BBC NEWS | Middle East | Iran film 'to tell sailors' tale'

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Iran film 'to tell sailors' tale'

Iran film 'to tell sailors' tale'
By Frances Harrison
BBC News, Tehran



The Iranian military says it will soon release a film documenting the arrest, interrogation and statements by UK sailors held in Iran for two weeks.
It said it was a huge scandal for the UK military that some of the sailors had been allowed to sell their stories.

The military will release a CD and book about the arrest of the sailors - or, as it calls them, "British aggressors".

The statement came from the culture and propaganda office of the joint chief of staff of Iran's armed forces.

The suggestion is this film will prove Iran's contention that it treated the sailors well and they confessed to entering Iranian waters of their own volition.

The Iranian military has now supported the line of the foreign ministry, saying the British government forced the group to refute their earlier statements, making them read from a prepared text.

The Iranian military also says Britain has put on a childish show after the release of its naval personnel and instead of welcoming Iran's compassionate attitude, the UK again showed its aggressive nature and ignorance of international law.

It seems Iran and Britain are increasingly engaged in a media war over the sailors, trading accusations over their treatment nearly a week after they were set free.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/6542599.stm

Published: 2007/04/10 16:49:19 GMT

U.S. military develops Robocop armour for soldiers

UK DAILYMAIL
We may have seen it all before in science-fiction films. But the bionic warrior is in fact a vision of real-life warfare in the 21st century. U.S. defence chiefs hope to have their troops kitted out in the outlandish combat gear as soon as 2020.

Included in the Pentagon's Future Warrior Concept are a powerful exoskeleton, a self-camouflaging outer layer that adapts to changing environments and a helmet which
translates a soldier's voice into any foreign language.


full res image of the new armor

The future soldier will also benefit from 'intelligent' armour, which remains light and flexible until it senses an approaching bullet, then tenses to become bulletproof.

Perhaps worryingly, several of the planned enhancements seem to owe more than a little to Hollywood blockbusters such as Robocop, Aliens and Predator.

But officials are quick to point out that many of these systems are already working in prototype form, or are refinements of proven technologies.

Some of the blueprints will be unworkable without eagerly awaited advances in nanotechnology, but researchers remain confident. And perhaps with good reason.

The sheer scale of U.S. military research spending and the pace of recent advances in aircraft stealth technology and guided precision bombs are staggering.

Project specialist Jean-Louis DeGay, a former captain in 75th Ranger Regiment, said: "We're already trialling equipment and technologies that did not exist a few years ago.

"The air force has just debuted its new stun gun and five years after the concept of an exoskeleton was first discussed, we have fully functioning prototypes."

He told Soldier magazine: "Five years ago, nobody thought we'd have a portable hydrogen fuel cell, but we've got them now.

"They're functioning, and we're just trying to make them smaller. And if I'm honest, nothing speeds up the development of technology like war."

If the U.S. military's vision of the future is even half-right, Britain's armed forces will have their work cut out trying to keep up.

Even comparatively understated attempts to improve our troops' battlefield technology, such as the Bowman digital battlefield radio system, have been blighted by years of delays and embarrassing technical blunders.

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Still think your not living in an orwellian twightlight zone? Think again.

School plans 1st non-segregated prom - Race & Ethnicity - MSNBC.com

School plans 1st non-segregated prom - Race & Ethnicity - MSNBC.com

School plans 1st non-segregated prom
After decades of separate functions, students hope to unite behind dance
The Associated Press
Updated: 10:11 a.m. ET April 10, 2007
ASHBURN, Ga. - Breaking from tradition, high school students in this small town are getting together for this year’s prom.

Prom night at Turner County High has long been an evening of de facto segregation: white students organized their own unofficial prom, while black students did the same.

This year’s group of seniors didn’t want that legacy. When the four senior class officers — two whites and two blacks — met with Principal Chad Stone at the start of the school year, they had more on their minds than changes to the school’s dress code.

