20090622
FYI: Bush sanctions 'black ops' against Iran
Do you remember this?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1552784/Bush-sanctions-black-ops-against-Iran.html
Bush sanctions 'black ops' against Iran
President George W Bush has given the CIA approval to launch covert "black" operations to achieve regime change in
Mr Bush has signed an official document endorsing CIA plans for a propaganda and disinformation campaign intended to destabilise, and eventually topple, the theocratic rule of the mullahs.
Under the plan, pressure will be brought to bear on the Iranian economy by manipulating the country's currency and international financial transactions.
Details have also emerged of a covert scheme to sabotage the Iranian nuclear programme, which United Nations nuclear watchdogs said last week could lead to a bomb within three years.
Security officials in Washington have disclosed that Teheran has been sold defective parts on the black market in a bid to delay and disrupt its uranium enrichment programme, the precursor to building a nuclear weapon.
A security source in the US told The Sunday Telegraph that the presidential directive, known as a "non-lethal presidential finding", would give the CIA the right to collect intelligence on home soil, an area that is usually the preserve of the FBI, from the many Iranian exiles and emigrés within the US.
"Iranians in America have links with their families at home, and they are a good two-way source of information," he said.
The CIA will also be allowed to supply communications equipment which would enable opposition groups in Iran to work together and bypass internet censorship by the clerical regime.
The plans, which significantly increase American pressure on Iran, were leaked just days before a meeting in Iraq tomorrow between the US ambassador, Ryan Crocker, and his Iranian counterpart.
Tensions have been raised by Iran's seizure of what the US regards as a series of "hostages" in recent weeks. Three academics who hold dual Iranian-American citizenship are being held, accused of working to undermine the Iranian government or of spying.
An Iranian-American reporter with Radio Free Europe, who was visiting Iran, has had her passport seized. Another Iranian American, businessman Ali Shakeri, was believed to have been detained as he tried to leave Teheran last week.
The US responded with a show of force by the navy, sending nine warships, including two aircraft carriers, into the Persian Gulf.
Authorisation of the new CIA mission, which will not be allowed to use lethal force, appears to suggest that President Bush has, for the time being, ruled out military action against Iran.
Bruce Riedel, until six months ago the senior CIA official who dealt with Iran, said: "Vice-President [Dick] Cheney helped to lead the side favouring a military strike, but I think they have concluded that a military strike has more downsides than upsides."
However, the CIA is giving arms-length support, supplying money and weapons, to an Iranian militant group, Jundullah, which has conducted raids into Iran from bases in Pakistan.
Iranian officials say they captured 10 members of Jundullah last weekend, carrying $500,000 in cash along with "maps of sensitive areas" and "modern spy equipment".
Mark Fitzpatrick, a former senior State Department official now with the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said industrial sabotage was the favoured way to combat Iran's nuclear programme "without military action, without fingerprints on the operation."
He added: "One way to sabotage a programme is to make minor modifications in some of the components Iran obtains on the black market."
Components and blueprints obtained by Iranian intelligence agents in Europe, and shipped home using the diplomatic bag from the Iranian consulate in Frankfurt, have been blamed for an explosion that destroyed 50 nuclear centrifuges at the Natanz nuclear plant last year.
The White House National Security Council and CIA refused to comment on intelligence matters.
Ants inhabit 'world without sex' :(
This is too funny not to spread, specially the last part that says that the ants have learned “not to operate under the usual constraints of sexual reproduction” J
Ants inhabit 'world without sex'
| By Victoria Gill |
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These ants do not need males |
An Amazonian ant has dispensed with sex and developed into an all-female species, researchers have found.
The ants reproduce via cloning - the queen ants copy themselves to produce genetically identical daughters.
This species - the first ever to be shown to reproduce entirely without sex - cultivates a garden of fungus, which also reproduces asexually.
The finding of the ants' "world without sex" is published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Anna Himler, the biologist from the University of Arizona who led the research, told BBC News that the team used a battery of tests to verify their findings.
Unusual evolution
By "fingerprinting" DNA of the ant species - Mycocepurus smithii - they found them all to be clones of the colony's queen.
And when they dissected the female insects, they found them to be physically incapable of mating, as an essential part of their reproductive system known as the "mussel organ" had degenerated.
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Anna Himler |
Asexual reproduction of males from unfertilised eggs is a normal part of some insect reproduction, but asexual reproduction of females is "exceedingly rare in ants", wrote the researchers.
"In social insects, there are a number of different types of reproduction," explained Dr Himler. "But this species has evolved its own unusual mode."
She and her colleagues do not know exactly why this particular species has become fully asexual, and how long ago the phenomenon evolved.
They are carrying out further genetic experiments, which will enable them to estimate how long ago the evolutionary change occurred.
No sex please
There are advantages to life without sex, Dr Himler explained.
"It avoids the energetic cost of producing males, and doubles the number of reproductive females produced each generation from 50% to 100% of the offspring."
But combining genetic material in sexual reproduction gives future generations many more advantages.
"If we're more diverse, we're more resistant to parasites and disease," explained Laurent Keller, an expert in social insects from the University of Lausanne.
