's province of Rio Negro, while snow fell on Buenos Aires for several hours on Monday.

Two deaths from exposure were reported in Argentina and one in Chile.

In Bolivia, heavy snowfall blocked the nation's main motorway and forced the closure of several airports.

In Argentina, several provinces in the Andes have been placed under a storm alert, according to the national weather centre.

But thousands of people cheered in the streets of Buenos Aires at the sight of the capital's first snowfall since 1918.

"Despite all my years, this is the first time I've ever seen snow in Buenos Aires," 82-year-old Juana Benitez was quoted as saying by the Associated Press news agency.

In Chile, temperatures dropped to -18C (0F) in parts of Araucania region in the south.

A suicide belt factory in Syria???

Gee, wait till the Chinese see this as a growth market...the Syrians will be out of business...

Iraqi security forces seized 200 explosive belts along the Syrian border Wednesday, a police spokesman said, reinforcing Baghdad's claims that its western neighbor isn't doing enough to stop the flow of fighters and weapons to al-Qaida in Iraq.

The belts were found during a search of a truck that had crossed into Iraq from Syria at the Waleed border station, Interior Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf said.

"When the truck was searched, 200 explosives belts were found in it," the general said. He said the driver was detained but he would not give his name or nationality.

The French and Hezbollah...

Way too cozy, in my opinion...

It appears that the Israeli dilemma of whether Hezbollah emerged from the Second Lebanon War strengthened or weakened has been resolved by France. This weekend, Hezbollah figures will arrive in the French town of St. Cloud to conduct a "national Lebanese dialog" under French supervision. This is the first time Hezbollah has been invited to France as a political entity equal to the other factions, for a meeting intended to find a solution to Lebanon's political future.

To everyone participating in this meeting, which will apparently be presided over by French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, Hezbollah's political power is clear. So clear, in fact, that the French president's special envoy, Jean Claude Cousseran, traveled specially to Tehran on Wednesday for the second time in 10 days, to persuade Iran to soften Nasrallah's stance on the issue of forming a national unity government in Lebanon.

Nasrallah thereby not only became Iran's representative in Lebanon, but also introduced Iran as an active partner in the political process, not only the military one, and gave it standing that Tehran will be able to exploit in discussions with France on other issues such as nuclear power and the future of Iraq.

Barbra Streisand - Just a Common Person????

She, should just stick to singing and not claim to be an ordinary person...

She is hardly known for her common touch.

So when Barbra Streisand professed a love of gristle-filled black puddings her northern audience looked baffled.

Between torch songs she assured them she'd spent the afternoon in the local chip shop and just loved those puddings. Frankly, they didn't believe her and laughter broke out among the 14,000 fans in Manchester.

Nobody who charges £600 a ticket and makes outrageous backstage demands, they reckoned, is going to settle for something that goes down well with tripe.

And yesterday the diva's shallow insistence on being one of the common people backfired when it emerged that flunkeys had researched local lore so she could thread it through her stage act.

So inept was their investigation that on Tuesday night the Manchester audience was treated to Liverpool football club's anthem You'll Never Walk Alone.

That was after the black pudding reference but around the same time as Miss Streisand, 65, assured them she also liked Cumberland sausage. This may be true but they're made 100 miles away.

She then claimed one of her favourite spots in the whole world was a local park so obscure that few in the audience had heard of it.

What the fans rapidly noticed was that 'improvised' patter about her local jaunts was being read from an autocue suspended from the roof of the MEN Arena where she was performing.

An arabic view on the threat from Iran....

Some sense from the arab world....

THE entire Arab world is in danger after becoming the epicenter of Iran’s policies. Iranian dictator Ayatollah Ali Khameini’s aggressive policies confirm our fears. Many issues, which concern only Arabs, have now fallen into the hands of Iran. After Hamas, using weapons, separated Gaza from the West Bank, the Palestinian issue has become a property of Tehran. By seizing control of Nouri Al-Maliki’s government Iran has made Iraq a pawn in its hands. As a result Iran is in a position where it can match the presence of the Unites States in Iraq. In other words, Tehran will gain complete control over Iraq when the US-led coalition forces leave Iraqi soil. The issue of Lebanon, which is fighting for freedom, sovereignty and independence, has also become a trump card for Iran due to Hezbollah which played the role of a Trojan horse in allowing Tehran’s influence sneak into the Lebanese fort.

