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unhappycamper

unhappycamper's Journal
unhappycamper's Journal
December 15, 2013

The US Needs To Get Kashmir Issue Resolved in Accordance with UN Resolutions

http://watchingamerica.com/News/228044/us-needs-to-get-kashmir-issue-resolvedin-accordance-with-un-resolutions/

The US Needs To Get Kashmir Issue Resolved in Accordance with UN Resolutions
Nawai-Waqt, Pakistan
By Editorial
Translated By Fauzia Iqbal
12 December 2013
Edited by Bora Mici

Rejecting the possibility of acting as mediator in the Kashmir issue, the U.S. has said that no shortcut exists to a solution; Pakistan and India will need to show courage in tackling this. Meanwhile, a "Black Day" was observed in occupied Kashmir on International Human Rights Day.

The U.S. is the world's superpower today. Its name wields authority over the whole world, and even the United Nations does not draw a breath without its permission. Therefore, instead of offering advice to Pakistan and India, the U.S. needs to bring about the implementation of the U.N. resolutions that already exist on the Kashmir issue, and the opinions of the people of Kashmir need to be heard about what they want.

For the past 65 years, India has been overwhelming Kashmir with its tyranny and barbarism, but besides human rights organizations, world powers are also playing the role of silent spectators. The previous day, on the occasion of International Human Rights Day, the people of the occupied valley observed a "Black Day." They carried out silent sit-ins and even demonstrated in front of the U.N. office. Nothing had the slightest effect on the custodians of peace.

The previous day, Chief Minister of Punjab Mian Shahbaz Sharif also emphasized this very point — that wars are not the solution to issues and disputes — problems should be resolved by means of discussions. Since Pakistan and India both possess nuclear power, any nuclear conflict between them could destroy a large section of humanity. According to a recent report of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, 2 billion people could be killed in the region in the event of a nuclear war between Pakistan and India. India needs to act with responsibility and move toward resolving the Kashmir issue in accordance with U.N. resolutions.
December 15, 2013

Afghanistan: All That for This …

http://watchingamerica.com/News/227764/afghanistan-all-that-for-this/

After 12 years of war against the Taliban and al-Qaida, the restoration of stoning is one more sign of the failure of Karzai and the West.


Afghanistan: All That for This …
Le Point, France
By Michel Colomes
Translated By Laura Napoli
4 December 2013
Edited by Anita Dixon

If, before the end of December, President Hamid Karzai has not signed the long-term security agreement put forward by Barack Obama, the last 75,000 soldiers, mostly Americans, who are trying to maintain a semblance of security in Afghanistan, will leave with their weapons and equipment, without leaving behind some $4 billion of annual aid or the 15,000 foreign troops contemplated by the agreement to help the Afghan army fight terrorism and especially to continue the education and training of local soldiers.

However, after having accepted the principle ideas, Hamid Karzai, who finishes his presidency in April, has now advanced the conditions for his signature: notably, freeing the last 17 Guantanamo prisoners and receiving commitments from foreign soldiers to no longer raid Afghan houses "without being invited."

In reality, the president that the Americans chose nearly 12 years ago to the day at the Petersburg Conference, on whom they have succeeded in imposing the nomination and re-election, finishes his last term and confirms to all that it was a terrible choice to distinguish him among his peers. He has revealed himself to be as corrupt as his brother Ahmed, the notorious drug trafficker, killed in Kandahar in 2011. And he has presented a weak front, which in reality serves as a cover for trickery and manipulation. In fact, Karzai, despite the constant support he receives from the White House, has never tried to change his country, nor to banish the demons that have made his country one of the main providers of trafficked narcotics.

After 12 years during which Western nongovernmental organizations and NATO soldiers tried, sometimes at the cost of their agents’ lives, to empower women, to promote education and to civilize tribal justice, the Afghan government is contemplating returning to barbaric and medieval practices. According to Human Rights Watch, in the proposed new penal code, death by stoning for adultery will be restored. The threat of this restoration led the leader of the Paris Bar, Christiane Feral-Schuhl, to write her Afghan colleague to make him aware of her dismay and to tell him that such a measure would cause the Bar to cease all contact with their Afghan colleagues.
December 15, 2013

My Country: Spies For Hire

http://watchingamerica.com/News/228038/my-nations-adware-is-for-sale/



We could build a National Center of Spying (On Us) and hire some young, ambitious and unemployed Jordanians. They could translate these conversations into English, explain the colloquial terms, concisely summarize them and submit them to the Americans in completely finished form.

My Country: Spies For Hire
Al-Dustur, Jordan
By Yousuf Ghishan
Translated By Phil Hoffman
12 December 2013
Edited by Bora Mici

According to reports originally published in The Washington Post and The Guardian — the work of American journalist Glenn Greenwald — Jordan is third among the nations that the U.S. spies on the most, second only to Iran and Pakistan.

The report states that 7.12 billion "acts of spying" have been committed, including the gathering of electronic communications and telephone conversations coming in and out of Jordan. Jordan sits on this list directly after Pakistan, with 13.5 billion acts of spying, while Iran is in first place, with 14 billion.

