Saturday, January 28, 2006
Democracy, a faithful dog that bit Bush
Photo: AFP. The gun and the Koran ... Hamas supporters celebrate in the West Bank city of Nablus on Thursday.
Michael Gawenda
Herald Correspondent in Washington
January 28, 2006
WITH his democracy project in the Middle East having produced a landslide victory for Hamas in the Palestinian elections, the US President, George Bush, is hoping Hamas will renounce terrorism and recognise Israel. But analysts agree the chances of this happening soon are remote.
Mr Bush's response to the result was surprisingly mild, even conciliatory. He pointedly avoided calling Hamas a terrorist organisation, leaving the door open for US contact with a Hamas government that recognised Israel and renounced violence. Bush officials, including the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, will soon hold talks with European allies on a joint approach to the Hamas election victory.
The challenge will be to find a way of leaving the door open for Hamas to change its mind on terrorism and recognise Israel while making it clear that without such a change, the peace process and the so-called road map will be dead.
At a hurriedly organised press conference, Mr Bush avoided a direct answer to the question of whether Washington would refuse to deal with a Palestinian government dominated by Hamas, saying "peace is never dead because people want peace".
He said the election had reminded people of "the power of democracy" and, in a reference to the alleged corruption that had characterised the previous government, he said the result was a wake-up call for Fatah and for the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas.
"Obviously people were not happy with the status quo," he said. "The people are demanding honest government. The people want services. And so the elections should open the eyes of the old guard there in the Palestinian territories."
But Mr Bush said as long as Hamas was committed to the destruction of Israel, no Hamas government, not even a democratically elected one, could be part of a peace process.
"We will watch very carefully about the formation of a government, but I will continue to remind people if your platform is the destruction of Israel, it means you're not a partner in peace, and we're interested in peace."
Martin Indyk, the Australian-born and educated former US ambassador to Israel during the Clinton administration, said the result of the Palestinian elections placed a big question mark over Mr Bush's foreign policy of spreading democracy. "Democracy has produced a Hamas victory and it may well have ended the peace process," he said.
Dr Rice left the door open for recognition, saying: "Anyone who wants to govern and do so with the support of the international community has got to be committed to a two-state solution and must be committed to Israel's right to exist."
Her challenge in the weeks leading to the Israeli poll in March will be to maintain the united front between the US and Europe on the need for Hamas to recognise Israel and renounce violence.
Sunday, January 22, 2006
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
The Revenge of Gaia
By James Button,
Herald Correspondent in London
January 17, 2006
Herald Correspondent in London
January 17, 2006
Doomsayer … James Lovelock says billions will die.
Photo: Environmentalists For Nuclear Energy
THE world has already passed the point of no return on global warming, and efforts to slow it may already be doomed, one of Britain's best-known environmentalists says.
In what The Independent described as the bleakest assessment yet of the effects of climate change by a leading scientist, Professor James Lovelock said billions would die by the end of the century, and civilisation as it is known would be unlikely to survive.
"The few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic, where the climate remains tolerable," Professor Lovelock wrote in the newspaper.
Professor Lovelock, who in the 1970s coined the Gaia thesis that the Earth was a single organism, called on governments to start making preparations for a "hell of a climate," in which by 2100 Europe and southern Australia would be 8 degrees hotter than they are today.
The scientist makes his predictions in a new book, The Revenge of Gaia, which argues that the feedback mechanisms that used to keep the Earth cooler than it would otherwise be are now working to amplify warming caused by human CO 2 emissions.
"Sadly I cannot see the United States or the economies of China and India cutting back in time and they are the main source of CO 2 emissions."
Professor Lovelock is a controversial but respected scientist who gave a briefing on global warming in 1989 to the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. Two years ago he caused a furore in the environment movement by urging greens to embrace nuclear power to reduce global warming gases.
