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Latest Articles: International News
Meat must be rationed to four portions a week, says report on climate change
Post Date: 2008-10-01 06:56:52 by A K A Stone
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People will have to be rationed to four modest portions of meat and one litre of milk a week if the world is to avoid run-away climate change, a major new report warns. The report, by the Food Climate Research Network, based at the University of Surrey, also says total food consumption should be reduced, especially "low nutritional value" treats such as alcohol, sweets and chocolates. It urges people to return to habits their mothers or grandmothers would have been familiar with: buying locally in-season products, cooking in bulk and in pots with lids or pressure cookers, avoiding waste and walking to the shops - alongside more modern tips such as using the microwave and ...
PETER HITCHENS: How China has created a new slave empire in Africa
Post Date: 2008-09-28 18:45:18 by A K A Stone
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I think I am probably going to die any minute now. An inflamed, deceived mob of about 50 desperate men are crowding round the car, some trying to turn it over, others beating at it with large rocks, all yelling insults and curses. They have just started to smash the windows. Next, they will pull us out and, well, let's not think about that ... I am trying not to meet their eyes, but they are staring at me and my companions with rage and hatred such as I haven't seen in a human face before. Those companions, Barbara Jones and Richard van Ryneveld, are - like me - quite helpless in the back seats. If we get out, we will certainly be beaten to death. If we stay where we are, we will ...
Chavez says crisis-hit U.S. needs new constitution
Post Date: 2008-09-27 21:23:18 by A K A Stone
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LISBON, Sept 27 - Venezuela's leftist President Hugo Chavez said on Saturday it was the capitalist system that had caused the financial crisis in the United States and the country should come up with a new constitution. Speaking to reporters in Lisbon on the last leg of a tour that included visits to China and Russia, he said: "I think the United States should start a constituent process to create a constituent assembly, a new truly democratic model." A constituent assembly is a body elected to draft and sometimes adopt a new constitution. "It was capitalism that caused the ruin" in the United States, said Chavez, who is one of Washington's fiercest critics, ...
Pirate Bay Boycotts Press After Television Ambush
Post Date: 2008-09-12 23:39:52 by A K A Stone
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The Pirate Bay, the controversial BitTorrent tracking site in Sweden, has become ensnared in a grisly, high-profile scandal involving the online circulation of autopsy pictures of two murdered children. The incident is the latest of a string in which The Pirate Bay has hit the headlines because of its founders' unbending stance that changing their policies would impinge upon freedom of speech and access to information. In this latest dispute, the Swedish media are focusing on The Pirate Bay's refusal to remove the links to the torrents of photos uploaded to the internet by its users of photos of two dead children. The photos are from a police case file concerning the murder of ...
Russia says it must stake claim to Arctic resources
Post Date: 2008-09-12 23:26:47 by A K A Stone
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MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia must stake its claim to a slice of the Arctic's vast resources, the secretary of Russia's Security Council said on Friday at an unprecedented session of the council held on a desolate Arctic island. Russia, the world's second biggest oil exporter, is in a race with Canada, Denmark, Norway and the United States for control of the oil, gas and precious metals that would become more accessible if global warming shrinks the Arctic ice cap. Underlining Russia's claims to the region, Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev assembled the defence and interior ministers and the speakers of both houses of parliament for the meeting on the Arctic ...
Obama might pursue criminal charges against Bush
Post Date: 2008-09-04 07:58:58 by A K A Stone
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Democratic vice-presidential nominee Joe Biden said yesterday that he and running mate Barack Obama could pursue criminal charges against the Bush administration if they are elected in November. Biden's comments, first reported by ABC news, attracted little notice on a day dominated by the drama surrounding his Republican counterpart, Alaska governor Sarah Palin. But his statements represent the Democrats' strongest vow so far this year to investigate alleged misdeeds committed during the Bush years. "If there has been a basis upon which you can pursue someone for a criminal violation, they will be pursued," Biden said during a campaign event in Deerfield Beach, ...
Pakistan PM Survives Assassination Attempt
Post Date: 2008-09-04 07:32:50 by A K A Stone
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The Pakistani prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, survived an assassination attempt today, officials said. Shots were fired at Gilani's car in the capital, Islamabad, but he was not inside. It was going to the airport to collect him. The prime minister's press secretary, Zahid Bashir, said unknown assailants fired "multiple sniper shots" in a "murder attempt". Two bullets hit the front window on the driver's side of the black Mercedes limousine. "The driver reached Islamabad airport, but the prime minister and his staff were not travelling in the vehicles," said the interior minister, Kamal Shah. A security official told Associated Press the ...