They wanted an all-school prom. They wanted everyone invited.

On April 21, they’ll have their wish. The town’s auditorium will be transformed into a tropical scene, and for the first time, every junior and senior, regardless of race, will be invited.

The prom’s theme: Breakaway.

“Everybody says that’s just how it’s always been. It’s just the way of this very small town,” said James Hall, a 17-year-old black student who is the senior class president.

“But it’s time for a change.”

There are excited announcements of the upcoming dance plastered all over the school, where about 55 percent of students are black and most of the rest are white.

A makeshift countdown to the prom is displayed as a cardboard cutout on a main hallway. Student council members canvass the hallways, asking students to buy a $25 ticket and be a part of history. In the cafeteria, images of palm trees and waterfalls brighten up the sterile walls. “The First Ever!” a poster exclaims. “Got your haircut?”

Difficult task
Students say the self-segregation that splits social circles in school mirrors the attitude of this town of 4,000 people. So getting every student to break from the past could be a difficult task.

With prom night about two weeks away, only half of the 160 upper-class students have bought tickets. And there’s talk around the school that some white students might throw a competing party at a nearby lake.

“Everyone is saying they’re not going to the school prom,” said Steven Tuller, a 17-year-old white junior who doesn’t plan to attend either event because he wants to wait until he’s a senior. “They’re saying it’s tradition.”

Yet Turner County High already has defied tradition this year. The school abandoned its practice of naming separate white and black homecoming queens. Instead, a mixed-race student was named the county’s first solo homecoming queen.


'Life's got to move on'
Some alumni welcome change at Turner County High.

“People still think of how life was 20, 30 years ago,” said Keith Massey, a 1990 graduate who now runs the popular Keith-A-Que restaurant in town, about 75 miles south of Macon. “And life’s got to move on.”

Massey recalls an attempt to integrate one of the prom parties when he was in school, but few whites showed up. Attempts to organize a school-wide prom in recent years failed because of a lack of student support.

Stone, serving his first year as the school’s principal, has been enthusiastic about an integrated prom. He’s funneling $5,000 of his meager discretionary fund to hire a DJ and buy decorations, and he’s persuaded a photographer to set up shop at the civic center to snap photos of the couples before the dance.

“This senior class is a close-knit group from top to bottom, and they want to do what’s right,” said Stone, who is white. “They wanted a full school prom. And I told them if they would do it, I’d do them right.”

© 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18034102/

Revolution, flashmobs, and brain chips. A grim vision of the future

the guardian

Information chips implanted in the brain. Electromagnetic pulse weapons. The middle classes becoming revolutionary, taking on the role of Marx's proletariat. The population of countries in the Middle East increasing by 132%, while Europe's drops as fertility falls. "Flashmobs" - groups rapidly mobilised by criminal gangs or terrorists groups.

This is the world in 30 years' time envisaged by a Ministry of Defence team responsible for painting a picture of the "future strategic context" likely to face Britain's armed forces. It includes an "analysis of the key risks and shocks". Rear Admiral Chris Parry, head of the MoD's Development, Concepts & Doctrine Centre which drew up the report, describes the assessments as "probability-based, rather than predictive".

The 90-page report comments on widely discussed issues such as the growing economic importance of India and China, the militarisation of space, and even what it calls "declining news quality" with the rise of "internet-enabled, citizen-journalists" and pressure to release stories "at the expense of facts". It includes other, some frightening, some reassuring, potential developments that are not so often discussed.

New weapons

An electromagnetic pulse will probably become operational by 2035 able to destroy all communications systems in a selected area or be used against a "world city" such as an international business service hub. The development of neutron weapons which destroy living organs but not buildings "might make a weapon of choice for extreme ethnic cleansing in an increasingly populated world". The use of unmanned weapons platforms would enable the "application of lethal force without human intervention, raising consequential legal and ethical issues". The "explicit use" of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons and devices delivered by unmanned vehicles or missiles.

