Category: UK

  • Iraqi interpreters sue UK government: Lawyers

    Iraqi interpreters sue UK government: Lawyers

    IraqUKLondon:  Forty Iraqi interpreters who worked for British forces in Iraq launched a group action against the government at the High Court in London, arguing that it failed to protect them, according to their lawyers.

    The Leigh Day & Co legal firm said its clients were suing the government for leaving them vulnerable to attack and persecution by militia hostile to foreign forces in Iraq, who saw them as collaborators.

    In eight cases, the claims were brought by relatives of interpreters who died in suspected militia attacks, which were believed to have been a direct consequence of their work, the firm said in a statement.

    “This is a tragic case of the British government doing too little too late to protect a vital part of its workforce,” said Leigh Day lawyer Sapna Malik.

    The Iraqis — almost half of whom now live in Britain — are each hoping to receive compensation ranging from GBP 5,000 to GBP 100,000, according to The Times.

    A spokeswoman for the Ministry of Defence — which is the target of the legal action with the Foreign Office and the Department for International Development — said the government valued the work of local staff.

    “We are aware of these claims and they are currently under investigation,” she said.

    “Where Her Majesty’s government has a legal liability to pay compensation we do so. It would be inappropriate to comment further while investigations are ongoing.”

    A first set of claims were lodged in March 2009, and the group action was given approval to proceed in November last year, Leigh Day said.

    Britain withdrew its troops from Iraq in July 2009, six years after joining the US-led invasion to depose dictator Saddam Hussein.

    Bureau Report

    , February 05, 2011

  • UK plans to double trade with Turkey, report says

    UK plans to double trade with Turkey, report says

    The White Paper, an official UK document on investment and trade perspectives, attaches crucial importance to trade with emerging and fast-growing economies, targeting doubling economic volume with Turkey. ‘We promote trade with Turkey,’ says a contributor to the report, adding that the goals were not for the short term

    The United Kingdom Trade and Investment’s, or UKTI, most recent White Paper includes a target of doubling mutual trade between the country and Turkey by 2015.

    “The U.K. also has significant interests in other emerging powers,” said the report released on Wednesday.

    “We aim to double trade with Turkey and support its accession to the European Union.”

    Turkey is in a customs union with the EU, the document noted. “The U.K. has long been a strong supporter of Turkey’s membership of the EU, as a major emerging economy in Europe that is set to be Europe’s second largest economy by 2050. Turkey is pro-trade and is seeking a series of bilateral trade deals, with a focus on Middle East and Caucasus markets. Turkey presents a significant opportunity and the U.K. is aiming to double current trade by 2015, from a base of 9 billion pounds [$14.5 billion].”

    Lord Brittan, trade adviser to the U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, who guided the strategy set out in the White Paper, told the Anatolia news agency that the fact that Turkey is not a member of the European Union creates no obstacles in trading with the nation.

    Responding to a question by Anatolia about the improvement in economic relations between the U.K. and Turkey since Prime Minister Cameron’s statement on doubling mutual trade during his visit to Ankara in July 2010, Brittan said, “This is not a short-term target.”

    Cameron Erdogan
    UK Prime Minister David Cameron (L) and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdoğan shake hands in this July 29 photo. The UK PM said during his visit to Ankara that he wanted to boost trade between the parties. AP photo

    “We promote trade with Turkey,” he said, noting that results were dependent to the British private sector’s approach.

    Still, in case results came out at a lower level than expected, the U.K. government would promote more, he said.

    Brittan, a former interior minister during the Conservative Party rule under Margaret Thatcher, became Cameron’s trade consultant in August last year. He had been working at the European Commission earlier.

    In the foreword section of the latest White Paper, Dr. Vince Cable, the U.K. secretary of state for business, innovation and skills, wrote that the fastest-growing emerging economies are now creating new opportunities for all to benefit further from trade and investment.

    “Despite these benefits, there is an urgent need to restate the case for open markets because the insecurity that is a legacy of the economic crisis fosters a mood of protectionism,” he said. “So far, the world’s nations have largely resisted the temptation to put up trade and investment barriers. But we must remain vigilant and reinforce the global system of rules that keep markets open for us all.”

