| News from January, 2002 -> Osama bin Laden gets a nose job ... After swelling up like a whale on food aid, Osama spends the rest of his trillions on a nose job...there is more discussion of this Bin Laden issue linked to on the December page... Afghan war photos : page one ... page two ... page three ... page four Starvation looms in Central America by September, 2001 "An estimated 1.4 million poor farmers in El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Guatemala have lost thousands of hectares of basic crops due to nearly three months of drought that began at the height of the planting season." UN issues plea for food for Central America ... Project Honduras Food Emergency page ... Also see the United Nations world food program with information on 2.5 million drought victims in Ethiopia, 250,000 Palestinians facing hunger, and the Central American drought emergency... Minister goes on hunger strike on U.S. Capital Hill - From the Jubilee 2000 site. According to his statement he wants to sensitize the congress and the senate by showing them what starvation looks like. Speaking of starvation, according to Oxfam, Save the Children, and other aid agencies, a major crisis involving millions of people is now taking place, and going unnoticed, in the Congo, the result of the devestation of the civil war. Even areas that once produced food surpluses are ruined.IRC Study Points to Horrific Death Toll in Eastern Congo: 2.5 Million "Excess" Deaths in 33 Months of Unrest and Executive Summary: Mortality Study, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (February-April 2001) "we estimate that 3.5 million deaths have occurred among the 19.9 million residents of eastern DRC, 2.5 million more than expected during this period. It is estimated that 350,000 of these excess deaths have been from violence. The magnitude of suffering associated with this war has been previously reported by the press. This report only adds depth, breadth and certainty to the fact that a humanitarian crisis has developed. This emergency is perhaps worse than any to unfold in Africa in recent decades. This situation demands the world's attention." Also : Children riot in Kinshasa after policeman shoots street kid caught stealing... From the Jubilee 2000 site - Congo being looted by neighbours ... The Congo is one of the richest nations in Africa (making the previous dictator, Mobutu, one of the richest men in the world while the Congolese people were kept in some of the worst poverty in Africa, and under the boots of one of Africa's most despotic regimes). Neighbouring regimes have carved up resource rich areas of the country on the pretext of involvement in the civil war in the country. The Congo is extremely important to the high tech industries in the industrial north, providing a large percentage of certain rare minerals (which are now being exported by neighbouring countries with no production of their own, making the war in the Congo 'self financing', according to the leader of Rwanda). The conflict has been called 'Africa's first world war' and as neighbouring countries battle each other and internal rebel movements for the spoils, they have caused massive death and destruction to the people of the Congo, who already been ripped off and left in some of the worst poverty in Africa by the (western supported) Mobutu regime... Appeal for help in supporting independent web radio broadcasting providing an outlet for non-mainstream media broadcasting over the net, a new democratic forum for broadcasting made possible by the proliferation of the internet (not possible previously due to the high cost of satellite transmission) and the Radio 4 All homepage ... Protestor shot at G-8 summit - After being shot in the head at point blank range the protestor is run over twice by the Italian paramilitary Land Rover. "Italian prosecutors opened a homicide investigation on Saturday against a paramilitary officer involved in the fatal shooting of the anti-capitalist protester at the Group of Eight Summit." Successful missile defence test was a hoax The CIA and the State Department block publication of report on U.S. involvement in the coup in Indonesia in the sixties Guns and Moses - more reports of right wing state violence in Israel BBC reporters told not to describe recent Israeli killings as 'assassinations' Palestinians - the new 'American Indians'? Broken treaties, empty promises, shrinking 'reservations' and expanding colonial settlements, the parallels seem to clear to be denied. An essay with links to graphics and maps illustrating the situation on the ground in Palestine... Off site Link: Heavy Tax Abatements Keep Firms In Toledo but Drain Education Coffers ... Faced with mobile capital and 'globalization' towns feels compelled to free corporations from paying taxes...On the IndyMedia site, from the Wall Street Journal... BBC: Coke sued over Columbian death squads. A quote from the article : "Trade union leaders in the United States have said they are suing the soft-drinks company Coca-Cola for allegedly hiring right-wing death squads to terrorise workers at its Colombian bottling plant. More than 50 union leaders have been killed in Colombia this year, 128 last year and more than 1,500 in the past 10 years, according to the complaint. "We do not own or operate the plants," added Mr Quiros." A related page : Coca Cola sued over Right Wing death squads and the murder of Union organizers A similar situation existed in Guatemala some years back. The company responded that the bottler in Guatemala was an independent franchise, a similar response to that being given in the current controversy, and the situation was finally addressed after religous groups who were also stock holders began protesting at stock holder meetings. The bottler in Guatemala was bought out by the Coca Cola head office in Atlanta, and the murders of union leaders ceased. Columbia arrests death squads ... A story from several months ago. "Last year there were almost 250 massacres, claiming 1,200 lives, and the paramilitaries were responsible for the majority of them." The constant activity of the Code Red virus Guns or Roses? - After the G-8 summit a debate ensues over the use of violence as a tool of social change. Links and some commentary. Drought in the Rocky Mountains - Prophecy being fulfilled once again? Adverstising software that alters web pages - while microsoft has disablecd 'smart links' which are inserted into web pages as you browse, downloadable software off the web often comes with ad software bundled into the package... a discussion on the Search Engine watch site... links to a few essays : Good evening, here is the real news ... essay on the rise of alternative media and video activism. Some quotes from the article: "Campaigners have now become so frustrated with the media that many are treating reporters as part of the problem rather than as part of the solution. Standing outside the locked doors of the media corporation, Joanna, an environmentalist, said, "The repetitive trend in broadcasting the 'violent anarchist' scare stories churned out by the police has only alienated us." ... During the G8 summit in Genoa last month, paramilitary police attacked the volunteer-run Independent Media Centre. As hundreds of armed troops destroyed computers and cameras, a video activist from Undercurrents escaped on to the roof and recorded the brutal raid ... Bill Hayton, a BBC reporter, was so shocked by the raid that he published his own report using the independent media portal. He wrote: "The thought that a European police force can line protesters up against a wall and beat them until their blood literally flows across the floor chills me to the bone." Police assaults on the Independent Media Centres during the protests in Davos and Quebec received little or no mainstream coverage ... " More discussion of the beating of IndyMedia journalists ... Italian police chief admits that excessive force was used on media center raid 'tactfully referring to the raid as 'disorganized' RELATED LINKS: Marco's best of IndyMedia News Wire UnderCurrents Video Activists SCHNews - the weekly direct action newsletter Alternative media links page I found this particular essay on the web to be very interesting reading ... The origins of the overclass focuses heavily on the role of the CIA in supporting the interests of the wealthy and big business in America, with some interesting side bars on the extreme social conservatism of the Vatican, and some interesting facts and figures (during the 'Reagan revolution' and the decade that followed the amount of wealth held by the richest one per cent of the American population soared from 22 per cent to the current level of 42 per cent, and the corrupting influence of such vast wealth - its funding of conservative causes in support of those with wealth and power - can be seen in such things as the concentration of ownership of the media (now owned exclusively by billionaires) and the no holds bar return of concentrated corporate ownership (a compliant government - wealth like this corrupts every institution in a society - there was a time when the great trusts were busted up, but now we see even more gigantic concentrations developing, unchecked). |
A Unified Field Theory
The Unified Field Theory
is also available as a zip file -> unified.zip
Introduction :The Pioneer Effect and the New Physics. A brief description of the new physics required to explain the 'Pioneer Effect', which is the constant deceleration of space craft as they fly through space.