Technology

By 2035, an implantable "information chip" could be wired directly to the brain. A growing pervasiveness of information communications technology will enable states, terrorists or criminals, to mobilise "flashmobs", challenging security forces to match this potential agility coupled with an ability to concentrate forces quickly in a small area.

Marxism

"The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx," says the report. The thesis is based on a growing gap between the middle classes and the super-rich on one hand and an urban under-class threatening social order: "The world's middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest". Marxism could also be revived, it says, because of global inequality. An increased trend towards moral relativism and pragmatic values will encourage people to seek the "sanctuary provided by more rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism".

Pressures leading to social unrest

By 2010 more than 50% of the world's population will be living in urban rather than rural environments, leading to social deprivation and "new instability risks", and the growth of shanty towns. By 2035, that figure will rise to 60%. Migration will increase. Globalisation may lead to levels of international integration that effectively bring inter-state warfare to an end. But it may lead to "inter-communal conflict" - communities with shared interests transcending national boundaries and resorting to the use of violence.

Population and Resources

The global population is likely to grow to 8.5bn in 2035, with less developed countries accounting for 98% of that. Some 87% of people under the age of 25 live in the developing world. Demographic trends, which will exacerbate economic and social tensions, have serious implications for the environment - including the provision of clean water and other resources - and for international relations. The population of sub-Saharan Africa will increase over the period by 81%, and that of Middle Eastern countries by 132%.

The Middle East

The massive population growth will mean the Middle East, and to a lesser extent north Africa, will remain highly unstable, says the report. It singles out Saudi Arabia, the most lucrative market for British arms, with unemployment levels of 20% and a "youth bulge" in a state whose population has risen from 7 million to 27 million since 1980. "The expectations of growing numbers of young people [in the whole region] many of whom will be confronted by the prospect of endemic unemployment ... are unlikely to be met," says the report.

Islamic militancy

Resentment among young people in the face of unrepresentative regimes "will find outlets in political militancy, including radical political Islam whose concept of Umma, the global Islamic community, and resistance to capitalism may lie uneasily in an international system based on nation-states and global market forces", the report warns. The effects of such resentment will be expressed through the migration of youth populations and global communications, encouraging contacts between diaspora communities and their countries of origin.

Tension between the Islamic world and the west will remain, and may increasingly be targeted at China "whose new-found materialism, economic vibrancy, and institutionalised atheism, will be an anathema to orthodox Islam".

Iran

Iran will steadily grow in economic and demographic strength and its energy reserves and geographic location will give it substantial strategic leverage. However, its government could be transformed. "From the middle of the period," says the report, "the country, especially its high proportion of younger people, will want to benefit from increased access to globalisation and diversity, and it may be that Iran progressively, but unevenly, transforms...into a vibrant democracy."

Terrorism

Casualties and the amount of damage inflicted by terrorism will stay low compared to other forms of coercion and conflict. But acts of extreme violence, supported by elements within Islamist states, with media exploitation to maximise the impact of the "theatre of violence" will persist. A "terrorist coalition", the report says, including a wide range of reactionary and revolutionary rejectionists such as ultra-nationalists, religious groupings and even extreme environmentalists, might conduct a global campaign of greater intensity".

Climate change

There is "compelling evidence" to indicate that climate change is occurring and that the atmosphere will continue to warm at an unprecedented rate throughout the 21st century. It could lead to a reduction in north Atlantic salinity by increasing the freshwater runoff from the Arctic. This could affect the natural circulation of the north Atlantic by diminishing the warming effect of ocean currents on western Europe. "The drop in temperature might exceed that of the miniature ice age of the 17th and 18th centuries."

Mysterious disappearance of US bees creating a buzz

afp

US beekeepers have been stung in recent months by the mysterious disappearance of millions of bees threatening honey supplies as well as crops which depend on the insects for pollination.

