25 Aug
Events of Interest and Analyses, A Foreign Perspective
Afghan timetable bolsters enemy says US general
The McGlynn: Truman would have him fired.
US general claims withdrawal plan has given a morale boost to Taliban…………..”In some ways, we think right now it is probably giving our enemy sustenance,” Conway, the Marine Corps commandant, said of the July 2011 deadline…………………….
***************************
Scientists attack court ruling against Obama’s stem cell policy
Federal judge blocks embryo research funding in surprise blow for President
AP In his ruling on stem cell research funding, Judge Royce Lamberth said the distinction between newly destroyed embryos and embryos that had already been destroyed was false
A judge has overturned a decision by Barack Obama to relax rules on funding US government research using human embryonic stem cells which promises to revolutionise medical science in the 21st Century.
Scientists yesterday described the judge’s ruling as “an astounding blow to American biomedical research” that threw into immediate doubt tens of millions of dollars in federal funding to support research that holds out the promise of new treatments for ailments ranging from heart disease to paralysis. President Obama last year eased the limits on research placed by his predecessor, George W Bush. The judge’s ruling overturning the decision appalled many leaders of the scientific community but cheered right-to-life conservatives…………………………………………………………
**********************
Indian tribe that took on a mining giant – and won
Andrew Buncombe and Alistair Dawber: Unexpected victory in battle to protect sacred mountain………………………….
********************
David Lister: These authors’ musings should be treasured, not thrown away
Virginia Woolf
The BBC is well known to have carelessly wiped or lost some of its best-loved work – most of the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore shows from the Sixties, for example. But this week, in the first episode of a BBC4 series on novelists talking, an even more startling example of carelessness was pointed out. George Orwell made radio broadcasts for the corporation for two years, but not a single second of his voice survives.
Not so much careless as criminal. The programme did, though, contain some remarkable radio and TV archive interviews. From Virginia Woolf on the need to keep beauty in the English language, to E M Forster trying to explain why he “dried up” after A Passage to India, to Christopher Isherwood describing the cigarette-stained hands and white powdered face of the real Sally Bowles, it was utterly absorbing.
We love hearing authors talk. That is why, in a swift move from one sort of author to very much another, it is so wrong of Tony Blair to have a set of restrictions at his London book signings which forbid anyone to converse with him. The pleasure of a book signing is not so much the signature as that snatch of conversation with the writer………………………………………
*****************************************
Wikileaks to release ‘CIA paper’
|
|
Wikileaks, the whistle-blowing website, says it plans to release a document from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
In a pithy message posted on Twitteron Tuesday, the organisation said simply: “WikiLeaks to release CIA paper tomorrow”.It controversially published nearly 77,000 classified US military documents on the war in Afghanistan on July 23 and has said it will publish another 15,000 within the next couple of weeks…………………………..
****************************
Jailed Iranian sues Nokia Siemens
Journalist says telecoms company sold surveillance gear to Iran’s government……………………….