    UKTI supports a number of formal ministerial bilateral economic and trade dialogues with key emerging and high growth markets, such as Brazil, China, India, Russia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, said the report. “These aim to strengthen economic, industrial and commercial ties between the U.K. and these markets and also look at barriers to trade between these countries.”

    UKTI plans to publish its new strategy later in 2011 to set out how to enhance the practical help British exporters and investors receive from the U.K. government.

    Hürriyet Daily News

  • The Egyptian revolt is coming home

    The Egyptian revolt is coming home

    Egypt’s uprising discredits every western stereotype about Arabs*

    John Pilger

    Revolt
    An Egyptian protester waves a national flag as he sits on an electricity pole during demonstrations by thousands of anti-government supporters. Photograph: Getty Images.

    Western leaders should be quaking in their boots.

    The uprising in Egypt is our theatre of the possible. It is what people across the world have struggled for and their thought controllers have feared. Western commentators invariably misuse “we” and “us” to speak on behalf of those with power who see the rest of humanity as useful or expendable. The “we” and “us” are universal now. Tunisia came first, but the spectacle always promised to be Egyptian.

    As a reporter, I have felt this over the years. At Tahrir (“liberation”) Square in Cairo in 1970, the coffin of the great nationalist Gamal Abdel Nasser bobbed on an ocean of people who, under him, had glimpsed freedom. One of them, a teacher, described the disgraced past as “grown men chasing cricket balls for the British at the Cairo Club”. The parable was for all Arabs and much of the world. Three years later, the Egyptian Third Army crossed the Suez Canal and overran Israel’s fortresses in Sinai. Returning from this battlefield to Cairo, I joined a million others in Liberation Square. Their restored respect was like a presence – until the United States rearmed the Israelis and beckoned defeat.

    Thereafter, President Anwar Sadat became America’s man through the usual billion-dollar bribery and, for this, he was assassinated in 1981. Under his successor, Hosni Mubarak, dissenters came to Liberation Square at their peril. The latest US-Israeli project of Mubarak, routinely enriched by Washington’s bagmen, is the building of an underground wall behind which the Palestinians of Gaza are to be imprisoned for ever.

    The grisly peacemaker

    Today, the problem for the people in Liberation Square lies not in Egypt. On 5 February, the New York Times reported: “The Obama administration formally threw its weight behind a gradual transition in Egypt, backing attempts by the country’s vice-president, General Omar Suleiman, to broker a compromise with opposition groups . . . Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said it was important to support Mr Sulei­man as he seeks to defuse street protests . . .”

    Having rescued him from would-be assassins, Suleiman is, in effect, Mubarak’s bodyguard. His other distinction, documented in Jane Mayer’s investigative bookThe Dark Side, is as supervisor of US “rendition flights” to Egypt, where people are tortured by order of the CIA. When President Obama was asked in 2009 if he regarded Mubarak as authoritarian, his swift reply was “no”. He called him a peacemaker, echoing that other great liberal tribune, Tony Blair, to whom Mubarak is “a force for good”.

    The grisly Suleiman is now the peacemaker and force for good, the man of “compromise” who will oversee the “gradual transition” and “diffuse the protests”. This attempt to suffocate the Egyptian revolt will depend on a substantial number of people, from businessmen to journalists to petty officials, who have provided the dictatorship’s apparatus. In one sense, they mirror those in the western liberal class who backed Obama’s “change you can believe in” and Blair’s equally bogus “political Cinema­scope” (Henry Porter in the Guardian, 1995). No matter how different they appear, both groups are the domesticated backers and beneficiaries of the status quo.

    In Britain, the BBC’s Today programme is their voice. Here, serious diversions from the status quo are known as “Lord knows what”. On 28 January the Washington correspondent Paul Adams declared, “The Americans are in a very difficult situation. They do want to see some kind of democratic reform but they are also conscious that they need strong leaders capable of making decisions. They regard President Mubarak as an absolute bulwark, a key strategic ally in the region.

    “Egypt is the country, along with Israel, on which American Middle East diplomacy abso­lutely hinges. They don’t want to see anything that smacks of a chaotic handover to frankly Lord knows what.”

