+ Syria fires on Israeli jets. Uhm, vad fan gör Israel i syriskt luftrum? Undrar vad världssamfundet skulle tycka om typ Egypten bestämde sig för att cruisa lite ovanför Tel Aviv med sina jaktplan..

+ Ohoj, enligt Aftonbladet tog Israel sig rentav en tur förbi det syriska presidentpalatset. Krigsförklaring som heter duga det.

+ Medan Israel bedriver statsterrorism och spränger broar och elkraftverk i Gaza och släpper ljudbomber över civilbefolkningen: Hamas bowed to the combination of an ultimatum from the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, and relentless international pressure last night by committing itself for the first time to a two-state solution of the conflict with Israel.

Dock inget nytt under solen egentligen, redan den 26:e februari skrev Al Jazeera att "Hamas is ready to recognise Israel if it gives the Palestinian people their full rights and a state in lands occupied since 1967, including the West Bank and East Jerusalem." Vidare, i januari publicerade Hamas sin valplattform som enligt den israeliska tidningen Haaretz "makes no mention of the principle that has been Hamas' raison d'etre since its founding: the destruction of Israel and establishment of a Palestinian state on all territory west of the Jordan River in its place."

+ A noted terror expert has told the BBC that Mohammed Siddique Khan, the alleged ringleader of the 7/7 London bombings, was working for British intelligence agency MI5 as an informant at the time of the attacks.

+ Hallucinogenic "magic mushrooms" are the latest trendy drug among young Europeans because of a growing interest in organic products and Internet marketing, the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) said on Monday. Bra val, om man nu ska envisas med att käka droger.

+ Ursäkta att jag inte postat på länge, men har varit upptagen eller lat. Välj själva.

+ 9/11 conspiracy theorists gather at LA conference.

They wore T-shirts asking "What Really Happened?," snapped up DVDs titled "9/11; The Great Illusion," and cheered as physicists, philosophers and terrorism experts decried the official version of the Sept. 11 attacks that shook America to its core.

Some 1,200 people gathered at a Los Angeles hotel on the weekend for what organizers billed as the largest conference on the plethora of conspiracy theories that see the 2001 attacks on Washington and New York as, at best, official negligence, and at worst an orchestrated U.S. attempt to incite world war.

+ Addicted To Knowledge. Neuroscientists at the University of Southern California have proposed a simple explanation for the pleasure of grasping a new concept: The brain is getting its fix. According to researcher Irving Biederman, the "click" of comprehension triggers a biochemical cascade that rewards the brain with a shot of natural opium-like substances. JA! JA!

+ Dust art. :)

+ Mountain glaciers are melting faster now than at any time in the past 5,000 years because of an unprecedented period of global warming, a study has found.

+ Och Daily Grail har släppt ett nytt nummer av SubRosa Magazine. Går att ladda ner i pdf-format.

+ Jeff på Rigorous Intuition har en ny utmärkt artikel uppe om 11 september och vart alla Pentagons pengar tog vägen: Flight of Capital. För den som är skeptisk till att Rumsfeld verkligen erkänt att 2.3 miljoner dollar gått upp i rök (och detta på dagen innan 11 september 2001), så finns en officiell länk här.

Utmärkt kommentar från någon läsare av R.I.:

The missing Pentagon trillions one day before 9/11 has been noted by many. Ewastud's contention that missing Pentagon funds are routine is true ... but not $2 Trillion in one single swoop.

What's missing here is an appreciation of the term "Trillion":

One Million seconds ago was 11 days, 20 hours ago.

One Billion seconds ago was November, 1975 (31.7 years ago).

One Trillion seconds ago was 31,700 years ago (317 centuries).

The Canada GDP is around $1.07 Trillion. The U.S. GDP is around $11.8 Trillion.

The yearly budget for Canada's government is around $178 Billion.

$2.3 Trillion is a lot of money. What good is $2.3 Trillion, however, if you don't buy a New World Order with it?