Russian Parliament Votes to Recognize South Ossetia and Abkhazia
Post Date: 2008-08-25 11:59:17 by A K A Stone
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Both houses of the Russian parliament called on President Dmitry Medvedev to recognize the independence of two breakaway Georgian regions that sparked Russia’s first foreign military incursion since the Soviet era. “Today we are faced with, I’m not afraid to say, a historic decision, to call upon the president of the Russian Federation to recognize the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia,” Sergei Mironov, the speaker of the upper house, said in an address to lawmakers in Moscow today. South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which broke away from Georgia in wars in the early 1990s, have cited Kosovo’s Feb. 17 declaration of independence from Serbia as a precedent for ...
Bangladesh opposes Indian plan to fence border
Post Date: 2008-08-25 07:57:08 by A K A Stone
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DHAKA: An Indian plan to build more fencing on the border with Bangladesh will not stop illegal cattle trading, which leads to regular deaths in the area, a Bangladeshi official said on Monday. In recent years, India has erected a barbed wire fence along more than half of the 4,000-kilometre (2,500-mile) border in recent years. But Major Mahmudul Hasan of the Bangladesh Rifles said further fencing will not stop cattle trade. He said 59 people, including 34 Bangladeshis, 21 Indians and four others, had been in killed by Indian Border Security Forces (BSF) in the last six months. "Most of the killings are related to illegal cattle trading. If it was legal to trade cattle the killings ...
How the Soviets Drilled the Deepest Hole in the World
Post Date: 2008-08-25 07:17:51 by A K A Stone
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In the Cold War '60s, as the space race heated up, another race began: to the center of the earth. Well, perhaps the Soviets and Americans couldn't drill quite that deep, but they could try to get to the so-called Moho, more formally the Mohorovicic Discontinuity, the theorized but much-disputed boundary between the mostly solid crust and the magma-filled mantle. After the launch of an American drilling program to reach the boundary, the Russians joined the race to drill the deepest hole in the world. "Between 1960 and 1962, the combination of economic interest and national pride during the Space Race period inspired scientists of the Soviet Union to plan drilling a ...
Georgia: 'There are no men left here. How will I bury them?'
Post Date: 2008-08-24 19:39:35 by A K A Stone
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THE men who came to Gulnara Militaura's house seemed to know what they were looking for. They entered her kitchen and shot her husband and his brother in the head. For the next five days, as fighting raged outside, she cowered at home, sprinkling vinegar on the bodies to try to keep them from rotting. Now that the fighting between Georgia and Russia over the breakaway region of South Ossetia has subsided, killings like those are becoming the grist for competing claims of ethnic cleansing. Militaura, an ethnic Georgian, is accusing South Ossetians, who ally themselves with Russia, of killing her husband and his brother. Ethnic cleansing has haunted the borderlands of the old Soviet ...
Iran's Ahmadinejad in new verbal attack on Israel
Post Date: 2008-08-24 08:37:06 by A K A Stone
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Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad renewed his verbal attacks on arch-foe Israel on Saturday, accusing it of dragging the world into turmoil and predicting its demise. "About 2,000 organised Zionists and 7,000 to 8,000 agents of Zionism have dragged the world into turmoil," Ahmadinejad told a rally in the central Iranian city of Arak carried live on state television. He said that if the West does not restrain Zionism, "the powerful hand of the nations will clean these sources of corruption from the face of the earth," without specifying which nations. Iran does not recognise the Jewish state and Ahmadinejad has drawn international condemnation by repeatedly saying ...
Afghan leader denounces U.S.-led airstrike, saying 95 were killed
Post Date: 2008-08-24 07:56:22 by A K A Stone
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KABUL: President Hamid Karzai over the weekend strongly condemned a coalition airstrike that he said had killed up to 95 Afghan civilians - including 50 children - in a village in western Afghanistan and said his government would be announcing initiatives to prevent such heavy loss of civilian life. "Afghanistan takes every necessary measure to avoid and stop such tragic accidents happening in the future," he said. Government officials who traveled Saturday to the village of Azizabad in Herat Province said the death toll had risen to 95 from 76, making the Friday strike one of the deadliest bombing attacks on civilians in six years of the war. The U.S. military said Saturday ...