The message to readers is that America, that loving darling, does what is expensive before what is cheap. The U.S. has chosen to forgo providing milk for its children or crutches to the elderly in order to focus on spying and listening in on the gossip of teenagers, our choice of toothbrush or what type of pants we are wearing. There have been 7 billion acts of spying on our country?

There is no doubt that this has cost several billion dollars, but allow me to assume that it has only cost $1 billion — forget the rest. Let me suggest that the [Jordanian] foreign minister start a campaign, in cooperation with the Ministry of Planning, called "e-Back." This would convince the Americans to spend billions of dollars more, so that we reach a point where we send a them copy of every email, tweet, Facebook post and Instagram picture we produce, even those that advertise male enhancement. Sending copies of all these things to U.S. intelligence agencies would spare them the trouble of collecting them, but it would all have to be translated.
December 15, 2013

Is the West’s Dry Spell Really a Megadrought?

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/is-the-wests-dry-spell-really-a-megadrought-16824



Is the West’s Dry Spell Really a Megadrought?
By Bobby Magill
Published: December 12th, 2013

SAN FRANCISCO — The drought that has been afflicting most of the Western states for the past 13 years may be a “megadrought,” and the likelihood is high that this century could see a multi-decade dry spell like nothing else seen over the past 1,000 years, according to research presented at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting on Wednesday and Thursday.

Today, drought or abnormally dry conditions are affecting every state west of the Mississippi River and many on the East Coast, with much of the Southwest under long-term severe, extreme or exceptional drought conditions. While drought conditions nationwide are down this year, they remain entrenched in the West.

Since 2000, the West has seen landscape-level changes to its forests as giant wildfires have swept through the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada, bark beetles have altered the ecology of forests by killing countless trees and western cities have begun to come to terms with water shortages made worse by these changes as future snowpack and rainfall becomes less and less certain in a changing climate.

“The current drought could be classified as a megadrought — 13 years running,” paleoclimatologist Edward Cook, director of the Tree Ring Laboratory at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., said at an AGU presentation Wednesday night. “There’s no indication it’ll be getting any better in the near term.”
December 15, 2013

Like The Iraq War, Media Fails To Report On Climate Change Accurately

http://cleantechnica.com/2013/12/11/media-fails-report-climate-change-accurately-like-iraq-war/

Like The Iraq War, Media Fails To Report On Climate Change Accurately

[center]Originally published on Skeptical Science.
By Stephan Lewandowsky.[/center]

“Iraq is developing a long-range ballistic missile system that could carry weapons of mass destruction up to 700 miles.” Iraq is progressing towards “dirty bombs that spew radioactivity, mobile bio-weapons facilities, and a new long-range ballistic missile.” An Iraqi defector “tells of work on at least 20 hidden weapons sites.” It is an “undisputed fact” that September 11 attacker Mohamed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence officers in Prague.



Those claims appeared in mainstream newspapers during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. All those claims were false. The nonexistence of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) in Iraq immediately prior to the invasion and the absence of links between Iraq and al-Qaida eventually became the official U.S. position with the Duelfer Report and the report of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

A decade later, those media failures are relevant not only because of the war’s six-figure death toll and because the Iraqi per capita GDP has so far failed to return to prewar levels, but also because they remind us that the media, including highly reputable newspapers, can sometimes get things quite wrong.

A similar media failure is arguably under way this very moment with regard to climate change. The most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC) concluded with near certainty that human economic activity is responsible for ongoing global warming, and some of the largest insurance companies on the planet have blamed the increase in losses from extreme weather events to climate-related disasters.
December 15, 2013

Fracking Hell: what it’s really like to live next to a shale gas well

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/12/14/fracking-hell-what-its-really-like-to-live-next-to-a-shale-gas-well/



Nausea, headaches and nosebleeds, constant drilling, slumping property prices – welcome to Ponder, Texas.

Fracking Hell: what it’s really like to live next to a shale gas well
By Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian
Saturday, December 14, 2013 7:55 EST

Veronica Kronvall can, even now, remember how excited she felt about buying her house in 2007. It was the first home she had ever owned and, to celebrate, her aunt fitted out the kitchen in Kronvall’s favourite colour, purple: everything from microwave to mixing bowls. A cousin took pictures of her lying on the floor of the room that would become her bedroom. She planted roses and told herself she would learn how to garden.

What Kronvall did not imagine at the time – even here in north Texas, the pumping heart of the oil and gas industry – was that four years later an energy company would drill five wells behind her home. The closest two are within 300ft of her tiny patch of garden, and their green pipes and tanks loom over the fence. As the drilling began, Kronvall, 52, began having nosebleeds, nausea and headaches. Her home lost nearly a quarter of its value and some of her neighbours went into foreclosure. “It turned a peaceful little life into a bit of a nightmare,” she says.