+ Evil Beatles. :P

+ No sooner did the corporate media parade gruesome photos of the freshly killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, or the person we are expected to believe was al-Zarqawi, then it set about arranging his successor, as evil Muslim boogiemen must remain front and center in the forever war against manufactured terrorism.

+ Crows make tools, play tricks on each other, and caw among kin in a dialect all their own. These are just some of the signs presented in a recent book that point to an unexpected similarity between the wise birds and humans. (...) As a sign of crows' advanced smarts, Savage cites Kacelnik's 2002 study in the journal Science on a captive New Caledonian crow that bent a straight piece of wire into a hook to fetch a bucket of food in a tube. "No other animal—not even a chimp—has ever spontaneously solved a problem like this, a fact that puts crows in a class with us as toolmakers," Savage writes in her book.

+ Revealed: the shrapnel evidence that points to Israel's guilt.

+ "How ironic. The Israeli occupation military lied about the last Gaza beach massacre, and then went ahead and perpetrated yet another massacre."

+ The Aymara people in South America have a concept of time opposite to the rest of the us, so that the past lies ahead of them and the future behind, according to a study published yesterday.

+ Free Gary McKinnon!

+ The Afghanistan province being patrolled by British troops will produce at least a third of the world's heroin this year, according to drug experts who are forecasting a record harvest that will be an embarrassment for the western-funded war on narcotics.

Rubriken enligt Angry Arab: Heroin Addicts for Bush hold their first convention.

+ A Lebanese man has confessed to assassinating a series of senior Hezbollah and Palestinian militants over a seven-year period on behalf of Israeli intelligence, the Lebanese Army said on Tuesday.

+ N.Y. Times: "Along with the scraps, it was mostly questions that remained. Chief among them was how Mr. Zarqawi, the terrorist leader killed Wednesday in the airstrike, could have survived for even a few minutes after the attack, as American officers say he did, when everything else around him was obliterated. Concrete blocks, walls, a fence, tin cans, palm trees, a washing machine: everything at the Hibhib scene was shredded or blown to pieces. It seemed puzzling, too, given the destruction and the condition of the other bodies, how Mr. Zarqawi's head and upper body — shown on televisions across the world — could have remained largely intact."

+ Rigorous Intuition har visst haft problem med Blogger och blivit tvungen att öppna en ny blog som du hittar här: Rigorous Intuition v2.0

+ Drug Warriors Push Eye-Eating Fungus.

On April 16, the New York Times ran a full-page ad from contact lens producer Bausch and Lomb, announcing the recall of its “ReNu with MoistureLoc” rewetting solution, and warning the 30 million American wearers of soft contact lenses about Fusarium keratitis. This infection, first detected in Asia, has rapidly spread across the United States. It is caused by a mold-like fungus that can penetrate the cornea of soft contact lens wearers, causing redness and pain that can lead to blindness—requiring a corneal replacement.

That same week, the House of Representatives passed a provision to a bill requiring that the very same fungus be sprayed in “a major drug-producing country,” such as Colombia. The bill’s sponsor was Rep. Mark Souder (R-Ind.) and its most vocal supporter was his colleague Dan Burton (R-Ind.), who has been promoting the fungus for almost a decade as key to winning the drug war.

+ Blairs nya England visar sin rätta sida.. Police apologise to east London raid family.

The Metropolitan police today bowed to demands for an apology from the family targeted in an east London terror raid, after the man shot by an officer spoke for the first time of fears for his life.

The assistant commissioner, Andy Hayman, issued the apology "for the hurt that we have caused" this afternoon, hours after an emotional press conference in which Mohammed Abdul Kahar described how a police officer fired at him from close range without identifying himself first.

(...)

Mr Kahar, 23, today spoke publicly for the first time since the raid on his family home in Forest Gate on June 2, in which he and his 20-year-old brother were arrested.

He said he had been woken by the screams "like I had never heard before" of his brother, Abul Koyair, at 4am. Assuming it was a robbery he ran downstairs with his brother directly behind him.

