The news said that tests on two staff members at the Millennium Hotel in central London and on one at the Sheraton Hotel have shown exposure to polonium-210, Britain's Health Protection Agency said. Sweden's National Board of Health and Welfare said a Swede who had visited one of the hotels had "slightly elevated" levels of polonium.
What I find interesting is why they have to translate the statements made in Moscow into English back in London. Why were the statements made in Russian in the first place, seeing as it was a British investigative team? The category of witness who so far has been and would have been involved in this case would almost certainly speak tolerable English, so why this retreat into ‘no speako Angliski’?
In the last five years, it’s fair to say that the majority of young people and much of the business community in the major Russian cities have learnt English, at least to conversational level, there are teachers of English everywhere who would have been more than competent and even if it had to be done formally, there are translation services dotted around. But the thing is, once again – most speak English. I can only see the insistence on speaking Russian as obstructive in this situation.
My first thought on seeing this was ‘not guilty’ but slowly, I began to wonder – what if? What if they had done it? And for good reason too. But I get ahead of myself. Here’s the story in a nutshell, depoliticized and expunged of Bulgarian and Libyan protests and Western outrage:
Six foreign health workers jailed in Libya for years on charges of deliberately infecting children with the AIDS virus were convicted and sentenced to death in a case that has long sparked international outrage and did so again Tuesday. The nurses and doctor have been in jail since 1999 on charges that they spread the HIV virus to more than 400 children at a hospital in the Libyan city of Benghazi during a botched experiment to find a cure for the disease.
Western nations blame the infections on unsanitary conditions at Libyan hospitals and accuse Tripoli of using the six health workers as scapegoats. Detained for nearly seven years, the defendants had previously been convicted and condemned to death, but Libyan judges granted them a retrial last year after international protests over the fairness of the proceedings.
An international legal observer, Francois Cantier, of Lawyers Without Borders, promptly criticized the retrial as lacking scientific rigor. Research published this month said samples from the infected children showed their viruses were contracted before the six defendants started working at the hospital in question.
Luc Montagnier _ the French doctor who co-discovered HIV - testified in the first trial that the virus was active in the hospital before the Bulgarian nurses began their contracts there in 1998. More evidence for that argument surfaced on Dec. 6 _ too late to be submitted in court _ when Nature magazine published an analysis of HIV and hepatitis virus samples from the children.
Idriss Lagha, the president of a group representing the victims, rejected the Nature article, telling a news conference in London on Monday that the nurses had infected the children with a "genetically engineered" virus. He accused them as doing so for research on behalf of foreign intelligence agencies.
Whew! Gadhafi asked Bulgaria for compensation which it rejected and that might be behind the convictions too. On the other hand, that last accusation of a "genetically engineered" virus – why not? Stop one second before you angrily click out of my blog. The scientific community has always chafed against ethical constraints which forces them to experiment on animals.
This is why such scientific advances were made in World War II because the shackles were off. There were plenty of Jews to do with as they wished. We know that many of these scientists were at large and there’s no reason to believe that scientific enquiry has ceased since that time. Science is dispassionate. It also needs money. Where is this sort of money? The US and Europe of course. Where are human rights of a lower order in Europe and people’s threshold of what they’re prepared to do for money somewhat lower? The fSU of course.
Now – where could one experiment and get away with it? Africa? Where else? Also, if you wanted to wipe out a few million people, especially those who are being a tad tiresome, e.g. Muslims, who better to experiment on than Gadhafi’s people? And Iran’s. But you couldn’t get your foot into Iran and you’re already in Iraq. Gadhafi, though, has been trying to butter up to the world lately and you might be able to do some exchange whereby you provide medical ‘help’. In other words, you have an ‘in’ into Libya which you don’t have elsewhere.
I’m not saying this is so but I really think we should ponder a little about the victims’ advocate’s words before deciding.
How much of this do you believe? Do you believe that:
Humans can detect very small concentrations of certain chemicals, experts said. One example is androstenedione, a compound present in human sweat. If you put a drop of it in an Olympic-size swimming pool, a human being is able to tell the difference between the pool with the drop and the pool without it.
Researchers suggest that humans may use their nostrils in a way similar to how they use their ears to locate a sound. If you drop a coin on the floor, you know where to look. The brain converts auditory information into spatial information. The brain does a very fast computation to tell you where things are. Similarly, the human brain takes advantage of different sensory input from the right and left nostril to locate the smell.
Traditionally, women spend more time in the kitchen, and studies have shown that they are generally better smellers than men. Women are not necessarily born with a better olfactory sense, it's that they pay more attention to smells because of cooking and putting on perfume.
More here …
Nicholas Biddle, object of Jackson’s ire
I’d like to thank Martin Kelly for drawing my attention to Pat Buchanan’s blog. It gives a US perspective but still, it’s equally applicable to Europe – more so because of the EU and that’s the primary reason I’m Eurosceptic. It’s a training run for the real thing.
I’d forgotten the House memorandum he quotes: On November 21, 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt wrote a letter to Col. Edward Mandell House, President Woodrow Wilson’s close advisor:
"The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson… "
That there is such a thing as a cabal of power brokers who control government behind the scenes has been detailed several times in this century by credible sources. Professor Carroll Quigley was Bill Clinton’s mentor at Georgetown University. President Clinton has publicly paid homage to the influence Professor Quigley had on his life. In Quigley’s magnum opus Tragedy and Hope (1966), he states:
"There does exist and has existed for a generation, an international … network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups and frequently does so. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret records.
I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies… but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known."
Once, at a stag night, the stripper took me aside and said: ‘You’re not taking this seriously. It makes me nervous.’
She was right about that. Once, as a schoolboy, my report said and I remember exactly: ‘Inclined to take the more serious aspects of [that institution] too flippantly.’
Another way it comes through: If you’ve rubbed up against real money once or twice, you’d know it’s certainly intoxicating. Once, in a hotel lounge in a European capital, I got talking with a chap and one thing led to another, we were whisked away to a location where some sort of party was going on, then to a high rise building I know not where in the night and the thing which struck me most was the hush and the hygiene.
Everything was clean, the carpet was plush, the double doors opening were silent, the leather car seats transported us behind darkened windows and in silence, except for discreet music on the CD, everywhere we were met by big smiles and opened doors. The lift was interminable as a padded cell, nothing was a problem, there was absolutely no fuss.
Then, in clinches of conversation, glass in hand, you were either summed up and marginalized or lifted, raised into some newer echelon. Level by level you went up and up but you had to care. I never cared. But many do and one top blogger recently wrote of this marginalization. He cared and it hurt. Once you've tasted this water, you couldn't bear to think of being parted from it.
… Tony Blair
I wonder what’s going on? Came home just now and though it was a bit after peak hour, still – you’d expect some traffic on the roads but it was virtually empty and I went past only three road accidents – three! Hometime is usually good for five or six. Went to the shop to pick up groceries and usually this involves queues – empty.
Came home, checked my site stats and it’s the lowest number of visitors since my very first month. Am I missing something here? Do people not like the apocalyptic articles or women’s issues? Have I posted one too many embarrassing rants?
Well, the proverb I’ve always lived by is, “If you’re treading on thin ice, you might as well dance,” so what else but to follow this up with an uber-uber-rant and really go down in flames?
The news said that tests on two staff members at the Millennium Hotel in central London and on one at the Sheraton Hotel have shown exposure to polonium-210, Britain's Health Protection Agency said. Sweden's National Board of Health and Welfare said a Swede who had visited one of the hotels had "slightly elevated" levels of polonium.