Margaret Thatcher's struggle with dementia revealed in daughter's memoir
Post Date: 2008-08-24 07:46:13 by A K A Stone
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Margaret Thatcher's struggle with dementia has been revealed in a new book by her daughter Carol. Her mother's gradual loss of memory, which began in 2000, is described in moving detail in the memoir. Ms Thatcher, a journalist, also discloses that she had to repeatedly break the "truly awful" news of the death of her father Sir Denis until the information sank in. In the book, "A Swim-On Part in the Goldfish Bowl: A Memoir" Ms Thatcher recalls how she first noticed her mother's failing memory during a lunch in 2000. Describing her mother's "blotting-paper brain" which had always absorbed vast amounts of information, she tells of her shock when ...
Coca-Cola celebrates Ramadan
Post Date: 2008-08-20 08:46:49 by A K A Stone
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Coca-Cola plans to celebrate Ramadan this year by decorating cans with a crescent moon and star – a widely recognized Islamic symbol. The moon and star can be found on at least 11 flags of Muslim countries, and now it will be featured on packaging in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Indonesia, Morocco, Tunisia and other Islamic countries during the Sept. 1-30 Muslim holiday, blogger Bob McCartney reported. Coca-Cola has hired a company named ATTIK to handle packaging, Brand Republic reports. Its Christmas cans are usually decorated with secular-themed images of Santa Claus, but McCartney asked the company whether it planned to introduce Christian symbols as well. "When I ...
China flaying animals alive Editor's Note: The descriptions and video of China's fur industry in this story will be disturbing to some readers.
Post Date: 2008-08-20 02:04:30 by A K A Stone
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VIDEO AT SOURCE The newest controversy over exports from China has caused nightmares for researchers documenting the abuse inflicted on animals bred and raised in tiny cages and then skinned alive for their fur. WND has reported multiple times on problems with exports from China, with poison found in pajamas, consumers warned against using ginger, an alert about the dangers from China's pickled vegetables and even the dangers from honey and fireworks. Now comes word from an extended investigation into the fur trade that China is estimated to produce approximately 85 percent of the world's fur products – and it has virtually no regulations or rules for the treatment of the ...
Russia rejects UN Georgia draft
Post Date: 2008-08-20 01:55:19 by A K A Stone
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Russia has rejected a draft UN Security Council resolution on Georgia, saying it contradicted the terms of last week's ceasefire deal. The draft text called on Russia to pull back its forces to the positions held before the current conflict. But Russia says the truce allows its troops to stay in a buffer zone on the Georgia side of South Ossetia's border. Moscow earlier dismissed a Nato warning that normal relations were impossible while its troops remained in Georgia. The conflict broke out on 7 August when Georgia launched an assault to wrest back control of the Moscow-backed breakaway region of South Ossetia, triggering a counter-offensive by Russian troops who advanced ...
Brits chase the news on L.A.'s dark streets
Post Date: 2008-08-20 01:52:34 by A K A Stone
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It was pushing 11 on a Friday night, and Austin Raishbrook wanted to be prowling the streets of Los Angeles looking for murder and mayhem. Mired in a pocket of messy downtown traffic, the 32-year-old British transplant clenched the wheel of his Police Interceptor Crown Victoria and cursed out loud. Every few seconds, he turned his attention to the laptop computer glowing beside him, checking for any fresh crash alerts on an internal California Highway Patrol website. One of the three radio scanners clipped to the visor above Raishbrook's head crackled to life. A Los Angeles Police Department dispatcher reported gun shots on 110th Street, near Broadway. A victim was lying in the ...
NATO pulls its punches on penalty against Russia
Post Date: 2008-08-20 01:47:44 by A K A Stone
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BRUSSELS, Belgium - NATO pulled its punches against Russia on Tuesday, suspending formal contacts as punishment for the Georgia invasion but bucking U.S. pressure for more severe penalties. The Russian ambassador to NATO played down the impact of the emergency meeting of the Western alliance. "The mountain gave birth to a mouse," said Dmitry Rogozin. Although the allies said they would not convene any more meetings of the NATO-Russia Council until Russian troops withdraw from Georgia, they bowed to concerns from Europe — which depends heavily on Russia for energy — and stopped short of adopting specific long-term steps to punish Moscow for its actions. "There ...