"I saw an orange spark," Mr Kahar said. "I fell against the wall. I slipped down.

Speaking quietly and haltingly, at times having to stop because he was overcome by emotion, Mr Kahar said he had been shot from a distance of "two to three feet" by a man at the bottom of the stairs.

He said the bullet passed through the right-hand upper part of his chest and exited through his shoulder.

Mr Kahar was insistent that the gunshot was not a mistake. "He [the policeman] looked at me straight away and shot. We had eye contact and he shot me straight away."

+ Hours after the Israeli military announced Tuesday that it was not responsible for the deadly explosion on a Gaza beach Friday, two more Israeli army missiles struck a van near Gaza's Jabalya Refugee Camp Tuesday, killing 11 people, including two children and two paramedics who arrived after the first strike.

+ This is Zionism.

+ The scientist who led the team that cracked the human genome is to publish a book explaining why he now believes in the existence of God and is convinced that miracles are real.

+ Veckans topplista:

01 Gram Parsons
02 Bruce Springsteen
03 Catherine Wheel
04 The Pretty Things
05 Bilal
06 IAM
07 Papoose
08 Goodz
09 The Birthday Party
10 Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E.

+ Oscar Swartz har ett scoop uppe om kopplingen mellan tillslaget mot Pirate Bay och turerna kring Kavkaz Center: Roswalls hämnd - The Pirate Bay och Kavkazcenter.

+ The Timely Death Of al-Zarqawi.

Zarqawi, the notorious shape-shifter who, according to grainy video evidence, was able to regenerate lost limbs, speak in completely different accents, alter the contours of his bone structure and also suffered an unfortunate binge-and-purge weight problem which caused him to change sizes with almost every appearance, was head of an organization that quite fortuitously dubbed itself "Al Qaeda in Iraq" just around the time that the Bush Administration began changing its pretext for the conquest from "eliminating Iraq's [non-existent] weapons of mass destruction" to "fighting terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them over here."

(...)

In yet another amazing coincidence, the announcement of the death of Zarqawi or somebody just like him came just as Prime Minister Maliki was finally submitting his candidates for the long-disputed posts of defense and interior ministers, which then sailed through parliament after months of deadlock. The fortuitous death also came after perhaps the worst week of bad PR the Bush Administration has endured during the entire war, with an outpouring of stories alleging a number of horrific atrocities committed by U.S. troops in recent months.

Oddly enough, Zarqawi first vaulted into the American consciousness just after the public exposure of earlier U.S. atrocities: the tortures at Abu Ghraib prison in the spring of 2004. With story after story of horrible abuse battering the Administration during an election year, Zarqawi, or someone just like him, suddenly appeared with a Grand Guignol production: the beheading of American civilian Nick Berg. This atrocity was instantly seized upon by supporters of the war to justify the "intensive interrogation" of "terrorists" even though the Red Cross had determined that 70 to 90 percent of American captives at that time had committed no crime whatsoever, much less been involved in terrorism, as the notorious anti-war Wall Street Journal reported.

Mer om Berg-historien här.

+ For those of us attempting to keep track of how many times US agent provocateur Musab Al-Zarqawi has been killed or captured today's news comes as something of a relief - the US government has stamped its official seal of approval on the fact that the Pentagon's most influential PR tool is no more.

+ Washington Post: The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military documents and officers familiar with the program. The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have overstated his importance and helped the Bush administration tie the war to the organization responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

+ A U.S. 'Propaganda' Program, al-Zarqawi, and 'The New York Times'.

The various 'generous' offers to the Palestinians

United Nations "Partition Plan" to the Palestinians: You are going to have 47% of the 100% which was originally yours.

Oslo Agreement" to the Palestinians: You are going to have 22% of the 100% which was originally yours.

Barak's "Generous Offer" to the Palestinians: We are going to give you 80% of 22% of 100% of the land which was originally yours.