Bee numbers on parts of the east coast and in Texas have fallen by more than 70 percent, while California has seen colonies drop by 30 to 60 percent.

According to estimates from the US Department of Agriculture, bees are vanishing across a total of 22 states, and for the time being no one really knows why.

"Approximately 40 percent of my 2,000 colonies are currently dead and this is the greatest winter colony mortality I have ever experienced in my 30 years of beekeeping," apiarist Gene Brandi, from the California State Beekeepers Association, told Congress recently.

It is normal for hives to see populations fall by some 20 percent during the winter, but the sharp loss of bees is causing concern, especially as domestic US bee colonies have been steadily decreasing since 1980.

There are some 2.4 million professional hives in the country, according to the Agriculture Department, 25 percent fewer than at the start of the 1980s.

And the number of beekeepers has halved.

The situation is so bad, that beekeepers are now calling for some kind of government intervention, warning the flight of the bees could be catastrophic for crop growers.

Domestic bees are essential for pollinating some 90 varieties of vegetables and fruits, such as apples, avocados, and blueberries and cherries.

"The pollination work of honey bees increases the yield and quality of United States crops by approximately 15 billion dollars annually including six billion in California," Brandi said.

California's almond industry alone contributes two billion dollars to the local economy, and depends on 1.4 million bees which are brought from around the US every year to help pollinate the trees, he added.

The phenomenon now being witnessed across the United States has been dubbed "colony collapse disorder," or CCD, by scientists as they seek to explain what is causing the bees to literally disappear in droves.

The usual suspects to which bees are known to be vulnerable such as the varroa mite, an external parasite which attacks honey bees and which can wipe out a hive, appear not to be the main cause.

"CCD is associated with unique symptoms, not seen in normal collapses associated with varroa mites and honey bee viruses or in colony deaths due to winter kill," entomologist Diana Cox-Foster told the Congress committee.

In cases of colony collapse disorder, flourishing hives are suddenly depopulated leaving few, if any, surviving bees behind.

The queen bee, which is the only one in the hive allowed to reproduce, is found with just a handful of young worker bees and a reserve of food.

Curiously though no dead bees are found either inside or outside the hive.

The fact that other bees or parasites seem to shun the emptied hives raises suspicions that some kind of toxin or chemical is keeping the insects away, Cox-Foster said.

Those bees found in such devastated colonies also all seem to be infected with multiple micro-organisms, many of which are known to be behind stress-related illness in bees.

Scientists working to unravel the mysteries behind CCD believe a new pathogen may be the cause, or a new kind of chemical product which could be weakening the insects' immune systems.

The finger of suspicion is being pointed at agriculture pesticides such as the widely-used neonicotinoides, which are already known to be poisonous to bees.

France saw a huge fall in its bee population in the 1990s, blamed on the insecticide Gaucho which has now been banned in the country.

Government Report: Bio-Weapons Could Be Used To Combat Overpopulation

PRISONPLANET
A British government Ministry of Defence report outlines a nightmare future society in which the population are forced to accept brain chips, immigration and urbanization ravages communities, class warfare ensues, and biological and neutron weapons are used to combat overpopulation.

The MoD's Development, Concepts & Doctrine Center drew up the document to crystallize the "future strategic context" likely to face Britain's armed forces, according to a report in the London Guardian today.

Since every deliberate action of government and industry is working to realize this future, we should look at this as a strategy plan rather than a warning of things to come.

The report hypothesizes what the world will be like in under 30 years and is an "analysis of the key risks and shocks" the planet is likely to face. It's predictions include;

- The development of neutron weapons that destroy living organs but not buildings and "make a weapon of choice for extreme ethnic cleansing in an increasingly populated world." Such weapons would be dispersed by means of unmanned vehicles, leading to "application of lethal force without human intervention, raising consequential legal and ethical issues."