    Fear of Lord-knows-what requires that the historical truth of US and British “diplomacy” as largely responsible for the suffering in the Middle East be suppressed or reversed. Forget the Balfour Declaration, which led to the im­position of expansionist Israel. Forget the secret Anglo-American sponsorship of jihadists as a “bulwark” against democratic control of oil. Forget the overthrow of democracy in Iran and the installation of the tyrant shah, and the slaughter and destruction in Iraq. Forget the US fighter jets, cluster bombs, white phosphorus and depleted uranium that are performance-tested on children in Gaza. And now, in the cause of preventing “chaos”, forget the denial of almost every basic civil liberty in Omar Sulei­man’s contrite “new” regime in Cairo.

    Overtaken by events

    The uprising in Egypt has discredited every western media stereotype about the Arabs. The courage, determination, eloquence and grace of those in Liberation Square contrast with “our” specious fear-mongering, with its al-Qaeda and Iran bogeys and iron-clad assumptions of the “moral leadership of the west”. It is not surprising that the recent source of truth about the imperial abuse of the Middle East, WikiLeaks, is itself subjected to craven and petty abuse in those self-congratulating newspapers that set the limits of elite liberal debate on both sides of the Atlantic. Perhaps they are worried. Public awareness is rising and bypassing them.

    In Washington and London, the regimes are fragile and barely democratic. Having long burned down societies abroad, they are now doing something similar at home, with lies and without a mandate. To their victims, the resistance in Liberation Square must seem an inspiration. “We won’t stop,” said a young Egyptian woman on TV. “We won’t go home.” Try kettling a million people in the centre of London, bent on civil disobedience, and try imagining it could not happen.

    * Title of the Print edition

    John Pilger, renowned investigative journalist and documentary film-maker, is one of only two to have twice won British journalism’s top award; his documentaries have won academy awards in both the UK and the US. In a New Statesman survey of the 50 heroes of our time, Pilger came fourth behind Aung San Suu Kyi and Nelson Mandela. “John Pilger,” wrote Harold Pinter, “unearths, with steely attention facts, the filthy truth. I salute him.”

    www.newstatesman.com, 10 February 2011

  • 12 months warning about the signs of an impending Ice Age

    12 months warning about the signs of an impending Ice Age

    Immediate Ice Gigantic Icelandic Volcano Could Plunge Europe Into Age…

    Volcano1

    A plethora of scientists have come out in the past 12 months warning about the signs of an impending Ice Age.

    (CHICAGO) – Another mammoth Icelandic volcano, Baroarbunga, is ready to erupt. This one could dwarf the Eyjafjallajokull glacier volcano that blew in 2010 causing havoc throughout Europe.

    That’s the word that’s streaming out of the northern island nation as geophysicists around the globe hold their breaths to see what will happen next.

    The Eyjafjallajokull eruption galvanized Europe and stunned the world with its unrelenting ferocity. It caused billionsVolcano2 of dollars in loss, paralyzed European air travel and caused food and other commodities to spike upwards.

    Worried experts warn that this eruption could be much, much worse.

    University of Iceland geophysicists have warned of a significant rise in seismic activity in the area of Vatnajökull, the largest of Iceland’s glaciers. A swarm of earthquakes has erupted signaling the likely eruption of Bardarbunga, Iceland’s second biggest volcano and one that sits directly above a major lava conduit.

    Baroarbunga, a stratovolcano towering 6,600 feet, is part of the island nation’s largest volcanic system. The huge volcano’s crater covers 43 square miles and is completely encased under glacial ice.

    Devastation in the 15th Century

    Baroarbunga’s last major eruption was horrendous. It changed the weather pattern in northern Europe and darkened the skies for months during 1477. That gigantic eruption generated the largest lava flow in 10,000 years and significantly expanded Iceland’s land mass.

    Volcano3Grim experts concede that if the volcano’s current activity culminates in an eruption equal to that of 1477, all of Scandinavia and much of northern Russia and Europe will be left reeling. The UK will be slammed by choking volcanic dust, grit and poisonous superheated gases. Commerce will grind to a halt, the skies will blacken for weeks, perhaps months, and agriculture would be severely affected.