Currently Iran is trying to extend its aggressive policies to all Gulf countries and Egypt in a bid to use this economically vital region as an ace up its sleeve in its negotiations with the United States, when the time comes. This raises the question: why are Arab countries not taking any steps or holding a summit to wrest control of these issues, which essentially belong to them? Arab countries have not done anything except send Secretary General of the Arab League Amr Mussa to Lebanon where he achieved nothing. Leaders of all Arab countries should hold a summit to prevent Iran from stealing Arab issues. They should tell Tehran to focus on its internal affairs instead of interfering in the affairs of other countries.

Dalrymple on the case for mistrusting muslims....

A very important, and disturbing, article...

One of the most sinister effects of the efforts of the bombers and would-be bombers is that they have undermined trust completely. This is because those under investigation turn out not to be cranks or marginals but people who are either well-integrated into society, superficially at least, or who have good career prospects. They are not the ignorant and uneducated; quite the reverse. Seven people detained in the latest plot worked in the medical profession.

The perpetrators do not bomb because of personal grievance but because they have allowed themselves to be gripped by a stupid, though apparently quite popular, ideology: radical Islam. Nor are they of one ethnic or national group only: We have had Somali, Pakistani, Arab, Jamaican, Algerian and British Muslim terrorists. This means, unfortunately, that no one can ever be quite sure whether a Muslim who appears polite and accommodating is not simultaneously contemplating mass murder. Deceit, after all, is one of the terrorists' deadliest weapons.

Mistrust of Muslims in Britain has developed quite quickly and could develop much further. In my youth, I traveled extensively in the Muslim world and lived for a time in Africa with a Muslim family without being aware of any hostility or antagonism on my part toward the religion or culture (had I been a woman, it might have been different, of course). Contrary to what the late Edward Said, author of the anti-Western "Orientalism," might have thought, I had inherited no anti-Muslim prejudice.

Now, despite friendly and long-lasting relations with many Muslims, my first reaction on seeing Muslims in the street is mistrust; my prejudice, far from having been inherited or inculcated early in life, developed late in response to events.

When will Africans get rid of Mugabe...

He's bankrupted Zimbabwe, let his people to misery...and the AU just does nothing...

Zimbabwe's economy was approaching paralysis yesterday as petrol stations across the country ran dry.

President Robert Mugabe's regime has ordered all retailers to cut fuel prices by 60 per cent, a move that forces them to sell petrol at a loss.

As a result, filling stations across the country have stopped selling altogether and petrol is only available on the black market, at five times the official price.

Without fuel, the entire economy is steadily shutting down.

"It is certainly making a bad situation worse. Many companies will stop functioning," said John Robertson, an independent economist in the capital, Harare.

A bus driver in Harare said: "At the moment, even on the black market, there is nothing."

Basic foodstuffs have already vanished from supermarket shelves thanks to the regime's order that all retail prices should be frozen at their June 18 level.

Inflation has reached such a level that one banana costs the same amount as 15 four-bedroom houses seven years ago. The regime's behaviour has dismayed many business people.

Abusing your welcome....

A really horrible story....

They fled to Britain from war- torn East Africa to escape persecution.

Here, they were given homes, an education and benefits by a society which held out the hand of friendship.

In return, Muktar Said Ibrahim, Ramzi Mohammed, Yassin Omar and Hussain Osman plotted mass murder against the very people who gave them sanctuary when they needed it most.

The four Islamic terrorists were facing life sentences last night after they were convicted of the 21/7 suicide bomb plot, which they hoped would be 'bigger and better' than the 7/7 attacks two weeks before which killed 52.

Stripped for surrender: Ibrahim (left) and Mohammed under arrest two years ago

Their Eritrean-born ringleader Ibrahim, 29, was given British citizenship and a British passport despite serving a lengthy jail term for two violent robberies, with a conviction for sexual assault also to his name.