- Within 30 years implanted brain chips as standard for all citizens in developed nations.

- A mass revolt on behalf of the middle classes of the developed world in opposition to rampant immigration, an urban under-class and the deterioration of social order.

- The revival of Marxism as a replacement for religion in an increasingly morally relativist age.

- Unchecked globalization that effectively ends the nation state and leads to wars based on territorial belief systems rather than country against country.

- A sharp decline in the population of white Europeans but an 81% increase in the population of sub-Saharan Africa and that of Middle Eastern countries by 132%.

- Endemic unemployment, instability and threat to the social order as a result of population increase.

- The emergence of a "terrorist coalition," an alliance of belief systems that oppose the state, from environmentalists to "ultra-nationalists" and remnants of religious groups.

The clear implication from this report is that any political or religious group that expresses opposition to the atheistic and dictatorial agenda of the state will be collectively demonized as terrorists and targeted for elimination and ethnic cleansing.

This is the very new world order that the establishment have sought to create by allowing rampant immigration, using the progress of technology to enslave us, launching endless war and shaping the course of history to construct a prison planet.

The elite are deliberately steering world events and engaging in psychological warfare to achieve this self-fulfilling apocalypse. They are hell-bent on manufacturing an end-times scenario similar to that described in Revelations, and whether you believe in the Bible or not, our future is being decided by maniacal psychopaths sworn to destroy humanity.

Every time we study government white papers and strategy documents, whether it be RAND, PNAC or any other major think tank, we come across an obsession with thinning the population by means of horrific acts of ethnic cleansing. In this instance, the plan isn't even veiled under the umbrella of terrorism, it clearly implies that states will deploy weapons of mass destruction to wipe out huge swathes of the population, and particularly those who express opposition to government.

"...advanced forms of biological warfare that can target specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool."

Who wrote these words in their own strategy document? The Nazis? The regime of Pol Pot?

No, it was Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, William Kristol, Donald Rumsfeld and the rest of the Neo-Con collaborators that formed the Project For a New American Century - the ideological framework of the Bush administration.

Armed Forces Journal, a mouthpiece for the military-industrial complex, last year carried a strategy plan for completely redrawing the borders of the Middle East written by retired Major Ralph Peters.

The document cites peak oil, an economic crash in 2008 and global warming as reasons for a chaotic convergence that will require harsh action on behalf of government.

"Oh, and one other dirty little secret from 5,000 years of history," writes Peters, "Ethnic cleansing works."

"There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing."

Ethnic cleansing is also popular amongst the establishment scientific community who advocate mass scale eugenics programs to "cull" humanity down to manageable levels. One such example is Dr. Erik Pianka, who made headlines last year when he gave a speech to the Texas Academy of Science in which he advocated the need to exterminate 90% of the population through the airborne ebola virus. The vast majority of his audience, students, scientists and professors alike, stood and cheered when Pianka labeled humanity a bacteria that had to be eliminated.

Similar sentiments are echoed by people like Prince Philip, who in the foreword to his 1986 book If I Were an Animal, wrote, "In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation."

"The simplest answer is that the world's population should be about two billion, and we've got about six billion now," media mogul Ted Turner told E Magazine, an environmentalist publication.

Turner went even further in an interview with Audubon Magazine.

"A total world population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal."

In a 1991 interview with the UNESCO Courier, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, the famous Emmy award winning film producer who went on to be a kingpin of the environmental movement said,

"It's terrible to have to say this. World population must be stabilized and to do that we must eliminate 350,000 people per day."

The global elite and the military-industrial complex have already sworn to inflict genocide to ethnically cleanse world population down to levels that are more easy to control and enslave. This is the ultimate end game of the New World Order - giving birth to the apocalypse and manufacturing hell on earth.

No longer can this be dismissed as a paranoid conspiracy theory when the very architects of this horror are openly discussing it on a regular basis in their own planning documents.