Monday, January 16, 2006
Name your poison
Julie Robotham
January 13, 2006
It's so practical it couldn't possibly happen here.Canadian doctors have completed a controlled experiment to give alcohol-addicted homeless people limited quantities of grog while they are at a shelter. The aim was to see whether it reduced dangerous binges and crime and kept them out of the emergency department or the clutches of the law.And it worked! 17 long-term alcoholics, mostly middle-aged men in Ottawa, were allowed alcohol on demand, up to 140 millilitres of wine or 90ml of sherry hourly between 7am and 10pm.
After five months to two years in the program, they halved on average the frequency with which they had to be taken to hospital, and police reports were also well down for all but two of the participants.Their alcohol intake was also reduced, from an average 46 drinks daily (give or take - most used to drink until they passed out) before going on the program to an average eight drinks, according to the report in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. A couple of them even detoxified after stabilising their intake on the program, a "formidable achievement" as Tina Podymow and Jeff Turnbull point out with justifiable proudness.Naturally, it's attracted some envy. "I believe the taxpayers (including myself) have paid for this wine," wrote hard-up student Yury Monczak to the journal's e-letters section. "If all citizens are equal in Canada, please let me know where I can sign up to participate in this program and get my free daily wine and sherry doses."And it won't go down well with abstinence-based organisations such as the Salvos.But it's a logical extension of harm-reduction programs in other addictions, such as methadone prescribing for heroin addiction. Odd, then, that it's never been tried before. Guess there's a different type of stigma around alcohol.
January 13, 2006
It's so practical it couldn't possibly happen here.Canadian doctors have completed a controlled experiment to give alcohol-addicted homeless people limited quantities of grog while they are at a shelter. The aim was to see whether it reduced dangerous binges and crime and kept them out of the emergency department or the clutches of the law.And it worked! 17 long-term alcoholics, mostly middle-aged men in Ottawa, were allowed alcohol on demand, up to 140 millilitres of wine or 90ml of sherry hourly between 7am and 10pm.
After five months to two years in the program, they halved on average the frequency with which they had to be taken to hospital, and police reports were also well down for all but two of the participants.Their alcohol intake was also reduced, from an average 46 drinks daily (give or take - most used to drink until they passed out) before going on the program to an average eight drinks, according to the report in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. A couple of them even detoxified after stabilising their intake on the program, a "formidable achievement" as Tina Podymow and Jeff Turnbull point out with justifiable proudness.Naturally, it's attracted some envy. "I believe the taxpayers (including myself) have paid for this wine," wrote hard-up student Yury Monczak to the journal's e-letters section. "If all citizens are equal in Canada, please let me know where I can sign up to participate in this program and get my free daily wine and sherry doses."And it won't go down well with abstinence-based organisations such as the Salvos.But it's a logical extension of harm-reduction programs in other addictions, such as methadone prescribing for heroin addiction. Odd, then, that it's never been tried before. Guess there's a different type of stigma around alcohol.
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
Snuppy - cloned dog real
Cloners faked the theory, not the dog: inquiry January 10, 2006 SMH
Snuppy ... the first male dog cloned from adult cells by somatic nuclear cell transfer.
A team led by a once-heralded and now disgraced South Korean scientist faked two landmark papers on embryonic stem cells but did produce the world's first cloned dog, an investigation panel has found.
The panel at Seoul National University told reporters there was no data to support the papers produced by the team led by scientist Hwang Woo-suk.
The two papers were a 2004 report on producing the first cloned human embryos for research and a 2005 paper on producing the first embryonic tailored stem cells.
US Corruption of Language
Behind the US Government's corruption of language lies a far greater perversion,
writes Salman Rushdie.
10/1/2006
SMH
BEYOND any shadow of a doubt, the ugliest phrase to enter the English language last year was "extraordinary rendition". To those of us who love words, this phrase's brutalisation of meaning is an infallible signal of its intent to deceive.
"Extraordinary" is an ordinary enough adjective, but its sense is being stretched here to include more sinister meanings that your dictionary will not provide: secret; ruthless; and extrajudicial.