The one and only time he used his prized passport was to travel to Pakistan, where he almost certainly attended an Al Qaeda training camp and where he is suspected of meeting two of the 7/7 bombers and planning coordinated suicide attacks on London.

He and his cohorts had claimed more than £165,000 in benefits between them before they tried to blow up Tube trains and a bus as retribution for the Iraq war.

Another British Union votes to boycott Israel....

Glad I don't live in the UK...they seem to have a passion for hating Israel...

Just ahead of the cabinet's authorization Sunday of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's offer to release 250 Fatah security prisoners as a goodwill gesture to Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, another British organization has called for sanctions against Israel over its policies in the PA.

The British Transport and General Workers Union, one of the UK's largest, voted on Saturday to boycott all products made in Israel.

Ahead of the actual vote, Eric McDonald, secretary of TGWU's Birmingham branch, which proposed the boycott motion, compared Israel to Nazi Germany.

Irshad Manji on Islam's Problem...

Manji is a voice of sanity...

LAST week, two very different Brits had their say about the latest terrorist plots in their country. Prime Minister Gordon Brown told the nation that "we have got to separate those great moderate members of our community from a few extremists who wish to practice violence and inflict maximum loss of life in the interests of a perversion of their religion." By contrast, a former jihadist from Manchester wrote that the "real engine of our violence" is "Islamic theology."

Months ago, this young man informed me that as a militant he raised most of his war chest not from obscenely rich Saudis, but from middle-class Muslim dentists living in the United Kingdom. There's sobering lesson here for the new prime minister.

So far, those arrested in connection to the car bombs are, by and large, medical professionals. The seeming paradox of the privileged seeking to avenge grievance has many champions of compassion scratching their heads. Aren't Muslim martyrs supposed to be poor, disenfranchised, and resentful about both?

WE should have been stripped of that breezy simplification by now. The 9/11 hijackers came from means. Mohamed Atta, their ringleader, earned an engineering degree. He then moved to the West, pursuing his post-graduate studies in Germany. No servile goat-herder, that one.

Bin Laden's new video...

Find this video and thousands of others at vSocial!

Guess what? Greenland Ice not at risk...

It seems that we learn more and more about our environment every day - which shows us that we actually know little...

An international team of scientists, drilling deep into the ice layers of Greenland, has found DNA from ancient spiders and trees, evidence that suggests the frozen shield covering the immense island survived the earth's last period of global warming.

The findings, published today in the journal Science, indicate Greenland's ice may be less susceptible to the massive meltdown predicted by computer models of climate change, the article's main author said in an interview.

"If our data is correct, and I believe it is, then this means the southern Greenland ice cap is more stable than previously thought," said Eske Willerslev, research leader and professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Copenhagen. "This may have implications for how the ice sheets respond to global warming. They may withstand rising temperatures."

We need regime change in Iran...

More evidence that Iran is supporting the insurgency in Iraq...

Earlier this week, the U.S. military made public new and disturbing information about the proxy war that Iran is waging against American soldiers and our allies in Iraq.

According to Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, the U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, the Iranian government has been using the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah to train and organize Iraqi extremists, who are responsible in turn for the murder of American service members.

Gen. Bergner also revealed that the Quds Force--a special unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps whose mission is to finance, arm and equip foreign Islamist terrorist movements--has taken groups of up to 60 Iraqi insurgents at a time and brought them to three camps near Tehran, where they have received instruction in the use of mortars, rockets, improvised explosive devices and other deadly tools of guerrilla warfare that they use against our troops. Iran has also funded its Iraqi proxies generously, to the tune of $3 million a month.

Based on the interrogation of captured extremist leaders--including a 24-year veteran of Hezbollah, apparently dispatched to Iraq by his patrons in Tehran--Gen. Bergner also reported on Monday that the U.S. military has concluded that "the senior leadership" in Iran is aware of these terrorist activities. He said it is "hard to imagine" Ayatollah Ali Khamenei--Iran's supreme leader--does not know of them.

And this is helping the Palestinians???

This humanitarian crisis, of course, will be blamed on the Israelis...if it is mentioned at all.

Hamas's threat to open fire at throngs of Palestinians stranded in Egypt has thwarted Israeli plans to open the Kerem Shalom crossing to southern Gaza on Wednesday to let the travelers return to their homes, defense officials told The Jerusalem Post.