    The late Cornell University professor, astronomer Carl Sagan, used the consequences of large volcanic eruptions impact on global cooling as part of his theoretical model for the frightening prospect of a nuclear winter.

    Ken Caldeira, an earth scientist at Stanford University, California, and member of Britain’s prestigious Royal Society working group on geo-engineering, explained that “dust sprayed into the stratosphere in volcanic eruptions is known to cool the Earth by reflecting light back into space.”

    That simple process has led to the starvation of whole nations in the past. Volcanic gases and dust suspended in the atmosphere cool the Earth to a point where the growing seasons significantly shrink and crops cannot reach maturity.

    Speaking to Icelandic TV about the danger the re-activating volcano posed to the country and the Northern Hemisphere, Einarsson said, “This is the most active area of the country if we look at the whole country together. There is no doubt that lava there is slowly growing, and the seismicity of the last few days is a sign of it.”

    Vulcanologists confirm they have great concern, but the region prevents them from detecting earth movements more accurately.

    “We need better measurements because it is difficult to determine the depth of earthquakes because it is in the middle of the country and much of the area is covered with glaciers,” Einarsson added.

    The UK and the Baroarbunga Ice Age

    Volcano4A plethora of scientists have come out in the past 12 months warning about the signs of an impending Ice Age. Some believe it will be a mini-Ice Age, others argue it will be a major one.

    Ice Ages are caused by a number of factors. Not all of the factors are fully understood.

    But a consensus of scientists agree that more than anything else what dominates the climate is the sun’s activity, the Earth’s core, volcanic action and water vapor in the atmosphere.

    Adding to Earth’s shivering woes: NASA has confirmed the sun will be going into an extended cooling period after 2012.

    The cool down is expected to last from 30 to 50 years.

    At one time geophysicists believed it took hundreds or thousands of years for an Ice Age to begin, but during the past few decades evidence has emerged that the planet can slip into an Ice Age in under a decade.

    Events like a giant volcano erupting…

    Salem News

  • The Economist’s unforgivable silence on Sayyid Qutb’s anti-Semitism

    The Economist’s unforgivable silence on Sayyid Qutb’s anti-Semitism

    Richard CohenBy Richard Cohen
    Qutb was hanged in 1966 by the Egyptian government of Gamal Abdel Nasser after the customary torture. He had been the intellectual leader of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood and a man of copious literary output. One of his efforts was called “Our Struggle with the Jews.” It is a work of unabashed, breathtakingly stupid anti-Semitism, one of the reasons the New York Review of Books recently characterized Qutb’s views”as extreme as Hitler’s.” About all this, the Economist is oddly, ominously and unforgivably silent.

    This is both puzzling and troublesome. After all, it’s not as if Qutb was some minor figure. He is, as a secondary headline on the Economist review says, “the father of Islamic fundamentalism,” and it is impossible to read anything about him that does not attest to his immense contemporary importance. Nor was Qutb’s anti-Semitism some sort of juvenile madness, expressed in the hormonal certainty of youth and later recanted as both certainty and hairline receded. It was, instead, the creation of his middle age and was published in the early 1950s. In other words, his essay is a post-Holocaust work, written in full knowledge of what anti-Semitism had just accomplished. The mass murder of Europe’s Jews didn’t give him the slightest pause. Qutb was undaunted.

    But so, apparently, are some others who write about him. In his recent and well-received book, “The Arabs,” Eugene Rogan of Oxford University gives Qutb his due “as one of the most influential Islamic reformers of the [20th] century” but does not mention his anti-Semitism or, for that matter, his raging hatred of America. Like the Sept. 11 terrorists, Qutb spent some time in America — Greeley, Colo.; Washington, D.C.; and Palo Alto, Calif. — learning to loathe Americans. He was particularly revolted by its overly sexualized women. Imagine if he had been to New York!