As for "rendition", the English language permits four meanings: a performance; a translation; a surrender - this meaning is now considered archaic; or an "act of rendering"; which leads us to the verb "to render" among whose 17 possible meanings you will not find "to kidnap and covertly deliver an individual or individuals for interrogation to an undisclosed address in an unspecified country where torture is permitted".
Language, too, has laws, and those laws tell us this new American usage is improper - a crime against the word. Every so often the habitual newspeak of politics throws up a term whose calculated blandness makes us shiver with fear - yes, and loathing.
"Clean words can mask dirty deeds," The New York Times columnist William Safire wrote in 1993, in response to the arrival of another such phrase, "ethnic cleansing".
"Final solution" is a further, even more horrible locution of this Orwellian, double-plus-ungood type. "Mortality response", a euphemism for death by killing that I first heard during the Vietnam War, is another. This is not a pedigree of which any newborn usage should be proud.
People use such phrases to avoid using others whose meaning would be problematically over-apparent. "Ethnic cleansing" and "final solution" were ways of avoiding the word "genocide", and to say "extraordinary rendition" is to reveal one's squeamishness about saying "the export of torture". However, as Cecily remarks in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, "When I see a spade, I call it a spade", and what we have here is not simply a spade, it's a shovel - and it's shovelling a good deal of ordure.
Now that Senator John McCain has forced upon a reluctant White House his amendment putting the internationally accepted description of torture - "cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment" - into American law, in spite of energetic attempts by the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, to defeat it, the growing belief that the Bush Administration could be trying to get around the McCain amendment by the "rendition" of persons adjudged torture-worthy to less-delicately inclined countries merits closer scrutiny.
We are beginning to hear the names and stories of men seized and transported in this fashion: Maher Arar, a Canadian-Syrian, was captured by the CIA on his way to the US and taken via Jordan to Syria where, says his lawyer, he was "brutally physically tortured".
Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen of Kuwaiti-Lebanese origin, was kidnapped in Macedonia and taken for interrogation to Afghanistan, where he says he was repeatedly beaten. The Syrian-born Mohammed Haydar Zammar says he was grabbed in Morocco and then spent four years in a Syrian dungeon.
Lawsuits are under way. Lawyers for the plaintiffs suggest their clients were only a few of the victims, that in Afghanistan, Egypt, Syria and perhaps elsewhere the larger pattern of the extraordinary-rendition project is yet to be uncovered. Inquiries are under way in Canada, Germany, Italy and Switzerland.
The CIA's internal inquiry admits to "under 10" such cases, which to many ears sounds like another bit of double-talk. Tools are created to be used and it seems improbable, to say the least, that so politically risky and morally dubious a system would be set up and then barely employed.
The US authorities have been taking a characteristically robust line on this issue. On her recent European trip, the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, more or less told European governments to back off the issue - which they duly, and tamely, did, claiming to have been satisfied by her assurances.
At the end of December, the German Government ordered the closing of an Islamic centre near Munich after finding documents encouraging suicide attacks in Iraq. This is a club which, we are told, Khaled al-Masri often visited before being extraordinarily rendered to Afghanistan. "Aha!" we are encouraged to think. "Obvious bad guy. Render his sorry butt anywhere you like."
What is wrong with this kind of thinking is that, as Isabel Hilton of The Guardian wrote last July, "The delusion that officeholders know better than the law is an occupational hazard of the powerful and one to which those of an imperial cast of mind are especially prone … When disappearance became state practice across Latin America in the '70s it aroused revulsion in democratic countries, where it is a fundamental tenet of legitimate government that no state actor may detain - or kill - another human being without having to answer to the law."
In other words, the question isn't whether or not a given individual is "good" or "bad." The question is whether or not we are - whether or not our governments have dragged us into immorality by discarding due process of law, which is generally accorded to be second only to individual rights as the most important pillar of a free society.
The White House, however, plainly believes that it has public opinion behind it in this and other contentious matters such as secret wiretapping. Cheney recently told reporters, "When the American people look at this, they will understand and appreciate what we're doing and why we're doing it."