According to the officials, 6,000 Palestinians have been marooned on the Egyptian side of Rafah since Hamas's violent takeover of the Gaza Strip three weeks ago and the closure of the Rafah crossing into Egypt. Palestinians shelled the crossing last week, forcing its closure after it had been used as an alternative to the Karni cargo crossing to send food and other supplies into Gaza.

During his meeting with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak at the Sharm e-Sheikh summit last week, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said he would work to relieve the humanitarian crisis on the Egyptian side of Rafah.

In an effort to allow the stranded Palestinians to return home, the IDF recently offered to Egypt to open the Kerem Shalom crossing - which connects Israel, Gaza and Egypt - to pedestrian travel. Egypt contacted Hamas and, according to Israeli officials, was told that if Kerem Shalom was opened they would attack the crossing with mortars and gunfire, even at the price of killing thousands of Palestinians.

And, more gay bashing in Amsterdam...

What's scary about the case last week is that just last December I was in Rembrendtplein with my boyfriend on the way to Regulierwarsstraat..

The Amsterdam police have received four new reports of violence against homosexuals after calling on victims and witnesses to come forward.

The police had called for anyone with information to come forward after six men were arrested last week for beating up two gay men on the Reguliersdwarsstraat in Amsterdam, an area where many gay bars are located.

The group that was arrested was most likely responsible for at least one of the four new reports. The Amsterdam police have already received 10 reports of violence against homosexuals this year, compared to 15 for the whole of 2006.

An attack on gays in Amsterdam...

Yet another attack by muslims...

A group of six men assaulted two gay men on the Reguliersdwarsstraat in Amsterdam city centre last Thursday night.

The victims are aged 37 and 45 and were most likely attacked because of their sexual orientation, Amsterdam police said on Monday. The six men were arrested after the attack for public violence.

The 37-year-old and a friend had visited a nightclub in the centre of Amsterdam. They were attacked by a group of men as they were crossing the Rembrandtplein via the Regulierdwarsstraat towards the Vijzelstraat.

The men shouted insulting statements about homosexuals, threatened the two and spit in the face of one of them. As the victims approached the Vijzelstraat both were punched in the face. A witness says the group also threatened the two gay men, chanting "I'm going to kill you, I'm going to kill you."

The group then headed towards the Herengracht. Witnesses had called police and the six were arrested. The suspects are all between the ages of 15 and 19. Four are of Moroccan descent, one is Surinamese and one is Turkish.

Why won't Al Gore debate???

He's sure of his science, but he won't debate...

On June 28, in an historic move the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has released the expert review comments and responses to its latest assessment of the science of climate change. The IPCC report is the primary source of data for Al Gore's movie and book titled "An Inconvenient Truth."

Many of the comments by the reviewers are strongly critical of claims contained in the final report, and they are directly at odds with the so-called "scientific consensus" touted by Gore and others calling for immediate government action. For example, the following comment by Eric Steig appears in Second Order Draft Comments, Chapter 6; section 6-42:

In general, the certainty with which this chapter presents our understanding of abrupt climate change is overstated. There is confusion between hypothesis and evidence throughout the chapter, and a great deal of confusion on the differences between an abrupt "climate change" and possible, hypothetical causes of such climate changes.

"It is now abundantly clear why Al Gore will not accept our debate challenge. The supposed scientific consensus on global warming is pure fiction. Hopefully, the public release of comments and responses will enable the debate over global warming to turn to facts and less fiction," stated Joseph Bast, president of The Heartland Institute, a national nonprofit think tank based in Chicago.

The Heartland Institute has been running ads in national newspapers calling on Al Gore to debate Lord Christopher Monckton, a prominent global warming "skeptic." Starting today, the institute says it is now including Dennis Avery, an economist and coauthor of a book on global warming that is on the New York Times nonfiction best seller list, who Gore has also refused to debate.

Is Gordon Brown nuts?

More political correctness...

Gordon Brown has banned ministers from using the word “Muslim” in ­connection with the ­terrorism crisis.