Russia Seizes U.S. Vehicles
Post Date: 2008-08-19 21:02:53 by A K A Stone
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Russian soldiers today held blindfolded Georgian servicemen at gunpoint and commandeered US Humvees in a dramatic sequence of events in Poti, a key Black Sea port. White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe stated that if Russia has seized any US military equipment in Georgia, it must return it immediately. In Poti, on the Black Sea, Russian forces blocked access to the naval and commercial ports this morning and towed the missile boat Dioskuria, one of the navy's most sophisticated vessels, out of sight of observers. A loud explosion was heard minutes later. Several hours later, an Associated Press photographer saw Russian trucks and armored personnel carriers leaving the port with about ...
AC/DC's 'Black Ice' Set For Release October 20th
Post Date: 2008-08-18 16:47:52 by A K A Stone
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Columbia Records announced today the October 20th release of AC/DC's widely-anticipated Black Ice, the band's first studio album in eight years. Black Ice features 15 new tracks from brothers Angus and Malcolm Young, Brian Johnson, Cliff Williams, and Phil Rudd. The album was produced by Brendan O'Brien at the Warehouse Studio in Vancouver, BC. "Rock 'N' Roll Train," the album's first single, will debut on August 28th. The video will premiere in September. And the band is set to kick off its first world tour since 2001 in late October. Black Ice will be sold in the US exclusively at Wal-Mart and Sam's Club retail locations at the special price of $ ...
Premature baby 'comes back to life'
Post Date: 2008-08-18 09:55:20 by A K A Stone
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A premature baby who was pronounced dead "came back to life" Sunday after five hours in Nahariya Hospital. The baby girl, who was in a cooler at the hospital, suddenly showed signs of life and was being treated in the premature baby unit. Doctors estimated that the cooler brought the fetus "back to life." The mother, 26, from a Western Galilee village, was in the fifth month of her pregnancy when she underwent a series of tests, during which it was discovered that she was suffering from internal bleeding and that the embryo had ceased to show signs of life. The woman underwent an abortion and the baby, weighing 610 grams, was extracted from her womb without a pulse, ...
Rounded up into torture camps: the ‘undesirables’ China doesn’t want you to see
Post Date: 2008-08-17 21:07:16 by A K A Stone
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Out in force: Security on patrol before the Olympic opening ceremony The bleak concrete walls topped with razor wire and the sentries in towers at the gates are a chilling reminder of a different era. On the nearby roads, heavily armed guards patrol relentlessly, checking both drivers and pedestrians, constantly alert. Meanwhile, less than 30 miles away, the world’s attention is focused on the world-famous ‘Bird’s Nest’ Olympic stadium and the other venues where a global audience of two billion is watching the Games and enjoying the spectacle of the ‘new’ China. The Beijing regime has deployed an army of 500,000 smiling volunteers to help foreigners find ...
Ukraine offers satellite defence co-operation with Europe and US
Post Date: 2008-08-17 13:31:26 by A K A Stone
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The proposal, made amid growing outrage among Russia's neighbours over its military campaign in Georgia, could see Ukraine added to Moscow's nuclear hitlist. A Russian general declared Poland a target for its arsenal after Warsaw signed a deal with Washington to host interceptor missiles for America's anti-nuclear shield. The move came as the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, signed a cease-fire deal that sets the stage for a Russian troop withdrawal after more than a week of warfare with its neighbour Georgia. The deal calls for both Russian and Georgian forces to pull back to positions they held before fighting erupted on August 8. As of last night, though, there was ...
British Papers Paid Hundreds Of Thousands To Families Of Alleged Liquid Bombers: Why?
Post Date: 2008-08-17 00:49:01 by A K A Stone
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Mistakes were made when the so-called "Liquid Bombers" were arrested, and in two instances, British national dailies reported information which turned out to be false. These false reports led to claims of defamation which have cost the publishers hundreds of thousands to settle out of court. In the first instance, it was reported that a British man had been arrested, held overnight, and released without charges. But later a consortium of newspapers published an apology saying he had never been arrested at all, and they paid £170,000 (about $330,000) to settle a claim filed on his behalf. The second instance concerned a man about whom many different reports were published. ...
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