He may be right for the moment, though the controversy shows no signs of dying. It remains to be seen how long Americans are prepared to go on accepting that the end justifies practically any means Cheney cares to employ.
In the beginning is the word. Where one begins by corrupting language, worse corruptions swiftly follow. Sitting as the Supreme Court to rule on torture last month, Britain's law lords spoke to the world in words that were simple and clear. "The torturer is abhorred not because the information he produces may be unreliable," Lord Rodger of Earlsferry said, "but because of the barbaric means he uses to extract it."
"Torture is an unqualified evil," Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood added. "It can never be justified. Rather, it must always be punished."
The dreadful probability is that the US outsourcing of torture will allow it to escape punishment. It will not allow it to escape moral obloquy.
Salman Rushdie is the author of The Satanic Verses, Fury and many other books.
writes Salman Rushdie.
10/1/2006
SMH
BEYOND any shadow of a doubt, the ugliest phrase to enter the English language last year was "extraordinary rendition". To those of us who love words, this phrase's brutalisation of meaning is an infallible signal of its intent to deceive.
"Extraordinary" is an ordinary enough adjective, but its sense is being stretched here to include more sinister meanings that your dictionary will not provide: secret; ruthless; and extrajudicial.
As for "rendition", the English language permits four meanings: a performance; a translation; a surrender - this meaning is now considered archaic; or an "act of rendering"; which leads us to the verb "to render" among whose 17 possible meanings you will not find "to kidnap and covertly deliver an individual or individuals for interrogation to an undisclosed address in an unspecified country where torture is permitted".
Language, too, has laws, and those laws tell us this new American usage is improper - a crime against the word. Every so often the habitual newspeak of politics throws up a term whose calculated blandness makes us shiver with fear - yes, and loathing.
"Clean words can mask dirty deeds," The New York Times columnist William Safire wrote in 1993, in response to the arrival of another such phrase, "ethnic cleansing".
"Final solution" is a further, even more horrible locution of this Orwellian, double-plus-ungood type. "Mortality response", a euphemism for death by killing that I first heard during the Vietnam War, is another. This is not a pedigree of which any newborn usage should be proud.
People use such phrases to avoid using others whose meaning would be problematically over-apparent. "Ethnic cleansing" and "final solution" were ways of avoiding the word "genocide", and to say "extraordinary rendition" is to reveal one's squeamishness about saying "the export of torture". However, as Cecily remarks in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, "When I see a spade, I call it a spade", and what we have here is not simply a spade, it's a shovel - and it's shovelling a good deal of ordure.
Now that Senator John McCain has forced upon a reluctant White House his amendment putting the internationally accepted description of torture - "cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment" - into American law, in spite of energetic attempts by the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, to defeat it, the growing belief that the Bush Administration could be trying to get around the McCain amendment by the "rendition" of persons adjudged torture-worthy to less-delicately inclined countries merits closer scrutiny.
We are beginning to hear the names and stories of men seized and transported in this fashion: Maher Arar, a Canadian-Syrian, was captured by the CIA on his way to the US and taken via Jordan to Syria where, says his lawyer, he was "brutally physically tortured".
Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen of Kuwaiti-Lebanese origin, was kidnapped in Macedonia and taken for interrogation to Afghanistan, where he says he was repeatedly beaten. The Syrian-born Mohammed Haydar Zammar says he was grabbed in Morocco and then spent four years in a Syrian dungeon.
Lawsuits are under way. Lawyers for the plaintiffs suggest their clients were only a few of the victims, that in Afghanistan, Egypt, Syria and perhaps elsewhere the larger pattern of the extraordinary-rendition project is yet to be uncovered. Inquiries are under way in Canada, Germany, Italy and Switzerland.
The CIA's internal inquiry admits to "under 10" such cases, which to many ears sounds like another bit of double-talk. Tools are created to be used and it seems improbable, to say the least, that so politically risky and morally dubious a system would be set up and then barely employed.