"In a colony of clones, if one ant is susceptible to a parasite, they will all be susceptible. So if you're asexual, you normally don't last very long.
"But in ants we're seeing more and more reports of unusual methods of reproduction," added Professor Keller, who was not involved in this study.
He also points out that social insects, like ants, may be particularly well suited to this type of reproduction because it enables the queen to control the caste and sex of all the offspring in her colony.
The first farmers
Dr Himler's interest in Mycocepurus smithii was originally sparked not by their unusually biased sex ratio, but by their ability to cultivate crops.
"Ants discovered farming long before we did - they have been cultivating fungus gardens for an estimated 80 million years.
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More interested in gardening than sex |
"They collect plant material, insect faeces and even dead insects from the forest floor and feed it to their crops," she said.
Many different species of ant - including the famous leafcutter ants - cultivate fungi, relying on it for nutrition.
But this particular species is able to grow "a greater number of crops than other ant species", she explained.
"When we started to study this species more closely, we just weren't finding any males. That's when we started to look at them in a different way."
Since the fungus crop reproduces asexually, Dr Himler thinks it might give the ants some kind of advantage "not to operate under the usual constraints of sexual reproduction".
"There is certainly more work to be done in this system," she added. "We're quite excited about the direction this research might take us, and its implications."
20090620
چیز آقای موسوی و چیز آقای احمدی نژادینا
| http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0pORyyeXds Probably made by Rajavi's group, but it is funny! |
20090618
NPR : Which Tweets From Iran Are True?
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2009/06/which_tweats_from_iran_are_tru.html?ft=1&f=103943429
Which Tweets From Iran Are True?
By Frank James
Many media organizations, present company included, have turned to social networking sites, including Twitter in the search for first-hand information on what's happening in Iran, especially since Iranian authorities have greatly restricted what foreign journalists there can report on and have stopped renewing journalists' visas.
But who can tell what's reliable and what isn't on Twitter? It's impossible to know even if what you're reading was actually written by people in Tehran or elsewhere in Iran, especially since there's a movement for as many people in the Twittersphere to use the Iranian capital as their location a là "I'm Spartacus" to make it harder for Iranian censors to stop tweets that are actually from Iran.
The unintended consequence of that move was to make it even harder for the non-Iranian censors to figure out what's really from Iran and what isn't. For instance, how do we know that Gabhan is really in Tehran and not, say, spoofing from Johannesburg?
And even if he's in Iran, how do we know his information is credible? It's even possible that some of the tweets are coming from Iranian authorities or foreign intelligence agencies issuing disinformation.
One function of mainstream media journalism is to disseminate information we've determined to be reliable. It's not easy to do and we journalists make mistakes in vetting "facts," witness much of the important reportage leading to the Iraq War. We're human.
But the reliance on Twitter and Facebook is essentially throwing the doors open to everything and anything.
All of which makes Jon Stewart's satirical riff last night on CNN's use of social-networking sites not only very funny but trenchant too.
| Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | ||||
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This isn't meant to denigrate the social-networking sites. Clearly, they are making it impossible for Iranian authorities to accomplish their goal of keeping the world ignorant of what's happening there.
But much of the information coming across those sites requires some heavy caveat emptor. We have to assume a lot of the information we're seeing on Twitter is true. We just don't know which part of the Twitter flow is and which isn't.
20090614
Juan Cole: Stealing the Iranian Election
Informed Comment: Stealing the Iranian ElectionTop Pieces of Evidence that the Iranian Presidential Election Was Stolen 1. It is claimed that Ahmadinejad won the city of Tabriz with 57%. His main opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, is an Azeri from Azerbaijan province, of which Tabriz is the capital. Mousavi, according to such polls as exist in Iran and widespread anecdotal evidence, did better in cities and is popular in Azerbaijan. Certainly, his rallies there were very well attended. So for an Azeri urban center to go so heavily for Ahmadinejad just makes no sense. In past elections, Azeris voted disproportionately for even minor presidential candidates who hailed from that province. 2. Ahmadinejad is claimed to have taken Tehran by over 50%. Again, he is not popular in the cities, even, as he claims, in the poor neighborhoods, in part because his policies have produced high inflation and high unemployment. That he should have won Tehran is so unlikely as to raise real questions about these numbers. [Ahmadinejad is widely thought only to have won Tehran in 2005 because the pro-reform groups were discouraged and stayed home rather than voting.) 3. It is claimed that cleric Mehdi Karoubi, the other reformist candidate, received 320,000 votes, and that he did poorly in Iran's western provinces, even losing in Luristan. He is a Lur and is popular in the west, including in Kurdistan. Karoubi received 17 percent of the vote in the first round of presidential elections in 2005. While it is possible that his support has substantially declined since then, it is hard to believe that he would get less than one percent of the vote. Moreover, he should have at least done well in the west, which he did not. 4. Mohsen Rezaie, who polled very badly and seems not to have been at all popular, is alleged to have received 670,000 votes, twice as much as Karoubi. 5. Ahmadinejad's numbers were fairly standard across Iran's provinces. In past elections there have been substantial ethnic and provincial variations. 