    The Economist’s review is stunning in its omission. Can it be that a mere 65 years after the fires of Auschwitz were banked, anti-Semitism has been relegated to a trivial, personal matter, like a preference for blondes — something not worth mentioning? Yet, Qutb is not like Richard Wagner, whose anti-Semitism was repellent but did not in the least affect his music. Qutb’s Jew-hatred was not incidental to his work. While not quite central, it has nevertheless proved important, having been adopted along with his other ideas by Hamas. Qutb blames Jews for almost everything: “atheistic materialism,” “animalistic sexuality,” “the destruction of the family” and, of course, an incessant war against Islam itself.

    Obviously, this is no minor matter. Critics of Israel frequently accuse it of racism in its treatment of Palestinians. Sometimes, the charge is apt. But there is nothing in the Israeli media or popular culture that even approaches what is openly, and with official sanction, said in the Arab world about Jews. The message is an echo of Nazi racism, and the prescription, stated or merely implied, is the same.

    The Economist and Rogan are insufficient in themselves to constitute a movement. Yet I cannot quite suppress the feeling that the need to demonize Israel is so great that the immense moral failings of some of its enemies have to be swept under the carpet. As Jacob Weisberg pointed out recently in Slate, the “boycott Israel” movement is oddly unbalanced — so much fury directed at Israel, so little at countries like China or Venezuela. Can it be that the French philosopher Vladimir Jankelevitch was prescient when he suggested years ago that anti-Zionism “gives us the permission and even the right and even the duty to be anti-Semitic in the name of democracy”? The line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, a demarcation I have always acknowledged, is becoming increasingly blurred.

    Because the Economist’s book reviews are unsigned, it’s impossible to know — and the Economist would not say — who’s at fault here. So the magazine itself is accountable not just for bad taste or unfathomable ignorance but for disregarding its own vow, published on its first page, “to take part in a severe contest between intelligence . . . and an unworthy timid ignorance obstructing our progress.” During the week of July 15, it didn’t just lose the contest — it never even showed up for it.

    [email protected]

    www.washingtonpost.com, August 10, 2010

    Cohen

    From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
    • Cohen (surname), the most common Jewish surname
    • Kohen, a direct male descendant of the Biblical Aaron, brother of Moses

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cohen

  • Israeli Ambassador’s Unsuccessful Visit to Manchester University

    Israeli Ambassador’s Unsuccessful Visit to Manchester University

    Ron ProsorBY LEEDS PSC (LEEDS PALESTINE SOLIDARITY CAMPAIGN)

    MPACUK The students of University of Manchester only had a little more than 36 hours to prepare for the coming of the self invited Israeli Ambassador, Ron Prosor. Understandably, considering the University didn’t release any notice of the visit until two days before his coming.

    The event, chaired by the President and the Vice-Chancellor, Nancy Rothwell, was on the topic of “Shifting Paradigms: Evolving Regional Dynamics in the Middle East.” It was obvious it was kept very quiet and deliberately so.

    Action Palestine, with some representation from Manchester ISOC helped to develop a plan of action the evening before. The next morning they were out on the Campus’ main road and it started well. The activists were ambient, hopeful and upbeat despite the cold. A stall outside raised publicity about the unwanted visit, educating students on the credentials of the Ambassador.

    When the time came they moved to the entrance of the venue and started chanting the familiar pro-Palestinian signatures of the ever growing global intifada. Naturally, there was no sign of the Ambassador, but hearing that he was there and starting his talk, their voices and chants grew louder and louder. The leaflets they were continuing to give out, helped in their efforts, as their numbers were given a bolster.

    Two Action Palestine activists who attended the event, reported that the event received a small audience of just 35. It seems the Ambassador’s visit was a bit of a flop. In contrast, Action Palestine received a lot of publicity from their pro-Palestine activity and in turn raised the issue of the Palestinian plight at the hands of Israeli oppression to hundreds of students and university staff. The message was loud and clear, the Vice Chancellor should think twice before she allows war criminals to visit her university.

    Many Muslims and non-Muslims make up Action Palestine and this reflects how the Palestinian issue is a humanitarian issue and not a religious one, much to the dismay of the Zionists on campus. Even after being called extremists by their Zionist counterparts, they still stood strong at every chance to defend the Palestinian cause on campus, in a pro-active way and they have come up on top. A good lesson for the rest of us, who may be easily scared by such tactical labelling.

    ,