The Prime Minister has also instructed his team – including new Home Secretary Jacqui Smith – that the phrase “war on ­terror” is to be dropped.

The shake-up is part of a fresh attempt to improve community relations and avoid offending Muslims, adopting a more “consensual” tone than existed under Tony Blair.

How about calling it a war against radical Islam???

A time for clarity...

Can we please stop the nonsense about terrorists having 'underlying' causes???

THE car-bomb/suicide-terror operations in London and Glasgow should have provided a fresh opportunity for reminding everyone, especially Muslims in Britain, that terrorism in the name of Islam still poses a major threat to public peace and safety. Yet this is not what is happening.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown keeps repeating that the attacks have nothing to do with Islam - but, at the same time, keeps inviting "Muslim community leaders" to Downing Street to discuss how to prevent attacks. If the attacks have nothing to do with Islam, why invite Muslim "leaders" rather than Buddhist monks?

Brown hasn't deemed fit to tell it like it is: that Muslims in Britain, indeed all over the world, must come out and condemn terrorism in unambiguous terms.

Instead, we are hearing that the attacks may have been prompted by "Muslim bitterness" about Salman Rushdie's knighting, the latest addition to the Islamist litany of woes. Some "moderate community leaders," like a certain Baroness Uddin, drop hints that Muslims have "foreign-policy issues" that might make them unhappy. The barely coded message: Unless Britain reshapes its foreign policy to please al Qaeda, it must expect to be attacked.

When will Al Gore recant?

A nice analysis of some of Al Gore's claims in his movie....

Many of the assertions Gore makes in his movie, ''An Inconvenient Truth,'' have been refuted by science, both before and after he made them. Gore can show sincerity in his plea for scientific honesty by publicly acknowledging where science has rebutted his claims.

For example, Gore claims that Himalayan glaciers are shrinking and global warming is to blame. Yet the September 2006 issue of the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate reported, "Glaciers are growing in the Himalayan Mountains, confounding global warming alarmists who recently claimed the glaciers were shrinking and that global warming was to blame."

Gore claims the snowcap atop Africa's Mt. Kilimanjaro is shrinking and that global warming is to blame. Yet according to the November 23, 2003, issue of Nature magazine, "Although it's tempting to blame the ice loss on global warming, researchers think that deforestation of the mountain's foothills is the more likely culprit. Without the forests' humidity, previously moisture-laden winds blew dry. No longer replenished with water, the ice is evaporating in the strong equatorial sunshine."

Gore claims global warming is causing more tornadoes. Yet the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated in February that there has been no scientific link established between global warming and tornadoes.

Gore claims global warming is causing more frequent and severe hurricanes. However, hurricane expert Chris Landsea published a study on May 1 documenting that hurricane activity is no higher now than in decades past. Hurricane expert William Gray reported just a few days earlier, on April 27, that the number of major hurricanes making landfall on the U.S. Atlantic coast has declined in the past 40 years. Hurricane scientists reported in the April 18 Geophysical Research Letters that global warming enhances wind shear, which will prevent a significant increase in future hurricane activity.

Gore claims global warming is causing an expansion of African deserts. However, the Sept. 16, 2002, issue of New Scientist reports, "Africa's deserts are in 'spectacular' retreat . . . making farming viable again in what were some of the most arid parts of Africa."

Gore argues Greenland is in rapid meltdown, and that this threatens to raise sea levels by 20 feet. But according to a 2005 study in the Journal of Glaciology, "the Greenland ice sheet is thinning at the margins and growing inland, with a small overall mass gain." In late 2006, researchers at the Danish Meteorological Institute reported that the past two decades were the coldest for Greenland since the 1910s.

Gore claims the Antarctic ice sheet is melting because of global warming. Yet the Jan. 14, 2002, issue of Nature magazine reported Antarctica as a whole has been dramatically cooling for decades. More recently, scientists reported in the September 2006 issue of the British journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society Series A: Mathematical, Physical, and Engineering Sciences, that satellite measurements of the Antarctic ice sheet showed significant growth between 1992 and 2003. And the U.N. Climate Change panel reported in February 2007 that Antarctica is unlikely to lose any ice mass during the remainder of the century.