6. The Electoral Commission is supposed to wait three days before certifying the results of the election, at which point they are to inform Khamenei of the results, and he signs off on the process. The three-day delay is intended to allow charges of irregularities to be adjudicated. In this case, Khamenei immediately approved the alleged results. I am aware of the difficulties of catching history on the run. Some explanation may emerge for Ahmadinejad's upset that does not involve fraud. For instance, it is possible that he has gotten the credit for spreading around a lot of oil money in the form of favors to his constituencies, but somehow managed to escape the blame for the resultant high inflation. But just as a first reaction, this post-election situation looks to me like a crime scene. And here is how I would reconstruct the crime. As the real numbers started coming into the Interior Ministry late on Friday, it became clear that Mousavi was winning. Mousavi's spokesman abroad, filmmaker Mohsen Makhbalbaf, alleges that the ministry even contacted Mousavi's camp and said it would begin preparing the population for this victory. The ministry must have informed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who has had a feud with Mousavi for over 30 years, who found this outcome unsupportable. And, apparently, he and other top leaders had been so confident of an Ahmadinejad win that they had made no contingency plans for what to do if he looked as though he would lose. They therefore sent blanket instructions to the Electoral Commission to falsify the vote counts. This clumsy cover-up then produced the incredible result of an Ahmadinejad landlside in Tabriz and Isfahan and Tehran. The reason for which Rezaie and Karoubi had to be assigned such implausibly low totals was to make sure Ahmadinejad got over 51% of the vote and thus avoid a run-off between him and Mousavi next Friday, which would have given the Mousavi camp a chance to attempt to rally the public and forestall further tampering with the election. This scenario accounts for all known anomalies and is consistent with what we know of the major players. More in my column, just out, in Salon.com: "Ahmadinejad reelected under cloud of fraud," where I argue that the outcome of the presidential elections does not and should not affect Obama's policies toward that country-- they are the right policies and should be followed through on regardless. The public demonstrations against the result don't appear to be that big. In the past decade, reformers have always backed down in Iran when challenged by hardliners, in part because no one wants to relive the horrible Great Terror of the 1980s after the revolution, when faction-fighting produced blood in the streets. Mousavi is still from that generation. My own guess is that you have to get a leadership born after the revolution, who does not remember it and its sanguinary aftermath, before you get people willing to push back hard against the rightwingers. So, there are protests against an allegedly stolen election. The Basij paramilitary thugs and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards will break some heads. Unless there has been a sea change in Iran, the theocrats may well get away with this soft coup for the moment. But the regime's legitimacy will take a critical hit, and its ultimate demise may have been hastened, over the next decade or two. What I've said is full of speculation and informed guesses. I'd be glad to be proved wrong on several of these points. Maybe I will be. PS: Here's the data: So here is what Interior Minister Sadeq Mahsouli said Saturday about the outcome of the Iranian presidential elections: "Of 39,165,191 votes counted (85 percent), Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the election with 24,527,516 (62.63 percent)." He announced that Mir-Hossein Mousavi came in second with 13,216,411 votes (33.75 percent). Mohsen Rezaei got 678,240 votes (1.73 percent) Mehdi Karroubi with 333,635 votes (0.85 percent). He put the void ballots at 409,389 (1.04 percent). |
Is Ahmadinejad the Iranian Hafizollah Amin?
| Ever since the day this idiot came into power, his way of acting, his bold stupid words and his arrogant behavior inside and outside of Iran reminded me of another "revolutionary" leader in our recent history. Amin, who was a radical "communist" enforced radical secular changes into Afghanistan in the 70s, killing and imprisoning many mullahs or religious elders all around Afghanistan and paved the way for the Mujahedin and CIA's propaganda machine to use him as an example of the evil intention of the Soviet to destroy Islam, the outcome of Amin's action was the Soviet invasion that was the tipping point needed for the sick empire to collaps. Amin, was nothing but a CIA stoog who did what he was told to fulfill the long time dream of Berzinskey, George Bush and his radical gang inside the CIA to make Soviet suffer for the defeat and humiliation they faced in Vietnam. http://www.afghanland.com/history/amin.html http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=haizullah_amin_1 In Iran, the scenario seems to be the same, the stoog is acting in accordance to the need of the foreign powers to create a perfect image of Iran as Evil, unpredictable and dangerous to teh world. His so called re-election and the demonstration we see in Iran may be the last draw in the game and it will be the "needed" push that many Iran strategists were talking about when they were asking about removal of Iran's "danger" from their map. Maybe the 300 million dollars that Bush left asside for "change" in Iran, was not to be used by the opposition, but to be spent on idiot IRI activists who wanted their "beloved" leader to be re-elected. I know it is far-fetched, but possible! Cheers, /Farhad |
20090608
FYI: Complete Software CD for educational use
This is part of the UNESCO supported activity to create a free, safe and solid SW for educational purposes. You can download the SW at their site at: http://edubuntu.org/
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20090605
10 second of your time and Save the children will get 25 cents!
Just visit the page and click on their link, Intel will donate 25 cents to Save the Children for every click you make
http://www.smallthingschallenge.com/?view=thankyou&d=y