Energy analysts in the US have been as surprised as Kronvall at how fast fracking has proliferated. Until five years ago, America’s oil and gas production had been in steady decline as reservoirs of conventional sources dried up. Then a Texas driller, George Mitchell, began trying out new technologies on the Barnett Shale, the geological formation that lies under the city of Fort Worth, Texas, and the smaller towns to the north, where Kronvall lives. Mitchell did not invent the technique. Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, was first used in the 1940s to get the gas out of conventional wells. As the well shaft descended into the layer of shale, the driller would blast 2m-4m gallons of water, sand and a cocktail of chemicals down the shaft at high pressure, creating thousands of tiny cracks in the rock to free the gas.

Mitchell’s innovation was to combine the technology with directional drilling, turning a downward drill bit at a 90-degree angle to drill parallel to the ground for thousands of feet. It took him more than 15 years of drilling holes all over the Barnett Shale to come up with the right mix of water and chemicals, but eventually he found a way to make it commercially viable to get at the methane in the tightly bound layers of shale. The new technology has turned the Barnett Shale into the largest producible reserve of onshore natural gas in the US. Other operators, borrowing from Mitchell’s work, began drilling in Colorado, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania and, most recently, California. More than 15 million Americans now live within a mile of an oil or gas well, 6 million of them in Texas.
December 15, 2013

Afghan President Hamid Karzai says he no longer trusts the U.S.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/12/14/afghan-president-hamid-karzai-says-he-no-longer-trusts-the-u-s/



Afghan President Hamid Karzai says he no longer trusts the U.S.
By Agence France-Presse
Saturday, December 14, 2013 8:25 EST

Visiting Afghan President Hamid Karzai said in New Delhi on Saturday he no longer “trusts” the United States, accusing the Americans of saying one thing and doing another in his troubled homeland.

Karzai’s statement to journalists came a day after he insisted he would not be “intimidated” into signing a security pact allowing US troops in Afghanistan to stay on after next year.

“I don’t trust them,” Karzai said in a wide-ranging discussion at a local hotel in which he singled out a letter US President Barack Obama wrote last month assuring him that US forces would “respect” the safety of Afghans in their homes.

Karzai was speaking on the second day of a three-day visit to India during which the United States hopes New Delhi can persuade him to sign the troubled troop deal.
December 14, 2013

Afterburned? Residents in the F-35 Flight Path Share Their Views on the Plane

http://www.7dvt.com/2013afterburned-residents-f-35-flight-path-share-their-views-plane



Kelley Sims

Afterburned? Residents in the F-35 Flight Path Share Their Views on the Plane
By Charles Eichacker (12.11.13)

U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy stood with the top brass but sounded a populist note at a press conference last week celebrating the U.S. Air Force’s announcement that 18 F-35 fighter planes would fly out of Burlington International Airport.

“I’ve never seen such a grassroots effort in this state,” Leahy remarked to 200 members of the Vermont Air National Guard.

But for some people who make their homes near the airport, Leahy’s statement didn’t convey the whole picture.

“Yeah, there’s broad grassroots support. But there’s also broad grassroots opposition,” said Julian Portilla, a Winooski resident and associate professor at Champlain College who counts himself among the opponents.
December 14, 2013

Turkey delivers first ‘world-class’ center fuselage for F-35

http://www.worldtribune.com/2013/12/13/turkey-delivers-first-world-class-center-fuselage-for-f-35/

Turkey delivers first ‘world-class’ center fuselage for F-35
Friday, December 13th, 2013

NKARA — Turkey has delivered its first fuselage for the U.S.-origin Joint Strike Fighter.

The state-owned Turkish Aerospace Industries supplied the first center fuselage of the F-35. On Dec. 11, TAI completed the delivery to Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin in a ceremony in Ankara.

“Delivery of this high quality, affordable center fuselage on time has been another major milestone,” TAI president Muharrem Dortkasli said. “TAI will continue utilizing its capability and capacity throughout the life of the program until 2040s.”

TAI has been a supplier to Northrop of the center fuselage of the JSF in a program worth up to $4 billion. The Turkish project required U.S. training and help in building production facilities for the assembly. Turkey has been a partner in the JSF program and plans an initial procurement of two fifth-generation aircraft.



unhappycamper comment: The outsourcing continues.
December 14, 2013

Controversial F-35 purchase could bank Canadian businesses $9.9B

http://globalnews.ca/news/1022291/controversial-f-35-purchase-could-bank-canadian-businesses-9-9-billion/

Controversial F-35 purchase could bank Canadian businesses $9.9B
By Murray Brewster The Canadian Press
December 10, 2013 7:55 pm

OTTAWA – Canada’s aerospace industry could be in line for slightly more benefits than previously estimated, if the Harper government decides to buy the oft-maligned F-35.

Documents tabled late Tuesday, as Parliament adjourned for its Christmas break, project that businesses in this country could land as much as $9.9 billion in contracts to construct and sustain parts for the Lockheed Martin-built stealth fighter.

The last estimate, tabled in the summer, pegged the potential industrial benefits at $9.4 billion.

The vast majority of that figure – $8.2 billion – would accrue throughout the projected life of the program under the 32 contacts already signed with U.S. defence giant, which gives companies from participating nations premium access to the work.

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