Sharon's "Peace Plan" to the Palestinians in 2000: We are going to give you 42% of 80% of 22% of 100% of the land which was originally yours, and this 42% will remain under continuous curfew.

"American Zionists" to the Palestinians: According to our version of the Bible you are entitled to 0% of 42% of 80% of 22% of 100% of the land which was originally yours.

The “Road Map” to the Palestinians that Bush envisions:

§ If you stop your resistance to the occupation (which we call terrorism), and

§ your refugees give up their right of return to their ancestral homes, and

§ you agree to only elect officials acceptable to Bush and Sharon, and

§ you agree to lock up all your resistance fighters, and

§ you agree to drive your cars only on roads that Sharon assigns for your use, and

§ you do not object to the ‘wall’ that Sharon is building, and

§ you agree not to claim Jerusalem as your capital, and

§ you agree that your children’s school curriculum only includes courses and books approved by the Israeli government, and

§ you agree not to give birth to more than three children per family,

then Sharon might consider negotiating with you on the 42% of 80% of 22% of 100% of the land which was originally yours.

+ ”Bojkott leder inte till demokrati”.

Hamas vill förgöra staten Israel, invänder jag.
–Vi har aldrig sagt så! Vi har sagt att vi ska befria de ockuperade områdena. Vi har föreslagit Israel en tioårig vapenvila om Israel drar sig tillbaka till 1967 års gränser. Vi håller fast vid våra rättigheter. Det blir ingen fred så länge ockupationen fortsätter. Vi har aldrig utfört någon operation utanför de ockuperade områdena, säger han.
Själv blev han utsatt för ett mordförsök genom förgiftning av israelerna 1997 i Jordanien.
Varje gång en Hamas-ledare förespråkat fred har han mördats.

+ Nu satsar verkligen Israel allt på ett kort för att få Hamas att bryta sin vapenvila. Häromdagen avrättade de en av deras säkerhetschefer, och som grädde på moset utfördes igår en regelrätt massaker, som Israel visste att Hamas skulle vara tvugna att svara på:

Sommarens första dag på stranden förvandlades till ett rytande inferno av död och förstörelse när israeliska örlogsfartyg i går attackerade en strandremsa i Gaza. Avslitna kroppsdelar, förstörda tält och blodiga filtar spreds över ett stort område när minst fyra granater detonerade bland palestinska familjer som hade picknick, uppger nyhetsbyrån AP.

Mer om det här: Israeli naval gunboats killed at least 10 Palestinian civilians and wounded about 40 others as they relaxed in the summer heat on a beach in northern Gaza yesterday.

Om inte detta är krigsbrott vet jag inte vad som är det. Men Israel fick i alla fall det svar de önskade: Hamas has launched rockets at Israel in retaliation for an attack that killed seven Palestinians who had been relaxing on a Gaza beach. The move, which formally ends a 16-month-old truce, saw 11 rockets and four mortar bombs fired.

+ The Jewish Week: Israelis Fear Spread Of War Crimes Cases. Laws passed in wake of Nuremberg trials now being pressed in Europe against Israeli generals.

+ As Wednesday morning dawned, northern Norway was hit with an impact comparable to the atomic bomb used on Hiroshima.

+ What if, seconds before your laptop began stalling, you could feel the hard drive spin up under the load? Or you could tell if an electrical cord was live before you touched it? For the few people who have rare earth magnets implanted in their fingers, these are among the reported effects -- a finger that feels electromagnetic fields along with the normal sense of touch. (!)

+ A new website that aims to transform music-industry economics is set to go live Thursday, giving musicians a major cut of the proceeds while largely freezing out record labels and other intermediaries.

+ The U.S. Air Force increased its bombing of Taliban and other insurgent targets in Afghanistan this spring, making about 750 airstrikes in May alone, Air Force officials said.

+ Skum illusion.

+ Lista över fel och lagbrott i samband med tillslaget mot The Pirate Bay.

+ More on the Toronto 17.