The US authorities have been taking a characteristically robust line on this issue. On her recent European trip, the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, more or less told European governments to back off the issue - which they duly, and tamely, did, claiming to have been satisfied by her assurances.
At the end of December, the German Government ordered the closing of an Islamic centre near Munich after finding documents encouraging suicide attacks in Iraq. This is a club which, we are told, Khaled al-Masri often visited before being extraordinarily rendered to Afghanistan. "Aha!" we are encouraged to think. "Obvious bad guy. Render his sorry butt anywhere you like."
What is wrong with this kind of thinking is that, as Isabel Hilton of The Guardian wrote last July, "The delusion that officeholders know better than the law is an occupational hazard of the powerful and one to which those of an imperial cast of mind are especially prone … When disappearance became state practice across Latin America in the '70s it aroused revulsion in democratic countries, where it is a fundamental tenet of legitimate government that no state actor may detain - or kill - another human being without having to answer to the law."
In other words, the question isn't whether or not a given individual is "good" or "bad." The question is whether or not we are - whether or not our governments have dragged us into immorality by discarding due process of law, which is generally accorded to be second only to individual rights as the most important pillar of a free society.
The White House, however, plainly believes that it has public opinion behind it in this and other contentious matters such as secret wiretapping. Cheney recently told reporters, "When the American people look at this, they will understand and appreciate what we're doing and why we're doing it."
He may be right for the moment, though the controversy shows no signs of dying. It remains to be seen how long Americans are prepared to go on accepting that the end justifies practically any means Cheney cares to employ.
In the beginning is the word. Where one begins by corrupting language, worse corruptions swiftly follow. Sitting as the Supreme Court to rule on torture last month, Britain's law lords spoke to the world in words that were simple and clear. "The torturer is abhorred not because the information he produces may be unreliable," Lord Rodger of Earlsferry said, "but because of the barbaric means he uses to extract it."
"Torture is an unqualified evil," Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood added. "It can never be justified. Rather, it must always be punished."
The dreadful probability is that the US outsourcing of torture will allow it to escape punishment. It will not allow it to escape moral obloquy.
Salman Rushdie is the author of The Satanic Verses, Fury and many other books.
Saturday, January 07, 2006
Rugby Larger
Code's been in last-chance saloon plenty of times, but scandals keep coming
May 21, 2004 SMH
Despite official condemnation, rugby league still has a serious drinking problem that is damaging the sport's image. Darren Walton reports.
If the situation wasn't so serious, you could say it was enough to drive rugby league bosses to drink. But right now is not the time to be making jokes.
Mark Gasnier's obscene phone call scandal is the latest in a long, long line of alcohol-related public relations disasters for the code. Given that Gasnier's offensive phone call followed a NSW State of Origin team drinking session on the very same night the NRL launched a $1 million forum into players' behaviour towards women, it can be argued that his regrettable act might well be the dumbest of all of league's alcohol-fuelled social faux pas.
And there's been a lot since the foundation of the NRL in 1998, almost all of them the dubious results of team bonding sessions.
It seems the NRL and the ARL have lurched from one boozy calamity to another ever since Julian O'Neill defecated in the shoe of a teammate and made a mess of a Dubbo motel room in March, 1999.
That was the same O'Neill who was once ejected from Jupiters Casino on the Gold Coast for urinating under a gaming table . . . while drunk, of course.
The same week O'Neill couldn't find a toilet in Dubbo, four North Sydney players were embroiled in their own alcohol-inspired mischief on another pre-season tour in Wagga Wagga.
A month later, Australian hooker Craig Gower exposed himself to a female Irish tourist at the Coogee Bay Hotel following - you guessed it - a bonding session, for the Test team.
The same week, Brad Fittler was discovered heavily intoxicated outside a Sydney police station after a big night out.
One police source at the time described him as "the drunkest human being ever". Whether he was or not, one thing is indisputable is this: he was drunk and he was to be named Australian captain 24 hours later.