The Official Story on the 17 arrested ‘terrorists’ in Toronto shifted from no mention of a police sting operation, to a report by the Toronto Star, which seems to have all the sources on this matter, that the supply of the tons of fertilizer was a RCMP sting, to a denial that it was a sting. The Official Story is now the heroic one that the RCMP intercepted the shipment and replaced the dangerous fertilizer with an non-dangerous substance.

CSIS has an unfortunate history of using informants. In the late 80’s, the terrorist threat du jour was extreme right-wing terrorism. CSIS hired a man named Grant Bristow to infiltrate right-wing groups. He did such a good job that he almost ended up as the leader, and how far he went in fitting in with his extremist pals is till the subject of controversy. Unfortunately for CSIS, there were no right-wing extremist groups to speak of in Canada prior to Bristow. There were a few loud-mouths with no money and essentially no followers. Some of the money supplied by CSIS was used to fund the main group, the Heritage Front. CSIS was therefore the founder of right-wing extremism in Canada!

+ The CIA suppressed the whereabouts of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann to help protect high ranking West German officials from possible revelations about their own Nazi pasts, according to CIA documents released on Tuesday.

+ Via Cryptogon: Elite special forces troops being dropped behind enemy lines on covert missions are to ditch their traditional parachutes in favour of strap-on stealth wings. (!)



Ett klipp från A Scanner Darkly
+ Shroom: A cultural history of the magic mushroom by Andy Letcher.

+ SVT har visst uppe ett intressant inslag om den shia-muslimske befrielseteologen Ali Shariati här.

+ Intelligence behind raid was wrong, officials say.

Senior counter-terrorism officials now believe that the intelligence that led to the raid on a family house last Friday in a search for a chemical device about to be used to attack Britain was wrong, the Guardian has learned.

One official, with knowledge why police acted and what had been found from days of searching, said the intelligence had been acted on correctly, but added last night: "There is no viable device at that house. There is no device being constructed, or chemicals. There does not appear to be anything there or anywhere else."

As lawyers for the two arrested men continued to protest their innocence, it emerged that the man who had passed the specific information that led to the raid in which a man was shot last Friday was a police informant who had been providing intelligence about the activities of alleged Islamist militants for several weeks.

Tur dom skjuter först och frågar sen. Hade de lyckats att döda snubben de sköt hade de säkert kokat ihop någon historia eller planterat något för att rättfärdiga deras attack.

+ Flashback.. Jean Charles de Menezes (7 January 1978–22 July 2005) was a Brazilian electrician living in Tulse Hill in south London, United Kingdom. Menezes was shot and killed at Stockwell tube station on the London Underground by unnamed Metropolitan Police officers. Police later issued an apology, saying that they had mistaken him for a suspect in the previous day's failed bombings and acknowledging that Menezes in fact had no explosives and was unconnected with the attempted bombings.

+ Climate Control, Beijing-Style. The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain, but in China? Well, the government will decide.

+ The raid that raised more questions than answers.

Lawyers for two men arrested in an anti-terror raid in east London spoke out angrily as mystery deepened about the circumstances surrounding the operation which left one suspect with a gunshot wound.

(...)

On Friday, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke, head of the Metropolitan Police's Anti-Terrorist Branch, had said the intelligence that led to Friday's raid was "very specific". There were suggestions yesterday that the intelligence indicating that a chemical device was being prepared may have come from America. But there was no indication that police had uncovered incriminating materials.

(...)

Kate Roxburgh, representing Mr Kahar, claimed that police had failed to give a warning before opening fire on her client. She said: "He was woken up ... by screams from downstairs, got out of bed in his pyjamas obviously unarmed, nothing in his hands and hurrying down the stairs. As he came toward a bend in the stairway, not knowing what was going on downstairs, the police turned the bend up towards him and shot him - and that was without any warning." She said: "He wasn't asked to freeze, given any warning and didn't know the people in his house were police officers until after he was shot. He is lucky still to be alive."