At the time, Nick Politis - the chairman of Fittler's Sydney Roosters - called for an alcohol ban across the code. The ban never eventuated and the problems continued.
If it wasn't John Hopoate turning up intoxicated to Manly training (1999), it was St George Illawarra forward Lance Thompson at the Dragons (2004) - or someone else.
There have been countless other drinking indiscretions in between. League officials could be forgiven for thinking they had documented enough of the dangers of its players drinking excessively on a team bonding session, although some observers might say such a stance was naive. The league might have learned after Chris Walker's exploits while breaking curfew at a Queensland State of Origin camp last month.
Capsicum spray was needed to rein in an intoxicated Walker in the early hours in Brisbane. He was later charged with assaulting police, obstructing police and being a public nuisance. Walker put his hand up, apologised and vowed to stay off the drink for the rest of the season.
In the wake of the latest incident, the Queensland players - sans Walker, who was sacked by the Maroons - will spend the next two evenings at their Gold Coast hinterland base some 20 km away from any major nightspots.
The Queenslanders will play cricket and golf and train, and probably drink and be merry - but they will only bother themselves. Maybe other clubs and players should also take the hint.
May 21, 2004 SMH
Despite official condemnation, rugby league still has a serious drinking problem that is damaging the sport's image. Darren Walton reports.
If the situation wasn't so serious, you could say it was enough to drive rugby league bosses to drink. But right now is not the time to be making jokes.
Mark Gasnier's obscene phone call scandal is the latest in a long, long line of alcohol-related public relations disasters for the code. Given that Gasnier's offensive phone call followed a NSW State of Origin team drinking session on the very same night the NRL launched a $1 million forum into players' behaviour towards women, it can be argued that his regrettable act might well be the dumbest of all of league's alcohol-fuelled social faux pas.
And there's been a lot since the foundation of the NRL in 1998, almost all of them the dubious results of team bonding sessions.
It seems the NRL and the ARL have lurched from one boozy calamity to another ever since Julian O'Neill defecated in the shoe of a teammate and made a mess of a Dubbo motel room in March, 1999.
That was the same O'Neill who was once ejected from Jupiters Casino on the Gold Coast for urinating under a gaming table . . . while drunk, of course.
The same week O'Neill couldn't find a toilet in Dubbo, four North Sydney players were embroiled in their own alcohol-inspired mischief on another pre-season tour in Wagga Wagga.
A month later, Australian hooker Craig Gower exposed himself to a female Irish tourist at the Coogee Bay Hotel following - you guessed it - a bonding session, for the Test team.
The same week, Brad Fittler was discovered heavily intoxicated outside a Sydney police station after a big night out.
One police source at the time described him as "the drunkest human being ever". Whether he was or not, one thing is indisputable is this: he was drunk and he was to be named Australian captain 24 hours later.
At the time, Nick Politis - the chairman of Fittler's Sydney Roosters - called for an alcohol ban across the code. The ban never eventuated and the problems continued.
If it wasn't John Hopoate turning up intoxicated to Manly training (1999), it was St George Illawarra forward Lance Thompson at the Dragons (2004) - or someone else.
There have been countless other drinking indiscretions in between. League officials could be forgiven for thinking they had documented enough of the dangers of its players drinking excessively on a team bonding session, although some observers might say such a stance was naive. The league might have learned after Chris Walker's exploits while breaking curfew at a Queensland State of Origin camp last month.
Capsicum spray was needed to rein in an intoxicated Walker in the early hours in Brisbane. He was later charged with assaulting police, obstructing police and being a public nuisance. Walker put his hand up, apologised and vowed to stay off the drink for the rest of the season.
In the wake of the latest incident, the Queensland players - sans Walker, who was sacked by the Maroons - will spend the next two evenings at their Gold Coast hinterland base some 20 km away from any major nightspots.
The Queenslanders will play cricket and golf and train, and probably drink and be merry - but they will only bother themselves. Maybe other clubs and players should also take the hint.
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