+ The Purpose Driven Life Taker.

Imagine: you are a foot soldier in a paramilitary group whose purpose is to remake America as a Christian theocracy, and establish its worldly vision of the dominion of Christ over all aspects of life. You are issued high-tech military weaponry, and instructed to engage the infidel on the streets of New York City. You are on a mission - both a religious mission and a military mission -- to convert or kill Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, gays, and anyone who advocates the separation of church and state - especially moderate, mainstream Christians. Your mission is "to conduct physical and spiritual warfare"; all who resist must be taken out with extreme prejudice. You have never felt so powerful, so driven by a purpose: you are 13 years old. You are playing a real-time strategy video game whose creators are linked to the empire of mega-church pastor Rick Warren, best selling author of The Purpose Driven Life. The game, slated for release by October 2006 in advance of the Christmas shopping rush, has been previewed at video game exhibitions, and reviewed by major newspapers and magazines.

+ Mer om dataspel: Muslims craft their own video games. Tired of Arabs and Muslims being portrayed as bad guys, a Syrian firm puts out a new line of games.

+ Intressant ny intervju med Karen Armstron: Going beyond God.

The trouble is that we define our God too closely. In my book "A History of God," I pointed out that the most eminent Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians all said you couldn't think about God as a simple personality, an external being. It was better to say that God did not exist because our notion of existence was far too limited to apply to God.

+ Xymphora: The Toronto 17.

It will be entertaining to watch the case against the 17 "terrorist" suspects arrested by police in Toronto slowly unravel. We’ve been down this same road before, with the post-September 11 arrest of 19 suspected terrorists in Toronto, a case which fell apart. (...) The main crux of the official case, the fact that the ‘terrorists’ ordered a large quantity of fertilizer, has been revealed to be a police sting operation, something the police didn’t bother to mention when they crowed about the arrests. Isn’t it just a bit odd that, in this day and age, ‘terrorists’ living in downtown Toronto would think they could get away with ordering tons of ammonium nitrate without attracting any official attention?

+ Veckans topplista:

01 Ghost Mice
02 Bilal
03 Ghostface Killah
04 Cocteau Twins
05 Gram Parsons
06 Shabazz the Disciple
07 Ruff Sqwad
08 Vapnet
09 Guns N' Roses
10 Ruff squad

+ Tim Boucher har verkligen gjort comeback nu!

Towards a Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory, Part 2.

I Will Choose Free Will!

Towards a Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory, Part 3.

+ What If They Gave a War...?

Why aren't we marching to demand an end to the illegal surveillance of American citizens by their own government, again under the pretext of waging war on terror? Why do we so blithely surrender our civil liberties -- the very thing that supposedly separates us from other societies -- to the illusion of security? All the high-tech snooping in the world won't stop a determined terrorist from striking. If it could, Israel would be the safest country on earth. (...) Why aren't enraged college students occupying their campus administration buildings, demanding that the United States sign the Kyoto Protocol? Hell, it might already be too late, but is the luxury of driving your mom's SUV really worth the coming dystopian world that you, more than I, will inherit? (...) In short, where the hell is everybody?

I'll tell you where they are. They're at home, tuning in to root for the next "American idol." They're plugged into their iPods, utterly self-involved and disconnected from what lies just outside their doors. They're spending 25 hours a week playing video games in virtual worlds instead of fighting to save the only world that really matters. They're surfing porn. They're text messaging and e-mailing and scheming to close that next big deal. They're flogging their useless crap on eBay.

+ Nearly 50 tons of mysterious red particles showered India in 2001. Now the race is on to figure out what the heck they are.

+ Två intressanta artiklar från Tim Bouchers alltid lika läsvärda blogg:

Towards A Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory - Part 1.

Eldridge Cleaver on the Kennedy Dynasty.

+ Pontén erkänner att Piratbyrån var målet!?

+ Gå med i Piratpartiet nu! Kostar bara 5 kronor.